Food for Sympathy: Illness, Nursing, and Affect in Victorian Literature and Culture

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dc.contributor.advisorMichie, Helenaen_US
dc.creatorDemirhan, Basaken_US
dc.date.accessioned2012-07-03T22:49:38Zen_US
dc.date.available2012-07-03T22:49:38Zen_US
dc.date.created2010-05en_US
dc.date.issued2011en_US
dc.description.abstractThe profuse illness and nursing narratives in Victorian texts frequently feature sympathy for physical suffering as a major cultural and literary trope. In a wide variety of texts ranging from social reform writing to autobiographies, from novels to poetry, physical suffering was often closely associated with a specific cultural form of affect called sympathy. While earlier epistemologies of sympathy developed by Scottish Enlightenment writers defined it as a free agent that autonomously flowed through individuals, toward the mid-century, this model left its place to formulations of sympathy as an alignment of affect between clearly separated subjects that could be achieved through sympathetic imagination. This epistemological and cultural shift is strongly apparent in both fictional and nonfinctional depictions of sympathy for the sick. Critical works on the nineteenth-century culture of illness and medical care have tended to focus on the community-building functions of the sickroom. However, the illness-nursing dyad constitutes an affective structure through which some less examined aspects of sympathy for physical suffering, such as the alterity and abjection of bodies in pain, can be explored. Descriptions of physical suffering usually followed certain narrative conventions that positioned the sufferers and their nurses as objects or subjects of sympathy. This particular object-subject relationship facilitated the construction, negotiation, and redefinition of collective identities like nationality, gender, and class. While nursing memoirs and conduct manuals adhered to conventional ideals of femininity, they also expanded definitions of feminity and maternalism to include competence. In their war nursing memoirs, unprivileged or marginalized women who worked as nurses were able to inscribe themselves as professional women and national subjects by contributing to the national narratives of the war with soothing narratives of their nursing experience. In Bildungsromans, their sympathy for disabled male companions enabled socially and economically disenfranchised male protagonists to reconstruct wounded masculinity as a hegemonic masculinity model. Destabilized social identities, on the other hand, culminated in novelistic examples of resistance to sympathy on the level of character or narrative, which the authors used as a representational strategy to approach dilemmas for which there are no solutions.en_US
dc.format.extent266 ppen_US
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen_US
dc.identifier.callnoTHESIS ENGL. 2011 DEMIRHANen_US
dc.identifier.citationDemirhan, Basak. "Food for Sympathy: Illness, Nursing, and Affect in Victorian Literature and Culture." (2011) Diss., Rice University. <a href="https://hdl.handle.net/1911/64420">https://hdl.handle.net/1911/64420</a>.en_US
dc.identifier.digitalDemirhanBen_US
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1911/64420en_US
dc.language.isoengen_US
dc.rightsCopyright is held by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder.en_US
dc.subjectBritish and Irish literatureen_US
dc.subjectLiteratureen_US
dc.titleFood for Sympathy: Illness, Nursing, and Affect in Victorian Literature and Cultureen_US
dc.typeThesisen_US
dc.type.materialTexten_US
thesis.degree.departmentEnglishen_US
thesis.degree.disciplineHumanitiesen_US
thesis.degree.grantorRice Universityen_US
thesis.degree.levelDoctoralen_US
thesis.degree.nameDoctor of Philosophyen_US
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