Miranda

Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone /

Multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal on the English-
speaking world 
4 | 2011
Samuel Beckett : Drama as philosophical endgame ?

Katherine Byrne, Tuberculosis and the Victorian

Literary Imagination
Laurence Talairach-Vielmas

Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/5085
DOI: 10.4000/miranda.5085
ISSN: 2108-6559

Publisher
Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès
 

Electronic reference
Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, “Katherine Byrne, Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination”,
Miranda [Online], 4 | 2011, Online since 24 June 2011, connection on 16 February 2021. URL: http://
journals.openedition.org/miranda/5085 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/miranda.5085

This text was automatically generated on 16 February 2021.

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 Katherine Byrne, Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination 1

Katherine Byrne, Tuberculosis and the

Victorian Literary Imagination
Laurence Talairach-Vielmas

REFERENCES
Katherine Byrne, Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), 223 p, ISBN 978–0–521–76667–8

1 Why was the Victorian feminine ideal emaciated and consumptive, epitomized by
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife, Elizabeth Siddal, aestheticized as she was dying in Beata
Beatrix? This is one of the questions that Katherine Byrne’s Tuberculosis and the Victorian
Literary Imagination addresses, explaining how pulmonary tuberculosis, or phtisis, a
disease which was at its height in Europe in the nineteenth century influenced “the
construction of the nineteenth-century social body through its pathologising of the
gender, class, and economic and aesthetic status of the individual body” (1).
Consumption not only killed more people than cholera and smallpox combined, but it
was also mysterious as the symptoms associated with consumption were manifold, and
the disease was likely to affect indifferently the brain, skin, lungs or stomach.
Interestingly, as Byrne highlights, the disease enabled Victorian writers to create
textual tropes, whether in relation to purity or sexuality. Through studies of Victorian
novels (or American works of the same period written and set in England, such as
Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady [1881]), as well as British paintings, Byrne looks at
representations of consumption in both Victorian medical writing and cultural
representations.
2 Chapter 1 focuses on nineteenth-century medical discourse on tuberculosis and the
percentage of the population affected by the disease. Its intention is to understand not
only its social significance, but also its cultural significance, particularly manifest in its
appearance in the social problem novel of the 1840s and 1850s. As Byrne makes explicit,
physicians used cultural representations of the disease in their medical writings,

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helping to purvey cultural stereotypes and associations of consumption with enduring

myths. As she argues, this helped link the disease with ways of life, revealing the role of
doctors in controlling their patients both morally and physically (from food restriction
—ironically enough since consumptives hardly ate—to physical cleanliness). The way in
which medical practitioners emphasized the social construction of consumption was
reflected in Victorian novels, which very often played with some of the contradictions
inherent in medical texts. The consumptive characters, either embodying saintly
spirituality or sexual depravation, were in most cases female characters, phtisis being
defined as a female disease while figures do not necessarily provide evidence of this.
Still, the links between uterine disorders as pre-disposing causes of pulmonary
disorders or the connections between the menstrual period and pulmonary
haemorrhage, show that consumption was closely connected with the female
reproductive system. It is hard to see the point Byrne tries to make, however, through
her choice of novels which were published at very different times, Mrs Henry Wood’s
East Lynne (1861–and not 1900 as argued), Mrs Ward’s Eleanor (1900) or Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights (1847), or whether she attempts to trace an evolution in the figure of
the consumptive (and in this case the non-chronological order in which the works are
analysed is confusing).
3 Chapter 2 deals with representations of consumption in Condition of England novels.
Byrne looks at Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1846–48) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North
and South (1854–55) and underlines the role disease played in the novels written or set
in the “hungry forties”. Consumption might seem to result from deprivation, but was
also a disease linked to the higher classes’ excess. In both cases, it was politicised in
order to reflect the ills of capitalism: Dickens’s denunciation of consumer society in
Dombey and Son hinges upon his representation of the consumptive heir of the family.
Dickens plays upon the ability of tuberculosis to disrupt the industrial world: Paul
Dombey’s angelic nature is brought out by the disease—a pathological force produced
by capitalism. In North and South, on the other hand, phtisis is caused by the lower
classes’ working conditions (poorly ventilated factories) and is simultaneously
associated with the consumption of luxury goods. Standing for capitalist exploitation
or over-consumption, used as a trope for luxury and deprivation, Victorian novelists
thus capitalized on the polyvalent meanings of tuberculosis, most especially in social
problem novels, since the disease could serve as a “powerful leveller of class” (68).
4 In Chapter 3, Byrne analyses the figure of the consumptive in Mrs Ward’s Eleanor (1900),
a novel she briefly compares to Henry James’s Wings of the Dove (1902), which also sets a
female invalid against an Italian backdrop. The parallel between Ward’s heroine’s
journey through Italy and the disease’s progression within her body enables Ward to
use consumption to reflect her heroine’s mental state, thus connecting mind and body
to represent emotional unhappiness. Comparing Eleanor with Charlotte Brontë’s
Caroline Helstone in Shirley (1849), Byrne explains the links or confusions between
consumption and anorexia nervosa as both diseases highlighted a denial of bodily
appetites and needs.
5 Byrne then turns to artistic representations of the consumptive woman, drawing on
Bram Djikstra’s Idols of Perversity, and situates consumption within the cult of
invalidism. As she argues, the female invalid epitomized capitalism: unproductive,
draining the household finances, the female invalid reflected her husband’s economic
power. Byrne looks at Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s aestheticisation of phtisis through his

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representations of Elizabeth Siddal. Rossetti, Byrne contends, as well as Siddal,

probably “manipulated and exploited the transforming power of the consumptive
aesthetic for social and economic ends” (96). She then compares Siddal to George Du
Maurier’s eponymous Trilby, both women showing the close relations between the cult
of invalidism and the cult of the dead woman. Mentioning Charles Reade’s A Simpleton
(1886), Byrne also recalls how the wearing of corsetry caused consumption and was
denounced by the medical profession, medical practitioners raising young women’s
awareness on the need to avoid pathological lifestyles.
6 Chapter 5, on Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), highlights the relationship between
consumption and vampirism. Like other diseases, such as anaemia, cholera or
porphyria, vampirism has often been associated with different wasting diseases.
However, Byrne shows that Victorian literary vampires exhibit symptoms traditionally
linked to consumption, a link that could even be found in real life since victims of
tuberculosis were sometimes exhumed to exorcise fears of vampirism. Bram Stoker was
not only Rossetti’s neighbour and probably influenced by his opening of Siddal’s coffin
seven years after her death to exhume his buried poems (and the discovery of her still-
perfect corpse) but he was also known to keep newspaper clippings mentioning cases of
death by consumption believed to be cases of vampirism. This may explain why in
Dracula the description of Lucy’s death is caught within a pathological discourse more
than a supernatural one. Byrne sets parallels with Le Fanu’s Carmilla, even drawing on
Thomas Beddoes’s 1799 Essay on the Causes Early Signs of, and Prevention of Pulmonary
Consumption and the physician’s description of the consumptive, to bring to light the
echo between nineteenth-century medical literature and Victorian literary vampires.
The link between these consumptive women and the supernatural figure of the
vampire points out the disease’s power to act as a metaphor for mystery and the
supernatural through its shifty appearance and meanings.
7 Chapter 6 deals with Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and shifts the focus to the
depiction of the male consumptive. Ralph Touchett, probably inspired by Minny
Temple, James’s younger cousin who died of phtisis, is an effeminate and self-sacrificial
figure. Though consumption is in no way a means of aestheticizing him, his sickly body
nonetheless brings out his pure soul, James thus capitalizing on the construction of
consumption as a “spiritualising disease” (172). Because he is not the main character of
the novel, Ralph sheds light on the role played by consumptive characters in canonical
Victorian novels, such as Helen Burns in Jane Eyre (1847), serving as foils to the main
characters and reflecting “the better half of the central character” (171).
8 However, when Robert Koch identified the bacteria at the root of consumption in 1882,
tuberculosis lost part of its symbolical power. There was very little mystery left in the
bacterial infection which had yet endowed with so much beauty the ethereal wasting
women of Victorian art and literature. In the twentieth century, tuberculosis became
instead a symbol of war and a consequence of it, novels playing on the image of the
sanatorium in twentieth-century “tubercular” novels. If the first and second World
Wars revisited the literary consumptive, the male body replacing the female body and
becoming an object of medical concern, invalidism was nevertheless not shown as
natural, but as resulting, on the contrary, from a pathological society. In the 1950s, the
widespread use of streptomycin put an end to the metaphorical power of the disease,
leaving the stage free for diseases that still baffled the medical profession: it was time

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 Katherine Byrne, Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination 4

for consumption to swap place with leukaemia and for images of aesthetic illnesses to
be revamped.
9 Byrne’s tracing of the trajectory of a particular disease and its various symbolical
meanings enables the reader to make his way through literary and medical writings of
the nineteenth century. Even if the grouping of texts may sometimes confuse the
reader, Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination is a convincing study of
tuberculosis, a disease which is recurrently shrouded in mystery in Victorian novels.
More significantly still, Byrne’s study underlines the metaphorical power of disease and
its cultural impact and will undoubtedly appeal to students and scholars interested in
nineteenth-century constructions of the body and in interdisciplinary research.

INDEX
Keywords: Victorian novel, Victorian art, tuberculosis, medicine
Mots-clés: roman victorien, art victorien, tuberculose, médecine

AUTHORS
LAURENCE TALAIRACH-VIELMAS
Professeur
Université Toulouse 2 – Le Mirail
[email protected]

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