Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel by Erika Wright (review)

Erika Wright’s Reading for Health: Medical Narratives and the Nineteenth-Century Novel takes a unique approach to interpreting narrative structure in “traditional novel[s]” by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell (5). Rather than focusing on the role that illness, disease, and pathology play in structuring plot, Wright focuses instead on health and the preventative measures that characters employ to sustain it. This is a clear divergence from critical approaches that take illness as their point of departure and that consequently depend on a language of “crisis and recovery” (5). As Wright points out, both contemporary critics as well as Victorians themselves have observed a tendency of novels to rely on scenes of illness, the sickroom, disease, and ailment to drive plot. Wright describes this critical approach as “therapeutic,” explaining that it is characterized by “a narrative arc of prelude, crisis, and cure” (6), which trains readers to “diagnose a work” (3) and anticipate a “cure” as a part of plot resolution. As Wright puts it: “Narrative arises when we get sick; closure happens because we get well” (25). Given the Victorian novel’s “responsibility for the seductiveness of the illness-cure trajectory,” the central question driving Wright’s study is, “Why always disease?” (4). What happens if instead of reading diagnostically for disease, we ask instead how representations of health may drive narrative and structure plot?

Wright’s central claim is that therapeutic models of reading have obscured narratives of health and the central role that the more “static models of maintenance and prevention” (what Wright calls “hygienic” models) play in formulating “our sense of order and temporality, setting and metaphor, point of view and voice” (6). While Wright acknowledges the value of contemporary research on disease and pathology, the point of Reading for Health is that “health has a narrative of its own…that complements even as it complicates the linearity of the disease-cure narrative” (6). The overwhelming critical emphasis on disease is understandable, Wright points out, partly because narratives of illness imply a kind of crisis, which makes for compelling reading (5, 44). But just as a tale of perpetual “happily ever after” is a bore, a tale of unending sickness is “no story at all” (12). There must be a balance between the two, and Wright makes a clear and compelling case that health can function as “a kind of narrative crisis in itself” (12)—or at least inform a “narrative process” (8)—capable of propelling plot and deserving a place not only in literary criticism, but also in the history of medicine. Consequently, Reading for Health offers an important counter to the tendency of contemporary criticism to focus on disease and pathology, especially in scholarship that draws on historical medical literature.

It is important to note that although Reading for Health provides an impressive and accessible outline of nineteenth-century medical and literary theories of health, its purpose is not “to tell a linear or progressive history of either field” (16). As a result, the term “health” is defined in subtly different ways throughout the study as Wright traces how various writers employ this term. Most importantly, Wright is careful to not describe “health” as a simple, reductive foil to “disease,” and she usefully explains how this historically amorphous term could be used to describe a range of bodily conditions and consequently functioned more as a relative than absolute descriptor (62). In general, however, Reading for Health defines “health” as an embodied condition (61). As Wright notes in her introduction, health is defined “by the ways we interpret and modify our body’s responses to, for example, the environment in which we live, the food we eat, the physical activity we exert, and the mental and physical hardships we endure” (16). Wright’s emphasis on health as an embodied phenomena is likely rooted in the medical literature that informs her reading, although she does...