Reading for Health. Erika Wright
Introduction
Becoming Patient Readers
In modern stories prepared for more refined or fastidious audiences than those of [Charles] Dickens, the funereal excitement is obtained, for the most part, not by the infliction of violent or—disgusting death; but in the suspense, the pathos, and the more or less by all felt, and recognized, phenomena of the sick-room. The temptation, to weak writers, of this order of subject is especially great, because the study of it from the living—or dying—model is so easy, and to many has been the most impressive part of their own personal experience.
—John Ruskin, “Fiction, Fair and Foul” (1880)
The pleasures of health are taken as a matter of course, and are only passively appreciated.
—Alexander Shand, “The Pleasures of Sickness” (1889)
Readers of Victorian novels will likely appreciate John Ruskin’s critique of “modern stories.” Disease and death are everywhere in nineteenth-century novels. Imagine Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853) without Esther Summerson’s delirium or the fetid atmosphere of Tom-All-Alone’s, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) without a young Jane clutching a dead Helen Burns, or an Elizabeth Gaskell novel without industrial illness—whether Mary Barton’s inanition or the fluff in little Bessy’s lungs. For many scholars, the Victorian novel would not be Victorian without illness.1 As Miriam Bailin observes in The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill, “There is scarcely a Victorian fictional narrative without its ailing protagonist, its depiction of a sojourn in the sickroom.”2 But for Ruskin, these “sojourns” are morally and aesthetically suspect—the mark of a lazy writer. Not only do such scenes cater to the reader’s baser instincts,3 but they also, perhaps more damningly, take minimal effort and almost no talent to depict. “Few authors of second or third rate genius,” Ruskin argues, “can either record or invent a probable conversation in ordinary life; but few, on the other hand, are so destitute of observant faculty as to be unable to chronicle the broken syllables and languid movements of an invalid” (Works, 274).
Disappointed by what he saw as an unfortunate dependence on the morbid and the pathological in the fiction of his day, Ruskin called for a return to a healthier literature, one in which the death toll is kept at a minimum, the sickroom scene is understated or absent, and the characters are not so morally repugnant. Ruskin identifies the various deaths in Dickens’s Bleak House and the unredeemable characters in George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss (1860) as particularly objectionable. By way of contrast, Sir Walter Scott’s novels—which as Ruskin notes favor “character[s] of a highly virtuous and lofty stamp” (Works, 285), “landscape[s] [that are] rich” (378), intricately woven plots, and a laudable purpose, which is to “study the effects of true and false religion on conduct” (381)—exemplify the “healthy and helpful literature” (376) for which Ruskin was nostalgic. But even Scott was not completely immune to the allure of sickbeds. Ruskin cites St. Ronan’s Well (1824), The Fair Maid of Perth (1828), and Castle Dangerous (1832), which were written during the period of illness before Scott’s death,4 as having sunk “into fellowship with the normal disease which festers throughout the whole body of our lower fictitious literature” (276). Disease, for Ruskin, was literal and metaphorical—the one often sliding into the other. Although a writer need not be unhealthy to write sick literature, those who suffer from actual illnesses are presumably more likely to succumb to the reading public’s prurient desire for “vice and gloom” (276) and to feature an array of diseased characters and insalubrious situations. “No good is ever done to society,” Ruskin explains, “by the pictorial representation of its diseases” (376).
Ruskin was not the only critic who thought about literature this way. As Bruce Haley points out in his seminal study The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture, “The Victorian critic believed that he should diagnose a work, looking for signs of disease or soundness, then looking further for causes of the disclosed condition.”5 For example, when Thomas Carlyle writes about Rousseau in 1841, he claims that Rousseau’s “books[,] like himself, are what I call unhealthy; not the good sort of Book.”6 In his 1858 analysis of Scott’s Waverley novels, Walter Bagehot implies—as Ruskin would much later—that the author’s experience with literal health was somehow integral to literary form, particularly when it comes to depicting monstrous or “anomalous” characters. Bagehot lauds Scott’s superior skills of characterization, claiming, “A writer must have sympathy with health before he can show us how and where and to what extent that which is unhealthy deviates from it.”7
Literary criticism that aligns the author’s mental, physical, and moral health with the metaphorical soundness of his text—though common enough during the nineteenth century—represents a type of evaluative and biographical analysis that has largely fallen out of favor. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars are much less inclined to make claims about the role that an author’s health plays in the value of his or her work.8 But in turning away from such health claims, we have, I suggest, lost a chance to see the subtle ways in which health—particularly physical health—operates in these works: the challenges it poses and the reading practices it engenders.
Ruskin suggests in the above epigraph that illness is “impressive”—that one’s experience with illness makes an impression on her life in a way that the experience of health cannot. Narratively speaking, health functions as little more than an addendum to the story of illness; it becomes simply a charming (or annoying) resolution, an innocuous character trait, or a pernicious metaphor for all that is right and good. In “Pathologizing the Victorians,” Kirstie Blair comments on the scholarly interest in disease at the 2000 Victorian Institute Conference on Victorian illness, health, and medicine, observing, “Almost every speaker focuse[d] on illness rather than health” and “Pathology has been the focus of Victorian criticism for some time.”9 Medical historian Roger Cooter makes a similar point in a 2003 review for Victorian Studies: “Corporeality and pathology have become obligatory points of passage in the study of Victorian society and culture.”10 Over a decade later, this preoccupation is still largely the case,11 for although we may be somewhat less interested than the Victorians in judging a novel based on how the writer felt as she wrote, we continue to ask why sickness is so pervasive and what exactly disease means in Victorian novels and to the Victorians themselves.12
My reading of the Victorian novel draws from these two critical modes: first, the current scholarly interest in disease, and second, the nineteenth-century call for “healthy literature.” I am sympathetic to our persistent fascination in Victorian studies with the pathological, and I am inspired by the methods recent scholars have used to articulate the social, political, and narrative implications of illness. But I am equally intrigued by Ruskin’s frustration with the ample material Victorian writers left us. I do not aim, as Ruskin did, to condemn the Victorian writers’ gratuitous use of illness, nor do I want to use sickness as a barometer for evaluating their characters. I do, however, want to ask, “Why always disease?” In asking this question, I want to suggest that health is an epistemological problem and that nineteenth-century narratives register, through both their form and their content, the difficulty of knowing what health is, how to preserve it, and whose is best.13 These questions are made explicit in the periodical press, in government pamphlets, and in memoirs, and are implicit as well as explicit in novels.14
One reason for the critical interest in disease, of course, is that disease and illness are medically and narratively more interesting than health. To use Ruskin’s term, illness is “impressive,” whereas health is, as Alexander Shand notes in the second epigraph to this introduction, a “matter of course,” only “passively appreciated.” Health is, in other words, a nonstory. Like Athena Vrettos, who points out in Somatic Fictions (1995) that “[t]o be ill is to produce narrative,”15 John Wiltshire surmises in his work on Jane Austen, “If the healthy body is largely passive, unconscious of itself, then the unhealthy body, as a site of anxious self-concentration, is the source of events, of narrative energies.”16 For