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PATHOLOGY and PERFORMANCE: the FEMALE BODY in the ROMANTIC ERA by Safari Ross a Dissertation Submitted Pathology and Performance: The Female Body in the Romantic Era Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation Authors Ross, Safari Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 26/09/2021 04:45:02 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/627696 PATHOLOGY AND PERFORMANCE: THE FEMALE BODY IN THE ROMANTIC ERA by Safari Ross ________________________ Copyright © Safari Ross 2018 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2018 3 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that an accurate acknowledgement of the source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his or her judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author. SIGNED: Safari Ross 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT……………………………………………………...…………………..……………6 INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………...………………....7 CHAPTER ONE – MADNESS, WRITING, AND THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE PERCEPTIONS OF MARY LAMB……………………………………………...…..….34 CHAPTER TWO – ATTITUDES, GESTURES, AND VOICES: PATHOLOGIZED BODIES IN COUNT BASIL AND THE CAPTIVE…….…………………………..…….72 CHAPTER THREE – HAUNTINGS, FRAGMENTATION, AND MELANCHOLY IN KEATS’S ISABELLA…………………………………….………...………………..126 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………………...….163 NOTES………………………..………………………………………………………….……..173 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………………...180 5 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1…………………………………………………………………………………………..78 Figure 2…………………………………………………………………………………………..78 Figure 3…………………………………..……………………………………………………..117 Figure 4…………………………………………………………………………………………117 6 ABSTRACT In my dissertation, “Pathology and Performance: The Female Body in the Romantic Era,” I examine the cultural practice of medical authorities pathologizing the female body in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I specifically focus on depictions of madness, depression, and hyper-femininity in representative texts that demonstrate the influence of medical discourse on authors of the Romantic Era. Borrowing Mary Poovey’s concept of the “proper lady,” I argue that women during this time were categorized as pathological if they deviated in any way from a proscriptive definition of “natural” womanhood, which itself was normalized through social conditioning rather than biological fact. Despite this larger practice of pathologizing female bodies as inherently sick, I have found moments of resistance and critique. The personal correspondence and biographical depictions of Mary Lamb demonstrate Lamb’s ability to manipulate characterizations of madness in her own favor, effecting her mastery of language despite her pathology. The tragic consequences of rigid gender roles in Joanna Baillie’s Count Basil illuminate the absurdity of hyperfeminine “romantic” behavior and the contagious threat of the “weak” female body. Matthew Lewis’s description of “sane” physical gesture in The Captive’s dramaturgy reveals the failure of feminine performance in a pathologized setting and the apathetic complicity of his audience. The gothic hauntings and thematic fragmentation in John Keats’s Isabella signal the violence of patriarchal authority on the female body and mind. Together, these works indicate the literary, theatrical, and cultural tensions established by the pattern of Romantic female pathology. 7 INTRODUCTION One of the most popular and pervasive medical texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was William Buchan’s Domestic medicine (1769). Domestic medicine was published in multiple European languages and underwent new editions and reprints every few years until 1846 in Britain (and until 1913 in America). Buchan (1729-1805), a Scottish doctor trained in Edinburgh, wrote a thorough, descriptive casebook of medical practice that emphasized the empirical, scientific study of the body for which Edinburgh medicine was known.1 He wrote Domestic medicine as a household guide for the average person, using non-medical terminology and explaining not only diseases and their treatments, but also preventative measures. C.J. Lawrence asserts that Domestic medicine made “distinctive contribution” to “three educational themes”: “the rise of popular science education; the rebirth of the health movement; and the tradition of domestic handbooks of all kinds” (22). Through his stated goal of “laying Medicine more open to mankind,” Buchan influenced the public’s perception of medicine, disease, and treatment, creating an atmosphere of bodily consciousness and deepening public concern for healthy bodies and minds (Buchan xxi). However, Buchan’s influence also contributed to a larger cultural pattern of objectifying and pathologizing the female body in ways that suggested women were inherently sick, abnormal, and in need of the social and medical authority of men. As one of the most influential medical textbooks published in the late eighteenth century, Buchan’s Domestic medicine provides ample evidence of the coded language and often outright misogyny with which male doctors studied and treated the female body. In addition to descriptions of diseases and regimens for treatment, as well as a heavy emphasis on cleanliness, Buchan’s book provided observations on the moral, physical, and intellectual aptitude of women. Consequently, the female body was treated as a marker for the overall morality of the female subject. We need only look at the very first pages of Domestic medicine to see the social 8 commentary embedded in Buchan’s “objective,” science-based medicine: “Women of delicate conditions, subject to hysteric fits, or other nervous affections, make very bad nurses: and these complaints are now so common, that it is rare to find a woman of fashion free from them” (2). Buchan’s complaints are twofold: (1) Women are predisposed to delicate conditions which impair their ability to raise children and perform other womanly duties; (2) women develop “nervous affections” because it is “fashionable.” The real implication is that not only are women weak, but that they wish to be ill, a notion fraught with misogynistic dismissal of female illness and psychology.2 William Buchan is not alone in his medical pathologizing of the female body and mind as abnormal and as prone to disease, if not already diseased from the start. Numerous other medical texts (which I will discuss in more detail below) demonstrate the pattern of pathology embedded in discussions of female anatomy, disease, and behavior that reached beyond the medical community to a broader public audience in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Roy Porter argues that medical self-help was “universal” in the Romantic Age: people “had access to a widespread lay culture of advice and action regarding health and sickness,” thus establishing a pattern of self-help first, making “the recourse to professional medical treatment…secondary” (Porter np). Specifically citing Buchan’s Domestic medicine as well as John Wesley’s Primitive Physick (1749) as prominent best-sellers in the medical self-help literary market, Porter attributes the simultaneous increase in demand of medical textbooks and expansion of medical professionals to (1) A distrust of doctors and a “healthy skepticism about the powers of the physician” and (2) “the growing prosperity of what has been called an early consumer society” (Porter np). Porter’s research clearly shows that, though there were not the kind of scientific breakthroughs that hallmarked the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Romantic period witnessed an increased medicalization of the body in public discourse. 9 We can see the significance of medical tensions over the body, particularly the female body, in both the medical and literary writings produced during this time. Romantic literature is often characterized by its emphasis on the powers of the mind, the imagination, the self; but recent studies “have demonstrated beyond doubt that many Romantics were deeply versed in medical and scientific knowledge. In certain respects, sickness was seen by Romantic writers and artists not simply as a physical effect—not merely a breakdown of the body machine—but as an expression of the soul or personality, a view which paralleled some Christian and folk beliefs” (Porter np). Some “folk” beliefs, in fact, were given substantial weight by the medical profession and the doctors, surgeons, and apothecaries that could claim the privileged knowledge of professional medicine,3 so much so that they sometimes espoused traditional assumptions rooted in superstition rather than scientific research. Since most of these professional medical practitioners were men, absolute male authority
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