Food for Sympathy:Illness, Nursing, and Affect in Victorian Literature and Culture

[摘要] The profuse illness and nursing narratives in Victorian texts frequently featuresympathy for physical suffering as a major cultural and literary trope. In a widevariety of texts ranging from social reform writing to autobiographies, from novels topoetry, physical suffering was often closely associated with a specific cultural form ofaffect called sympathy. While earlier epistemologies of sympathy developed byScottish Enlightenment writers defined it as a free agent that autonomously flowedthrough individuals, toward the mid-century, this model left its place to formulationsof sympathy as an alignment of affect between clearly separated subjects that could beachieved through sympathetic imagination. This epistemological and cultural shift isstrongly apparent in both fictional and nonfinctional depictions of sympathy for thesick. Critical works on the nineteenth-century culture of illness and medical care havetended to focus on the community-building functions of the sickroom. However, theillness-nursing dyad constitutes an affective structure through which some lessexamined aspects of sympathy for physical suffering, such as the alterity and abjectionof bodies in pain, can be explored. Descriptions of physical suffering usually followedcertain narrative conventions that positioned the sufferers and their nurses as objectsor subjects of sympathy. This particular object-subject relationship facilitated theconstruction, negotiation, and redefinition of collective identities like nationality,gender, and class. While nursing memoirs and conduct manuals adhered toconventional ideals of femininity, they also expanded definitions of feminity andmaternalism to include competence. In their war nursing memoirs, unprivileged ormarginalized women who worked as nurses were able to inscribe themselves asprofessional women and national subjects by contributing to the national narratives ofthe war with soothing narratives of their nursing experience. In Bildungsromans, theirsympathy for disabled male companions enabled socially and economicallydisenfranchised male protagonists to reconstruct wounded masculinity as a hegemonicmasculinity model. Destabilized social identities, on the other hand, culminated innovelistic examples of resistance to sympathy on the level of character or narrative,which the authors used as a representational strategy to approach dilemmas for whichthere are no solutions.

[发布机构] Rice University

[效力级别] and