What Was the Matter with the ‘Fair Correspondent’?

EDWARD SHORTER What Was the Matter with the 'Fair Correspondent'? What was the matter with the 'Fair Correspondent'? This languid young woman, asleep on her invalid's couch in Auguste Toulmouche's 1864 painting , seems to have a problem. She's taken the trouble to dress. As a bourgeoise , an upper-middle-class housewife, she would not normally lounge in her nightgown in front of the servants. Yet as ~he huddles by the fire, she has adopted all the paraphernalia of chronic illness in the nineteenth century, such as the thick throw rug and the little silk house-slippers. These are the totems of invalidism. What could possibly be going on? She seems overcome by fatigue. As she falls asleep, the qUill pen has slipped from her exhausted fingers, the letter scarcely begun. She seems pale, a victim perhaps of iron-deficiency anemia ('chlorosis,' in the parlance of the day). Her anemia would certainly make her tired. But there may be something else.' Why do we think she may have another problem?1 Toulmouche, a genre painter, depicted scenes from the lives of upper-middle-class Parisians. In these years all Paris was talking about 'les femmes achaise longue,' women who would take to their beds and then not arise again for years or even decades. Such women were called 'sofa cases' in North America,to use the term of Philadelphia neurologist Weir Mitchell. Other phYSicians knew them simply as 'grand valetudinarians,' from the Latin valetudo, for health. In 1864 invalidism was just becoming an issue for middle-class women everywhere in Western society. There seems to have been nothing organically wrong with them, no tuberculosis, no neurological calamity. When for exalnple Alice James, Henry James's sister, took to her bed, it was more as a cultural reflex: she was tired and all of her friends were tired. It was rather like eating disorders today: one ofmy students told me that after she and seven of her girlfriends from Forest Hill Collegiate went off to McGill, six 'of the eight developed eating disorders within the year. Thus it was in the nineteenth century, when paralysis and mysterious conditions the French called 'suffering' ('Madame est souffrante') were fashionable symptoms. 1 For background on these issues, see my two-volume history of psychosomatic illness; vol 1, From Pamlysis fo Fatigue, and vol 2, From the Mil1d into tire Body. Information on Auguste Toulrnouche's life may be found in Monneret, 305-6. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 66, NUMBER 2, SPRING 1997 454 EDWARD SHORTER Auguste Toulmouche, French (1829-189°) The Fair Correspondent, 1864 oil on canvas, 44.8 x 48.9 cm Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, Gift of the Estate of J. Edgar McAllister But it was not justFrance. The artwork in Augustus Hoppin's 1883 novel A Fashionable Sufferer (published in Boston) shows the young female patient abed, surrounded by her little bibelots and settled in for a long stay; a later illustration shows her going for a carriage ride, her manservant walking ahead of her carrying a rocking-chair from which she can sit and contemplate Bella Vista, her back extravagantly bolstered by pillows to ward off 'spinal irritation.' In both the medical writing and the novels of the nineteenth century, the grand valetudinarian was a stock figure. For upper-middle-class women, having little to do in a household run by servants, chronic invalidism was a fashionable complaint. The physicians of the Parisian gratin, or upper crust, saw many chronic invalids, women in households full of servants who were prostrate for reasons nobody could ever exactly figure out. After AUGUSTE TOULMOUCHE 455 1887, when the Parisian neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot introduced into France the concept of 'neurasthenia,' or tired nerves, the doctors finally received a definite diagnostic term: The Fair Correspondent was suffering from neurasthenia! Yet Toulmouche died in 1890 just as the diagnosis was beginning to circulate. So in his mind the young woman probably did not have neurasthenia. But maybe she was treated by a gynecologist rather than a neurologist like Charcot. In the 18605 and 18705, women's problems were often attributed to their reproductive organs. Ifthe Fair Correspondent had fallen into...