Jane Austen and the Body: "The Picture of Health." (review)

Reviews John Wiltshire. Jane Austen and the Body: "The Picture ofHealth. " Cambridge, New York, and Victoria (Australia): Cambridge University Press, 1992. xiii + 251pp. US$54.95. ISBN 0-521-414768. "A sick chamber may furnish the worth of volumes," says Anne Elliot in Persuasion. Her friend Mrs Smith agrees "doubtingly," and notes that it is usually the weakness and not the strength of human nature that most appears in times of sickness. John Wiltshire furnishes his own volume, Jane Austen and the Body, on the wisdom that may be gleaned in the sick-chambers of Austen's world, and on the manifold intersections of health with morality. In this study of the body in her novels he has chosen from the outset to concentrate on issues of health and ill health, on which she certainly provides extensive information . Mrs Weston's comment on Emma as "the picture of health" is the phrase that figures in his title. This is not to say that he excludes other aspects of the body; but such prominent bodily issues as beauty and ugliness—for instance, the way in which the Bennet girls in Pride and Prejudice quite naturally and inevitably take their status from their degrees of attractiveness—are not his main concern. Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey do not receive sustained treatment. Wiltshire's concerns are reflected in chapters on Sense and Sensibility, in which a heroine almost dies of a disease that is specified with considerable attention to medical detail; Mansfield Park, in which the physically and socially disadvantaged heroine communicates most fully by her "eloquent blood"; Emma, where valetudinarianism is a source of power; Persuasion, in which the heroine demonstrates her social virtue by performing the duties of a nurse, and turns to an invalid as confidante; and Sanditon, which envisages the wild combination of galvanic energy with invalidism and ruthless self-doctoring in a commercial health resort. Given Wiltshire's approach to the body as medically viewed, I would expect that tantalizing fragment The Watsons to receive fuller attention. Here the heroine's brother is a surgeon, and her father a chronic invalid who is actually to die of a serious disease . (Death in Austen's fiction, famously, is relatively rare, and characters who do die must do it decorously at a distance, like Mrs Churchill in Emma.) EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 6, Number 2, January 1994 190 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 6:2 Now that I have done my reviewer's gambit of saying what this author does not do (and by implication what the reviewer would do, and do splendidly), let me concentrate on the much that he does do, and does very well. For this is a fine book, informed and sensitive, and it throws a spotlight on an aspect of Austen's work all too rarely noticed. Wiltshire reads closely and revealingly. He is extraordinarily sensitive to the degrees of belief to be attached to any given proposition in the novels, according to the various tugs of self-interest, self-deception, and irony. For instance, on the question of whether the powerful and capricious invalid Mrs Churchill is "really ill" or not: "Knowledge of this figure on the distant horizons of Emma is filtered through Frank's reports, and obscured by the supervening questions of motivation, and these reports are then refracted in the light of the desires of those who receive them" (p. 121). Such attentiveness marks the highly qualified Austen reader. Among her personnel, facts seldom matter as much as opinions, and the last thing the disputants want in an argument, say, on whether little Harry Dashwood is taller than little William Middleton is for the matter to be settled by the use of a tape-measure. They would rather assert their opinions, and through them declare their personal allegiances and antipathies. Wiltshire has a fine ear for these modulations. He can also use his novel approach to the novels to provide new insights on familiar material. We can all go on about Austen's moral vision; he can surprise as well as confirm in showing how often effective moral action is bound up with some kind of nursing. Paying proper attention to the...