Reading for Health. Erika Wright
an utter stranger to exercise and open air, who lives on tea and other slops, may bring a child into the world, but it will hardly be fit to live” (4). Buchan argues that, in some instances, the best way to prevent disease or debility is to prevent life in the first place.
Beddoes does not go as far as Buchan, but he similarly focuses his attention on what parents do wrong. Beddoes’s advice acts as a warning and a plea; for the manual, he claims, will help these parents “equip [their] children, as they advance to that age when they must be left to their own guidance, with the most precise instructions respecting the hazards they will soon have to encounter” (“Essay I” in Hygeia, 15). Hygeia demonstrates over the next thousand pages what Austen takes only a few hundred to show: how a mismanaged household produces debilitated children who grow up to be wretched adults. Bad diet, lack of exercise, poor schooling conditions, and intemperance—all the stuff of which novels are made—are just some of the “hazards” children suffer when left “to their own guidance.” The more pernicious activities of masturbation, shopping, and novel reading similarly matter less as moral vice than as detrimental to the medical health of the household.
But such medical advice is as much about the physical conditions of the body as it is about the moral condition of the soul. The full subtitle of Beddoes’s collection, Essays Moral and Medical, on the Causes Affecting the Personal State of Our Middling and Affluent Classes, articulates this connection, and in his first essay he instructs his readers that “[t]o form a moral sense . . . is not more practicable in itself, than to form a sense for health, or for happiness, which latter must be, in great measure, composed of the sense of health” (84). Beddoes conflates the moral and the medical to construct a comprehensive story of middle-class conduct, and he demands that his readers become moral managers of their own bodies and the bodies of those around them, particularly their children. To emphasize his point, he ends his first essay by asking his readers to imagine their own child, “[t]hat being, whose happy smiles thou art now watching,” crying out in the future, “Ah! had not the affection of my parents been as blind as it was strong, never should I have been the wretch I am” (92). Beddoes does not simply explain causes to his readers so that they can avoid their effects; he creates characters we recognize from the fictional narratives that nineteenth-century novelists reverted to time and again. We hear traces of the story of the fallen woman and the profligate son, whose demises were initiated by ignorant parents. Beddoes offers this ominous ventriloquizing of the reader’s child as a “wretch” in the future to suggest that parental responsibility is the key to familial health and happiness. As the last sentence of his first essay, this remark is quite a cliffhanger. What parent, especially one with strong affections, would not look out anxiously for the next essay, while keeping a more vigilant eye on his or her child and anticipating fresh dangers?
PREVENTION AND CURE IN Sense and Sensibility
Austen’s novels, which are also sympathetic to the relationship between the moral and the medical, do not allow for such a tidy elision between the two. Like the physicians, Austen targets negligent parents—though with a decidedly sharper wit and a more nuanced approach. Bad domestic managers are bad preventionists. In Sense and Sensibility (1811),10 Austen depicts the type of affectionately neglectful parent to whom Beddoes might be addressing his essays. Nobody doubts Mrs. Dashwood’s maternal affection, but we all recognize that she is more than a little “blind” to the truth of her middle daughter’s affair. The plot that unfolds, Beddoes might suggest, is a result of domestic mismanagement and a lack of foresight. From the start, Sense and Sensibility functions not so much as a manual of what to do or even of how to recover from what has been; rather, its structure relies heavily on the tension between preventing what might happen and curing what has happened. As such, Austen organizes her first novel around the discursive parallels between cure and prevention, between the cautionary wretch, Marianne Dashwood, and her more vigilant, older sister, Elinor. For example, during Marianne’s initial encounter with her would-be lover, Willoughby, when she twists her ankle, all propriety is lost in the face of physical harm. Willoughby, a complete stranger, must carry Marianne through the rain. Although her embarrassment prohibits Marianne from fully examining him, “his person and air were equal to what her fancy had ever drawn for the hero of her favourite story” (38), a story that soon becomes all too real. Willoughby’s constant overtures eventually lead everyone except Elinor to assume that the couple is engaged. When Willoughby takes his leave of Barton, Elinor’s foresight directs her to urge Mrs. Dashwood into proper conduct and to ask Marianne whether she and Willoughby have a formal understanding. Mrs. Dashwood’s refusal should remind us of those bad parents that Buchan and Beddoes describe. The narrator tells us that “common sense, common care, common prudence, were all sunk in Mrs. Dashwood’s romantic delicacy” (74).
Like her mother, Marianne ignores “foresight” in favor of romance. She would rather be a wretch than have no story at all. To this end, Marianne refuses to eat, finds it “very inexcusable” to sleep, and develops a “head-ache” in response to her lover’s departure. This unchecked grief initiates her decline and turns into the type of narrative that requires either cure or death at its end. But before she is fully sunk, Marianne embraces her grief. Buchan explains that while grief is natural, to embrace it is a potentially dangerous precursor to wretchedness. In “On Grief” in Domestic Medicine, Buchan offers guidance for preventing the physical decline that attends this “Passion of the Mind.” When in a state of grief, he suggests, we should “turn the attention frequently to new objects. Examine them for some time. When the mind begins to recoil, shift the scene. By this means a constant succession of new ideas may be kept up, till the disagreeable ones entirely disappear.” “Indolence,” he warns, “nourishes grief.”11 Austen initially presents Marianne’s behavior as comical—we are meant to laugh at the deliberateness of Marianne’s romantic symptoms. But beneath the absurdity of her behavior lurk the seriousness of Buchan’s warning and the potentially tragic outcome of Marianne’s conduct. The narrator tells us that Marianne plays Willoughby’s favorite songs and “read[s] nothing but what they had been used to read together.” In short, she does the opposite of what the manuals recommend. “This nourishment of grief,” we are told, “was applied [by Marianne] every day” (73). Nourishment generally has a positive association; we might think of hearty food or mother’s milk or any number of domestic terms that invoke home, health, and care, which contrast with Marianne’s rejection of such things. Buchan’s use of the term nourish thus hints at the domestic aspects of indolence and grief. Indolence occurs in the home and therefore comes under the purview of domestic management.
Austen adopts this sense of indolence but undercuts the danger we have learned to read into it from Buchan by recasting nourishment as the act of a silly young girl. Like Buchan, Austen applies the term to something that should not be nourished. An important difference between their usages is the agent of the action. For Buchan, indolence does the nourishing. For Austen, Marianne does. Buchan recommends that the grieved reader replace the sad story that has resulted in her current condition with a “new,” more agreeable one. Instead of following this model, Marianne cares for and nurtures her grief, deliberately allowing it to grow. Yet rather than simply condemning Marianne for, in some sense, failing to follow Buchan’s advice, Austen depicts her actions as necessary to the plot. Had Marianne properly prevented her grief—indeed, stopped it from growing—her narrative might well have stopped there. Instead, this grief becomes the first in a series of presumably preventable yet highly desirable and narratable episodes that propel the story and must, we expect, move us toward cure.12 Marianne’s resistance to prevention nourishes the narrative of cure, and the struggle between these two narratives—not simply the presence of crisis—energizes the novel.
But lest this sound like a familiar version of the crisis-cure plot, Austen’s anatomy of wretchedness offers an alternative style of grief management through the parallel plot of Elinor, the novel’s chief preventionist. During Edward Ferrars’s final visit to Barton in the first half of the novel, Elinor senses a difference in his treatment of her. She does not, at this point in the novel, know that Edward is engaged to Lucy Steele, but the changes she detects are enough to cause her grief. Instead of indulging her grief, however, Elinor becomes “determin[ed] to subdue it, and to prevent herself from appearing to suffer.” “She