This turned out to be about Henry James

[truepenny]

Had extremely complicated WWII spy-thriller dreams last night. Also dreams about LiveJournal and being able to use a graphic interface to change the color of people's hair to match their text. Consequently feeling a little scattered and a lot lazy. Work is waiting for me, and I'm not ready for it yet.

I'm reading Leon Edel's one-volume biography of Henry James (thanks again to heres_luck who is letting me depredate her shelves). I don't much like James as a writer--except for The Turn of the Screw, which is brilliant--but I'm finding that I like him rather a lot as a person. We have things in common. Which is a fucking weird thing to say, but there you are.

In a lot of his early stories (Edel helpfully provides capsule summaries), the heroes and heroines fall into fevers and die after having some crushing disappointment. And I'm wondering, is that just a literary convention which the youthful James couldn't quite shake off, or is he transcribing some actual part of Victorian life? Because if people died of crushing disappointments today, there'd be a lot fewer people in the world. It's like "brain-fever," which is the most wonderfully convenient illness in the whole of literature, useful for everything. I know they thought of it as real--at one point William James writes to their parents from Italy saying Henry has a "sort of brain-fever"--but what was it?

Comments

[hedda62.livejournal.com]

I would assume it was not encephalitis or something similar that actually inflames the brain, as would be today's definition; possibly just any fever that made people highly delirious or confused?

As far as the crushing disappointments go, it must be in part a literary convention (so very pathetic, you know), but I expect there were a lot of people psychologically weakened by tragedy who coincidentally caught something and couldn't fight it off, or didn't want to. There were a lot more fatal illnesses going around in those days; if you were poor and got one, you just died, but if you were middle-class or above you could afford to connect your death to the loss of your one true love or having your ambitions smashed or losing your father's fortune (in which case the poor-scenario kicks in, I suppose), because it was more sublime.

I read a great monograph called Speaking in Hunger (http://www.sc.edu/uscpress/Sp98/3275.html) on why Richardson's Clarissa starved herself to death (which I hadn't even got when I read it; she just seemed to up and die) and the relationship between power and starvation; it was better than it sounds in the linked description, actually, and got into the psychology of the characters nicely, and managed to make me somewhat sympathetic to Lovelace in a way that didn't diminish the nastiness of his actions. Anyhow, thought of that when you mentioned the fevers.

Hello, by the way; have put you on my friends list since I have been reading your journal for a while but just recently joined the LJ ranks myself. Always thoughtful and entertaining, thank you.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Hi! Welcome!

Thanks for the pointer. That monograph sounds fascinating.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I think we'd term it today, "profound situational depression." We just used to cut people a lot more slack for grief than we do today--and in a stiff upper lip Victorian setting, it's *vital* to have some sort of social outlet for emotion that is both unbearable and inexpressible in polite company.

On the other hand, I'd say QEI 'died of a broken heart'. From all accounts, her health wasn't any worse than it had been: she just decided to quit when the last of her childhood friends were gone.

Really, I can't blame her--

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I agree with matociquala about brain fever being depression.

I think the disappointment that people died of was probably a case of succumbing to some disease they'd have fought off if they'd been happy -- no penicillin, lots of diseases, resistance is definitely related to psychology, goodness knows I've succumbed to colds with misery that I'd held off in happiness.

It wasn't just a literary convention, but I think it was a literary convention too.

Hobby-horsing here

[oursin.livejournal.com]

May I put on my stuffy medical historian's hat? I don't think any Victorian disease, even in a medical case book or on a death certificate, necessarily maps directly to modern diagnostic categories. (I had somewhat of a fight, er, heated discussion, in a Victorianist forum about this recently.)

A lot of literary ailments would appear to be symbolic &/or conventional, and not even to be anything a Victorian doctor would necessarily recognise. Plus a lot of quite nasty things got glamorised in literature and art, e.g. 'consumption' was not romantic. Some authors were better than others at having plausible disorders for their characters.

Having got which off my chest, I would suggest that 'broken heart' might well be the result of other factors working on a depressed immune system, and that 'brain fever' could cover a multitude of febrile disorders causing delirium. It should not be forgotten, however, how unhealthy life in C19th could be and the plethora of things that could go wrong.

Re: Hobby-horsing here

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

May I put on my stuffy medical historian's hat?

Yes, please do.

I realized I'd phrased my question badly, because I know perfectly well that modern understandings of disease and Victorian understandings of disease don't correlate. The question I was really asking--or rather, the two questions, were:

1. Are there documented cases of people dying of broken hearts or crushing disappointments--or, at least, that being acknowledged socially if not medically as the cause of death? I.e., was that a recognized social phenomenon as well as a literary one?

2. Brain-fever. It seems to have been as convenient a catch-all as "hysteria," useful to writers from Arthur Conan Doyle to Lewis Carroll, and the symptoms, at least as a literary ailment, to have varied as needed for the plot--although often involving amnesia. I wasn't so much asking what we'd call it today as I was asking about the disease as the Victorians themselves understood it.

Sorry for the imprecision and buried assumptions in my original post.

Re: Hobby-horsing here

[oursin.livejournal.com]

No problem. The one thing I am sure of with Victorian medical diagnosis is that 'general paralysis of the insane' almost certainly means syphilis (neurosyphilis demonstrates very characteristic mental deterioration patterns). This can be unfortunate when dealing with family historians.

There was a fairly general belief in Victorian society that grief could kill: e.g. Tennyson, 'She must weep or she must die', a line which was praised by the late C19th alienist Sir James Crichton Browne for its insight into the grieving process. If they didn't understand the aetiology as we might today, they did understand losing the will to live and the potential lethal outcome. If a woman went nursing in a cholera epidemic because her heart was broken, she was perhaps more likely to catch cholera and die of it than if her heart wasn't broken. They don't talk about lowered resistance but the concept might be there if one read the texts closely enough (which I haven't done).

I think you're right about brain fever - it was a catch-all phrase and a multi-use disease. It's possible that by the later decades of the century neurasthenia was taking over as the (mainly male) malady supposedly caused by stress and too much mental application. Janet Oppenheim's "Shattered Nerves" might be worth looking at in this connection, though as I recall it's mainly about the functional diseases of the 'nerves' rather than brain fever as such. It's probably worth reading anyway in connection with the James family.

And of course, reputable Victorian medical opinion believed that masturbation could cause a wide variety of ailments, so I think intuitive understanding of the holistic causation of disease could only go so far...

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Brain fever was often malaria - that's what Sara Crewe's father died of in A Little Princess - but it probably also referred to any fever with delirium.

[marith.livejournal.com]

One learns the most *interesting* things reading lj.

Thought one: Did the working poor die of crushing disappointments and broken hearts? Or did they slog on earning a living until something else felled them, so it wasn't recorded as such? Could the enforced idleness of gentrification have made depression worse?

Today there are more options for dealing with grief. One can clear out and start over somewhere else, see a therapist, fall into a rebound relationship, immerse oneself in work, etc. (Some of which admittedly were possible back then, at least for men.) Life isn't over even though it feels like it. But I definitely get the impression that back then there were fewer conventional ways to achieve happiness and a limited amount of time to secure them.

And if I'd missed a chance and felt myself doomed to spinsterhood forever, living with more fortunate relatives who pitied me and gossips who would still be telling how I failed to marry the viscount's son ten years from now, nursing and cholera might suddenly have its appeal. :)

Thought two: How often was suicide recorded as a cause of death back then (in real life, not fiction)? If Aunt Amy drank the whole bottle of laudanum six months after her husband died, might the physician tactfully put down "brain fever from grief" instead?

Thought three, damn, they're multiplying: Sondheim's musical Passion is set in that time period, and is all about emotions so strong they can kill you. Or as Sondheim put it, "how the force of somebody's feelings for you can crack you open". If you haven't seen it, you might find either the movie or filmed stage version very interesting to watch. (And it has brain fever, too.)

(Small warning, though: Passion provoked intense reactions in most people I know who have seen it. It is brilliant, but I did not enjoy it, and the premise still makes me bitterly angry. Must see it again sometime to achieve analytical distance.)

[oursin.livejournal.com]

The question about the poor is very interesting. There was some work done on admissions to a large Edinburgh hospital in the mid-C19th, which would have had a working-class constituency (the middle classes and above didn't go into hospitals). What they found out was that large numbers of working women (servants, shopworkers, seamstresses etc) were being admitted with 'hysteria', which a lot of books still tell us was a diagnosis devised solely for the purpose of keeping middle and upper class women in order. They were treated with a good deal of sympathy within the parameters of medical attitudes at the time. (If you are really, really, interested in this I can probably track down a more precise reference.)

There is also some recent historical work on (public and poor law) lunatic asylum admissions which might indicate how often disappointment in love was seen as at least a factor in mental disturbance and possibly attempted suicide. Even among the 'lower classes' admitted to these institutions, diagnoses such as 'religious melancholia' are recorded. (Again, I can supply refs for anyone who wants to pursue this.)

As suicide was a crime until the 1960s, I 'd guess that there'd have been quite a lot of pressure among the 'respectable classes' to cover it up if at all possible (and given that doctors often certified embarrassing causes of death euphemistically, seems probable if there was any way of describing it otherwise). But Olive Anderson's big book on Victorian suicide probably goes into all this in great detail.