Somatic fictions
Subtitle: imagining illness in Victorian culture
By: Athena Vrettos.
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 1995
Place of publication: Stanford, Calif
Language: eng
Number of pages: 250
Subjects: English fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; Medicine, Psychosomatic, in literature.; American fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; Literature and mental illness -- English-speaking countries.; Literature and medicine -- English-speaking countries.; Medical fiction -- History and criticism.; Somatoform disorders in literature.; Mind and body in literature.; Imagination in literature.; Diseases in literature.; Health in literature.; Sick in literature.
Description: Somatic Fictions focuses on the centrality of illness - particularly psychosomatic illness - as an imaginative construct in Victorian culture, emphasizing how it shaped the terms through which people perceived relationships between body and mind, self and other, private and public.

The author uses nineteenth-century fiction, diaries, medical treatises, and health advice manuals to examine how Victorians tried to understand and control their world through a process of physiological and pathological definition. Tracing the concept of illness in the fiction of a variety of authors - Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Henry James, Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Meredith, Bram Stoker, and H.

Rider Haggard - Vrettos explores the historical assumptions, patterns of perceptions, and structures of belief that invested sickness and health with cultural meaning.

The book treats narrative as a crucial component of cultural history and demonstrates how literary, medical, and cultural narratives charted the categories through which people came to understand themselves and the structures of social interaction. Vrettos challenges those feminist and cultural historians who have maintained that nineteenth-century medical attempts to chart the meaning of bodily structures resulted in essential categories of social and sexual definition.

She argues that the power of illness to make one's own body seem alien, or to link disparate groups of people through the process of contagion, suggested to Victorians the potential instability of social and biological identities.

The book shows how Victorians attempted to manage diffuse and chaotic social issues by displacing them onto matters of physiology. This displacement resulted in the collapse of perceived boundaries of human embodiment, whether through fears of psychic and somatic permeability, sympathetic identification with another's pain, or conflicting measures of racial and cultural fitness.

In the course of her study, the author examines the relationships among health, imperialism, anthropometry, and racial theory in such popular Victorian novels as Dracula and She, and the conceptual linkage of spirituality, hysteria, and nervousness in Victorian literature and medicine.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [221]-240) and index.