Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth Century Literature

Invalid Lives

Alex Tankard

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319714455
• eBook ISBN: 9783319714462
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Demonstrates that recognisable, politicised, and self-aware disabled identities were possible one hundred years before the modern Disability Rights movement 

Argues that emerging biomedical model of tuberculosis began to undermine the dominance of sentimental, Romantic, and religious models of consumptive identity  

Argues that when the right social and cultural conditions aligned, these remarkable disabled identities could even be found in bestselling or canonical Victorian novels 

© The Author(s) 2018

Alex TankardTuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth Century Literature Literary Disability Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71446-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Alex Tankard¹

(1)

University of Chester, Chester, UK

End Abstract

I am very happy, Jane; and when you hear that I am dead you must be sure and not grieve: there is nothing to grieve about. We all must die one day, and the illness which is removing me is not painful; it is gentle and gradual; my mind is at rest. […] By dying young I shall escape great sufferings …¹

The deathbed scene of Helen Burns in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), above, is one of the most famous Victorian representations of ‘a consumptive’. Helen’s invalidism is not an affliction but, rather, a sign of her spirituality and purity: like many consumptives depicted in nineteenth-century texts, she coughs a little and then dies because she is too good to live in a harsh, unfeeling world.

Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Invalid Lives is not about those consumptives.

As a teenager I fell in love with the Romantic stereotype of the tragic, doomed consumptive genius embodied (or so I thought) by John Keats (1795–1821). And yet, I grew to admire consumptives who, in one way or another, behaved badly, like Decadent artist and sometime-pornographer Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898), or consumptive Wild West gunfighter ‘Doc’ Holliday (1851–1887). Then, as an undergraduate at Keele University, I read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (1869) and was (unsurprisingly) gripped by one of its most savage antagonists: nihilistic teenage psychopath Ippolit Terentyev who, on receiving a diagnosis of terminal consumption, fantasizes about committing mass murder. Enraged by the novel’s infuriatingly meek hero, Ippolit demands to know:

What sort of morality is it that demands not only your life but also the last death-rattle with which you surrender the last atom of your life, listening to the consoling words of the prince whose Christian arguments are bound to come to the happy conclusion that, as a matter of fact, it is much better that you should die? (Christians like him always come to this conclusion: it’s their favourite obsession.)

[…] what has my humility to do with it? Can’t I simply be devoured without being expected to praise that which has devoured me?²

Ippolit’s bitterness and rage made me wonder how many people living with tuberculosis in the nineteenth century felt alienated by the cultural images and stereotypes imposed upon them. How many resented their sickness and curtailed lifespan, rather than thanking God for this blessing? More pertinently, given the platitudes to which Ippolit is subjected by Prince Myshkin, and the indignation and disgust with which other characters receive Ippolit’s protests, how many consumptives were coerced into conforming to contemporary expectations of consumptive behaviour—or were punished, ridiculed, and silenced if they did not? Where are all the angry, blasphemous, bad consumptives in Victorian literature?

I also realized that most nineteenth-century texts depicted people dying of consumption, but rarely acknowledged the fact that they lived with it—often facing, as Aubrey Beardsley did, ‘the mortal funk of the pauper’s life—and death’ for many years.³ This was not merely a lack of medical realism, although the way in which literary ‘consumption’ usually bears little resemblance to ‘tuberculosis’ is an important issue to address. Rather, the disproportionate literary (and critical?) focus on the consumptive’s final days suggests a widespread evasion of what Martha Stoddard Holmes calls ‘the material circumstances that surround all disabilities’: the socio-economic and cultural structures that restricted the day-to-day lives of people with chronic illness, limiting their participation in public life and confining them to the deathbed and to the role of placid, pious ‘invalid’.⁴

To remedy this, Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Invalid Lives analyses nineteenth-century representations of tuberculosis through the lens of critical disability studies.⁵ There are several definitions of ‘disability’ that might be applied to Victorian consumptives. For example, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) (1990) defines ‘disability’ as:

1. (A)
   a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities of such individual;
2. (B)
   a record of such an impairment; or
3. (C)
   being regarded as having such an impairment.⁶

Victorian medical and sociological writing, letters, and press interviews indicate that tuberculosis certainly limited the ‘major life activities’ of Victorian consumptives. More importantly, though, Rosemarie Garland Thomson observes in the Americans with Disabilities Act the implicit suggestion that the way people are perceived (C) can be as disabling as the impairment (A) that limits their activities.⁷ Yet ADA part (A) still locates disability in the body, whereas Thomson herself is more radical in describing disability as ‘the attribution of corporeal deviance—not so much a property of bodies as a product of cultural rules about what bodies should be or do’.⁸ This definition, too, may illuminate the representation (and even the experiences) of consumptives: while they undoubtedly experienced many uncomfortable physical symptoms, such as coughing, pain, breathlessness and fatigue, these experiences would be evaluated against commonplace assumptions about how ‘normal’ bodies should work, how many hours they should labour, how many steps they should climb, and how fast. Those commonplace assumptions about what bodies should be and do shape the world around us—and shape it into structures that ignore or actively exclude bodies that do not fit. The terminology created in 1976 by the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) was far more explicit than the ADA in this matter, defining disability not as a medical condition of any kind, but as:

the disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by contemporary social organisation which takes no or little account of people who have physical impairments and thus excludes them from participation in the mainstream of social activities.⁹ [emphasis added]

This ‘social model’ of disability locates disability not in the individual body but in a society that makes inclusion conditional upon a level of physical functioning impossible for some of the population to attain: disability is not a medical condition but a social situation. This is not to insist that pain, shortened lifespan, or physical deterioration cannot cause suffering. Rather, the UPIAS definition forces us to question how much discomfort and inconvenience really is biologically determined, and how much is inflicted by socio-economic injustice and cultural attitudes. Throughout this book, I refer to tuberculosis as ‘an impairment’, not ‘a disability’, and consumptives as ‘disabled people’ rather than ‘people with disabilities’. I follow the UPIAS use of ‘disability’ to refer to the social marginalisation and stigma experienced by people with physical impairments of all kinds: in this context, referring to a ‘person with a disability’ would be like referring to a woman who experiences sexist discrimination as a ‘person with a misogyny’.

Since the conference that produced the essays in Colin Barnes and Geoff Mercer’s collection, Exploring the Divide: Illness and Disability (1996), my discussion of people with tuberculosis as disabled should not be controversial: people whose impairments are caused by disease are just as likely to experience disability as people whose impairments are caused by car accidents or congenital differences. In fact, the US Department of Justice states that ‘persons with HIV disease, either symptomatic or asymptomatic, have physical impairments that limit one or more major life activities and thus are protected by the ADA ’.¹⁰ The UK Equality Act (2010) states that ‘a person who has HIV infection, cancer or multiple sclerosis (MS) is a disabled person. This means that the person is protected by the Act effectively from the point of diagnosis.’¹¹ While modern antibiotics enable most people with tuberculosis to be treated and cured within a few months, this was certainly not the case in the nineteenth century (as I will show in Chap. 2), when people often lived with incurable tuberculosis for many years. Susan Wendell’s description of disabling social structures is therefore worth quoting at length for its relevance to Victorian consumptives:

Much of the public world is also structured as though everyone were physically strong, as though all bodies were shaped the same, as though everyone could walk, hear, and see well, as though everyone could work and play at a pace that is not compatible with any kind of illness or pain, as though no one were ever dizzy or incontinent or simply needed to sit or lie down. (For instance, where could you rest for a few minutes in a supermarket if you needed to?) Not only the architecture, but the entire structure of physical and social organization of life tends to assume that we are either young and healthy and able to do what the average young, nondisabled man can do or that we are completely unable to participate i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Medical and Social Influences on Consumptive Identity, 1821–1912
• 3. Victimhood and Death: Consumptive Stereotypes in Fiction and Non-fiction
• 4. ‘I Hate Everybody!’: The Unnatural Consumptive in Wuthering Heights (1847)
• 5. ‘Too Much Misery in the World’: Protest in Jude the Obscure (1895) and Ippolit’s ‘Necessary Explanation’ in The Idiot (1869)
• 6. Progress: Valid Invalid Identity in Ships That Pass in the Night (1893)
• 7. Conclusion
• Back Matter