the developments in medicine, and the vastness of the reading public converged during the nineteenth century to make it a period of intense debate about health, particularly in terms of the two categories of medicine—hygiene and therapeutics—that Galen identified. For although these categories are interrelated, advice books by medical professionals and laypersons alike often emphasize one over the other. William Strange, for example, wrote predominantly on the restoration of health,27 or therapeutics, whereas Sinclair focused on hygiene, organizing the sixth edition of his Code of Health and Longevity (1844) “under three general heads:—on the means, 1. Of preserving health, 2. Of prolonging life, and 3. Of curing or alleviating disease” (3). The first two headings (preserving and prolonging) fall under the umbrella term of maintenance (hygiene), while the third is dedicated to therapeutics. Sinclair employs this formula in part because he was not an expert on cure. But more than that, he (like many other writers) was aware of or concerned about the notion that readers think too much about cure. The reading public, among whom Sinclair includes medical professionals, needs to attend more to the story of health than to that of disease. Thus, while I am interested in the narrative structures that make health legible—a text to be read and followed—I want to demonstrate how these structures and how reading “hygienically” function as a form of resistance to dominant modes of thought, particularly the curative or “therapeutic” ethos, which seeks closure and a definitive end.
I attend to these issues not to suggest that disease and closure are unimportant or that the ability to find solutions for them is unworthy of our attention. Getting sick is terrifying, and it was particularly so during the period before germ theory was fully accepted, when a simple cut could lead to a life-threatening infection or a drink of water could unleash a deadly epidemic. But wherever possible, avoiding illness in the first place is safer than relying on treatment. Sinclair was not a medical man, but his work offers a plan for health based on his extensive reading (it summarizes several popular medical guides) and his own experience. Influenced by Galenic theories of medicine that tout the importance of moderation in diet and exercise, he counsels readers, “The foundation should be laid early; the plan or system should begin in youth, and ought afterwards resolutely to be persevered in” (1844 Code, 10), while acknowledging that the perseverance (or narrative “drive”) perhaps more than the plan (or “plot”) is what readers seem to resist. He criticizes those who “represent hygeian rules as troublesome; and account all persons as miserable, who live according to any regular system,” promising instead that “pleasure,” or what we might call narrative fulfillment, comes from developing “habits” of health (14).
Novelists such as Austen, Brontë, Martineau, Dickens, and Gaskell not only thematize and satirize the details of these “plans” (recall Mr. Woodhouse’s concern about wedding cake in Emma) but also incorporate the notion of perseverance and daily practice into the very form of their narratives. Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, for example, may feature therapeutics as integral to the advancement of their heroines’ plots and seem almost wholly organized around the crisis (or multiple crises) they must endure, but these plots are governed equally, if not so obviously, by a hygienic model of narrative. They reflect a desire to maintain rather than simply treat, to prevent rather than cure. In these narratives, the ostensibly dilatory state of health intersects with and subsumes the teleological impulse of disease. These novels teach us an alternative rhythm of reading, one that operates outside the comfort of cure and the allure of disease and invites readers to revise their expectations about character development (bildungsroman), the narrator’s authority (omniscience and reliability), narrative closure (essential to marriage plots), and the metaphorical language associated with these structural elements, which align with the critical investment in illness.
Although determining what people knew about health and whether or not they were accurate in that knowledge is of interest in this book,28 I am more concerned with identifying the ways authors write about such topics—the narrative strategies used by novelists and medical writers when trying to preserve, promote, and define health and the reading practices these strategies invite or impose.29 Reading for Health’s focus on the narrative of health has been shaped, as the title implies, by Peter Brooks’s Reading for the Plot (1984) and D. A. Miller’s Narrative and its Discontents (1989), as both critics examine the reader’s and the narrative’s relationship to beginnings and ends and to the traditional narrative of crisis and recovery.30 Brooks challenges “the static models” of narrative developed by formalists, because they fail to account for “reading narrative as a dynamic operation.” He uses metaphors such as “motor” and “engine” to explain the type of movement that occurs in narrative, and he couples this model with a Freudian understanding of psychic mobility, suggesting that desire for the end (the death instinct) initiates the narrative and drives the plot. As he explains it, “Narrative desire is ultimately, inexorably, desire for the end.”31 But even as Brooks asserts the death drive as narrative’s primary force, he calls on the language of medicine to describe this narrative event. In his examination of Great Expectations (1860–61), for example, he argues, “At the end [of the novel] we have the impression of a life that has outlived plot, renounced plot, been cured of it: life that is left over.” “Plot,” he suggests, “comes to resemble a diseased, fevered state of the organism.”32 Medical rhetoric, particularly the language associated with crisis and recovery, seeps naturally into theories of narrative action.
For Miller, “narratability” is “the instance of disequilibrium, suspense, and general insufficiency from which a given narrative appears to arise.”33 Miller offers Mary and Henry Crawford from Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) as examples, noting that both characters defer textual closure—Henry through his flirtatious behavior and refusal to commit to marriage and Mary through discourse, her “perpetual promise and deferral of knowledge and right nomination.” Miller highlights these two characters because, for Austen, narratability “coincides with what the novelist strongly disapproves of (waywardness, flirtation) and . . . closure is associated with her most important official values (settlement, moral insight, and judgment).” These nonnarratable, or “healthy,” behaviors are, for Miller and others, what the novel (and the novel reader) seeks to achieve. In another example, Miller explains that we know Emma Woodhouse has been “cured” when she begins to think of herself in terms of her “blindness” and “blunders,” when her language shifts from self-absorbed to self-aware.34 Both Miller and Brooks call on the language of health (cure and recovery) to construct their theories.35 In doing so, they highlight the notion that traditional narratives are marked by the drive toward cure, toward expelling that which is undesirable or diseased.
But just as a story in which everyone is healthy and happy is no story at all, neither is one in which all the characters are constantly sick. We need, as Brooks might argue, the detours that move us between these two states and keep us slightly off-balance. Miriam Bailin challenges the traditional view that health and cure are fiction’s desired and necessary end, arguing in her study on the Victorian sickroom that “[t]he conventional pattern of ordeal and recovery takes on its particularly Victorian emphasis in the location of the desired condition of restored order and stability not in regained health but in a sustained condition of disability and quarantine.”36 Referring to Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens in particular, she goes on to argue that the “narrative cure for disorder is more often than not illness itself and the therapeutic situation constructed around it.”37 If, as Bailin proposes, the Victorian novel transforms illness into cure (narratively speaking), then I would like to suggest that it transforms health into action, into a kind of narrative crisis in itself. For, even as novels in the nineteenth century rely on the illness-cure model, another model, I argue, undergirds this traditional structure—one determined by the vagaries to be found within plots of health. Health is a precarious and subjective condition marked by uncertain chronologies, invented plots, and hopeful, vigilant characters. It insists on the simultaneous application of hindsight and foresight and provides writers narrative possibility rather than simply an ending, an ongoing drama rather than the absence or end of action.38
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