The Hallucination of the Real: Pre-Raphaelite Vision, Democracy and Masculinity

Abstract

The women writers on which the previous two chapters have focussed employ the bodily spectre represented by the medical discourse of nervous irritability as a way of appropriating the transcendent authority of Romantic vision. Harriet Martineau associates nervous irritability with the religious establishment in order to assert the superiority of Unitarian rational belief. Similarly, Harriet Beecher Stowe connects nervous irritability with the institution of slavery in a way which implies that the apparent passivity of Uncle Tom incarnates the transcendent authority of the Bible. In both cases, I have suggested, the marginality of the figures whose authority is asserted by this strategy encodes feminist implications.