Epilogue

The closing remarks restate the importance of illness to modernism, arguing that it is defamiliarization rather than diagnosis that is central to modernist illness. Literary modernism demonstrates an investment in non-normative bodies and their experience, not as case studies or symbols, but as lived objects that overspill medical classifications. Modernism’s careful attention to such variety and nuance is passed on to the reader, for whom the literary experience of other subjects is thus neither a simple extension of our own embodiment, nor wholly out of our imaginative ambit. Modernism shows the ill subject as other, but also embedded in a social world in which they play a full and lively role.

T. S. Eliot and the Skin around the Skull

The ill body plays an important role in the composition, theorization, and substance of Eliot’s poetry. Ill health is attributed a creative function in his work on F. H. Bradley, as well as in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, which corrects the bloodless theory of composition in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. In his reviewing, Eliot differentiates modern poetry by its appetite for describing the sick body. And in his poetry, Eliot uses a range of skin conditions, to portray repellently racialized and sexualized bodies. Illness is not something felt, or even felt for, in Eliot’s poems, but seen with disgust and alienation.

Sensory Intensity and Illness in Lawrence

Lawrence repeatedly associates illness with moments of bodily intensity. His ill protagonists show opposing tendencies: demonstrating a failed integration with the body, but also moments of heightened existence and revelation. Lawrence develops a physiological conception of the subject, judging culture and bodily experience, using pathological ideas. He interweaves the ill body’s literal and metaphorical aspects in discussions of education, sympathy, and writing. ‘Sun’ and Sons and Lovers use illness to stage failures of interpersonal relations. This is contrasted with the positive valence of illness in The Rainbow, where a fever brings revelation. Finally, the chapter juxtaposes afflictions in ‘The Blind Man’ with Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The former depicts blindness heightening affective, bodily potency. The latter shows injury estranging Chatterley from his body, reducing its desires and sensations. Mellors is contrasted not as an example of healthful virility, but of sensuality grounded in affliction.

Winifred Holtby and the Fevered (Middle)Brow

Placing Holtby’s writing in extended dialogue with Woolf’s, this chapter argues that the pathological canon missed in ‘On Being Ill’ is partly realized in the period’s middlebrow writing, which contests the topic of embodiment with Woolf’s preferred highbrow. The gendered category of middlebrow—associated by Woolf with ‘invalidish ladies’—is linked to the gendering of illness as female. The chapter also discusses the role of cinema in distinguishing brows, and its use in South Riding as an opposing artistic force to sickness, signifying illusion and insubstantiality. Reading Holtby’s popular journalism the author argues that illness provides a way of gently satirizing middle-class moral domestic values. South Riding and Anderby Wold show models of female identity that are identified with illness and its care. These are not, however, oppressive but often liberating, providing a field in which women acquire and enact expertise, authority, and power in the interwar period.

Virginia Woolf

Woolf’s formation as an experimental writer was founded on early observation of illness, and of bereavement. The Voyage Out uses illness to subvert the marriage plot by colliding it with stories of exploration and adventure, where tropical fever tests the protagonist. Rachel Vinrace’s fever, however, is not a climax of self-realization but a violent interruption that collapses plot and novelistic convention. In Rachel, Woolf uses the fever to create a distorting and disorienting, but also vividly mimetic portrayal of the mind. In Mrs. Dalloway Woolf provides the complementary view to the rich interiority of The Voyage Out, relating the perspective of onlookers who repeatedly see Clarissa as an influenza sufferer; a viewpoint that influences her own experience in turn.

Introduction

This introduction argues that physical illness is an important category for literary modernism. Through a close reading of Virginia Woolf’s ‘On Being Ill’ (1926), the author argues that the altered, often intensified forms of embodied experience in illness, constitute an important subject, method, and manner of writing. Self-consciously ‘new’, Woolf’s proposal for a canon of illness writing resembles a voyage of self-discovery, a linguistic experiment, and a phenomenological study. Requiring innovative stylistic effects, physical illness reveals a world at once strange and familiar, in a manner central to modernism’s own distinctiveness. The emphasis on physical illness is clarified with regard to current and historical categorization, as is the relationship between illness, disability, and their attendant terminology. It also explains the predominant focus on textual rather than authorial illness, and on illness rather than medicine.

‘You ought to be supported by the state!’

Richardson’s Pilgrimage uses illness to examine the operations of sympathy and the structures of care and responsibility. Pilgrimage is, in part, a realization of the aspiration to write a ‘dental novel’, where the surgery setting allows the depiction of a rich and distinctive social world. Consequently, the chapter shows the meaning of illness to be socially and politically determined. Analysis of the mechanisms of sympathy, empathy, and narrative method in the surgery leads to a discussion of public healthcare policy. Pilgrimage reflects the contemporary debate between sociological and moral models of healthcare, exemplified by the Fabian Society and the Charity Organisation Society. Pilgrimage balances, therefore, individual, sympathy-driven care against systematic, disinterested care.