Abstract
The deathbed scene of Helen Burns in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) is one of the most famous Victorian representations of ‘a consumptive’. Helen’s invalidism is not an affliction but, rather, a sign of her spirituality and purity: like many consumptives depicted in nineteenth-century texts, she coughs a little and then dies because she is too good to live in a harsh, unfeeling world.
Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Invalid Lives is not about those consumptives.
As an undergraduate at Keele University, I read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (1869) and was gripped by one of its most savage antagonists: nihilistic teenage psychopath Ippolit Terentyev who, on receiving a diagnosis of terminal consumption, fantasizes about committing mass murder. Ippolit’s bitterness and rage made me wonder how many people living with tuberculosis in the nineteenth century felt alienated by the cultural images and stereotypes imposed upon them.
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Notes
- 1.
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847), ed. by Margaret Smith with notes by Sally Shuttleworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 81.
- 2.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot, translated by David Magarshack (1869) (London: Penguin Books, 1955), III. 7, pp. 396–397.
- 3.
Beardsley to Smithers (31st May 1897), in The Letters of Aubrey Beardsley (1878–1898), ed. by Henry Maas, J.L. Duncan and W.G. Good, 2nd edn (Oxford: Plantin Publishers, 1990), p. 328; subsequently referenced as Letters AB.
- 4.
Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), p. 29.
- 5.
Sections of this Introduction—and particularly of Chap. 2—have appeared previously in Alexandra Tankard, ‘The Victorian Consumptive in Disability Studies’, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 5 (2011), pp. 17–34. Permission from Dr David Bolt.
- 6.
ADA, ‘Sec. 12102. Definition of Disability’: Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, as amended (2008); https://www.ada.gov/pubs/adastatute08.htm [accessed 11th May 2017].
- 7.
Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 6.
- 8.
Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, p. 6.
- 9.
Colin Barnes, ‘A Legacy of Oppression: A History of Disability in Western Culture’, in Disability Studies: Past, Present and Future, ed. by Len Barton and Mike Oliver (Leeds: Disability Press, 1997), pp. 3–24 (p. 4).
- 10.
‘Fighting Discrimination Against People with HIV/AIDS’; ADA.gov/HIV [accessed 11th May 2017].
- 11.
Equality Act 2010 Guidance (HM Government/Office for Disability Issues, 2011), A9, p. 10; www.gov.uk [accessed 31st July 2017].
- 12.
Susan Wendell, The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), p. 39.
- 13.
F.B. Smith, The Retreat of Tuberculosis, 1850–1950 (London: Croom Helm, 1988), p. 19, suggests tuberculosis accounted for around 80 per cent of disability.
- 14.
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Books, 1979), p. 30.
- 15.
Smith, Retreat, pp. 238–239.
- 16.
See Holmes, Fictions of Affliction, p. 29.
- 17.
David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, ‘Representation and its Discontents: The Uneasy Home of Disability in Literature and Film’, in Handbook of Disability Studies, ed. by Gary L. Albrecht, Katherine D. Seelman and Michael Bury (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2001), pp. 195–218 (p. 208).
- 18.
On its historical origins, see Lennard J. Davis, ‘Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, the Novel, and the Invention of the Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century’, in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. by Lennard J. Davis (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 9–28 (p. 15).
- 19.
Shelley Tremain, ‘On the Subject of Impairment’, in Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory, ed. by Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare (London and New York: Continuum, [2002]; 2006), pp. 32–44 (p. 42).
- 20.
Andrew Motion, Keats (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), p. 501.
- 21.
Mitchell and Snyder, ‘Representation’, p. 208.
- 22.
Michael P. Kelly, ‘Negative Attributes of Self: Radical Surgery and the Inner and Outer Lifeworld’, in Exploring the Divide: Illness and Disability, ed. by Colin Barnes and Geoff Mercer (Leeds: The Disability Press, 1996), pp. 74–93 (p. 79).
- 23.
See Deborah Kaplan, ‘The Definition of Disability’ http://www.accessiblesociety.org/topics/demographics-identity/dkaplanpaper.htm [accessed 6th August 2007] for a simple list of models of disability.
- 24.
See especially Deborah Kent, ‘Disabled Women: Portraits in Fiction and Drama’, pp. 47–63, and Paul K. Longmore, ‘Screening Stereotypes: Images of Disabled People in Television and Motion Pictures’, pp. 65–78, both in Images of the Disabled, Disabling Images, ed. by Alan Gartner and Tom Joe (New York: Praeger, 1987).
- 25.
See Tom Shakespeare, ‘Cultural Representation of Disabled People: Dustbins for Disavowal?’, in Disability Studies: Past, Present and Future, ed. by Len Barton and Mike Oliver (Leeds: Disability Press, 1997), pp. 217–236 (p. 232).
- 26.
Angela Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary (London: Pimlico, 1999), pp. 32–33; 66.
- 27.
Maria H. Frawley, Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 162–168. This is remarked upon by Edmund Gosse in Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments (1907; Public Domain books/Kindle, 2012), location 389.
- 28.
Clark Lawlor, Consumption in Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 38.
- 29.
See Fred Kaplan, Sacred Tears: Sentimentality in Victorian Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 12–13, on universal human nature (and, by extension, universal responses to emotional stimulus) as dictated by a benign Creator.
- 30.
Mary Klages, Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality in Victorian America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. 17.
- 31.
Leonard Kriegel, ‘The Cripple in Literature’, in Images of the Disabled, Disabling Images, ed. by Alan Gartner and Tom Joe (New York: Praeger, 1987), pp. 31–46 (p. 36).
- 32.
Holmes, Fictions, p. ix.
- 33.
Holmes, Fictions, pp. 28–29.
- 34.
‘Definition of “disability” under the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA)’, http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Disabledpeople/RightsAndObligations/DisabilityRights/ [accessed 11th Jan 2010].
- 35.
Sontag, Illness, p. 58.
- 36.
David B., Morris, Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 269–270.
- 37.
Gareth Williams, ‘Theorizing Disability’, in Handbook of Disability Studies, ed. by Gary L. Albrecht, Katherine D. Seelman, Michael Bury (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2001), pp. 123–144 (pp. 126–127).
- 38.
Dr Bowditch, ‘Prevention and Curability of Consumption’, Treasury of Literature and Ladies’ Treasury, 1st June 1869, p. 227; https://search.proquest.com (British Periodicals I&II) [accessed 2ndJune 2017]. This section also appears in Henry I. Bowditch, ‘Consumption in America’ (from The Atlantic Monthly, January–March 1869), in From Consumption to Tuberculosis: A Documentary History, ed. by Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz (New York, NY & London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1994), pp. 57–96 (p. 95).
- 39.
Susan Wendell, ‘Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability’, in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. by Lennard J. Davis (New York, N.Y. and London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 260–278 (p. 270).
- 40.
For a critique of these discussions, see Emmeline Burdett, ‘“Beings in Another Galaxy”: Historians, the Nazi “Euthanasia” Programme, and the Question of Opposition’, in Changing Social Attitudes Toward Disability: Perspectives from Historical, Social, and Educational Studies, ed. by David Bolt (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 38–49.
- 41.
Mike Oliver, ‘Defining Impairment and Disability: Issues At Stake’, in Exploring the Divide: Illness and Disability, ed. by Colin Barnes and Geoff Mercer (Leeds: Disability Press, 1996), pp. 39–54 (p. 50).
- 42.
Bill Hughes, ‘Disability and the Body’, in Disability Studies Today, ed. by Colin Barnes, Mike Oliver and Len Barton (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), pp. 58–76 (p. 61). Katherine Byrne, Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 54 addresses the consumptive’s lack of production or consumption in relation to Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855), although not in the context of disability studies.
- 43.
Liz Crow, ‘Including All Our Lives: Renewing the Social Model of Disability’, in Exploring the Divide: Illness and Disability, ed. by Colin Barnes, and Geof Mercer (Leeds: The Disability Press, 1996), pp. 55–73; Wendell, ‘Toward a Feminist Theory’, pp. 260–278; Tom Shakespeare, ‘Cultural Representation’, pp. 217–236.
- 44.
David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 55.
- 45.
Holmes, Fictions, p. 134.
- 46.
Catherine J. Kudlick, ‘Disability History, Power, and Rethinking the Idea of “the Other”’, PMLA, 120 (2005), pp. 557–561 (pp. 559–560); http://JSTOR.org [accessed 2nd June 2017].
- 47.
Tom Shakespeare, ‘Disability, Identity, Difference’, in Exploring the Divide: Illness and Disability, ed. by Colin Barnes and Geoff Mercer (Leeds: Disability Press, 1996), pp. 94–113 (p. 106).
- 48.
Klages, Woeful Afflictions, p. 4; Gerry Kearns, ‘Tuberculosis and the Medicalisation of British Society, 1880–1920’, in Coping with Sickness: Political Aspects of Healthcare in a Historical Perspective, ed. by J. Woodward and R. Jutte (Sheffield: EAHMN Publications, 1995), pp. 145–170.
- 49.
Bill Hughes, ‘Disability and the Body’, in Disability Studies Today, ed. by Colin Barnes, Mike Oliver, and Len Barton (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), pp. 58–76 (p. 61).
- 50.
Holmes, Fictions, p. 33.
- 51.
For example, see Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, Chap. 2, for the intersection of race, gender, and physical ‘abnormality’ in American freak shows.
- 52.
Byrne, Tuberculosis, p. 6.
- 53.
Byrne, Tuberculosis, p. 184.
- 54.
Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, p. 9.
- 55.
Susan J. Hekman, Private Selves, Public Identities: Reconsidering Identity Politics (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 6.
- 56.
R.W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), p. 37.
- 57.
Connell, Masculinities, p. 76.
- 58.
Maggie Wykes and Kirsty Welsh, Violence, Gender and Justice (London: SAGE Publications, 2009), p. 63.
- 59.
See John Banks and Ian A. Campbell, ‘Environmental Mycobacteria’, in Clinical Tuberculosis, ed. by Peter D.O. Davies, 3rd edn. (London: Arnold, 2003), pp. 439–448, on other types of mycobacteria that can cause tuberculosis in humans.
- 60.
James Arthur Gibson, ‘The Cry of the Consumptives’, Nineteenth Century, 272 (1899), pp. 641–653 (p. 644); https://search.proquest.com (British Periodicals I&II) [accessed 2nd June 2017]. According to Thomas Dormandy, The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis (London: Hambledon & London, 1999), p. 166, this situation had scarcely changed in 1910.
- 61.
See Sir Arthur Newsholme, Fifty Years in Public Health: A Personal Narrative with Comments: The Years Preceding 1909 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1935) and F.B. Smith, The Retreat of Tuberculosis 1850–1950 (London: Croom Helm, 1988) for criticism of the sanatorium movement.
- 62.
See Dormandy, White Death, p. 153; and Smith, Retreat, p. 99.
- 63.
Eric Wittkower, A Psychiatrist Looks at Tuberculosis (London: The National Association for the Prevention of Tuberculosis, 1955), p. 73.
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Tankard, A. (2018). Introduction. In: Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth Century Literature. Literary Disability Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71446-2_1
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