Chapter 2 - Jane Barker, Medical Discourse, and the Origins of the Novel

Summary

This chapter explores the relationship between medicine and the novel in the long eighteenth century through a reading of the work of medical authority and novelist Jane Barker. Emphasising the rich interplay between eighteenth-century medicine and the novel, I begin with a review of criticism that considers novelistic representations of the body–mind relationship, sensibility, nerve theory, illness, disease as metaphor, and disability. I go on to suggest that Jane Barker deserves a place in the critical discussion of the relationship between the origins of the novel and the world of medicine. She was an innovator, both in her use of fiction to purvey medical knowledge and in her manipulation of such knowledge to narrative ends. In her novel Love Intrigues (1713), Barker displays her familiarity with the most modern and supposedly advanced medical wisdom, and rewrites and challenges such wisdom, sometimes drawing on older, humoural understandings of the body. Barker’s characterisation of her protagonist Galesia is evidence of a nascent psychological realism that effectively captures the heroine’s mental landscape – an effect achieved in part through her curious management of discourses of hysteria.