Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (review)

The pallid and recumbent invalid can be found in the interiors of many nineteenth-century homes. What novel fails to include these supine valetudinarians? And in real life, the famous, from Charles Darwin to Wilkie Collins, from Harriet Martineau to Florence Nightingale, took to upholstered surfaces like ducks to water. Maria H. Frawley makes it her business to enter into the inner sanctuary of the invalid's sickroom and reveal the secrets that lay therein. Her goal is to bring the marginalized but significant figure of the invalid from the darkened Victorian interiors to the bright light of contemporary academic study. Frawley sees in the invalid a key to unlocking the British nineteenth century.

Frawley's first point is that disease generates narrative and knowledge. The invalid writer speaks from the location of his or her disease, marginalized by the illness while gaining authority from the sick role. Frawley offers a useful outline of the rise of scientific medicine in the nineteenth century and shows how this rise was linked to many other trends in the cultural, social, religious, and scientific history of the period. Obviously, it is difficult to provide definitive causalities, but Frawley at least gives us, in broad strokes, the contours of influence.

The second chapter is an overview of "hypochondriac" narratives. These confessional texts, exemplified by the anonymous Confessions of a Hypochondriac (1849), provide an archeology of symptoms and a Baedeker of locations and cures. The author of Confessions gives us a particularly apt definition of the hypochondriacal state: "a state of being without a sense of security; a perpetual suspense, an expectation, a dread of an inevitable evil" (95). Identifying hypochondria as part of the general trend toward nervous diseases, Frawley, like many other scholars, places it on a gender continuum that culminates in hysteria. Her discussion thus ranges from the masculine Edward Bulwer-Lytton's writings on being a "water patient," to John Addington Symonds's attempt to make sense of how his homosexual desires were part of his illness, to, in a later chapter, the speculations of Martineau.

Another chapter traces the invalids' grand tours abroad in search of health. The tropes of pursuit and search especially interest Frawley, who traces how the seemingly active quest of these invalids balances the passivity of the bedridden hypochondriac. In crossing the Channel, these Britons fuelled the tourist industry and the culture of tourism characteristic of this period. From hydrotherapy to climatotherapy, the search for healing waters and pure air changed the way cures were regarded. Referring to the writing of Robert Louis Stevenson and Symonds, Frawley notes that situating their travel writing in the "current medical fashion underscores the role that patient testimonials played in legitimizing medical science" (145).

Frawley also addresses the way Christianity developed its own forms of invalid narratives, seeing value in suffering, illness, and death. The aim of these texts, above all, was consolation. In them, the role of the physician, so prominent in this century, is reduced to insignificance and replaced by the best physician of all: God. Titles such as Ellen Chadwick's Weak, Yet Strong (1903) convey the new Christian role of the patient, not one who is launched into search and cure missions, but who is elevated to quasi-divine sufferer, most often female. A subsequent chapter on the psychological and physical space of the sickroom presents that space as both domestic sanctuary and observation deck—a kind of retreat from the world that allows the invalid to see the world anew from his or her "mattress life" (205). The room can be prison, monk's cell, studiolo, or scriptorium. In a section on Martineau, Frawley describes the "distinctive psychological attributes of the chronically ill or bedridden" (201). Frawley has recently edited an excellent edition of Martineau's Life in the Sickroom (1844) and is uniquely qualified to tease out the intricacies of Martineau's writings.

The strength of Invalidism and Identity is that it...