Abstract
Wuthering Heights ridiculed consumptive stereotypes, and Jude the Obscure exposed socio-economic and cultural factors that disabled people with chronic illness, but neither could hope for a better future. Beatrice Harraden’s 1893 bestseller, Ships That Pass in the Night, also offers a complex, bitter critique of the way in which sentimentality obscures the abuse and neglect of disabled people by non-disabled carers; it undermines the Romanticisation of consumptives, and shows consumptives driven to suicide by social marginalisation that leaves them feeling useless and hopeless. Yet its depiction of a romantic friendship between an emancipated woman and a disabled man also engages with the exciting possibilities of 1890s’ gender politics, and imagines new comradeship between disabled and non-disabled people based on mutual care and respect.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Miss Harraden’, The Times, 6th May 1936, p. 18; find.galegroup.com (Times Digital Archive) [accessed 27th July 2017]. See Beatrice Harraden, Concerning ‘Ships That Pass in the Night’ (London: S.S. McClure, [1894]), pp. 5–6. Rhodes (1853–1902) became consumptive aged16; see Dormandy, White Death, pp. 122–123.
- 2.
Beatrice Harraden, Ships That Pass in the Night (1893) (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauschnitz, 1894 ‘continental edition’; facsimile repr. [n.p.]: Kessinger, 2007), XI, p. 121. An electronic version of the novel can be obtained online for free.
- 3.
A review of Ships That Pass in the Night in The Bookman, 4: 19 (April 1893), p. 27, https://search.proquest.com (British Periodicals I&II) [accessed 27th July 2017], states that ‘the story is distinctly of the present day’, and bewails ‘the cloying morbidity which, unfortunately, is the strongest impression left by the book’.
- 4.
See Fred Hunter, ‘Beatrice Harraden’, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/33720 [accessed 8th June 2009], and ‘Miss Beatrice Harraden’, Review of Reviews (June 1897), p. 569; https://search.proquest.com (British Periodicals I&II) [accessed 27th July 2017]. Harraden became a member of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union.
- 5.
‘Miss Beatrice Harraden’, Bookman, 4: 22 (July 1893), p. 108; https://search.proquest.com (British Periodicals I&II) [accessed 27th July 2017]. See ‘Miss Beatrice Harraden’ (1897), p. 569.
- 6.
Harraden, Concerning ‘Ships’, p. 2.
- 7.
Most of Harraden’s recorded involvement with feminist activities occurred after she wrote Ships. The insertion of parables in Ships suggests the influence of Olive Shreiner’s proto-feminist novel The Story of an African Farm (1883).
- 8.
‘Miss Beatrice Harraden’ (1897), p. 569.
- 9.
Beatrice Harraden, ‘My Liberty’, Nash’s and Pall Mall Magazine, 76: 394 (February 1926), pp. 26–27, continued pp. 108–112 (pp. 26–27); https://search.proquest.com (British Periodicals I&II) [accessed 27th July 2017].
- 10.
Harraden, ‘My Liberty’, p. 111.
- 11.
See L. Bryder, Below the Magic Mountain: A Social History of Tuberculosis in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
- 12.
Clark, Treatise, p. 177; Newsholme, Prevention, pp. 49–50. By contrast, George Gissing, The Odd Women (1893), ed. by Patricia Ingham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 41–42, ignores the fact that young female deaths from tuberculosis were falling dramatically in the second half of the nineteenth century (Smith, People’s Health, p. 289) and implies that single women entering the workforce are dying from consumption in droves.
- 13.
Bailin, Sickroom, p. 10.
- 14.
A.E. Ellis is the nom de plume of English writer Derek Lindsay (1920–2000), who underwent treatment in a Swiss sanatorium as a student in the 1940s. Inspired by his experiences, The Rack is a horrifying and brutal novel clearly set in a similar (or identical) location to Ships, but fifty years later.
- 15.
See Dormandy, White Death, p. 312, and Tuberculosis and the Commonwealth: The Full Verbatim Transactions of the Second Commonwealth and Empire Health and Tuberculosis Conference (National Association for the Prevention of Tuberculosis [NAPT], 1949), p. 287.
- 16.
Squire, Hygienic Prevention, pp. 130–132.
- 17.
UPIAS in Barnes, ‘Legacy’, p. 4.
- 18.
See two more mentioned on III, p. 29.
- 19.
Abberley, ‘Concept of Oppression’, p. 171.
- 20.
Kriegel, ‘Cripple in Literature’, p. 43.
- 21.
Longmore, ‘Screening Stereotypes’, p. 73.
- 22.
Smith, Plea for the Unborn, pp. 27, 40 and 101.
- 23.
Longmore, ‘Screening Stereotypes’, p. 73.
- 24.
Although Bernadine has some unspecified impairment, her social marginalisation is less disabling than Robert’s; she is able to leave the Kurhaus while he must stay to survive.
- 25.
‘Review of Ships That Pass in the Night’, Spectator, 24th June 1893, p. 861.
- 26.
Harraden, Concerning ‘Ships’, p. 4.
- 27.
Congreve, On Consumption, p. 2.
- 28.
Harraden, Concerning ‘Ships’, p. 6.
- 29.
See Richardson, Love and Eugenics, pp. 162–164, comparing ‘The Heart of the Apple’ with The Woman Who Did. See Gail Cunningham, ‘“He Notes”: Reconstructing Masculinity’, in The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms, ed. by Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 94–106, on Gallia.
- 30.
Grant Allen, ‘The Girl of the Future’, Universal Review, 7: 25 (May 1890), pp. 49–64 (p. 60); https://search.proquest.com (British Periodicals I&II) [accessed 27th July 2017].
- 31.
Harraden, ‘My Liberty’, p. 26. See ‘Miss Beatrice Harraden’ (1897), p. 569. See Richardson, Love and Eugenics, pp. 179–214 on Caird. Robert refers to Bernadine and even to himself as a child (XII, pp. 133–135, and II. IV, pp. 255–258), but never as potential parents.
- 32.
John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869), in On Liberty, and Other Essays, ed. by John Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 471–582, (p. 482).
- 33.
[Stephen], ‘Sentimentalism’, p. 71.
- 34.
Frawley, Invalidism, p. 27.
- 35.
Mitchell and Snyder, ‘Representation’, p. 208.
- 36.
Beardsley to Raffalovich (12th December 1896), in Letters AB, p. 225, discussed in Chap. 3.
- 37.
Kittay, Love’s Labor, p. 35.
- 38.
See Doat, ‘Evolution and Human Uniqueness’, pp. 16–19, on nineteenth-century writers suggesting that vulnerability and care of the vulnerable are an essential part of human evolution, not a hindrance to natural selection. See also Kittay, Love’s Labor, p. 29.
- 39.
See also Mona Caird, ‘Does Marriage Hinder a Woman’s Self-development?’ (1899), in The Daughters of Danaus (1894; facsimile repr. [n.p.]: Aegypan Press, [2009]), pp. 373–376, in which Caird reverses gender roles to demonstrate the impossibility of self-fulfilment for anyone (male or female) taking on a woman’s place in marriage.
- 40.
Marion Shaw and Lyssa Randolph, New Woman Writers of the Late Nineteenth Century (Tavistock, Devon: Northcote, 2007), p. 4.
- 41.
Chris Willis, ‘“Heaven defend me from political or highly educated women!”: Packaging the New Woman for Mass Consumption’, in The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms, ed. by Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 53–65 (p. 57).
- 42.
See Harraden’s letter to The Times, 10th November 1908, p. 17, find.galegroup.com (Times Digital Archive) [accessed 27th July 2017], on women’s suffrage as ‘an elemental force of which no person, or group of persons, can control the manifestation’.
- 43.
See Linda Hughes, ‘A Club of Their Own: The “Literary Ladies”, New Women Writers, and Fin-de-Siècle Authorship’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 35 (2007), pp. 233–260; https://www.cambridge.org [accessed 27th July 2017].
- 44.
David Bolt, ‘The Blindman in the Classic: Feminisms, Oculacentrism, and Jane Eyre’, pp. 32–50 (pp. 44–45), and Margaret Rose Torrell, ‘From India-Rubber Back to Flesh: A Reevaluation of Male Embodiment in Jane Eyre’, pp. 71–90 (pp. 80–81 discuss Bolt’s reading), both in The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability, ed. by David Bolt, Julia Miele Rodas, and Elizabeth J. Donaldson (Columbus: Ohio State University, 2012).
- 45.
See Trevor Fisher, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of Late Victorian Britain (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1995) on social purity feminism in response to the 1864 Contagious Diseases Act.
- 46.
Olive Schreiner, Woman and Labour (1911; repr. Champaign, IL: Project Gutenberg, [1999]), p. 105.
- 47.
Helen Mathers, ‘Old Versus New’, English Illustrated Magazine, 135 (December 1894), pp. 81–88 (84); Emma Churchman Hewitt, ‘The “New Woman” in Her Relation to the “New Man”’, Westminster Review, 147 (March 1897), pp. 335–337. Both https://search.proquest.com (British Periodicals I&II) [accessed 27th July 2017].
- 48.
Sarah Grand, ‘The New Aspect of the Woman Question’, in Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, ed. by Talia Schaffer (New York: Pearson/Longman, 2007), pp. 205–210 (first publ. in North American Review, 158 (March, 1894), pp. 270–276), p. 208, complains that the ‘trouble is not because women are mannish, but because men grow ever more effeminate’, and characterises men as passive or even reactionary.
- 49.
Mona Caird, ‘Marriage’, Westminster Review, 130 (July 1888), pp. 186–201 (p. 196); https://search.proquest.com (British Periodicals I&II) [accessed 27th July 2017].
- 50.
Clementina Black, ‘On Marriage: A Criticism’, Fortnightly Review, 47: 280 (April 1890), pp. 586–594 (p. 593); https://search.proquest.com (British Periodicals I&II) [accessed 27th July 2017]. See also Livesey, Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism, pp. 47–79.
- 51.
Shakespeare, Gillespie-Sells, Davies, Sexual Politics, p. 63.
- 52.
H.E. Harvey, ‘Science and the Rights of Women’, Westminster Review, 148 (1897), pp. 205–207; (repr. in A New Woman Reader, ed. by Carolyn Christensen Nelson (Toronto: Broadview, 2001), p. 168).
- 53.
Caird, ‘Marriage’, p. 198; Black, ‘On Marriage’, p. 591.
- 54.
According to Gertrude Atherton, Adventures of a Novelist (1932), quoted in Weintraub, Aubrey Beardsley, p. 117, Harraden and Beardsley attended the same garden party in 1894, but I am not aware of any friendship between them, or of any evidence that Beardsley had read Ships.
- 55.
This delicate negotiation can be illuminated by Kittay’s exploration of dependency and care in Love’s Labour (especially p. 35).
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Tankard, A. (2018). Progress: Valid Invalid Identity in Ships That Pass in the Night (1893). 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_6
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