Why must fictional sickness mean more than itself?
Regular readers of my somewhat sporadic blog posts will note that I do seem rather absorbed with suffering, despair and death. Today you'll be delighted to hear it's illness. Woody Allen created the line "I am not afraid of death, I just don't want to be there when it happens" - but writers put us in the room with sick people, with the dying, and want us to react. I've just re-read, for the purposes of this article (little else would make me pick up a Hardy novel these days) the end of Jude the Obscure, and even this Hardy-hater has to admit that the way that our hero Jude coughs away his life, and our villain Arabella maintains her disgustingly rude health (not to mention her unwillingness to nurse), is a powerful and angry use of illness as metaphor, in which Jude's illness is actually a sign of his wasted talent, and Arabella's health is a sign of her limitations and ironically her success.
Hardy is at the end of a 19th-century tradition of depicting illness which often uses illness as a metaphor for an emotional state and/or as punishment for sin - sometimes leading to recovery and redemption, sometimes to death. Jude's cough is not just a cough - it is a sign of his special vulnerability, his unfitness for this world. Think of Jane Austen using punitive illnesses to ensure that her wayward characters return to the proper path - Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, or Tom Bertram in Mansfield Park. (I'll leave it to others to analyse Dickens, and Eliot, and Braddon, and the Brontës...). These depictions of illness allow "good" female characters to emerge as idealised nurses - Anne Elliott, Esther Summerson - and reveal "bad" female characters who just won't mop brows (we're back to Arabella again).
