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  • The Doctor in the Victorian Novel: Family Practices
  • Ann-Barbara Graff (bio)
Tabitha Sparks. The Doctor in the Victorian Novel: Family Practices. Ashgate. 2009. viii, 178. US $99.95

Much work has been done by literary scholars and historians of science on the role of the physician in the nineteenth century. To the contributions of Lilian Furst, Janis Caldwell, Sally Shuttleworth, Thomas Laqueur, Michael Mason, Mary Wilson Carpenter, and Akihito Suzuki, Tabitha Sparks in The Doctor in the Victorian Novel offers an original take. Unlike some earlier critics, her purpose is ‘not to uncover developments or trends in the theory of medicine, nor to trace commonalities in the imaginative work or conceptual vocabularies of medicine and literature.’ Nor does she offer ‘a close reading of medical or scientific concepts.’ Instead, Sparks makes a case for thinking about the doctor as a figure by which we can ‘chart the sustainability of the Victorian novel’s central imaginative structure, the marriage plot.’ Taking a cue from Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction (1988), which identifies the marriage plot as the master narrative of the Victorian novel, and How Novels Think (2005), which explores the relationship between the formation of the modern individual and the novel, Sparks argues, ‘[T]he doctor-character’s own participation in the marriage plot offers a précis of the novelist’s relationship to material knowledge as it furthers (or . . . threatens) the literary love story.’ For Sparks, the doctor-figure is a lens through which to view the dynamic relationship between domestic romantic fantasy and empirical realism that exists in dramatic tension and configures the Victorian novel, its thematic concerns, and epistemological context. The doctor also ‘provides a metonym for that genre’s evolution and disintegration more generally.’ [End Page 745]

The text tracks the entwined marriage plot and doctor-figure from Martineau’s Deerbrook (1838–39) to Conan Doyle’s Round the Red Lamp (1894), emplotting a narrative: at the beginning of the century, the literary doctor was an incidental figure and the novel encoded a romantic sensibility. By mid-century, the doctor became the hero of a courtship plot, ‘a Victorian invention, made possible by the new respectability of the professional man.’ The doctor’s social mobility is coincident with a changing episteme which places romantic and empirical sensibilities at odds (with the latter in the ascendant). By the end of the century, a Faustian ‘drive-to-knowledge . . . obliterates his social compassion’ and ‘often disqualifies [him or her] from experiencing romance’ – at this point, the triple-decker, like the marriage plot, meets its demise.

In chapter 1, Sparks compares Hope and Lydgate from Deerbrook and Middlemarch (1872) to suggest an increasing awareness of positivism’s limits. In chapter 2, Sparks incisively discusses MacDonald’s anomalous Adela Cathcart (1864), a novel presented as a self-referential triumph of the literary over the empirical. Its focus on women’s (mental) health and the place of storytelling in pathology and cure provide a useful touchstone for mid-century texts. In chapter 3, Sparks contrasts Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife (1864) and Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1866). The author concludes that the sensation novelist, Braddon, is grappling with sentimental compromise, whereas Gaskell, a less generically bound writer, ‘brilliantly maps the way that a mature, scientifically informed . . . subject can fall in love.’ Is this conclusion the inevitable function of a strained comparison between two differently gifted writers – one outside her depth, straining after realism, anglicizing Flaubert, and the other in complete control of her craft? Next, in Wilkie Collins’s Armadale (1866) and vivisection-themed Heart and Science (1882), Sparks traces how the doctor is growing cruel, particularly in his treatment of femininity. In chapter 5, Sparks elegantly moves from the Contagious Diseases Acts, the canonical figures of Moreau and Hyde, and the anxiety produced by the New Woman to the staged Gothic ‘symbolic revenge plots’ of Bram Stoker and Arthur Machen, where women are experimental subjects. Plotty chapter 6 discusses the woman doctor (as imagined by women writers), though, surprisingly, not Dr. Janet of Harley Street. The final chapter briefly considers Conan Doyle’s medical stories, Round the Red Lamp.

Sparks’s text is lucid...

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