Body Dysmorphic Disorder: The Self-Anatomy of Coleridge’s Aesthetics

Abstract

Coleridge’s medical complaints were numerous and severe. Chronic aches, uneasiness, disordered bowels, a pain in the gut. He diagnosed in himself gout, depression, and rheumatic fever. Yet far from simply disabling, his various disorders quickened his sustained theorization of ‘his own diseased body’ in his letters, notebooks, lyric poetry, and essays, as Jennifer Ford has argued (1998, p. 3). That such incessant interpretations of his ill health could bespeak hypochondria, moreover, is the point George Rousseau and David Haycock make in a recent study of ‘the decades of [Coleridge’s] concern for his ailments’ (2003, p. 254). Yet even to diagnose Coleridge’s hypochondria as Rousseau and Haycock do leaves much work to be done. To suggest that Coleridge is ‘pre-eminently hypochondriacal’ (p. 232) in an era obsessed with health-consciousness risks obscuring the ways in which his ongoing attempts to dissect and ascertain his own health represent more than a preoccupation with illness, if such a compulsive and pervasive fascination with sickness is itself readily legible. His biographer Richard Holmes refers to his ‘hypochondriac delights’ to describe Coleridge’s focused relationship with disease (1989, p. 303). Despite frequent and sometimes rapid recoveries from serious illness, Coleridge nonetheless cultivated an understanding of a ‘body diseased and fevered by my imagination’ (CL I, p. 348).