Reading the Brontë Body: Disease, Desire and the Constraints of Culture

by Beth E. Torgerson

Anne, Emily, and Charlotte Brontë's literary representations of illness and disease reflect the major role illness played in the lives of the Victorians and its frequent reoccurrence within the Brontës' personal lives. An in-depth analysis of the history of nineteenth-century medicine provides the necessary cultural context to understand these representations, giving modern readers a sense of how health, illness, and the body were understood in Victorian England. Together, medical anthropology and the history of medicine offer a useful lens with which to understand Victorian texts. Reading the Brontë Body is the first scholarly attempt to provide both the theoretical framework and historical background to make such a literary analysis of the Brontë novels possible, while exploring how these representations of disease and illness work within a larger cultural framework.

196 pages, Paperback

First published July 15, 2010

Reviews

[Angela · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book unfortunately is completely invested in psychogenic explanations for physical illness, and repeats various logical fallacies throughout. There is no critical analysis of the various manifestations of psychogenic explanations and how they themselves are culturally constructed and subject to ideology, and the adverse effects of such flaws in reasoning. This inevitably causes a very one dimensional account of how the Brontes used illness in their novels, and how their lives were affected. The book shows how flawed much "literary" discourse on the body and impairments is. Torgerson wrote this in 2005. My own book critically analysing the logical fallacies, ideologies and adverse effects of psychogenic explanations was published in 2012. It is books like this that make me glad I wrote mine, though whether thinking has advanced enough to consider my work inthe canon is not yet clear. It is frustrating especially to see aspects of sociology pressed into an ostensibly tentative, but ultimately manipulative, uncritical promotion of the psychogenic explanation, with all its flaws in reasoning.