Brain fever in Gaskell's Cousin Phillis: Reading and hiding love in the body of Victorian heroines

Abstract

When we consider Victorian literature, it is striking to note the high number of novels that participated in the growing debate of the time around health, in particular that of women. This debate was encouraged by the attention nineteenth century medicine paid to the female body. Thus, there are countless examples of novels in which the heroine falls mysteriously ill at a certain point in the plot, disconcerting family and friends and requiring the immediate assistance of the doctor and the nurse. Contemporary medical theories warned about the somatic consequences of both emotional excess and repression, particularly in the case of women, considered by nature more emotional than men. Therefore, medical anxieties focused on women, especially bourgeois women, scrutinizing their bodies for external signs of emotion. The female body, subject to the medical gaze, turns into a text that offers her readers privileged access to her emotional life. Its vigilance and the control of her emotions was necessary to grant her health and that of the Empire. Despite the effort of doctors to acquire it, this ability to read bodily signs of emotion was directly attributed to women. However, it is interesting to analyse how novels like Cousin Phillis (1865) provided instruction in the emotional language of the body. Gaskell‘s novel supports medical theories about the threat of emotions to the fragile balance of female health while, simultaneously, questioning the supposedly natural association of women with affective hermeneutics.