Cynthia Harris // This is my second post inspired by the articles in the recent issue of the literary journal “Literature and Medicine.” In her article “Authenticity and Fashionable Disease in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Jessica Monaghan quotes Lady Dainty, a character in Colley Cibber’s The Double Gallant or, the Sick Lady’s Cure: “tis betraying our [female]…
Author: ckh2115
Review of “Literature and Medicine,” Part 1
Cynthia Harris // This month, I will discuss the fascinating and excellently done recent issue of the journal “Literature and Medicine.” This issue’s articles all address the nature of “fashionable diseases,” that is, diseases with a “novel, modish prominence,” that rose and fell in popularity over the decades during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (239,…
Contagious Bodies in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House
Cynthia Harris Last month, I wrote about the third-person narrator’s miasmatic thinking in Bleak House. This month, I will examine Esther’s opposing understanding of disease and human bodies as well as how these two modes of transmission converge narratively around Esther’s illness. The two narrators offer strikingly different descriptions of London, grounded in their…
Miasmatic thinking in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House
Cynthia Harris This semester, I will look at the two-narrator structure of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House through the lens of the then current debate about the mechanism by which disease spreads. The nineteenth century was marked by a vigorous controversy between contagionists and proponents of miasma. Contagionists, or germ theorists, believed disease was spread through…
Poem: Hydrostatic Force
Hydrostatic Force Sometimes The swelling comes Ribs become cage I curl fingers Over sternum I tug To split skin and sinew For escape But there is none The swelling does not pass Rather it ebbs Waiting on the tide Before it flows back in But does this feeling truly…
Promethean Heat and Paternal Creation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Cynthia Harris This month I will focus on the alternative title to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, “The Modern Prometheus” and examine how it connects with the novel’s interest in purely paternal creation. Prometheus is a figure from Greek mythology who creates mankind from clay, and his “modern” successor, Frankenstein, similarly works “to animate the lifeless clay”…
Masturbation as Creation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Cynthia Harris Despite the classic cinematic image of animation by lightning strike, the creation sequence in the original novel version of Frankenstein is much more intimate, more biological than electrical or even scientific. There is a striking absence of scientific instruments in Frankenstein’s “workshop of filthy creation” (78). Instead, Frankenstein’s focus is on the…
Neonatal Jaundice in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Cynthia Harris To many readers, Frankenstein is best read as a “birth myth,” even as a “cautionary obstetric tale” that warns of the horrors of motherhood.[1] These interpretations have historically relied on seeing Victor Frankenstein as analogous to the pregnant and later post-partum mother, possibly even to Mary Shelley herself. In my Fall semester…