Symptomatic identities: lovesickness and the nineteenth-century British novel

摘要

Lovesickness is a common malady in British literature, but it is also an illnessthat has been perceived and diagnosed differently in different eras. The nineteenthcenturyBritish novel incorporates a lovesickness that primarily affects women withphysical symptoms, including fever, that may end in a female character's death. Thefever of female lovesickness includes a delirium that allows a female character to playout the identity crisis she must feel at the loss of a significant relationship and possiblyof her social status. Commonly conflated with a type of female madness, the nineteenthcenturynovelists often focus less on the delirium and more on the physical symptoms ofillness that affect a female character at the loss of love. These physical symptoms requirephysical care from other characters and often grant the heroine status and comfort.Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens all use subtle variations inlovesickness to identify the presence or absence of a female character's virtue. JaneAusten established lovesickness as a necessary experience for female characters, whochoose only if they reveal or conceal their symptoms to a watchful public. ElizabethGaskell established both a comic socially constructed lovesickness in which a femalecharacter can participate if she is aware of popular culture and a spontaneouslovesickness that affects socially unaware female characters and leads to death. Charles Dickens establishes lovesickness as culturally pervasive by writing a female characterwho stages lovesickness for the purpose of causing pain to others and a female characterwho is immune to lovesickness and the rhetoric of love, yet is consistently spoken intoothers' love stories. Lovesickness becomes a barometer of the soul in several nineteenthcenturynovels by which we read a heroine's virtue or lack of virtue and the depth of herloss.