Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers

Session 11 - Exploring Health, Illness and Disease through Literature
Chair: Julie Anderson

Strand by Strand: Untying the Knots of Mental and Physical Illness in the Correspondence and Diaries of Antonia White and Emily Coleman
Sherah Wells
University of Warwick, United Kingdom

Antonia White and Emily Holmes Coleman met in the early 1930s and remained friends until Coleman's death in the mid-1970s.  Various circumstances often prevented them from meeting in person so much of their friendship is documented through their correspondence.  In these letters, they most often discussed the three main themes which occupied their lives:  writing, illness, and religion.  Both suffered psychotic breakdowns as young women which they fictionalized in novels and short stories.  They did not meet until after these initial breakdowns, and their diaries from these time periods are missing.  However, mental instability continued to plague both women for the rest of their lives, and they continued to discuss the problem in their diaries and letters.
This paper does not consider the fictionalization of their mental illnesses which has often been interpreted as a form of scriptotherapy.  Instead, it considers White’s and Coleman’s perceptions of their mental illness, specifically their perceptions of their bodies as female, and the way in which these perceptions are expressed in correspondence and journals.  The paper approaches this issue from two separate angles.  First, it will examine the way in which the popularization of psychoanalysis during the early twentieth century encouraged the two women to utilize a psychoanalytic vocabulary in their writing.  It will then examine the transformation in this vocabulary when both women became actively involved in the Catholic church.  In this way the paper will demonstrate the extent to which psychoanalysis and Catholicism served as competing discourses for White and Coleman in their life-writing texts, and the differences in the way in which medical and religious discourses may be used to interpret mental illness in society.

Narratives of Illness in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel
Peggy Yoon
School of English, University of Exeter, United Kingdom

In his novel Clarissa (1747-8), Samuel Richardson presents a case study of society diseased by the ‘English malady’ (nervous disorders) and in desperate need of a cure.  Through the tribulations (including rape) of his heroine Clarissa, Richardson metaphorically displays the negative effects of what his personal physician, George Cheyne, pinpointed as the “Diseases which proceed from Idleness and fulness of Bread”.  The grim vision of Clarissa emphasizes Richardson’s strong belief that English society needed moral lessons to withstand material temptations, increased by Britain’s recent economic success as, for Richardson, the physical was inextricably linked with the moral.  The effects of commercial success on society from the late 17th to early 18th centuries have been well documented by contemporary physicians like Cheyne, Nicholas Robinson, and Thomas Sydenham, as well as by recent historians like Roy Porter, Linda Colley, and John Brewer, however, studies of these effects on how health and illness are portrayed in the novel are few.
Clarissa’s journey from her father’s house to the heart of commercialism itself, London, charts the medical progression of a patient’s decline in health, from initial malaise to full-blown disease.  Reading the novel as a message of ominous warning to society, Clarissa’s life and death symbolize how moral health immediately impacts physical health.  Her inevitable death becomes the ultimate sign of a diseased society.
This paper will explicate the specific ways Richardson mapped out the theories of George Cheyne in his novel, creating a model of the social body through the Harlowes.  Richardson’s social vision is influenced by the medico-religious theories of Cheyne, a prominent physician of early eighteenth-century English medicine, during a period when he experiences physical illness and embarks on an ascetic dietetic regimen of “milk and seeds” reminiscent of his heroine’s diet as she enters the last stages of her illness.

Writing Plague: Transforming Narrative, Witnessing, and History
Jennifer Cooke
University of Sussex, Brighton, Sussex, United Kingdom

Plague left Western Europe in 1720, never to return in epidemic proportions, but its legacy survives in literature. This paper explores the past and current importance of that legacy through the intersections of two plague texts: Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722) and Albert Camus’ The Plague (1947). Defoe’s narrator purportedly provides an eyewitness account of the 1665 plague in London; Camus’ fictional plague outbreak, in 1940s Oran, is recounted by a doctor.
Writing plague, this paper establishes, transforms traditional narrative practice and results in the authors structuring their accounts around multiple small stories of personal tragedy or hope in their attempt to render the massive loss of life more emotive, personal and authentic. These ‘episodemics’, through the inevitable deaths they portray, alter the usual development of characterization expected in fiction. In addition, the writing of disease infects the language and punctuation of the narratives, which stylistically becomes symptomatic of the fevered, breathless, tortured experiences described.
Coupled with the exploration of how plague transforms narrative is a discussion of the transformations these plague texts imply for the usually discrete categories of fiction and history. Defoe and Camus provide eyewitness narrators, who survive to recount the plague. This paper examines the role of the eyewitness in relation to the narrativising of history, drawing on arguments made by Shoshana Felman in relation to The Plague, which she reads as an analogy of the Second World War. Felman’s claim that “narrative as history” can transform our understanding of cataclysmic historical events is read against and enriched by an understanding of the blending of history and fiction provided by Defoe. The paper proposes that these plague texts reveal, contra Felman, that literature’s gift is not in providing an imaginative experience which history cannot summon, but in the provision of a witness who can “speak for all.”  This “fantasy witness,” examined in relation to Defoe and Camus, can have a transformative role to play in the history upon which it draws, and in the recuperation and re-imagining of that history, but is not, I suggest, without its dangers. 

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