Narratives of Women’s Health and Hysteria in the Nineteenth-Century Novel

__Narratives of Women’s Health and Hysteria in the Nineteenth-Century Novel__ looks extensively at hysteria discourse through medical and sociological texts and examines how this body of work intersects with important cultural debates to define women’s social, physical, and mental health. The book sketches out prominent shifts in cultural reactions to the idea of diffused agency and the prized model of the interiorized, individual person capable of self will and governance. Melissa Rampelli takes up the work of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, showing how the authors play with and manipulate stock literary figures to contribute to this dialogue about the causes and cures of women’s hysterical distress. Acknowledgments Contents About the Author Chapter 1: Introduction: Hysteria and the Plot of Pathology Bibliography Chapter 2: The Sentimental Heroine and Hysteria in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility Hysteria Discourse and the Agential Ill Body Restoring Women’s Cognitive Agency in Austen’s Juvenilia Mind-Body Relations and the Plot of Pathology in Sense and Sensibility Bibliography Chapter 3: The Woman Detective and Hysteria in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House Women’s Work and Health in Mid-Century England Overview of Women in Work in the Wake of the Industrial Revolution (1840s–1850s) The Ideological Ideal: Separate Spheres and the Angel in the House Hysteria Discourse and the Danger of Stimuli, Shock, and Emotion The Burgeoning Field of Occupational Health: Hysteria, Infant Mortality, and Other Dangers When Rhetoric and Reality Are at Odds The Centrality of Bodily Knowing in Mr. Bucket’s Detective Process Unraveling the Safety of the Domestic Through Esther’s Hysterical Episodes Mrs. Bucket’s and Mrs. Bagnet’s Non-hysterical Detective Genius The “Public Objects” of Mrs. Pardiggle, Mrs. Wisk, and Mrs. Jellyby The Detective, Non-hysterical Woman, and Social Reform Bibliography Chapter 4: The Married Woman and Hysteria in George Eliot’s Middlemarch The Power of Marriage in Hysteria Discourse Dorothea Brooke and Rosamond Vincy: Case Studies in the Non-preventative Powers of Marriage Rewriting the Cure: Mementos and the Mind-Body Connection Sympathy, Sorority, and a New Marriage Plot Bibliography Chapter 5: The New Woman and Hysteria in Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders Hardy’s Theory of the Will and Cultural Contexts Felice Charmond and Edred Fitzpiers as Hardy’s Hysterical Degenerates Grace Melbury’s Hysterical Episodes and an Indictment of Marriage Marty South as Hardy’s Non-degenerate Figure The Un-sexing and Hysteria of the Unconventional Woman Marty’s Androgyny as a State of Health Bibliography Chapter 6: Epilogue: Continued Preoccupations—The Shell-Shocked War Veteran and Hysteria in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway Bibliography Index