4th Global Conference
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Monday 4th July - Thursday 7th July 2005
Mansfield College, Oxford
Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers
Session 11: The Myths and Metaphors of Illness (2)
Chair: Gillian Bendelow
Serpents, Devils, Zebras: Metaphors of Illness in
Swedish Literature on Eating Disorders (1987-2005)
Katarina Bernhardsson
Litteraturvetenskapliga Institutionen,
Lunds Universitet, Lund,
Sweden
During the last decades, the Western world has seen
an increase in the number of people suffering from anorexia nervosa,
an illness particularly afflicting young girls entering puberty. In Sweden
this has resulted in a literary boom, where a new corpus of novels and
autobiographies dealing with anorexia has emerged, with the starting
point in the publishing 1987 of Evelyn Spöke (Evelyn
Ghost),
written by nineteen-year-old Maria Hede. Since then more than twenty
books on the subject have been published, almost exclusively written
by girls in their twenties and often being their début. The anorexia
literature is widely acknowledged as a new subgenre, where the boundary
between fiction and autobiography is blurred, and it is not seldom frowned
on as inferior literature.
My purpose with this paper is to discuss the
metaphors and cultural myths used to make sense of anorexia in Swedish
literature since 1987, drawing on studies by scholars like Anne Hunsaker
Hawkins (Reconstructing
Illness) and Leslie Heywood (Dedication to Hunger) as well
as ethnological studies of anorexia. It is not unusual that an ill person,
regardless of the nature of his or her illness, feels guilty for having
caused it (by leading the wrong life, or having a cancer-prone personality).
In the case of anorexia, however, this is a specifically common part
of the illness experience, and this opens up for a partial transformation
of the illness metaphors. As an example, the common ‘battle metaphor’ that
Hawkins writes about is altered. For a person suffering from a disease
like cancer or heart problems, the battle is fought against ‘illness
as enemy’. In the anorexia literature, illness is not always seen
as an enemy, but just as often perceived as a friend who offers an identity.
The battle is not fought against illness, but the illness is a
battle, a battle against the body, the flesh and the self. In addition,
battle metaphors are used against those trying to make the girl healthy
and forcing her to eat. ‘Illness as friend’ is in the anorexia
literature often depicted as an Other inside the Self – a monster, ‘a
tangle’, Lucifer, a wolf – an ambiguous friend offering consolation
at the same time as it is forcing the girl to blindly obey.
The literature
about anorexia nervosa offers an important way to understand an illness
that, looked at from the outside, seems enigmatic and obscure. There
are metaphors used to make sense of anorexia, the body and the anorexic
person’s identity, but also of the difficult journey out
of the illness. In this journey the difficulty lies not only in achieving
the healthy goal, but as much in being able to actually desire it.
Constructing a Consumptive Myth: Medical
Discourse and the Representation of Tuberculosis
Katherine Byrne
Norwich,
Norfolk, United Kingdom
My paper will
focus on the
ways the Victorian medical profession attempted to "make sense" of
this
mysterious and incurable illness by exploring, utilising and developing
the cultural myths and metaphors that traditionally accompanied it.
Given the absence of medical knowledge about the cause of consumption
until Koch indentified the bacillus in the 1880s, superstition and
sterotype were important, if highly unscientific, sources of information
for physicans struggling to identify, explain and treat this disease.
For example, one of the most pervasive traditional assumptions about
tuberculosis was that it only afflicted the young and beautiful,
a
belief commonly expressed in the Victorian novel, but by no means
confined to fiction. Medical discourse 're-wrote` the consumptive
stereotype as a consumptive diathesis, and this notion of a clearly
identifiable pathological type became a popular diagnostic tool
for
many physicans. Similarly, the idea that consumptives were sexually
deviant was explored and perpetuated by medical writing which sought
in
this behaviour both a cause of the disease, and its potential cure.
My
paper will explore the medical perpetuation of these and
other
consumptive myths, and examine why they were appealing to physicans,
even though they possibly hindered the progression of knowledge about
the disease, and had damaging implications for the social perception
of
the tubercular patient - implications which still have resonance
today.
Final Exam with the Gargoyle: Cancer and
Its Metaphors in Gail Godwin’s
Novel The Good Husband
Gudrun M. Grabher
Institut für Amerikastudien, Universität Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria
In
Gaild Godwin’s brilliant novel The Good Husband (1994),
the main protagonist Magda Danvers is dying of ovarian cancer. As a college
professor of English literature she has never looked at life merely as
a given fact but always tried to trace the symbolical meaning behind
every action, motive, and move („ [...] every act and choice, however
small, is consequential in the pattern of a life“ – GH 71). The
awareness that she is facing death and will go through a period of physical
pain and psychological suffering accompanying the deterioration of her body
and brain is posing a last challenge to her. Even though she labels the
cancer spreading within her the Gargoyle, she accepts it not only as
kind of a companion but also as her final teacher.
Obviously sharing the
Socratic conviction that „an unreflected
life is not worth living,“ („It’s sinful not
to try to keep track of who you are“ – GH 210), Magda Danvers
tries to make sense of her illness by integrating it, as the last part
of the puzzle, into the pattern of her life. She is eager to learn from
the point of view of her gruesome teacher: that once she gets herself out
of the way, she can see things as they really are; that like the prophetic
artists, whom she has always admired, she can „solve something for
everybody by making universally compelling images of their conflicts“ (GH
25f.), that her (and every human being’s) vocation is „to fulfill in
an inner way, in a symbolic way what the outer world is failing to
provide [her] with in the service of wholeness“ (GH 24). Allowing
the Gargoyle’s grin to stretch „at her expense,“ she
finally gives in to it, satisfied with having made sense of her last exam
as well.
In my analysis of the novel I will try to demonstrate how the
protagonist, rather than denying and rejecting her illness and impending
death, accepts it as a last revealing symbol of the enigma of (her) life,
which she has both managed to come to terms with and to successfully share
with the people around her.