Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth Century British Prose (review)

Peter Melville Logan. Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century British Prose. Foreword by Roy Porter. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. xviii + 248 pp. $16.00 (paper).

Always a sexy topic in literary criticism, the discussion of hysteria and nervous disorders has recently shifted from psychoanalytic discourse to cultural and historical approaches in important works such as Roy Porter's social histories of nervous disorders, Elaine Showalter's Hystories, and Sally Shuttleworth's analyses of nervousness in literary texts. Peter Logan is no Showalter or Shuttleworth, and his book does not break new theoretical ground, but he is a solid scholar with a gift for summarizing the theories of others and then applying these theories to new texts. Nerves and Narratives is a well-written and informative work of literary criticism that introduces readers to current and past debates about nervousness and examines how medical and social constructions of nervousness shaped the narrative structures of Caleb Williams, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Harrington, and Middlemarch.

My review begins with the puzzling inaccuracy of Logan's subtitle. He does not provide a "cultural history of hysteria in nineteenth-century British prose," but rather a cultural history of nervousness--of which hysteria is but a subset. Indeed, he is careful to remind readers that his work is not a psychoanalytic study, a field with which the term "hysteria" has long been associated. The book (although divided into three sections, according to the table of contents) separates into two mirrored halves: the first half opens with a discussion of a well-known and influential medical writer from the Georgian era (Thomas Trotter) who defines nervous disorders, followed by an analysis of literary texts with "nervous narratives"; the second half again overviews an influential nonfiction text, this time from the social reformer Edwin Chadwick who usefully represents the Victorian era's different constructions of the nervous body, followed by a brief chapter discussing Middlemarch.

Logan's basic literary claim is that "the nervous body is a defining characteristic of late Georgian literature," and that (as Roy Porter has also noted in his criticism and editing of Thomas Trotter's texts) the nervous body and its status as the definitive middle-class disorder "became part of the official discourse of medicine" (p. 5). Logan defines nervousness as it was understood in the Georgian era through an overview of Trotter's landmark book A View of the Nervous Temperament (1800). Trotter depicts nervousness as a two-stage disease: an individual first must have a predisposition to nervousness--a nervous temperament; next, the actual disorder is manifested as hypochondria, hysteria, or another nervous disorder if the sufferer is exposed to certain socially produced conditions that aggravate the predisposition.

Trotter's text is useful to Logan because it summarizes eighteenth-century medical perceptions of nervousness. It also explicitly links nervousness to gender, class, and narrative. Women's bodies have an inherent predisposition to nervousness, according to Trotter, in that the female nervous system is more impressionable than the male body. In addition, the middle class is particularly susceptible to nervousness, for it strikes those with sedentary lives (bankers, investors, vendors) as well as wives and daughters who read passion-inflaming novels. Finally, nervousness as a disease is closely affiliated to narration, for it enables speech, or what Trotter would term "a selfish desire of engrossing the sympathy and attention of others to the narration of their own sufferings" (p. 16). What is most significant in Trotter's work and Logan's interpretation of it is that the difference between a healthy and a sick body rests in narrative.

According to eighteenth-century neuroscience, healthy nerves receive and transmit impressions without ill effect, but the nervous body retains the effects of sense impressions within the structure of its nerves. Within each nervous body lies the story of the social conditions that...