Introduction

A new body appeared in Britain in the late eighteenth century, one marked by its susceptibility to hysteria and a host of related nervous conditions, variously called hypochondria, spleen, vapours, lowness of spirits, melancholia, bile, excess sensibility, or, simply, nerves. These complaints were not themselves new; they had previously been the exclusive province of the English aristocracy. But their appearance as an epidemic in the middle class of the late Georgian years reflected a new set of assumptions about the bodies of speculators, traders, and businessmen and their wives, daughters, and servants. As a consequence, nervous disorders such as hysteria became the leading category of illness, accounting for two-thirds of all disease, and the new middle-class nervous body was viewed with considerable alarm.^[1]

The emergence of this new body was explained by the rationale George Cheyne developed in The English Malady in 1733. Responding to the European view that the English aristocracy had a constitutional melancholy, Cheyne—who was Samuel Richardson’s physician—argued that this malady was a “disease of civilization” resulting from the consumption of too many luxuries. Physicians at the century’s end such as Thomas Beddoes, Thomas Arnold, and the provincial Thomas Trotter argued that the new middle class was finally falling prey to the same dangers, having itself amassed considerable wealth.^[2] The new nervous body, however, was not simply a repetition of the one defined by Cheyne’s aristocrats. Its disorders were the consequence of a class-specific form of social life, and they were brought on by such middle-class conditions as year-round urban residency. The nervous body of the speculator was a corporeal response to the dynamics of the stock market. The hysteria of his wife was an embodiment of her being confined in a townhouse, unable to walk out by herself. The hypochondria of the retired tradesman followed from his sudden loss of acquisitive activity. The lower class, by virtue of its poverty and constant labor, was still considered immune to the diseases of wealth, and so the fear of a nervous epidemic was singularly focused on the middle class and its social environment.

Because of this linkage between nervous bodies and social conditions, nervous complaints became a useful tool for writers engaged in social criticism. The leading characteristic of this new body was its excessive impressionability; it was permeated by the artificial world in which it lived, having lost the ability to resist the harmful effects of England’s new social environment. Like a canary in a mine shaft, this body, with its mysterious symptoms, was singing its warning song. An author could credibly use the health or sickness of the body to ground a commentary on the British way of life, or, more precisely, on the structure of British social power, which had brought the nervous body and its protean complaints into being. Because its disorders were broad and causation vague, it made possible an unlimited range of naturalized critiques of unnatural life.

Its use for this purpose in literary narratives of the period was widespread. The disorders of Mary Wollstonecraft’s heroines in both Mary: A Fiction and The Wrongs of Woman are well-known indictments of the punishing social experiences that cause them. Nervous manifestations range in severity from the intensity of the crisis (as with Marianne Dashwood’s nearly fatal ailment in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility) to the diffuseness of the chronic: Miss Milner’s impulsiveness in Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story has a pathology familiar to medical texts of the time. Each of these variations functions in its own way as a commentary on the order or disorder of the social conditions that produced it.

Nerves and Narratives is an archaeology of that nervous body and its implicit social critique. In particular, this study focuses on one of the central characteristics of the nervous body: its tendency to talk, especially to talk about itself. The nervous patient spoke incessantly about her or his body, its pains and sufferings, and its history. As Part 1 discusses, this body’s tendency to narrate the story of its nervous condition was itself a sign of the condition. Thus, this association of nerves and narrative makes problematic the narratives of social criticism in the period that depend on a nervous narrator to testify from personal experience to the injustice of society.

What happens when that nervous body tells its story? A significant cluster of first-person literary narratives in this period featured precisely such a nervous narrator, and four examples are analyzed in Part 2: William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), and Maria Edgeworth’s Harrington (1817). Each of these examples is a full-scale nervous narrative—that is, one in which the nervous narrator is the central narrating voice—and they demonstrate a need to simultaneously negotiate two wholly opposite narrative problems. First, these narratives strain to avoid the negative implications of the narrator’s hysterical speech, as the hysteria threatens the authority to speak. However, the texts also pose an opposite and more intractable problem caused by the relationship between the speaker’s illness and the speaker’s voice. In each case, the narrator’s illness serves a positive purpose, for it gives rise to the narrative voice. Without the disease there would be no narrative, not even one with the social utility of warning against the social conditions that created it in the first place. And so, paradoxically, the nervous narrative promotes, in its formal structure, the same disorder it cautions against by transforming the narrator’s debility into a narrative premise. This problem only intensifies as the narrative gets increasingly convincing. The more compelling it is aesthetically or intellectually, the more valuable the nervous condition ultimately appears as a precondition to the act of speech. Thus, these narratives have to negotiate two contradictory problems, one in which hysteria implicitly undermines the authority to speak, the other in which it becomes the basic condition of speech.

Each of the four narratives discussed in Part 2 represents a different response to the problem of the nervous narrative form as a means of social commentary. The two opposite endings William Godwin wrote for Caleb Williams create opposite relationships between narrator and narrative, and so they serve as an introduction to the paradoxical difficulties the form presented. Godwin’s narrator finally disowns his narrative, losing all interest in it as self-representation. However, this kind of detachment, in which the past is thrown off or tossed aside, is rejected by the early feminist philosopher Mary Hays in her Memoirs of Emma Courtney, a novelistic response to Caleb Williams. Hays instead constructs an ongoing relationship between the narrator and her earlier narrative, one she links to the social condition of woman.

The writers of this first pair of narratives were political radicals who utilized the instability of the nervous narrative form to expose unresolvable conflicts within the existing social order. Both narratives insist on the instability of the narrator’s voice, and that instability ultimately serves as a metonym for the social instability the narratives seek to represent. Politically conservative writers who used this form adopted a very different approach to its problematic structure. They insisted on resolution rather than instability. Two examples are examined in the second pair of narratives, Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Maria Edgeworth’s Harrington. Both writers tried to contain the instability of the form by constructing narrators who describe their escape from a past nervous condition. That escape is the precondition of speech for both narrators, and thus they attempt to tell the story of recuperation and reconciliation, rather than disorder and alienation.

Nervous narratives continued beyond the brief life span explored here, and nervous conditions in the Victorian age were a major subject of discussion, but the nervous body did not continue in the same fashion.^[3] Part 3, “Victorian Bodies,” looks at two qualitatively different kinds of historical developments that affected the earlier idea of the nervous body and impinged on its cultural status. The first development was a relative change. The nervous body was a paradigm that the middle class used to explain itself to itself and to differentiate itself from other classes. With the rise of the new urban working class, that self-definition underwent a change, and we can see that shift by looking at the new discourse of public health, which arose as the medical science of the working-class body. In this new genre of middle-class discourse, the working class became the inheritor of the problem of an excessive environmental determinism. In comparison, the middle-class body appeared to be relatively healthy.

The second development was an internal shift in the Victorian medical conceptualization of the nervous system, which is outlined at the beginning of Chapter 7. George Eliot was aware of this paradigm shift, and in Middlemarch the novelist looks at medicine as, itself, a narrative in transition about the body. Rather than embracing or deploying the fixed medical concept of the body, George Eliot portrays medicine as engaged in a business of conceiving bodies, and thus she questions the basic structure of medical knowledge itself. Because it is set in 1832, at the close of the medical generation with which this study begins, Middlemarch also makes it possible to return symbolically to the early century, and to revisit the questions—medical authority, epistemologies of the body, their bearing on the forms of literature—of that era. The question takes on a radically different meaning in this paradigmatic novel of Victorian high realism.

The combination of an extended analysis of the theory of narrative in an outdated, noncanonical medical text with analyses of narrative problems in literary narratives of the time is a deliberate means of establishing the methodological field within which my object of study can come into view. That object is not the individual works, whether medical, fictional, or autobiographical, that constitute this study, nor their different genres, but rather the cultural episteme in which they participate. I term that episteme “the nervous body.” It is the basic literary claim of this study that the nervous body is a defining characteristic of late Georgian literature. The basic historical claim is that the nervous body enjoyed its clearest moment of cultural ascendancy in the late Georgian period, when specifically middle-class disorders became part of the official discourse of medicine, and that its cultural status changed with the emergence of the working-class body in the early Victorian years.

The “body” with which this study is concerned is not a given that exists outside of history. It is a flexible group of narratives used by members of late Georgian culture to explain their physicality to themselves. The assumption that the body could serve as a natural locus for social criticism rested on a second series of assumptions about how this body was structured, how it functioned, and why it reacted in one way and not in another. And so the physiology of experience became a cultural language through which this social critique operated. The cultural episteme of the nervous body made it possible to appeal to physicality as a meaningful source of social commentary. It was the precondition for meaning, the theoretical structure that followed from the physical structure. The narratives about nervous function that this culture told itself permitted some kinds of bodily meanings and not others. And so this cultural episteme was not a specific message but rather the grammar in which a variety of messages could be constituted.

This body resists being reduced to a cultural construction that can be understood in relation to a given or “real” body, a body understood to be outside of cultural interpretations. “I can offer material for how powerful prior notions of difference or sameness determine what one sees and reports about the body,” Thomas Laqueur writes, describing how cultural assumptions about gender came to define the physical structures that were then appealed to as the body’s given sex.^[4] The distinguishing feature of the nervous body, the one that made it particularly useful for social criticism, was that it was highly responsive to cultural conditions. Each occupation produced a distinctive body type, for example, which was then further differentiated through the inheritability of acquired characteristics.^[5] The physical material of the body had more pliability than it now appears to have. And so, from the perspective of the late twentieth century, it is tempting to say that this antiquated nervous body is clearly different from the real body because this mutability is a (mis)representation.

But this cultural variability was premised on an essential physical structure that could respond to cultural conditions yet retain its integrity. This body allowed for variation within limits, and the center of this conceptual structure, the presence that both enabled and constrained its play, was the physiology of the nervous system. These physiological principles (sensibility, irritation, nervous power, excitability) were present in all bodies and were necessary to account for the observed physical variations between bodies.^[6] That these principles were rudimentary, that they were vaguely understood, that they were purely hypothetical—all of this uncertainty was fueled by the underlying belief that the “real” body did function in a particular fashion, or at least within observable parameters. In recognizing that they did not quite have it right, writers on nerves were doing two things simultaneously: They were asserting that the culturally limited views of the available science were necessarily misrepresenting the real body, and they were outlining the space, outside of culture, where that real body resided. They knew without question what the real body was not. It was not structured humourally, as their Renaissance predecessors had thought. And that realization in itself began to shape what the body might be, so the space of the real body, that which is not understood but is always present, shifted. The real body existed in a space very different from the one that I, in my cultural perspective, would ever imagine, because I, too, know what the real body is not. I know that it is not nervous.^[7]

Thus, although the nervous body has an intimate relationship to late Georgian culture, and although nervous characteristics are thought to be highly responsive to cultural events, the cultural episteme of the nervous body also affects the sense of the body as a given, because it shapes the area against which that natural body can be thought. Though it is tempting to view the nervous body as purely a product of discourse and as a cultural (mis)representation of the given body, we cannot do so without eliding the way this episteme also shapes the “real” body, the one that exists apart from all cultural understanding. I find it impossible to distinguish, ultimately, between what a culture takes for granted about “the body” and the body as something that is given. For that reason, this study is ultimately concerned not with the body but rather with the means through which a culture produces its version of the body as that which exists outside of culture.

The same problem appears when trying to differentiate between “actual” psychological states and a culture’s beliefs about its own psychological processes. The nervous system had an “intimate association with the phenomena of mind” because, despite disagreement on a somatic site for the mind, “it was generally recognized that the nervous system did represent an interface between the material and psychic realms.”^[8] As a result, the late Georgian era is called “the age of physiological psychology.” The defining feature of the nervous body was its susceptibility to nervous disorder. But although all bodies had nerves, not all nerves were susceptible to nervous disorder, and the way in which that line was drawn, in terms of gender and class, is a central preoccupation of this study.

“Hysteria” was the term most often used for nervous conditions. It derives from the Greek word for uterus, hystera, and was used in classical antiquity to describe complaints caused by the “wandering womb,” which traveled around within the female body.^[9] The Middle Ages attributed supernatural causes to hysteria, and it became associated with witchcraft and possession, but naturalistic explanations advanced during the Renaissance viewed it as a physical, rather than spiritual, condition. Hysteria became known as a disorder of the nervous system rather than the uterus during the Enlightenment and remained so throughout the nineteenth century. Though theories of causation and consequence changed, hysteria remained a functional organic disease—that is, a disease assumed to originate in physical causes even though empirical evidence of the physical cause was unavailable. However, at the end of the nineteenth century Breuer and Freud redefined hysteria as originating in mental, rather than physical, causes, so mental states that were physical in origin again ceased to qualify as hysterical, as in the Middle Ages.^[10] More recently, “hysteria” has all but disappeared as a diagnostic category in clinical usage. In 1987 it still existed parenthetically, as an antiquated alternate term, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-III-R, the official taxonomy of disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association. Those references disappeared in DSM-IV, published in 1994.^[11]

Even after reviewing this brief history, however, it is difficult to avoid the implication that hysteria, variously labeled, has an ontological status apart from its labels. The idea that one could write a history of hysteria presupposes that, at some level, there is something to write a history of, something that is consistent enough to be traced through various representations over 2,000 years.^[12] And yet the purpose of this study is not to gesture toward the transhistorical reality of hysteria but to outline the shape that category took in the late Georgian period.

Today, at the same moment that hysteria is disappearing from clinical practice, it is enjoying a renaissance in academic writing.^[13] In a survey of this phenomenon, Mark S. Micale locates four hundred separate publications on hysteria, most of them published between 1980 and 1995. He calls this phenomenon “the new hysteria studies” and lists the separate disciplines involved as follows: “within the health sciences, neurology, psychiatry, clinical psychology, and psychoanalysis, and within the humanities, intellectual history, medical and science history, legal history, women’s studies, psychoanalytic studies, art history, and literary history and criticism” (Approaching Hysteria, 5). Each discipline defines hysteria differently, and different definitions exist within the disciplines.

The predominant definition of hysteria used in literary criticism derives from psychoanalytic theory. Hysteria is associated with woman’s exclusion from the sphere of representation, the symbolic that is necessarily gendered male. In elegantly theorizing hysterical narrative, Mary Jacobus writes: “Women’s access to discourse involves submission to phallocentricity, to the masculine and the symbolic: refusal, on the other hand, risks re-inscribing the feminine as a yet more marginal madness or nonsense. When we speak (as feminist writers and theorists often do) of the need for a special language for women, what then do we mean?”^[14] Within this interpretive paradigm, hysterical narrative can become valorized as a radical social critique because it is the means of evacuating the phallocentric space of the symbolic and opening up a space in which the theoretical paradox, a language for women, becomes possible.^[15]

As the point of departure, psychoanalysis uses the opening act in the twentieth-century conceptualization of hysteria, the publication in 1895 of Breuer and Freud’s Studies in Hysteria, and its foundation text, the case history of Fräulein Anna O., in which the “talking cure” originates. Anna O., the paradigmatic hysteric, is unable to tell the story of her own past. As Breuer sees it, “she would complain of having ‘lost’ some time and would remark upon the gap in her train of conscious thoughts” (Studies on Hysteria, 24), and that inadequacy is the central symptom of the disorder. Through the talking cure, she slowly works her way backward in memory, moving through layers of unconscious resistance until she finally remembers the originary event she had repressed. Her hysteria disappears once she becomes able to tell the story of her past. Through this case history, hysteria has become regularly associated with aphasia and the inability to tells one’s story. Hélène Cixous’s formulation is memorable: “Silence: silence is the mark of hysteria. The great hysterics have lost speech, they are aphonic” (“Castration or Decapitation?” 49).

Aphasia was one of the grab bag of hysterical and hypochondriacal symptoms before Freud, but so too was a contradictory impulse to speak, and we must account for those other parts of the constellation of hysterical stars. One can see definite prefigurations of Freud’s ideas within the tradition of writing on nerves.^[16] Freud began his career as a neurologist, and so his early training was in the school of medical ideas about nerves in the late nineteenth century that, in turn, originated in the Enlightenment redefinition of the body as primarily nervous.^[17] The most well-known intellectual history of hysteria, Ilza Veith’s Hysteria: The History of a Disease, shows how tempting it is to read the record of hysteria as a slow parade toward the concepts Freud would later articulate.^[18] But this synchronic narrative obscures the diachronic coherence of those pre-Freudian hysterias. Emphasizing those elements of nervous thought that are continuous with Freud’s ideas and ignoring those that are discontinuous is a useful strategy for understanding Freud and psychoanalysis, but it comes at the expense of the materials necessary to conceptualize the structural center of earlier hysterias.^[19] For the purposes of cultural history, the value of hysteria as an object of study lies precisely in its protean, wide-ranging, and frequently unrestricted semiology. This conceptual flexibility allowed the disease construct to be adapted to the different circumstances of time and place.^[20] Hysteria is always thought to be enigmatic, and so it is necessary to account for the local context in which it is deployed, the individual decision that this is hysterical and that is not.

Roger Chartier points out that the object of cultural history has shifted over time.^[21] What began as an attempt to define a prior social reality has focused instead on an analysis of the process of its representation. “Reality thus takes on a new meaning. What is real, in fact, is not (or is not only) the reality that the text aims at, but the very manner in which it aims at it in the historic setting of its production and the strategy used in its writing” (Cultural History, 44). This is the basic premise of this study and is why, in writing about Thomas Trotter and Edwin Chadwick’s ideas, for example, I place them in a prominent relationship to their profession-building projects. My approach toward the topic of the working-class body is to interrogate it as a middle-class representation and to focus on the discourse in which that body was constructed. As with hysteria and the body, I am not locating the social reality of working-class experience in these middle-class studies. I am solely concerned with the middle-class idea of a working-class body and with understanding why it was imagined in the way that it was.

I do not know whether these literary writers read the medical texts under discussion. It is worth noting that medical texts at the time were not the province of specialists that they are now, that their language was still accessible to any well-educated reader, and that all the literary authors discussed in Part 2 were exceptionally well read in that broad category of discourse then known as “letters.” My argument is not one of influence but rather that this nervous body was an integral part of the culture in which these writers lived.^[22] And if they did not think about the body and its psychological life in the precise detail of medical writers, they could not think at all about these things without using the basic grammar of its nervous structure as the means through which the amorphousness of personal experience was organized and explained.

My assumption is that the structural premises on which the nervous body rests are most accessible in the grammar of physicality contained in the language of medical writing, where the physiology of the body receives its fullest discussion. I also assume that this grammar exists outside of any individual medical text and that it is not restricted to medical discourse. To avoid an overly specialized treatment, I have chosen to concentrate on a medical text that is more representative than innovative, to do a formal analysis of its structural assumptions, and to use those assumptions as representative beyond this specific text. This is a manageable procedure because I am ultimately writing not about late Georgian culture in its entirety but rather about a slender, horizontal section of it. Although I utilize primary texts from a variety of discursive practices—philosophy, medicine, fiction, colonial history—all are written by middle-class writers for an assumed middle-class readership. Indeed, all can be traced to the thinnest band, a narrow intellectual segment of that contentious class, because almost all are written by people, men and women, who made their living through writing or the educated professions.

I have thus tried to focus my analysis as specifically as possible on a localized context of nerves, as they were conceived by members of one class in one place and at one time. And if this nervous body and its narratives appear more strange than familiar, that at least indicates progress. To take this problem further by going backward to the epigraph from Francis Bacon, if that body were to “bleed afresh”—Bacon thought it might even open its unseeing eyes—then we, its post-Freudian “murtherers,” will finally know we have got the right corpse.

Notes