Tuberculosis caused more fatalities and severe impairment than any other disease in Victorian England, yet has received relatively little attention from literary and cultural historians of disability. Nineteenth-century literature often reduced its consumptive characters to ‘passive angelic’ figures whose invalidism conformed to certain restrictive models: either as exemplary types whose suffering provided an opportunity for spiritual growth, or as sentimentalised victims. Alternatively, as modelled by life writing about the poet John Keats, consumptives were portrayed as doomed Romantics whose disease provided a source of creative inspiration, but led to a tragically early demise. These stereotypes cast a long shadow over literary representations of tuberculosis, but Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Invalid Lives, as Alex Tankard declares on page 1 of her rich and provocative book, is ‘not about those consumptives’.
Rather than considering tuberculosis as a tragic disease that led inevitably to a character’s death, Tankard focuses on what nineteenth-century texts have to say about the experience of living with the disease. Tankard’s interest is in how writers challenged and exposed the fallacy of conventional models of heroic suffering to present more nuanced, troubling or, in some cases, positive visions of consumptive identity. In doing so, she considers more widely how texts constructed a nineteenth-century disabled identity. Over the course of the nineteenth century, conventional cultural models of consumption were disrupted by the emergence of new biomedical perspectives on the disease that drew attention to the physical symptoms of the disease, ultimately presenting a more realistic view of what it was like to live with consumption. Some figures, such as the artist Aubrey Beardsley, embraced these new modes of thinking, and forged an ‘aggressive, playful, disruptive consumptive identity’ through his life and work (89) that challenged the image of the consumptive as a weak, passive victim.
Through a series of case studies, Tankard explores the ways in which writers reflected on the identity and social role of consumptives. Emily Brönte’s Wuthering Heights (1847) presents multiple perspectives on consumption, ranging from pity to abuse, and in the process exposes consumptive characteristics as ‘mere conventions that may be used or discarded at will’ (109). The abusive domestic environment in which the consumptive Linton Heathcliff is raised demonstrates the limits of sentimentality, and its failure to guarantee the care, sympathy and dignity that disabled people need. Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895) and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (1869) highlight the imprisoning nature of the sickroom – a place where, as Tankard argues, material deprivation and cultural stigmatisation converge. Jude, in particular, focuses on the consequences of the male consumptive’s inability to perform the traditional breadwinner role, and the way in which it causes domestic strife for disabled men.
The book’s final chapter turns its attention to the bestselling – yet today largely forgotten – novel Ships that Pass in the Night (1893) by Beatrice Harraden. Whereas the other novels examined by Tankard either challenge consumptive stereotypes or expose the material hardships and isolation that disable people with chronic illness, Ships that Pass goes further in exploring the possibilities for more fulfilling roles for people with tuberculosis. At the novel’s centre is a romantic friendship between an emancipated ‘New Woman’ and a disabled man, which – although ultimately thwarted by the tragic death of the female protagonist in a road accident – ‘imagines a new comradeship between disabled and non-disabled people based on mutual care and respect’ (167). The novel’s disability politics is informed by the demand for new non-exploitative relationships between the sexes during the 1890s, which supplies a tool for critiquing the uneven power relationships in the sentimental sickroom, and a model for more equal, interdependent, relations.
Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Invalid Lives is a fascinating book that provides new insights into disability representation in Victorian fiction. Of particular interest is Tankard’s argument that the emergent biomedical model of disease provided a way for writers to undermine stereotypes of disabled characterisation, rather than ‘standing as an institutionalised, oppressing hegemony’ (111). This book is a reminder for disability scholars that the medical model did not emerge fully formed and all-powerful; rather, biomedical discourses of disease and disability evolved in the nineteenth century alongside and in competition with religious, sentimental and other models. In time, this would change – the introduction in 1912 of the need to notify of all cases of tuberculosis, and the spread of institutional care in the early twentieth century, would increase the power of the medical establishment over patients’ lives, halting the development of inclusive communities like those imagined by Harraden. Alex Tankard’s illuminating study shows how biomedicine enabled writers to confront the difficult realities of living with chronic illness and, in the case of Ships that Pass in the Night, to acknowledge these without ‘dismissing the identities so formed as hopelessly spoiled and illegitimate’ (194).
Department of History, Swansea University, Swansea, UK
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