HYGIENIC AESTHETICS: SICK NURSING AND SOCIAL REFORM IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL, 1845-1880.
Contributors: University of California, Berkeley.
Published: 1992
Number of pages: 281
Subjects: Literature, English.; Women's Studies.; Health Sciences, Nursing.
Description: There has been little critical attention paid to the plethora of nursing and nurses in the Victorian novel. The nurse as a specific figure is often subsumed under the general category of the "angel in the house," or rendered invisible in discussions of the mid-nineteenth-century British novel. My dissertation--Hygienic Aesthetics: Sick-Nursing and Social Reform in the Victorian Novel 1845-1880 --offers an exploration of this literary and cultural figure. Here I endeavor to illuminate the received idea of the nurse by immersing it within its cultural specificity.

Furthermore, this study addresses some of the larger issues surrounding the relationship between literature and medicine. Here I argue that the mid-Victorian realist novel and the rise of the medical realm coalesce in a more than coincidental manner, and I elicit some of the specificity of this mutual penetration through my analysis of the sick-nurse--a figure that I argue is crucial in the medicalization of Victorian England and consequently to the consolidation of middle-class power and the formation of the middle-class subject. By concentrating on the representation of the sick-nurse in both fictional and non-fictional texts, my dissertation poses the question of the novel in terms of the amalgamation of medical, the aesthetic and the domestic.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-10, Section: A, page: 3537.

Thesis (PH.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, 1992.

School code: 0028.