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Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Invalid Lives
Tankard, Alex
Tankard, Alex
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2018-03-15
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Chapter 5
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Abstract
Chapter 5 as sample from monograph.
Wuthering Heights ridiculed consumptive stereotypes, and Jude the Obscure exposed socioeconomic and cultural factors that disabled people with chronic illness, but neither could hope for a better future – much less suggest real strategies for improving the lives of people with tuberculosis in the nineteenth century. Beatrice Harraden’s 1893 bestseller Ships That Pass in the Night also offers a complex, bitter critique of the way in which sentimentality obscures the abuse and neglect of disabled people by nondisabled carers; it undermines the Romanticisation of consumptives, and shows consumptives driven to suicide by social marginalisation that leaves them feeling useless and hopeless. Yet its depiction of a romantic friendship between an emancipated woman and a disabled man also engages with the exciting possibilities of 1890s’ gender politics, and imagines new comradeship between disabled and nondisabled people based on mutual care and respect.
Citation
Tankard, A. (2018). Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Invalid Lives. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan
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DOI
10.1007/978-3-319-71446-2
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Book
Language
en
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The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71446-2
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9783319714462