The Doctor in the Victorian Novel

The Doctor in the Victorian Novel Family Practices Tabitha Sparks The Doctor in the Victorian Novel To D.S.O., of c...

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The Doctor in the Victorian Novel Family Practices

Tabitha Sparks

The Doctor in the Victorian Novel

To D.S.O., of course

The Doctor in the Victorian Novel Family Practices

Tabitha Sparks McGill University, Canada

© Tabitha Sparks 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Tabitha Sparks has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401–4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Sparks, Tabitha. The doctor in the Victorian novel : family practices. 1. Physicians in literature – History – 19th century. 2. Marriage in literature – History – 19th century. 3. English fiction – 19th century – History and criticism. I. Title 823.8’093543-dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sparks, Tabitha. The doctor in the Victorian novel : family practices / Tabitha Sparks. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–7546–6802–2 (alk. paper) 1. English fiction – 19th century – History and criticism. 2. Physicians in literature. 3. Medicine in literature. 4. Marriage in literature. I. Title.

PR878.P46S63 2009 823’.809–dc22

ISBN 9780754668022 (hbk) ISBN 9780754696407 (ebk.V)

2009011695

Contents Acknowledgements Introduction

vii 1

1

Doctoring the Marriage Plot: Harriet Martineau’s Deerbrook and George Eliot’s Middlemarch

23

2

Textual Healing: George MacDonald’s Adela Cathcart

47

3

Marital Malpractice at Mid-Century: Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife and Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters

63

4

Myopic Medicine and Far-Sighted Femininity: Wilkie Collins’s Armadale and Heart and Science

87

5

New Women, Avenging Doctors: Gothic Medicine in Bram Stoker and Arthur Machen

111

6

The “Fair Physician”: Female Doctors and the Late-Century Marriage Plot

133

Conclusion – “The Overstimulated Nerve Ceases to Respond”: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Medical Modernism

157

Bibliography

163

Index

173

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Acknowledgements I have incurred many debts, personal and professional, during the writing of this book. An early version of this project was a dissertation I wrote at the University of Washington, under the expert supervision of Lauren Goodlad. Her contribution to my scholarly training is immeasurable, and I am lucky to have worked with her. Special thanks also go to University of Washington faculty members Kathleen Blake, Gary Handwerk, Leroy Searle, Dick Dunn, and in memory of Jim Clowes. The Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University generously supported much of this research with a postdoctoral position. At McGill, I have many colleagues who have been (and continue to be) mentors and friends, including Maggie Kilgour, Brian Trehearne, Erin Hurley, Monique Morgan, Berkeley Kaite, Marty Kreiswirth, and Wes Folkerth. The following PhD students, former and current, deserve special mention; it has been an honor to work with Tara MacDonald, Mike Lee, Natalie Huffels, and Brad MacDonald. Special thanks also go to former undergraduates Jacqueline Appleby, Elissa Gurman, and Rebecca Cramer, who worked as research assistants on this book, as did Tara MacDonald. Other friends and/or members of the profession who contributed to or variously supported this research include Louise Penner, Alan Rauch, Tom Glass, Jocelyn Stager, Kerry Brandt, Dagni Bredesen, and Lydia Fisher. My deepest thanks go to Daryl, for his tireless reading and astute commentary. He never suggested, even indirectly, that it was time for me to leave the Victorians alone. I also want to thank Emily Sparks and Vincent Fogle, Fritz Sparks and Iris Davis, and Ben and Andrea Sparks, for their encouragement and support; Zoë and Benjamin Ogden, for their patience while I was writing; and Phoebe Sparks Ogden, who is not yet old enough to practice patience, but is well-meaning in her own energetic way. An earlier version of Chapter 3 appeared in Beyond Sensation: Mary Braddon in Context, eds Marlene Tromp, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Aerin Haynie (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000): 197–209. An earlier version of Chapter 4 appeared in The Journal of Narrative Theory, 32.1 (Winter 2002): 1–31. An earlier version of Chapter 5 appeared in Nineteenth-Century Feminisms, 6 (Fall–Winter 2002): 87–102. The author wishes to thank TheWellcome Library, London, for the use of the cover image: “A bedridden sick young woman being examined by a doctor, accompanied by her anxious parents,” engraving by F. Engleheart, 1838, after Sir David Wilkie. The author also wishes to thank the generous and efficient editorial staff at Ashgate, especially Ann Donahue, Jeanne Brady, and Celia Barlow.


Introduction Towards the end of his 1857 novel Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens provides an extended description of a character, “Physician.” The length and specificity of the details Dickens offers reflect the rising social identity of physicians during a dynamic period in medicine and professionalization. At the same time, the description encapsulates the focus of this book by articulating something more abstract. Dickens’s narrator shows Physician’s distinction from his assembled company, for his stock-in-trade confers on him a status and privileged access that makes his relationships unique. I quote the description at length to reveal this emphasis: Few ways of life are hidden from Physician, and he was oftener in its darkest places than even the Bishop. There were brilliant ladies about London who perfectly doted on him, my dear, as the most charming creature and the most delightful person, who would have been shocked to find themselves so close to him if they could have known what sights those thoughtful eyes of his had rested within an hour or two, and near to whose beds, and under what roofs, his composed figure stood … As no man of large experience of humanity, however quietly carried it may be, can fail to be invested with an interest peculiar to the possession of such knowledge, Physician was an attractive man … Where he was, something real was … It came to pass, therefore, that Physician’s little dinners always presented people in their least conventional lights. The guests said to themselves, whether they were conscious of it or no, ‘Here is a man who really has an acquaintance with us as we are, who is admitted to some of us every day with our wigs and paint off, who hears the wandering of our minds, and sees the undisguised expression of our faces, when both are past our control; we may as well make an approach to reality with him, for the man has got the better of us and is too strong for us.’ Therefore Physician’s guests came out so surprisingly at his round table that they were almost natural. (Dickens, Little Dorrit, 683–4, my emphasis)

To Physician’s dinner guests, his medical purview facilitates two levels of “the real”: it represents the specialist knowledge of a trained professional, and it grants him intimate access to his patients. In turn, the effect of that knowledge and access on his relationships is transformative; as the narrator explains, it overrides the scheming and subterfuge so otherwise prevalent in Little Dorrit. As this description of Physician exemplifies, I am most interested in the belief systems that he (and other fictional Victorian doctors) represent, and by the effect of his medical experience on his personal relationships. Just as Physician’s proximity to the darker side of life allows his friends to pare away the specious


and elaborate facades that test Little Dorrit’s characters (and those in virtually all of Dickens’s novels), this equation between Physician and “the real” influences his characterization, too. Because he is named by his accreditation alone, his vocation consumes his personal identity; it is hard to imagine him also as a husband, a father, or a son. Physician stands apart from the rest of the novel’s characters whose personal desires, fears, and prejudices are the stuff of the story. In sum, Physician is so close to the truth that he is outside of the story, presiding over it and his dinner table in a generous but disinterested way. While Physician’s particular influence transcends the plot of Little Dorrit, the same is not true for Dickens’s more famous doctor, Allan Woodcourt in Bleak House (1852–53), and their respective relationships in the novels in which they appear inform my argument in The Doctor in the Victorian Novel. Woodcourt’s selfless treatment of the diseased poor in London, his heroism as a naval surgeon aboard a shipwreck, and his exemplary marriage to Esther Summerson all make him an admirable example of mid-century reformism and domestic honor. So while Physician, with his lofty hold on the truth and seeming imperviousness to deceit, hovers above Little Dorrit’s world like an ostensibly benign god, Woodcourt personifies Bleak House’s domestic morality. The two doctors’ representations of empirical truth (Physician) and marriage and domesticity (Woodcourt) divide the trajectory toward which the doctor figure propelled the plot in the Victorian novel. My dominantly chronological reading of Victorian novels analyzes not the co-production of scientific and literary ideas so much as the marriage plot’s efficacy in harnessing the empirical mindset, as represented by the doctor, into a conventionally romantic story. The challenge of merging a medical consciousness into the marriage plot both heralds and causes the end of the bourgeois, domestic novel, as the detachment exemplified by Physician gradually eradicates the mode of romance and realism integrated by Woodcourt. While the portrayals of doctors analyzed in this book vary significantly, most of them, like Physician in Little Dorrit, invite us to reflect upon each novel’s mediation between the fictive world and the “real” insights associated with medical knowledge. Numerous books have correlated medical and scientific developments and Victorian literature, but The Doctor in the Victorian Novel reads Victorian medicine towards a different end. I focus on the figure of the Victorian doctor not to uncover developments or trends in the theory of medicine, nor to trace

My emphasis on the division between empiricism and imaginative discourses departs from an important concept named by Gillian Beer and recently enlarged upon by Janis McLarren Caldwell. For Beer and for Caldwell, the concept of “romantic materialism” in the early to mid-nineteenth century describes Darwin’s dual and mutually productive understandings of imagination and materiality. For descriptions and discussions of romantic materialism, see Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (NY: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983) and Caldwell, Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain: From Mary Shelley to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Introduction

commonalities in the imaginative work or conceptual vocabularies of medicine and literature. Instead, I use the figure of the doctor to chart the sustainability of the Victorian novel’s central imaginative structure, the marriage plot. I am thus treating the doctor-character as a human index of modern material and physiological knowledge as it enters and shapes the novel’s most sustained exercise in fancy, the marriage plot and love story, and the emotional logic on which they stand. The doctor’s fraught synthesis into and out of the marriage plot novel (over the course of the period) provides a metonym for that genre’s evolution and disintegration more generally. Victorian literature’s most famous doctor, the surgeon Tertius Lydgate in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872), exemplifies the ill fit between the marriage plot and the doctor-character. Lydgate’s attraction to Rosamund Vincy binds him to a marital plot that uniquely represents his professional orientation. Following a failed love affair in Paris, Lydgate vows (before meeting Rosamund) to take a “strictly scientific view of women” and his appreciation of Rosamund likewise is anatomical and material (he thinks she is beautiful, and would make an impressive wife for a status-conscious, rising surgeon). Lydgate’s entrance into marriage reflects his medical-professional domain and, more specifically, his keen commitment to scientific medicine. But when Rosamund’s exorbitant spending forces him to replace his research ambitions with a financially profitable private practice, the collision of the medical/professional and emotional spheres in their marriage typifies the friction between doctor-characters and domestic, romantic plots in the Victorian novel across the period. If my analysis relies in a great part on the doctor’s proximity to empirical knowledge, then why is it directed at the doctor and not the scientist? I focus on the doctor for several reasons, all of which have to do with my understanding of the Victorian novel as a medium for imagining individuals in and through their relationships. While scientists usually work towards the definition of what is true of life or matter in general, doctors approach natural knowledge through individual, human cases. The doctor forms intimate relations with his patients, and so his relationships are a telling measurement of the usefulness, authority, and application of naturalistic knowledge in a given novel. More specifically, I argue that the doctor-character’s own participation in the marriage plot offers a précis of the novelist’s relationship to material knowledge as it furthers (or as I dominantly find, threatens) the literary love story, which is treated here as the essence of the bourgeois novel itself. Lydgate is a surgeon; often in this book I use the term “doctor” in the modern sense, referring to a medical professional in cases where context does not demand the specification of surgeon, physician, apothecary, general practitioner, or other, more specialized designation. Here and elsewhere I refer to the Victorian doctor-character as “he,” reflecting the majority of the examples I study. In Chapter 6 I discuss the significant but atypical example of the female doctor.


The application of material knowledge reflected by doctors in this book is informed by professionalism as much as medical science. Medical historians such as S.E.D. Shortt and Arnold Thackray have argued against a traditional, causal theory whereby scientific discovery paves the way for professionalization. In treating science as a sign of intellectual and cultural sophistication, as in social organizations like the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, Thackray proposes that the social identity associated with scientific knowledge was instrumental to professional organization and hence helped to promote the rise of science in culture. For the most part, my first three chapters describe doctors in the period prior to the mid-century scientific revolution in Victorian medicine, and so they emphasize professional politics, the doctor’s social status, and his marital eligibility more than science per se. The latter three chapters suggest that scientific and medical developments generally adapted to and concretized the social roles that the professionalization of medicine had already forged. For example, in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1866), Mr. Gibson’s work as a surgeon limits his emotional perception. This is not because of the scientific orientation of surgery, as the novel takes place in the early 1830s, but rather because of the field’s demand for dogged, ambitious, and practical-minded professionals. It was this same professional mindset that accommodated the empirical advances of surgery later in the century, and informed the portraits of fictional surgeons whose progressive scientism all but destroys their humanity and compassion, such as those depicted by Wilkie Collins and Arthur Machen. My thinking about an individual figure as a discursive reflection of the Victorian novel is indebted to critical works by Nancy Armstrong and Daniel Cottom. In How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719–1900 (2005), Armstrong treats the rise of the novel as a process by which this art form “figured out how to adjust to, incorporate, and abject competing ways of thinking about the individual” (10). Her description of the novel’s development of individual subjectivity usefully informs my reading of the single figure of the doctor. Armstrong’s understanding of the reconciliation between the concept of the individual and the form of the novel at a particular moment in literary history provides a closer model for my critique than, for example, historically situated analyses of an individual figure, such as Mary Poovey’s comprehensive examinations of the governess or the nurse in Uneven Developments (1988). Poovey’s case studies teach us more about these figures’ fraught ideological status and the interpretative demands that they placed on their readers than they direct us to the novel genre’s accommodation of them in its central plots. Another deft argument for approaching a novel’s meaning Similarly, Shortt writes that “biomedical innovation and professional delineation were events which, during the nineteenth century, occurred in parallel. Traditional historiography, however, has assumed a more intimate relationship, arguing that the new science increased competence and competence brought professional recognition and status” (54): S.E.D. Shortt, “Physicians, Science, and Status: Issues in the Professionalization of Anglo-American Medicine in the Nineteenth Century,” Medical History 27 (1983): 51–68.

Introduction

through an individual portrayal comes from Daniel Cottom in George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance (1987). To Cottom, Eliot recognized the individual as “the basis of any realistic representation of human life,” and thus Eliot “announced that knowledge in general was contingent upon an understanding of this phenomenological category before all else” (68). Cottom’s interpretation of Eliot’s portrayal of the individual as a phenomenological paradigm foregrounds my analysis of doctors as character-specific renderings of a given novel’s stance towards the rising authority of science and professional medicine in culture. As much as the doctor-character changed over the course of the Victorian era, so too did the representation of marriage. While the novels of Jane Austen at the turn of the nineteenth century revolutionized marriage as a harmonious retreat from an increasingly commercial world, Victorian novels further confronted rapidly changing gender roles, the rise of professionalism, and the increasing secularization of culture. The Victorian marriage-plot novel that I study in this book relies on two key concepts. At the beginning of the period, these concepts are mutually enhancing: they are the dual assumptions that the novel’s work is to depict the everyday experience of identifiable characters, almost always in familiar, middle-class, domestic settings. Secondly, this mode of realism finds a satisfying and convincing resolution in a marriage plot that symbolizes companionship, often (but not always) desire, and the economic and civic virtues of compromise that marriage represents. The balance between these two assumptions, so deftly forged by Austen, commands the domestic, realist novel through the early and middle decades of the century so much so that exceptional plots only highlight its standard. The ambiguous endings of two great mid-century novels, Villette and Great Expectations, are haunting and powerful largely because they thwart the expectations of a happy ending for Lucy and Paul Emmanuel, and Pip and Estella

I consider the novels of Jane Austen exemplary of the marriage-plot format that most Victorian novelists took up. Austen’s courtships and marriages merge economic security with personal discrimination. They establish married couples as the basis of a modern society that prizes individualism above institutional loyalties, fostering a middle-class, democratic ethic that challenges money and status as the defining points of a “good” marriage. Austen, writing at the turn of the nineteenth century and in its first decades, amalgamates marital ideals of an earlier age as well as ones that would be given increasing confidence by the Victorians. Whereas Elizabeth Bennett’s engagement and marriage to John Darcy in Pride and Prejudice exemplify, through an almost fairy-tale-like vision of aristocratic largesse, the apex of a middle-class woman’s fantasy, the companionate and sentimental pairing of Anne Elliot and Captain Frederick Wentworth in Persuasion emphasizes personal affinity more than triumphant class rise. As Joseph Allan Boone writes, “whether or note marriage is actually attained,” the patterns of courtship, seduction, and wedlock “almost uniformly uphold the concept of romantic wedlock as their symbolic center and ideal end” (original italics). Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 9.


that each novel seems to anticipate, conventionally and morally. This is not to say that early and mid-Victorian novels all end happily, but even when they do not (Ruth, The Mill on the Floss), they routinely impose death as the alternative end and so make a zero-sum argument that implicitly equates “life” with “marriage” in the standard marriage-or-death conclusion. Critics who treat the marriage plot as the master narrative of the nineteenthcentury novel have influenced this book. Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction (1988) and Tony Tanner’s Adultery in the Novel (1979) both read the domestic marriage plot as a condensation of the nineteenth-century’s move towards secular, individualistic, and democratized bases of power. Following the example of Foucault, Armstrong argues that the “female voice” disseminated in the late eighteenth and nineteenth-century novel was not a universal attribute or pre-existing condition, but an invention of an historical milieu in which men maintained political identities and women affirmed the private, individualistic characteristics associated with domesticity. While Tanner is less interested than Armstrong in gender, he sees the bourgeois novel as “coeval and coterminous with the power concentrated in the central structure of marriage.” As long as plots about adultery yield chaos and destruction (Madame Bovary, La Nouvelle Héloïse, Die Wahlverwandtschafter), they expose the absoluteness of the marital structure. When adultery no longer devastates the narrative, the bourgeois novel, like bourgeois marriage, loses its essentiality (15). Joseph Allan Boone’s elegant Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (1987) similarly argues that the hegemonic marriage plot so central to the nineteenth-century, Anglo-American novel predicates, by way of its very ideological and narrative stronghold, counter-narratives that explore, collide with, sometimes replace, but inevitably draw attention to this central plot. Following Tanner and Boone, with the former’s emphasis on the chronological nature of the process, I argue that novelists progressively doubt the marriage plot’s unifying logic. By the later century, “realistic” and “happy marital resolution” become increasingly hostile bedfellows, with the latter often suggesting an idealized “happily ever-after” formula that undercuts a realistic treatment of ordinary life and the boredom, frustration, and grief that novelists including Hardy and Gissing portray so relentlessly. Scholars of the late Victorian, Edwardian, and Modernist In another example, Dickens’s decision to end Hard Times with “no love at all” reflects the complete subversion of human affection and its structural corollary, the marriage plot, that Dickens sought in imagining a society governed by Utilitarianism. Charles Dickens, Hard Times, eds. George Ford and Sylvère Monad (New York: W.W. Norton, 1966), p. 236. For a clear overview of this norm, see Linda M. Shires, “The aesthetics of the Victorian novel: form, subjectivity, ideology” in The Victorian Novel, ed. Deirdre David (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 65, and Penny Boumehla, “Realism and the Ends of Feminism” in Grafts: Feminist Cultural Criticism, ed. Susan Sheridan (London: Verso, 1988), p. 326.

Introduction

novel attribute the decline of the “essentialized” marriage plot to a variety of forces, among them a changing legal and social code for women that allowed for some measure of financial independence, more permissive divorce laws, and, more abstractly, an easing of the intimate bonds enabled by an increasingly urbanized society. Two recent studies of the Victorian marriage-plot novel have expanded our understanding of this fictional category by rethinking its functions and its momentum. In Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot (2007), Rachel Ablow interprets the sympathetic mode of the domestic, marriage-plot novel as a parallel to or even stand-in for the wifely function so celebrated in Victorian culture. In Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (2007), Sharon Marcus argues for the utility of female friendship in marshalling heterosexual marriage plots, calling it “a transmission mechanism that kept narrative energies on track” (3). From different angles, both of these studies come at a supposition that informs my argument, too: the idea that the Victorian marriage plot can teach us, indirectly and explicitly, about a range of socio-cultural values and anxieties, even those only tangentially related to a hero and heroine’s story of courtship and marriage. In this way, my study uses doctors in conjunction with the marriage plot to measure a novel’s medical and scientific authority, its balance between professionalism and intimacy, and its attachment of these values to gendered identities. In addition to addressing the numerous shifts in social life and marriage, Victorian novelists faced another spectrum of knowledge that challenged the fictional representation of private life: the development of medical science and its attendant influence on the way that Victorians lived, thought, and forged personal bonds. The “Scientific Revolution” of the mid-to-late nineteenth century instituted an epistemological shift away from the personal subjectivity that was the special province of the domestic novel, and embraced, or at the very least confronted, a newly rational and empirical consciousness.10 Increasingly throughout the period, personal relationships in the novel are subjected to the objectifying gaze of modern science. As my readings of novels attest, fiction gradually loses the authority that medicine and science were claiming as the medical profession

These include the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 and the Married Woman’s Property Act of 1870. For a thorough discussion of Victorian women’s legal reforms, see Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 10 Ablow concludes her study of the wifely role of the mid-Victorian novel by writing that late Victorian and early Modern novels “are more commonly marked by growing doubts regarding the viability of ever fully “entering into” another person’s thoughts and feelings, and a diminishing faith in the “transformative potential of marital sympathy” (145). The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).


worked to locate knowledge of human life in physiology rather than literary subjectivity (Small 23, 220). The rise of medical influence on the novel does not straightforwardly demonstrate medicine accruing power as novels lose it, for almost all of the novels studied here agree that the doctor’s authority comes at the cost of his isolation from society and morality, exactly the ruling domains of the marriage-plot novel. As fictional doctors increasingly become lonely bachelors or callous experimentalists over the course of the period, so too and therefore does the systematizing logic of the marriage plot wane. In treating the doctor as a figural stand-in for the encroachment of empirical knowledge on a morally formulated artistic genre, I see his alienation from the marriage plot and its interrelated decline as a very succinct sign of the end of the Victorian novel. With marriage losing its totalizing force as an Austenian emblem of social conciliation, the Modernist novel evolves in the shadow of this nineteenthcentury formula, and authors as disparate as Conrad, Galsworthy, Forster, Woolf, and Waugh find ways to thematize and stylize the emotional cavity wrought by empiricism’s indifference to human emotion. In addition to the studies of the marriage plot already mentioned, the critical works that have most influenced The Doctor in the Victorian Novel are those that consider literature alongside and against other fields, but reserve their primary conclusions for arguments about a literary field or genre. In Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity, 1800–1865 (1998), Helen Small examines the changing theorization of a novelistic figure, the love-mad woman. In the earlier part of the century, this stock character is defined according to hyperbolic notions of sentimentalism and Romanticism, but along with the medicalization of psychiatry, she becomes constrained by increasingly clinical conceptions of insanity and psychological realism. Catherine Gallagher’s The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (2006) also compares literary epistemes to an empirical one: political economy. At the turn of the nineteenth century, writes Gallagher, both Romanticism and the incipient science of political economy were defined as organic processes that linked their authority to natural processes (8). Moving through the nineteenth century, Gallagher charts the effort of political economists to distinguish their field from philosophic and scientific domains; for instance, Nassau Senior’s Outline of the Science of Political Economy (1836) was calculated to exempt political economy from the demands of ethics (186). Indeed, this effort by political economists resembles a parallel endeavor by historical doctors to focus their expertise in scientific rather than humanistic spheres and so exculpate themselves from competing loyalties. A striking example is John Burden Sanderson’s attempt to develop a school of physiology at Oxford, to rival those on the Continent, by excusing physiology from the empathetic concerns that had curtailed British research on animal subjects.11 Increasingly throughout the century, fictional doctors, too, characterize 11

I explore this case and fictional analogies in detail in Chapter 5.

Introduction

spiritual, philosophical, and humanistic interests as separate from the professional and scientific ambitions of medicine. In a study similarly concerned with disciplinary boundaries but more interested in their philosophical foundations than Gallagher’s, Mary Poovey’s Genres of a Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (2008) compellingly unpacks the institutional consolidation and, consequently, the notional parting of the ways between political economy and literature. For Poovey, literary authors from the late seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries embarked upon a lengthy process of identifying themselves as imaginative commentators, marking their territory and defending their significance against the development of fact-based writings like political economy. By the nineteenth century, Poovey argues, literature was established as a non-factual genre. Towards my own thesis, it was exactly this constitutional basis of the novel as imaginative that taxed Victorian novelists’ growing apprehension of the medical knowledge that they realistically worked into their plots. I have written this book amidst a (roughly) two-decade period of extraordinarily rich interdisciplinary scholarship in science and literature. The dominant scholarly trend in interdisciplinary studies in Victorian literature and science stems from the influence of Beer’s Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983). Beer’s literary examples focus on George Eliot and Thomas Hardy and their evolutionary discourse. As Beer shows us, Eliot finely adapted scientific concepts to Middlemarch in a way that makes them seminal to and indivisible from the novel’s plot and language, and its representation of life and selfhood as bounded by natural law, but enduring in and through Darwinian understandings of inheritance. Darwin’s Plots exemplifies the cross-pollination of imaginative and empirical discourses that has inspired so many scholars over the last two decades. In Beer’s footsteps, the effort to discern evidence of most branches of nineteenth-century science in the fiction of the period has been unevenly realized. Along with Beer, the more convincing theorists in this tradition draw closely from texts and authors wherein a reflection of scientific thinking is plausible. In Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1992), Lawrence Rothfield examines novelists (including Eliot, Flaubert, and Balzac) whose fiction draws upon a rigorous study of scientific and medical precepts, and thus quite consciously adapts these epistemologies to fictional models. Similarly, Laura Otis’s Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science (2000) focuses on several authors between 1830 and 1930 whose training in science and/or medicine overtly shapes their literary metaphors. Narrowing the field of examples to fiction writers with a proven facility with empirical knowledge makes claims for cross-disciplinary influence both credible and unsurprising. Another strain of science and literary criticism relies less overtly on a novelist’s verified experience with scientific work, and assumes a more generalized popularization of scientific or medical theory. The leading practitioner of this approach is George Levine, whose edited collection One Culture: Essays in

10


Science and Literature (1987) explores the two domains by way of their shared cultural discourse rather than through a hierarchy of values that places “real” scientific knowledge above “imaginative” literature. In Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (1988), Levine argues for the imprint of the scientific imagination in works by novelists whose familiarity with science is wellknown, like Eliot, but also in less scientifically inclined novelists like Dickens. While Dickens did not immerse himself in naturalist knowledge, Levine argues, his richly plotted worlds show an “indirect influence” (244) of the connectedness between organisms that he owes to Darwinian genealogy and inheritance.12 Such analysis demonstrates the somaticization of culture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by emphasizing the presence of scientific and medical ideas in literary genres. My identification with the design of the marriage plot sets The Doctor in the Victorian Novel apart from many recent studies of Victorian science, medicine, and literature that claim, with varying degrees of conclusiveness, that a novelist’s consciousness was shaped by empirical domains extrinsic to the imaginative realm we ascribe to the novel.13 In such cases, proof of a novelist’s scientific or medical acumen can suggest, if indirectly, that literature is substantiated through its 12 In this same vein, John Gordon writes in Physiology and the Literary Imagination (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003) about “what was being done with medical doctrine by certain powerful imaginations during the birth, development, and consolidation of what we now call modern medicine” (3). 13 For instance, in the following three examples, scholars use literary examples to enlarge the social history of medicine in an illustrative way that is not interested in the generic differences between fiction and history. For example, Lilian R. Furst in Between Doctors and Patients: The Changing Balance of Power (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1998), considers Middlemarch “medical history translated into personal – and fictional – terms” (14). Similarly, in Medical Progress and Social Reality, Furst writes that literature can “literally flesh out medical history in crucial ways,” “disclos[e] the variegated human responses to scientific advances of the period,” and “reveal” the social effects of the developing medicine field (xi, xii). Lilian R. Furst, ed., Medical Progress and Social Reality: A Reader in Nineteenth-Century Medicine and Literature (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000). Another example of this causal thinking, by which literature can showcase a novelist’s understanding of the complex social ramifications of medicine or science, is found in “Medicine and Zola” by Garabed Eknoyan and Byron A. Eknoyan: “The repercussions of the new laboratory medicine and Claude Bernard’s experimental and naturalistic method echoed throughout the literary world. But it was Zola, more than any of his contemporaries, who dedicated himself to applying the physiological approach to human personalities. His technique of candid disclosure and objective dissection of his characters surpassed the efforts of his contemporaries…” (105): Garabed Eknoyan and Byron A. Eknoyan, “Medicine and Zola,” in The Body and the Text, eds. Bruce Clarke and Wendell Aycock (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1990): pp. 103–14. Finally, literature’s potential to enlarge our understanding of medical history clearly motivates Chester R. Burns, who wishes “only to claim that a study of fictional doctors can be instructive in understanding the social history of medical ethics in the United States” (39):

Introduction

11

relationship to “hard” subjects like science. While this urge to firm up literature’s foundations (and our own scholarly contribution) is a quite reasonable response to a market culture that, at the very least, devalues the study of the humanities, we do not confirm the value of our field by externalizing its insights in more commercially influential spheres.14 One particular branch of this criticism, which David Amigoni describes in its most extreme form as neo-Darwinian reductionism, translates complex social and literary phenomena into fixed biological drives, without explaining why the latter is a superior explanatory method.15 Examples of this mode of criticism are studies that answer questions like “what illness was Milly Theale actually dying of in The Wings of a Dove?”, or analyze the anxious relationship between Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park through the dynamics of the sexual drive. In contrast, my use of the doctor-character as a representation of and metonym for the decline of the marriage-plot novel does not rely on a close reading of medical or scientific concepts as a control group that helps me assess what was happening in fiction. For better or worse, such arguments can reinscribe the critical triumph of scientific consciousness over the literary text. Indeed, while many such studies provide sophisticated lenses for looking at Victorian novels, they can also reify the authority of medical science in the novel. But one does not have to read Victorian science or medical texts to find empirical evidence in the novel, for the novel supplies this current of thought with a stunning consistency of its own, whether in the works of George Eliot, Annie S. Swan, or all the novelists great and obscure between them. The Doctor in the Victorian Novel thus directs attention to the arc of the marriage-plot novel and not to the influences of, for instance, physiology, cellular theory, or evolutionary biology.

Chester R. Burns, “Fictional Doctors and the Evolution of Medical Ethics in the United States, 1875–1900,” Literature and Medicine 7 (1988), pp. 39–55. 14 Poovey discusses a related idea in Genres of a Credit Economy when she characterizes the current status of literary criticism as devalued by “the increased importance [that] advanced societies now assign to information … As a discipline devoted to selfculture and the elaboration of ambiguities, Literary studies seems irrelevant … because it fails to produce information that one might use” (418; original emphasis). 15 See David Amigoni, “A Consilient Canon? Bridges to and from Evolutionary Literary Analysis,” ESC 32/2–3 (June/September 2006): 173–85. Among the recent works that Amigoni places in this category, whereby biological processes offer a text’s essential meaning, are Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson, eds, The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005); David P. Barash and Nanelle R. Barash, Madame Bovary’s Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature (New York: Delacorte Press, 2005).

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The Doctor in the Nineteenth-Century Novel The Romantic and Early Victorian Eras How were doctors imagined in fiction before the great Victorian medicalization of culture? Social realities facing most doctors in the first half of the century impeded their heroic and romantic representation in fiction. The distasteful association of a profession largely identified with service, the nearly ubiquitous financial struggles, and a whiff of scandal all worked against the doctor’s social reputation. The title “doctor,” referring to a medical professional, was not in use until the mid-eighteenth century, at which point it registered equivalent status to such ignoble titles as the blood-sucker, the surgeon’s mate, or the little apothecary (Cornfield 140). The subdivisions within the medical field at the start of the nineteenth century were comprised of physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries. Physicians, the most prestigious group, dealt in theory, diagnosis, and prescription, and only constituted about 5 percent of medical practitioners in the mid-nineteenth century (and were themselves drawn from the upper strata of society). Surgeons studied anatomy and treated external disorders and were not known as men of science and learning. Apothecaries were drug-prescribing tradesmen (Cornfield 149; Petersen 8–10; Stevens 12). The separation of activity that those titles designate was, however, often disregarded, especially in rural areas where small populations did not support large numbers of medical professionals (Waddington 8). General practitioners sought to override these officially discrete positions by unifying medical duties, particularly in order to serve patients outside of urban centers with teaching hospitals and specialists. The general practitioner built his trade primarily on the basis of a middle-class clientele. Since the general practitioner could also practice midwifery, his service could encompass most medical problems that a middle-class family might face at a relatively low cost (Waddington 25). But the wide scope of his work degraded the status of the general practitioner in a profession that measured status by specialization, and the level of training it conferred (Cornfield 146–8). As general practitioners sought to improve their standing among the public and the medical elite, they had to contend with class-specific restrictions to their progress, such as the fact that the Royal College of Physicians conducted its examinations for licensure in Latin until 1820 (Bonner 63). The Homeopathic Times complained in 1834 that the public dishonored the general practitioner by regarding him as a “mongrel kind of doctor, man-midwife, surgeon and druggist, a true jack-of-all-trades and master of none” (Loudon 243). Until the mid-nineteenth century, doctors overwhelmingly belonged to the lower-middle class, and most received their training in hospital schools or through apprenticeships; a mere 20 percent of doctors at mid-century were estimated to have university educations (Bonner 244). Historical Victorian doctors attest to the years of sacrifice and scarcity that precede even celebrated careers. As a young man, Sir James Paget (1814–99), a middle-class man who later became physician extraordinaire to the Queen, writes about skipping meals and “learning the value

Introduction

13

of dates and raisins for averting hunger,” and about delaying his engagement for eight years until he could afford to marry his fiancée (Paget 188–90). While honorable but struggling doctors like Paget lacked the romantic appeal that might have inspired their fictional counterparts (an eight-year engagement between patient lovers is unlikely to motivate a scintillating story), another challenge to the doctor’s reputation came from the stain of immorality. Romantic and early Victorian doctors were vulnerable to charges of “body snatching” as dissection or “morbid anatomy” (increasingly incorporated into medical school curriculums in the nineteenth century) connected doctors and medical students with depraved, criminal, and godless practices. The infamous Burke and Hare trials in Edinburgh in the 1820s scandalized the public with the account of ambitious anatomists (Burke and Hare) who paid grave-robbers for fresh cadavers.16 For the most part, early nineteenth-century doctors in fiction are minor professional archetypes rather than individualized characters. In Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811), a medical man makes a brief appearance during the novel’s climax, the nearly fatal illness suffered by Marianne Dashwood. Marianne’s heartbreak over a broken love affair weakens her, and her precipitous illness provokes her sister Elinor to call for an apothecary, a Mr. Harris. Without knowledge of or interest in Marianne’s romantic disappointment, Harris dispenses a range of (unnamed) treatments in an experimental fashion. His second visit to Marianne exemplifies his distance from the moral and emotional context of the novel: Mr. Harris was punctual in his second visit, – but he came to be disappointed in his hopes of what the last would produce. His medicines had failed; – the fever was unabated; and Marianne only more quiet – not more herself – remained in an heavy stupor. Elinor, catching all, and more than all, his fears in a moment, proposed to call in farther advice. But he judged it unnecessary; he had still something more to try, some fresh application, of whose success he was almost as confident as the last, and his visit concluded with encouraging assurances which reached the ear, but could not enter the heart, of Miss Dashwood. (265)

In fact, the heart of Miss Dashwood constitutes the core of the novel, and Elinor’s consciousness, more subtle and judicious than Marianne’s, is often indistinct from that of Austen’s narrator. That Mr. Harris’s reasoning process fails to appease Elinor or cure Marianne detaches him from the dominant, romantic ontology of the novel. His inability to predict the course of Marianne’s illness (she declines when he expects her recovery, and recovers when he fears her decline) also heightens the

16

The Anatomy Act of 1832 legalized the use of “unclaimed” bodies for dissection by the medical profession, which usually meant paupers: Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind (New York: Norton, 1999): p. 318. Before this Act, Parliament had decreed in 1752 that all executed murderers could be dissected; see Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987).

14


tension of the episode by underscoring the powerlessness of her observers – even that of the medical ‘expert.’ While the title character of Samuel Warren’s Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician, a popular serial in the 1830s, moves closer to the center of the plot than Mr. Harris in Sense and Sensibility, his personal characterization is eclipsed by his professional status as an intimate visitor into patients’ lives.17 The serial episodes depict the rising physician’s various cases, with him presuming the role of narrator and patient confidant. The series gained a loyal readership riveted by the realistic details of the cases, and many readers mistook Warren’s narrator for a real physician. As one of Warren’s obituary writers remembered in 1877, the realistic details of the “Late Physician” series ignited a controversy about a perceived breach of patient confidentiality: The profession was indignant at the breach of etiquette implied in the publication of records of practice, and its journals anxiously sought to discover the offender. Month after month fresh passages were eagerly expected, were critically scanned when published, and not unfrequently made the subject of warm newspaper discussion. It does not appear that any suspicion was excited regarding the reality of the author’s assumed personality. (Blackwood’s 382)

The non-fictional status presumed of Warren’s series attests to the knowledge furnished by his medical training. But it also points to the originality of Warren’s subject matter. As I explore in more detail in Chapter 1, the doctor-hero was an unusual fictional choice before the Victorian age, when the rise of professionalism popularized a middle-class realm of subject matter, including the dramas and stories attached to the learned professions. As the example of Dickens’s Physician from Little Dorrit illustrates, an access to “the real” is a presumed result of the doctor’s work. But whereas Dickens, writing two decades later than Warren, identifies realism through his Physician’s understanding of privileged (if largely unexplored in the novel itself) medical knowledge, Warren’s physician accesses a different kind of realism. His task as a diary-writing doctor enables the reader’s entry into a private and often uncomfortable scene, and thus verisimilitude is transmitted by intimacy, not specialized knowledge. After the first installment, the thoughts and characteristics of the physician become, for the most part, narrative contrivances that locate him at the bedside of the more developed subjects of the stories, his patients and their friends and family members. One of these tales, “Cancer,” features a beautiful young woman suffering from a cancerous tumor of the breast. The physician focuses on the young woman’s fortitude and bravery in the face of a gruesome surgery (in the days before anesthesia). The emphasis of the story is on the 17 Born in Wales in 1807, Samuel Warren studied medicine in Edinburgh and law in London before earning great popular appeal with the Late Physician series, which ran in Blackwood’s Magazine between 1830 and 1837.

Introduction

15

woman’s virtue, and the ending reveals that her great hope is not survival (which plot would implicate the physician), but that her husband “would love her yet!” (20). The destiny of the story is romantic, and the medical theme and its principal player provide a means to narrate that story. Both Mr. Harris in Sense and Sensibility and the physician in The Diary of a Late Physician, then, are important to their texts insofar as they mark or preside over dramatic moments. What I am proposing in this book more generally is that, across the Victorian period, the development of the physician in the novel was a charged task for novelists that taxed the marriage-plot novel’s constitutional dependence on romantic as opposed to empirical logic. In the pre-Victorian age of Sense and Sensibility and The Diary of a Late Physician, the doctor’s significance to a fictional plot is checked by his relative inability to control nature. Mr. Harris neither predicts nor controls the course of Marianne’s illness, and Warren’s physician uses his access to private moments as a means to tell exciting or dramatic stories rather than to relay his authority or supremacy over the body. As medical and scientific developments accordingly bestowed upon the historical doctor a greater authority over life and death, the doctor’s presence in the novel became more central and more vexed. The doctor as hero of the courtship plot is a Victorian invention, made possible by the new respectability of the professional man, but one that also epitomizes the tension between medical and romantic epistemologies that interests me. A story of 1835 illustrates the conceptual novelty of a doctor as the subject of a romance. In Mary Russell Mitford’s story “The Surgeon’s Courtship,” published in Belford Regis, we see the lengths that an author had to go to in convincing her reading public that a medical man could be a romantic hero. Indeed, this premise constitutes the plot of Mitford’s story, in which neither the doctor-hero nor his bride-to-be ever speak. The substance of this tale is comprised of the fact that the hero is a doctor. As Mitford puts it, “the most skilful surgeon in Belford may be, and actually is, with equal impunity the greatest beau in the place” (118). Such contemporaneous treatments of the doctor-as-hero make Harriet Martineau’s detailed portrait of country surgeon Edward Hope in Deerbrook a fascinating inauguration of a professional type, which I analyze in Chapter 1, “Doctoring the Marriage Plot: Harriet Martineau’s Deerbrook (1837) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872).” 18 A comparison between these novels, written fortyfive years apart but both concerning provincial surgeons in the late 1820s and 18

While I argue that Martineau was the first Victorian novelist to depict the doctorcharacter in any detail, F.R. Leavis and Q.D. Leavis consider Charles Kingsley’s portrait of a cholera doctor in Two Years Ago (1857) to be the first “genuinely modern” representation of the role. See their essay “The Symbolic Function of the Doctor in Victorian Novels,” an appendix to Dickens the Novelist (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979): pp. 179–83. Tom Thurnall, the doctor-hero of Two Years Ago, shows “a vocation for medical practice as well as a generally scientific bent,” has “a strong social conscience,” and is devoted to his patients (180–81). But Martineau’s Edward Hope possesses all of these

16


early 1830s, sets out the larger argument of The Doctor in the Victorian Novel by showing how the historical impact of science knowledge rewrites the marriage plot. Martineau’s early-period portrait of a surgeon accommodates her pragmatic vision of a companionate marriage, as the advent of scientific medicine had not yet taxed the logos of the novel. As a result, her country surgeon can teach us more about professional identity in a democratizing age and Martineau’s goals for the domestic novel than about medicine per se. In contrast, Eliot’s retrospective version of a Reform-era society betrays a later-period understanding of the plot incongruities reflected by a “scientific adventurer” (her surgeon, Tertius Lydgate) and his marital expectations. Thus, whereas Middlemarch is commonly mined for its acute representations of early Victorian medical science, which approach has recently been extended to Deerbrook as well, my analysis treats the marriages in these novels as the standard to which the surgeon-heroes must adapt. The Middle Century What medical historians have referred to as the Victorian Scientific Revolution only incrementally affected medical practice. By the 1840s, the physical and natural sciences had made great progress while medicine, for the most part, had not. Medical historian A.J. Youngson describes the gap between scientific developments and medical practice: “Most doctors before 1850, and many as late as 1870 … simply did not observe or think scientifically” (17). This trend was to change slowly with the incorporation of scientific studies in medical school curricula, and the mid-century triumph of Edinburgh as the seat of modern medical training, which substantiated the tradition of objective science dating from the Scottish Enlightenment in the previous century. Controls for pain and infection resulted in perhaps the greatest feat of applied medicine in the nineteenth century, including the adoption of anesthetics (first used in Britain in 1846) (Youngson 30), antiseptics (pioneered by Joseph Lister in 1867), and immunology (Cornfield 140; Youngson 42–72). These great medical strides and their debt to scientific research put in motion a trend that would only intensify: the rise of medical authority in reverse proportion to lay understanding. The growth of exclusive and scientifically informed medicine in the second half of the nineteenth century also yielded a rise in specialist institutions and branches of research. Between 1855 and 1875, the number of specialist departments in London teaching hospitals grew from 23 to 52, which Jeanne Petersen attributes to the Victorian public’s growing interest in science and technical expertise, but also – and more practically – to “a desperate search for economic survival or ambition” that reflected the field’s competitiveness (Petersen 248, 285). The correlation between self-promotion and specialist medicine certainly informs the unsympathetic portrayal of scientifically minded doctors as men who are driven characteristics, too, and differs from Thurnall only in his Christian conscience (Thurnall is a religious skeptic).

Introduction

17

by the profit motive or the glory of discovery. In such portraits, we see a trend in fiction that would occur with increasing frequency until nearly overdetermining the doctor-character by the century’s end: the idea of the physician as detached from the common feelings of the civilized, feeling person. Ranthorpe, George Henry Lewes’s novel of 1847, includes several medical students of this type – all brutish, grasping, and one murderous. The novel’s narrator laments modernity’s adaptation to a scientific epistemology that inculcates this drive in its rising doctors, and counters it in Ranthorpe with the curative and consoling sympathies of the novel’s artist-heroine, Isola. Lewes’s polarization of unfeeling, masculine science and compassionate, feminine art (including literature) will remain a stock convention through the century, but a mediating type does appear at its midpoint. A characterization of the doctor that melds a charitable, service-oriented drive (identified with the public health movements of the 1830s and 40s) and the increased professional respectability he enjoys surfaces in characters like Dickens’s Woodcourt, Charlotte Bronte’s John Graham Bretton (Villette, 1853), and Anthony Trollope’s Thomas Thorne (Dr. Thorne, 1858). These doctors expertly transverse professional and domestic realms, expanding their vocational power without impairing their masculinity.19 At this same time, the Medical Act of 1858 established a unified register of approved practitioners and created the General Medical Council as an ethico-legal watchdog, helping to substantiate the profession’s credibility (Porter 355). Allan Woodcourt exemplifies a distinct moment in mid-century medical heroism by his charitable work as well as by impeccable personal integrity, principally shown through his happy marriage to Esther Summerson. Much of Woodcourt’s respectability can be understood through the field of public health, which emerged in the late 1840s in response to the growing urban population’s vulnerability to epidemics including cholera and typhus, as exacerbated by unsanitary living conditions and a great influx of new city dwellers. The field’s charitable drive as well as its locus in public government characterized the movement as prudent, service-oriented, and compassionate, much like Woodcourt himself. Lauren M.E. Goodlad, in Victorian Literature and the Victorian State (2003), traces the way that Woodcourt exposes Dickens’s ambivalence to, and finally rejection of, the bureaucratization of sanitary reform. Despite Woodcourt’s heroic self-sacrifice as a doctor in the navy (he saves scores of lives during a shipwreck) and later in the dens of contagious London, Goodlad points out that Woodcourt is “one of the least developed characters in Bleak House” (103). Goodlad reads Dickens’s discomfort with medical power and reform becoming regulated by the government into Woodcourt’s insipidity. Had Woodcourt been more idiosyncratic, forceful, or 19

Thorne does, however, walk a fine line between incompatible domains of the medical profession. He both dispenses drugs like an apothecary and, like a physician, dispenses a higher measure of his expertise through “advice.” In straddling the high and low of the profession, the practically-minded Thorne is seen as a traitor to his more ambitious colleagues.


18

opinionated, and had he been slated for a more ambitious career than the one he eventually settles for as a public health official, then Dickens would have accorded medicine with more political agency. By presenting Woodcourt’s virtuousness as a local enterprise inspired by the goodness of his own character, we can understand his medical practices to fulfill and promote the interests of emotional bonds and individual contentment and therefore align with the conventional plotting of the domestic realist novel. But the relative scarcity of doctor-heroes like Woodcourt (in addition to his particular blandness) attests to the challenge of integrating medical expertise into novels organized by love and marriage.20 Reacting to the distancing effects of both professionalism and the increasingly scientific orientation of medicine, George MacDonald’s novel Adela Cathcart (1864) proposes an idealistic and romantic solution. Conventional medicine fails to cure the ailing heroine, and in its place, MacDonald’s narrator and an eccentric young doctor prescribe a story-telling club to reinvigorate her. In a plot that conflates health with romance (both in its narrative and emotional forms), MacDonald nostalgically argues that modern life and its pragmatic approach to human ills fails to cure the soul. One of MacDonald’s main targets in Adela Cathcart is the self-interested character of the professional doctor. The rift between professional ambition and personal or emotional judgment is the also the subject of Chapter 3, “Medical Malpractice at Mid-Century: Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife and Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters.” Braddon and Gaskell’s novels, both about practical surgeons and their fatuously romantic wives, register a growing abyss between doctors and society in the mid-century, and connect it to the “separate spheres” between the genders that novels commonly critique at this time. Tracing the way that masculine and professional authority participates in domestic ideology, I show how Braddon and Gaskell’s surgeons are disadvantaged by their empirical approaches to relationships. But where Braddon kills off her surgeon-husband and rewards his widow with a large inheritance, Gaskell submits her couple to a life of prosaic disappointment. The ways in which these novelists incorporate (or, in Braddon’s case, eliminate) these surgeons reveal, respectively, Braddon’s reinscription of romance in the pragmatic Victorian age, and Gaskell’s attempt to Dr. Thorne usefully distills the structural opposition I am tracing between medicine and the marriage plot, but in this case, the doctor’s relationship to the marriage plot is paternal (or to be precise, avuncular) rather than personal. Dr. Thorne finds himself simultaneously caring for a patient whose death would enable Thorne’s deserving niece and ward to inherit a fortune. Thorne’s conflict represents a fairly common convention at the mid-century, with the doctor contending against mutually exclusive personal and professional goals. This tension surfaces in Villette, too; Brontë’s Dr. John Bretton, like Woodcourt, achieved “a world of active good. . . amongst a very wretched population,” (228) but his professional acumen and “penetrating” (230) knowledge of Villette and its sick contrasts to his superficial assessment of women. His adoration of the beautiful but frivolous Ginevra Fanshawe stands out as a lapse of his sympathetic acuity, especially as heroine Lucy Snowe emerges as his intellectual equivalent. 20

Introduction

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tell, as realistically as possible, an ‘every-day’ story. These contrary responses to a medical man’s presence in a marriage-plot thereby typify the novelists’ respective ambitions for fiction. The Later Century During the mid-century heyday of Victorian scientific and medical confidence, the progress of science was equated with that of civilization. Science promised to establish a range of improvements including better health and physical well-being, intellectual liberty, and social mobility (Turner 591). But by the later decades of the century, the field and the mood surrounding it had grown considerably more pessimistic. The rise of laboratory science contributed to a growing public distrust of doctors; as medical historian Roy MacLeod argues, “Sickness had become a matter of microbes, not of man” (5). In effect, the increasing authority of science in the later century renders a new vision of the doctor that strays farther and farther away from the ideals associated with the family. The doctor of the fin-de-siècle often is a reactionary figure, encroaching on family autonomy and the morality identified with emotional bonds, and demonstrating a drive-to-knowledge that obliterates his social compassion. This identification finds overwhelming evidence in the growing distance between the doctor and the marriage plot. From approximately the 1870s to the end of the century, we see a general shift from the representation of the “family doctor” to the doctor as a man of science, often hostile to or ominously distant from the marriage plot; later-century doctors are more often bachelors, or unhappily married, than in the earlier period. The information they master often disqualifies them from experiencing romance, and the fancy on which it is based, first-hand. As I discuss in Chapter 4, the many doctors in Wilkie Collins’s Armadale (1866) and Heart and Science (1882) either struggle to maintain their moral links to a society that progressively mistrusts them, or they revel in their amorality. Collins explores these polarized ethics through two accompanying categories: a doctor’s affinity for or cruelty to women, and his skepticism towards or passionate embrace of science. Without exception, Collins regards scientifically oriented doctors as harmful to his heroines’ well-being and, by extension, to the love story of the novel writ large. Whereas these plot dynamics are incipient in the earlier Armadale, Collins literalizes his conflation between fragile heroines, romance, and the love tale in his later Heart and Science, in which the heroine’s life must be wrested away from a craven vivisectionist. The oppositional interests of scientific medicine and femininity that underwrite Collins’s novels extend across genres in the last decades of the nineteenth century, as two wildly divergent novels of the 1880s illustrate. An interjection from a doctor in Thomas Hardy’s Two on a Tower (1882) epitomizes tension between the late-century doctor and the marriage plot in its stark description of their incompatibility. Two on a Tower concerns an unhappy widow, Lady Viviette Constantine, and the young man who loves her, Swithin St. Cleeve, who is an

20


aspiring astronomer. When Swithin’s uncle, Dr. Jocelyn St. Cleeve, a “bachelor and hardened misogynist” (115) learns of the romantic entanglement between the two, he writes his nephew, whom he has never met, a letter outlining his objection to the relationship. The occasion of my addressing you is briefly this: Nine months ago a report casually reached me that your scientific studies were pursued by you with great ability, and that you were a young man of some promise as an astronomer … [But, I learnt] that there was something in your path worse than narrow means, and that that something was a woman … If your studies are to be worth anything, believe me, they must be carried on without the help of a woman. Avoid her, and every one of the sex, if you mean to achieve any worthy thing. (112–15)

The doctor was informed about Swithin’s promising career and the female impediment to it nine months previously – a term soon echoed by the illegitimate child the lovers are expecting. Dr. St. Cleeve’s equation between scientific achievement and bachelorhood is bolstered by an offer: he will bequeath his estate to Swithin in the event that his nephew renounces Lady Constantine. With the pessimism typical of Hardy, the choice that Swithin faces – love or professional achievement – is soon interrupted by a diminishment of both of these prospects. But the contest that Dr. St. Cleeve sets up identifies the increasing exclusivity granted to the romantic and the scientific, which are predominantly associated with femininity and literature, and masculinity and empiricism. Even married doctors in the later Victorian era reveal an antipathy to the institution of marriage that extends from their medical sensibility. Frank Danby’s Dr. Phillips: A Maida Vale Idyll (1887) sensationalizes the incompatibility between the professional doctor and the marriage plot.21 Dr. Benjamin Phillips, the Jewish villain of this exceptionally racist novel, enjoys the respect and intimacy coterminous with his work, especially among his female clientele. As the narrator observes, one “could see by a glance that he was essentially the lady’s doctor. So easy, so tactful, replying to all and satisfying all” (16). The trust he inspires in women and his prodigious talent (as a young man he was expected to be “the greatest surgeon of his time” (28)) enable his malevolence, for mid-way through the novel, Phillips murders his wife under the auspices of a therapeutic surgery, so as to protect his dalliance with his Christian mistress. Wife-murder and infidelity are not Phillip’s only crimes, and recalling a great public scandal of the time, Phillips’s surgical methods recall the practice of vivisection, which was identified with brutality and a disregard for suffering.22 This inclination evolves with a chilling logic from his surgical skill:

21 Frank Danby is a pseudonym for Julia Frankau (1859–1916), a British-Jewish writer with a profound hatred for the Zionist movement in Britain. 22 I explore the scandal and controversy of medical vivisection in detail in Chapter 4.

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21

He commenced to play with his knowledge. He experimentalized, half idly, half maliciously; the lives that were at that time in his keeping had trembled in the balance, and had been sacrificed or almost sacrificed to a curiosity which was not a thirst for knowledge. (85)

Femininity’s foil to scientific medicine is complicated in the late 1880s and 90s by the figure of the politically autonomous New Woman, especially as the medical field sought to retain its control over the management of women’s bodies. Bram Stoker’s Dracula and two novellas by Arthur Machen, “The Great God Pan” and “The Inmost Light” are the subject of Chapter 5, “New Women, Avenging Doctors: Gothic Medicine in Stoker and Machen.” Stoker and Machen adjudicate the control over women’s bodies and especially their reproductive systems by dramatizing the unnatural, sometimes uncanny disposition of the New Woman. In these texts, aggressive and sometimes fatal medical interventions operate as necessary punishments for errant womanhood, as New Women challenge the traditional boundaries of marriage. We see this trope structurally in these texts’ variations on the marriage plot, which as a literary organization has deteriorated from this period’s gendered struggle for moral and biophysical control, as is testified by the independent New Women and the doctors who discipline them. The familiar portrayal of late-century doctors as heartless experimentalists or science experts dissociated from the moral principles of society is complicated by an historical phenomena that fictional authors find difficult to reconcile with the role of the doctor. The relatively unusual but well-documented licensure of women doctors in Britain, beginning with Elizabeth Garrett’s successful passing of the Apothecary’s Exam in 1862,23 challenged the conventional portrayal of doctors as coldly scientific, revealing the well-worn cultural equivalence between femininity and emotionality. In Chapter 6, “The ‘Fair Physician’: Female Doctors and the Late-Century Marriage Plot,” I examine the near-impossibility of a woman doctor’s conventional romance and marriage in several novels and short stories. Some fiction writers retained the medical doctor’s severe reputation and represented women doctors as unnaturally masculine, as we see in Charlotte Yonge’s unflattering portrait of the respectable but eccentric Janet Brownlow in Magnum Bonum (1879). Janet is a caricature of the bluestocking (at one point she enters the breakfast room laden with “a pair of compasses, a safety inkstand, and a microscope” (233), lest we miss the outlying hints of her scholarly drive). Other novelists labored to unite feminized characteristics, like emotional sensitivity and beauty, with a professional identity that did not easily admit such softness. This effort encumbers Annie S. Swan’s Elizabeth Glen, M.B. (1895). Swan’s continued insistence that Elizabeth Glen’s heroic and astute work as a physician does not detract from her femininity cumulatively suggests the exceptionality of the “womanly” doctor, and thereby undermines the case for the role that Swan 23 Ross, Margaret The Royal Medical Society and Medical Women .

22


pitches more generally. Among the several woman-doctor texts I analyze, only Margaret Todd’s Mona Maclean, Medical Student (1892), imagines a married female physician, and thus provides a fascinating testament to the dominance of the pattern from which it diverges. Nevertheless, the relocation of the choice between love and medicine to a female doctor literalizes and condenses the conflict I explore throughout The Doctor in the Victorian Novel between the discordant epistemologies that marriage and medical plots invite, as virtually all the authors who portray women doctors overtly grapple with the contradiction inherent in “female doctor.” Finally, the late-century novel’s failure or refusal to accommodate doctors into marriage personifies the decline of romantic and domestic subjectivity, which is a trope often related to scientific materialism in the Edwardian and Modernist novel. In a brief conclusion to the book, I examine Arthur Conan Doyle’s doctor stories in Round the Red Lamp (1894) in the context of their failed love and marriage plots. These stories figure nostalgia for love and romance, and an era not yet transfigured by the clinical detachment and hyper-rationalism that Conan Doyle associates with his dogged, serious, and often wistful modern doctors. From this book’s first to last chapter, then, we see doctors move from idealized heroes and family men, as in Harriet Martineau’s Deerbrook, 1839, in which the doctor-hero does not yet contend with the knowledge systems of science, to hyper-rational scientists isolated from family life and fiction’s romantic resolutions, as in Round the Red Lamp.

Chapter 1

Doctoring the Marriage Plot: Harriet Martineau’s Deerbrook and George Eliot’s Middlemarch In 1866, the Positivist philosopher Frederic Harrison wrote a letter to his friend George Eliot, in which he urged her to use her fictional talents to portray the benefits of a “future, Positivist society,” led by secular and empirical ideals. Eliot had recently published Felix Holt: the Radical (1866), her most political novel, but Harrison was disappointed by this novel’s facility in meaning different things to different people. In short, he objected to its naturalism. Her next novel, he proposed, could show the possibility of “healthy moral control over societies,” reveal “the positive fruits of science and industry,” and thus “illustrate the superiority of the new [science of Positivism] to the old way of life” (Haight 288–89). This idealistic community could be led, in Harrison’s words, by “the local physician, who would represent science and would gradually acquire … an entirely moral ascendancy over both capitalist and laborer” (Haight 287-288). The doctor, he continues, would allow Eliot to resolve “the darker passions” of class conflict by the “active intervention” of the trusted physician. To Harrison, the doctor-hero could reflect leadership in a utopian future, which, after the tenets of Positivism, would be organized by empiricism and what he sees as the inevitable moral and social progress that follows from the teleological power of scientific thinking. Eliot, however, envisioned no such confidence in the example of the doctor to assuage social ills with medical science. Her 1872 novel Middlemarch does include many of the elements suggested by Harrison, among them a talented doctor and a provincial society divided by class interests. But the resolutions of Middlemarch frustrated Harrison (Vogeler 417); far from achieving the transcendent influence of a scientifically minded leader, Eliot’s doctor Tertius Lydgate fails to translate his great ambitions into practice, and thus dies a disappointed man. While Harrison’s advice to Eliot attaches transformative power to modern science and medicine, Lydgate’s experience in Middlemarch attests to the human framework that shapes, and in his experience, limits empirical knowledge. Eliot further checks the great potential associated with Lydgate by setting her novel in the late 1820s and early 1830s, and so attesting implicitly to history’s invisible record of scientific intentions. To find a more optimistic version of Positivist triumph, we must revisit a novel that both shares its setting with the heady beginning of Positivism in England, and aligns its hopeful vision with an as-yet-untested future. Harriet Martineau’s little-known novel Deerbrook (1838–39) serves virtually all of the plot


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requirements of Harrison’s imaginary utopia. In Deerbrook, general practitioner Edward Hope achieves transcendent leadership of a divided and ignorant populace, and through his characterization, Martineau forges new literary ground with one of the first sustained studies of a middle-class, professional man in a Victorian novel. As this chapter argues, Martineau, like Harrison over thirty years later, believes that the characterization of a local physician can proffer a powerful example of new, Positivist leadership. But while Harrison’s confidence in the medical hero situates study of the Victorian doctor in its expected domain of scientific and empirical authority, Martineau’s interest in a doctor-hero is in fact guided by her political and democratic ideals, and her Mr. Hope thereby represents a mode of civic interaction above and before medical practice. My comparison between Hope and Lydgate, then, argues that Hope’s success in fitting into a domestic plot reflects pre-scientific medicine’s essentially civic and social identification, which for Martineau was an excellent guide for marriage relationships. In contrast, Lydgate’s scientific ambitions (and Eliot’s later-Victorian knowledge of modern science and medicine) shape a marriage relationship that is negatively informed by a emotional-empirical divide not yet visible to Martineau in the 1830s. The science of Positivism was developed by French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857), who imagined it as a modern and secular antidote to religion. Comte’s Positivism was organized by three historical stages that mark humanity’s development. The first stage is Theological and employs supernatural beliefs as its mode of explanation; the second, the Metaphysical stage, relies on an abstract but incomplete epistemology, and the third, the Positive stage, indicates human understanding of the natural laws that rule the world. The Positive stage as Comte conceived it represented mankind’s control of what previously had been a hostile and unpredictable universe, including the elimination of suffering and illness. The rationalist basis of Positivism relies on evidence (and hence eliminates the suppositions of faith-based theology); as Comte wrote, “there can be no real knowledge but that which is based on observable facts” (Lenzer 72). Positivism’s appeal to medical science was consistent with the nineteenth-century medical drive to establish a more physiological basis of disease, in a large part through advances in surgery, anatomy, and dissection. Positivism also considers how scientific knowledge can influence human behavior. After Comte’s example, Martineau, for instance, ambitiously imagines that empirical logic could ultimately guide even irrational passions like the emotions. Eliot, while sympathetic to Comtean Positivism and friendly with many of its principal adherents in England, is more skeptical, which perspective I explore through Middlemarch in the closing section of this chapter. Both

Martha Vogeler’s fine essay “George Eliot and the Positivists” traces Eliot’s participation in Comtean philosophy (Nineteenth-Century Fiction 35 [1980]: 406–31). Vogeler disputes a critical tendency to overstate Eliot’s adherence to the movement, and instead argues that Eliot’s many friendships with English Positivists including Harrison, Richard Congreve, and Edward Spencer Beesly should not be mistaken for her wholehearted

Doctoring the Marriage Plot

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Deerbrook and Middlemarch operate as testing grounds for Positivism’s success insofar as they imagine the influence of doctors in provincial villages that are beset by very irrational emotions like love, jealousy, and fear. Hope’s great success and Lydgate’s failure mark their respective author’s commitments to Positivism. But beyond modeling the science of Positivism, the lessons that Hope imparts in Deerbrook can be more precisely identified when we consider Martineau’s goals for the domestic realist novel than if we look at her representation of science and medicine. Hope’s utility, above all, is the exemplification of an unsentimental point of view that is consonant with his profession, and that explains Martineau’s revisionary ambitions for fiction in Deerbrook. Determined, like George Eliot after her, not to add to the numbers of “silly novels by lady novelists,” Martineau embarks in Deerbrook on no less than a rejection of the romantic marriage plot that has structured domestic realism since the novels of Jane Austen. It is one of my contentions that the fictional Victorian doctor reflects not only the rise of science in culture, which is logical, but also the revised and revising fortunes of domesticity and marriage. Called upon to serve both professional and medical interests as well as domestic and intimate ones, the doctor’s role in Victorian culture accordingly maps a dynamic interface between the public and private spheres. When the doctor-character participates in the romantic or marriage plot, as do Hope and Lydgate, we necessarily confront a collision between public and private interests. That is, while the doctor as a Victorian professional man personifies a rational perspective, the doctor-in-love (or marriage, as is the case with Hope) must also engage in a convention that is embedded in literary culture and pre-dates the rise of modern science. The experience of the rational doctor in love and/or marriage, then, posits a struggle between the growing authority of professional medicine and the sentimental and intuitive feelings that inflect the convention of romance. The Victorian doctor-in-love thus uniquely exemplifies novelists’ efforts to coalesce literary conventions of marriage with newer, scientific objectives. My focus on the interaction between the rationalist doctor and the marriage plot leads to my interpretation of the reason why Martineau, Harrison, and Eliot saw the novel as a place to debate medical authority. Marriage constitutes the most revealing interpersonal relationship in the domestic realist novel, and as such it can serve as our index of other power relations and social visions in the genre. But scholarship on Deerbrook (which is scarce) and Middlemarch (which is extensive) participation in the movement (418). James F. Scott’s essay “George Eliot, Positivism, and the Social Vision of Middlemarch” (Victorian Studies [1972]: 59–76) argues that Middlemarch was Eliot’s dramatic testing ground for the Comtean view of social change (59). Like Vogeler, Scott emphasizes Eliot’s critique of Positivism as a set system of beliefs, but argues that she embraces the creed insofar as it encourages a method of inquiry. Eliot’s 1856 article, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (Westminster Review 66 [October 1856]: 442–61) critiques the romantic plots of most novels written by women as unrealistic and escapist.

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usually separates the “medical” from the “domestic”; in doing so, it ironically betrays an allegiance to the same separation of spheres that both Martineau and Eliot overtly critique in these novels. Martineau uses her doctor-hero to typify a distinctly modern figure whose participation in social and political life surmounts his medical work. Indeed, not least important in the character of Edward Hope is his function as an enlightened husband and recovered lover. The consolation of work and duty that Hope and his wife Hester eventually model in their marriage crystallizes Martineau’s advocacy of novels as practical guides to middle-class life. In this way, Martineau uses “doctor” to exemplify a logical, dispassionate, and revised picture of marriage that in turn advocates a new role for the domestic novel. Eliot, in contrast, ultimately demands less from her doctor-hero. Lydgate, at the end of Middlemarch, compromises his scientific and professional goals for more self-interested ends. In his case, “doctor” signifies a limited professional and scientific perspective that conflicts and ultimately is trounced by his subjective and romantic identity. The comparison between these doctors draws attention to the ways that romantic and domestic plots are impacted by medicine in the pre-scientific age (when Martineau wrote and situated Deerbrook) and in an age deeply informed by science (the period in which Eliot wrote – but did not place – Middlemarch). Eliot’s Lydgate fails at his career and research aspirations, and his scientific perspective also leads him to misjudge his marital fortunes. In this way, he resembles other medical men conceived in the later century (such as those I study in Chapters 4 and 5) more than he does Edward Hope. In contrast, Hope’s deft amalgamation of the identities of doctor and husband reflect the pre-scientific world of Deerbrook. Martineau’s rendering of marriage as a civil and cooperative union complements her conception of medicine as a similarly socially conscious and service-oriented domain. Deerbrook Set in the small, Midland-shire village of Deerbrook, Martineau’s novel begins with the arrival of two sisters from Birmingham, Margaret and Hester Ibbotson, who have been welcomed after the deaths of their parents by their distant cousins, the Grey family. The Ibbotson sisters are initiated into village life and its social politics, which include a feminine preoccupation with scandal and gossip. The Greys introduce Hester and Margaret to the much-admired local doctor and eligible bachelor, Edward Hope. Mr. Hope soon falls in love with Margaret, the plainer but more sensible of the sisters. But Mrs. Grey, who means well but persistently meddles in others’ lives, urges him to marry the less virtuous Hester, who mistakenly believes that it is she whom Hope loves. Out of a strong sense of duty and self-sacrifice, Hope marries Hester, resolving to quell his love for Margaret.


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After the wedding of Hope and Hester, Deerbrook takes a darker turn, leading to a more focused analysis of Hope and his changing fortunes. Hope and Hester are both disappointed by marriage; Hope still loves Margaret, and Hester senses his emotional reserve and is frustrated by the difference between her romantic expectations and the ordinary trials of domestic life. Their relationship is soon taxed by outside forces as well. Hope is victimized by a jealous neighbor woman, Mrs. Rowland, and by the local aristocracy, who objects to his liberal politics and gradually curtails his once-thriving practice. The Hope family subsequently is forced to practice strict domestic economy – as Hope refuses to accept help from friends, or give in to the pressures of the villagers to adjust his political ideals, even when rioters demolish his surgery. Beset by indifference to the poor and to the political activism that Hope sees as an antidote to its suffering, Deerbrook is contaminated by a typhus epidemic. Showing that his missionary dedication to the villagers transcends his own persecution, Hope tirelessly works to cure the sick – which he largely does through improved domestic hygiene and the abandonment of folk-medicine in favor of ‘modern’ sanitation. Inspired by Hope’s unselfish example, Hester’s character sufficiently improves so that, by the end of the novel, she has become the wife Hope deserves. Hope masters his feelings for Margaret and by the novel’s end, is able to celebrate her engagement to neighbor Phillip Enderby. *** Bucking such familiar conventions as the handsome squire (Austen) or the courageous warrior (Scott), Martineau’s choice of a homely general practitioner in Deerbrook was for many an inauspicious choice for a hero. While other novelists of the time wrote about doctors, they most often wrote about them as undifferentiated stock figures in the service of (but not participating in) the novel’s central plot, as we see in Thackeray’s Pendennis (1850). The doctor, Thackeray writes, “comes – sits beside us – encourages us to complain, and listens. Oh, what can equal the blandness and sympathy of a listening doctor! We detail our minutest sensations with a modest pride at possessing so many indisputable claims on his attention” (623). Patrick McCarthy claims that “it was the ambiguous social status of the doctor [in the early Victorian period] which troubled authors” and prevented them from figuring doctors as heroes unless they were “purged … of any association with mere trade” (807). More recently, Lawrence Rothfield explains the “relative paucity of explicit literary representations of physicians,” at least until the 1870s (“Doctors” 173) by drawing near my argument in Family Practices. For Rothfield, “Lawyers or churchmen could be imagined as suitable romantic interlocutors in a way that medical men, [whose “respectability” was “questionable”] for the most part, could not” (171). But Rothfield does not dwell on the relationship between a As a country doctor practicing at the turn of the century, Hope served as an apothecary, surgeon, and physician, in that order.

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doctor’s participation in the romance or marriage plot and a novelist’s willingness or capacity to depict him; instead, he suggests that the doctor’s “way of exercising power and manifesting authority” (171) were both threatening and ambiguous to novelists, and so, by and large, they left him alone. While I agree with Rothfield’s thesis, this book ventures where he does not by tracing the impact of medical knowledge on the Victorian novel by and through the doctor character’s unwieldy juxtaposition to the marriage plot. Responding directly to Deerbrook, reviewer Sydney Smith mocked the idea of a “poticary” as fictional, showing how far the hero’s role was subsumed by romantic connotations. Smith jokes that if a doctor-hero “took his mistress’s hand, he would feel her pulse by force of habit; if she fainted, he would have only Epsom salts; he would put cream of tartar in her tea and flower of brimstone in her bosom – no, a ‘medicinal lover’ would not do” (Webb 185). But Hope was, explicitly, not a lover at all, unless we count his love for political and social responsibility; his discipline of his love for Margaret is one of the triumphs of the novel. Martineau’s choice of the medical profession for Deerbrook’s hero most importantly is an entrée into an example of disinterested work in general, in the same way that Deerbrook’s Austenian beginning (the arrival of the marriageable Ibbotson sisters and the courtship plot concerning them and Hope) leads Martineau into the more pragmatic design of domestic and social compromise. Hope’s role as a doctor, that is, does not reflect medicine and its interventions so much as the ethical Positivism for which his doctoring stands. As a middle-class professional who rejects material and selfish objectives in favor of a disinterested commitment to social equality and stability, Hope broadly personifies Martineau’s stance against the ‘romantic’ in fiction, as his thwarted love for Margaret also makes clear. Martineau’s professed goal in Deerbrook is to revise the prototype of the novel that she regarded as dated, impractical, and escapist. The prospective design for this new mode of fiction takes shape in an oft-cited review she wrote of Sir Walter Scott in 1833. While praising Scott’s genius, Martineau suggests that his extravagant drama be replaced by more immediate and realistic subject matter in fiction. [W]hy not now take the magnificent subject, the birth of political principle, whose advent has been heralded for so long? What can afford finer moral scenery than the transition state society now is! Where are nobler heroes to be found than those who sustain society in the struggle; and what catastrophe so grand as the downfall of bad institutions, and the issues of a process of renovations? (qtd. in Sanders 27)

In adhering to a fundamental realism, a straightforward depiction of ordinary lives, and skepticism towards the possibilities available for heroic action or dramatic reversals of fortune, Martineau’s revision of the novel focuses on her prioritization of the civic over personal goals. The position of the doctor at this time necessarily imparts these values. Hope has a private practice (a surgery attached to his house) but is also a civic employee, appointed to practice at the local almshouse. The


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modesty of this position resonated with Deerbrook’s contemporary critics (as Sydney Smith’s review demonstrates) and entered the novel into a growing number of realistic novels that carried serious social ambitions. Despite its relative obscurity in the canon of nineteenth-century novels, Deerbrook’s role in inaugurating the middle-class domestic novel has been long noted by critics. Gregory and Kathleen Tillotson consider Deerbrook “the first serious novel of middle-class provincial life since Jane Austen” (324). Vineta Colby stresses Martineau’s attention to those spheres of life that the novel, after the pattern of Austen, had not previously examined. Colby calls Deerbrook a “pioneering work, a model for many later novels. [Martineau] breaks out of the confines of the purely domestic scene and personal love story, moving freely from the hearth to the marketplace and the village green” (252). Such “serious” ambitions for fiction met with much popular resistance. Writing wistfully in 1833 about the waning appeal of dramatic fiction that his own Newgate and historical novels typified, Edward Bulwer Lytton describes the period’s growing interest in “didactic” art: When Byron passed away, the feeling he had represented craved utterance no more. With a sigh we turned to the actual and practical career of life; we awoke from the morbid, the passionate, and the dreaming … Hence that strong attachment to the Practical, which became so visible a little time after the death of Byron, and which continues … to characterize the temper of this time. Insensibly acted upon by the doctrine of Utilitarians, we desired to see Utility in every branch of intellectual labor. (ii)

Bulwer Lytton refers to a community of revision-minded novelists; Martineau was not alone in her attempt to use fiction as a model for social values founded upon pragmatic principles. Other prominent female novelists of the age used fiction as a medium by which they could fashion a more practical ethic for industrial culture and for women writers, whose most evident contribution to letters heretofore was the romance novel. Most prominently, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna and Frances Trollope helped to popularize the genre of instructional fiction, which often focused on the lower class. Martineau registers Deerbrook’s conversion of intimate relations to collective interests in two principal and intertwined ways: she chooses a doctor for her hero, and she models his marriage after the statutes of political concession rather than romance. Especially in its middle-class orientation, Deerbrook resembles the rising genre of social-problem novels, which include Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837) and Hard Times (1854), Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1856), and Disraeli’s Sybil (1845). While addressing political measures like the First Reform Bill (1832), the New Poor Law (1834), and social inequities arising from Valerie Sanders describes Martineau’s formative role in the social-domestic novels soon to be written by novelists including Gaskell, Dickens, the Brontës, and Eliot (xii–xv).

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industrial culture, these novels ambitiously tried to reconcile reformist politics with family life in general and the marriage plot in particular. Catherine Gallagher reads the “structuring metaphor” of social paternalism in Hard Times as a way to “advocate that the relations between classes becomes like the cooperative associations of family life” (148). Josephine Guy similarly treats the marriage between genteel Margaret Hale and industrialist Frederick Thornton in North and South as a model for the integration of industrial relations with personal life (171). Deerbrook, however, maintains a more critical attitude towards domestic love and marriage; rather than using the latter as a model for the former, Martineau adapts marital relations to the revisionary ethics of the new middle class after a distinctly unromantic agenda. In the service of political economy and its Utilitarian goals, Martineau targets misleading and escapist “love tales” as symptoms of the bourgeois complacency that extends from outmoded notions of a patrician leadership. Martineau’s reformist politics depend upon middle-class, professional men like Hope opposing the entrenched superiority of the noblesse oblige through democracy and political participation. Deerbrook’s illustration of female involvement in the political process idealizes the way that social life depends upon (and, at best, admits) the participation of all of its citizens. Other female writers of the era matched Martineau’s determination to transcend, in fiction, female isolation from civic life, and similarly regarded the literary romance as destructive to this mission. Writing as editor of the Christian Lady’s Magazine in 1834, Tonna defines the direction of her fiction in words that anticipate Deerbrook: Against love-tales we enter our solemn protest … It is our ambition, not merely to supply our friends with a periodical that may amuse them for a fleeting hour, but to furnish their shelves with an occasional volume of useful reference on topics of permanent importance. (qtd. in Kestner 197)

Martineau voices a similar intent in Deerbrook when she complains that marriage comprises “the grand influence of a woman’s life” (159) and thereby overshadows other, more socially and politically conscious services. In The Woman and the Hour, Caroline Roberts interprets Deerbrook as a heretofore unacknowledged feminist text. I differ from this view in my reading of Martineau’s revision of the false feminine values and habits (preoccupation with marriage; gossip; egotism) implicit and explicit in her critique of the traditional marriage plot. As Ann Hobart argues too, Martineau in Deerbrook repudiates essentialized differences between men and women by asserting a singular standard of socially responsible behavior that depends on rationality and hard work instead of sexualized duties and characteristics. Positivism according to Comte also proffers a view of political participation that transcends sex and gender roles. See Caroline Roberts, The Woman and the Hour: Harriet Martineau and Victorian Ideologies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002) and Ann Hobart, “Harriet Martineau’s Political Economy of Everyday Life,” Victorian Studies 37/2 (1994): 225.


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Martineau’s professed rejection of the love story depends on her representation of marriage as serving a communal rather than personal good, which goal her doctor-hero exemplifies. Referencing the new direction she sought for the treatment of love in the novel, Martineau writes: Love may now be truly represented as sanctified by generosity and self-denial in many of the sad majority of cases where its course runs not smooth. All the virtues which have graced fictitious delineations are still at the service of the novelist; but their exercise and discipline should be represented as different from what they were. The same passions still sway human hearts; but they must be shown to be intensified or repressed by the new impulses which a new state of things affords. (“The Achievements of the Genius of Scott” I, 40ff., 54)

This emphasis on the “new state of things” that overdetermines all personal relationships explains Martineau’s particular treatment of love and marriage in Deerbrook, which do not run smoothly. The primary example of marital relations serving civic ethics is that of Hope and his fraught marriage to Hester. Hope’s decision to marry Hester reflects his sense of obligation to the larger community, which has mistaken Hester for his intended wife. Hester’s own feelings, too, influence his romantic sacrifice. “Nothing [was] so intolerable,” the narrator says of Hope, as the idea of “injuring any human being … his consolation, his refuge in every former trial in life, since the days of childhood, had been in resolving to abide faithfully by the decisions of duty” (117). While Hope’s sense of duty reconciles him to a companionate rather than romantic marriage, Hester’s expectations reflect Martineau’s critique of women who define their lives by love. Admitting to her quick temper, Hester tells Margaret that “the right man will make her good” (24). By marrying Hester to the wrong man, Martineau forces her to find goodness in herself, and accordingly fortify the marriage that started so inauspiciously. A change in fortune, the necessity of work, and the moral guidance of Hope and Margaret help this transformation. When Hester complains that there is no perfect confidence in her marriage (207), Margaret urges her romantic sister to find instead a place for “rational affections” (208). Whereas later “political” novelists transform ill-fated relationships into passionate marriages (as we see when Margaret and Thornton’s hostile relationship in Gaskell’s North and South develops into a romance), Martineau reshapes the idea of marital purpose: compromise and hard work, she argues, should trump love as marriage’s rationale. Toward the end of the Hope family’s trials, which include a fall in social station and a direct assault against the doctor, Hope reflects on his wife’s transformation: “[Hope] had seen Hester coming out nobly from the trial of adversity … she had been not only the devoted wife, but patient and generous towards her foes … capable of any degree of self-denial in the conduct of her daily life” (402). Hester only masters this disinterested world-view after she alters her formerly romantic expectations for marriage. A preoccupation with marriage is caricatured in Deerbrook through the example of the child Matilda Rowland, who

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at age 10 has internalized her mother’s feminine affectations so much that marriage is all that she thinks or talks about. Mrs. Rowland, Hope’s great adversary in the village, clearly cultivates her daughter’s impractical mindset. The comical nature of this portrait becomes somber when Matilda is the sole victim of the typhus plague among Hope’s immediate friends and family members. In Martineau’s vision of social progress, women (or girls) who live only to become wives cannot survive in the modern world – or the modern novel as Martineau conceives it. While the narrowness of female lives constitutes Martineau’s principle reason for an unhealthy preoccupation with marriage, the example of Hope shows that men, too, are prone to defeatist romantic notions. Hope’s love for Margaret, interestingly, is both a sincere expression of their like-mindedness and an obstacle to conquer. While ill-fated love affairs in Austen’s novels ultimately prove to be misbegotten or unwise (such as Marianne’s passion for the duplicitous Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility, or Henry Crawford’s pursuit of Fanny in Mansfield Park), the prospective pairing between Hope and Margaret satisfies all inclinations of their values and characters. The hopelessness of their match therefore boldly and originally represents Martineau’s conviction that even true love can, and sometimes must, be conquered. The benefit of its defeat for Hope is a mature realization that personal desire can be sublimated into the social virtues that underwrite his ethics as a good citizen and as a doctor. In resolving to overcome his feelings for Margaret, Hope aspires to dwell … on the prospect of a home full of domestic attachment, of rational pursuit, or intellectual resource; and looked forward to a life of religious usefulness, of vigorous devotedness to others, of which he trusted that his first act of self-sacrifice [marrying Hester] and its consequences were the earnest and the pledge. (140)

Martineau’s focus on the trials of marriage instead of the dramas of courtship sets Deerbrook apart from both Austen’s marriage-plot novels and the socialproblem novels of the 1840s and 1850s. The marital couples in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, and Mansfield Park, like those in social-problem novels including Disraeli’s Sybil, Dickens’s Hard Times, Gaskell’s North and South and Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley, model social cooperation between a romantic pair who occupy different class positions. Martineau’s order of influence reverses love’s example on social life, however. She founds Hope and Hester’s brief courtship on false expectations (Hester) and resignation (Hope), and then spends the greater part of the novel adapting their personal desires to the interests of the family and, by extension, their community. The lessons that Hope and Hester learn, then, come from the absence of sentimental love, which inspires their development towards a more dispassionate exercise of utilitarian and Positivist principle. By the end of Deerbrook, Hope and Hester’s marriage does serve as an example of cooperation for their village, but their moral example extends from


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their selflessness and humility instead of romantic feeling. Margaret summarizes the meaning of their relationship to her friend Maria: What a spectacle it has been! When I think how they have “overcome evil with good,” how they have endured, how forgiven, how toiled and watched on their enemies behalf, till they have ruled all the minds, and touched all the hearts, of friends and foes for miles round, I think theirs the most gracious piece of tribulation that ever befell. At home – Oh, even you [Maria] do not know what a home it is! (520)

Margaret evokes a strongly social purpose to Hope and Hester’s marriage, especially insofar as it “rule[s] all the minds” of the greater community. By retreating from personal satisfaction and intimacy as the goal of a happy marriage, Martineau argues that other relationships can aspire to be similarly influential and ameliorative, and she thereby attempts to picture a more inclusive model of social participation than the romantic marriage plot. Martineau’s curative attitude towards the misleading enticements of romance transforms Hope and Hester’s marriage into a domestic partnership that mirrors Hope’s broader dedication to the community. But this service ideal falters in her portrayal of another member of the village, the crippled governess Maria Young. Maria was engaged to Philip Enderby until an accident left her crippled and her father’s insolvency forced her to earn her own living as a governess. She voices the gifts and burdens of a single woman’s existence with an ambivalence atypical for Martineau. Bravely and not insincerely, Maria considers her “peremptory vocation” a “blessing,” disguised though it may be by loneliness and neglect (35). Like Hope, whose education and civic-mindedness make him superior to the other villagers of his station, Maria lacks companionship worthy of her intellect until Margaret moves to Deerbrook. And yet, Margaret’s eventual marriage to Enderby, and Maria’s consequent and dual alienation from her former fiancé and her closest friend, interrupts the orderly closure represented by Margaret and Enderby’s muchdelayed engagement and marriage. True to her revisionary principles, Martineau determines not to close Deerbrook with the reunion and marriage of Margaret and Enderby, but with Maria’s resolute and lonely acceptance of her lot. Martineau’s poignant portrait of Maria is artistically innovative, as it reminds us of the extent to which the structure of marriage defines the domestic novel at this time. Furthermore, the unsentimental clarity with which Martineau characterizes Maria’s experience falters against her idealized portrait of Hope. In her zeal to reject romantic fantasy and tout the advances of Positivism, Martineau’s heroic ‘poticary’ instantiates a central ambivalence that undercuts the novel’s realistic attitude towards the fallacy of ‘romantic’ marriage. On the one hand, Hope represents Martineau’s desire to use the novel as a platform by which to show how a lowly, neo-professional, middle-class man can realize leadership potential consonant with the democratizing projects of Positivism and Utilitarianism. But on the other hand, and in her enthusiasm for this scheme, she emphasizes Hope’s

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very exceptionality. When, for instance, Phillip Enderby observes that Hope is “no ordinary case of the village apothecary,” Margaret Ibbotson laughs; “so little did Mr. Hope look like the village apothecary of her imagination” (27). Especially as the obstacles against Hope’s reformism mount, his utility as an “everyman” village doctor recedes behind his saintly commitment to the moral health of the village. Hope’s heroic qualities thus seem to be in conflict with his utility as a humble agent of social change. Further, Martineau’s choice to make Hope a physician also marks Deerbrook’s experimental territory, not because of his medical work per se, but because of his commitment to civic participation, his view of women, and the Positivist ideology that underwrites these attitudes. Hope represents an interesting and understudied facet of the doctor’s role that Martineau employs towards her revision of romantic marriage; her choice of the medical profession for her hero signals not the logic of empirical science so much as the commonsensical approach she identifies with this modern professional, including his curative attitude to the misleading notions of romance. Yet both Hope’s enemies in the novel and Deerbrook’s contemporary critics confuse the doctor’s revolutionary persona with his medical role. One misapprehension of the first order occurs when Hope distances himself from his de facto patron, Sir William Hunter, who as local aristocrat and landowner oversees the doctor’s appointment at the public almshouse. Determined to assert his political opinions against the entrenched Tory leadership, Hope votes against Hunter’s candidate for the general election. Such a bold move is not in the selfinterest of the doctor, for as Mr. Grey explains to Hope before the election, “you are quite absolved from interfering in politics. Nobody expects it from a medical man. Everyone knows the disadvantage to a professional man, circumstanced like you, of taking any side in a party matter” (183). Hope’s willingness to jeopardize his career shows that his higher purpose is not professional success so much as setting a positive (and Positivist) example of engagement in a political process. This point is emphasized when Hope refuses his wife’s suggestion that they move to another village after their reputation and his practice have been all but destroyed. Hope’s explanation to Hester consolidates his sense of moral obligation but is not specific to his work as a doctor: It is my duty to offer moral resistance to oppression, and make a stand for reputation. When it pleases God that men should be overcome by calumny, it is In “Cousin Marshall,” one of Martineau’s stories in volume III of Illustrations of a Political Economy (1832–34), the medical officer Mr. Burke is similarly heroic. Burke’s abilities, including his thorough knowledge of his constituency and his moral identification with the clergy, reflect Martineau’s ideal of a new middle-class professional who can enjoin professional expertise with social compassion. Further, his leadership confirms her objection to the centralized bureaucracy put in place by the New Poor Law as it suggests that local officials were best equipped to help their communities.


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a dreadful evil which must be borne as well as it may; but not without a struggle … We must stay and struggle for right and justice, – struggle for it, by living on with firm, patient, and gentle minds. (335–6)

When Hunter’s anger against Hope leads to a village-wide suspicion of the doctor, the people of Deerbrook falsely accuse Hope of performing dissections. The scandalous charge of dissection acts as a surrogate for the real challenge to the integrity of a sacred body, which is Hope’s willingness to disrupt the political status quo. Martineau therefore uses a medical target to render a set of embattled social relationships. But this target represents the villagers’ resistance to change as it strategically conceals (for a time) the subject of the actual progress that Hope forges: not the boundaries of medical science but those between the people and the aristocracy that traditionally has determined political order. The virtual absence of clinical descriptions of Hope’s work further casts doubt upon the relevance of his clinical practices to the novel. But some critics, including Caroline Roberts, have taken Deerbrook’s medical theme as an epistemological guide for the novel and turned a clinical eye to Martineau’s largely imprecise and symbolic descriptions of Hope’s medical work and particularly the typhus epidemic. While Roberts argues that “Martineau’s apothecary-hero both reflects and promotes the professionalism of medical practitioners” (52), this emphasis lends to the novel a medical-historical reading that is ancillary to Martineau’s fictional and political doctrine. Robert’s determination that “Hope’s efforts to cure fever conform with the directions medicine was taking in the 19th century … [including] a concern for public hygiene as a means of prevention” is correct (62); Martineau certainly is conscious of the theoretical trend of disease etiology in the 1830s, as a social critic of her reach and stature could not help but be. But Martineau’s emphasis in Deerbrook is not clinically specific, and the general accuracy of Hope’s medical work does not define his purpose in the novel as much as his devotion to his political and social ideals. When Roberts describes a scene in which Margaret nurses a poor family suffering from typhus, her diagnosis further imparts a hyper-realism to the scene’s allegorical orientation. “The Platts seem to be suffering from gastrointestinal irritation in its advanced stages,” writes Roberts, which description she follows with the similar diagnosis of a historical doctor on these symptoms (63). A reading of the typhus epidemic and this particular scene in the Platts’ cottage that attends to Martineau’s fictional aspirations more than medical history renders a different emphasis than Robert’s diagnosis. The typhus epidemic provides a perfect stage for Hope’s medical work to symbolize a social transformation. Hope’s ministrations to those struck by typhus are not described, but his cultivation of Margaret as a sick nurse illustrates the service-ideal identified with his vocational commitment. Despite the severity of the fever, Margaret entered the Platts’ infected cottage but “was not deterred by … her dread of the [sickness]. She gained now a new strength of soul, and … she feared nothing. During the long hours there was much to do – three sufferers at once requiring her cares” (482). The emotional transformation

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that Margaret undergoes as a nurse shows her becoming more like Hope in her newfound allegiance to duty, her fearlessness, and her dawning realization that hard work benefits the worker as much as the recipient. Margaret’s imperviousness to the fever adapts to a fictional convention that celebrates the power of her “new strength of soul.” Martineau thus subordinates the realism of the typhus epidemic (which might realistically threaten Margaret) to the Positivist principles that inveigle Margaret’s missionary purpose as a moral vaccine. Furthermore, that the only person in the novel’s inner circle who dies of typhus is Matilda Rowland operates as a judgment against her perfidious mother Mrs. Rowland, who has spread malicious rumors about Hope. The retributive nature of the child’s death incites Mrs. Rowland’s penitence and remorse, largely due to Hope’s tireless, if futile, efforts to save Matilda. Herein we see Martineau wielding the threat of the fever as a moral maxim, not an etiological risk. Martineau’s willingness to suspend belief regarding the spread of pathology in the service of rewarding and punishing her characters belies a straightforwardly empirical and historical reading of the medical work in Deerbrook. While the general parameters of Hope’s approach (to hygiene as the source of disease) are historically accurate, his own descriptions of his work underscore its removal from a medical-historical interpretation. As Hope writes in a letter to his brother Frank: I am well satisfied with my choice of an occupation in life as ever. Mine has its anxieties, and désagrémens, as others have: but I am convinced I could not have chosen better … I could tell you a good deal that you do not and cannot know of the perils and troubles attendant upon being the depository of so much domestic and personal confidence as my function imposes upon me … I sometimes long to be able to see nothing but what is apparent to all society; to perceive what is ostensible, and to dream of nothing more … . (78)

The unspoken illnesses and injuries of Hope’s patients assumedly provide the contexts in which they disclose their private feelings to the doctor; this emphasis clarifies that Hope’s opportunity for moral guidance comes by way of his less interesting offices of medical practice. Allison Winter similarly interprets the way that Martineau disengages from medical and scientific theory in her 1844 text, Life in the Sickroom. While the text topically covers illness, Winter reads Martineau’s perspective as a challenge to the mainstream medical community and its reigning theories of disease and treatment. Martineau, writes Winter, “surrounded herself with a natural world unsanctioned by the elite scientific and medical community, where she presided over a kingdom populated by mesmerists, oracular servants, political and literary figures and a house full of poignant Victoriana” (613). As “[Martineau’s] sick room directly engaged in the world of public affairs,” so too does the context of Deerbrook introduce a medical theme and hero to explore a larger context of social participation (613).


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Hope’s attitude towards death is perhaps the greatest strike against the urge to read his work in light of empirical medical history and its developments in the 1830s. “Not regarding death as a misfortune,” Hope says he is more disturbed by the “cases of guilt and remorse” that he observes than those of bodily sickness and death (44). Such a position would hardly be advantageous to a doctor, especially during the profession’s fraught rise to respectability and authority in the period in which Deerbrook is set. But Hope explains to Margaret and Hester that “there are many sorrows greater than a separation by death of those who have faith enough to live independently of each other … ” (43–4). Even during the typhus plague, Hope professes that “the apathy of some, and the selfish terrors of others, are worse to witness than the disease itself” (476). While such complacency towards death and illness might appear to be an occupational flaw in a doctor, Martineau extends her doctor’s influence to a wider frame than the health of individuals, and therefore reading the work that Hope performs as a realistic depiction of medicine in the plague-ridden 1830s would be misguided without foregrounding its debt to the religious and moral contexts that some doctors of the time, like Hope, identified as their rationale in lieu of scientific theory. Indeed, Martineau’s identification of the ethical and humanitarian purpose of Hope’s work accords with historical doctors whose professionalism hinged upon a ministerial service-ideal rather than a proto-scientific objective. In The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Class Employed in Cotton Manufacture in Manchester (1832), physician James Kay (later Kay-Shuttleworth) describes his purpose as a doctor to the poor in a way that, like Hope’s, stresses the moral reach of medicine. Kay held the poor partly responsible for the diseases that consumed them. “It is melancholy to perceive, how many of the evils suffered by the poor flow from their own ignorance or moral errors,” he writes, a point of view routinely echoed by Hope (5). Kay’s connection between “barbarous manners” and “the progress of pestilence” functioned as a theory of disease, and his primary means of care was an intimate reckoning with the domestic lives of the infected poor (12). Kay’s call-to-arms to rid the lower class of disease depends upon a new mode of medical observation and intervention, which, like Hope’s work in Deerbrook, barely approaches clinical theory: He whose duty it is to follow the steps of this messenger of death [cholera], must descend to the abodes of poverty, must frequent the close alleys, the crowded courts, the overpeopled habitations of wretchedness, where pauperism and disease congregate round the source of social discomfort and political disorder in the center of our large towns, and behold with alarm, in the hot-bed of pestilence, ills that fester in secret, at the very heart of society. (Kay 8)

While Kay’s Manchester is a larger and industrialized “hot-bed of pestilence,” the modest village of Deerbrook exposes its own “overpeopled habitations” and festering secrets with the onset of typhus. Also like Hope, Kay establishes his field of research as the private home. By launching the doctor as professional whose

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“merciful interference” aids both the individual home and the society around it, Kay helps to institutionalize the middle-class agency that Martineau allots to Hope in Deerbrook (8). This is a strategic ability to cross public and private lines in a dangerously divided society. The “minute personal interference” that Kay assigns to the doctor heralds Martineau’s representation of the role’s reach across class and gender lines (11). Deerbrook’s narrator explains that “there was no nook, no hamlet, to which [Hope’s] tastes or his profession had not led him,” (10) and his worldly scope, instead of making him more discriminating, makes Hope instead a friend to all, “seeing the best side of everybody” (39). Hope’s position as a doctor is tactical to Martineau’s revision of the domestic story insofar as it enables him to “[obtain] more knowledge of human affairs than any other type of man,” as a neighbor observes (27). But again, Martineau’s emphasis is on human affairs, not disease theory. Within this frame of interest, Hope’s sensitivity to the position of women, especially single or disadvantaged women, is one of the Positivist and enlightened signs that Martineau uses “doctor” to stand for. His “strong domestic tendencies” show his embrace of the feminine world of domesticity to be a beacon of progress that, along with his resistance to aristocratic governance, signals his modernity. So too does his initial preference for Margaret over Hester show his progressive relationship to women. Hester is by all accounts the more beautiful sister, but Hope is drawn instead to Margaret’s “transparency” and “modesty.” In addition to Hope’s inclination towards inner beauty, his thoughtful consideration for women extends to a genuine concern for their livelihood in an economy that largely ignores the plight of women’s financial dependence on men. Hope bequeaths his share of a modest family inheritance to his sisters, who in his mind have been inadequately provided for by their grandfather’s will. As he writes in a letter to his brother, “I … imagine that my grandfather’s notion is a very common one, – that women have little occasion for money, and do not know how to manage it; and that their property is to be drawn upon to the very last, to meet the difficulties and supply the purposes of their brothers” (75). To Hope this notion is one of “utter injustice and absurdity” (75). He shows a similar empathy for Maria Young, who without family assistance or the prospect of marriage lives on the meager earnings of a governess. Hope’s treatment of women is an index of Martineau’s own objections to the female condition in the new industrial economy. His perseverance in transforming his marriage to Hester from a disappointed romance to a model domestic partnership is his primary contribution in Deerbrook, as from this dedication comes the selflessness that he shows as a doctor and confidant. His training of Margaret as a nurse, too, reflects a modern ethic that will admit women’s labor alongside that of men, and thus inaugurate a wider horizon for female opportunity than marriage alone. That Martineau identifies these functions as those of a doctor references medico-scientific theory insofar as the trained doctor can be assumed to embrace secular and intellectual philosophy, but she does not impart specific insights particular to Hope’s medical training nor to his practices of diagnosis and


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treatment. Focusing on Hope’s medical orientation alone does not enable us to make connections between his exemplary leadership in Deerbrook and Martineau’s determination to revise the domestic realist novel away from romance and towards Positivist ideals. Above all, Hope’s utility as a doctor is his allegiance to a modern commitment to cooperation over romance, perseverance in the face of despair, economic prudence and democratic engagement in the political process, which includes a progressive view of women’s position in society. Middlemarch: Romance Stoops to Conquer The tendency to read Hope’s role and experience in Deerbrook through the medical theory of his age is part of a trend in literary criticism that examines literature through contemporaneous scientific and medical epistemology. No Victorian novel invites this relationship more explicitly than Middlemarch. Eliot’s studious and complex understanding of the theory of pathology that Lydgate practices reveals (among other influences) her engagement with George Lewes’s related research, published in Problems of Life and Mind (1875–79). As already discussed, critics including Gillian Beer, George Levine, and Lawrence Rothfield have deconstructed the vocabularies and imaginative paradigms that Eliot’s knowledge of science lent to Middlemarch. The complexity of these literary examinations pays off with Middlemarch, but has inspired critical investigations of novels like Deerbrook that reflect a lesser command of scientific theory. As I have argued above, medical and scientific insights do not disclose the innovation that Hope represents in Deerbrook and that Martineau offers to domestic realism more generally. On the surface, Lydgate shares many characteristics with Martineau’s Hope. Both doctors settle, in the late 1820s and early 1830s, in provincial environments and are atypical additions to village life. Hope, as Enderby puts it, is “no ordinary case of the village apothecary,” and “[t]here was a general impression … that Lydgate was not altogether a common country doctor, and in Middlemarch at that time such an impression was significant of great things being expected from him” (116). But the differences between Hope and Lydgate’s careers are far more significant than the initial similarities; Hope becomes a model of civic engagement and Lydgate a failed pathological ‘explorer’ and unsuccessful innovator of the medical profession. Again I return to the advice that Frederic Harrison offered Eliot, concerning the transformative example that a ‘physicianhero’ could represent in a provincial novel. Without direct confirmation of Harrison’s advice as an inspiration for Middlemarch, I am treating Eliot’s novel as an imaginative rebuttal to his expectation that the power of Positivist science could so renovate society, especially in the form of an individual character’s Positivist example. In her graceful reply to Harrison’s suggestion, Eliot explained that she considered “diagrammatic art” (such as his idea of Positivist heroism) inferior to the “aesthetic teaching” that “deals with life in its highest complexity” (Letters, Vol. IV, 300–302).

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In a very simplistic way, Martineau’s embrace of Positivist triumph and Eliot’s rumination on its failure charts the novelists’ divergent goals for domestic realism and among those, their conceptions of the romantic marriage plot as a structuring device. By rejecting romance as the basis of Deerbrook’s central relationship – Hope and Hester’s – Martineau’s novel argues that the values of duty and perseverance can sustain social life, at home and more broadly. The science of Positivism applies seamlessly to Martineau’s pragmatic vision of civic improvement once the false expectations of romance are shown to be an inadequate foundation for her characters’ development and their prospective contributions to social life. But where Hope’s sense of purpose comes from a diffused service ideal, which includes but is not altogether comprised by his work as a doctor, Lydgate’s relationship to his vocation in Middlemarch follows the course of his doomed marriage. The determining logic of Positivism in Deerbrook transforms the relationship that would conventionally deliver romance to the novel (Hope and Hester’s marriage: that between the novel’s undisputed hero and a beautiful woman who loves him) into a conquest over the false values and expectations of romance. Eliot does essentially the opposite in Middlemarch. She features the plot most likely for Positivist success, Lydgate’s talents and ambitions as a doctor, and maps them onto the course of Lydgate’s unhappy marriage. Against Harrison’s hopeful notion of a Positivist success story inspired by the rational knowledge of a middle-class physician, Eliot upholds the defining logic of the romance even or especially as its derails Lydgate’s hopes. Reading the Lydgate plot in Middlemarch as a contest between dispassionate Positivism and personal ambitions is analogous to a study of the surgeon’s entry into the provincial village. Lydgate’s desires for scientific renown, class status, and an adoring and decorative wife ultimately prove to be more powerful determinations of his actions than the empirical knowledge and scientific curiosity that drive his vocational aspirations. Eliot presages this consequence early in her description of Lydgate and his career ambitions in a paragraph that reveals her conviction of the way that love stories overdetermine both the shape of human life and the domestic novels that imagine those lives: We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or fatally parted from her. Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that we are never weary of describing what King James called a woman’s “makdom and her fairnesse”, never weary of listening to the twanging of the old Troubadour strings, and are comparatively uninterested in that other kind of “makdom and fairnesse” which must be wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires? In the story of this passion, too, the development varies: sometimes it is the glorious marriage, sometimes frustration and final parting. And not seldom the catastrophe is bound up with the other passion, sung by the Troubadours. (174)


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The “catastrophe” of Lydgate’s dashed ambitions is one of those stories of failure “bound up with the other passion,” his romantic feelings for Rosamund that lead to their improvident marriage. Eliot’s archaic description of romance in this paragraph – the old English idiom (“makdom and fairnesse”) and reference to the Troubadours – teasingly attests to the hold that love stories have on the imagination, even in the modern times illustrative of Lydgate’s careerism. The generality of romance’s defeat over vocation referenced here also applies to Dorothea and Casaubon. Dorothea’s housing scheme for the poor never materializes, and her renunciation of her fortune for marriage to Will Ladislaw recycles the dynamic described above, in which a “passion” for industry is trounced by romance. Even Casaubon, whose scholarly devotion to his research seems a guarantee of ascetic detachment, becomes distracted by his fears over Dorothea’s interest in his young nephew Ladislaw. This anxiety leads to a heart condition, which kills him before his work is completed. That a disorder of the heart destroys Casaubon is an ironic testament to the domination of emotions over reason in Eliot’s imagination. The two paragraphs that follow the above description of love’s hold over other, more worldly ambitions reiterate the influence of romance over “industry” experienced by Lydgate, Dorothea, and Casaubon. In the first, Eliot describes the gradual way by which vocational objectives are compromised; she pictures “the multitude of middle-aged men” who “once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little” but yield to conformity, convention, or whose defeat “perhaps … came with the vibrations from a woman’s glance” (174). In the next paragraph, Eliot muses upon Lydgate’s resolve to contribute to science by and through professional reform, but again she augurs his failure by remarking upon his tendency to let personal emotions overpower other objectives: “[H]e was an emotional creature, with a flesh-and-blood sense of fellowship which withstood all abstractions of special study. He cared not only for ‘cases,’ but for John and Elizabeth, especially Elizabeth” (174–5). Lydgate’s affections, and particularly his sensitivity to women, comprise his promising ability to connect with patients beyond the empirical basis of his scientific interest, but ultimately also affect his undoing. While he vows, after a failed love affair in Paris, to “take a strictly scientific view of women,” he does not execute this promise and lets his “fleshand-blood” emotions for Rosamund interfere and eventually ruin his professional ambitions (144). That is, his desire to marry Rosamund before he can provide the lifestyle that they desire instantiates a debt that leads to his unwise transactions with the financier Bulstrode. This same material and romantic impatience later pushes him towards a lucrative private practice where, instead of contributing to the new frontiers of pathological science, he can guarantee a salary commensurate with his and Rosamund’s social ambitions. In Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), George Levine deftly sums up Eliot’s admittance of emotions into scientific work. For Eliot, he writes, “knowledge is always implicated in and sustained by feeling” (192).

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The early description of the pattern by which vocational ambitions are subverted by romantic desires anticipates the course of Lydgate’s life but also the overarching shape of the novel. Middlemarch ends in the way that the paragraphs quoted above end: the pull of a woman’s affections replaces worldly power with personal satisfaction (or at least its prospect). Dorothea’s decision to marry Will Ladislaw requires her to renunciate her inheritance from Casaubon, and so also her large-scale and expensive plans to improve the housing for the poor. The narrator famously muses upon the commonality of women like Dorothea, whose grand objectives are buried under the daily cares and limited horizons of family life. Lydgate’s lot is more melancholy than Dorothea’s, for from the early days of his marriage he realizes that Rosamund was a poor choice for his wife, and unlike Dorothea and Will, he and Rosamund lack the emotional and intellectual harmony that compensates for the loss of his worldly influence. But for both couples, Eliot maintains that the fortunes of professional ambition are subtly undermined by romantic impulses and domestic arrangements. In this way, we see the logic of Nancy Armstrong’s argument from Desire and Domestic Fiction (1988), which attests to the dominance of the feminine subjective and its influence over social life and domestic narratives. Eliot’s topical interest in medical and scientific life can and has obscured the novel’s structural allegiance to the marriage plot as a more powerful shaping device than vocational “passion” or even the scientific objectivity it purports to develop. In his article “Is Middlemarch Ahistorical?”, Henry Staten disputes the critical consensus that attributes Lydgate’s failure to provincial society and its indifference to a talented man’s progressive ideas and ambitions. As Staten argues, Lydgate bears most of the blame for his career disappointment, which is largely caused by his unrealistic class aspirations, including his choice of the covetous and shallow Rosamund for a wife. The self-professed unpopularity of Staten’s position is evinced by Lilian Furst’s reply to his article, which was published in the subsequent issue of PMLA and challenges Staten’s characterization of Lydgate as “middle-class” and guilty of his own professional compromise. This debate over Lydgate’s accountability for his transition from ambitious pathologist to indebted husband, and finally to conformist practitioner to the wealthy, is also, indirectly, a dispute over the accomplishment of Positivist science in early Victorian society. Staten’s reading invites us to apply Positivism’s detached logic, as personified by Lydgate’s desire to enlarge the scientific, rational basis of his profession. Conversely, by locating Lydgate’s failure principally in the ignorance of the populace, Furst reserves the right to credit his Positivist science as its own achievement – albeit one unrecognized by the village. Here we see traces of the same dynamic between Harrison and Eliot that colors my reading of Middlemarch as an experiment in realist science’s integration into the domestic novel. Harrison suggests the “physician-hero” to Eliot in much the same spirit as Furst defends Lydgate’s attempts to introduce modern science to Middlemarch. Both maintain – at least in theory – the triumph of empirical medicine and its power to transform society after a scientific rationale. By largely excusing Lydgate


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for the responsibility of his career disappointment, Furst conserves the ideal of his transformative power, which in Middlemarch is improperly cultivated. Harrison’s response to Middlemarch was disappointment; he found the novel “tedious,” its characters “maundering” and “curiously uninteresting” (qtd. in Vogeler 417). But Eliot, as Staten deftly interprets, undermines Positivist science’s ability to shape society by limiting its influence even over Middlemarch’s most talented and promising practitioner. As domestic and romantic urges explain Lydgate’s weakened vocational resolve in Middlemarch, Eliot imagines a hero whose rational mind is trounced by the overwhelming currents of his social ambition. In this way, she poses a conceptual rebuttal to Harrison that denies Positivism’s victory over personal, and in Lydgate’s case, shallow desires. Eliot’s failed physician thus bows to the doctrine of private interests that, in the structure of the novel, are consonant with the marriage plot. In contrast, Martineau imagines through Edward Hope’s achievement in Deerbrook a more mutable definition of the domestic realist novel. Determined to portray a society that is transformed away from petty and selfish desires, and principally those romantic fallacies that preoccupy women and girls (and to a lesser extent, even practical, professional men like Hope), she writes a novel that replaces love and romance with a hard-won, democratic commitment to social conciliation. Martineau’s didactic bent and Eliot’s commitment to “aesthetic teachings” yield novels of vastly different complexity and artistic merit. Deerbrook is a fascinating testament to Martineau’s faith in both Positivism and her own ability to rewrite the structural logic of romance in the domestic novel. It also deserves notice as an early version of the social-problem novel popularized in the following decades by Dickens, Gaskell, Disraeli and others. But the juxtaposition of Deerbrook and Middlemarch that concerns me is the authors’ use of a doctor-hero to figure their opposing visions of the power of empirical wisdom over personal and romantic goals. In both novels, the doctor’s creed is challenged by the belief systems that write the marriage plots. For Hope in Deerbrook, the “rational affections” that inform his democratic politics, his sanitary science, and his orderly, peaceful household demand that he move beyond the horizons of his own interests – principally, his love for Margaret. That this love is sincere and reciprocal makes Martineau’s statement against love as an all-consuming goal (for the novel and for historical individuals) all the more ambitious. While Hope in broad terms contributes to and participates in his age’s medical and sanitary reforms, the theories of these changes do not adequately reflect Deerbrook’s impetus to use Positivism as an antidote to romance. Eliot’s use of science and medical theory in Middlemarch is far more detailed than Martineau’s in Deerbrook, but her novel eventually discards scientific rationales in favor of the more deterministic impulses of personal affection. Lydgate’s forsaken pledge to take “a strictly scientific view of women” perfectly encapsulates the ultimate treatment of empiricism in Middlemarch; he is sincere in his promise but the subtle and gradual infraction of that passion “sung by the Troubadours” – or in his case, its seductive trappings – foils his rational plan. Because science does

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not in fact organize Lydgate’s inner life, which is the territory Eliot masters in her novel, and science theory or even the professional pratfalls of medical history do not explain Lydgate’s failure so much as his own proclivity for a beautiful woman and an affluent lifestyle. While Middlemarch’s retreat from scientific progress counters the chronological scheme that organizes this book on one level, the clash between Lydgate’s medical mindset and the romantic logic of the novel anticipates and reflects the divergence of marriage/romance and scientific authority that I track more broadly. That is, by evincing Lydgate’s early-period optimism (and, as the example of Deerbrook demonstrates through its faith in the Positivist direction of culture), Eliot suggests that a “scientific explorer” on the verge of the Victorian era could not foresee the personal consequences wrought by a social turn towards empiricism, which vision is the inheritance of her experience in the early 1870s. When Joseph Allan Boone explains the “disappointment that many readers and critics have felt over the terms of [Dorothea’s] final alignment with Will Ladislaw,” his reasoning could easily extend to Lydgate’s story as well. Dorothea’s experience “attests to the problems embedded in an inherited plot dynamic in which the heroine’s quest for fulfillment cannot be separated from issues of love and marriage, from dynamics of gender and power” (97). We can substitute “hero’s” for “heroine’s” and specify that Lydgate’s “quest for fulfillment” is focused on scientific medicine, and then apply Boone’s emphasis on the constraints of an plot dynamic that is overdetermined by the stories of love and marriage. Further reading Boone’s description of the role of gender and power in the marriage-plot dynamic, another example of the difference between the 1830s and the 1870s is represented by the ultimate positions of Hester and Rosamund in Deerbrook and Middlemarch. Their stories demonstrate Martineau’s and Eliot’s respective understanding of the relationship between Positivist goals and personal interests. Hester converts utterly to her husband’s unselfish work ethic and so upholds, at the end of Deerbrook, his vision of a companionate marriage as a model for social well-being. But Rosamund never converts to Lydgate’s point of view, and instead firmly if innocuously coerces his career sacrifice for their material ambitions. Here again we see the standards of the feminine, organized by the structural order of marriage, regulate the various and conflicting personal, professional, and worldly urges that Middlemarch explores – even those that attend to the dispassionate wisdom of science. At the end of the nineteenth century, Harrison wrote about a trend in Victorian literature that casts a revisionary note upon the advice he gave Eliot, with which I opened this chapter. While he urged the novelist in 1866 to embody Positivism’s opportunities in her fiction, and thus characterize a defeat of the religious and intellectual currents that he identified as backward and pre-scientific, Harrison later regrets this larger trend in the literature of the day. As he writes in “Characteristics of Victorian Literature” (in his Studies in Early Victorian Literature, 1899), Harrison discerns an inclination in the 1860s in which the “scientific and sociologic” temper of the age began to “overshadow, if not to oust, the literary, poetic, and romantic


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interest” (24). Such a trend fits my argument for the consonant but oppositional presence of doctors and marriage plots. Their coexistence in Victorian novels, as analysis of Deerbrook and Middlemarch suggests, reveals their authors’ broader insights into the way and degree that scientific knowledge can organize human life and its private interests. For Hope to triumph in Deerbrook, Martineau must also render the defeat of the romantic sensibility. And for Lydgate to fail in Middlemarch, Eliot alternatively argues for the power of domestic passions over more erudite and materialist objectives. The theories of Victorian science and medicine do not reveal these narrative dynamics so well as attention to the domestic loves and losses of the fictional characters, and most especially the doctors who map the trajectory of love in an increasingly scientific age. The two novelists’ perspective upon the efficacy of science as a model for human behavior also registers their different expectations for the Positivist example. Martineau realizes in Deerbrook an imaginative picture of Comte’s third stage of Positivism – wherein the logic of science replaces the more primitive and alienating influences of religious thinking, social competitiveness, and the insubstantial temptation of romance. It is not Hope’s medicine that instantiates this example so much as it is his attitude towards work as a means of socially constructive intervention. For Eliot, the accumulating knowledge of the sciences offers to Lydgate, and implicitly to the expectations of Positivists like Harrison, a beguiling illusion of a world wherein petty human needs and wants will be reorganized by empirical truths and the collective interests they serve. Eliot’s sophisticated knowledge of science seduces Lydgate into thinking that medicine is the “key to all mythologies,” and, in a different way, fascinates those critics of Middlemarch who interpret the novel according to the rational episteme that she knows so well. But Lydgate’s dashed ambitions – and his own role in dashing them – demonstrate Eliot’s conviction that the wand of science is still wielded by a human hand, and it therefore touches upon personal wants above and before social ones.


Chapter 2

Textual Healing: George MacDonald’s Adela Cathcart

Our life is not a dream; but it may become a dream, and perhaps ought to become one … Novalis

Deerbrook and Middlemarch, in their very different ways, show that the Victorian courtship and marriage plot was difficult to reconcile with the rise of modern medicine, which the figure of the doctor exemplifies in his personal struggles between disinterested professionalism (Deerbrook) or empirical knowledge (Middlemarch), and romantic social practices. With Deerbrook, Martineau imagines a community that largely learns to forgo the consolations of romance for the sturdier truths of Positivism. Eliot’s Middlemarch, over thirty years later, devastatingly shows that the inclinations of a world-view shaped by literary love are as seductive as they are misleading, and the compromise of Tertius Lydgate testifies to the human weakness for “love’s fairy fancies” even amidst the cold light of science. George MacDonald’s eccentric novel of 1864, Adela Cathcart, is noteworthy for its readiness to dismiss the scientific, medical, and practical in favor of the literary and fantastic, which is a counter-move to the dominant trend that I trace over the Victorian period as a whole. Adela Cathcart charts a transformation from a material and pragmatic ontology to one where the limits of art and life are indistinguishable, and where that confusion is a virtue and a blessing. The quotation from Novalis that opens this section, said to be MacDonald’s favorite saying from the German Romanticist (Woolf, Golden Key 116), encapsulates the moral of Adela Cathcart in its movement from a recognition of reality to a preference for fantasy. While Martineau’s Deerbrook largely pre-dates the division between scientific and moral perspectives that Middlemarch (and the novels examined in the later chapters of this book) explores, MacDonald’s response to the influence of medical science in Adela Cathcart is more deliberate. Indeed, in 1864, MacDonald faced not only the momentum-gathering rise of science in Britain, but what he perceived as its corresponding encroachment upon more abstract and moralistic value systems. In this chapter, I read Adela Cathcart as a unique response to the vulnerability of the literary imagination in an age of rising materialism. MacDonald was not alone in his anxiety about the influence of empirical knowledge and what he perceived as the stultifying constraints of professionalization, but his Adela

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Cathcart recommends a distinctively counter-historical and literary solution to this challenge. *** For all of the absolute values that can be attached to Scottish-born MacDonald (1824–98), their antitheses apply to him surprisingly often. He was deeply devout yet decommissioned from the Anglican Church; he was trained in and fascinated by science and disbelieving of empirical truths; he was puritanical about women and also accepting of neo-feminist sexual and social roles; he was a devoted paterfamilias who prized independence and self-direction and yet relied on the generosity of patrons for all of his adult life. Such contradictions apply equally to MacDonald’s canon. He is best known as a fantasist and author of children’s fairy tales, but he also produced a number of socially conscious novels that offer didactic critiques of modern life. One of these novels, Adela Cathcart, presents its own confusion of genres by featuring a realistic setting wherein members of a story-telling club narrate a number of fairy tales, gothic stories, and Christian parables. These stories-within-the-novel are elicited by a rather thin plot, detailed below, that prescribes them for the titular heroine’s health. The novel begins when its narrator, bachelor John Smith, arrives at his old friend Colonel Cathcart’s home for the Christmas season. Smith is concerned by the appearance of Cathcart’s 22-year-old daughter, Adela, whose rapidly declining health stymies her family and physician, Dr. Wade. Adela’s complaint is ambiguous and appears to result from ennui. After meeting several members of the village, Smith suggests an unusual course of treatment. He has noticed that Adela’s interest is aroused when she listens to stories, and so with the support of the physician Harry Armstrong, he organizes a story-telling club with the Cathcarts, the curate Mr. Armstrong (Harry’s brother) and his wife, and Mr. Bloomfield, the school master, and his wife. Adela’s cousin Percy and aunt, Mrs. Cathcart, visiting for the season, attend the meetings, too. With the purpose of enlivening Adela’s interest in life and thus curing her unnamed disorder, the club members’ stories comprise much of the novel. These include several fairy tales, a gothic story of a sixteenth-century painter, and a number of parables that celebrate virtues like hard work, modesty, and Christian sacrifice. Interspersed between them are several plot lines concerning Adela and her circle, including Percy’s attempt to marry Adela, with clear financial motivation; the growing mutual attraction between Adela and physician Harry Armstrong, who replaces Dr. Wade in her care; Colonel Cathcart’s disapproval of Harry as a suitor to Adela, and John Smith’s support of this relationship. My interest in Adela Cathcart, at best an uneven and highly contrived novel, centers on the unusual curative procedures followed by the physicianhero, Harry Armstrong, and the narrator, John Smith. A cursory glance at the novel could invite a charge often leveled against MacDonald more generally: that it (and he) is detached from the topical contexts of the Victorian period.

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For instance, Armstrong’s medical practice does not reflect current medical or scientific developments, and the settings of most of the stories told by the story-club members are either historically indeterminate or fantastic. The story concerning Adela also lacks historical or sociological detail. However, for all of their ahistorical elements, MacDonald’s defense of the art of stories and the love plot he constructs between doctor and patient can be read as a retort to Victorian materialism in both scientific and social forms. As part of my larger contention that the character of the doctor in the Victorian novel elucidates the period’s competition between the empirical and the literary, Adela Cathcart makes an extreme claim for the power of the imagination in an era of scientific development. MacDonald’s reification of literature and the imagination at first comprises the scheme of story-telling at the heart of Adela Cathcart, and ultimately subsumes even the realistic plot that frames it. What MacDonald does with the doctor-hero in Adela Cathcart, therefore, is more symbolic than the realistic portrayals of medical men already examined in Deerbrook and Middlemarch. MacDonald ultimately seizes the agency of the doctor for himself: he collapses his own perspective into that of the novel’s narrator, John Smith, and as the meta-narrator of the text, he heals the plot from the atomizing forces that he connects to medical and scientific thinking. To put it another way, if Martineau and Eliot represent doctors in the third person, MacDonald experiments with the doctor’s healing capacity and turns it on the novel itself. In doing so, he translates medicine into an entirely humanistic endeavor, and the symbolic import of this maneuver is its opposition to the material and causally inclined direction of Victorian culture. MacDonald therefore reflects an extreme version of the novelist who grapples with the collision of medicine and literature in the mid-century. Biographers of MacDonald trace this professional contest to his own young adulthood. In his second year at the University of Aberdeen, Elizabeth Saintsbury writes: [MacDonald] applied himself to the study of chemistry … His interest in the sciences derived from a natural curiosity about how things work … [His] acquaintance with chemistry led to an ambition to take up Medicine. For humanitarian reasons … he hankered after the opportunities such a profession would afford. (40) Jennifer Koopman calls the “curative power” identified by one of Adela Cathcart’s embedded stories, “The Cruel Painter,” a tacit confirmation “of the significance of MacDonald’s career choice, [thus] suggesting that a life devoted to writing fiction is as useful as – and possibly better than – the physician’s career”: “Redeeming Romanticism: George MacDonald, Percy Shelley, and Literary History”, Diss. (McGill University, 2006): p. 130. I agree with this statement, but without the qualification: in arguing that Harry Armstrong’s literary and philosophic bent (as well as John Smith’s inauguration of the story cure) I read the benefits of literature definitively above those of traditional medicine in this novel.

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Saintsbury speculates that a lack of funds probably interfered with MacDonald’s medical ambitions. Such personal disappointment, which incited his turn to the Church and eventually to literature, informs his identification of the callous financial motives behind his characterization of Dr. Wade and the conventional medical profession in Adela Cathcart. Adela’s Modern Malaise Adela’s unnamed disorder renders her weak, listless, and ominously recalls her mother’s earlier death of an unspecified “decline” (14). Adela describes her illness to John Smith as a kind of apathetic withdrawal from the world. The onset of her illness, she explains, was abrupt: “Some six weeks ago, I woke suddenly one morning, very early, – I think about three o’clock, – with an overpowering sense of blackness and misery. Everything I thought of seemed to have a core of wretchedness in it. I fought with the feeling as well as I could, and got to sleep again. But the effect of it did not leave me next day … And the next day was worse. I began to see the bad in everything – wrong motives, and self-love, and pretense, and everything mean and low. I am crowded with wretched, if not wicked, thoughts, all day. Nothing seems worth any thing. I don’t care for anything.” “But you love somebody?” “I hope I love my father. I don’t know. I don’t feel as if I did.” (24–5)

As Smith gradually discovers, Adela’s sense of hopelessness reflects the spiritual and emotional emptiness of her life. She has no friends of her own age except for her cousin Percy, whose eagerness to marry her for her money is both undisguised and encouraged by her doting but superficial father. This marital opportunity comprises Adela’s only future prospect, except for death. The initial course of treatment for Adela’s illness is as insufficient a remedy for her apathy as the expectation of an engagement to a cousin she barely tolerates. The family physician Dr. Wade prescribes “steel wine, and quinine, and all that sort of thing,” says Colonel Cathcart, “but certainly they don’t do her any good” (14). Wade exemplifies a type of rule-following conformism to professional norms. Colonel Cathcart considers Wade “a stupid old fool,” and explains that he believes MacDonald’s son and biographer Greville MacDonald also speculates that a lack of money put an end to MacDonald’s prospective medical studies and career: Greville MacDonald, George MacDonald and his Wife (London: 1924): p. 68. Adela’s thin body, large eyes, and slow pulse remind Laurance Talairach-Vielmas of the “stereotypical nineteenth-century consumptive woman.” See Talairach-Vielmas, Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007): p. 33.

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“[Wade] knows no more about the state of [Adela’s] chest than he does about the other side of the moon … he comes here for his fees, and he has them” (14). When Smith asks Cathcart why he does not hire another doctor, the Colonel explains that he sees no alternative. “… they’re all the same in this infernal old place. I believe they’ve all embalmed themselves, and are going by clock-work. They and the clergy make sad fools of us. But we make worse fools of ourselves to have them about us. To be sure, they see that everything is proper. The doctor makes sure that we are dead before we are buried, and the parson that we are buried after we are dead. About the resurrection I suspect he knows as much as we do. He goes by the book.” (14)

For MacDonald and narrator Smith, Wade’s approach to illness – dispensing medicine for the body but ignoring the state of the emotions – reflects the sickness of a society that has eclipsed values like spiritualism, imagination, and character with more mundane and superficial interests, such as class status and leisured indulgence, which are the motives behind Wade’s professional self-interest and Percy’s bid to marry Adela. In reference to the emotional orientation of Adela’s condition, John Smith claims that all illness is a punishment for human failings: “I think that if we were all good, disease would, in the course of generations, disappear utterly from the face of the earth” (103). For his doctor-hero, then, MacDonald invents a physician whose understanding of illness and cure is almost entirely moral as well. In physician Harry Armstrong, MacDonald imagines a doctor whose commitment to scientific medicine is all but denounced, and this unusual professional disposition evinces Armstrong’s authenticity and sensitivity to human nature as well as his willingness to defy social expectations. From the beginning of the novel, Armstrong stands out as a maverick who flouts convention. When Bloomfield recommends his services for Adela, the Colonel balks: “What! The young fellow that goes flying around the country in boots and breeches?” Bloomfield agrees, adding,

Adela’s symptoms, medical care, and the characterization of her illness as personal disappointment and ennui strikingly resemble the representation of the ambiguous disease (and its treatment) suffered by Caroline Helstone in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849). After she is weakened by a fever and a loss of appetite, Caroline receives a physician whose routine care recalls Dr. Wade’s. Like an “oracle,” her physician “delivered a dark saying of which the future was to solve the mystery, wrote some prescriptions, gave some direction – the whole with an air of crushing authority – pocketed his fee, and went” (354). Caroline’s health continues to decline, and she “believe[s] grief is, and always has been, my worst ailment. I sometimes think, if an abundant gush of happiness came on me, I could revive yet … I have no object in life” (361): Charlotte Brontë, Shirley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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The Doctor in the Victorian Novel “He’s not so very young though, – he’s thirty at least. And for the boots and breeches, – I asked him once, in a joking way, whether he did not think them rather unprofessional. But he told me he saved ever so much time in open weather by going across the country. ‘And,’ said he, ‘if I can see the patients sooner, and more of them, in that way, I think it is quite professional. The other day,’ he said, ‘I was sent for, and I went straight as the crow flies, and I beat a little baby only by five minutes after all.’ Of course after that there was nothing more to say.” (29)

In addition to Armstrong’s unceremonious approach to his patients, his “queer notions” include devout Christianity and a general avoidance of physiological investigation. He prefers observation to drug treatment (though he does prescribe unspecified drugs); he first defers Adela’s case to his brother, the curate, and then follows Smith’s non-medical plan for treatment; when he visits Adela for the first time, he asks her father to conceal the fact that he is a doctor in order to interact with her in a “non-professional” way (41). For MacDonald, such an unofficial rapport between physician and patient renders a more personal diagnosis, as opposed to the type of doctoring that treats all patients in the same way without attention to individual circumstances. This approach characterizes Dr. Wade, who “goes by clock-work” or “by the book” (14) and “whose face had no expression except a professional one” (42). In contrast, Smith notes that Armstrong’s face revealed “nothing of the professional” but showed “lines of remarkable strength and purity” (41). Armstrong’s transparency is matched by his ability to read and diagnose others. His techniques of observation emphasize a patient’s spiritual health and draw upon literary and theological scholarship rather than science. When Armstrong makes his preliminary description of Adela’s complaint, Smith is amazed: “how could you tell that from the very little conversation you had with her?” (50). Armstrong’s answer reveals his theological and intuitive turn of mind: “It was not the conversation only, – I watched everything about her; and interpreted it by what I know about women. I believe that many of them go into a consumption just from discontent, – the righteous discontent of a soul which is meant to sit at the Father’s table, and so cannot content itself with the husks which the swine eat. The theological nourishment which is offered them is generally no better than husks.” (50)

Adela’s condition is rife in modern life, Armstrong explains; “There are a good many of [such invalids] amongst girls at her age” (48). Smith wonders how

Especially in his emphasis on observation, Armstrong recalls Erasmus Darwin, one of the greatest medical doctors of the Romantic age, the era which overwhelmingly informs MacDonald’s philosophy.

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Armstrong, a bachelor, could have developed such expertise on women, and Armstrong’s answer reveals his debt to literary learning: “I believe [I learned about women] in part by reading Milton, and learning from him a certain high notion about myself and my own duty. None but a pure man can understand women, – I mean the true womanhood that is in them. But more than to Milton, am I indebted to that brother of mine you heard preach today … .” (51)

By drawing from artistic preferences, Milton, and his brother’s expertise as a curate, Armstrong’s avoidance of the scientific domain represents a world-view steeped in a literary and humanistic tradition. This world-view includes the illuminating features of music as well as literature. Armstrong tells Smith that in diagnosing Adela, he “looked over her music on purpose, and I did not find one song that rose above the level of the drawing room, or one piece of music that had any deep feelings or any thought in it. Of course I judged by the composers” (50). While Armstrong reflects a compassionate improvement to the medical practices of Dr. Wade, he too is ultimately trumped by an even less ‘medical’ approach: the story cure that is conceived and superintended by John Smith. Smith designs the club in response to the emotional basis of Adela’s illness: It seems to me that the interest she cannot find for herself we might be able to provide for her, by telling her stories; the course of which every one should be at liberty to interrupt, for the introduction of any remark whatever. If we once got her interested in anything, it seems to me, as Mr. Armstrong has already hinted, that the tide of life would begin to flow again. She would eat better, and sleep better, and speculate less, and think less about herself, – not of herself … “A capital plan,” said [Mr. Armstrong] … . (48–9)

The story cure described by Smith emphasizes the moral teleology of narrative and the communal experience of story-telling. It thereby replaces a medical episteme for one that is literary. MacDonald was not the only Victorian novelist to figure the curative effects of literature and story-telling; in addition to Wilkie Collins (whose depiction of the therapeutic domain of literature I explore in detail in Chapter 4), George Henry Lewes writes at length about stories as an antidote to modern malaise in his littleread novel, Ranthorpe (1847). Lewes pits the ambitious and insatiable curiosities of doctors and scientists against morality in general and literature in particular. Much like John Smith, Lewes’s narrator in Ranthorpe believes that the modern world is beset by a materialist urge towards discovery that obviates more nuanced and sympathetic domains like literature, emotion, and imagination: Most wise doctors! Most credulous parents! Most unhappy children! To you all, a blessed millennium of science is coming, wherein imagination and emotion will no more vitiate the mind; wherein “prejudices” will be matters of research,

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The Doctor in the Victorian Novel and the differential calculus be expounded to the infant in the cradle! – A time when “gentle maidens reading through their tears” will feel their hearts tremble over – conic sections; romantic youths will feel their breasts inflated with the mystery and magic of – the composition of forces … . (192)

Lewes threatens that science (or more specifically, medical knowledge) directly challenges the survival and relevance of literature. This Gradgrindian consciousness is countered heroically in Ranthorpe by the title character, an idealistic and sensitive young writer, and the woman he loves, Isola, an artist. Isola exemplifies her virtue by imparting the wisdom of a simpler time to a young boy in her charge; she feeds “his insatiate appetite with stories of human sympathies, sufferings, virtues, and prowess – fairy tales, and legends gay and sad” instead of the “monstrous pedantic absurdities now in fashion with respect to education” (193). Similarly, in Adela Cathcart, Smith believes that Adela’s illness results from a larger cultural failure to find the “stories” available in everyday experience. He relates this judgment in language that critiques society’s material frame of mind: “ … the tendency of the present age is to blot from the story of every-day life all reminders of the ordinary human relations, as commonplace and insignificant, and to mingle all society in one concourse of atoms, in which the only distinctions shall be those of rank; whereas the sole power to keep social intercourse from growing stale is the recognition of the immortal and true in all the simple human relations.” (391; my italics)

As Smith (and Lewes) see it, modernity’s material bias towards scientific thinking (with its “atomization” of experience) and its preoccupation with class status blinds one to a healthy apprehension of the wonders and gratifications that attention to the “story of every-day life” can so simply provide. A medical approach to psychic suffering like Adela’s, as Wade’s useless remedies demonstrate, neglects the emotional source of the illness and so fail to enliven and replenish the psyche. MacDonald explored the dangers of atomistic thinking throughout his life and in different genres. In an 1889 sermon “The Truth,” he bemoans the tendency of “the man of mere science” to focus on the particulars at the expense of a more holistic vision, arguing that “the very process of [scientific] work is such a leaving of God’s ends behind”: Ask a man of mere science, what is the truth of a flower: he will pull it to pieces, show you its parts, explain how they minister each to the life of the flower; he will tell you what changes are wrought in it by scientific cultivation; where it lives originally, where it can live … and doubtless many more facts about it. Ask the poet what is the truth of the flower, and he will answer: “Why, the flower Saintsbury paraphrases MacDonald’s critique of empiricism by saying that “scientific explanations rob nature of its magic and leave the world poorer” (40).

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itself, the perfect flower, and what it cannot help saying to him who has ears to hear it” (qtd. in Hein, Heart 380)

Not only is the scientific man blind (or deaf) to the essence of the flower, but he is destructive: where he pulls it to pieces, the poet’s apprehension is holistic and benign. Adela’s healing process similarly substitutes Dr. Wade’s focus on isolated symptoms for Harry Armstrong and John Smith’s attention to her body and psyche. Adela’s Recovery Convinced that Adela should not know that the story club has a medicinal purpose, Armstrong and Smith hide its official function from the patient, and while Armstrong prescribes a variety of innocuous tonics to Adela, they are given no exposition or agency in the representation of her improvement. They do, however, work to appease any curiosity she may have about her treatment, and Adela thus credits Armstrong, not the story club, with her recovery: “I think Mr. Armstrong’s prescription is doing me a great deal of good,” she explains. “It seems like magic. I sleep very well indeed now. And somehow life seems a much more possible thing than it looked a week or two ago. And the whole world appears more like a work of God” (202). Adela’s affective synopsis of her health unknowingly taps into exactly the influence that Smith has sought. The transmission of stories has enlivened Adela’s faith in “magic” and God, and in doing so, has had a very concrete effect on her sick body. As a corrective to the world-vision that has been inculcated by her stodgy father and the rule-following Dr. Wade, the story club nourishes Adela’s incipient belief in a spiritual universe. The physical regeneration that ensues and the improved sleep and heightened energy, suggests that a literary epistemology, and especially one that prominently figures fairy tales and other fantastic genres, is more than mere amusement and in fact summons the vivacity that Adela has lacked. The case that MacDonald makes in Adela Cathcart for the healing properties of the imagination is similarly explored in his 1879 novel Paul Faber, Surgeon. That later novel features an honorable surgeon whose atheism constrains him to a cripplingly material interpretation of the world: [Paul Faber] had such a horror of all kinds of intellectual deception or mistake, that he would rather run the risk of rejecting any number of truths than of accepting one error. In this spirit he had concluded that, as no immediate communication had ever reached his eye, or ear, or hand from any creator of men, he had no ground for believing in the existence of such a creator; while a thousand unfitnesses evident in the world, rendered the existence of one perfectly wise and good and powerful, absolutely impossible. (12)


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Faber’s unwillingness to accept God in the face of an imperfect world ill-prepares him for the inevitable challenges of that world. When he discovers that his wife concealed from him a “fallen” past, his anger at her betrayal incites their total separation. MacDonald uses Faber to argue that the consolations of religion are only possible if one accepts that doubt is part of the sacred contract, and that human relations, including marriage, are still under the mantle of God: “The Maker of men alone understands His awful mystery between the man and the woman” (32). Without such faith, Faber becomes sick and depressed, like Adela in her apathy. While he never completely accepts God, Faber does accept the waywardness of his wife in recognition of his own flawed past, and they reconcile. In both this novel and Adela Cathcart, MacDonald contends that those who try to operate outside of the margins of faith and doubt and dwell in an evidence-based universe incapacitate their relationships, and in both cases, illness ensues. The fantastic and symbolic stories that cure Adela are in fact not so different from the story of religion that proposes to heal Faber, and which works through a power akin to magic. John Smith expresses the affinity between religion and the fantastic in his narrator of “The Light Princess,” the first story delivered at the story club: “if both church and fairy-tale belong to humanity,” he posits, “they may occasionally cross circles without injury to either. They must have something in common” (57–8). “The Light Princess” stands alone when it is dissociated from its context in the novel, but its relevance to Adela’s case dramatizes MacDonald’s championship of the curative power of fantasy. In “The Light Princess,” the title character is cursed by her evil aunt and robbed of gravity. Her parents are baffled by their daughter’s condition, and only when the princess falls in love with a handsome prince does she – literally – return to earth. The story of a princess who lacks gravity amuses Adela and so distracts her from the self-involvement that makes her sick, and it also portrays “lightness” and levity as a curse that can be resolved by romantic love and the earnestness that it demands. Adela herself soon learns this lesson through a romance that substantiates her shallow life and reinvigorates her mind and body. Laurance Talairach-Vielmas persuasively reads “The Light Princess” as a fantastic version of the plot concerning Adela. The “embedded fairy tale,” she writes, like Adela’s story, “focuses on the way the female body is governed by tropes which men strive to define and control” (37), and the experiences that the Light Princess undergoes “all aim to subdue her unruly body so that [she] may regain her gravity and marry” (9). The medical machinations practiced by Dr. Wade and Harry Armstrong on Adela do the same, as Adela’s marriage enables the conflation of the love plot with the medical treatment through the lover-physician Harry Armstrong.

MacDonald wrote “The Light Princess” in 1862, but failed to find a publisher for it, and so he incorporated it into Adela Cathcart two years later (Talairach-Vielmas 33). Later, in preparing the 1882 edition of Adela Cathcart, MacDonald removed this story and two others from the novel, and republished them elsewhere as children’s stories (Hein 21).

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Becoming Emplotted, Becoming Well In the second half of Adela Cathcart, the heroine’s own entrance into a love story begins to rival the story club’s various recitations of romance, drama, pathos, and sacrifice. Until this point, the plotlessness of Adela’s life (with dying from boredom or marrying Percy her only prospects) renders her sick. But as she becomes acquainted with the stories and their visionary elements of fantasy and romance, a counter-narrative involving a romance with Armstrong begins to emerge, and the prospect of living this love story emplots her formerly empty experience. Armstrong anticipates this course early on when he asks Smith if there was “any young man to fall in love with her” (51) and thus awaken her from her ennui. The romance between Adela and Armstrong faces some conventional challenges in the form of a rival suitor, Percy, and a resistant father, Colonel Cathcart, in whom “there was quite enough of worldliness left … to make him feel that a country practitioner, of very moderate means, was not to be justified in aspiring to the hand of his daughter” (222). To Smith, however, marriage to Armstrong “would be the very best thing for Adela,” (101) and he champions the young couple’s suit. His efforts are obstructed when the Colonel glimpses Armstrong and Adela poised for a kiss, and the furious Colonel bars Armstrong from his home. When Armstrong insists on visiting Adela anyway, Smith parodies his own status as narrator, claiming that … I do not know anything that passed [between the young couple]. How should I know? Neither of them was likely to tell old Smith. And I wonder at the clumsiness of novelists in pretending to reveal all that he said, and all that she answered. But if I were such a clumsy novelist, I should like to invent it all, and see if I couldn’t make you believe every word of it … . (411)

Smith then presents two competing versions of the meeting, with the first featuring the couples’ “lips play[ing] with the ripples of love, while their hearts were heaving with the ground swell of its tempest” (412) and the second a more mundane reconciliation. These conflicting accounts undermine his authority as narrator, so that Smith exemplifies a point that MacDonald makes in the novel as a whole: that the “real” is a matter of perspective or preference. Adela learns this same lesson through the story club’s delivery of largely fantastical stories that nevertheless contain significant morals and messages when she learns to apply them to her own experience rather than take them literally. We see a reverse example of this logic in the character of Adela’s selfish and judgmental aunt, Mrs. Cathcart, who constantly resists the story club and its tales as childish and superficial. Her

Rebecca Arkany makes a similar point in writing that “the readers” whom MacDonald writes to “will understand that the text itself is symbolic, carrying with it wonders of an invisible world”: Rebecca Thomas Arkany, The Story, the Teller, and the Audience in George MacDonald’s Fiction (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000): p. 114.

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critique of one story as “not true to Nature” (283) exemplifies her failure to admit or imagine a reality beyond the demonstrable and ordinary. The worldly orientation of Mrs. Cathcart, her son Percy, Dr. Wade, and Colonel Cathcart follows the pretense of materialism for most of the novel. In contrast to Smith, Armstrong, and the other members of the story club, these characters are driven by a fact-driven estimation of reality that weighs status, money, and data above imagination, emotion, and the symbolic power of literature. When the Colonel rejects Armstrong as a future son-in-law, John Smith mocks his reasoning by revealing its specious foundation: But why should [the Colonel] refuse … [Armstrong]? The doctor was not on an equality with the colonel … The difference between the colonel and the doctor is consisted chiefly in this, that whereas the colonel lived by the wits of his ancestors, Harry lived by his own, and therefore was not so respectable as the colonel. Or, in other words: the colonel inherited a good estate, with the ordinary quantity of brains; while Harry inherited a good education, and an extraordinary quantity of brains. So of course it was very presumptuous in Harry to aspire to the hand of Miss Cathcart. (407)

What MacDonald through his proxy Smith ridicules here is the idea that wealth and status has any “real” connection to honor, or character, or stability – all traits that Armstrong has in abundance. This last illusion, stability, is devastated when the Colonel suddenly receives the news that his fortune has been lost in a bad speculation. In another instance of sickness reflecting emotional health and personal circumstance rather than some dispassionate organic cause, the Colonel suffers a fit of apoplexy upon hearing about his loss of fortune. Whereas he nearly dies after his reversal of fortune, Adela’s response accords with the new values she has gleaned from the story club and Armstrong’s palliative influence. Adela consoles her father by referring to her own recent recovery: “Papa … if you knew how awful things looked to me a little while ago, – but it’s all gone now! – the whole earth black and frozen to the heart, with no God in it, and nothing worth living for, – you would not wonder that I take the prospect of poverty with absolute indifference, – yes, if you will believe me, with something of a strange of excitement. There will be something to battle with and beat.” (418)

Adela’s openness to a challenging future recalls Hester Hope’s similar transformation in Deerbrook, when her doctor-husband also inspired her enthusiasm for conflict and the unknown. The “strange excitement” Adela feels for the future is exactly what she lacked during her illness. Armstrong, for his part, embraces the new poverty of the Cathcarts as it equalizes his and Adela’s social status and thus clears their path to marriage: “for my own [sake],” he says, “I cannot help thinking it the luckiest thing that could have happened” (491).

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The twist of fate that levels the Cathcarts’ fortune and facilitates Adela’s marriage to Armstrong is objectionable on the basis of realism; it too fortuitously rewards Armstrong’s enlightened attitude to love and punishes the Colonel’s longstanding snobbery. But the improbable element of such a timely development, one that promotes the marital plot so efficiently, corresponds with MacDonald’s embrace of a romantic world-view that allows his divided lovers to overcome their social challenges and live happily ever after. The very conventionality of this ending is part of MacDonald’s systemic pitch for the healing qualities of a literary, indeed fairy tale-like, ethos. The loss of the family fortune that enables Adela to marry her hero transforms her formerly empty life into the kind of tale with which she was entertained at the story club, and this process by which the ontology of the stories consumes that of the “realistic” story that frames it encapsulates MacDonald’s ideal, vis-à-vis Novalis, that while life may not be a dream, it “perhaps ought to become” one. At the end of the novel, John Smith imagines a conversation between himself and his implied reader in which he is asked about the curative agency of the story club: “Pray, Mr. Smith, do you think it was your wonderful prescription of storytelling that wrought Miss Cathcart’s cure?” “How can I tell?” I answer. “Probably it had its share. But there are other things to take into account. If you went on to ask me whether it was not Harry’s prescriptions; or whether it was not the curate’s sermons; or whether it was not her falling in love with the doctor; or whether even her father’s illness and the loss of their property had not something to do with it; or whether it was not the doctor’s falling in love with her; or that the cold weather suited her, – I should reply in the same way to every one of the interrogatories … But I retort another question: – Did you ever know anything whatever resulting from the operation of one separable cause?” (420)

MacDonald admonishes in his implied readers a tendency to seek causal explanations for complex human developments, or more simply, for human stories. The probable cures listed above inseparably contribute to Adela’s recovery. The model for these interconnected influences is not conventional medicine, which relies on physical evidence (and the cause-and-effect or “separable cause” methodology that Ward ineffectively follows) but literature, and more particularly the Bildüngsroman, which studies the hero/heroine’s development – such as Adela’s transformation from a sickly, aimless girl to a virtuous wife-to-be. Even better, and as the story club exemplifies, a life that is interpolated by a variety of literary genres (including Christian parable, fairy tale, and gothic fantasy) is enriched by the lessons and examples of stories that are triumphant, fantastic, tragic, humorous, and mysterious. The self-consciousness of the reading experience that these overlapping genres demand of the reader of Adela Cathcart, as on the titular listener herself, are meant to provide a kind of mental and moral richness

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that mimetic realism and factual information cannot convey. This is MacDonald’s self-referencing argument for the salutary experience of literature and the literary as a way of life. Adela’s recovery by way of the love story is also, of course, the recovery of the love story. Her death would have relegated the novel to the realism we could plausibly expect from a scenario that includes a dying girl, a collection of stories, and an artistically inclined doctor! But the celebratory union of these elements in marriage refutes the logic that they invite, and MacDonald revels in the gratifications wrought by a romantic ontology. The marriage-fantasy plot between Adela and Armstrong structurally sustains the narratives whereby nature bows to morality. Why does this analysis of a nearly forgotten book by an eccentric Victorian matter to the representation of Victorian doctors? Doctors in Victorian novels, as I argue, symbolize their culture’s anxiety about the encroachment of scientific reasoning. Sometimes we see this realistically with doctors like Lydgate, whose intellectual experience and the confidence it engenders poorly equip him for the emotional life celebrated in the novel. The disappointments of the LydgateRosamund marriage makes this discord a part of the structural design of the novel, and therefore comment on the health of the marriage plot itself. But in Adela Cathcart, by portraying a physician who is more humanist than scientist, conflating cure with a successful marriage plot, and merging the tasks of healer and narrator, MacDonald lays bare the novelist’s investment in imaginative enterprise in a personal way (his vocation as a fiction writer) and as a facet of cultural life (the benefits he as a novelist offers to his readers through Adela’s exemplary case). In indicting modern professional practices and modes of treatment as dangerous to Adela’s health, and thus to the trope of the love story that depends upon her survival, MacDonald upsets the narrative-of-progress associated with medical and scientific developments. Moreover, MacDonald is not actually concerned with Victorian medical theory or specific modes of treatment, but with how Victorian culture, as it leans precariously towards materialism, can best engage in meaning. The answer, his tale allegorizes, is not the rational thinking that medicine and the social and professional orders commonly promote, but the multi-faced richness and even enchantment which literature offers to those who can abandon causal logic and risk the vitalizing uncertainty of abstraction. Novels that end happily-ever-after exemplify such restorative practice. But the fact that Adela Cathcart was unsuccessful upon its publication (and virtually unknown today) locates MacDonald’s quest for meaning through the literature of fancy and abstraction an already dated project. In fact, of the novels studied so far, the canonical supremacy of Middlemarch is not owed entirely to its artistic Stephen Pickett explores the readerly self-consciousness demanded by MacDonald’s Phantases, which he connects to the great tradition of German Bildüngsroman and particularly Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (121).

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merit as so many literary critics resurrect Eliot’s extra-literary expertise, the scientific and medical understanding that routinely earns her such a triumphant place in the Victorian canon. After all, the significance that even professors of literature impart to Eliot’s grasp of empiricism proves MacDonald’s worst imaginings quite correct.


Chapter 3

Marital Malpractice at Mid-Century: Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife and Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters Mary Braddon, one of the Victorian period’s most infamous sensation novelists, wrote The Doctor’s Wife (1864) in an attempt to elevate her fiction to the status of realism. According to her letters, The Doctor’s Wife was Braddon’s anglicized variation on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and her most serious attempt to transcend the generic and artistic limitations of sensationalism and write a serious novel (Wolff 162). Elizabeth Gaskell, known for her conscientious probing of social issues, attempted no such generic revision in Wives and Daughters (1866). If anything, this novel, her last, is less stringently moralizing than many of her earlier explorations of social conditions – such as Mary Barton’s condemnation of factory abuse and Ruth’s lament against the plight of unmarried mothers. Braddon’s attempt to elevate her art and Gaskell’s loosened focus on social abuses turned them towards a common ground in the 1860s: the growing dilemma of marriage. Both novelists converged upon the conflicted unions between professional doctors and their unfulfilled, romantic wives in a pairing that was seemingly normalized in the 1860s as a beacon of marital crisis. The template reflected by a rational, professional husband (usually a doctor or scientist) and a frivolous wife who reads too many romance novels is exemplified by Madame Bovary, but has many English variations as well. In her essay “Heroines and the Grandmothers” (1865), Anne Thackeray Ritchie critiques the romantic notions that Braddon (following Flaubert) and Gaskell evince in their respective heroines, Isabel Gilbert and Hyacinth Gibson, and condemns “women’s novels” for breeding such unrealistic expectations. One novel that Ritchie uses to exemplify the frivolity of modern fiction, Too Much Alone by Mrs. J.H. Riddell (1860), bears a striking resemblance to The Doctor’s Wife: [The heroine] is a young woman who marries a very silent, upright, and industrious chemical experimentalist. He has well-cut features, honourable feelings, a genius for discovering cheap ways of producing acids and chemicals … which, combined with his perfect trust in and neglect of his wife, very nearly bring about the destruction of all their domestic happiness. She is a pale, sentimental young woman, with raven-black hair, clever, and longing for sympathy … Days go by, lonely alike for her … Her husband is absorbed in his work. She has no one to talk to, nothing to do or think of. (Ritchie 492)

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Lina and Maurice Storn of Two Much Alone are the near-image and character of George and Isabel in The Doctor’s Wife. Like Isabel, Lina falls in love with a worldly bachelor, and she only comes to appreciate her husband after the tragic death of their son and near-demise of their marriage. Similarly, in Charles Lever’s Barrington (1865), a novel set in rural Ireland, country physician Dr. Dill and his wife exemplify domestic disappointment. Dr. Dill’s profession clarifies the source of their discord: he “expended all the benevolence of his disposition in the course of his practice, and came home utterly exhausted … so it was that his family never saw him in those moods of blandness which he invariably appeared in to his patients” (47). His wife suffers the brunt of his exhaustion and the burden of his rigid economizing and her only enjoyment is a ritual escape into Richardson’s Clarissa. When their finances are especially low, Mrs. Dill, unhappy Mrs. Dill, who neither hunted, nor smoked, nor played skittles, [was told by her husband] that his hard-earned pence should not be wasted in maintaining a “circulating library.” Was there ever injustice like this? Talk to a man with one meal a day about gluttony, lecture the castaway at sea about not giving way to his appetites, you might just as well do so to preach to Mrs. Dill – with her one book, and who never wanted another – about the discursive costliness of her readings. (69)

The literature that Mrs. Dill and the other doctors’ wives use as distraction from the prosaic everyday occupies a more idealistic subgenre than the novels that feature these women. Clarissa, for instance, and the French novels that Isabel and Hyacinth enjoy do not attend to the solidly middle-class realities and expectations that challenge these reading heroines, but instead, sustain a relatively consistent dramatic romance. These “romantic” novels are thereby distinguished from the novels (by Flaubert, Braddon, Gaskell et al.) that offer them as a point of contrast to their own more realistic representations of marital relationships. As the heroines’ preoccupation with literary ideals here under review suggests, the fictional trend that explores a (dis)junction between empirical doctors or scientists and their idealistic wives extends beyond this common thematic element in 1860s domestic fiction and turns attention to what role the novel plays in shaping female expectations, especially as it comes to terms with the modernizing and rational developments of mid-Victorian science and medicine. As argued below, The Doctor’s Wife gradually converts to the genre of literature that the other novels here critique, as the realist scheme which organizes it initially is replaced by an endorsement of sentimental romance. Other novels that identify this contrariety between science-minded doctors and marriage-minded women include the surgeon Bayham Badger and his frivolous, thricemarried wife in Bleak House (a slightly earlier incarnation in 1853). In an 1857 story by Dinah Craik, “The Double House,” Dr. and Mrs. Merchiston mysteriously occupy separate but adjoining houses. As the story’s narrator and fellow doctor’s wife Mrs. Rivers learns

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Thus, while Braddon and Gaskell’s doctors attest to the rise of professional medicine in Victorian culture, the narrative conventions that frame their intervention – the courtship stories, the marriages themselves, and the tragic/disappointed aftermaths – are challenged by the rationalism that the doctors represent. The doctors’ presence in these texts therefore elicits the author’s narrative selfconsciousness about the inclusion of a determinedly rational figure into the literary scheme of the marriage-plot novel, which is itself reflected by the idealistic and romantic expectations of the doctors’ wives. In effect, the doctors and wives stand for the oppositional poles of realism and sentimentalism/romance. My reading of these novels at the point of conflict between realism and romantic idealism is indebted to George Levine’s The Realistic Imagination (1981). Levine traces the rise of the nineteenth-century bourgeois novel’s self-consciousness of its own narrative design, and situates the tradition of Victorian realism between various stylistic and narrative extremes: “Realism in England belongs … [to a] moderate tradition … It belongs, almost provincially, to a ‘middling’ condition and defines itself against the excesses, both stylistic and narrative, of various kinds of romantic, exotic, or sensational literatures” (5). Levine’s understanding of the “moderation” of Victorian realism informs my interpretation of the epistemological role of the doctors in these novels. Levine also links the rise of realism with that of nineteenthcentury science: “The epistemology that lay behind realism was empiricist, with its tendency to value immediate experience over continuities or systems of order, and it was obviously related to the developments in empirical science as they ran through the century” (18). Important to my analysis is Levine’s reciprocal treatment of the rise of empirical science and that of fictional self-consciousness: he contends that by “positing the reality of the external world” as it is shaped by a new scientific rationalism, the Victorian novel “self-consciously examines its own fictionality” (21). This chapter, too, claims that the doctor’s scientific/medical perspective inspires a new self-consciousness about the marriage-plot novel’s

only after his death, Dr. Merchiston suffers from a “monomania”: an overwhelming urge to murder his beloved wife. His solution is the “double house,” which protects his wife from his pathological impulses (he arranges to never see her) while providing at least nominal conjugal status. The intimate relationships in this story are not between the doctors and their wives, but rather between the two doctors, and the two wives: the doctors confer professionally about their patients and about Merchiston’s condition, and the wives console and support each other in the alienating role of the doctor’s wife. “The Double House” thus represents the separate spheres of wives and doctors literally in the Merchiston’s semidetached living conditions, and symbolically in the Rivers’s relationship, for while they live in the same house, they are divided by the unique strictures of medical confidentiality and masculine intellectualism: Dinah Mulock Craik, “The Double House,” Nothing New: Tales (London: Hurst & Blackett. 1857). Finally, while not a married couple, the title character of Margaret Oliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks (1865) and her doctor-father represent a domestic pair with opposite interests. While the daughter presides over her parlor, the apex of society in Carlingford, her father escapes to his office and his issues of the Lancet.


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forms and conventions, and in doing so, helps to define the limits and goals of realism in The Doctor’s Wife and Wives and Daughters. The Doctor’s Wife Set in 1852, Braddon’s novel begins with a portrait of Isabel Sleaford, a fey young woman whose favorite pastime is the reading of romance novels. When her family’s boarder, hack-novelist Sigismund Smith, introduces Isabel to country doctor George Gilbert, he unintentionally links the destinies of an ill-matched pair. But first, without warning and under mysterious circumstances, the Sleaford family disappears from their suburban London house. Isabel later resurfaces and asks for Smith’s help in finding a job. He places her as a governess with Mr. Raymond, his uncle, who turns out to be George Gilbert’s neighbor. Reunited in the country, George proposes to and is accepted by the hapless Isabel, only to situate her in a monotonous lifestyle that she resents. Isabel soon meets the dashing local landowner Roland Lansdell, and promptly falls in love with him. But when Lansdell asks Isabel to elope with him, she refuses. Her domestic imprisonment comes to an end when George dies of typhoid, a day before her father, supposed to be dead, returns to visit his daughter and delivers a fatal blow to Lansdell, his old nemesis. Despite these tragic circumstances, Lansdell has bequeathed to Isabel the bulk of his considerable fortune, ironically transforming her into the sophisticated lady she was acquainted with through fictional example. Isabel’s final installment at the Lansdell estate thus fulfills her girlish fantasy of becoming a heroine after the sensational fashion of her literary familiars. Despite her professed attempts to imitate Flaubert’s realism in Madame Bovary, Braddon complies with the sensation genre in a number of ways: she dispenses with Flaubert’s representations of consummated adultery and suicide, and she portrays both violent murder and extramarital passion. Isabel’s preoccupation with the world of romantic novels and poetry demonstrates the influence of this literary style – both on Isabel herself and on Braddon’s novel. As a young girl, she hopes to be a “heroine,” “unhappy, perhaps, and dying early” (14) – hardly an appropriate wish for the wife of a physician. As she learns all too quickly, George’s character cannot adequately sustain a romance plot, and his simplistic character does not discern Isabel’s unhappiness. In fact, Braddon’s portrait of George is an early sign that she will ultimately satisfy Isabel’s romantic desires and write a sensational, sentimental novel, rather than a realistic one. While Isabel yearns for a dramatic life, George has no ambition beyond the examples of his father and grandfather, his professional predecessors in the

See Tabitha Sparks, “Fiction Becomes Her: Representations of Female Character in Mary Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife,” Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context, eds. Marlene Tromp, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Aeron Haynie (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999): 197–209.


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‘Midlandshire’ village of Graybridge-on-the-Wayverne. Braddon relates his complacency to his choice of a profession and attendant lack of worldly goals: “He thought that he would marry some pretty girl, and have plenty of patients, and perhaps some day be engaged in a great case which would be mentioned in the Lancet, and live and die respected, as his grandfather had done before him, in the old house with the red tile roof … ” (15). George’s work entails a withdrawal from the modern world, and a nostalgic return to a simpler way of life: … next to Mr. Neate, the curate, George Gilbert was the best beloved and most popular man in Graybridge. He had never had any higher ambition than this. He had no wish to strive or to achieve; he only wanted to be useful … The young man’s life could scarcely have been more sheltered from the storm and tempest of the world, [than if] the walls of some medieval monastery had encircled his little surgery … Away at Coventford there were factory strikes, and political dissensions, and fighting and rioting now and then; but here the tranquil days crept by, and left no mark by which they might be remembered. (26)

The country doctor’s life is respectable but hardly the substance of a romance novel, that register of emotional and literary experience by which Isabel measures her happiness. Ellen Wallace’s 1848 novel Mr. Warrenne, the Medical Practitioner, similarly underscores the country doctor’s undistinguished station: [The term “medical practitioner”] is of comparatively modern date, and is applied to the Pariahs of the medical profession. Men who are compelled to unite the acquirements of a physician with those of the surgeon … [It is] impossible to be worse remunerated than the medical practitioner. In a country where wealth is the sole standard of social position, and where talent is comparatively disregarded, the condition of the medical practitioner, and still more, the condition of [his?] family, is far from enviable … No gentleman ought to enter the profession. (11–12)

Like Wallace, Braddon associates the country doctor with a type of backwardlooking parochialism, and only briefly adjusts George’s purview to the many legislative and social measures that the medical profession was then undertaking to improve its social and scientific authority. Though written in 1864, Braddon sets her novel in 1852, which date de-emphasizes the political implications of the mid-Victorian medical marketplace and the movement of the “lower” orders of the profession into the higher echelons of the field, which are most obviously referenced by the Medical Act of 1858. Braddon generally evades the modernizing efforts and/or potential of medicine, showing George’s domain in the novel to

The political strides made by the profession at mid-century also characterize a victory of middle-class professionalism against entrenched aristocratic privilege. See Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977): p. 24.

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be compassionate but largely old-fashioned. George’s last words, uttered on his death-bed, commemorate his dedication to his patients and mark the novel’s only reference to the contemporaneous concerns of the medical field: “I hope I’ve done my duty – the poor people – better rooms – ventilation – please God, by and by. I’ve seen a great deal of suffering – and – my duty … ” (178)., George’s commitment to his patients is upheld as a model of professional duty, but this trait ultimately impairs his marriage and ends his life: he dies a hero by acquiring typhoid from a patient, and his determination to return to his work impedes his recovery: Unhappily for the patient, it was not the easiest matter in the world to keep him quiet. There was not much in George Gilbert, according to any poetic or sentimental standard; but there was a great deal in him, when you came to measure him by the far nobler standard of duty. He was essentially “thorough;” and in his quiet way he was very proud of his profession. He was attached to those rough Midlandshire peasants, whom it had been his duty to attend from his earliest manhood until now. Never before had he known a day’s illness; and he could not lie tranquilly watching Isabel sitting at work near the window … . (150–51)

George’s work ethic makes him an ideal doctor but his death nullifies his influence, and Braddon thereby devitalizes the professional and masculine service ideal at the same that she overtly lauds its integrity. This is suggested by George’s insistence that the typhoid that eventually kills him is not infectious but environmental (153). George’s final plea relates to the efforts made by the early and mid-Victorian doctors to improve sanitary conditions of the poor as a means to curb infectious disease. Many doctors strategically affected their authority and fledging scientific reputations by positioning themselves as stewards of public health. Most famous in this role was Edwin Chadwick, whose landmark report on sanitary conditions of 1834 led to the centralization of public medicine in England. But George’s concern here seems to focus on the health of the poor rather than a self-conscious attempt to contribute to governmental organization or contribute to policy conversations. In her introduction to The Doctor’s Wife, Lyn Pykett describes the novel’s relative lack of engagement with science and medicine by comparing it to Middlemarch: “[while Eliot’s novel] has thoroughly internalized the language of modern science … The Doctor’s Wife simply refers to current scientific debates” (xxiv). Also similar to my reading, Pykett emphasizes The Doctor’s Wife’s exploration of female leisure and especially, women’s reading practices: as she writes, “Braddon’s novel … succeeds in its attempt to offer (among other things) a serious analysis of the limitations of women’s education, the constraints of middle-class domesticity, and the dangers for women of romantic fantasy” (xxiv): Lyn Pykett, intro., The Doctor’s Wife (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998): pp. vii–xxviii. Critics are divided on the generic implications of George Gilbert’s death. Pamela Gilbert in Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels argues that


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George, the novel’s inveterate realist, ultimately has no place in this highly selfconscious and dramatic novel; as realism in The Doctor’s Wife connotes a limited imagination, George’s perspective conflicts with the conventions of romance, excitement, and class rise that the novel endorses. Moreover, in Braddon’s selfconscious merging of the novel’s form and subject, she repeatedly marks George’s exclusion from the standards of the novel by showing his limitations as a reader. Upon first meeting Isabel, George listens to her and Smith discuss their reading preferences in a scene which prefigures the imaginative distance between George and Isabel: The young surgeon could only stare wonderingly at [Isabel], for he hadn’t the faintest idea what she and his friend were talking about … George did not see the full extent of Isabel Sleaford’s beauty, for his was merely a good young man, with a tolerable common-place intellect, and Isabel’s beauty was of a poetic kind, which could only be fully comprehended by a poet … . (12)

Isabel’s beauty stands in for a complex code of emotional and intellectual characteristics, and the ability to “read” her necessitates a poetic and symbolic familiarity with the hidden depths and quixotic signs that extend beyond George’s clinical and material expertise. When, for instance, Isabel suffers from a headache brought on by lovesickness for Roland, George treats her with the studied ministrations of a doctor but utterly lacks the privileged knowledge of someone able to read his wife’s moods. Even when his fantasies are cast into the language of fiction, the humble register of George’s imagination contrasts to Isabel’s romantic vision. Before their engagement, George … already pictured Isabel sitting opposite to him in the little parlour, making weak tea for him in a Britannia-metal teapot, sewing commonplace buttons upon his commonplace shirts … Yes, George pictured Miss Sleaford the heroine of such a domestic story as this and had no power to divine that there was any incongruity in the fancy; no fineness of ear to discover the dissonant interval between the heroine and the story. (38)

While George imaginatively “writes” a humble story of domestic accord, Isabel – and Braddon – are invested in a far more exalted romantic scheme. A harsh example it is Isabel’s desire that functions to kill her husband (111), while Catherine Golden, in Images of the Woman Reader in Victorian British and American Fiction, sees George’s death as prosaic and undramatic: “The dual death scenes of Isabel’s husband and lover in the third volume might be seen as Braddon’s concession to conventions of sensation fiction. Neither death is sensational, however. Like Flaubert, Braddon delivers the body of the good provincial doctor, but in an unromantic way. George Gilbert dwindles from a fever he contracts from his poor patients whose lives he tries to improve” (114).

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of the “dissonant interval” that George overlooks occurs early in their marriage, in a scene that tellingly revolves around the couples’ respective relationships to poetry. While reading to George one evening, Isabel surprises him by suddenly bursting into tears: “You don’t care for the poetry, George,” she cried with the sudden passion of a spoiled child. “Oh, why do you let me read to you, if you don’t care for the poetry?” “But I do care for it, Izzie dear,” Mr. Gilbert murmured soothingly, – “at least I like to hear you read, if it amuses you.” Isabel flung [the poems] into the remotest corner of the little parlour … “You don’t understand me,” she said; “you don’t understand me.” (59)

Here the subject of poetry takes on the symbolic weight of the marriage itself, and Isabel’s casting away of the book represents her own recognition that she, the impassioned reader, has no place in the doctor’s humble parlour either. While Isabel is a “spoiled child,” Braddon tempers her selfishness with a social critique that allows us to identify Isabel’s escapist reading and improvident marriage as a consequence of her negligent upbringing. Analysis of the environment responsible for Isabel’s poor decisions and preoccupation with literature is evident from the very start of the novel. As a girl in her family’s ramshackle house in Camberwell, London, Isabel reads in the back garden, where the overgrown plants reflect her undisciplined imagination, as well as her tenuous membership in the lower periphery of the middle class: It was a dear, old, untidy place, where the odour of distant pigsties mingled faintly with the perfume of the roses; and it was in this neglected garden that Isabel Sleaford spent the best part of her idle, useless life … lolling in the low basket-chair, with a book on her lap, and her chin resting on the palm of her hand. (12)

The weedy garden suggests a social condemnation of Isabel’s idleness and taste in fiction, which threaten to spout beyond the limits of useful literature and fertilize her incipient romantic impulses. Even the school where Isabel receives her education illustrates dubious credentials: She had been taught a smattering of everything at a day-school in the Albany road; rather a stylish seminary in the opinion of the Camberwellians. She knew a little Italian, [and] enough French to serve for the reading of novels that she might have better left unread. (14)

Isabel’s father’s decision to educate his daughter “stylishly” but unevenly contributes to her own grandiose self-image. Her indulgence in romantic novels is also the effect of inadequate guidance:


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If there had been anyone to take this lonely girl in hand and organize her education, Heaven only knows what might have been made of her; but there was no friendly finger to point a pathway in the intellectual forest; and Isabel rambled as her inclination led her … living as much alone as if she had resided in a balloon, forever suspended in mid-air, and never coming down in serious earnest to the common joys and sorrows of the vulgar life about her. (15)

Braddon’s narrator regrets the superficiality of Isabel’s fantasy world, but also recognizes the vulgarity of that which Isabel tries to elude. Viewing Isabel’s reading practices through the lens of a social critique of female misguidance and miseducation helps explain her propensity to escape into literature and later, to perceive George as inadequate. As George lies dying, Isabel discovers “for the first time how much he was beloved; he who had not one of the attributes of a hero” (155). Her appreciation of George comes too late, and implicitly contributes to the novel’s affiliation with romantic tragedy – exactly the domain with which Isabel yearns to identify. Braddon’s representation of the ideals fostered by romantic, sensational, and sentimental literature approaches a realist critique in her meta-treatment of the interpretative abilities of her characters. While George is mystified by Isabel, the writers in the novel – hack novelist Sigismund Smith and squire-poet Roland Lansdell – read her aptly. Roland’s love for Isabel is fully informed by her extravagant imagination. He fantasizes about a future with this “dear romantic child” as one which could be “transfigured by [her] pure and exalted affection” (103). Smith also appreciates Isabel with a writer’s eye, and uses her inspiration in his writing. As he tells George, “she’s lovely … I do her for all my dark heroines, – the good heroines, not the wicked ones” (15). As much as he admires Isabel, Smith also discerns her faults: “she’s dreadfully romantic … she reads too many novels” (15). Smith’s knowing distance from the potential of his own creations to mislead further reveals his canny ability to differentiate between reality and fiction – an ability that he alone has mastered in this novel. However, rather than critiquing the sensational quality of fiction that Smith so shrewdly understands, the ending of the novel distances us from his comprehension of the misleading effects of “too many novels,” and upholds instead their accumulative ideals. As Kate Flint argues, “novel-reading [in The Doctor’s Wife] remains uncondemned as an activity in itself,” despite the narrator’s many references to its dangerous influence on Isabel (291). Far from admonishing the heady appeal of sensation literature, as Flint continues, Braddon instead highlights “the cultivation of a self-knowing, responsible attitude towards it” (291). This point of view certainly describes Smith’s detached appreciation of sensationalism. But Isabel’s self-knowledge remains questionable. In the final circumstances of her life, as a widow to a husband who has become a “hero” only through his martyred death, and a fine lady by way of Roland’s inheritance, Braddon sustains the value system of a romantic “woman’s” novel, as her resolution does not require Isabel to reappraise her adolescent and literary desires. This turn of events hardly


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resolves the novel’s incompatible marriage, or functions as a moral punishment for the antagonism that emerges in the feminine dreamer for her professional husband. That Roland proves to be as ephemeral as a character in a novel is one of Braddon’s great ironies, but his role in Isabel’s good fortune eclipses that irony by translating his implausible persona into an operative plot device that rewards Isabel. In this ending, Braddon quite definitively abandons her earlier attempts to write a novel after the style of Flaubert; her rejection of realism seems an aboutface in light of the way that we have been encouraged to see Isabel as an overly romantic and misled girl. Wives and Daughters The subtitle of Wives and Daughters, “An Every-Day Story,” heralds Gaskell’s demystification of the same kind of sensational and sentimental romance that shapes The Doctor’s Wife. Where Braddon delivers unhappy Isabel from her unsatisfying union with George and rewards her with a future worthy of sentimental romance,10 Gaskell refuses to improve or relieve the disappointment suffered by Gibson and Hyacinth. Their sustained unhappiness shows the novelist’s dedication to a realistic story and its quotidian discontents. More specifically, the Gibsons’ marriage occasions Gaskell’s critique of the false values of feminine, literary romance, and the masculine obtuseness that falls victim to its charms. And while professional authority like Gibson’s appears to be a form of middle-class power, the novel shows that in their control of courtship relations, women wield more authority over the evolution of English society than the medical or scientific experts who officiate over the specialized knowledge of health and natural law. But far from ending Wives and Daughters with the restrained disappointments of the Gibsons, Gaskell propels the novel into the next generation, and envisions a more promising union between Gibson’s daughter Molly and the rising scientist, Roger Hamley.

Alternatively, Ann Heilmann highlights Isabel’s distance from Emma Bovary’s more sensational behavior, such as her affair and suicide. Of Isabel’s failed attempts to write, she notes, “she consistently resists the Flaubertian plot in both its moral and sensational configurations” (38). Yet Pamela Gilbert, in a reading closer to mine, sees Isabel as catalyst for the invasion of the sensational: “Through her, the realist world and the privileged fictive form are invaded by elements of the popular … Isabel Gilbert lives between the popular and the realist novel for the reader, and for the other characters, between the fictive and the real” (Disease 110). 10 Sally Mitchell, in “Sentiment and Suffering: Women’s Recreational Reading in the 1860s,” defines the ideologies behind this popular genre, including among its major authors Rhoda Broughton, Charlotte Yonge, Caroline Norton, and Florence Marryat. The sentimental novel, she writes, “gratifies common needs; it provides a mode of distancing which gives repressed emotions a form that is publicly acceptable and that makes them a source of pleasure” (31).


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This marriage, which closes the novel, ambitiously reconciles scientific realism with the love story.11 My examination of the literary genres that compete against each other in Wives and Daughters (including romance, poetry, and scientific realism) extends from a number of critics who read Gaskell through the lenses of feminist scholarship and scientific theory. Hilary Schor and Pam Morris see Wives and Daughters as a text that evinces male and female “systems of information” (183). To these critics, the male culture of the novel is organized by scientific theory and an empirical mindset, which contrasts to a female culture made up of what Schor refers to as “gossip, courtship narratives, and blackmail” (184) and Morris as “romantic falsification, secrecy, and novels and poetry” (xvii). Both critics determine that the gendered languages and modalities of the novel generally favor the feminine discursive. “Masculine rationality,” writes Morris, is “shown to be a falsification, a fiction that men fabricate to protect themselves from aspects of reality – especially emotional reality – they wish to avoid or repress” (xvii). Schor argues similarly that “plots of female desire (flirtation, seduction) have the power to disrupt the certainties of (masculine) knowledge” (194). In their attention to the construction of a female subject position that underwrites the novel’s morality and realism, these critics broadly reflect the scholarship of Nancy Armstrong in Desire and Domestic Fiction (1988). Armstrong uses conduct books and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century domestic novel to argue that bourgeois subjectivity in the Victorian age was female and effectively disembodied – that is, dissociated from a material self (especially in its sexual identity) and evolved into a psychologically inflected moral position that middle-class culture more generally cultivated in its definition of civilized, non-aggressive, and ‘English’ respectability. Armstrong’s construction of Victorian subjectivity, however, imperfectly fits certain characterizations and resolutions in Wives and Daughters, and as a model, enables us to question the feminine discursive authority described by Schor and Morris. Mrs. Gibson and her daughter Cynthia, for instance, model a type of economic competitiveness and opportunism for which Armstrong’s descriptions of feminine domestic restraint and modesty do not sufficiently account. Elizabeth Langland suggests, alternately, that the outwardly passive female character so celebrated as the Victorian domestic ideal in fact masked just such a competitive drive, and thus made the quietly strategic female “manager” palatable to those gender codes that demanded submissiveness in women (8). Morris, Schor, Armstrong, and Langland treat the gender positions within Victorian fiction as relatively autonomous, and they all determine that while female subjectivity represents and inscribes different values, in general it organizes the moral thrust of the domestic realist novel. In her reading of Gaskell, Deirdre D’Albertis forges a different critical path, arguing that Gaskell is in fact skeptical about the separation between masculine and feminine spheres of influence and, 11 My references to the end of Wives and Daughters are speculative, as Gaskell died before she finished the novel.

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accordingly, male and female ‘languages’ (164). D’Albertis contends that critics have overlooked the self-conscious and experimental way that Wives and Daughters complicates the gendered ‘systems of information’ described above: “In choosing either a female domestic or male scientific reading of the text, excluding one at the expense of the other, past readers have reproduced the split between male and female versions of narrative control in the novel” (138). Such interpretations, she continues, inadvertently confirm the significant divisions and tensions between the two that shape Gaskell’s novel. Moreover, this confirmation of the competing narratives of masculine and feminine languages or epistemologies overlooks, for D’Albertis, the merits of Gaskell’s novel. Gaskell, she writes, displays a “mingled attraction to and fear of ‘masculine’ systems of classification” that leads her “alternately to attack and emulate the ‘scientist’s’ method” (222 n.55). My reading of Wives and Daughters extends one step beyond this description of Gaskell’s ambivalence towards scientific methodology. As the novel advances, Gaskell increasingly accommodates scientific thinking, principally by merging it with certain ‘feminine’ conventions that, ultimately, define a love story by borrowing from the best insights of science and domesticity. I am treating Gaskell’s critique and transformation of masculine, scientific methodology (primarily through the characterizations of Gibson and Roger Hamley) as the scaffold on which she constructs her revisionary realism. Moreover, the deployment of scientism through the marriage plot that moves towards a focus on the Molly/Roger pairing suggests that scientific and romantic discourses can share a common destiny.12 Both Gibson and Roger display their particular scientific methodologies in their assessment and knowledge of the women they choose to marry. These women, in turn, challenge their lovers’ empirical assumptions, in a large part through their own affiliations with a ‘feminine,’ literary, and sentimental perspective. In the coming together, for better or worse, of scientific/medical men and their wives, we have a schematic example of the ‘marriage’ between the masculine/realistic and feminine/romantic discourses that organize Gaskell’s novel. As I explore later in this chapter, the distinctions between the doctor (Gibson) and the scientist (Roger) further delineate Gaskell’s vision of the union between the epistemological loyalties that this novel negotiates through its analysis of literary genres and the men and women who identify with them. These gendered inquiries into the literary and scientific 12 In my interpretation of Gaskell’s reconciliation of the gender position in Wives and Daughters, one that does not dominantly favor either male or female systems of information, I am aligned with Susan E. Colón in her recent and provocative reading of the novel. Colón argues that Gaskell’s representation of the utility of the new professional class admits both male and female roles – and notably extends to Molly Gibson as well as to her rising-surgeon father. For Colón, professional ideology during the setting of the novel emphasizes “human capital,” which is transgendered, rather than aristocratic codes of value like leisured femininity or landowning largesse: Susan E. Colón, “Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters: Professional and Feminine Ideology,” Victorians Institute Journal 35 (2007): 7–30.


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identities of men and women recall, in a more subtle way, Braddon’s exploration of romantic Isabel (and Roland Lansdell) and prosaic, empirical George. Also like George in The Doctor’s Wife, Gibson exemplifies the limitations of medicine’s authority over provincial life, which the doctor’s inability to recognize makes poignant and subtly parodic. Gibson naively extends the rational perspective that informs his practice to social life and relationships, at cost to the self-knowledge that Gaskell links to happiness and fulfillment in Wives and Daughters. For instance, Gibson mistakenly attributes this increase “to his greater skill and experience,” while the basis of his popularity is in fact far more superficial: it is his work at the Towers, the seat of the local aristocracy that in fact determines his professional success (321). Gibson’s personal attractions also help him professionally, as the townswomen approve of his “elegant figure” and “distinguished manner” (38). Gibson’s oblivion to the power of social regard reveals his empirical approach to human behavior. He had “rather a contempt for demonstrative people, arising from his medical insight into the consequences to health of uncontrolled feeling” (32). Gibson’s composure anticipates the autobiographical description of Gaskell’s cousin, the eminent physician Sir Henry Holland, who considers his emotional equanimity a professional asset. As Holland writes in his memoirs: I have … spoken of my good fortune in going through a busy professional life with almost entire freedom from personal quarrel or controversy … So much of human life is embittered by passions or prejudices of a personal kind, that I have great reason to appreciate [my] exception from them. (166)

Where Holland deems himself lucky to have escaped the passions and prejudices of an emotional temperament, Gaskell suggests in Gibson that such sanguinity comes at a cost. For instance, Gibson’s emotional detachment shapes the parenting decisions that lead to his own marital unhappiness and, over time, make Molly vulnerable to imprudent influences. When Molly is a young child, Gibson counsels her governess to curtail Molly’s education, especially her reading and writing, and focus only upon what was “necessary” (34). As Molly grows up and receives the unwelcome attention of a suitor, Mr. Coxe, who is one of Gibson’s apprentices, Gibson’s method of intervention shows his lack of emotional depth. He hopes that Molly “would not be such a goose as to lend a willing ear to a youth who could never remember the difference between apophysis and epiphysis” (400), which desire both patronizes and overestimates Molly, who is neither a childish “goose” nor a girl who shares her father’s arcane medical vocabulary – in part because he himself has restricted her literacy to the strictly “necessary.”13 13 Gibson’s description of Molly as a “little goose” precedes a very similar reference in an 1881 poem by Victorian poet and highly trained scientific amateur, Constance Naden, “Evolutional Erotics.” In this poem, a female narrator reviews her perception of her lover,

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Gibson’s incompatible vocabularies reveal his blindness to the gendered divisions between the semantic and literary standards that he as a doctor and Molly as a young girl acquire. His solution to Coxe’s suit is decisive but overly simple. Gibson intercepts a note from Coxe to Molly, and given his practical expectations of the medical trade, is surprised that Coxe as a doctor-in-training would be so foolish as to write a “love letter”: “Who would have thought the lad had been so poetical,” he wonders; “to be sure, there’s a ‘Shakespeare’ in the surgery library: I’ll take it away and put ‘Johnson’s Dictionary’ instead” (49). Gibson’s removal of the source of poetry from the library follows a similarly concrete course as he simultaneously removes Molly from home (and Coxe’s attention) and installs her at Squire and Lady Hamley’s for an extended visit. There, however, Molly interacts with two young men, the Hamley sons Osborne and Roger. Gibson’s decision to install her at the Hamleys’ isolates her from Coxe but overlooks the prospect of the Hamley brothers’ company, and unwisely relies upon the impractical governance of Lady Hamley, who inadvertently awakens Molly’s romantic interest in Osborne. More serious, however, is Gibson’s other solution to Molly’s romantic defenselessness. He decides to remarry, believing that the presence of a stepmother will protect Molly from future advances. But Gibson’s ignorance of human character facilitates his choice of Hyacinth Kirkpatrick for his second wife. The former Hyacinth Clare had first married a respectable but poor clergyman, Mr. Kirkpatrick, after working as a governess at the Towers. With Mr. Kirkpatrick she had one child, Cynthia. But Kirkpatrick’s death sent her back to the workplace, and with the help of Lord and Lady Cumnor of the Towers, she set up a school for young ladies. It is as a struggling schoolmistress that Hyacinth reunites with the handsome Hollingford doctor. Like George Gilbert’s misreading of Isabel, Gibson’s limited understanding of his wife indicates his larger failures of perception; Gibson only gradually realizes that his second wife’s surface charms and manners are an elaborate fiction. While Gibson’s literal-mindedness compromises his judgment of his wife, her faults lie in the opposite direction. Mrs. Gibson’s intricately deceptive and “poetic” rhetoric covers a range of transgressions, but principally denotes her substitution of fact for fiction. Her modesty during courtship is an act that enables her to attract Gibson, masking her real motives: “Mrs. Kirkpatrick accepted Mr. Gibson principally because she was tired of the struggle of earning her own livelihood” (125). The same which started idealistically and devolved as the lover obviously discarded her intellect. She recounts: My logic he sets at defiance, Declares that my Latin’s no use; And when I begin to talk Science He calls me a dear little goose.

Qtd. in Patricia Murphy, In Science’s Shadow: Literary Constructions of Late Victorian Women (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006): p. 62.


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pretense by which Mrs. Gibson contrived her marriage inflects her communication in general; as the narrator explains, “About novels and poetry, travels and gossip, personal details, or anecdotes of any kid, she always made exactly the remarks which are expected from an agreeable listener” (97). Mrs. Gibson understands her deceitfulness to be a mark of femininity – and her success in wrangling Gibson affirms its effectiveness as a tool for the social progress of an underprivileged woman. While once professing to Molly her first husband’s devotedness, Mrs. Gibson shows both her powers of fabrication and her defense of such: “I was always of such an affectionate sensitive nature. I remember a little poem of Mr. Kirkpatrick’s in which he compared my heart to a heart-string, vibrating to the slightest breeze.” [Molly] “I thought harp-strings required a pretty strong finger to make them sound … .” “My dear child, you’ve no more poetry in you than your father.” (447)

Attesting to the novel’s critique of the false values of romantic rhetoric, Mrs. Gibson treats Molly’s factual frame of mind as unfeminine, while defending the artfulness of poetry. Gaskell demonstrates that Mrs. Gibson’s feminization of deceit and poetry – and their effectiveness as a means of self-improvement – is not an exclusive fault. The social authority of Grinstead’s, the village bookshop, consolidates these same values: [Grinstead’s] was the centre of news and gossip, the club, as it were, of the little town. Everybody who pretended to gentility in the place belonged to it. It was a test of gentility, indeed, rather than of education or a love of literature … There were residents in the little town, such as Mrs. Goodenough, who privately thought reading a great waste of time, that might be much better employed in sewing, and knitting, and pastry-making, but who nevertheless belonged to it as a mark of station … . (496)

The tension between practical domestic arts like needlework and baking and the idle pastime of reading signals the social clout identified with ‘poetry’ and ‘the poetic’ as a front for refined femininity in this novel. While Hyacinth imitates the enhancements of the literary arts with some initial success (that is, she convinces Gibson that she is more “respectable” than her later behavior reveals), a resident upper-class character, Lady Hamley, essentializes the poetic feminine and its attendant disregard of practical life. “Unworldly and romantic to a fault,” (57) Lady Hamley was “a great reader, and had considerable literary taste” (43). Lady Hamley spends the bulk of her time at Hamley Hall reclusively, in a room overlooking a lily pond: “about this unseen pond in the deep shade Lady Hamley had written many a pretty four-versed poem since she lay on her sofa, alternately reading and composing poetry” (44).


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In Gaskell’s depiction of the “every day,” poetry becomes a sign of escapism and impractical femininity. Like Mrs. Gibson, Lady Hamley extrapolates a range of feminine and desirable characteristics from “poetry.” When she first meets Molly, she intuits immediately and appreciatively that the girl is “poetic”: “… you like poetry! … I was sure you did, from your face. Have you read this last poem of Mrs. Hemens?” (64).14 Lady Hamley shares her poetic characteristics with her son Osborne, and both live feebly and precipitously in the realm of fantasy, imagination, and romance. Osborne, an amateur poet, squanders a promising career at Cambridge, racks up debt that his family cannot pay, and more closely resembles a romantic hero than a prudent heir when he secretly and improvidently marries a Roman Catholic French governess and fathers her child.15 Meanwhile, Osborne’s impractical and furtive choices accompany a distinctly feminine persona. Squire Hamley tells Molly that “Osborne has a girl’s delicate face, and a slight make, and hands and feet as small as a lady’s” (74). Later, the Squire tells Gibson that [Osborne is] “always in his element talking to women. I sometimes think he’s half a woman himself, he spends so much money and is so unreasonable” (392). Characteristically less literal than her husband, Lady Hamley feminizes Osborne through his poetry rather than his body: she thinks his verses “are almost as good as Mrs. Hemens’” (64). That both Lady Hamley and Osborne die in Wives and Daughters adds a special valence to their poetic idealism: Gaskell shows that the “every day” scheme of this novel cannot and does not sustain characters whose romantic delusions include Lady Hamley’s overestimation of her unpublished son’s talent, or Osborne’s melodramatic and disastrous marriage. Gaskell’s common-sense approach to the domestic love story upholds instead the orientation of practical characters, which excludes not only the novel’s poets, but also the scientific men whose esotericism marks a similar alienation. (The similarity between these poets and scientists leads me to rethink the critical division denoted by Schor and Morris that favors feminine tropes and “languages” over male ones.) Gibson, “not a man who could make conversation,” (33) relates well to the gentlemen-scientists in Hollingford, the “odd-looking, simplehearted … leaders of the scientific world” who were similarly “very much in earnest about their own subjects, and not having much to say on any other” (39). 14

Mrs. Gibson, in contrast, complains that Molly is like her father and thus not “poetic” enough (267, 447). Both Mrs. Gibson and Mrs. Hamley interpret Molly’s femininity in ways that serve themselves: Mrs. Gibson defends her own frivolity indirectly by critiquing Molly’s unpoetic imagination, and Mrs. Hamley projects femininity on to Molly to forge an instant bond with the girl. This variable register shows the slipperiness and self-interestedness of Gaskell’s treatment of femininity – which is a kind of “fiction” that Mrs. Gibson and Mrs. Hamley read according to their own wants. 15 Osborne’s French family bears a similarity to William Wordsworth’s youthful experience. As a young man, Wordsworth fathered a French daughter, whose presence in his life functions in his poetry as a sign of early and indiscrete passion.


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Such partisan interest relays a recurrent problem in Wives and Daughters – the narrow-mindedness (whether poetic or scientific) that Gaskell ominously links to stereotypical gender roles, and that results in unhappy marriages like the Gibsons’. For instance, eligible widower Lord Hollingford fails to make even casual contact with women and Gaskell attributes his failure to the scientific domain in which he lives, much like Lady Hamley in her pond-side retreat. Hollingford resists his sister’s encouragement to attend the Easter ball by asserting his inability to speak to women: “And what shall I say to my partner? I haven’t a notion: I shall have no subject in common … [My partner will be] disappointed when [she] find[s] I can neither dance nor talk!” (296). Roger Hamley alone transcends the social and emotional withdrawal that marks the other medical and scientific men in Wives and Daughters, and yet his ascendance to self-knowledge and non-partisan communication is hard-learned. Unlike his effete brother, Roger is hearty and strong, economically shrewd, and poised to make a brilliant contribution to scientific naturalism. To his mother, perceiving the world through the lens of poetry, Roger appears merely simple: Roger is not much of a reader; at least, he doesn’t care for poetry, and books of romance, or sentiment. He is so fond of natural history; and that takes him, like the squire, a great deal out of doors; and when he is in, he is always reading scientific books that bear upon his pursuits. (66)

Roger’s preference for science and the outdoors signals his empirical approach to the world, but also (and unlike the intellectually detached and philosophical scientists in the novel) his careful observation of life and ready involvement in it. Roger’s scholarship benefits from observations “of a fine and accurate kind” (365), and his language is equally precise: as Gibson says, “one gets a great deal of meaning out of Roger’s words” (591). Roger’s rising reputation as a scientific philosopher at Cambridge earns him a prestigious fellowship, and soon after, he is sent on an explorative mission to Africa as a naturalist.16 But before he leaves for Africa, Roger’s good sense falters when he falls in love with beautiful but capricious Cynthia Kirkpatrick. In his estimation of Cynthia alone, Roger acts childishly and irrationally: “with all a lover’s quickness of imagination and triteness of fancy, he called her a star, a flower, a nymph, a witch, an angel, or a mermaid, a nightingale, a siren, as one or another of her attributes rose up before him” (371). The miscellany of these endearments contradicts Roger’s academic reputation for observational and linguistic precision. These terms employ a language identified with poetry and romance, genres unfamiliar to scientific Roger, and illustrative of emotional deceptiveness in Wives and Daughters. The unofficial engagement between Roger and Cynthia also stands to derail the novel’s revision of domestic romance, for the prospect of their marriage augurs the same mismatch as that endured by the Gibsons. 16

As many have pointed out, Roger is modeled on Darwin (D’Albertis 139).

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In keeping with this novel’s pattern of literary preferences forming and revealing character, the lessons of literature writ large deliver Roger from the fascinations of Cynthia and the disappointments that their marriage would instantiate. Roger’s letters to Cynthia from Africa fail to interest the object of their affection. Cynthia passes one letter to Molly, complaining that “I have not read [one passage] myself for it looked dullish – all about Aristotle and Pliny – and I want to get this bonnetcap made up before we go out to pay our calls” (413). Cynthia’s letters in return to Roger document her disinterest in his work and by association, in him. These letters reveal Cynthia’s true nature, as Roger later tells Gibson: “I did love Cynthia very much. Her manners and her beauty bewitched me; but her letters, – short, hurried letters, – sometimes showing that she really hadn’t taken the trouble to read mine through, – I cannot tell you the pain they gave me!” (642). Roger’s confession to Gibson constitutes a lesson the older man did not learn, as Cynthia’s disinterest in Roger’s work is a reprisal of her mother’s determination to protect her “finer” sensibilities from the realities of medical practice. While Cynthia clearly prizes the same superficial values as her mother, she also possesses the self-knowledge to see them as such: she displays a canny and resigned understanding of her own insubstantiality, which again and again she describes in literary terms. In this discussion between the step-sisters, the example of sincere, straightforward Molly prompts Cynthia to reflect upon her own literaryinflected shortcomings: [Cynthia] “I wish I was good! … I am not good, and I never shall be now. Perhaps I might be a heroine still, but I shall never be a good woman, I know.” [Molly] “Do you think it easier to be a heroine?” [Cynthia] “Yes, as far as one knows of heroines from history. I’m capable of a great jerk, an effort, and then a relaxation – but steady, every-day goodness is beyond me.” (221)

Cynthia’s self-identification as a heroine incapable of “every-day goodness” in fact renounces her position as the heroine of Gaskell’s “every-day story.” The heroine’s conventions after which Cynthia styles herself – her devastating feminine wiles – are the same ones that end her relationship with Roger (the novel’s indisputable hero) and propel her to marry the wealthy Mr. Henderson of London and thus satisfy her desire for money and position rather than emotional satisfaction. Cynthia, in her own words, does not like “people with deep feelings” (601). Her expectations for marriage and her mother’s unqualified joy for her daughter replicate the standards that Braddon supports in The Doctor’s Wife, which in its overdetermining reflection of the values of literary romance, prizes the trappings of the “heroine” above emotional or psychological maturation. Gaskell’s use of Molly as a correction to the feminine deceit and delusion instilled in Cynthia shows the didactic and realistic undertone of Wives and Daughters. Molly’s path in the novel starts with self-conscious references to the conventions of literary romance and develops gradually into Gaskell’s revisionary and realistic


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domestic love story. This transformation principally depends upon Molly’s learned extrication of herself from the conventions of romance, a process that demands that she oppose the values of Mrs. Gibson, Cynthia, and Lady Hamley. In the novel’s opening chapter, Molly’s vulnerability to the structures and strictures of romance surfaces when she inadvertently is left at the Towers after a party, and must spend the night in the company of fine strangers and Hyacinth Clare, who at the time works as Lady Cumnor’s attendant. Hyacinth is to blame for Molly’s unplanned stay at the Towers, as she forgot to reunite Molly with the Brownings before they left for home. Molly’s first visit to the Towers is expressed in the language of the fairy tale, and its themes of captivity and rescue.17 Molly’s introduction to this bewildering world comes under the tutelage of Hyacinth, and continues, as she gets older, through the example of Lady Hamley. Moreover, Molly’s relief in reuniting with her father and leaving the mystifying Towers anticipates the same values that she will pursue when she learns to love the overtly un-romantic Roger. But before she chooses Roger, Molly must learn her own lesson in the pitfalls of a romantic or “literary” consciousness. When Gibson sends Molly to stay with the Hamleys and avoid the attentions of Mr. Coxe, Lady Hamley inadvertently stirs Molly’s romantic interest in Osborne. Molly’s girlhood acquaintance with both Hamley brothers –first through their mother’s description and then in person – reveals the novel’s larger trajectory of romantic aspiration. Academic, scientific Roger, who Molly meets first, functions as her de facto tutor, and the poetic, mysterious Osborne her Byronic hero: [Molly] looked to [Roger’s] opinion, to his authority on almost every subject … Still, although they were drawn together in this very pleasant relationship, each was imagining some one very different for the future owner of their whole heart – their highest and completest love. Roger looked to find a grand woman, his equal, and his empress; beautiful in person, serene in wisdom, ready for counsel, as was Egeria. Molly’s little wavering maiden fancy dwelt on the unseen Osborne, who was now a troubadour, and now a knight, such as he wrote about in one of his own poems; some one like Osborne, perhaps, rather than Osborne himself, for she shrank from giving a personal form and name to the hero that was to be. (147)

While Osborne occupies the position of the traditional romantic hero – dashing, mysterious, and doomed – Roger, less dramatically, is friend and mentor to Molly. As Roger introduces Molly to the rudiments of scientific naturalism, “[he] cherished her first little morsel of curiosity, and nursed it into a very proper desire for further information. Then he brought out books on the subject, and translated the slightly pompous and technical language into homely every-day speech” (120). Roger’s role as mentor differs from her father’s restriction of Molly’s education 17 See Schor 185, and Karen Boiko, “Reading and (Re) Writing Class: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters,” Victorian Literature and Culture 33 (2005): 86.

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(encouraging only the strictly “necessary” acquirements of reading and writing). Roger sees a practical effect of Molly’s education, for he treats her incipient scientism as a consolation to her homesickness and regret over her father’s remarriage. He “felt himself of real help to her in her hours of need, and in making her take an interest in books, which treated of higher things than the continual fiction and poetry which she had hitherto read” (147). Unlike the literally-minded Gibson, Roger corrals his scientific objectivity towards personal consolation as well as professional success. Gaskell essentially does the same thing in utilizing the methods of science to instill those emotional and psychological truths upon which happy domestic relations depend. That is, the education of “higher things” than fiction and poetry to which Roger introduces Molly serves the girl throughout her adolescence and charts her romantic destiny as well as her fraught reception into a community unfamiliar with women who possess such knowledge. While Mrs. Gibson objects to Molly’s intellectualism and worries that her stepdaughter will “be a bluestocking by and by” (267), others with more social and intellectual authority respect Molly’s academic turn. With uncharacteristic enthusiasm, Lord Hollingford – the same widower who resists attending balls for fear of being unable to converse with his dancing partners – tells Gibson “what a charming little lady [his daughter] is! Most girls of her age are so difficult to talk to; but she is intelligent and charming and full of interest in all sorts of sensible things; well read, too – she was up in Le Règne Animal – and very pretty!” (297).18 That Hollingford’s positive estimation of Molly does not threaten her femininity discounts Mrs. Gibson’s label of “bluestocking” and shows Gaskell’s effort to claim knowledge and learning as a pursuit both socially advantageous and sufficiently feminine. Gaskell’s critique of the misleading effects of a ‘poetic’ interpretation of the world comes to a crisis point when Molly’s sexual reputation is jeopardized. Molly experiences the danger of feminine gossip and romantic speculation (imprecise languages in the extreme) when she attempts to help Cynthia break off a botched engagement to Mr. Preston, land-agent of the Towers. Molly’s circumspect meetings with Preston lead to rumors that she, and not Cynthia, is the object of Preston’s affections. Two of Molly’s defenders, her father and Lady Harriet, use fictional terms to describe her predicament, thus augmenting Gaskell’s critique of the fictional license (and in this context, licentiousness) of courtship language. Mr. Gibson warns his daughter of the projected relationship between herself and Preston, saying: “It is all a mystery. I hate to have you mixed up in mysteries.” [Molly] “I hate to be mixed up. But what can I do? I know of another mystery

18 Wives and Daughters editor Pam Morris notes that Le Règne Animal was written by Baron George Cuvier, a pioneer of modern zoology, comparative anatomy, and paleontology, in 1817 (665).


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which I am pledged not to speak about. I cannot help myself.” “Well, all I can say is, never be the heroine of a mystery.” (519)

To Gibson, being the “heroine of a mystery” is a path to ill-repute. But where the doctor characteristically puzzles over the “mysteriousness” of courtship gossip, Lady Harriet more perceptively determines the real cause behind Molly’s meetings with Preston: “I think it is much more likely that Clare’s own daughter – that pretty pawky Miss Kirkpatrick – is the real heroine of this story … She always looks like the heroine of a genteel comedy … Now little Molly Gibson has a certain gaucherie about her which would disqualify her at once from any clandestine proceedings. Besides, ‘clandestine!’ why, the child is truth itself.” (526)

As Lady Harriet correctly identifies, Cynthia is indeed the “heroine” of the romance with Preston, which effectively disqualifies her from the new breed of heroine that Gaskell is establishing in her “every day story.” Cynthia’s secretive, deceitful relations with men ultimately earn her a conventionally successful but marginal place in the novel’s final constellation of relationships, while the role of “heroine” is scientific, pragmatic Molly’s bequest to Wives and Daughters and, moreover, to Gaskell’s new conception of domestic romance founded on scientific precision rather than poetic innuendo. Molly’s maturation is completed by a revision of a childhood delusion which also signals her transformation from a romantic to realistic point of view. Wives and Daughters begins and ends with Molly’s two trips to the Towers. The first one establishes Molly’s childish, fairy-tale version of the grand house as a prison from which she must escape to return to her loving father. But her second visit, arranged for her recuperation from illness while her family attends Cynthia’s London wedding, revises Molly’s imaginative conception with an accurate vision of life at the Towers. She enjoys the company of the Cumnors, regains her health, and by the end of the visit, “was astonished … for being sorry to leave the Towers; and found it difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile the long-fixed idea of the house as a place wherein to suffer all a child’s tortures of dismay and forlornness with her new and fresh conception” (621).19 Molly’s mature experience at the Towers represents more than the correction of a childhood fallacy: it marks the end of the imaginative fallacies that, in turn, posits the self-knowledge that leads to Molly’s happy (prospective) marriage to Roger. Molly’s path to marriage has been obstructed by her sentimental fascination with Osborne and by the punishing 19

Gaskell’s refutation of young Molly’s fairy-tale like perception of the Towers with a more mature and realistic vision provides an interesting contrast to the ethos that George MacDonald ultimately affirms in Adela Cathcart. MacDonald’s novel embraces the implications of happily-ever-after with Adela and Harry Armstrong’s engagement in its purposely vague and idealistic conclusion.

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effects of her entanglement with Preston – both of which were perpetuated by the influence of ‘poetic’ women, Lady Hamley and Cynthia – and, indirectly, by the failures of her step-mother to provide her with adequate guidance, as was inaugurated during Molly’s childhood visit to the Towers. But by the novel’s end, such staples of the clichéd romance as the Byronic hero and the romantic scandal are replaced by Molly’s fully conscious match with Roger, her equal in truth, accuracy, and sincerity. Because the pairing of Molly and Roger obliterates the false values of romantic fiction, it (re)defines love as a measure of keen understanding, not fantasy. The love between Molly and Roger is aided by his observational accuracy, a skill he imparts to Molly when she is a young girl, and one that he temporarily neglects in his fascination with Cynthia. The “every day” love story that Gaskell writes about Molly and Roger has more in common, in fact, with the modern methods of scientific observation and perception to which Roger so brilliantly contributes than with the literary-styled fancies that preoccupy Mrs. Gibson, Cynthia, Lady Hamley, and – during her brief fascination with Osborne – Molly. Roger’s love for Molly also realizes his maturity; as the narrator says, “He was no longer a boy to rush at the coveted object; he was a man capable of judging and abiding” (636). Roger thereby utilizes the skills that have brought him scientific renown in choosing Molly as his wife. In her reconciliation of the love story with scientific methods of judgment, Gaskell proffers a new model of Victorian realism. Significant to my interests is the eclipse of the doctor (Gibson) by the scientist (Roger) in the marriage plot that closes Wives and Daughters and comprises its argument for cultural and literary progress. That Gibson “never learned to anatomize a woman’s heart” (396) while Roger triumphs, both professionally and personally, reflects a Victorian world-view in which the medical mindset is curtailed by cultural limits (such as the separate spheres and a cursory understanding of women), and the scientific perspective achieves, in contrast, a relatively disinterested and objective understanding. The reflection of these perspectives in the marriage plot crystallizes the status of the medical and scientific epistemologies in the 1860s: medicine, as Gibson epitomizes, is hampered by the social customs that propel him into an unwise marriage in the same way that educational and professional limitations for women drive Mrs. Gibson’s self-serving deceit and escapism. In contrast, the discipline of science is defended throughout the novel as a method that stands to liberate men and women from the short-sighted limitations of social customs and cultural scripts, including the romantic fallacies perpetuated by literature and poetry. *** In Wives and Daughters, Gaskell ambitiously seeks an alternative to Martineau’s sanguine faith in Positivism, Eliot’s somber reflection of the discord between a scientific and romantic perspective, or MacDonald’s reactionary dismissal of modern professionalism and medical theory. The courtship of Molly and Roger, though


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unfinished, brilliantly maps the way that a mature, scientifically informed male or female subject can fall in love without resorting to the myopia and subterfuge that feeds so many ill-fated penny-romances. The Doctor’s Wife is a challenging novel to situate, as Braddon’s self-consciousness of the conventions that she eventually yields to invests their idealism with an ironical edge. Nevertheless, by complying with the standards of the sentimental romance, The Doctor’s Wife finally evades the epistemological confusion attributed to an inveterate reader and her doctorhusband, which epitomized the larger fractures that result from a culture divided into separate spheres. Generic differences aside, Braddon and Gaskell’s novels come to their points of resolution through a variety of measures that expel the doctor from a domestic picture of success and fulfillment. This is not to say that doctors George Gilbert and Edward Gibson comprise the central position in either novel, but their orientation as doctors underwrites a significant marital tension at the mid-century. In this way, Braddon and Gaskell, two wildly divergent novelists, explore marriage through a fairly uniform understanding of the conflict between masculine and pragmatic professionalism, and feminine, escapist frivolity that medical men and women styled after literary heroines (especially those who experience a class rise) seem uniquely qualified to represent. This chapter, like the others in this book, thereby constitutes an understanding of its rational figurehead, the Victorian doctor, in tandem with a particular marital scheme. The mid-century divergence between acquisitive and impractical women and their emotionally limited doctor-husbands also heralds a more divisive relationship I will find in the later century, in novels that feature doctors who are unable to enter into or sustain even the kind of deeply fractured and mutually confusing relations we see through George and Isabel, and Gibson and Hyacinth. More generally, this chapter evinces a moment in the Victorian effort to reconcile a modern figure with the literary conventions that, through the marriage plot, turn upon a set of feminized ideals that do not easily admit rationalism, scientism, and the professional mindset through which they are socialized. Along with George Levine, I have featured the unwieldy integration of science into the domestic novel in part through attention to the novels’ self-consciousness of the role of fiction in an increasingly rational age. Both Braddon and Gaskell’s novels, and particularly their female heroines, routinely use the languages of fiction to understand their difficult romantic and marital relationships. In styling themselves after various heroines, Isabel, Hyacinth, Cynthia, and for a while, Molly, struggle to align the men in their lives to the complementary position of the hero, a task that proves to be impossible when the man is a doctor. Domestic satisfaction (Isabel) and love (Molly and Roger) only comes when the doctors in the texts have been excluded. For Braddon, the exclusion of George Gilbert enables Isabel’s romantic fantasy, and for Gaskell, the eclipse of Gibson and Hyacinth with Molly and Roger constitutes a realism that admits to the logic of science and love, and corrects earlier, crippling notions of the intellectual disparities between “heroes” and “heroines.”


Chapter 4

Myopic Medicine and Far-Sighted Femininity: Wilkie Collins’s Armadale and Heart and Science One of the many paradoxical features of Wilkie Collins’s novels is that they transform generic and thematic traditions at the same time that they meticulously chronicle the cultural status quo. Collins’s dual success as a “king of inventors” (as Catherine Peters entitles her biography of the novelist) and as a vigorous scribe of Victorian mores reaches its peak in his 1860s novels – The Woman in White (1860), No Name (1862), Armadale (1866), and The Moonstone (1868). The later novels of the 1870s and 1880s follow Collins’s plot innovations in such a formulaic way that the mistaken identities, nervous disorders, professional missteps, and Mary/ Magdalene dichotomies (to note some of his favorite features) lack the earlier novels’ ingenuity and potential to disturb. But throughout his canon, Collins’s reflection of cultural trends stays current, and to such a degree that several of his later novels read like indexes of late Victorian controversies: Heart and Science (1882) has such a relationship to vivisection, as does The Evil Genius (1886) to divorce law, and Blind Love (1889) to the movement for Irish independence. Thus, by way of the representational currency that is Collins’s most sustained achievement, his novels map not only controversies in Victorian culture but their evolution. In this vein, the representation of the doctor in the Collins canon encapsulates medicine’s fraught rise to authority. Collins attests to the emergent mindset that fostered scientifically based medicine, and that both marginalized and elevated the work of the doctor, conferring a considerable power that would increasingly be interpreted as suspicious and even sinister. An example of the way that the doctor benefited from science at the same time that he became associated with arcane knowledge is seen in his increased access to medical technology. The microscope, for instance, commonly used by the 1860s (Shortt 71), became a new symbol of the doctor’s scientific faculties, and added to his prestige by introducing him to provinces beyond the sight of the layperson. In parallel with the development of scientific and medical technologies was the perception of nature and natural law fostered by Darwinism. Darwin’s literary

This term for Collins was originally termed by his publisher George Bentley in 1863. Penelope Cornfield refers to this progress as the “Scientific Revolution” in Victorian medicine, and documents such developments as the adoption of anesthetics in Britain (1846), antiseptics (1867), and immunology (the 1880s).


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and cultural biases have been thoroughly articulated by Gillian Beer, George Levine, and Ruth Yeazell, and while these critics have represented the influence of cultural assumptions on Darwinian theory, they confirm Darwin’s influence on the Victorian frame of mind. Writing with a botanist’s eye for detail and an inductive scientist’s insistence on evidence, Darwin set a new standard for materialist and theoretical argument. And, in a signal contribution to the public imagination, he rewrote the human story as part of a dispassionate process that challenged the ethical tale of creationism with a survivalist account of natural determinism. Collins’s novels grapple with a similar contest between the seemingly unsympathetic world depicted by science and the morally determined events familiar to a character-driven novel or God-ordered universe. While Collins harnesses certain aspects of the rationalist’s deductive process, his selective use of a scientific mode of reasoning consistently adapts to a relatively predictable set of narrative and social conventions. That is, while Collins makes use of empirical argument, a happy marriage between a mature hero and deserving heroine remains the goal (and outcome) of most of his novels. Empiricism is usually illustrated by the doctors, lawyers, and professional law enforcers who populate Collins’s fictional worlds against his sentimental and/or moral prototypes, such as his maidens-in-distress and old-fashioned clerics. A conflict between empirical and romantic world-views often organizes Collins’s plots. In Armadale, for instance, the devastating logic of Mr. Hawbury, a doctor, challenges Ozias Midwinter’s dark presentiment that a dream foretells his destiny. Because of Hawbury’s devotion to evidence, Midwinter analyzes his own method of abstruse logic, so that the nature of argument between them becomes one of the novel’s central concerns. Armadale’s conclusion supports Midwinter’s intuitive sense instead of the hard reasoning of Mr. Hawbury. In this way, Collins exploits professional and See Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction; Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction; Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel, especially Chapter 12, “Modesty and Female Choice”; Strawbridge, “Darwin and Victorian Social Values”, In Search of Victorian Values, ed. Sigsworth. I use “mature” with one reservation. Ovid Vere (Heart and Science) undergoes a process of maturation that ennobles and educates him, and thus makes them deserving of the heroine’s love and commitment. Walter Hartwright in The Woman in White also follows (in fact, initiates) this trajectory, as does Franklin Blake in The Moonstone. However, Allan Armadale (Armadale) does not really “mature,” and neither is he “heroic” as are the others. Armadale is an exceptional novel in that its real hero, Ozias Midwinter, occupies a suspicious place for most of the novel and can only be recognized as heroic towards its end. (This novel also lacks a heroine.) Even then, Midwinter remains something of an outcast, finally unaligned to the promise of a marriage plot. A more typical Collins narrative would enable Allan Armadale to gain wisdom and gravity, and would either exile Midwinter or affect his death. This is the fate of a character I compare to Midwinter later in this chapter, The Moonstone’s Ezra Jennings.

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rational argument towards the romance that underwrites his thematic and structural foundation, but does not present that rationality as the novel’s objective. Similarly, in The Moonstone, doctor’s assistant Ezra Jenning’s progressive knowledge of barbiturates contributes to the solution of the novel’s mystery, the theft of a precious diamond. But this empirical wisdom does not tell the whole story, for Jennings himself retains an inscrutability that complicates his medical approach. Jennings’s personal tragedies, which include a failed love-affair and a mixed-race heritage that alienates him from English life, lend him a personal mysticism that compliments the diamond’s embattled colonial history and status as an ill-fated romantic gift. In effect, Jenning’s medical solution to the diamond’s theft is tempered by the abstraction that is the novelist’s, not the doctor’s, field of explanation. As Jennings exemplifies, the doctor (or in Jenning’s case, doctor’s assistant) in Collins’s novels often enacts the conflict between a moral vision of the world and a dispassionate, scientific one. The doctors that Collins depicts throughout his canon range from banal but respectable professional men to inhuman purveyors of a scientific rationale. They more often are the arbiters of other characters’ lives, whether towards good or evil, than they are the players in the romantic plots at the novels’ centers. Nearly all of these doctors practice a mode of analysis that explains their repeated exclusion from the sentimental/romantic plots of the novels: the empirical reasoning that is identified prominently with the scientific direction of Victorian medicine and Darwinism. This chapter examines two of Collins’s novels, Armadale and Heart and Science. Written in 1866 and 1882 respectively, these novels allow us to trace the Victorian doctor’s escalating authority, and more particularly, they reveal Collins’s resistance to the empiricism that he treated as antithetical to the values and lessons of fiction. A passage in Heart and Science encapsulates Collins’s preference for a romantic schema, even or especially as rational order comes to define modern life, and does so increasingly (as Heart and Science warns) at the expense of the emotional and personal bonds that are fiction’s purview: When two friends happen to meet in the street, do they ever look back along the procession of small circumstances which has led them both, from the startingpoint of their own houses, to the same spot, at the same time? Not one man in ten thousand has probably even thought of making such a fantastic inquiry as this. And consequently not one man in ten thousand, living in the midst of reality, has discovered that he is also living in the midst of romance. (12–13)

In this description, Collins discloses the “fantastic” armature behind the realistic details that punctuate his plots, such as the data gleaned from the professions, contemporary journalism, and current events. He is that “one man in ten thousand” whose inquiry reveals the “romance” in “the midst of reality.” Collins’s representation of medicine and science, moreover, usually (or at least initially) stands in for the realistic and factual approach for life that overlooks romance and the “fantastic,” but his novels – as this discussion of Armadale and Heart and


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Science argues – reinforce those unlikely schemas that a materialistic perspective mainly discounts. In other words, the medicine practiced by the majority of Collins’s doctors follows an itemized and demystifying logic, so that its realism stands against the ineffable order of love and romance that his novels explore through his fanciful use of coincidence, luck, and instinct. These latter techniques most prominently characterize the fate and virtue of womanhood, which throughout the Collins canon stands on the brink of a precipitous and absolute fall. As I argue below, the doctors in Armadale collectively embody a scientized consciousness that both dispels and exploits a ‘feminine’ intuitive sense – one that can grasp abstraction, but can also fall victim to the delusions born of superstition. In Heart and Science, the devious surgeon Benjulia literalizes the atomizing approach: he is a vivisectionist. As such, Benjulia would willingly trade the life of heroine Carmina for the scientific advancement he so craves and that her death would enable. In a sophisticated exchange between the horizon of medical knowledge and the romantic order upon which the literary love-plot depends, Collins juxtaposes these spheres of analysis in a contest in which the triumph of one necessitates the death of the other. That the fate of the literary romance is literalized by that of Victorian femininity concentrates our vision on the doctor’s devastating logic and the surgeon’s knife, and their invasive disregard for femininity’s precious and precarious integrity. Armadale The natural tendency of accurate science is to make the possessor of it look for, and eminently see, the things connected with his special pieces of knowledge; and as all accurate sciences must be sternly limited, his sight of nature gets limited accordingly. Ruskin, Modern Painters IV (6: 475)

The convoluted plot of Armadale hinges upon a series of misappropriated identities, most of which concern the name of Armadale. Allan Wrentmore, born and raised in the West Indies, takes the name of his wealthy cousin Armadale when that cousin renounces his own dissolute son Allan Armadale (II), in favor of young Wrentmore. Later, still in the West Indies, Allan (Wrentmore) Armadale’s supposed friend, Fergus Ingleby, elopes with Allan’s intended bride, Jane Blanchard. Ingleby is later exposed to be the original Allan Armadale II, the renegade son whose inheritance was redirected to Allan (Wrentmore) Armadale. Subsequently, the two Allan Armadales bear sons, each named for his father. But (Wrentmore) Armadale’s enmity drives him to murder the man he knew as Ingleby, and his son (Allan Armadale III), adopts the name of Ozias Midwinter so as to disconnect himself from his father’s crime. Meanwhile, the widowed Jane Blanchard Armadale raises her son, Allan Armadale (III) to be ignorant of his father’s misdeeds. In the kind of coincidence that orders Collins’s sensational plots,


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Allan (III) and Midwinter meet and become friends. Midwinter discovers their hidden connection and is haunted by a fear that they are destined to replay the sins of their fathers. This fear is galvanized by a dream of Allan’s that prognosticates, in a series of highly detailed vignettes, Allan’s death, which Midwinter interprets as a sure sign of their tragic and inter-generational destiny. This dream, which seems to be borne out by the novel’s events, increasingly convinces Midwinter that he and Allan are fated to pay for their fathers’ crimes. The entrance of the beautiful villainess Lydia Gwilt into Midwinter and Allan’s lives is another generational corollary to the earlier Armadale tragedy. As a young girl, Lydia was maid to the renegade Allan Armadale, a.k.a. Fergus Ingleby. She helped arrange Ingleby’s furtive marriage to Jane Blanchard, and was thereby an accessory to the complicated politics of inheritance that Ingleby wrested from Allan (Wrentmore) Armadale, Midwinter’s father. During the course of the novel’s contemporary plot line, Lydia resolves to marry Allan, heir of the Armadale estate and fortune. But under the guidance of a pair of conscientious lawyers, Allan is apprised of her criminal past, which involves other mercenary (and murderous) seductions. Midwinter, meanwhile, falls in love with Lydia with characteristic fervor and desperation. Lydia realizes that if she married Midwinter, she would still become the wife of an ‘Allan Armadale,’ and thus, on paper, lay claim to the family fortune. This plot hinges upon Allan’s death, a complication which Lydia willingly justifies. She and the besotted Midwinter marry, at which point Allan’s security is indeed jeopardized in accordance with the predictions of his dream. The adversarial relationship between rationalism and instinct correlates to Armadale’s tension between two modes of reasoning that can be more finely characterized as masculine and medical, and feminine and instinctive. Both means of explanation are dangerous and misleading, and Armadale calls for the policing of the former and the moderation of the latter. Ruskin’s invocation, above, against the particularized vision of the scientist, concurs with Collins’s portrayal of the doctors in the novel, who atomize nature (or their patients’ illnesses) into discrete pathologies and in so doing overlook significant contextual clues. As Midwinter complains in reference to a doctor’s “essentially practical” position, “the view of the medical man, when he has a problem with humanity to solve, seldom ranges beyond the point of the dissecting knife” (143). The tendency of medical advice to diminish the importance of emotion is also treated comically in the novel. When the elderly and senile Mr. Bashwood falls hopelessly in love with Lydia Gwilt, he constantly is encouraged towards “physic” cures. Pedgrift, Jr., a lawyer, notes Bashwood’s unhealthy appearance and recommends a medical solution: “Hotwater bottles to the soles of his feet, and a mustard plaster on the pit of his stomach – that’s the modern treatment” (568). In other cases, the “modern” medical method typifies a more delinquent and injurious approach to human ills. For instance, when Midwinter questions the Scottish doctor Mr. Hawbury about the significance of Allan’s dream, the doctor answers with an emotionless materialism. Mr. Hawbury’s interpretation of the dream rejects Midwinter’s paranormal convictions (or Allan’s characteristically


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artless explanation of indigestion). For Hawbury, dreams string together the images and impressions of one’s experience while awake, and the narratives ascribed to these images are purely imaginative. As he explains: … we don’t believe that a reasonable man is justified in attaching a supernatural interpretation to any phenomenon which comes within the range of his senses, until he has certainly ascertained that there is no such thing as a natural explanation of it to be found in the first instance. (173)

The medical theory here follows an atomizing principle that separates sensory information from the story that unifies it. Hawbury’s impersonal logic also draws upon the collective authority of the medical profession and thereby reveals a deductive norm that disqualifies individuating circumstances: “There is nothing at all extraordinary in my theory of dreams,” the doctor explains. “[I]t is the theory accepted by the great mass of my profession … ” (174). In Contesting Cultural Authority, Frank Turner situates such hostility to Midwinter’s metaphysical perspective in the professional rise of the Victorian scientist: By claiming their own epistemology as the exclusive foundation for legitimate science and as the correct model for knowledge generally, the professionalizing scientists sought to undermine the intellectual legitimacy of alternative modes of scientific thought and research. Positivist epistemology provided an intellectual solvent to cleanse contemporary science of metaphysical and theological survivals. (182)

Hawbury reflects this urge to extinguish the messy theories of the untrained empiricist, and he resolves the debate with Midwinter with the “pitiless politeness of a conquering man” (151). More violent examples of doctors neglecting personal contexts include the novel’s opening episode, in which Allan (Wrentmore) Armadale, Midwinter’s The dream-theory that Hawbury expounds closely recurs in The Moonstone, when Ezra Jennings borrows from William Carpenter’s fifth edition of Human Physiology (1855), later expanded in Principles of Mental Physiology (1874): “ … every sensory impression which has once been recognized by the perceptive consciousness, is registered … in the brain, and may be reproduced at some subsequent time, although there may be no consciousness of its existence in the mind during the whole intermediate period” (The Moonstone 440). Jennings’s use of Carpenter’s theory is documented by Lyn Pykett in Wilkie Collins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 170. There was a counter-tradition against this hyper-positivist point of view that Collins does not depict. As Jonathan Smith writes in Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), some thinkers sought to “portray science as an imaginative, speculative, creative enterprise” (13).


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father, receives the grudging and callous attentions of Mr. Neal, another Scottish doctor, as he lies on his deathbed in a German spa. This Armadale suffered a stroke while he was writing a letter that confessed his murder of his cousin Allan Armadale/Fergus Ingleby. The local German doctor describes the case to Mr. Neal, appealing to the Scot’s greater experience and prestige: “Over that fatal letter, the stroke had struck him – over that fatal letter, we found him, paralyzed as you see him now” (18). Neal’s rejoinder typifies his dismissal of the power of emotions over bodily health: “‘Thus far,’ said Mr. Neal, ‘you merely show me that you are exciting yourself. This is too serious a matter to be treated as you are treating it now. You have involved Me in the business – and I insist on seeing my way plainly’” (19). Neal’s insistence that contextual information is unserious and unworthy of his attentions reveals his inability “to be drawn … out of the regions of plain fact” (16). While Mr. Neal is heartless, the novel’s real medical villain is Doctor Downward, a charlatan without medical qualifications who manipulates the discipline for his own financial gain. Downward, one of Lydia Gwilt’s accomplices in her plot to secure the Armadale fortune, first surfaces as an abortionist in Pimlico. He later appears in Hampstead, where he has purchased a sanatorium and the identity and credentials of a Doctor Le Doux. The setting of the novel in the early 1850s predates the Medical Amendment Act of 1858’s regulation of such use of false or deficient medical credentials. The Sanatorium, too, dramatizes the mid-century scandal of wrongful confinement in lunatic asylums, as publicized by the Act to Amend the Law Relating to Lunatics, 1862. Le Doux knowingly exploits these holes in the system; as he tells Lydia, “This is not a madhouse; this is not a Licensed Establishment – no doctors’ certificates are necessary here!” (740). But Le Doux’s imitation of a serious alienist relies upon such fallacies in the system. His office in the Sanatorium displays “long rows of glass jars, in which shapeless dead

When Neal marries the late (Wrentmore) Armadale’s wife and becomes stepfather to young Midwinter, his violence against his stepson extends from this refusal to empathize. Another sham doctor in the novel is Oldershaw, “a traveling quack-doctor, who dealt in perfumery and medicines,” (632) and who with his wife informally adopted Lydia Gwilt (whose parentage was unknown) as a child. The Oldershaws exploited Lydia’s stunning red hair as a bogus example of their cosmetic products until Jane Blanchard took pity on the child and hired her as a maid. These events are recounted by a character hired to uncover Lydia’s ambiguous past (632–47). As Peter McCandless explains in “Liberty and Lunacy: The Victorians and Wrongful Confinement,” Journal of Social History, 11 (1970): 366–86, the Lunacy Act of 1845 “prohibited any medical man interested in or attending a licensed house from signing a certificate for the admission of a patient into that house” (370). Yet what constituted interest in or attendance was not entirely clear. In 1862, a more direct clause prohibiting such arrangements was passed, offering further protection for “lunatics” as well as for those wrongly labeled mad (371).


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creatures of a dull white color floated in yellow liquid” (711).10 The unidentified “creatures” mean to legitimize Le Doux’s work through their mysteriousness; information about what they are, where they came from, and what problems they manifest would render them (presumably) human instead of pure “specimens.” Their suspension in glass jars also anticipates the treatment of future patients in the Sanitarium and their ostensible status as objects of research, which proposition is doubly disturbing in a context where no research occurs. Le Doux prompts Lydia’s recognition of the outward signs of modern medicine, which for him fully render its power: “Here I am,” he says, “with my galvanic apparatus, and my preserved specimens, and all the rest of it” (712). Where Armadale’s doctors – real and false – err by way of a myopic tendency to dissect the subject from the context, structurally they oppose what is treated as a feminized urge to extrapolate isolated data into a coherent story that, invariably, supports one’s personal needs or bias. Le Doux understands this inclination as essential to womanhood, remarking that Lydia’s relentless drive to acquire the Armadale fortune was “So like a woman! … The moment she sees her object, she dashes at it headlong the nearest way. Oh, the sex! the sex!” (717). An early example in Armadale of feminine irrationality is seen in Mrs. Armadale, widow of the devious Allan Armadale/Fergus Ingleby and mother to the Allan Armadale at the center of the novel’s contemporary plot. Mrs. Armadale’s near-obsessive anxiety for Allan reflects the feminine emotionalism that often accompanies a genuine intuitive gift in Collins’s novels. When Mrs. Armadale first meets Midwinter, she immediately discerns his true identity as the other Allan Armadale, but denounces him as an interloper who will expose Allan to the dangerous Armadale heritage. She insists on these pronouncements in her “vehement, female way” (72), irrespective of any confirmation. While she correctly discerns Midwinter’s identity, her suspicions of him reveal the tendency of the feminine mind to go astray. When Midwinter suffers a bout of nerves (“brain fever”), Mrs. Armadale asserts that his illness is a sham meant to win Allan’s devotion: “It was useless to reason with her. The whole College of Physicians might have certified to [Midwinter’s] illness, and, in her present frame of mind, Mrs. Armadale would have disbelieved the College, one and all, from the president downwards” (73). Collins conflates Mrs. Armadale’s vulnerable situation with the faltering authority of a Victorian woman who follows her emotions in a world increasingly governed by the doctrinaire truths of professional men. Her imagined dispute with “the whole College of Physicians” underscores the novel’s polarized treatment of doctors and women. The illogical female mind, as Collins defines it, especially is susceptible to medical roguery. As an abortionist, Doctor Downward’s success rests on the 10

The branch of medical science that such specimens attest to is, in the 1860s, the avant-garde field of physiology. As discussed later in this chapter in reference to Heart and Science, physiology was controversial for its dependence on vivisection, dissection, and the treatment of the body as an organism rather than a human being.


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ignorance and need of his female clientele, who presumably are unmarried and/or working as prostitutes, as well as on the illusion perpetrated by his “carefullyconstructed” appearance. Downward … was one of those … physicians, in whom the public – especially the female public – implicitly trust. He had the necessary bald head, the necessary double eyeglass, the necessary black clothes, and the necessary blandness of manner, all complete. His voice was soothing, his ways were deliberate, his smile was confidential. (409–10)

Downward’s female clientele willingly amalgamates the identifying clues into the composite that best serves their presumably desperate aims. His façade of everything “necessary” to a physician thus masks the real necessity of medical training. As the Sanatorium’s director, Le Doux again manipulates women who lack the skills and experience to discriminate between reality and fiction. The tours of the Sanatorium that Le Doux offers in preparation for its opening appeal to local women with leisure time and a titillated interest in the insane or “nervous.” These women take the tour as a “golden opportunity to plunge into public life” (768); their ignorance that the life they are introduced to belies a clandestine purpose and no scientific foundation dramatizes their gullibility. When asked by one curious lady if the patients read novels to fill their purportedly tranquil days, Le Doux answers that they read “[n]othing painful … There may be plenty painful in real life, and for that reason, we don’t want it here” (769). Le Doux’s restriction of novels that reflect “real life” shows his utter subversion of fact and fiction; realistic fictions are rejected in a place founded upon the realistic fiction of Le Doux’s medical practice. The conflict between medical and feminine methods of thinking is reflected and finally compromised in Midwinter’s character, which for most of the novel is divided precariously. Midwinter anticipates the more famous Ezra Jennings, doctor’s assistant in The Moonstone: the tragic man whose ‘mixed’ blood dooms him to a psycho-social no-man’s-land. Midwinter’s constitution is the inheritance of miscegenation; his parents are (Wrentmore) Armadale and a Creole woman, and their son manifests a tortured personality that combines his “mother’s negro blood in [his] face” (105) and “his father’s heathen belief in Fate” (120). These fraught legacies result in a “sensitive female organization” (265) that attests to Collins’s understanding of emotionality as feminine, and explains Midwinter’s chronic nervous condition (variously described as “brain fever” and “nerves”). His shattered identity reveals itself through his declaration of love for Allan, which sounds like that of an impassioned heroine: “I do love him! It will come out of me – I can’t keep it back. I love the very ground he treads on! I would give my life – yes, the life that is precious to me now, because his kindness has made it a happy one – I


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tell you I would give my life – ” (122).11 Midwinter here evinces a series of inner conflicts: he admits his feelings against his better judgment (“I can’t keep [them] back”); he would relinquish the life that Allan’s friendship inspires him to value, and this confession comes, incongruously, as a confirmation that his feelings for Allan enable the “calmer and brighter thoughts” and “truer view of the world” (121) in the face of the tragic destiny he expects. Late in the novel, the Reverend Mr. Brock, a friend to (the now-deceased) Mrs. Armadale and Allan’s unofficial guardian, advises Midwinter on reconciling his dangerously divided consciousness: It is no part of my design to combat the belief which I know you to hold, that mortal creatures may be the objects of supernatural intervention in their pilgrimage through this world. Speaking as a reasonable man, I own that I cannot prove you wrong. Speaking as a believer in the Bible, I am bound to go farther, and to admit that you possess a higher than any human warrant for the faith that is in you. The one object which I have it at heart to attain, is to induce you to free yourself from the paralyzing fatalism of the heathen and the savage, and to look at the mysteries that perplex, and the portents that daunt you, from the Christian’s point of view. (621–2)

Brock’s words resound with the values that Collins advocates in lieu of an empirical perspective. Brock directs his advice towards those very unique experiences that inspired Midwinter’s mystical beliefs. In his hope that Midwinter progress beyond the “paralyzing fatalism” that is the bequest of the “heathen and the savage,” Brock also urges Midwinter’s integration into a Christian and English identity – thus burying with his paranoid fatalism the implied curse of his mixed parentage, his mother’s Creole blood and his father’s “heathen belief in Fate” (120). Collins here combines a version of supernatural belief that is both acceptable to the cleric’s standard of faith and his self-identification as “a reasonable man.” Lydia’s plot to kill Allan dramatically forces the reconciliation of Midwinter’s divided character. She and Le Doux imprison Allan in the Sanatorium under the pretense of an unnamed illness,12 and plan to kill him by leaking gas into his room through a mechanism designed to use gas to subdue (but not kill) unruly patients. 11

The homosexual implication of these words are provocative, but are eclipsed when Midwinter subsequently falls in love with Lydia Gwilt, which fosters the events that lead, ultimately, to Allan and Neelie Milroy’s marriage. Midwinter’s transfer of affection from Allan to Lydia therefore follows the progress he makes in the novel away from neurotic femininity and towards a more stable masculinity. 12 The feigning of illness to cover a domestic plot revisits a more famous sensation novel about wrongful confinement, Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1864). In that novel as in Armadale, an asylum is used as a cover for a domestic transgression; Lucy Audley is imprisoned not because she is insane, but because of her threats to the name and livelihood of a respectable family.


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At the final hour, Midwinter intuits Allan’s danger and switches rooms with him, playing out his earlier promise that he would give his life for Allan’s. Midwinter is saved, narrowly, by a repentant Lydia, who commits suicide. The experience resolves Midwinter’s previous struggle between logical and sensory information, and he accepts in a rational fashion those abstruse intuitive senses which incited him to rescue Allan, and so lays to rest his crippling and “feminine” uncertainty. As the narrator explains: Confronted by actual peril, the great nature of the man intuitively freed itself from the weaknesses that had beset it in happier and safer times. Not even the shadow of the old superstition rested on his mind now – no fatalist suspicion of himself disturbed the steady resolution that was in him. (796)

Finally transformed into the hero that Armadale lacked, Midwinter’s new conviction in the unexplained represents a triumphant compromise between narrow empiricism and zealous superstition. Moreover, his measured acceptance of the unexplained befits the manly nature that had previously been overwrought by “feminine” nerves. Midwinter’s late equanimity towards the supernatural is accomplished by an act of great courage, and inspired by his devotion to Allan. The cure of his heretofore “shattered nerves” thereby transpires through the healing properties of love and selflessness rather than through the medical materialism practiced by the novel’s doctors. The medical approach in Armadale comes to appear as shallow as Le Doux’s purported “cures” in the Sanatorium. Le Doux, furthermore, transforms his sham institution into a murder site when he stands to profit from Lydia’s projected inheritance of the Armadale fortune. Similarly, after Mr. Neal, the Scottish doctor who presided over the deathbed of Allan Armadale (Midwinter’s father), marries Armadale’s widow, his formerly cold and authoritative manner becomes violent towards young Midwinter, as alienating Armadale’s heir benefits Neal financially. Le Doux and Neal’s devolution from a medical materialism (or its imitation) into brutality signifies Collins’s perception of the inhuman side of rational science and medicine. Extending from the way that medical practice in the novel diminishes human patients into pathologized specimens, Neal and Le Doux further atomize their fellow men into material prospects. Collins thereby conceives of a slippery slope by which doctors progressively lose their humanity. Medical practice’s extension towards an inhuman drive to power and profit is deftly summarized by the lawyer Pedgrift, whose great experience in the courtroom makes him the novel’s de facto reader of personal character. In blunt distinction to the materialist diagnoses of Armadale’s doctors, Pedgrift “know[s] that circumstances are not always to be taken as they appear on the surface” (441). Deliberating on the events in the Sanatorium that resulted in Lydia’s death, Pedgrift writes to his son:

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The Doctor in the Victorian Novel I believe [Le Doux] to have been at the bottom of more of this mischief than we shall ever find out … We live … in an age eminently favorable to the growth of all roguery which is careful enough to keep up appearances. In this enlightened nineteenth century, I look upon the doctor as one of our rising men. (810)

The esoteric criminality that Pedgrift attributes to the “rising” doctor forebodes a continued influence of medical crimes as his culture embraces practical, material, and rational modes of authority. In spite of Pedgrift’s dark presentiment of the doctor’s ascension, Collins concludes the novel with a resistant celebration of those spheres of knowledge and art that rationalism cannot conquer. Midwinter chooses to withhold from Allan their undisclosed link as Armadales in the belief that doing so protects Allan’s unblemished conscience. Moreover, by “[keeping] the secret of the two names … [Midwinter] left the memory of Allan’s mother … a sacred memory in the heart of her son” (815). Allan and Midwinter practice a similar illusion in choosing to protect the secret of Lydia’s suicide and her role in the attempted murder. Midwinter’s penchant for idealism over realism is further marked by his prospective career: he might “take to Literature” (814) and thus literalize the protective and moral fictions that his management of past tragedies represents. Finally, a postscript to the novel documents a supernatural event experienced by Collins that underscores Armadale’s defense of the uncanny. After outlining the final events of the Armadale manuscript, Collins was apprised of a ship in the Liverpool harbor called The Armadale. Three deaths had lately occurred on this ship, and, as Collins writes, “the Inquest proved that the three men had been all suffocated by sleeping in poisoned air!” (817). He cites this event as incriminating proof against those “[p]ersons disposed to take the rational view” (817) of the novel’s supernatural claims. Collins’s insertion of a “real” incident as a defense for his novel’s mystical argument blurs the line between the fictional and the realistic, and so challenges rationalism’s presiding episteme. While the doctor Mr. Hawbury asserts that “[t]here is nothing at all extraordinary in my theory of dreams,” (174) Collins’s version of events in both fiction and history suggests that to deny the extraordinary is also to deny the real – albeit a real that cannot be verified. In Heart and Science, Collins develops a much more sophisticated picture of Armadale’s celebration of abstraction over pragmatism, with a more focused view of the novelist’s stake in this competition. Heart and Science: A Story of the Present Day Note … that a faithful study of the liberal arts humanizes character and permits it not to be cruel. Ovid, Ex Ponto, II, ix, 47


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While Armadale seeks a compromise between callous rationalism and hysterical emotion, which poles also denote doctors/science and women/nature, Heart and Science distills this feud into a debate between medical practices. The first, represented by “heart,” is a type of medicine that embraces morality, abstract reasoning, and the virtue of innocent womanhood. The second, denoted by material science, and more specifically, by the practice of vivisection, is a mode of medical research that denies the immaterial realm of human feeling. Collins uses an unmarried heroine, Carmina Graywell, as a metonym for the insecurity of personal happiness in an age of scientific innovation, and thereby aligns “bad” medicine with the events of the novel that stand in the way of the marriage plot. While evil vivisectionist Nathan Benjulia would willingly enable Carmina’s death for the benefit of his research, the “good” doctor, Ovid Vere, not only practices compassionate medicine, but wants to marry Carmina. Thus, the marriage plot in Heart and Science wholly depends on Ovid’s brand of ethical medicine. The alienation of vivisectionist Benjulia from the conventions of domestic morality, marked by his Jewishness and ruthless science, further aligns proper medicine with the morals associated with the marriage-plot novel. Heart and Science is a more issue-driven and violent novel than Armadale, and it differs significantly in its development of a morally conscious doctor. Armadale’s doctors (and pseudo-doctor Downward/Le Doux) never progress beyond their narrow championship of empirical science. But Ovid in Heart and Science establishes a new breed of physician: one who revises modern medicine by and through his domestic and romantic values. At the same time that Collins establishes a new direction for moral medicine in Heart and Science, he provides a devastating account of vivisection. While experiments on live animals had been practiced in France and Germany for some time, the field of physiology and its reliance on animal dissection was slow to develop in England. In the 1860s and 1870s, the rise of the physiological school was bolstered by the naturalist philosophies and scientific methodologies of T.H. Huxley, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and John Hughlings Jackson (Lawrence 58). In response to the naturalism that guided these thinkers, the antivivisection movement was formulated upon distinctly emotional and humanitarian grounds (Ritvo 163). By 1875, bills that controlled experiments on live animals had been introduced in Parliament, and the impassioned feminist, activist, and social crusader Frances Power Cobbe was especially influential in implementing legal restrictions to live dissection at this time.13 However, the emphasis in England focused on the

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Parliament passed the Cruelty to Animals Act in 1876, which required all researchers to obtain a license before conducting experiments on live animals. For analysis of this Act, see Andreas-Holger Maehle, “The Ethical Discourse on Animal Experimentation, 1650–1900,” Doctors and Ethics, eds. Andrew Wear, Johanna Geyer-Kordesch, and Roger French (Atlanta, GA: Rodolpi Press, 1993), p. 229.

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immorality of the vivisectors themselves, and the dangers their work posed to the rising generation of doctors, and by extension, to English culture.14 Perhaps the event that sparked the debate over vivisection in the public imagination was the 1873 publication of John Burden Sanderson’s Handbook for the Physiological Laboratory. Professor of Practical Physiology at University College London, who was later recruited to head a new physiology school at Oxford, Sanderson compiled in his handbook two volumes of instructive chapters by well-known physiologists. His text, however, instanced egregious errors in physiology’s delicate public relations program. Medical historian Stewart Richards singles out Sanderson’s preface as “a calamity” that “rebounded cruelly against its author and had consequences far wider than had the success or otherwise of the book it purposed to describe” (36). Sanderson and his fellow doctors wrote the book as the first guide of its kind to experimental procedures on live animals, but its contents were shocking and troubling to the uninitiated. To Richards, their efforts to “promote the study of [their] science” took “the vivisectionist approach for granted and [exploited] a host of instrumental and analytical techniques pioneered on the Continent” (35). Most of all, the book was criticized for neglecting to review in any detail the use of anesthetics in the procedures described, and for being “intended for beginners” despite its exhaustive and advanced descriptions of specialist experimental procedures (Richards 36). The writers of the Handbook therefore unwittingly but disastrously described their methodology without considering the potential effect of their unreservedly clinical rhetoric. Such oversights led to what Harriet Ritvo calls the antivivisectionists’ inclination to conflate science with evil itself (163) – and see science as a blood sport that deliberately traded life for knowledge. In line with the reputation of the vivisectionist as wholly materialistic, many antivivisectionists asserted that the practice of his trade led inevitably to moral decline. For instance, in his 1875 article in Fortnightly Review, “Some Popular Fallacies about Vivisection,” Lewis Carroll argues that vivisection’s chief danger lies in its unavoidable extension of influence from the laboratory to culture itself. He disputes the claim that “the practice of vivisection will never be extended … to … human subjects” (853), and darkly anticipates a day when “successive generations of students, trained from their earliest years to the repression of all human sympathies, shall have developed a new and more hideous Frankenstein – a soulless being to whom science shall be all in all” (854). By prophesizing that the dissection of live animals would someday endanger humans, Carroll, like Collins, rejects the idea of a natural or finite division between animal and human medical treatment. Early in Heart and Science, when Carmina’s London cab runs over a dog, her response confirms the urge to reject this practical discrimination between humans and animals: “If it isn’t a dog,” she cries, “it may be a child next 14 Dougald B. MacEachen’s “Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science and the Vivisection Controversy,” Victorian Newsletter, 2 (1966) valuably contextualizes the novel amidst the vivisection controversy in the 1870s and 1880s.


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time” (58). Benjulia notes a similar relationship, though his insight does not curb his lust for knowledge: My last experiments on a monkey horrified me. His cries of suffering, his gestures of entreaty, were like the cries and gestures of a child. I would have given the world to put him out of his misery. But I went on. In the glorious cause I went on. My hands turned cold – my heart ached – I thought of a child I sometimes play with – I suffered – I resisted – I went on. All for Knowledge! All for Knowledge! (191)

While Collins’s fictional vivisectionist bears witness to the likeness between animals and humans, historical descriptions of dissectors do not. Emmanuel Klein, a Viennese physiologist teaching in London and a contributor to the Handbook, embodied many of his opponents’ worst nightmares when he testified to the Royal Commission on Vivisection in 1875. Klein did not use anesthetics unless out of deference to his audience, and when asked about his attitude to the suffering of animals, he responded immediately that he had “No regard at all” (Richards 44). Heart and Science works to deny such fundamental separation between scientific and moral disciplines, and animal and human suffering. In his contrasting portraits of doctors Ovid Vere and Nathan Benjulia, Collins positions “proper” medicine within the context of the scholarly and not the scientific tradition. In his two prefaces to the novel, Collins explains the differences between these two domains, and the expectations that organize their representations. The first preface, directed to “readers in general,” maintains that his novel is about character and humor rather than incident and dramatic situation; in other words, Collins insists that his novel is not merely “sensational.” But the second preface, addressed to “readers in particular,” assures this audience that an eminent London surgeon has ratified the medical and scientific developments depicted in the novel. In writing two prefaces that mean to address scientists and lay readers, Collins’s novel can be read as a repudiation of the kind of specialized narrative that Sanderson defends in his preface. The Handbook, according to Sanderson, is … a book of methods, not a compendium of the science of physiology, and consequently claims a place rather in the laboratory than in the study … The practical purpose of the book has been strictly kept in view … [and] many subjects are omitted which form important chapters in every textbook. (qtd. in Richards 43)

Sanderson’s assumption that the proper application of his textbook could be mediated by his prefatory remarks is proven grossly wrong by the reception of the Handbook. Indeed, Heart and Science can be read as a direct refutation of the effort to direct a book like Sanderson’s to the laboratory but not the study. Collins proposes, then, in Heart and Science, to subject medical practice to humanitarian ideals, and to subject to a fictional order the discrete, clinical, or anatomical

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thinking of which real and imagined physiologists like Sanderson, Klein, and Benjulia are guilty.15 In his review of Heart and Science, A.C. Swinburne dismisses the medical research Collins undertook for the novel as something “attempted if not achieved by the simple-minded and innocent author” (qtd. in Peters 401). Collins’s attempts do not explicitly mention Sanderson’s book in the preface to Heart and Science, but the novelist did read David Ferrier’s The Localisation of Brain Disease (1878), which text determined that different hemispheres of the brain are responsible for different functions,16 as well as an inflammatory pamphlet published by the AntiVivisection Society, Bernard’s Martyrs: a comment on Claude Bernard’s Leçons de physiologie opératoire (1879) (Baker and Clarke 451). In writing his critique, Swinburne may not have considered that Collins (over) simplified vivisection on purpose. In an 1882 letter to Frances Power Cobbe, Collins outlines the responsibility he feels towards “readers in general”: [I am aware of] the importance of producing the right impression by means which keep clear of terrifying and revolting the ordinary reader. I shall leave the detestable cruelties of the laboratory to be merely inferred, and, in tracing the moral influence of those cruelties on the nature of the man who practices them … If I can succeed in making him … an object of compassion as well as of horror, my experience of readers of fiction tells me that the right effect will be produced by the right means. (Baker and Clarke, 370)

While it is true that Collins’s representation of vivisection in the novel does not begin to explain the scientific reasons for the practice, and is weakened by jargon and sensationalism, he did appreciate – as Sanderson and his editors famously did not – the influence of rhetoric on the reading public. And yet, by protecting the readers of Heart and Science from the “detestable cruelties of the laboratory,” Collins seems unaware that this editorial decision undercuts his attempt in writing two prefaces to bridge the cultures of the drawing-room and the laboratory.

15 Christopher Lawrence’s description of the medical elite’s resistance to experimental physiology relays the perception that this field was populated by upstarts without any of the traditional claims to scientific – and cultural – authority. As in Heart and Science, that authority was associated with classical education and the class background it connotes. “Some of the great gentleman physicians,” writes Lawrence, “saw it as an incursion by basic scientists (which it was) into a curriculum which they said should rest on a sizable chunk of classical learning” (Medicine in the Making of Modern Britain, 1700–1920 (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 59). 16 Collins’s biographer Catherine Peters suspects that Ferrier’s trial of 1881, in which he was charged with cruelty to animals for practicing vivisection without a license, was “the spark that ignited” Heart and Science. The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993): p. 399.


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Heart and Science begins with the arrival of the orphaned Carmina Graywell in London. Carmina, the only child of the late Robert Graywell, an artist, and his Italian wife, is sent to the home of her paternal aunt, Mrs. Gallilee, a social climber with an inveterate interest in science. Carmina and Ovid Vere, Mrs. Gallilee’s son from her first marriage, fall in love, but must withstand a long separation, as Ovid is about to embark on a journey to recover from overwork. Shortly before Ovid’s departure, a fellow doctor, Nathan Benjulia, enters into the Gallilee family circle. Benjulia’s quest to uncover the cause of brain disease (or hysteria) consumes him, and his medical practices are shrouded in mystery. Gradually, it is discovered that Benjulia is a vivisectionist. With Ovid out of the country, Mrs. Gallilee increasingly maltreats Carmina because she wishes her son to marry a more socially prominent woman. Carmina succumbs to the same nervous disease that drives Benjulia’s research, and his interest in conducting a post-mortem examination of her brain impedes her medical treatment, for he sees her as an ideal subject for observation. At Carmina’s final hour, Ovid returns from Canada, interrupts Benjulia’s neglect of Carmina, and with the aid of an obscure medical manuscript, cures her himself. Once she is well, Ovid and Carmina marry, and Benjulia, whose research has been disproved by Ovid’s manuscript, burns his laboratory and commits suicide. In a variety of ways Benjulia’s medical ambitions alienate him from the cultural values sustained by the marriage plot narrative. Collins suggests that Benjulia’s disregard for personal relationships results from his practice as a “specialist” who only treats brains and nerves. The connection between Benjulia’s specialization and his immorality is one that Collins had long tied to medicine; in Armadale, for instance, his doctors’ repeatedly overlook a composite understanding of their patients, and especially the personal nature of their illnesses. Benjulia’s domestic situation signals his moral degradation, which culminates in his secret work as a vivisectionist. His work habits undercut the Victorian ethos that separates the private home from public occupations. As Ovid tells Carmina, “[Benjulia] is said to have discontinued medical practice, and devoted himself to chemical experiments. Nobody seems to know much about him. He has built a home in a desolate field – in some lost suburban neighborhood that nobody can discover” (97). When Ovid seeks out Benjulia at home, he stumbles upon an unfamiliar world: There, in the middle of a barren little field, he saw Benjulia’s house – a hideous square building of yellow brick, with a slate roof … The enclosure within was as barren as the field without: not even an attempt at a flower-garden or kitchengarden was visible … Behind [the laboratory] was the hedge which parted Benjulia’s morsel of land from the land of his neighbor. Here, the trees rose again, and the fields beyond were cultivated. No dwellings, no living creatures


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appeared. So near to London – and yet – in its loneliness, so far away – there was something unnatural in the solitude of the place. (129)17

The world over which Benjulia presides, desolate of all living things, explicitly negates “proper” domestic and cultural realism, including the peaceful suburban domain just beyond the reach of his property. Benjulia’s domestic conditions also expose his foreignness. Rejecting middleclass conventions that celebrate the home as a private retreat, he lives for days at a time at his laboratory, “eating at his dreadful [dissection] table; snatching an hour’s rest occasionally on the floor” (211). (His single-minded dedication recalls Victor Frankenstein’s ruinous creation of a monster whose murders also target romantic relationships.) Benjulia’s illicit cohabitation with animals is complicated by his scientific interests, which simultaneously raise him above such primitive and class-laden descriptions, and make his savage domestic ways all the more shocking. In a related historical note, Richards points out that Sanderson was granted the most unusual privilege of having his private dwelling in London licensed for animal experimentation (Richards 116). This transaction may have registered the same uncomfortable imposition of professional work upon the private sphere that Benjulia’s depraved domesticity conveys. Collins classifies the secret nature of his vivisection as an outsider’s mode of transgressive, arcane knowledge. Ovid, after all, must embark on a “voyage of exploration” to find Benjulia’s secret laboratory. Benjulia’s interaction with the kindly but ineffective Dr. Morphew, another doctor who treats Carmina in Ovid’s absence, reduces his moral failures to his poor English. When Morphew describes a patient of Ovid’s in a letter, Benjulia’s impatience with the mode of story-telling that the letter takes in the absence of pure physiological detail clarifies his intellectual priorities. “He reviled poor Mr. Morphew as ‘a born idiot’” for not plainly stating the patient’s malady, and for “wasting paper on smooth sentences encumbered by long words” (183). These bothersome “long words” contain a double slur: they depict Benjulia as a bad reader and a doctor divested of the human element of medicine. But in Collins’s novels, the former insult almost necessarily signifies the latter. We learn that Benjulia cannot read well and dislikes human narratives in a novel about the human interactions surrounding medical plots. This damning information 17

This description strikingly recalls the description of Le Doux’s Sanatorium in Armadale. Lydia describes her first visit to the place:

“We came upon a wilderness of open ground, with half-finished villas dotted about, and a hideous litter of boards, wheelbarrows and building materials of all sorts scattered in every direction. At one corner of this scene of desolation stood a great overgrown dismal house, plastered with drab-coloured stucco, and surrounded by a naked unfinished garden without a shrub or flower in it, – frightful to behold” (711).

The Sanatorium and its setting convey the life-taking properties of the institution under Le Doux’s direction, a theme that Benjulia’s laboratory would make more explicit.


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alienates Benjulia further from the (reading) audience, and elects that audience, as good readers, to the privileged side of medical practice – that which implicitly is mediated by and through the literary romance at hand. Moreover, literature and “good writing” threaten to hasten Benjulia’s downfall. Lemuel Benjulia, the doctor’s publisher-brother, forecasts the vivisectionist’s punishment through the publication of a book: “Morphew’s going to write a book against you – and he asked me to get it published at our place. I’m on his side, you know; I shall do my best to help him; I can lay my hands on literary fellows who will lick his style into shape – it will be an awful exposure!” (186). As Sanderson’s disastrous preface (which could have been improved by the “licks” of some “literary fellows”) verified, Victorian readers were reluctant to separate science from contextualizing moral values. Benjulia’s failure to understand and follow the domestic and moral values endorsed by literature predicate his downfall. As Carroll claimed, the vivisector himself suffers most from his labors. Benjulia’s project is the study of nervous disease, and by the novel’s end, he suffers from that condition himself. After Ovid cures Carmina and invalidates Benjulia’s research, the vivisectionist grieves the death of his ambitions. As he says to Ovid: When we met that night at my garden gate … you told me my life should answer for her life, if she died. My neglect has not killed her – and you have no need to keep your word. But I don’t get off, Mr. Ovid Vere, without paying the penalty. You have taken something from me, which is dearer than life. I wished to tell you that – I have no more to say. (320)

In Benjulia’s formula, science demands the price of life, and ultimately, he pays it himself rather than exist without the prospect of “knowledge” which is “dearer than life.” Benjulia’s suicide, under these terms, necessarily precedes the marriage of Ovid and Carmina. As Benjulia threatens to wreck the marriage by failing to cure Carmina and risking her life, he stands to arrest the narrative, and thus thwart the expectations of Collins’s “readers in general.” The scientific plot concerning Benjulia’s attempt to find a cure for nervous disease thereby competes with, and is ultimately trounced by, the marriage plot. If Collins critiques Benjulia as a prototype of “science” dissociated from human experience in a tradition that he started with Armadale, Ovid illustrates “heart” and its relation to a moral version of medical practice. All three of the principal characters in the novel – Ovid, Benjulia, and Carmina – become ill with nervous disease because of emotional rather than physiological problems. Collins thus underscores the register of illness that vivisection necessarily overlooks. Ovid empathizes so powerfully with others’ pain that, when the novel begins, he has been sickened by “overwork.” He had “received a warning, familiar to the busy men of our time – the warning from overwrought Nature, which counsels rest after excessive work” (45). Ovid’s sensitivity confirms that emotions rule his body. Similarly, Carmina’s illness is an affective response to her loneliness after Ovid

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leaves for Canada, where he travels to regain his health. She recovers only when Ovid returns to her side. Benjulia’s disorder, by the end of the novel a full-blown case of nervous derangement (culminating in his suicide), is a response to the brutalizing practices of his laboratory. Bad behavior, Collins infers, makes Benjulia lose his mind. By showing that his two doctors succumb to illness affectively, Collins writing as a pathologist disregards the methods of diagnosis and treatment that inspect the body’s interior and inspires the vivisectionist. Instead, he draws our attention to domains accessible to the novels – the heart, and the moral and physical consequences of life experience. A letter that Ovid writes to Carmina from Canada reiterates the importance that Collins places on the relationship between proper language and proper medicine. This association necessarily favors Englishmen like Ovid over foreigners like Benjulia. It also expresses the centrality of the emotional realm in Ovid’s (and Collins’s) concept of treatment and anticipates the equation of “good” medicine with a happy domestic situation, which Ovid and Carmina’s marriage ultimately affirms. In Canada, a local doctor calls Ovid to consult on the case of a mulatto surgeon. As a final act of gratitude, the dying surgeon bequeaths to Ovid a manuscript describing a cure for nervous disease that negates the practice of vivisection (and all of Benjulia’s research). Ovid writes to Carmina: I found myself rewarded [by the manuscript] a hundredfold for the little that I had been able to do. This unhappy man must have been possessed of abilities which (under favoring circumstances) would, I don’t hesitate to say, have ranked him among the greatest physicians of our time. The language in which he writes is obscure, and sometimes grammatically incorrect. But he, and he alone, has solved a problem in the treatment of disease, which has thus far been the despair of medical men throughout the whole civilized world. (160)

As a reward for his sensitivity to the patient, Ovid inherits the solution to the medical mystery that has driven Benjulia to the dissection table. The message is clear: humanitarian medicine leads to a great breakthrough, which comes in the form of an obscurely written manuscript. Ovid turns to the Canadian surgeon’s manuscript with the eye of a literary critic. The surgeon writes: The information which is presented in these pages is wholly derived from the results of bedside practice; pursued under miserable obstacles and interruptions, and spread over a period of many years. Whatever faults and failings I may have been guilty of as a man, I am innocent, in my professional capacity, of ever having perpetuated the useless and detestable cruelties which go by the name of Vivisection. (307)

This surgeon asserts that he has followed benign bedside procedures even as they have been threatened by obstacles, demonstrating that the care of the patient has always preceded the facility of the researcher. He also claims that vivisection


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imparts the failings of the man, not just those of the doctor. In these qualifications we see a contrast to the dispassionate agenda followed by Sanderson et al., which does not invoke the personal in the articulation of the scientific. Collins, in his prefaces to Heart and Science, both recovers the split between morality and medicine (by addressing the two separate audiences) and in his novel, attempts to close that gap. The Canadian’s manuscript also redirects Ovid’s personal life in a way that confirms Collins’s endorsement of professional service merged with a conventional domestic situation. Ovid continues in his letter to Carmina: If a stranger was looking over my shoulder, he would be inclined to say, This curious lover writes to his young lady as if she were a medical colleague! We understand each other, Carmina, don’t we? My future career is an object of interest to my future wife. This poor fellow’s gratitude has opened new prospects to me; and who will be so glad to hear of it as you? (160)

Ovid’s ability to see his career and his domestic happiness as interrelated helps define him as Collins’s masculine ideal – a man for whom professional and personal integrity are mutual projects. Whereas Benjulia’s destructive and selfserving medicine stands to upset the marriage plot (by allowing for Carmina’s death), Ovid’s practice promotes his relationship with Carmina, so that the realm of emotion (and its culmination in marriage) overcomes the callous practice of material medicine. The crying monkeys and limping dogs that occupy Benjulia’s laboratory signify the vivisector’s heartlessness, but it is the treatment of Carmina that best demonstrates the influence of the novel’s two doctors. In Carmina, Collins recycles one of his most familiar female types. Like Lucilla Finch in Poor Miss Finch (1872) and Laura Fairlie in The Woman in White, Carmina betrays a vulnerability that signals the risk of inappropriate possession: “There was a delicacy of finish in her features – in the nose and lips especially – a sensitiveness changefulness in the expression of her eyes (too dark in themselves to be quite in harmony with her light hair), and a subtle yet simple witchery in her rare smile” (53). Collins invests heroines like Carmina with a “changefulness” and “witchery” that invite our uneasiness and thus enable these women to hang in the balance of the plot. Carmina’s fey charms are contrasted to the characteristics of the other principal women in the novel: her hardened aunt, Mrs. Gallilee, and the ugly Miss Minerva, governess to Mrs. Gallilee’s two young daughters. Whereas Carmina has been raised unconventionally in an artists’ household in Italy and lacks any formal education, Mrs. Gallilee and Miss Minerva are both coarsened by the degrading influence of science. Disappointed financially by her younger sister’s brilliant marriage, Mrs.Gallilee, widowed and married to her second husband, turns her ambitious nature to scientific discovery. Miss Minerva reflects some of the same unfeminine traits as Mrs. Gallilee, but these are the sad inheritances of her social position, not her own misguided choices. The miserable

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exemplar of the Victorian bluestocking, Miss Minerva represents the unwomanly attributes that come from intellectual effort and employment. Vivisection applies here, too. Mrs. Gallilee’s “glorious career, which now associated her with the march of science,” has made her “familiar with zoophyte fossils” and able to “dissect the nervous system of a bee” (67). Her scientific education, however, “left her completely in the dark, where questions of sentiment were concerned, as if her experience of humanity, in its relation to love, had been experience in the cannibal islands” (67). As for Miss Minerva, she was … so yellow and so learned, so ugly and so poor! And yet, if mystery is interesting, this was an interesting woman. The people about her felt an uneasy perception of something secret, ominously secret, in the nature of the governess which defied detection. If Inquisitive Science, vowed to medical research, could dissect firmness of will, working at its steadiest repressive action – then, the mystery of Miss Minerva’s inner nature might possibly have been revealed. (61)

Collins’s mockery of scientific investigation exposes his ability to do exactly what empirical research evades: dissect the human will. Indeed, it is Carmina, perhaps the least scientifically inclined character in the novel, who uncovers the secret behind Miss Minerva’s implacable persona: the governess is in love with Ovid. In the same way that Mrs. Gallilee’s failed social ambitions import science as a consolation prize, Miss Minerva’s unrequited love turns her to the purview of facts in her work as an unsentimental schoolteacher. Mrs. Gallilee and Miss Minerva function in this novel as examples of the polluting influence of scientific culture on Victorian womanhood, and likewise, on the integrity of the marriage-plot novel, dependent as it is on the romantic construct of the desirable heroine. Carmina symbolizes a type of ahistorical femininity that embodies an ideal endangered by progressive developments in medicine and science. Proper medicine, as practiced by Ovid, protects and cherishes vulnerable womanhood as a governing practice. Likewise, in his manuscript, the Canadian surgeon explains that his major breakthrough in curing nervous disease occurred with the treatment of two young girls, one who recovered, and the other who died in an undisclosed accident. This accident, unrelated to her brain sickness and therefore outside of the surgeon’s responsibility, enabled him to do a post-mortem operation. Ovid, in reading these accounts, describes the two girls as “inexpressibly precious to him, in Carmina’s present interest” (308). The significance of these patients lies in their gender and age, which they share with Carmina. The repeated instance of the patient as a young, unmarried woman shows Collins’s conceptual parallel between the sick patient and the virginal heroine. The sick woman, on the verge of either death or recovery and marriage, embodies the contest between moral and immoral medicine. Whereas Ovid can successfully resolve the medical and marital plots by both fixing Carmina’s body and marrying her, the scientific madman Benjulia is poised to dismember both narratives. Collins replaces Benjulia’s brand of science with Ovid’s, one that possess the power to secure


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privileged romantic relations and to practice the kind of seemingly non-scientific (and therefore non-realistic) medicine that can endorse those same relationships. When Ovid’s superior character, which secures him the manuscript, and his romantic feelings activate Carmina’s recovery, Collins successfully translates the vivisection plot (and its effort to solve the mystery of nervous illness) into a domestic narrative. The Canadian doctor’s cryptic manuscript thus validates in kind the domestic narrative that Carmina’s cure enables, as its prioritization of patients checks the medical practices that attempt to dissect science from life. *** In the postscript to Armadale and the second preface to Heart and Science, Collins directly addresses those “Persons disposed to take the rational view” (Armadale, 817) and the “Readers in Particular” (Heart and Science) who represent science. The Armadale postscript references a real event of uncanny coincidence concerning a ship called The Armadale, and it also asserts that the novelist “spared no pains to instruct myself on matters of fact” concerning “Law, Medicine, or Chemistry” (817). The Heart and Science preface similarly addresses those presumably doubtful of the way that the romance in the novel accomplishes a more desirable medical cure than the scientific methodology. Both novels depend on the conversion of these “particular” readers to “general” readers – that is, readers who accept the abstract, mystical, and romantic schemes put forth under the rubric of the ‘literary.’ The prophetic dream in Armadale and the miraculous cure in Heart and Science therefore necessarily are treated as mysteries, for to explain the “extraordinary” would be tantamount to Collins denying his power as a novelist. Moreover, Collins ties his novelistic power to the preservation of the feminine, whether literally in Carmina, or symbolically, as in Midwinter’s intuitive gifts which routinely are feminized. The survival of both characters stands in for the perpetuation of vulnerable femininity (again, in personal or epistemological form); Carmina and Midwinter suffer from nervous illnesses that imperil their life and reason, respectively. Moreover, their wellbeing is directly challenged by emotionless doctors (Benjulia in Heart and Science and Harbury and Le Doux in Armadale). For Collins, the virtuous feminine cannot co-exist with the conspiracy of empiricism; the rise of one depends on the fall of the other. And as he rescues the fortunes of romance from the clutches of science, he also tells the story of the endangered novelist, whose trade depends on the moral illusions perpetrated by a romantic teleology.


Chapter 5

New Women, Avenging Doctors: Gothic Medicine in Bram Stoker and Arthur Machen This chapter begins with a crystallizing moment in late Victorian sexual and medical politics: the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts in 1886. While this decision marked an ostensible victory for the legal and physical autonomy of women, it also signaled a growing hostility between feminist agitators for women’s rights and the medical establishment. The repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts registered a severe defeat for the medical profession – a defeat with far-reaching consequences for the state medical regulation of sexuality. Frank Mort claims that “in the closing debates of the nineteenth century it was moralists and feminists who set the pace in the field of sexual politics,” a public wresting away of this field from medical doctors (109). The feminists’ seizure of control of the discourses surrounding female sexuality, in part through their successful agitation for the repeal of the Acts, informs my readings of several texts that alternately evince and revoke these political dynamics. Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1898) and Arthur Machen’s short stories “The Great God Pan” and “The Inmost Light” (1894) depict medical doctors seizing (back) control over women’s sexuality and reproductive capacities – a reversal of the historical situation described by Mort and other historians. I read the fraught relations between doctors and two controversial categories of women that converge over the politics of the Contagious Disease [CD] Acts, the “New Woman” of the late century, and prostitutes, through their symbolic translation in Stoker and Machen’s fictions. The historical gains achieved by New Women and prostitutes, here represented by the abolition movement that successfully repealed the CD Acts, are figuratively reversed by the punitive medicine practiced by the doctors in these gothic stories. The political antagonism between doctors and feminists that frames this chapter is assimilated by my wider focus on the romantic and marital relationships that structure the Victorian novel. In the texts studied in this chapter, doctors and women are sexually and often maritally involved. Their relations, however, See also Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992) and Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking, 1990) for excellent discussions of the cultural politics surrounding the Contagious Diseases Acts.


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ultimately are determined not by emotional or legal connections, but through medical acts (usually surgeries) in which the doctors use the women as objects of explorative research. In understanding such putative medicine as an imaginative rejoinder to the medical establishment’s waning power over female sexuality and health, I explain a number of common tropes in Stoker’s novel and Machen’s stories. First, these texts prepare for the medical punishment of the female characters by aligning them either with prostitutes or New Women – two wildly divergent sectors of Victorian women whose political interests were aligned by the Repeal campaign. Stoker and Machen criminalize the female targets of medical “research” in these stories by symbolically infecting them with venereal disease and thus treating their sexuality as immoral and worthy of the medical punishment that ensues. The fictional doctors also assert a measure of biophysical control that their historical contemporaries were losing in these stories’ gothic representations of unnatural births engineered by the doctors and against the will or knowledge of the female patients. The Medical Gothic at the Fin de Siècle The conceptual link between the vampires, demons, satyrs, and occult medicine in these stories, and the historical-legal politics surrounding the CD Acts and their repeal turns on the tension between late-century medicine and its empirical foundations – a tension both moral and epistemological. By the 1880s and 1890s, a public disenchantment with science and the methodologies associated with the scientific Enlightenment underwrote the “humane” medical movements (including the antivivisection and anti-vaccination campaigns as well as the repeal of the CD Acts), reflecting the alleged distance between morality and scientific authority (MacLeod 1, 5). The mid-century, high rationalist and materialist subjectivity of John Stuart Mill and Middlemarch transformed at the fin de siècle to a broader, more slippery scientism that included – if controversially – spiritualist and psychical research. The literature of the era personifies the suspect power of the scientist or surgeon in figures like Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Moreau, among whose moral crimes include experimentation for its own sake rather than towards the alleviation of human pain and suffering. As Utterson explains in Stevenson’s novella, “too many of [Dr. Jekyll’s] experiments [had led] to no end of practical usefulness” (38). This drive to knowledge – unchecked by cautionary compassion or empathy for patients – prompts in Stoker and Machen’s texts (and others at the fin de siècle) a disciplinary supernaturalism that transcends the surgeons’ omnipotence. See Terry Eagleton, “The Flight to the Real,” Cultural Politics at the Fin-de-Siècle, eds. Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 13. Wilkie Collins’s Dr. Benjulia in Heart and Science also, if less famously, exemplifies this atrocity.

New Women, Avenging Doctors

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As the high rationalism of Victorian medicine had not effectively reined in medical (and especially surgical) power, these authors imagine supernatural forces as a higher authority than empirical practice and belief. At the same time, the doctors in these texts embrace the occult sciences as viable extensions of their research. In Dracula, Van Helsing accepts that “there are always mysteries in life” (210), and this knowledge benefits him and his followers in the fight to subdue Dracula. His young protégé, Jonathan Seward, learns to reject his early belief that “there must be some rational explanation for all these mysterious things” (223; Stoker’s italics). Machen’s doctors do not need to be convinced of the occult, but their experiments with the “black arts” exceed their control and thereby discredit their repute as empirical practitioners. The fate of medical practice in late-century fiction, then, invites and accommodates occultism as both a disciplinary force against doctors, and a sign of doctors’ willing engagement with a sinister episteme. Just as occultism represents the moral failures and human limitations of doctors in these texts, so too does it herald women’s deviance from conventional marriage and sex roles, and invite a surgical form of retribution. Occultism and feminism often unite in the late century against conventional, masculine authorities. Georgina Weldon notoriously and successfully campaigned against her husband, Henry Weldon, and an alienist, L. Forbes Winslow, for conspiring to intern her in an insane asylum because she was a spiritualist. Medical men characterized spiritualists as hysterical women involved in fraudulent practices. (Spiritualists, in turn, regarded doctors as hyper-masculine and hostile towards their beliefs (Walkowitz, City 171–2).) The reproductive imperative that flourished in this period of imperial anxiety also represented New Women as an explicit threat to England’s future. In addition to privileging her intellect at the professed expense of her reproductive function, some New Women also rebelled against the traditional roles of wife and mother through another form of resistance to convention: celibacy. To turn-of-the-century and Edwardian women, celibacy was sometimes seen as a positive step in women’s self-advancement (Mort 180). But in Dracula, “The Great God Pan,” and “The Inmost Light,” occult forces disempower women by transforming them into sexual deviants. Once the women in these stories become monstrous and unwomanly, their murder becomes a redemptive act justified by their potential to disrupt the sex roles that conventional society deemed “natural.” Two New Woman novels offer comparative and realistic antidotes to the medical gothic fictions explores here. Sarah Grand’s highly autobiographical novel The Beth Book (1899) is one of very few Victorian novels to acknowledge the CD Acts. Heroine Beth Caldwell McClure finds out after her marriage that her doctor-husband works at a Lock Hospital, enforcing the CD Acts. Beth is horrified, but Dan McClure defends

Lock Hospitals were specialized hospitals for the treatment of female venereal disease. Women (mostly prostitutes) diagnosed with VD were checked into these hospitals without their consent, and there received both medical and moral “treatments.” As Judith Walkowitz writes in Prostitution and Victorian Society, lock patients “were subjected to

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his work in the name of “sanitation,” arguing that he is protecting men against the “stigma” of venereal disease (400). Dan consolidates all of the medical and antifeminist ideas that Grand and other New Women sought to change; he disparages feminists, values women only superficially (“if a girl isn’t pretty, she’s of no account” (342)), and enforces a medico-moral punishment on women at the Lock Hospital. In another instance of the tension between feminist consciousness and the animal rights movement analyzed in the previous chapter’s section on Collins’s Heart and Science, Beth also discovers that Dan engages covertly in vivisection. To Beth, Dan’s cruelty to animals is proof of his unfitness as a husband, and shortly after she discovers his vivisection experiments, she leaves the marriage, explaining to Dan that she “cannot understand any but unsexed women associating with vivisectors” (441). By making Dan both a CD Acts doctor and a vivisector, Grand justifies Beth’s separation from her husband as a moral obligation. Stoker and Machen’s texts upset exactly this kind of feminist logic in transferring the stain of sexual transgression to the New Woman and away from the medical system. A little-known novel of 1887, St. Bernard’s, or, The Romance of a Medical Student by Edward Berdoe, figures a New Woman with considerable power over the development of hospital care. Feminist and heiress Mildred Lee spends the bulk of her inheritance building a hospital in a poor London neighborhood. In direct contrast to the brutal, science-driven practices of the teaching hospital, St. Bernard’s, where hero Harrowby Elsworth is trained, Lee’s Nightingale House is devoted to palliative care, not medical progress. Her critics scorn this project as “a humanitarian craze of the shrieking sisterhood” (Berdoe 467). Lee’s challenge to the medical establishment, represented by St. Bernard’s, is a defense of those victimized by conventional, scientific medicine – women and the poor, in particular. The marriage between Elsworth and Lee effectively transfers the hero from the camp of the doctor/ scientists to that of the feminist/humanitarians. The Beth Book and St. Bernard’s exemplify in a realist mode many of the same medical and sexual politics that Stoker and Machen translate into gothic and occult forms. But where Grand and Berdoe instance New Women as the victors in the battle of women’s medical rights, Stoker and Machen defeat them on two important and interlocking fronts: the progressive horizon of science and the marital plot that literally and symbolically unites male and female interests. The Contagious Diseases Acts The Contagious Diseases Acts, first passed in 1864, officially served to protect the British armed forces from venereal disease spread through prostitution. Doctors an intensive religious atmosphere and coercive discipline” (61) that meant to “cure” their supposed moral depravity as much or more than their infection. See Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).


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in the Crimean War (1854–56) had discovered that VD was endemic among British soldiers; in consultation with physicians, legislators designed the Acts to protect soldiers without necessarily changing their habits. This safeguarding of the British armed forces anticipates the defensive imperialism of the later century that identified racial outsiders as both feminine and sexual, and thus more “primitive” than the European men at the top of the hierarchy (Young 94). The CD Acts targeted prostitutes rather than soldiers as the progenitors of VD, thus censuring one of Victorian Britain’s most infamous and reviled subgroups at the same time that they attempted to regulate contagion. The first Act was put on the statute book in 1864 without Parliamentary debate – a testament to its presumed incontestability (and to the disenfranchisement of those subjects it disciplined). This Act was established in eleven port and garrison towns with the objective of preventing “contagious diseases” (VD) in military and naval stations. The legal agents of the Act were an appointed body of surgeons and police who detained and examined suspected prostitutes. If surgeons found infection, the prostitute was given a choice between appearance in front of the magistrate’s court, or confinement to a Lock Hospital for three months. The 1866 Act gave police license to periodically seize and examine a suspected prostitute for up to one year. In addition, it extended the compulsory detention period for infected women from three to six months, and retracted the option of appearing before a magistrate. In 1869, the Act was extended to six more towns, and the period of detention in hospital lengthened from six to nine months (Nield 7–8; Mort 68–76; Bland xiii–xiv). The criminalization of prostitutes imposed by the CD Acts has an extensive prehistory in Victorian social and medical opinion, which judged sexuality in women as a sign of a depraved and unnatural instinct. In contrast, male sexuality was “natural.” The 1871 Royal Commission on the Contagious Disease Acts normalized this stance by arguing that “no comparison [can] be made between prostitutes and the men who consort with them. With the one sex the offense is a matter of gain; with the other it is an irregular indulgence of a natural impulse” (qtd. in Walkowitz, Prostitution 23). This statement elides the fact that economic desperation rather than advantage (or perversity) may lead a woman to prostitution. The medical logic applied to the Acts was informed by gender ideologies so normative as to permeate disease etiology and management. The Select Committee on Venereal Disease of 1867 debated the extent to which sailors and soldiers should be subjected to compulsory inspection. The prevailing judgment, which was upheld in the 1871 Royal Commission report, argued against compulsory examination of men on the grounds that it would destroy their self-respect and counteract the good efforts of the reforms against prostitutes (Mort 10–11). Even before the Acts, most regiments had abandoned the compulsory examination of soldiers for VD by 1859, chiefly because it was held to be distasteful to medical officers (Nield 10). The Lancet, mouthpiece of the British medical establishment and a great proponent of the Acts, defended them in 1869:


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It is only insofar as a woman exercises trade which is physically dangerous to the community that Government has any right to interfere … [T]he women do not as a rule know the names of their paramours, and even if they did we do not see how they could identify them, so as to identify the source of contagion… Lastly, there is every reason to suppose … that a woman gives twenty diseases of this sort for every one she receives and more and more she may be quite ignorant that she is the subject of any disease, which is not likely to be the case with a man. – The Lancet, 27 November 1869 (qtd. in Sigsworth and Wyke 97)

Along with her physiological efficacy in spreading contagion, a woman’s presumed ignorance of her clients and her own body contributes to her guilt. This writer’s concern for the prostitute’s endangerment of the community apparently overlooks the prostitute’s capacity to jeopardize herself through a trade that routinely sickens her. The writer claims that the male clients could not be identified, but does not acknowledge that the Acts were often criticized for their improper and liberal identification of women, who had only to be suspected of prostitution to be detained and examined. As Philippa Levine writes, the CD Acts assumed a direct relationship between specifically female sexual activity and efficient disease transmission (37). Further, the provision within the Lock Hospitals for moral and religious instruction of the detained women (Mort 69) typifies the synthetic relationship between the moral and medical dimensions of the legislation. Historians of gender, sexuality, and medicine have long and convincingly argued that Victorian women were victims of prejudicial thinking by the medical establishment in this period’s habitual association between femininity and illness. Medical anti-feminism invoked a paradoxical logic that defined illness as a womanly ideal, and as a punishment a woman suffers for repudiating that ideal

Historians Sigsworth and Wyke draw a weak causal link between feminism and the medical establishment’s punitive treatment of women, noting only that the Contagious Diseases Acts “coincided with the feminist movement” (my emphasis). E.M. Sigsworth and T.J. Wyke, “A Study of Victorian Prostitution and Venereal Disease,” ed. Martha Vicinus, Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1972), p. 97. The interest of the public over that of the prostitute is explicit in the following statement from Charles Lucas of the Colonial Office: “The Object of Contagious disease laws … is, I take it, not to put down prostitution and not directly, at least, to benefit and alleviate the condition of the prostitute but to prevent the community at large from suffering from syphilitic diseases and to prevent the spread of such diseases” (qtd. in Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 41). See, for instance, Barbara Ehrenrich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1979); Patricia Branca, Silent Sisterhood: Middle Class Women in the Victorian Home (Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1975), and Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).


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(Harrison 27). Feminists seem to have been targeted by doctors in many ways that extended beyond a biomedical understanding of pathological femininity. The medical establishment’s stand against women’s increased control of their own bodies is typified in the disenfranchisement of Dr. Henry Allbutt, the first English doctor to claim authorship of a study that gave contraceptive advice, and whose name was taken off the medical register as a result of this research (Mason 187). The Repeal of the Acts: New Women Defeat the Medical Establishment Opponents of the Contagious Diseases legislation, including John Stuart Mill and Josephine Butler, protested their aggressive state intervention. “We cannot take [medical and legal] authority for the half and refuse it for the whole,” argued Mill, who further characterized the Acts as “opposed to one of the greatest principles of legislation, the security of personal liberty” (135). The abolition movement of the Acts officially dates to 1869, with the formation of the National Association for the Repeal of the CD Acts and the Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the CD Acts, which included Florence Nightingale and Harriet Martineau among its members. Throughout the 1870s, a motley collection of evangelists, feminist social purity campaigners, working-class radicals, and some sympathetic Liberal MPs devoted themselves to what historian Keith Nield describes as a “staggeringly unpolitical” campaign to repeal the Acts (10). Josephine Butler emerged as the campaign’s figurehead, leading an emotionally charged crusade that variously targeted the ‘social evil’ of prostitution, the slavish condition of working-class women, and the political disenfranchisement of women in general. By the late 1870s, the continuation of the Acts appeared to turn upon whichever party garnered the majority of Parliamentary seats. The Liberal Party’s general election victory in 1880 led to the suspension of the Acts in 1883 through arguments against their statistical and hygienic effectiveness. When the Acts were repealed in 1886, even opponents like Butler saw the achievement as a political maneuver rather than a moral triumph (Fisher 38, 95); the repeal, that is, had not transformed the Conservative Party’s prevailing estimation of prostitutes as deserving of punishment rather than sympathy, a view undoubtedly shared by a large sector of the Victorian public. The publicity generated by the repeal campaign – and particularly by Butler herself – was instrumental in consolidating the women’s movement in Victorian England (Smith 128). Such feminist activism was absorbed in the 1880s and 1890s into the characterization of the “New Woman,” a figure distinctly modern in her involvement in public issues and intent upon reforming the numerous social, educational, political, and medical inequities provoked by the sexual double standard that the CD Acts exemplified. The efforts of the feminists and New Women to repeal the CD Acts, and in so doing, liberate women from medical controls, made them easy scapegoats of the medical establishment, cowed by the loss of public faith in medical authority that the repeal campaign represented.


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The hostility between the medical establishment and feminist activists was bolstered by the highly public campaign against vivisection, also in the 1870s and 1880s, in which feminists were once again highly visible proponents. William Acton’s 1875 reissue of The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive System included a diatribe against the insubordination suffered by husbands from their wives in this newly feminist climate (Mort 82). The New Women’s further efforts to manage their own bodies were manifest through initiatives including the attempt (and limited success) of women to become doctors, use birth control, and separate sexual activity from reproduction (Cranny-Francis 74; McLaren 268). Moreover, the reproductive imperative that flourished in this period of imperial anxiety, whereby the colonial invader threatened to enervate the English bloodline, represented New Womanhood as an explicit threat to England’s future. Doctors claimed that the New Woman could effect social degeneration because the energy she devoted to her brain enervated her reproductive organs (Showalter 40). This medical anti-feminism speaks in part to the medical profession’s efforts to monopolize the health field and thereby regulate an unstable profession wherein doctors competed against uncredentialed practitioners, herbalists, and midwives (McLaren 269). Gothic Resistance to the New Woman Stoker and Machen’s symbolic repeal of female sexual agency in Dracula, “The Great God Pan” and “The Inmost Light” betrays hostility to the gains made by the New Woman of this period. Their resistance is focused on the assertive sexual identity of women in these texts, a hallmark of the New Woman, for the sexuality of Stoker’s Lucy and Machen’s Mary and Helen marks a departure from the passivity that Victorian ideologues and the CD Acts prescribed as “natural” to women. As many critics have pointed out, the two women at the center of Dracula, Lucy Westenra and Mina Murray, embody opposing registers of female identity.

Ardent feminist Frances Power Cobbe was the most prominent spokesperson for the antivivisection movement. See, for instance, Carol Senf, “Dracula: Stoker’s Response to the New Woman,” Victorian Studies, 3 (1982): 33–49; Deborah S. Wilson, “Technologies of Misogyny: The Transparent Maternal Body and Alternate Reproductions in Frankenstein, Dracula, and Some Selected Media Discourses,” Bodily Discursions: Genders, Representations, Technologies, eds. Deborah S. Wilson and Christine Moneera (Stony Brook: State University of New York Press, 1997), pp. 105–33; Stephanie Demetrakopolous, “Feminism, Sex Role Exchanges, and Other Subliminal Features in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Frontiers, 2.3 (1977): 104– 13; Jeffrey L. Spear, “Gender and Sexual Dis-Ease in Dracula,” Virginal Sexuality and Textuality in Victorian Literature, ed. Lloyd Davis (Stony Brook: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 179–92, and Anne Cranny-Francis, “Sexual Politics and Political Repression in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Nineteenth-Century Suspense: from Poe to Conan


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Lucy demonstrates both a childlike type of English womanhood, and an aggressive, unconscious sexuality, a paradox later realized in the split personality of Lucythe-virgin and Lucy-the-vampire. Mina enacts a more complicated and enduring female identity, endorsing certain characteristics of New Womanhood in her education and employment as a teacher. However, her sense of duty and devotion to her husband also represent the traditional values espoused more unconditionally by an earlier generation of Victorian women. Critical debates about Stoker’s (anti)feminism have typically focused upon the sexual etiology established in the novel, and particularly the treatment of Lucy’s sexuality. For instance, Carol Senf argues that Stoker’s “treatment of women in Dracula does not stem from his hatred of women in general, but … from his ambivalent reaction to a topical phenomenon – the New Woman” (34). Working from a definition of the New Woman that makes this figure’s sexuality her most conspicuous characteristic, Senf claims that Stoker’s ambivalence towards New Women hinges upon his simultaneous effort to depict sexual women as demonic and dangerous, and to elevate other traits of New Womanhood, such as intellectual achievement. Yet as the medical treatment and death of Lucy demonstrate, Stoker ultimately discounts the claims made by New Women by espousing a male-centered regulation of the female body. Early in the novel, Lucy receives three marriage proposals in one day, inspiring her to ask Mina, “why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble? But this is heresy and I must not say it” (59). Lucy’s question registers her first instancing of aggressive sexuality, which, preceding her affiliation with vampirism, indicates New Womanhood and its endorsement of non-reproductive sex, female independence, and unconventionality (CrannyFrancis 74). In a similar scene, Jonathan Harker, sequestered in Castle Dracula, finds himself repulsed by his attraction to three mysterious female vampires. “I am alone in the castle with those awful women,” he writes. “Faugh! Mina is a woman, and there is naught in common. They are devils of the pit!” (53). The mutability of womanhood in Dracula represents an anxiety over woman’s ability to be both sexual and virginal at once. Lucy is virgin by day and (later) vampire by night; Mina has “a man’s brain and a woman’s heart” (234), and the women who seduce Jonathan in the castle are undeniably female, and yet as he puts it, not women insofar as they are unlike Mina – that is, sexually aggressive and exotic. By this logic, “real” womanhood is defined against the standards of the New Woman as a sexually passive and retrogressive concept. In “The Great God Pan,” Arthur Machen illustrates the insecure status of latecentury medicine through a plot wherein a sexually aggressive woman trumps a doctor’s control over reproductive and social economies. Machen enjoyed brief fame in the 1890s with a number of short stories and novellas including “The Great God Pan.” While this novella is seldom read today, it links three fin de siècle preoccupations: a Faustian lust for scientific progress of which vivisection is one Doyle, eds. Clive Bloom, Brian Docherty, Jane Gibbs, and Keith Shand (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), pp. 64–79.

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familiar marker, female sexuality as a destructive power, and the occult revival (Spencer 203). Machen’s doctor Raymond in “The Great God Pan” uncovers proof of female sexual power, opening a Pandora’s box dangerous to society and its “safe” demarcation between authoritative men and quiescent women. The symbolic power of the New Woman in “The Great God Pan” follows a fantastic chain of events that unfold from a medical laboratory. Machen’s tale begins when Raymond, a brain surgeon and scientist, performs an experimental surgery on a foundling girl, Mary. His journalist friend Clarke witnesses the operation and its aftermath – Mary’s transformation into a “hopeless idiot” – which Clarke recalls years later when writing a piece called Memoirs to Prove the Existence of the Devil. This narrative documents the seductive powers of a young woman, Helen Vaughan, who repeatedly drives happy, prosperous men to suicide after committing acts only described as “nameless infamies.” The penultimate chapter of the story is composed of the manuscript of another doctor, the late Robert Matheson, who describes his baffling observation of the dissolution of a horrific, inhuman body. The end of the tale reunites Clarke with Dr. Raymond, who tells him that nine months after the surgery, Mary gave birth to Helen, the progeny of Mary and Pan, and the “foul” form that Matheson saw on its deathbed. The liberation of Helen Vaughan, Mary’s child with Pan, turns upon a concomitant enervation of men. Helen, adopted by simple country people, grows up into an extraordinary woman: “Everyone who saw her … said she was at once the most beautiful woman and the most repulsive they had ever set eyes on” (198). Helen’s danger rests on this paradox, as she manages to deploy the power of feminine beauty without any of the passive characteristics with which it is traditionally associated. Helen targets prosperous men, and causes the financial ruin of her husband Herbert, whose account of the events that led him towards begging on a London street turns upon his deviant wife, who “corrupted [his] soul” and eradicated his savings. Helen’s victims are variously described as “a man of a good family and means” (196), “Arthur Meyrick, the painter, a thoroughly good fellow” (220), and “Lord Argentine … a great favorite in London society” (214). Helen has trounced these respectable men on their terms: finance and position. She reveals in destructive form the New Woman’s aim to seek masculine reward for masculine qualities (Walkowitz, City 61). Helen’s death reveals that her unnatural sexuality is biologically based, an alchemy of male and female properties born by Raymond’s unnatural science. As Dr. Matheson observes in the throes of her death, a suicide motivated by the revelation of her identity, “[t]he skin, and the flesh, and the muscles … and the firm structure of the human body that I had thought to be unchangeable … began to melt and dissolve … I saw the form waver from sex to sex, dividing itself from itself, and then again reunited” (245). By attributing Helen’s deviance to her inextricable sexuality, Machen assigns Helen’s androgyny to the realm of gothic fantasy, and invokes the logic that naturalizes “good” (passive) femininity as a physiological standard.


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“The Inmost Light” also instances a doctor’s unwise experiment in occult medicine at the expense of a woman. Black, the doctor/husband in the story, performs a surgery on his wife that he thinks will uncover a material connection between brain theory and physiology. But instead, middle-class, suburban Mrs. Black transforms into a demon, and Black – in his mind justifiably – murders her. Black’s post-mortem examination of his wife reveals a non-human brain, and a broken Dr. Black wastes away in a series of progressively impoverished London flats. The rest of the story is a convoluted collection of anecdotes concerning a mysterious jewel, which exchanges hands throughout London. The gemstone is traced by an amateur criminologist, Dyson, who is writing a “science” or “physiology” of London – what he calls “the greatest subject that the mind of man can perceive” (249). Dyson uncovers, along with the jewel, a manuscript written by Black detailing the occult sciences that led to his wife’s surgery and her consequent transformation. The last pages of the story reveal that the singular gemstone is in fact Mrs. Black’s soul, and its extraction is what effected her transformation into a devil. Despite Black’s responsibility in destroying his wife, her passive body is nevertheless criminalized in a way that correlates feminine sexuality with the lust for discovery that Black cannot help but pursue. In this way, Mrs. Black is guilty of tempting her husband to his ruinous experiment, in a dynamic later mirrored by his rationalization of her murder. Gothic Analogies to Prostitution and Venereal Disease The political subtext of the CD Acts prefigures the conjunction of medical condition and sexual activity represented by Lucy’s affliction with vampirism, Helen’s pathological destructiveness, and Mrs. Black’s biological (if dormant) capacity for evil. But the medical treatments and experiments that frame these women’s sexual threat are complemented by a civic appropriation of their sexuality, which rests upon the threat that their sexuality represents to the public at large, a threat that reconfigures the primary defense of the CD Acts. The transference of the prostitute’s sexuality to the realm of public interest simulates a revision made by William Acton in the 1871 edition of his widely read 1857 study, Prostitution. In the original edition, Acton famously wrote that “women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind.” The 1871 version substitutes “(happily for them)” with “(happily for society)” (qtd. in Bland 55) – a correction that considers the civic consequences of female desire, implied here to be aberrant, and that also insinuates Acton’s championship of the CD Acts. Lucy’s affliction with vampirism marks her transformation from virginal girl to sexually compromised woman, and resembles venereal disease in the illicit nature of its transmission and its progressively degenerate effect on her health. Before her first transfusion, Lucy is given a narcotic, but not told of the proceedings: Van Helsing says to her “cheerily,” “Now, little miss, here is your medicine. Drink it off, like a good child” (122). In contrast, Lucy’s ailing mother is conscious of her own

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illness, a heart condition. Stoker thus demarcates a symbolic difference between Mrs. Westenra’s respectable illness and Lucy’s indecent and clandestine “venereal disease.” When Lucy has received more transfusions, Van Helsing pledges that he “will tell her all when she is well” (123), but she dies before he has the chance. Following her death, the “undead” Lucy encounters in a graveyard the army of men intent on subduing Dracula: doctors Van Helsing and Seward, Arthur, Lucy’s fiancé, and Quincey Morris, a former suitor. All of these men have felt a romantic attachment to Lucy, and with the exception of Van Helsing, they have all proposed to her. But despite that romantic history, the men are revolted by the overtly sexual Lucy they meet in the graveyard. Arthur immediately recoils from Lucy’s vampiric alter ego, though it is a caricature of the original Lucy, with lips redder, skin whiter, and sexuality unleashed. He remarks that “it is her body, yet not it” (214). Arthur’s omission of gender in this description of Lucythe-vampire is repeated by Seward, who writes in his diary that “there was no love in my own heart, nothing but loathing for the foul Thing which had taken Lucy’s shape without her soul” (213) (my emphasis). As Van Helsing explains to Arthur, preparing him for a mutilation of Lucy that will end her career as a vampire, “I have a duty to do, a duty to others, a duty to you, a duty to the dead … ” (206–7). Extending his medical prowess to a measure of national security, Van Helsing proclaims that he and the other men “go out as knights as the old Knights of the Cross … [W]e are pledged to set the world free” (354–5). In this way the doctors’ work jeopardizes Lucy’s autonomy at the same time that it works to safeguard England; by compromising the woman, the doctors maintain public health. The directors of the Commission of the International Medical Congress in 1879 demanded stronger contagious disease laws in terms that replicate the same anxiety over vampirism as it is sexually transmitted in Dracula. The Anglo-Saxon race, they warned, “would not long maintain against so deteriorating an influence [as VD] that physical vigor of which they are justly proud, not even their moral energy” (qtd. in Smith 124). Vampirism according to Stoker encodes this fear of a venereal disease epidemic, and by treating Lucy as the conduit of the disease in a way that justifies her gruesome murder as an act of national security, it parallels the punishing dynamic that we see in the CD Acts. Helen’s aberrant sexuality in “The Great God Pan” takes on a literal and figurative public dimension. The amorality signaled by her presence in the slums of London signals the reflexive association between women unaccompanied in urban spaces and prostitution. Prostitutes, also referred to as “public women,” announced their trade simply by occupying public streets – particularly in the lower neighborhoods. During the operation of the CD Acts, this easy association contributed to the authorities’ confidence that “suspected” prostitutes were indeed guilty of that trade (Mort 77). Villiers, one of the writers who piece together Helen’s identity, reflects on her position in aristocratic society by musing that She must have [initially] moved in circles not so refined as her present ones … I have always been fond of diving into Queer Street for my amusement, and I


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found my knowledge of that locality and its inhabitants very useful [in tracking Helen] … I should think the worst den in London far too good for her. (228)

While Villiers’s rambles in Queer Street do not affect his character or reputation, but function as a sort of expertise, Helen’s passage from the dens of London to high society registers her sexual amorality as a distinctly economic instrument. Like the Victorian prostitute whose trade is punishable by the state in the name of “gain” rather than seen to be a desperate form of employment, Helen’s opportunism endangers the status quo that retains money as a masculine province. Machen represents Helen’s crimes against West End men (which incite their suicides) by comparing them to the most famous emblem of late-century sexual violence, the Jack the Ripper murders in the Whitechapel district. Like Jack the Ripper’s serial murders, Helen’s series of ineffably violent acts take place in 1888: … the police had been forced to confess themselves powerless to arrest or explain the sordid murders of Whitechapel; but before the horrible suicides of Piccadilly and Mayfair they were dumbfounded, for not even the mere ferocity which did duty as explanation of the crimes in the East End, could be of service in the West. (231)

Machen’s gender reversal of criminal and victims effectively resolves whatever moral ambivalence lurked around the representation of the Ripper’s victims. Prostitutes were not easy subjects of Victorian sympathy, and while Jack the Ripper’s crimes were universally reviled, the grotesque graphic and journalistic representation of the victim’s bodies in the press underscores the prostitutes’ already degraded status (Walkowitz, City 198). Their sexuality, as that of the prostitutes disciplined by the CD Acts, was publicly appropriated as a matter of social (and prurient) interest. By comparing Helen’s acts to the Ripper’s, Machen doubles the charge of evil against his criminal; sex crimes by a woman against respectable, upper-class men are infinitely worse than those by a man against already transgressive women. The popular belief that Jack the Ripper was a doctor further aligns Machen’s text and its dangerous surgeon to this sex scandal.10 In “The Inmost Light,” the presence of venereal disease lurks around Dr. Black in an attribution of sexual transgression that emphasizes the innocence of Mrs. Black. The doctor who performs the inquest on Mrs. Black’s corpse tellingly directs his diagnosis at her husband by suspecting that “Black murdered his wife, being in himself in all probability an undeveloped lunatic” (122). Lunacy, associated with the tertiary stage of syphilis, explains both Black’s mad surgery and his

Stoker’s 1901 Preface to the Icelandic edition of Dracula contextualizes the novel’s events in reference to the Ripper murders, which lends the novel historical credibility, and underscores the connection I am drawing between Lucy and the fallen women she comes to resemble. 10

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progressive physical collapse. Dyson describes the rapid physical transformation of Dr. Black after the surgery: What a change! When I saw Dr. Black [before the surgery] he was an upright man, walking firmly with well-built limbs; a man, I should say, in the prime of his life. And now before me there crouched this wretched creature, bent and feeble, with shrunken cheeks, and hair that was whitening fast, and limbs that trembled and shook together, and misery in his eyes. (118)

Black describes his deterioration with a geographic metaphor that relates its depravity. “There is a region of knowledge,” he tells Dyson, “which you will never know, which wise men seeing from afar shun off like the plague, as well they may, but into that region I have gone” (120). Black literalizes this transgressive moral “region” after his wife’s death, by leaving their quiet suburb for the “wretched quarters” in London, the back streets and alleys that Machen repeatedly identifies with sexual and criminal traffic. Medical Revenge Plots: Doctors Seize Reproductive Functions Stoker and Machen divest women of control over their own reproductive functions, and indeed, over their own health. A medical conduct book of 1890 advocates this dynamic by clarifying the profession’s stance against birth control and abortion: “To [prevent] conception … and other expedients to aid crime or to defeat nature, although not offenses within reach of the law, are nevertheless most derogatory and degrading to the assenting practitioner, and a gross abuse of his professional knowledge” (qtd. in McLaren 269). While the medical modes of treatment and experiment that Stoker and Machen’s doctors practice are troubling and often violent, their representation of doctors’ command over women’s bodies corresponds to historical medical efforts to regulate reproductive functions (against the efforts of the New Women) and to defend that practice as appropriate care for a female patient. In more abstract forms, we see this same seizure of reproductive power in two canonical late-century novels. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) confronts the deficiency of rational science by transforming an upstanding doctor into a monster. Gradually, Dr. Jekyll upsets the judicious and reliable discourses of the novel (including Mr. Utterson’s legal rhetoric and interpretation and his own knowledge of chemical “laws”) as he transforms into Hyde. The greatest danger presented in the novel, however, is the abandonment of natural laws of reproduction. Jekyll creates Hyde by using chemicals in his laboratory, and the text’s near-total absence of female characters underscores its eerily clinical domain. Similarly, Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau tells the story of an evil doctor whose experiments with breeding create a depraved race of animal/humans who ultimately try to overthrow Moreau, his assistant, and the


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shipwrecked naturalist who narrates the story. Moreau’s experimental technologies also withdraw the presence of woman from the reproductive act. Stevenson and Wells’s novels both depict the doctor’s work as morally irresponsible, instancing a medical drive that is inspired by an insatiable lust for knowledge. Drs. Jekyll and Moreau function outside of the professional boundaries of work and research endorsed by the medical establishment; they work secretly, in a locked house and on a tropical island. These novels also figure experimental technologies that obviate the presence of women from the reproductive act. In Dracula, the medically endorsed destruction of Lucy can be read as a displaced punishment of the New Woman. In different ways, the doctors and Dracula both divest Lucy of her reproductive power. Dracula, whose sexual aggression against Lucy is figured through occultism rather than medicine, enacts his version of male-driven procreation by creating the “undead” version of Lucy. Dracula’s generative power makes use of ancient, folkloric, and foreign methodologies, playing on fears of imperial miscegenation. Athena Vrettos points out that “[t]he vampire … appropriates the female function of reproducing the species” (164), but she neglects to note that the doctors’ donation of blood mirrors Dracula’s extraction of it; both acts achieve male versions of procreative power by subverting Lucy’s command of her own body. Van Helsing and Seward, that is, attempt to regenerate Lucy through experimental blood transfusions, activating a new technology that allows for a reconfiguration of procreative identities and thereby resolves the late Victorian medical battle for authority over women’s sexual and physiological functions. In figuring the (albeit temporary) success of the transfusions, Stoker rests medical progress on the prostrate body of the woman and gives the male new, generative power. Van Helsing approves Arthur’s plea to help Lucy by donating blood, explaining that “[a] brave man’s blood is the best thing on this earth when a woman is in trouble” (149). The doctors’ execution of the transfusions replicates Dracula’s attacks on Lucy; she is ignorant of their proceedings as both acts occur while she is asleep. The parallel between Dracula’s and the doctors’ work represents a world wherein both good and evil forces negate female reproductive controls, a rebuke to the efforts of the New Women to direct medicine towards their own political and physical autonomy. What is more, Lucy’s subversion of “natural” motherhood as a vampire is so complete that instead of giving life, she preys upon young children.11 In “The Great God Pan,” Dr. Raymond’s surgical experiment rests upon Mary’s status as his dependent. Raymond justifies Mary’s destruction and Helen’s birth with the gains of what he terms “transcendental medicine,” and he thus represents a wholly clinical interest in Mary’s surgical transformation, which he likens to the lifting of a veil. “You may think all this strange nonsense,” he tells Clarke before 11 For a more extensive discussion of “Lucy’s sacrilegious reversal of motherhood,” see Leila S. May, “‘Foul Things of the Night’: Dread in the Victorian Body,” Modern Language Review, 1 (1993): 19.

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the surgery, “ … but it is true, and the ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god Pan” (170). Raymond assures Clarke that “the knife is necessary” and uses his years of research to justify the violent operation: “After years of labor, after years of toiling and groping in the dark, after days and nights of disappointment and sometimes of despair … I knew the long journey was at an end” (171). Raymond, by the novella’s end, is chastened by his knowledge of the danger he released through the operation on Mary, and its perversion of natural reproduction. As he tells Clarke, “it was an ill work I did that night when you were present. I broke open the door of the house of life, without knowing or caring what might pass forth or enter in” (242). Raymond’s medical experiment jeopardizes cherished physical and symbolic frontiers in the surgical alteration of Mary’s brain, which crime is repeated in Helen’s transgressive and upwardly mobile route from London’s slums to the West End. The pathologized terrain of Mary’s brain becomes via Helen a civic threat (like that represented by Dracula and Lucy) that endangers privileged masculine and social codes. Yet Raymond’s guilt revolves around the danger he unleashed upon an unsuspecting public, while the sacrifice of Mary is unaccounted for – a dynamic that repeats the defensive social policy underwriting the CD Acts. The prostitute (and the conditions that determined her labor) was only the conduit through which contagion spread to a public that deserved protection. As The Lancet article, quoted earlier, argues, “it is only insofar as a woman exercises trade which is physically dangerous to the community that the Government has any right to interfere” (qtd. in Sigsworth and Wyke 97; my emphasis). The demonic spawn of Dr. Black in “The Inmost Light” materializes from the doctor’s obsession with occult science. While Mary in “The Great God Pan” (however disturbingly) complies with Dr. Raymond’s experiment, Mrs. Black resists her surgery and predicts the danger that Mary does not. Black recounts the night of the surgery: For one night my wife consented to what I asked of her, consented with the tears running down her beautiful face, and hot shame flushing red over her neck and breast, and consented to undergo this for me … I kissed her on the lips, and her tears ran down my face. That night she came down to my laboratory, and there, with shutters bolted and barred down, with curtains drawn thick and close … I did what had to be done, and led out what was no longer a woman.

While Raymond’s surgery on Mary transformed her into a vegetative state and conceived Helen, Black effectively destroys his wife and “births” this non-woman issue in her place. After the surgery, Dyson recalls his brief but lurid encounter with the former Mrs. Black. While walking through the Blacks’ suburban neighborhood one afternoon, Dyson experiences a shock like an electric current and is momentarily mystified. As he later realizes:


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… I knew what had made my very heart shudder and my bones grind together in an agony. As I glanced up I had looked straight towards the last house in a row before me, and in an upper window of that house [I saw] … the face of a woman, and yet it was not human. [We] have heard in our time, as we sat in our seats in church in sober English fashion, of a lust that cannot be satiated and of a fire that is unquenchable … I knew I had … seen hell before me. (254)

Once an “uncommonly pretty wife” (252), Mrs. Black now assumes “the visage of a satyr” (255). Just as Black describes the surgery through the language of a sexual fall (replete with images of Mrs. Black’s blushing shame and a laboratory shrouded by curtains and bolted shutters), Dyson refers to “lust” as he relates her rebirth into a devil. A wife or consort, Machen suggests in “The Great God Pan” and “The Inmost Light,” has been replaced by a sexualized demon – much like Lucy’s transformation into a vampire in Dracula. In all three texts, the sexual nature of these women, transformed against their will, signals an inhumanity for which they must pay, for once they are characterized as monsters, the purposes of civic safety and social purity justify their destruction. Gothic Medicine: Treating in Order to Punish The associations between prurient and medicalized aggression to the body of the fallen woman inform the medical practices imposed upon women in Dracula, “The Great God Pan,” and “The Inmost Light,” which are both libidinous and punishing. The doctors’ violence in these texts suggests anger against female power, even though the women here are victims. By symbolically converting latecentury fears about the spread of venereal disease into gothic plots that dispossess women of their reproductive power, and often end up killing them, these authors imaginatively reverse the politics that repealed the CD Acts and empathized with the position of prostitutes. The doctors’ treatment of Lucy in Dracula uses medicine covertly in order to discipline and contain her sexuality. Seward and Van Helsing each betray an interest in Lucy’s personal attractions, and the transfusions signify a mode of sexual congress, which make the treatment Lucy receives far from a dispassionate exercise in clinical medicine. Seward proposes to Lucy, which establishes his romantic interest in her prior to her illness, and Van Helsing forces his own intimate friendship with her. As he tells Seward, “the disease … interest me, and the sweet young dear, she interest me too. She charm me, and for her, if not for you or disease, I come” (114). Giving Lucy his own blood allows her fiancé Arthur Holmwood to actualize his devotion to her: “What can I do?” he asks the doctors. “Tell me, and I shall do it. My life is hers, and I would give the last drop of blood in my body for her … ” (121). For Lucy, Arthur’s gift of blood subconsciously deepens her feelings for him. As she writes in her diary after receiving his blood in the clandestine transfusion, “Somehow Arthur feels very, very close to me, I seem to

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feel his presence warm about it” (126). Indeed, the transfusion creates so intimate a connection that the doctors work to mitigate its impropriety. When Seward gives Lucy blood in Arthur’s absence, Van Helsing warns him to keep it a secret, as knowledge of the transfusion would “at once frighten and enjealous” Arthur (128). (Quincy Morris also gives blood to Lucy, without Arthur’s knowledge.) Seward’s description of donating blood to Lucy suggests his generative power as well as the implicitly sexual nature of the medical act: “It was with a feeling of personal pride that I could see a faint tinge of color steal back into the pallid cheeks and lips. No man knows till he experiences it, what it is to feel his own life-blood drawn away into the veins of the woman he loves” (128).12 After Lucy’s death, the two doctors ruminate over Arthur’s despair, and Seward recounts in his diary that in deference to Arthur’s relationship to Lucy, “none of us said a word of the [other transfusions that Arthur did not give] and none of us ever shall” (174). He recalls that Arthur felt that “the transfusion of his blood to her veins had made her truly his bride,” to which Van Helsing responds, “If so, then what about the others? Ho, ho! Then this so sweet maid is a polyandrist, and me, with my poor wife dead to me, but alive by Church’s law, though no wits, all gone – even I, who am faithful husband to this now-no-wife, am bigamist” (176). The medical project of the transfusions jeopardizes exactly what it tries to protect – Lucy, and by extension, her virtue (Lucy as “undead” sexual predator does not receive their restorative attentions: instead, they slay her). That is, the doctors’ medical procedure seems to imperil Lucy’s sexual morality, which undermines their larger attempt to protect her from Dracula, the sexual predator. In fact, because the doctoring in the transfusion scenes suspiciously resembles the ceremonies of love and marital relations, the clinical nature of the doctors’ work is further compromised. For Machen’s Raymond, the female body contains scientific opportunities that easily rationalize Mary’s sacrifice. Mary appears to be a willing subject for Raymond, even though the surgery is purely experimental, and she is not ill. Raymond offers her a choice to undergo the surgery: 12 A similarly sexual representation of a blood transfusion occurs in George MacDonald’s Paul Faber, Surgeon (1879). In this scene, Faber performs a transfusion on Juliet, who is at this point his love interest, and later revealed to be a “fallen” woman. After Faber transfused his blood into Juliet, he “turned sick, and lay down on the floor. Presently, however, he grew able to crawl from the room, and got into the garden at the back of the house, where he walked softly to the little rude arbor at the end of it, and sat down as if in a dream. But in the dream his soul felt wondrously awake. He had been tasting death from the same cup with the beautiful woman who lay there, coming alive with his life. A terrible weight was lifted from his bosom … Then a horror seized him at the presumptuousness of the liberty he had taken. What if the beautiful creature would rather have died than have the blood of a man, one she neither loved nor knew, in her veins, and coursing through her very heart! She must never know it” (59). As with Lucy and Seward in Dracula, Juliet’s transfusion represents an intimate and indecent “liberty,” but also inspires Faber’s pride in his generative power.


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[Raymond] “Mary … the time has come. You are quite free. Are you willing to trust yourself to me entirely?” “Yes, dear.” “You hear that, Clarke? You are my witness. Here is the chair, Mary. It is quite easy. Just sit in it and lean back. Are you ready?” “Yes, dear, quite ready. Give me a kiss before you begin.” The doctor stooped and kissed her mouth, kindly enough. (177)

This transaction proposes that Mary undergoes the surgery voluntarily, and that she is complicit in their implied sexual relationship, despite her compromising position as Raymond’s unofficially adopted, working-class ward. Mary possesses ambivalent signs of worth and perversion, similar to those her daughter Helen would dramatize. Entering the surgery, all dressed in white, Mary undermines her own virginal and bridal aspect when she demands Raymond’s kiss and thereby asserts the impurity of her social caste. Raymond appears to be the passive participant in this scene, generously giving her a kiss but not initiating the contact. Because working-class female desire was a clear marker of immorality and degeneration, Machen’s sexualization of Mary in this scene effectively moderates Raymond’s transgressiveness, wholly eliding Pan’s role in the story (who either literally or metaphorically conceals Raymond’s liability) beyond his (alleged) impregnation of Mary. Raymond only determines Pan’s presence in Mary’s mind after she is shocked into idiocy. Days after the surgery, Raymond takes Clarke to Mary’s bedside: “She was lying wide-awake, rolling her head from side to side, and grinning vacantly. ‘Yes,’ said the doctor, still quite cool. ‘It is a great pity; she is a hopeless idiot. However, it could not be helped; and, after all, she has seen the Great God Pan’” (179). More disturbing than Raymond’s exhilaration at “lifting the veil” that separates the occult from the laws of nature is his willingness to use Mary as a sacrifice to science, which her working-class status appears to justify. That Mary was a foundling “rescued” by Raymond makes the rearticulation of her body and mind a socially complex event. The reader’s first glimpse at Mary is offered when Raymond rationalizes the danger she will risk as his experimental subject. Clarke suggests that “something might go wrong; and [Raymond] would be a miserable man for the rest of his days,” but Raymond dismisses this risk. “No, I think not, even if the worst happened,” he says. “As you know, I rescued Mary from the gutter, and from almost certain starvation, when she was a child; I think her life is mine, to use as I see fit” (173). Raymond’s claim that her life is at his disposal represents a destructive combination between an urge to scientific discovery and a late-century understanding of the use-value of a fallen woman.13 We see a similar surgical exploitation of underclass women in Berdoe’s St. Bernard’s, 13 Dr. Raymond’s overdetermination of Mary’s class position has some historical support. Keith Nield notes that Victorian law considered the abduction of an heiress a felony, and that of a girl with no title to property a misdemeanor (Neild 7).


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in which the ambitious gynecologist Dr. Stanforth supervises a new machine for the administration of anesthesia. “Long before one dare use such a thing on Lady Millefleurs,” the narrator explains, “its capabilities and little eccentricities must be exhibited on the unimportant carcass of Eliza Smith” (281). As Black’s manuscript in “The Inmost Light” reveals, his long years of research finally position him on the brink of a major discovery about the “the gulf between the world of consciousness and the world of matter” (284). Like Raymond in “The Great God Pan,” Black is enthralled by his work. His fascination with occult knowledge functions as an addiction, and when he realizes the direction that his research will take him, he “knew that [his] doom had been pronounced … [his] position was as utterly hopeless as that of the prisoner in an utter dungeon” (133– 4). Black’s compulsion to pursue his project contaminates his wife, and although she is innocent, the burden of research implicates her more seriously than it does her husband. As he explains his research directive to her, Black “looked into [his] wife’s eyes,” and, as he continues, At last I told her all. She shuddered, and wept, and called on her dead mother for help, and asked me if I had no mercy, and I could only sigh … I concealed nothing from her, I told her what she would become, and what would enter in where her life had been; I told her of all the shame and the horror … . (285)

Black’s scientific breakthrough extends here automatically to his wife, who by way of her passivity and proximity to her husband’s research is reflexively elected to the status of the scientific offering. The transference of punishment from Black’s addictive research to Mrs. Black’s body parallels the medical emphasis on the woman’s body as the source of contagion that informed the CD Acts and the public antagonism to prostitutes. With seeming inevitability, Dr. Black transmits the “shame” and “horror” of his project to his wife. As a foregone conclusion to her position as an experimental doctor’s wife, Mrs. Black is transformed into something uncanny and deserving of punishment, and the doctor murders her in order to suppress her new subhuman nature that is his creation. Black explains with a paradoxical logic that appears to prove his commitment to his wife, “[Mrs. Black] had only asked one thing of me; that when there came at last what I had told her, I would kill her. I have kept that promise” (286).14 Black’s emphasis on what he does for his wife – fulfills his promise to kill her – means to counteract his original guilt in destroying her. In a similar transmission of guilt, Elaine Showalter writes that members of the public hypothesized that Jack the Ripper was either a doctor or a syphilitic (or both), taking revenge on women because they carried disease (188). ***

14

Mina also promised to die if her sacrificial death would help subdue Dracula.


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Machen and Stoker write medical plots that allegorically figure retaliatory measures against the medical politics exemplified by the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts. In writing his story of vampiric possession and non-human reproduction through the phenomenon of the “undead,” Stoker articulates in occult and medical terms the anxieties about sexually transmitted diseases that haunt late Victorian culture. He displaces this fear of contagion onto two usual suspects: exotic foreigners (Dracula) and sexualized women. His band of vampire slayers – Arthur, Quincy, Seward, Van Helsing, and Jonathan – are largely motivated by the desire to protect Mina from sharing Lucy’s fate. Their destruction of Lucy and Dracula thus is warranted by any means of medical and imperial terrorism necessary to curb the spread of vampirism. Machen’s biomedical exploitation tales also instance a strike against feminist ideology. Machen’s link between working-class status and female depravity first explains the sacrificial treatment of Mary and then the annihilating drive of Helen. Both texts endorse in their reactionary nationalism a return to an England purified of outsiders and a definition of femininity similarly contained and traditional. According to the medical logic of these texts, doctors are permitted to destroy sexually dangerous women for the good of the English race, even if they – the doctors – have been complicit in the transformation of the women from good to evil. Once the women in these stories become monstrous and unwomanly, their murder becomes a redemptive act justified by their potential to disrupt the sex roles that conventional society and doctors, with waning authority, deem “natural.” The symbolic targets of these cautionary tales, the New Woman and the prostitute, are provocateurs to late-century medical jurisdiction and its command over sexual and reproductive law.


Chapter 6

The “Fair Physician”: Female Doctors and the Late-Century Marriage Plot As examined in the previous chapter, critics and historians of the New Woman argue that late-century medical policies like the Contagious Diseases Acts and the medical establishment’s hostility to birth control directly challenged the New Woman’s crusade for physical and reproductive autonomy. But amidst this dispute for biophysical control was an endeavor that restructured the conflict from a rivalry between women and doctors into a more complex dynamic involving the effort of women to become doctors. Women’s entrance into the ranks of medical doctors in Britain proceeded in fits and starts. The first woman in Britain to register as a doctor was Elizabeth Garrett Anderson in 1866, after passing the exam administered by the Hall of Apothecaries in 1865. Following Garrett Anderson’s registration, the Hall of Apothecaries changed its regulations in order to bar women from the exam. In 1869, a group of women matriculated in medicine at the University of Edinburgh, and so began a lengthy battle between university administrators, faculty, and the students themselves (both the female applicants and the largely opposing male student body). These female students, soon known as the “Edinburgh Seven,” had to pay for their own lectures as the University did not allow them to sit in the lectures in mixed company. In 1873, after several years of conflict, the University decreed that the woman could not get a degree in medicine from Edinburgh. Many of the Edinburgh Seven obtained medical degrees from Continental schools of In her recent article on the representation of professionalism in Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, Susan E. Colón sees the efforts of historical Victorian women to become doctors as the “best example of the compatibility of Victorian sexual ideology and professional advance for women,” arguing for medicine’s “relative accessibility to female incursion” (9). I disagree with this positive estimation of medicine’s accessibility for women, either in history or fiction, as this chapter makes clear. The obstructed path to women’s matriculation in British medical schools strikingly resembles the same process women went through to gain acceptance at Oxbridge. In both cases, women were first accepted as “unofficial” members of the university, allowed to attend classes but not earn degrees. For an excellent description of Cambridge University’s grudging acceptance of female students, see Rita Tullberg McWilliams, “Women and Degrees at Cambridge University, 1862–67,” A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977): pp. 117–45.

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medicine, and Parliament passed a law in 1876, the Enabling Bill, facilitating the examination of female candidates for the medical degree, but not requiring schools to do so. The Irish College of Physicians in Dublin was the first British university to license female doctors, and the University of London was the first English university to do so. Not until 1892 did the University of Edinburgh admit women undergraduates to its medical program. In May 1870, a letter appeared in The Lancet, titled “A Lady on Lady Doctors,” and signed only “Mater.” This commentator argues against an appeal made to Parliament to allow women admission to medical schools, and she summarizes many of the objections that were to surround this controversy for the next two decades. Women lack the appropriate physical strength required of a doctor, and also the calm nerves, she writes. They are “morally … not fitted” because they are incapable of “hold[ing] their tongues” and this trait threatens patient confidentiality. On the issue of the woman doctor’s marital status, the writer offers more detail: Are they to be vowed vestals? Or is their being condemned to a state of single blessedness taken to be cela va sans dire, because no man would care to try and make them change it? Character might be irreproachable, but there is such a thing as virginité de l’âme, and it is a purity men love. But granting (as we must) the privilege of matrimony to these aspiring ladies, how then? Under certain resulting conditions, what is to become of the patients? Is a “nursing mother” to suckle her babe in the intervals snatched from an extensive practice? Or is the husband of the “qualified practitioner” to stay at home and bring up the little ones with one of those “artificial breasts” so kindly The names and medical credentials of the Edinburgh Seven are as follows: Sophia Jex-Blake: attended the London School of Medicine for Women, which she helped to found in 1874, and passed her M.D. exams in Bern in 1877; Isabel Jane Thorne: attended the London School of Medicine for Women in 1874, and became the school’s honorary secretary from 1877 through 1908; Edith Pechey (later Pechey-Phipson): attended the London School of Medicine for Women in 1874, and passed her M.D. exams in Bern in 1877; Matilda Chaplin (later Chaplin Ayrton): attended the London School of Medicine for Women in 1877, and passed her M.D. exams in Paris in 1877; Helen Evans (later Evans Russel): no further medical training; Mary Anderson (later Anderson Marshall): attended the London School of Medicine for Women in 1874, and passed her M.D. exams in Paris in 1877; Emily Bovell (later Bovell Sturge): attended the London School of Medicine for Women, and passed her M.D. exams in Paris in 1877. See Catriona Blake, The Charge of the Parasols: Women’s Entry into the Medical Profession (London: The Women’s Press, 1990), pp. 156, 185. The Enabling Bill, also called the Russell Gurney Enabling Bill after the M.P. who introduced it, was a permissive piece of legislation, meaning that it removed legal barriers from the medical examining boards should they grant licenses to women. The exclusion of women from any medical school or licensing body, however, continued to be perfectly legal (Blake 184). See .

The “Fair Physician”

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invented to save idle and selfish woman from fulfilling the sweetest and most healthful of all duties of maternity? A man’s home should be to him also a rest. Will it be much of this with his wife in and out all day, called up all night, neglecting the household management, and leaving the little ones to the care of servants? I think not. Granted, then, that married doctoresses will not answer, we have only the maiden students to fall back upon. (680–81)

As Mater understands it, the institution of marriage cannot accommodate a wife who is employed outside the home in conditions that so compromise her attention to her husband, the household, and her children. The conditions Mater names are conventional signposts of Victorian respectability: a woman’s maternal instinct, a man’s right to a “restful” home. Eminent physician Benjamin Ward Richardson, in his 1897 memoir Vita Medica: Chapters of Medical Life and Work, opposes the phenomenon of the “Lady Doctor” by transferring the debate away from morality, intellectual ability, or cultural role, and to the all-powerful domain of physiological fitness: There has never been the faintest moral reason why women should not become doctors, mathematicians, or chemists, or anything professional that they might find themselves fitted for … but if the race is to continue there are natural physiological reasons that must ever stand in their way. Wives and mothers cannot by any device or industry rival men. No provision has been made for such a contest; on the contrary, Nature seems to declare that what she intended the female to be as a part of the race was a good mother, as the first business. Nature is so determinate in all long runs of her own designing, that an imperfect generation might spring out of the choicest female doctors, unless we could succeed in changing the sympathetic nervous build, and establish an organization in which the brain and its parts reign supreme. (433)

That Richardson unaccountably and perhaps unconsciously translates women doctors into “wives and mothers” discloses not only dominant Victorian gender roles, but the late-century preoccupation with evolution, here also referenced in his ominously conditional “if the race is to continue … .”

The intellectual context behind the Mater’s 1870 emphasis on morality and Richardson’s 1897 fears about evolution (or devolution), in their respective objections to female doctors, attests to the rise of natural determinism at the end of the century. As Wayne Shumaker argues in his seminal analysis of English autobiography, scientists and scientific philosophers including Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, and Wallace reveal in their memoirs a change in the way that individual lives were made socially relevant. Hereditary and environmental influences, towards the fin de siècle, assumed the centrality which had formerly been accorded to actions and observations (90): Wayne Shumaker, English

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An historical doctor, Elizabeth Blackwell, corroborates the incompatibility of marriage and a medical career from the other side of the argument than Mater and Richardson. Blackwell quite consciously enters into the medical field as “a way to place a strong barrier between myself and ordinary marriage” (Krug 55). Writers who fictionalize the case of the woman doctor from the 1870s to the 1890s diverge widely on the endorsement of this figure, but all of them agree with Mater, Richardson, and Blackwell that women who are doctors cannot simultaneously participate in “ordinary marriage,” at least without dire consequences. This chapter presents a brief inventory of five woman-doctor texts that fall into two categories: those which imagine the careerist female doctor as a “bride of science,” and those which feature female doctors who trade in their careers, usually exultantly, for marriage. After setting forth these distinct norms, I then examine two texts in greater detail: Annie S. Swan’s Elizabeth Glen, M.B.: The Experience of a Lady Doctor (1895) and Margaret Todd’s Mona Maclean, Medical Student (1892). While overtly approving of her heroine’s medical career, Swan demonstrates the essential incompatibility between the doctor and the wife that Mater, Richardson, and Blackwell articulate towards such different ends. In the context of this consistent divide between the woman doctor’s career and her marriage, Todd’s tentative portrayal of a married woman doctor stands out in my analysis of the marriage-plot novel as a more unusual achievement than a close reading of its professional story might invite on first glance. The fictional construct of the woman doctor radically distills my analysis of medicine’s personal interaction with the marriage plot. Because the Victorian narrative of femininity is so dependent on domestic and romantic relationships, imagining the “woman doctor” in fiction demands either a reassessment of the marriage plot as female destiny, or of medicine’s later-century distance from the personal and emotional sphere. That is, a survey of women doctor novels and short Autobiography: its Emergence, Materials, and Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954). Although she was born in Bristol, England, Blackwell (1821–1910) immigrated to the US with her family as a child, and spent her early adult life there. She was the first woman to become a licensed medical doctor in the US, earning her medical degree from Geneva College (New York) in 1849. She moved back to England in 1869 and helped to open the London School of Medicine for Women. Among her many public causes was the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts in the 1870s. The conservative direction of these plots corresponds to Joseph Boone’s characterization of “traditional” marriage plots as those which “develop narrative organizations suited to the promotion of [a] culture’s valorization of hierarchy and order within social (and sexual) relations” (8). Swan’s Elizabeth Glen stories, while they superficially valorize the female doctor, exemplify this description of traditional social/ sexual roles. The “M.B.” of Elizabeth Glen’s title refers to “Bachelor of Medicine,” which is the designation used in the United Kingdom for a medical degree that follows a course of undergraduate study in medicine or surgery.


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stories from 1876 to 1897 demonstrates that fiction writers can imagine female doctors who are unmarried, and those who leave their careers for marriage, but with one limited exception, Todd’s Mona Maclean,10 they cannot imagine a female doctor who is also a wife. The importance of this pattern to my study is that the female doctor’s champions and her adversaries agreed on the general exclusivity of a woman’s medical career and marriage. By the late century, the role of the doctor was so strongly disassociated from the romantic and sentimental ethos of marriage that the narrative possibilities of the era – even those fashioned by the ideologically progressive New Women – almost always separate the stories of love from the stories of doctoring. The Woman Doctor as a Bride of Science The fictional women doctors who opt for medical careers in place of marriage still exist within a romantic frame, but in their case, that frame draws attention to their commitment to medicine as a distinct proxy for the more normative entrance into heterosexual marriage. Thus, these ostensibly careerist portraits of female doctors are still overdetermined by the narrative of marriage as it shapes the future of a young woman’s life. The most detailed examination of a woman doctor in Victorian fiction is Charles Reade’s heroine Rhoda Gale in The Woman-Hater (1876). Reade, an advocate for female doctors, conceived of The Woman-Hater as a didactic instrument that could help the woman doctor’s cause through sympathetic representation.11 He imagines Rhoda Gale as one of the Edinburgh Seven, narrating her history as an account of these British women who tried and failed to get medical degrees at the University of Edinburgh in the 1870s. The central plot of the novel concerns a small coterie surrounding Lord Harrington Vizard, a divorcé and committed misogynist, and his half-sister Zoë. One night at the theatre, Vizard meets Rhoda Gale, an unemployed doctor, and discovers that she is starving. Vizard becomes Rhoda’s patron, engaging her to practice medicine in the village outside his Barsetshire estate. His regard for 10 Margaret Todd, who published this novel under the pseudonym “Graham Travers,” was a doctor and the lesbian partner of the vanguard female doctor and activist Sophia JexBlake. Jex-Blake was one of the “Edinburgh Seven” who later ran a successful Edinburgh practice, established the Edinburgh Hospital for Women and Children, founded the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women and co-founded the London School of Medicine for Women, which Todd attended before earning her M.D. in 1894. 11 See David Finkelstein, “The Woman Hater and Women Healers: John Blackwood, Charles Reade, and the Victorian Woman’s Medical Movement,” Victorian Periodicals Review, 28:4 (Winter 1995): 330–52. See also Poovey’s discussion of Reade in Genres of a Credit Economy. Poovey characterizes Reade’s evaluation of literature as its ability to “use information and facts” in order to provoke readers to “act” (324; her emphasis), which underscores the pragmatic expectations he attached to the portrait of Rhoda Gale.

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Rhoda inspires Vizard to reassess his contempt for women, which ultimately leads to his happy marriage to opera singer Ida Klosking. But Rhoda’s presence in a text otherwise devoted to the romantic entanglements of a set of wealthy sophisticates is a jarring testament to her aberrant status. While Reade’s explicit desire is to present the female doctor sympathetically, his portrait of Rhoda reinforces some of the objections made against her. For instance, he unwittingly aided his adversaries by figuring Rhoda Gale as a manly competitor of men (Swenson 117). In addition to her intellectual brilliance, Reade principally represents Rhoda’s medical calling as a reflection of her unsuitability for ordinary life and relationships. Rhoda confesses romantic feelings for Zoë and Ida, and her antipathy to heterosexual relations has a constitutive relationship to her medical vocation. In effect, Reade makes Rhoda into a freakish genius whose radical challenge to conventional gender roles is unlikely to function as an exemplar for the female doctor. When Zoë urges Rhoda to support herself through a more practical vocation, like teaching, Rhoda likens her commitment to medicine to a marital relationship: … oh Miss Vizard, please take into account all that I have done and suffered for medicine. Is all that to go for nothing? Think what a bitter thing it must be to do, and then to undo – to labor and study, and then knock it all down; to cut a slice out of one’s life – out of the very heart of it – and throw it clean away. I know it is hard for you to enter into the feelings of any one who loves science and is told to desert it. But suppose you had loved a man you were proud of – loved him for five years – and then they came to you and said, “There are difficulties in the way; he is as worthy as ever, and he will never desert you, but you must give him up.” … I love science as other women love men. If I am to give up science, why not die?

Later in the novel, Zoë faces exactly this heartbreak upon learning that the man she loves is already married, which retroactively defends Rhoda’s plaintive appeal. That Rhoda’s desire to be a doctor takes the shape of a marital bond reveals the way that the feminine subject is overdetermined by the romantic ethos of the marriage plot, even when that feminine subject is supported in her quest towards a career. Furthermore, Rhoda identifies her vocation as “science” rather than medicine, which orients her in the progressive and objectivist context of the field rather than that side of practice that emphasizes social relations. Like Reade, Wilkie Collins depicts a woman doctor whose medical vocation is explored in and through its romantic connotations. His short story, “Fie! Fie! Or, the Fair Physician” (1882) concerns the young and pretty doctor Sophia Pillico, whose manipulative designs upon her male patients shape her medical judgments. The story takes place in two neighboring homes in suburban London, where the fragile and effeminate Otto Fitzmark and his beautiful neighbor, Salome, are poised for a romantic relationship. When Sophia is engaged to treat Otto’s stepfather, the Alderman and former mayor of London, Sir John Skirton, her intimate handling of Sir John strikes his wife as sexual rather than medical. The Lady Dowager [Skirton]


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discovers the doctor with “her rosy little ear pressed [medically pressed] against Sir John’s broad back” (225): “‘Look at her!’ said Lady Dowager, addressing Otto. ‘Hugging my husband before my face – and he seventy-four years old, last birthday. You unnatural hussy, let go of him. You a doctor indeed? I know what you are. Fie! Fie!’” (226) In fact, Sophia’s exploitation of her medical role concerns Otto, as she recommends that he decline an invitation to Salome’s home because of the frailty of his heart. After a “prolonged examination” and with a clearly personal interest at stake, Sophia determines that “under present conditions” he must not marry at all (232). But when Salome’s sister intervenes and tells Sophia that Otto is “fickle” in an effort to renew his attentions to Salome, Sophia conveniently revises her medical opinion, and Otto and Salome become engaged. Sophia later alludes to her “professional connection” with Otto by claiming that “[a]t my present time of life, stupid male patients persist in falling in love with me. Mr. Fitzmark was a particularly offensive instance of this” (238). By depicting Sophia’s medical authority as a means of romantic contrivance, Collins undermines her scientific or dispassionate interest in medicine. Moreover, his decision to figure an effeminate hero in the Otto-Salome-Sophia triad suggests that the presence of the female doctor transforms gender norms collectively. Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “The Doctors of Hoyland” (1895) similarly emasculates a man by way of his relationship with a careerist female doctor. At first, Dr. James Ripley epitomizes the clinically-minded, modern physician. An eligible bachelor who was “particularly happy in the managements of the ladies” (119), he spurned his many marriage prospects because his “love for his work was the one fanaticism which found a place in his dry, precise nature” (119). When Dr. Verrinder Smith moves to Hoyland, Ripley happily recognizes the name from articles he has admired in The Lancet. Ripley is shocked and discomfited when he finds out that Smith is a woman, and resolves that her commitment to medicine must necessarily “unsex” her. Her presence is “a monstrous intrusion to rankle his mind. A woman doctor had been an abstract thing before, repugnant but distant” (122). Dr. Smith successively disturbs Ripley’s prejudices against women doctors, first by her femininity and then, when Ripley breaks his foot and Smith sets it, by her superior surgical skills. Smith understands her colleague’s antipathy to female doctors and suggests that another surgeon continue with his case, but Ripley admits that he “should prefer [her to] continue the case,” following his request with “a half-hysterical laugh” (124). Ripley’s “feeble” and “half-hysterical” submission to Dr. Smith’s care demonstrates that the woman doctor in fact “unsex[es]” Ripley rather than the “ladylike” Smith, a dynamic accentuated by their status as patient and doctor. Smith’s power over Ripley is soon enhanced by his romantic attachment to her, but when he proposes, she explains that she has devoted her life “entirely to science,”12 and soon leaves Hoyland for a more elite post at the Paris Physiological 12 Like Reade’s Rhoda Gale, Verrinder Smith’s objective is science rather than medicine.

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Laboratory. At the story’s end, a heartbroken Ripley wistfully occupies the position of the local women who formerly tried to entice him with dances and picnics as he consumed himself with medical study. This role exchange between doctors Ripley and Smith suggests a sum total of medical authority, to be doled out in a contest in which women can compete – and win. “The Doctors of Hoyland” also tells a story about the way that female doctors stand to revise the marriage plot that organizes men and women in Victorian fiction. Kristine Swenson reads the story as an “amazingly refreshing” testament to the attractiveness of an accomplished woman (116), but the cost of Ripley’s transformation seems to outweigh its feminist example. After Smith moves away, “folks noticed that [Ripley] had aged many years in a few months, that a weary sadness lurked always in the depths of blue eyes, and that he was less concerned than ever with the eligible young ladies whom chance, or their careful country mammas, placed in his way” (126). While the marriage plot structurally invites a future for its characters, this defeated ending points to a new world wherein talented but unsympathetic women usurp their male competitors and lovelorn men wither away in loneliness. Trading Medicine for Marriage If the professional success of the woman doctor upsets the forward motion of the marriage plot, her romantic reversal triumphantly restores it. The pattern in which ambitious women doctors trade in their careers for marriage is reflected in works by Charlotte Yonge, a conservative averse to female doctors, and by Sarson J. Ingham and Annie S. Swan, whose loyalties are more complex.13 Charlotte Yonge’s Magnum Bonum (1879) features a woman doctor whose vocation is one of many signs of unsuccessful femininity. As a girl and after her doctor-father’s tragic death (he dies of tuberculosis, contacted through a patient), Janet Carey discovers his “Magnum Bonum,” a cryptic text that contains a secret and ambiguous cure for disease.14 Janet’s discovery and her intellectual temperament inspire her to become a doctor herself, and so carry out the promise of the Magnum Bonum. (Her father explicitly left the innovation to whichever of his four sons would prove most fit for medical work.) Her willful determination to become a doctor occurs against the wishes of her mother, who sees the Magnum Bonum as a project beyond Janet’s scope: “it is not a thing a woman could work out,” Mrs. Carey says. “It is a matter [that Janet’s father] could not have made sure 13 Another text that fits this pattern is Doctor Zay (1882), by American novelist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. The unsatisfying love plot in the second half of this novel interrupts the title character and female heroine’s successful medical career. 14 The disease that the “Magnum Bonum” proposes to treat is also unnamed, though Talia Schaffer argues that it is a sexual disorder. See Talia Schaffer, “The Mysterious Magnum Bonum: Fighting to Read Charlotte Yonge,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, 55.2 (2000): 244–75.


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of without a succession of experiments very hard even for him, and certainly quite impossible for any woman” (148–9). Janet hopes nevertheless to “triumph over prejudice” (149), and she continues in medicine, eventually going to Germany for further study. When Janet returns a few years later, she surprises her family with her marriage to Professor Demetrius Hermann, a German-Greek lecturer in physiology with suspect credentials. From her youth, the plain and “morose” Janet had seemed unlikely to marry, and had devoted herself to a passionate friendship with another woman. Her husband strikes the family as a “mere adventurer” drawn to an “errant and unprotected young lady of a large and tempting fortune” (233), but Janet’s effective draw is the Magnum Bonum, which she believes will “receive its full development” in the hands of her husband (229). Their partnership is an unqualified disaster. They move to America, have a baby daughter, and Demetrius pursues negligible opportunities as a lecturer as Janet discovers that “he had very little real science, and indeed [she] had to give him the facts and he put them in his flowery language” (376). They end up in Texas, where Demetrius’s medical incompetence makes him responsible for a patient’s death, and he and Janet separate in their efforts to flee an angry and vengeful mob. Soon after, Janet’s baby daughter dies, and she moves to New York where she works as a photographer’s apprentice, under an assumed name to distance herself from her wanted husband. Janet then reunites with her mother and siblings, and she and her brother Jock, now a doctor, travel to Virginia to help fight the yellow fever epidemic. Janet, working as a nurse, contacts the disease and dies. Jock returns to England and devotes his promising career to the Magnum Bonum. For the misguided Janet, her medical training and her choice of a husband function as different signs of the same essential flaw: her failure to cultivate a womanly instinct that would set her upon a more suitable destiny. In choosing to study medicine and unlock the secrets of the Magnum Bonum, Janet positions herself in competition with her brothers, which for Yonge signifies immaturity and futility. A better motive for a medical career is Jock’s: far from desiring the fame and credit of the Magnum Bonum, he “turned doctor as the readiest way of looking after mother” (375). Janet chooses equally badly in marrying Demetrius. The broken marriage, the dead child, and the failed vocation all mark Janet as a tragic figure who is only vindicated by her sacrificial death. On her deathbed in Virginia, Janet’s last words are to her mother: “Don’t waste time on me. I know these symptoms. Attend to Jock. That is of use. Only forgive and pray for me” (382). Although she is a trained doctor, Janet sacrifices herself by working as a nurse in the epidemic, in the first “appropriate” (if doomed) role she ever occupied. In “Hilary; Or, The Amateur Surgeon,” a serialized story by Sarson J. Ingham in The Girl’s Own Paper (1896), Hilary Gladwin is a talented and energetic young woman whose recently widowed mother has been forced into reduced circumstances. As part of her contribution to the family’s welfare, Hilary studies ambulance training in London in preparation for emigration to Australia, where she hopes to work as a surgeon to woman and girls. In Australia “there was more

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room, and womanly independence less fettered by conventional restrictions” (570). Her professional aspirations are treated like a practical alternative for a woman from a large family who will have little or no dowry. Before she leaves London, Hilary puts her training to work when she comes to the rescue of an injured man on the Strand. Later contact with the patient, however, reveals that Hilary’s heroism misfired: she set the leg that was not broken, and the fainting patient was unable to correct her. As the injured patient Geoffrey Clavers recovers, he nurses a strong desire to thank the beautiful “Angel of Patience” (600) who came, at least in principle, to his aid. A family connection reunites Hilary and Geoffrey in Australia, where they recognize each other and fall in love. In her subsequent engagement to Geoffrey, Hilary represents a modern, educated woman who chooses to give up a practicable career for love. When Hilary explains her decision to her family at home in England, “[she] seemed to think that her deviation from the path she had first marked out for herself required many apologies, with professions of penitence, which she possibly deluded herself into believing sincere” (611). Hilary misconceives that marriage to an upright man with a promising future requires explanation or apology, a stance that allows her to retract her careerism in good faith. In this way, Hilary’s medical ambitions are never consciously compromised, even when she is steered towards a more conventional, because romantic, future. So while Ingham is more amenable to the prospect of a female doctor than Yonge, she implies that marriage to a respectable man, when possible, is still the most promising course for a modern woman. Annie S. Swan’s Elizabeth Glen, M.B.: the Experiences of a Lady Doctor We see a more elaborate and conflicted version of the replacement of a medical career for marriage in Annie Swan’s two volumes about Elizabeth Glen. First published in 1894 in the magazine that Swan edited, The Woman at Home, the Elizabeth Glen stories came out as a volume in 1895 as Elizabeth Glen M.B.: Experiences of a Lady Doctor, followed by a sequel in 1897: Mrs. Keith Hamilton M.B., More Experiences of Elizabeth Glen. Swan was a popular and prolific author and editor, who wrote more than fifty novels and also published fiction under the name of David Lyall. The Woman at Home (1893–1918) was a conservative magazine aimed at mothers of young children, and published works by authors including Eliza Lynn Linton, H.G. Wells and Marie Corelli. Swan was married to a physician, Edward Burdett-Smith, and often depicted medical work in her fiction.15 The Elizabeth Glen stories portray a fictional doctor, the title character, in casual conversations with her friend Annie, a character meant to signify Swan. In these conversations, Annie encourages Elizabeth to tell stories about her medical work for Annie to include in her magazine. 15 As David Lyall, Swan published a novel called Ross Durham, Surgeon in 1907, which is somewhat racier than the titles published under her own name.


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In their departure from medical realism, Elizabeth Glen M.B. and Mrs. Keith Hamilton M.B. revisit the narrative design of a late Romantic text examined in this book’s introduction, Samuel Warren’s Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician, published in Blackwood’s, 1830–37. Writing fifty years after Warren, Swan faces much of the same challenge as her predecessor in convincing her readers that a doctor, though this time a lady doctor, is fit material for fiction. Warren mediated this challenge by using his physician as an entry point into the patients’ intimate lives but rarely discussing the medical work he did, and Swan similarly averts the controversy of her female doctor by her distance from bodily specifics and medical or scientific information. Elizabeth Glen explains the purview of her work by saying that “the doctor gets behind the scenes, where people act without their masks. I have seen things that would make the angels weep” (248). But her serene presence and sympathetic ministrations situate Elizabeth more as a nurse than a physician, and many of her case-stories feature scenarios in which domestic attention constitutes her principal labor. Attending to a young couple about to have a baby, Elizabeth builds a fire, puts the kettle on for tea, and makes “a dainty morsel of buttered toast with her own hands” (81). “It is so exquisite to relieve distress,” she explains (82). To another young mother Elizabeth bestows “sympathy, mothering, and loving understanding,” where a male doctor, she says, “would have gone on exclusively treating poor little Norah Fleming’s body, when her mind was at the bottom of it all the time” (132). Despite this emotional support, Norah Fleming still dies, and Elizabeth cries along with the young husband (143).16 In this story and others, Elizabeth’s loss of a seemingly high number of patients shows that Swan values the sentimental effects of the deathbed over her heroine’s medical efficacy. The deathbed scenes enable Swan to depict Elizabeth’s sensitivity to her patients and also her piety. As Elizabeth presides at the death of one patient, she tells Annie that she “laid [her] hand on [the patient’s] … and I supposed I looked the sympathy I felt. My heart indeed overflowed with the pity of it, and I felt nothing but honour for the poor woman … ” (111). At the same deathbed, Elizabeth recalls that she “knelt down at once in the midst of the wondering children, and what I said I knew not; but words fitting and appropriate were given me, and I know I had a strange feeling of nearness to the Divine” (116). By facilitating the expression of the doctor’s deep religious feeling, the scene offsets any fears that this modern figure might have abandoned God for science. Annie observes Elizabeth during the recitation of this tale, and explains 16

The domestic nature of so much of Elizabeth’s work resembles a late nineteenth and twentieth-century philanthropic role more than it does a medical doctor – that of the Health Visitor. Health Visitors were middle- and upper-class women who, through sanitary example and congenial good advice, improved the public health conditions of poor households. As Dr. Mabyn Read said in the early twentieth century, women could “get at the family in a way that men could not – by making friends in the home” (Davies 46). See Celia Davies, “The Health Visitor as Mother’s Friend: A Woman’s Place in Public Health, 1900–1914,” Social History of Medicine, 1.1 (1988): 39–59.

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that the doctor “wore a most steadfast and lovely look, which almost made me feel that she was conversing with the Unseen” (123). Later in the series Elizabeth prays that one of her patients may live, but admits that she “knew all the time that no earthly aid could avail” (286). Elizabeth’s orientation in sentimental rather than scientific discourse is further evinced by her interest and involvement in her patients’ romantic and marital problems. Annie prompts Elizabeth’s tales by suggesting that the doctor “must have come across many interesting love stories” in her practice (146). Elizabeth agrees, and elsewhere cheerfully admits that her curiosity about her patients is a “common weakness of [her] sex” (49) and in the stories she tells to Annie her role as a matchmaker, advisor, and parent-figure takes precedence over her medical labors. Indeed, Elizabeth’s sympathies are more aroused by domestic tribulation than life-threatening illness. She considers, for example, romantic jealousy as “one of the most hopeless of all diseases” (268), and in Mrs. Keith Hamilton, M.B., Elizabeth relates that … [I]n the course of my professional work … it was my sad privilege to see much behind the scenes of family life, and this I could set down, that of all the forms of misery and wretchedness which abound in this sad world, there is none more hopeless, more degrading, and more heartbreaking than that of a loveless and unsuitable marriage. (93–4)

Elizabeth’s judgment that unhappy marriage trumps all forms of misery, even death, identifies her with Swan’s female magazine readers more than with medical colleagues. The female medical professional in Victorian fiction, both the doctor and the nurse, is the subject of a recent book by Kristine Swenson, Medical Women & Victorian Fiction (2005). Swenson’s analysis of medical woman extends the fictional representations of nurses and doctors to the evolution of Victorian womanhood more generally. She argues that the changes we can track in these fictional figures encapsulate the era’s gradual accommodation of female education, professionalism, and women’s management of their sexuality. The female doctor in Victorian fiction, according to Swenson, becomes “the exemplar of the New Woman, the representative of her sex most at home with the forces of modernity infiltrating Victorian culture” (93). While the women doctor-characters that Swenson considers do fit the mold of the New Woman,17 Swan’s Elizabeth Glen does not. Swan’s emphasis on traditional marital romance and piety explicitly distinguish her work from New Woman texts, even though Elizabeth’s career would suggest otherwise. Well before the text refers to the reunion that will occasion her marriage and the end of her career, Elizabeth’s characterization and history belie the New Woman-implications of her medical work. To begin with, 17 Towards this argument Swenson analyzes Reade’s Rhoda Gale and Todd’s Mona Maclean among other characters not covered here.


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Annie glosses over the events that led Elizabeth to become a doctor until the last chapter of Elizabeth Glen, M.B. The summary of Elizabeth’s background only conveys that she took her degree at Dublin University, and studied for a year at medical schools in Paris and Vienna before setting up her practice in Bloomsbury ten years before the stories are set. This would place Elizabeth’s medical education in the early 1880s, and Swan’s decision to send Elizabeth, a Scot from a prominent family, to medical school abroad perhaps means to distance her character from the radicalism associated with the “Edinburgh Seven” in the late 1870s.18 Elizabeth does refer to the controversy surrounding her decision to study medicine, but her description of this period in her life evades the information that we would expect to find in a New Woman text: It is not necessary to enter here upon the considerations which induced me to enter the ranks of professional women, not to expatiate upon the many difficulties, at times almost insurmountable, which barred the way, and made the attainment of my life’s purpose seem an impossible task. When I look back upon the bitter humiliations of my early struggle, I marvel much that courage and endurance were mine to pursue my course in the face of opposition most bitter and strenuous from all I loved. Although time and success have somewhat mellowed their objections, I am, to this day, the Ishmaelite of my family, a being regarded with a mixture of pity, disapproval, and mild contempt. (10–11)

Most New Woman novels consist of exactly what Elizabeth Glen finds “not necessary to enter here”: the personal inclinations and influences that prompt a young girl to seek a career in place of or in addition to marriage.19 Furthermore, the financial struggles that often accompany the story of a New Woman’s career path are prominently absent from Elizabeth’s experience; she is the daughter of a wealthy Scottish landowner whose resources she draws upon for her poorer patients. As she tells one family, “I am a rich woman – at least I have a father in Scotland who has more money than he knows what to do with,” and using his money to buy the family provisions would “delight his soul” (77). While Annie reports that “[p]rosperous days had come to Dr. Glen, and [her] carriage was paid for out of her own professional earnings,” (39) Elizabeth displays a discomfort around money that signals an altruistic rather than professional objective.

18 The decision to send Elizabeth to Dublin also may refer to the fact that the Royal College of Physicians at Dublin was the first university to follow the Enabling Bill of 1876. 19 New Women novels that exemplify this course of action include Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book (1897), in which the heroine marries young and disastrously, and then through great hardship separates from her husband and forges a career as a writer and orator. Other New Woman novels that focus on a young woman’s early career path include Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman (1894), and Grant Allen’s The TypeWriter Girl (1897).

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When one poor patient tries to remunerate her, Elizabeth quickly declines it, “feeling quite ashamed” that money was offered to her (69). The greatest strike against the views associated with the New Woman is comprised by Elizabeth’s relationship to Keith Hamilton, an old friend she reunites with at the end of Elizabeth Glen, M.B. and marries. Elizabeth and Keith reconnect in Switzerland, when she is called from her holiday by mutual friends to attend to a sick young woman, Effie Grey, who is engaged to Keith. Elizabeth cares for Effie nobly but in vain, and Effie’s dying wish is that Elizabeth “help [Keith],” which would make her “very happy in heaven” (289). The occasion of her reunion with Keith finally prompts Elizabeth to tell Annie about her prior engagement to him and her decision to become a doctor, and the recitation of this story as part of a disappointed love-affair dilutes the feminist implications of her success in a dominantly male profession. As Elizabeth recounts, she and Keith had been engaged when they were very young and still living in Scotland. Elizabeth’s desire for a medical career, incited by the example of a female missionary doctor, initiated their rupture: [Annie] “What led to the estrangement?” “Why, this thing, my desire to be a doctor, and to live a more useful and a fuller life than that of ____” “Keith Hamilton’s wife?” She nodded, and her face flushed softly, and her eyes shone. (295–6)

Elizabeth’s youthful desire for a meaningful life outside of marriage leads to her mature perception of all that she lost in choosing medicine over marriage. She also characterizes her medical plans as something of a ruse, saying that she “meant to marry [Keith], too, when he had come to his senses. Which he never did” (304). Elizabeth’s retrospective account of this period in her life accentuates the disappointment that she experienced in her separation from Keith rather than pride or satisfaction in her work, so that the medical career functions as a compensation for a broken heart, and the reason for her self-characterization as “a lonely woman, standing on the outside always” (202). Thus, while the young Elizabeth retorted to Keith’s objections to her medical career that she could “live her own life, thank Heaven, independently of you or of any other man” (298), and the stories confirm that she can achieve professional success in lieu of marriage, the exchange is far from even. The mature Elizabeth confides to Annie that the end of her engagement constituted a bitter and regretted loss. After seeing Keith again, Elizabeth … no longer hid from myself that I was a miserable, empty-hearted woman who had tried to feed herself with the husks of life, and only found herself hungry still. I knew now – and bravely faced the meaning of the dull heartache I had often experienced going about my work, when I would get a sudden, sweet glimpse of home happiness, and see what life can be to a woman whom God has blessed with the devotion of a true husband and the love of little children. (308)


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The reunion with Keith inspires Elizabeth’s confession that she loved him “as my own soul” (287),20 and that his “glance warmed my starved heart” (286). Far from regretting the loss of her thriving practice, Elizabeth’s only doubts about a future with Keith concern whether she is sufficiently attractive to him, as she assures her husband-to-be that if he is “are willing to take me now that my youth is gone, I’ll give up everything for you, and be glad to do it” (311). Annie has “some passing regret for the cozy consulting room on Rayburn Place” (312), but closes the text by affirming the achievement that Elizabeth’s marriage represents: I often point to her proudly as a living exponent of my fondly cherished theory, that the woman whose intellect has been fully developed and whose heart beats warm, and sweet, and true to her sex, by bringing all the powers of head and heart to bear upon her surroundings achieves the highest possible results, and more nearly than any can make the perfect home an accomplished fact. (312–13)

Annie’s assessment of Elizabeth’s marriage does not fully dismiss her medical career, but positions it within a general paradigm of a woman’s intellectual development as a benefit to marriage, discounting the challenges that a female physician faced both in earning a degree and setting up a viable practice. In her own autobiography, My Life, Swan makes a very similar statement about her own career, writing that she has “often said that I am prouder of being a good housewife than of my literary reputation. The greatest compliment I ever had paid was by a man who told me I could make a home out of a cave and a handful of twigs” (66). Like Annie’s closure of Elizabeth Glen M.B., this statement situates conventional domesticity against New Woman ideals of professional achievement and independence. In fact, this ideological rivalry underwrites much of The Woman at Home, as Swan’s editorializing continually safeguards traditional domestic values. In an 1895 piece in the magazine, “Should Married Women Engage in Public Work?”, Swan and three other prominent women, Lady Laura Ridding, Lady Mary Murray, and Lady Isabel Margesson, advocate a woman’s public work only when she can also fulfill “a woman’s first and most sacred obligations” to her home (115). While the ending of Elizabeth Glen M.B. unhesitatingly treats Elizabeth’s marriage as preferable to her medical career, the text complicates Swan’s sanguine rhapsodies about Elizabeth’s decision to marry. Swan’s choice to idealize a female physician as the subject of her narrative, only to have Elizabeth forego her career for marriage, reveals a conflicted agenda. In effect, while Swan attempts to depict a heroine who can retain her femininity despite a very masculine-identified career, the effort to prove Elizabeth’s womanliness ultimately derails the defense of the woman doctor, and so pits medicine and marriage against each other. From the first Elizabeth Glen story, Swan conveys an awareness that her exceptional character does not fit into the conventional mold of the marriageexpectant heroine. Elizabeth, in her mid-thirties, is older than many subjects of 20

Keith later says this very thing to Elizabeth (310).

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marriage plots, and her highly demanding work separates her from the domestic context and routine of most women of her class. The very qualities that have enabled Elizabeth’s great success as a physician make her an unwieldy ideal for a women’s magazine that adulates wives and mothers. In the first chapter, Annie must cajole Elizabeth into giving her an account of her medical work for Annie’s magazine. At first reluctant, Elizabeth throws Annie’s title page into the fire and protests that she is “rational,” wants to “avoid mischief,” and will not be the “heroine of a story” (8). She agrees to furnish Annie with a story only when Annie agrees that Elizabeth “not be made more prominent than is absolutely needful” (10). By the point of this agreement, all of Elizabeth’s protests and stipulations have been broken by the language and design of the text, reflecting a pattern that is generally true of the divide between the text’s professed defense of female doctors and the love story that evolves, if inexplicitly and ambivalently, against it. Elizabeth is the indisputable heroine of a text fully embracing of the “mischief” she herself performs in continually “playing cupid” within her network of patients and friends. Elizabeth’s claim for rationalism also follows a revelation of intuition that sounds uncanny. When she arrives home and finds Annie waiting for her in her own drawing room, she says, “I knew you were here today; I felt it as I came along the street, and was glad of it” (5). Such instinct functions throughout the Elizabeth Glen Hamilton stories as evidence that the heroine’s sensitivity has not been compromised by the hardening influence or materialist episteme of medical work. This opening dynamic wherein Elizabeth only becomes the story’s heroine by purportedly denying this role and its irrational connotations encapsulates Swan’s larger ambivalence between a defense of the woman physician and her cancellation through marriage. The story’s presentation as a series of conversations between Annie and Elizabeth is intended to furnish Annie with material for her magazine. This narrative deflection away from Elizabeth’s status as a heroine, like the doctor’s own disavowal of the heroine’s role, reveals the tension between the narrative conventions that Swan favors and the radical figure of the female doctor, which is a topic that revisits the credulity of Samuel Warren’s readers of Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician in the 1830s. As discussed in my introduction, Warren’s fictional tales of a London physician so convinced the reading public of their authenticity that they stirred a controversy about the ethics of a physician publishing stories from his case files. The seeming authenticity of Warren’s doctor reflects the relative novelty of a physician-hero in the 1830s. But Swan’s readers revive this experience over sixty years later in response to Elizabeth Glen. In one installment of “Life and Work at Home,” a regular column in The Woman at Home, a reader requests information about Elizabeth Glen, and Swan cunningly obscures her heroine’s fictionality. Swan writes: “X.Y.Z.” would be much obliged for the address of Elizabeth Glen, and also some authentic particulars regarding that lady and her work. I am sorry it is not in my power at present to gratify “X.Y.Z.” I am not pledged to any particular


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secrecy regarding my friend, but I have promised that she shall not be troubled more than is necessary. (467)

Swan’s protection of her heroine’s fictionality likely is an inside joke to those readers who have surmised more than “X.Y.Z.” But the behind-the-scenes pretense of Elizabeth’s authenticity performs an important narrative strategy for both informed and naïve readers. By pretending that Elizabeth is an actual doctor, Annie indirectly affirms her character’s estrangement from the role of the heroine. Elizabeth’s pseudo-factualism also allows Annie to off-handedly describe and refer to those feminine, personal characteristics that counterbalance Elizabeth’s controversial professional role. That is, it is through the story-gathering “interviews” with Elizabeth that Annie nonchalantly mentions her friend’s beauty, bearing, and the details that are inconsequential to her career but make her so admirable in Annie’s estimation (“Dr. Glen, being the most womanly of women, was always making the most delightful alterations and additions to her drawing room” (120)). As we see in the following observation, the extraneous nature of Annie’s compliments can undermine their own efficacy: “You don’t look a bit like a doctor, Elizabeth. I really think you grow younger every day,” I said suddenly, struck by her bright, beautiful, girlish look. “I have ever so many letters asking for your address, and I believe I am right in withholding it. So long as I wrap you in a veil of mystery, my readers regard you with a proper mixture of awe and respect … [My readers would] fall in love with you, every man and woman of them, and you know it, Elizabeth. But really, dearest, you seem to have acquired the secret of perpetual youth.” (228)

These gratuitous compliments expose Annie’s anxieties about her heroine in another instance of the cross-purposes of her text: if concealing (and thus reifying) Elizabeth’s identity will inspire the readers’ respect, we wonder if a frank characterization would distance it? By acknowledging Elizabeth’s youthfulness, does Annie imply that her readers might expect the hard-working doctor to look haggard? Annie’s efforts to establish Elizabeth’s beauty and femininity in spite of her profession lead somewhat inevitably to the ultimate proof of these characteristics: her marriage to a powerful and attractive man, who confirms that her decadelong career as a doctor has not degraded her romantic appeal. The love story’s cumulative progress towards the climax of marriage structurally and ideologically disputes the tales of doctoring that we see earlier in Elizabeth Glen, M.B. These stories, organized as case studies, are episodic and only accumulate general developments, such as the reader’s growing awareness of Elizabeth’s loneliness (or the gradual rise to fortune that we see with Warren’s physician in the Late Physician series). For this reason, the proof of Elizabeth’s romantic desirability is also and necessarily the completion of her career. The symbiotic relationship between Elizabeth’s marriage and the end of her career also suspends the development of Mrs. Keith Hamilton M.B. The sequel


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opens at Flisk, the Hamiltons’ estate in Scotland, where the now-married Elizabeth is presented to the reader with quite a different narrative dilemma from the challenge of making her medical career sufficiently ladylike: the seeming absence of any plot at all. Elizabeth lives at Flisk in a state of “absolute content,” and reports that her “husband lives to make me blessed” (6). From this seeming stasis Elizabeth makes a confession to Annie about her new role as a wife: “I found myself [since my marriage] a good deal hampered. Elizabeth Glen could go where Mrs. Keith Hamilton is not welcome. I have closed up many doors of usefulness by my marriage.” “But opened others,” I said, hastily, for I could not bear to hear her even seem to hint at disappointment. “Oh, of course; to begin with, there is Keith: to see a man so guilelessly, completely, and absolutely happy is something, and his career is more interesting to me than any case I ever had,” she said, with a lovely blush. (7–8)

Elizabeth’s initial observation seems to invite a very different outcome to this conversation. By confirming the limitations produced by marriage, which we infer to mean the end of her medical career, she appears to position herself alongside a New Woman’s objection to the restrictions of traditional marriage. But Annie’s anxious solicitation of her friend’s happiness obliges Elizabeth’s banal declaration of her preference for the vicarious influence offered by Keith’s political career. The muffled sense of Elizabeth’s disappointment or purposelessness (despite her profession of “absolute content”) continues for much of Mrs. Keith Hamilton, M.B., with the same contradictory effect as this title’s amalgamation of two roles: wife and doctor that are in her case self-canceling. Annie repeatedly insists upon Elizabeth’s greater influence as a Member of Parliament’s wife, while Elizabeth vaguely plans to act as a visiting surgeon at a hospital she and her husband are building in the local village (20). This scheme disappears, and in its place Elizabeth briefly considers building her own hospital in London, which idea Annie firmly opposes. As Annie narrates to the reader, she “prayed … that [Elizabeth] might be long spared to continue in her new sphere the wholesome, womanly, and Christian work begun in the little home where I learned to love her first” (97). From Annie’s point of view, this evolving Christian work started from Elizabeth’s respectable role as a physician but was magnified by her marriage to an illustrious man. The relative enhancement of her power to do good work extends from the social clout of Mrs. Keith Hamilton, M.P. (rather than M.B.) which no woman physician, no matter how womanly, beautiful, or compassionate, can enjoy.21

21

Annie’s argument that Elizabeth will enjoy more power as an M.P.’s wife than as a professional doctor aligns to the (then) totally masculinized realm of politics, rather than to a sphere associated with the New Woman and the suffragettes, who were positioned against mainstream politics at this time.


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Much of Mrs. Keith Hamilton M.B. reflects the aimlessness of a plot whereby the heroine is portrayed as entirely content, and its first half largely consists of Elizabeth’s reminiscences of her former life as a London doctor. Swan then arrives at a new scheme for her married heroine whereby Elizabeth uses her extensive financial resources to open a boarding-house for respectable young working girls in London, which she and Annie oversee. The romantic plots of their tenants constitute several of the stories in the middle of the volume, in a similar pattern to those episodic tales of love and marriage of Elizabeth’s patients in the earlier collection. Where that volume ended with the reunion and marriage of Elizabeth and Keith, the second volume comes to a similarly conventional close with the birth of Elizabeth’s son. This event follows a chapter in which Elizabeth considers adoption, and even takes home a baby from an unstable family for a trial period. Rather than keep the child, Elizabeth decides that she can better repair the birth family’s rupture, a decision which earns Annie’s typically conservative approval. “I think you are wise to wait a little, Elizabeth,” Annie tells her friend,” and just a year later the two “stood together beside a dainty white cot, looking down upon the little heir to Flisk and Glenspeed” (275). These are the last lines of the Elizabeth Glen story, and the narrative closure offered by childbirth is an orthodox conclusion to the story of Swan’s erstwhile physician. Margaret Todd’s Mona Maclean, Medical Student Mona Maclean, Medical Student incorporates many features of the Elizabeth Glen series, most notably a dogged insistence upon a doctor-heroine’s femininity. Like Swan’s Elizabeth, Todd’s Mona is wealthy, beautiful, elegant, and seemingly oblivious to her own appeal. Mona is also an orphan (Elizabeth’s father is alive, but distant), which liberates her atypical career choice from the presumed disapprobation of genteel parents. In their stead is a dashing uncle, Lord Douglas Munro, whose gradual acceptance of Mona’s medical work stands in for the older generation’s reconciliation to the New Woman’s quest for progress. But where Swan begins Elizabeth’s story with her thriving practice and only gestures to her heroine’s background and education through the story of the engagement that ends her career, Todd’s novel concerns Mona’s process of becoming a doctor. In this way, it resembles other New Woman novels that principally explore a young woman’s efforts to expand her professional and romantic destiny beyond conventional notions of feminine passivity and sacrifice. Mona’s medical ambitions exemplify the many facets of the New Woman’s social objectives, such as a commitment to female education and intellectual achievement, a defense of a woman’s professional career, and the idea that these modern triumphs neither threaten nor detract from a woman’s femininity and her potential for wifehood and motherhood. Mona Maclean critic Christine Thompson examines Todd’s novel through the author’s relationship with maverick physician and activist Sophia Jex-Blake, and reads the novel’s marital conclusion

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as surrender to the late-century inability to fictionalize the kind of parvenu destiny we see in Jex-Blake’s life, which modern writers would formulate in the coming decades.22 While I agree with Thompson that the late-Victorian era still is overdetermined by the marriage-plot structure in regard to its female heroines, I therefore emphasize what is rare about Todd’s conclusion. As we see in the texts by Reade, Collins, Conan-Doyle, Yonge, Ingham, and Swan, the concept of the woman doctor parts ways from that of the wife with a finality that determines the outcomes of these plots: when she chooses to marry, she ends her career, and when she chooses her career, she renounces marriage. Considering Mona Maclean from the developmental history of the marriage plot rather than from the context of the New Woman or female-doctor novel calls attention to its uniqueness. The novel opens with Mona’s second consecutive failure of her Intermediate exams. No explanation is offered for Mona’s blunder, but setting most of the story in its wake creates tension between Mona’s goal of becoming a doctor and the challenge of this pursuit. Before she attempts to pass the exam again, Mona decides to take some time off with two very different sets of relatives. First, Mona visits Norway with her genteel aunt and uncle, Sir and Lady Munro, and their daughter Eleanor. Her uncle Sir Douglas takes a great interest in Mona and is appalled by her professional aspirations. A connoisseur of women, “[t]he genus Medical Woman was not as yet included in his collection, but he had heard of it, and had classified it in his own mind as a useful but uninteresting hybrid, which could not strictly be called a woman at all” (22). After Norway, Mona impulsively accepts an invitation from a cousin she has never met, Rachel Simpson, in Borrowness, a small town in Scotland. To Mona’s dismay, Rachel runs a shop, and staying with her includes working as a shop-girl. Mona resolves to treat her extended working holiday as a learning experience and embarks cheerfully upon an improvement of the shop and its wares. She promises Rachel to keep her gentility and medical ambitions a secret, for Rachel also disapproves of Mona’s desire to be a doctor, and does not want her cousin’s elite status to draw attention to her own middle-classness. In Borrowness, Mona becomes friendly with a young visiting doctor, Ralph Dudley, who like her is mid-way through his medical examinations, and through their growing friendship regrets her pledge to Rachel to conceal her medical career. When she leaves Scotland and reenrolls in medical school in London, Mona and Dudley reunite. Dudley is shocked to find out that she too is preparing for medical licensure, and the two circle each other warily until Dudley confesses his romantic feelings for Mona, and she discloses the pledge she had made to Rachel. Towards the end of the novel and in quick succession, they pass their final examination, marry, and set up a practice together in London. These events are only briefly touched upon; most of the novel precedes their intimacy and for Dudley is dominated by an apprehension that he is falling in love with a shop-girl. 22 Christine Thompson, “Disruptive Desire: Medical Careers for Victorian Woman in Fact and Fiction,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 15:2 (1991): 181–96.


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By concealing Mona’s career and her class status, Todd moderates the womanphysician tale and emphasizes instead a plot about mistaken class identity. In this way, Dudley’s discovery of Mona’s medical training is joined by the happy ending that accompanies undisclosed gentility, as seen in paradigmatic examinations of Victorian class like Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman. Dudley’s relief that Mona is a class-appropriate marriage prospect thus dampens the controversy linked to her medical training. This deflection of Mona’s radical career into a class plot is one instance of a sophisticated strategy whereby Todd adapts her unconventional heroine to welltrod discursive solutions. Rather than read these adaptations as feminist timidity, I see them as creative ways to figure a character ahead of her time: the woman doctor who is also and simultaneously a romantic heroine. While Swan polarizes Elizabeth’s career and marriage and only admits ambivalence through discursive complexity, Todd’s novel courageously features a heroine uncertain about her maverick status. Mona’s psychological character thus admits to the innovation of her personal life even when its plotting proceeds familiarly. This detachment between marriage plot and psychological awareness prefigures those modernist novels that deliberate consciousness more intricately than they do social contracts like marriage, such as Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist or Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Mona’s strong objections to marriage at the beginning of the novel are upended by her relationship with Dudley, but her continuation of her medical career preserves the novel’s social radicalism. At first, as Mona tells her cousin Eleanor, she can only imagine her careerism in place of marriage, as attested by the other woman-doctor novels examined here: “Oh, my dear, at the romantic age of 17 you cannot even imagine how much I prize my liberty; how many plans I have in my head that no married woman could carry out. It seems to me that the unmarried woman is distinctly having her innings just now. She has all the advantages of being a woman, and most of the advantages of being a man.” (56)

This bifurcation of marriage and career depends upon a traditional view of marriage, and as Mona tells an elderly Scottish aunt, such marriage has “gone out of fashion” (144). Mona’s commitment to her career is complicated by her feelings for Dudley. While still living in Borrowness and keeping her medical work a secret, Mona’s emotions anticipate a conversion of the novel’s career plot to a love plot: “While most girls dream of Love, Mona had dreamt of Duty, and now Love came to her as a stranger – a stranger armed with a mysterious, divine right to open up the secret chambers of her heart” (370). In fact, both Mona and Dudley’s early experiences of love typify conventional romance narratives. Mona is disarmed by what she considers to be the prosaic experience of romance: “Were they all for nothing, those years of striving after the highest, with strong crying and tears? I thought I had attained, and here I am, at the end of it, only a commonplace, jealous

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woman after all!” (457–8). Dudley, too, first narrates his feelings for Mona in the sentimental language of sentimental romance. When he returns from London to Borrowness and is surprised to find her no longer there, he muses that “she had vanished out of his life like the heroine of a fairy tale, and he had not vaguest notion where to look for her” (421). Once reunited and frank about their feelings for each other, Mona and Dudley’s first kiss imitates the ending of a love story: Oh human love! What are you? – the fairest thing that God has made, or a Willo’-the-wisp sent to brighten a brief space of life’s journey with delusive light? I know not. This I know, that when Ralph sent a kiss vibrating through Mona’s being, waking up a thousand echoes that had scarcely been stirred before, the happiness of these two human souls was almost greater than they could bear. (489)

In Elizabeth Glen, M.B., a similarly passionate reconciliation between Elizabeth and Keith portends the end of the story and the heroine’s career; Keith’s proposal to Elizabeth prompts her observation that “the turning point of my life had come” (309). But for Mona, the great happiness she finds with Dudley is absorbed into her career plans, and Todd positions Mona and Dudley’s love within the era’s propitious advances for romantic relationships. After Dudley’s initial panic at Mona’s absence in Borrowness, in which he imagines that his “heroine” has vanished from his life, Todd writes that “saner thoughts began to take form in [Dudley’s] mind. He was living, after all, in the latter part of the nineteenth century. People could not vanish nowadays and leave no trace” (421). Chapter LXI, entitled “A Fin-De-Siècle Courtship,” describes the couple’s unconventional period of engagement: It was arranged that the wedding should take place as soon as [Dudley] and Mona had passed their M.B. examination … and during the fifteen months that intervened, they resolved to devote themselves with a whole heart to their studies, and if possible to forget that they were lovers. (495)

Although Mona and Dudley’s engagement is described in four brief chapters and their married life in a two-page concluding chapter, Todd’s innovative romance deserves close analysis. Unlike the other woman-doctor texts studied here, and especially different from Swan’s heavy-handed commemoration of Elizabeth Glen’s marriage, Todd considers the complexity of Mona’s position as an expectant wife and doctor. During the engagement Mona freely confesses to Dudley that she is “horribly depressed” about the challenges she faces: You see, dear, it’s a great responsibility to become a registered practitioner, and it’s a great responsibility to be married; and the thought of undertaking the two responsibilities at once is simply appalling … I am not afraid of feeling pulses and taking temperatures … nor even of putting your slippers to the fire. (499)


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This confession could easily precede the customary choice between marriage and medicine. Mona, however, extends the complexity of her dual roles to a political self-consciousness, explaining that “[t]he thought that appalls me is, that one must hold oneself up and look wise, and have an opinion about everything. No more glorious Bohemian irresponsibility: no more airy – ‘Bother women’s rights!’ One must have a hand to show, and show it” (499). While the standard opposition of wifehood and doctoring compels Mona to identify as a political figurehead, she opts out of the statement-making potential of her challenge at the same time that she proceeds upon its daunting course. Swenson considers Mona Maclean a consummate New Woman novel, but it differs from many like texts in its refusal to take a firm stand on the issue of women’s political emancipation. Mona distances herself from the suffragette movement, reserving the right to “never try to influence [her] own sex” (498). Mona further differs from the typical New Woman in her stance on vivisection. As detailed in the previous chapter, the antivivisection movement was identified with proto-feminists, many of whom were also suffragettes. Mona defends vivisection as necessary to medicine’s investigative progress (205). This same objectivity turns out to be the delayed explanation for her failures of the Intermediate exam. Some of Mona’s classmates at the London School of Medicine for Women describe her spirit of scientific inquiry as ill-served by the route nature of medical examination (390). Her third attempt yields success, as does the round of Final Examinations, in which Mona wins the first class and gold medal in Physiology, the branch of science most dependent upon dissection and by extension, vivisection. (Dudley wins the same honour for Anatomy.) By first denying her participation in the suffrage movement, and then using vivisection and physiology to reflect Mona’s intellectual disposition, Todd boldly separates her heroine from normative markers of New Womanhood.23 The last chapter of the novel, “Partners,” glances at Mona and Dudley’s professional arrangement and illustrates their marriage dynamic through this lens. On the evening that they return to their new home in Bloomsbury from their Continental honeymoon, a disheveled woman comes into Dudley’s practice room, which adjoins to Mona’s. Dudley’s glance diagnoses the woman as scared and pregnant, and he sends her to his wife. Mona “was sitting alone in the firelight, and his heart glowed within him as he contrasted her bright, strong, womanly face with – that other. ‘Mona, dear,’ he said quietly, ‘here is a case for you’”(512; original emphasis). These last lines of the novel manage an unusual tension: Dudley 23 In this way, Mona resembles a radical American doctor, Mary Putnam Jacobi (1842–1906), who identified her work with scientific progress and critiqued the tendency of many women doctors to trade on the compassion assumed of their “womanly” natures. In particular, Jacobi attacked women (doctors and laypeople) for their antivivisection work. See Carla Bittel, “Science, Suffrage, and Experimentation: Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Controversy over Vivisection in Late Nineteenth-Century America,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 79.4 (2005): 664–94.

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assigns the patient to Mona and compares her unfavorably with his wife, but these authoritative gestures do not undermine the agency accorded to Mona’s role in the partnership. Mona’s projected treatment of the young woman, and the symbolic beginning represented by the expected child, are an enterprising reorientation of the marriage plot’s conclusion. These features in fact exclude Dudley, retroactively showing his supervision of the patient to be capitulatory rather than managerial. Analyzed alongside the ending to Mrs. Keith Hamilton, M.B., where Elizabeth and Annie gaze into the little heir’s “dainty white cot,” Todd’s version of the renewal through childbirth appears very radical indeed. Todd does end her novel with the marriage of Mona and Dudley, but we can presume that the child she beckons to here is both unaligned to the conventional frame of marriage, and well-cared for by his or her conscientious and skilled female doctor.

Conclusion

“The Overstimulated Nerve Ceases to Respond”: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Medical Modernism By the fin de siècle, the “three-decker” marriage-plot novel was becoming a scarcer commodity, either produced by authors considered out of step with the times, or transformed from its early-century paradigm in which marriage symbolizes conciliation and resolution. To review a few markers of the late-century fictional marketplace, Mary Augusta Ward continued to produce earnest tales about the moral utility of marriage, but was considered old-fashioned by the 1880s and 1890s, and her books sold increasingly less to an aging marketplace. Thomas Hardy’s novels featured the complex and heavily populated love plots of Victorian tradition, but instead of the Austenian ending whereby a hero and heroine’s marriage symbolically resolves a larger social conflict, they tell of the obstacles – social, psychological, and natural – that thwart love and the realization of personal desires. George Gissing’s realistic commentaries on the abyss between convention and professional opportunity often included young couples in love, but his marriage plots cannot contend against the social plot and its crushing effect on individual desire. In the most popular literary vein of the late century, neo-Gothicists like Bram Stoker, Rider Haggard, Marie Corelli, and H.G. Wells captivated readers with scientific romances that often centered on exotic settings or subjects. Marriage, when explored in these fictions, serves or complicates the mystery or crime that functions as the central plot. The rise of Arthur Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes stories comprised another distinct fictional genre. Detection and criminal forensics embody the late-century fascination with methods of classification and deduction that also led to the development and institutionalization of the social sciences. Such empirical processes combined with the late-century destabilization of gender roles made the novel of love and marriage seem an objet d’art of an earlier time. The ontological insecurity of a narrative dislodged from a marital resolution is evident in many New Woman novels. New Woman novelists such as Sarah Grand, Grant Allan, and Ella Hepworth Dixon wrote socially critical studies of On Ward’s late-century reputation, see Judith Wilt, Behind her Times: Transition England in the Novels of Mary Augusta Ward (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), pp. 149, 207; and John Sutherland, Mrs. Humphrey Ward: Eminent Victorian, PreEminent Edwardian (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 322.

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the place of women in society, but shunned the traditional arc of the marriage plot, as its very conventionality exemplified the female destiny that they sought to widen. In Grand’s The Beth Book, the disastrous marriage of heroine Beth McClure Caldwell compels her to separate from her husband. Beth nearly dies of starvation before she becomes a successful writer and orator. The novel ends on an ambiguous note with the arrival of Beth’s prospective lover, a broadminded American artist. A similarly open-ended but more foreboding ending occurs in Dixon’s A Story of a Modern Woman (1894). In this novel, heroine Mary Earle’s unsuccessful career, disappointment in love, and loneliness convene at the end of the narrative and cumulatively distance the text from the hopes of a structural and emotional resolve. While Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories evince the satisfying resolutions of a solved crime, in other instances he underscores the lack of resolution that would come to be associated with the Modern novel. In 1894, Conan Doyle published a little-known collection of medical stories, Round the Red Lamp, which was inspired by his own experience as a struggling physician in the 1880s and early 1890s. These fifteen tales reveal what Doyle calls in the preface “the darker side” of medical practice and they perfectly encapsulate the two strands of this book that I am linking together: the formal demise of the marriage plot and the scientization of the doctor. As all of Conan Doyle’s stories in Round the Red Lamp demonstrate, medical work creates emotional distance between doctors and society, which Doyle primarily signifies through the romantic failures of his doctors. Explaining the beleaguered state of the late-century doctor, Conan Doyle writes that medical work “takes something from [a doctor’s] sense of proportion … The overstimulated nerve ceases to respond” (81). This analogy for paralysis or impotence illuminates both the scientific and romantic regress in Round the Red Lamp. Again and again, the stories come to unsatisfying ends, usually in reference to the romantic failures of the doctors, which in turn signify the suspended effect of a story that features romance but does not move towards a marital conclusion. As discussed in Chapter 4, the structural and moral antagonism between scienceminded doctors and their female (or feminized) patients in Wilkie Collins’s novels established a dichotomy that became more overt as the century progressed. The symbolic revenge plots against the New Woman and her threat to the late-century medical establishment, as I write in Chapter 5, instances a pivotal incarnation of this conflict, as does, in another form, the usual bifurcation of career and marriage in novels about female doctors analyzed in Chapter 6. Following this pattern, Conan Doyle’s Round the Red Lamp also correlates medical practice with failed romance, which he attributes to the daunting authority of the New Woman. Conan Doyle’s rationally minded doctors in this collection repeatedly are foiled by the dizzying sexual and psychological control that these proto-modern women yield. In effect, the doctors lose the contest of wills between positivist medicine and the less quantifiable, but ultimately more powerful, human emotions that the women

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in these stories inspire. Furthermore, he also features many medical doctors whose immersion in empirical knowledge deflates their romantic expectations. In “The Case of Lady Sannox,” the most violent story in the collection, a surgeon’s zeal for science is equated with his passion for a beautiful woman in a plot that calls attention to the hazard of both. The story concerns the brilliant surgeon Douglas Stone, his mistress Lady Sannox, and her husband Lord Sannox. The vengeful Lord Sannox devises a plot that takes advantage of Stone’s insatiable medical curiosity in order to punish his wife. Lord Sannox disguises his wife and himself as Turks, and asks the unknowing Stone to perform a brutal surgery on his unwitting wife’s veiled face. Despite his doubts, Stone agrees to perform the surgery. “To Douglas Stone,” explains the narrator, “this was already an interesting case, and he brushed aside as irrelevant the feeble objections of the husband” (67) – as he had already done, of course, in his illicit affair with Marion, Lady Sannox. When Lady Sannox wakes screaming from Stone’s incision and the doctor finally recognizes his lover, Lord Sannox calmly explains that the procedure was “necessary for Marion … not physically, but morally.” Marion, now gravely disfigured, takes the religious veil of Christianity and disappears from society. As for Stone, on the morning after the surgery, “the celebrated operating surgeon, the man of steel nerves, had been found … seated on one side of his bed, smiling pleasantly upon the universe, with both legs jammed into one side of his breeches and his great brain about as valuable as a cap full of porridge … ” (63). Stone’s loss of sanity follows from emotional shock, which invalidates the empirical basis of surgical medicine. While Lady Sannox’s only utterance in the story is the terrifying scream that suspends the surgery, her disregard for sexual morality and the social respectability it connotes ostensibly fuels this story’s surgical revenge plot. Her briefly detailed rise from actress (a profession historically associated with prostitution) to Lady, and the implication that her sexual indiscretions exceed the relationship with Stone, expresses the New Woman’s controversial social and sexual empowerment. In “A Physiologist’s Wife,” another story that figures the collision between romantic love and a medical career, the celebrated professor of physiology Ainslie Grey learns at the expense of his life that materialist knowledge cannot always govern the cunning of women. Grey’s downfall mirrors that of scientific optimism in the later nineteenth century, as science confidently expanded into ethically fraught territories including physiology and its reliance on vivisection. Early in the story, Professor Grey signifies positivist certainty, living “in a serene and rarefied atmosphere of scientific calm, high above the petty emotions which affect humbler minds” (50). When Grey falls in love with a widow, Mrs. O’James, he explains his emotions in language that is self-consciously separated from literary abstraction: “Love has been taken away from the poets, and has been brought within the domain of true science. It may prove to be one of the great cosmic elementary forces. When the atom of hydrogen draws the atom of chlorine towards it to form the perfected molecule of hydrochloric acid, the force which it exerts may

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The Doctor in the Victorian Novel be intrinsically similar to that which draws me to you. Attraction and repulsion appear to be the primary forces. This is attraction.” (54)

But despite his pragmatic confidence in the chemistry of love, Grey soon finds out that it exceeds the bounds of a controlled experiment. After he marries Mrs. O’James, he discovers that she is a bigamist. Bigamy here provides a caricature of the New Woman’s propensity to flout moral convention and satisfy her own illicit and selfish drives. It also gestures to a stock plot in the sensation genre, which is itself underwritten by melodrama, improbable coincidence, and heightened emotion. When Mrs. O’James returns to her first husband, Grey represses his disappointment through work, but soon grows ill and dies. The attending physicians struggle to identify his illness, agreeing between each other that the “vulgar” name for his death is “a broken heart” (62). “Vulgar” here stands in for the literary logic or resolution that these stories both mock with their rational wisdom, and express nostalgic for. “A broken heart” may be an insufficient explanation for the physiological process that led to Grey’s death, but it is a literary convention that the new science has not adequately replaced. Conan-Doyle’s “The Case of Lady Sannox,” “A Physiologist’s Wife,” and “The Doctors of Hoyland,” which I explored in Chapter 6, all figure unfulfilled endings: Stone injures his lover and loses his mind; Grey languishes and dies from heartbreak, and Ripley remains baffled and lonely in the wake of his failed romance with Dr. Verrinder Smith. When a character in another story points out that “the worst of these medical stories [is that] they never seem to have an end” (83), he is not referring to the failed romances catalogued here, but to the relentless demands on a doctor more generally. But his observation about the endless and alienating nature of medical work also symbolically extends to the thwarted marriage plots in Round the Red Lamp. The New Woman’s authority over these doctors can be read as a structural foil that, by impeding the closure of a marriage plot and threatening the doctor’s masculinity, stands in for the doctor’s larger provisionality at the fin de siècle, and also for the emotional limitations of an empirical domain. By undermining nineteenth-century bourgeois ideals of professional and personal fulfillment, the fraught portrayal of doctors in Round the Red Lamp recalls the most sustained fictional analysis of a Victorian doctor, Tertius Lydgate. Lydgate’s brilliant professional prospects are derailed by his marriage to Rosamund Vincy. While hardly a New Woman, Rosamund anticipates the power of her latercentury counterparts in her ability to manipulate her husband, and she manages to eclipse his scientific ambitions with the demands of a philistine domesticity. Like Lydgate, the doctors in Round the Red Lamp cannot reconcile the challenging demands of love and science. Neither, his work suggests, can Doyle – for in his greatest achievement, the Sherlock Holmes series, Doyle largely avoids “the woman question.” While Doyle engages with Sherlock Holmes almost exclusively, he retains one vestige from Round the Red Lamp in the form of Holmes’s humble accomplice, Watson. Unlike most of the doctors in Round the Red Lamp, Watson happily marries a devoted woman. As he explains, “My own

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complete happiness, and the home-centered interests which rise up around the man who first finds himself master of his own establishment, were sufficient to absorb all my attention” (“Scandal” 2), but this is not true for Doyle, at least for very long: the presence of Mrs. Watson distracts from the Holmes/Watson crime-solving partnership until her abrupt and unexplained death enables Watson’s undivided service to Holmes. The great detective, Watson tells us, “never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer” (“Scandal” 1). This information comes in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” the only story in which Holmes does suffer the temptations of a woman. The unobtainable Irene Adler, a beautiful American singer, outwits Holmes in a strategy that exemplifies the freedom sought by the New Woman: she disguises herself in men’s clothes, and brazenly greets the unsuspecting Holmes on the street. That this short-lived enticement to “the softer side” occurs in the first Holmes story published in The Strand effectively liberates the subsequent stories from similar entanglements, clearing the generic slate for the business of detection. But even Holmes’s attraction to Irene Adler is intellectual, for “all emotions, and [love] particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind” (“Scandal” 1). Holmes’s mental and social disposition thus forecloses the marriage plot, and while he is not a doctor, he extends from Doyle’s tradition of the romantically compromised physicians that we see in Round the Red Lamp. *** This book has argued that over the course of the Victorian period, the medical profession’s rise to power (here represented by the doctor) and the associated scientization of medical and lay culture gradually displaces emotional and romantic intuition as the guiding ethos of the novel, and as it is principally rendered through the marriage plot. In an article in The Lancet published on May 7, 1910, “Medicine in Fiction,” the anonymous author refers to several unnamed novels that collectively attest to the “distinct evidence that the public is becoming more alive to the intimate manner in which medicine in its different branches must enter into social life” (1282). The author identifies two representational trends in medically-inflected fiction, one benign and one dangerous. The first trend is medicine that is “moulded to fit the story” and so reflects incorrect treatments or diagnoses. In these cases, “adaptation of scientific verity to the exigencies of the drama may lead to a good story,” and no harm is done by such a “subsidiary or auxiliary” use of medical topics. But in his second example, the writer argues that “inaccurate medicine” may do a “great deal of harm where the conditions of medical life, or questions of medical ethics, or matters of hospital administration … are wrongfully treated” (1282). Here “the authors deal with circumstances that are supposed to be within the public ken, and with matters on which the public has For a discussion of Mrs. Watson’s liminal role in the Holmes stories, see Arthur Marshall, “Ring for Our Boots,” in Harold Orel, Critical Essays on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1992), pp. 31–5.

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a right to have a critical opinion,” which include “the place of medical men in the social scheme” and “the behavior of medical men towards their patients” (1282, 1283). This writer approaches something I have tried to claim broadly in all of my chapters: that the novelist’s critique of medicine is most incisive when it reflects the sphere of his or her own trade, the arena of personal relationships, rather than when it borrows from the physician’s case book or the scientist’s lab manual. To go one step farther, that emotional or personal sphere is the object towards which all medical information in a novel (accurate or not) is “moulded to fit the story.” It has thus been one of my intentions to foreground the fictional scheme of the Victorian novel even as it portrays empirical truths. One of the main ways I have done this is by looking at the doctor’s personal (especially marital) relationship as an epistemic gauge of a novel’s place on the continuum from emotional subjectivity to hard empiricism. This continuum, I have argued, is also roughly chronological in the evolution of the novel from Austen to Modernism that frames this study. Finally, as Victorian authors faithfully added doctors to their cast of characters in reference to the historical doctor’s rising cultural prominence, they also participated in the dismantling of their own art form as one structured by the emotional bond of the marriage plot. That is, over the course of the Victorian age, the perspective and experience of medicine in the representation of domestic life unseats love as the allegory for human determinism and, in its place, elects health. In writing about modern doctors and their increasingly scientific perspectives, Victorian novelists drew attention to the clinicism and detachment that came to be identified with modern medicine. Moreover, novelists helped to invent modern medicine’s detached manner not because of some inherent tendency of “medicine” to be calculating or unsympathetic, but because the doctor’s biophysical vantage point was an uneasy fit into an imaginative structure that had been, primarily since Austen, organized by a marital conclusion that delineated personal character and the development of romantic love. Perhaps to the Victorian novel and its marital design, then, we owe some of the modern era’s association between medical practice and emotional reserve.

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Index

Ablow, Rachel 7 abortion 124 Acton, William 118, 121 Allan, Grant 157−8 Allbutt, Henry 117 Amigoni, David 11 anesthetics 16, 100, 130 apothecaries 12 Armstrong, Nancy 4, 6, 42, 73 Austen, Jane 5, 25, 27, 29, 162 Mansfield Park 11, 32 Northanger Abbey 32 Pride and Prejudice 32 Sense and Sensibility 13−15, 32 Balzac, Honoré de 9 Beer, Gillian 9, 39, 87−8 Berdoe, Edward: St Bernard’s 114, 129−30 birth control see contraception Blackwell, Elizabeth 136 Blackwood’s magazine 14, 143 body-snatching 13 Boone, Joseph Allan 6, 44 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth: The Doctor’s Wife 18, 63−72, 75, 80, 85 Brontë, Charlotte Jane Eyre 153 Shirley 32 Villette 5−6, 17 Burdon Sanderson, John see Sanderson Burke and Hare trials 13 Butler, Josephine 117 Byron, Lord 29 Carroll, Lewis 100, 105 Christian Lady’s Magazine 30 Cobbe, Frances Power 99, 102 Colby, Vineta 29 Collins, Wilkie 4, 53, 87, 103, 152, 158 Armadale 19, 87−99, 103, 105, 109

Blind Love 87 The Evil Genius 87 “Fie! Fie! or The Fair Physician” 138−9 Heart and Science 19, 87−90, 98−109, 114 The Moonstone 87, 89, 95 No Name 87 Poor Miss Finch 107 The Woman in White 87, 107 Comte, Auguste 24, 45 Conan Doyle, Arthur 152, 157 “The Doctors of Hoyland” 139−40 Round the Red Lamp 22, 158−61 Sherlock Holmes stories 158, 160−61 Conrad, Joseph 8 Conservative Party 117 Contagious Diseases Acts 111−18, 121−3, 126−7, 130, 133 contraception 117−18, 124, 133 Corelli, Marie 157 Cottom, Daniel 4−5 Craik, Dinah Maria: John Halifax Gentleman 153 D’Albertis, Deirdre 73−4 Danby, Frank: Dr Phillips: A Maida Vale Idyll 20−21 Darwin, Charles 99 Darwinism 9−10, 87−9 Dickens, Charles 10, 43 Bleak House 2, 17−18 Great Expectations 5−6 Hard Times 30, 32 Little Dorrit 1−2, 14 Oliver Twist 153 Disraeli, Benjamin 43 Sybil 32 divorce law 87 Dixon, Ella Hepworth 157−8

174


A Story of Modern Woman 158 “doctor”, use of title 12 doctors authority of 8, 67, 72, 89, 92 emotional and moral standing of 97, 125, 158−9, 162 social status of 4, 12, 27 training of 12 see also hero figures; women doctors doctors (fictional) Armstrong (in Adela Cathcart) 48−59 Benjulia (in Heart and Science) 90, 99−109 Black (in “The Inmost Light”) 121−7, 130 Bretton (in Villette) 17 Brownlow (in Magnum Bonum) 21 Carey (in Magnum Bonum) 140−41 Dill (in Barrington) 64 Downward or Le Doux (in Armadale) 93−9, 109 Faber (in Paul Faber, Surgeon) 55−6 Gale (in The Woman-Hater) 137−8 Gibson (in Wives and Daughters) 4, 72−85 Gilbert (in The Doctor’s Wife) 66−72, 75, 85 Gladwin (in “The Amateur Surgeon”) 141−2 Glen (in Elizabeth Glen, MB and Mrs Keith Hamilton MB) 21−2, 142−51, 154, 156 Grey (in Round the Red Lamp) 159−60 Harris (in Sense and Sensibiity) 13−15 Hawbury (in Armadale) 88−92, 98, 109 Hope (in Deerbrook) 15−16, 24, 26−40, 43, 45, 58 Jekyll (in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) 112 Jennings (in The Moon-stone) 89, 95 Lydgate (in Middlemarch) 3, 16, 23−4, 26, 39−45, 47, 60, 160 Maclean (in Mona Maclean, Medical Student) 22 McClure (in The Beth Book) 113−14 Matheson (in “The Great God Pan”) 120 Moreau (in The Island of Dr Moreau) 112, 125

Morphew (in Heart and Science) 104−5 Neal (in Armadale) 92−3, 97 Ovid Vere (in Heart and Science) 99−109 Phillips (in A Maida Vale Idyll) 20−21 “Physician” (in Little Dorrit) 1−2, 14 Pillico (in “The Fair Physic-ian”) 38−9 Raymond (in “The Great God Pan”) 119−20, 125−30 Ripley (in “The Doctors of Hoyland”) 139−40, 160 St Cleeve (in Two on a Tower) 20 Seward (in Dracula) 122, 125−8, 131 Smith (in “The Doctors of Hoyland”) 139−40, 160 Stanforth (in St Bernard’s) 129−30 Stone (in Round the Red Lamp) 159 Storn (in Too Much Alone) 63−5 Thorne (in Doctor Thorne) 17 Van Helsing (in Dracula) 113, 121−2, 125−8, 131 Wade (in Adela Cathcart) 48−58 Watson (in Sherlock Holmes stories) 160−61 Woodcourt (in Bleak House) 2, 17−18 Doyle, Arthur Conan see Conan Doyle Edinburgh University 133−4, 137 Eliot, George 4−5, 9−11, 84 Felix Holt: the Radical 23 Middlemarch 3, 9, 15−16, 23−6, 39−45, 47, 49, 60−61, 112 The Mill on the Floss 6 empiricism 44, 61, 65, 88−9, 92, 97, 109, 162 femininity 21, 77−8, 82, 90, 108−9, 131, 136, 140, 151 feminism 73, 111, 114, 117−18, 131, 146 Ferrier, David 102 Flaubert, Gustave 9, 72 Madame Bovary 6, 63−6 Flint, Kate 71 Forster, E.M. 8 Foucault, Michel 6 Furst, Lilian 42−3

Index Gallagher, Catherine 8, 30 Galsworthy, John 8 Garrett Anderson, Elizabeth 21, 133 Gaskell, Elizabeth 43, 64−5 Mary Barton 63 North and South 30−32 Ruth 6, 63 Wives and Daughters 4, 18−19, 63, 66, 72−84 gender roles in society 73, 79, 113, 135, 138−9, 157 General Medical Council 17 general practitioners 12 Gissing, George 6, 157 Goethe, J.W. von: Die Wahlverwandtschafter 6 Goodlad, Lauren M.E. 17 Grand, Sarah 157−8 The Beth Book 113−14, 158 Guy, Josephine 30 Haggard, Rider 157 Haight, Gordon S. 23 Hardy, Thomas 6, 9, 157 Two on a Tower 19−20 Harrison, Frederic 23, 25, 39−45 hero figures, doctors as 15−18, 22−4, 26−31, 39−40, 49, 51, 68, 71, 85, 148, 153 Holland, Sir Henry 75 The Homeopathic Times 12 Huxley, T.H. 99 Ingham, Sarson J. 140, 152 “Hilary or The Amateur Surgeon” 141−2 International Medical Congress (1879) 122 Jack the Ripper 123, 130 Jackson, John Hughlings 99 James, Henry: The Wings of the Dove 11 Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La Nouvelle Héloïse 6 Joyce, James: Portrait of the Artist 153 Kay(-Shuttleworth), James 37−8 Klein, Emmanuel 101−2 The Lancet 115−16, 126, 161

175

Langland, Elizabeth 73 Lever, Charles: Barrington 64 Levine, George 9−10, 39, 65, 85, 87−8 Levine, Philippa 116 Lewes, George Henry 39 Ranthorpe 17, 53−4 Lister, Joseph 16 Loudon, Irvine 12 love stories 3, 31, 40−41, 56−7, 60, 73−4, 78−81, 84−5, 90, 157, 162 Lyall, David (pseud.) 142; see also Swan, Annie S. Lytton, Edward Bulwer 29 McCarthy, Patrick 27 MacDonald, George 84 Adela Cathcart 47−61 Paul Faber, Surgeon 55−6 “The Light Princess” 56 “The Truth” 54−5 Machen, Arthur 4, 113, 124, 131 “The Great God Pan” 21, 111−14, 118−30 “The Inmost Light” 21, 111−14, 118, 121−7, 130 Macleod, Roy 19 Marcus, Sharon 7 Margesson, Lady Isabel 147 marriage institution of 5, 20−21, 25−6 for women doctors 134−42, 146−56 marriage-plot literature 2−11, 15, 19−22, 25−30, 40−45, 47, 60, 65−6, 74, 84−5, 99, 103−8, 114, 136−40, 147−8, 152, 156−62 Martineau, Harriet 84, 117 Deerbrook 15−16, 22−40, 43−5, 47, 49, 58 ‘Mater’ 134−6 Medical Amendment Act (1858) 17, 67, 93 medical information in literary works 161−2 microscopes, use of 87 Mill, John Stuart 112, 117 Milton, John 53 Mitford, Mary Russell: “The Surgeon’s Courtship” 15 Morris, Pam 73, 78 Mort, Frank 111

176


Murray, Lady Mary 147 natural law 87 New Woman literature 21, 111−14, 117−20, 124−5, 131, 133, 137, 144−7, 150−51, 155, 157−60 Nield, Keith 117 Nightingale, Florence 117 Novalis 47, 59 occultism 113−14, 126, 129−30 Otis, Laura 9 Ovid 98 Paget, Sir James 12−13 Peters, Catherine 87 Petersen, Jeanne 16 physicians 12 poetry 78 political economy 8−9, 30 Poovey, Mary 4, 9 Positivism 23−8, 33−45, 47, 84, 92 professionalization of medicine 4−5, 18, 47, 65 prostitution 111−17, 121−3, 126−7, 130−31, 159 public health 17, 122 rationalism and rationality 25, 65, 73, 88−91, 98 Reade, Charles 152 The Woman-Hater 137−8 realism in literature 14, 29, 40−43, 58−60, 63−6, 69, 72−4, 83−5, 89−90, 113−14 Richards, Stewart 100, 104 Richardson, Benjamin Ward 135−6 Richardson, Henry: Clarissa 64 Riddell, Mrs J.H.: Too Much Alone 63−5 Ridding, Lady Laura 147 Ritchie, Anne Thackeray 63 Ritvo, Harriet 100 Roberts, Caroline 35 romantic literature 8, 28, 64−5, 70−74, 80−83, 88−9, 161 Rothfield, Lawrence 9, 27−8, 39 Royal College of Physicians 12 Ruskin, John 90−91

Saintsbury, Elizabeth 49−50 Sanderson, John Burden 8, 100−107 Schor, Hilary 73, 78 scientifically-based medicine 16−21, 24, 60, 87, 89, 138, 158, 161−2 Scott, Sir Walter 27−8 Senf, Carol 119 Senior, Nassau 8 sensationalism 71 Shortt, S.E.D. 4 Showalter, Elaine 130 Small, Helen 8 Smith, Sydney 28−9 social-problem novels 29−32, 43 Spencer, Herbert 99 spriritualism 113 Staten, Henry 42−3 Stevenson, Robert Louis: Dr Jekyll and My Hyde 112, 124−5 Stoker, Bram 157 Dracula 21, 111−14, 118−28, 131 story-telling, curative effects of 53−9 subjectivity 73, 162 surgeons 12, 15−18 Swan, Annie S. 11, 140, 152−3 Elizabeth Glen, MB 21−2, 136, 142−9, 154 Mrs Keith Hamilton MB 142−4, 149−8, 151, 156 My Life 147 Swenson, Kristine 140, 144, 155 Swinburne, A.C. 102 Talairach-Vielmas, Laurance 56 Tanner, Tony 6 Thackeray, William Make-peace: Pendennis 27 Thackray, Arnold 4 Thompson, Christine 151−2 Tillotson, Gregory and Kathleen 29 Todd, Margaret: Mona Maclean, Medical Student 22, 136−7, 151−6 Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth 29−30 Trollope, Anthony 17 Trollope, Frances 29 Turner, Frank 92 Utilitarianism 29−30, 33

Index vampirism 122, 125, 139 venereal disease 112−15, 122−3, 127 vivisection 20, 87, 90, 99−109, 114, 118−20, 155 Vrettos, Athena 125 Wallace, Ellen: Mr Warrenne, the Medical Practitioner 67 Ward, Mary Augusta 157 Warren, Samuel: Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician 14−15, 143, 148−9 Waugh, Evelyn 8 Weldon, Henry and Georgina 113 Wells, H.G. 157 The Island of Dr Moreau 112, 124−5

177

Winslow, L. Forbes 113 Winter, Allison 36 The Woman at Home (magazine) 142, 147−8 women, legal and social status of 7; see also gender roles in society women doctors 21−2, 118, 133−56, 158 “women’s novels” 63, 71 Woolf, Virginia 8 To the Lighthouse 153 Yeazell, Ruth 87−8 Yonge, Charlotte 152 Magnum Bonum 21, 140−41 Youngson, A.J. 16


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