Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), a Victorian poet, was always
plagued by poor health, and her mid-life episode of life-threatening illness
(1870-1872) when she suffered from Graves' illness provides an illuminating
case study of the ways in which poetry and prose can represent illness.
Rossetti, her relatives, and her doctors understood the disease of Graves as a
heart condition; but the writing of Rossetti represents a different model,
introducing themes of self-attack and a fractured self that uncannily echo the
current perception of the disease of Graves as autoimmune in nature.
Interestingly, these imaginative depictions indicate an interpretation of this
disease mechanism that could not have been understood through Rossetti's family
records and the history of Victorian medicine. Rossetti 's writing started to
use modern rhetoric and imagery of self-acceptance and hardship as a way of
personal improvement after the crisis had ended. This essay addresses the
similarities that exist between Literary and somatic metaphors: the body and
art of Rossetti are always "saying" the same thing simultaneously,
the physical symptoms somatically reflecting the same dynamic reflected in
Rossetti 's artistic writing in metaphor and narrative. Such a well-documented
history of cases poses concerns about how paradigms of disease that are not
available to the conscious mind can influence writing. We currently accept that
the unconscious mind can be an significant source of artistic creativity: is it
possible that the unconscious physical operations of the body in a creative
person may also be a source of metaphor? This diverse subject is truly
interdisciplinary, as we aim to better understand ways of transmitting disease,
raising questions in fields ranging from medicine and cognitive science to
philosophy, language theory, literary critique, and aesthetics.
Author (s) Details
Mary Arseneau
Department of English, Hamelin Hall, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON K1N
6N5, Canada.
Dr. Emery Terrell
Faculty of Medicine, Roger Guindon Hall, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON K1H
8M5, Canada.
View Book - https://bp.bookpi.org/index.php/bpi/catalog/book/280
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