Austen on Illness

Since finishing Sense and Sensibility a few month ago, I have been interested in the use of illness in Austen's work. Some of her most ridiculous characters suffer from or fear illness (often imaginary), and use it to control situations (like Mrs. Bennet and her "nerves"; the hypochondriac Mr. Woodhouse; and the tyrannical Mrs. Churchill, whose illnesses "never occurred but for her own convenience"). On the other hand, bright, lively, and "too" romantic characters suffer life-threatening illnesses and emerge transformed (Marianne Dashwood and Tom Bertram; Col. Brandon's first love is a notable exemption from the "re-emerged"). Illness is often used as a sort of punishment for high living, unhealthy ideas about romance, or betraying social values. Sound familiar? It's like how every prostitute from Manon Lescaut to Marguerite Gautier dies from tuberculous (usually). Illness is still today linked with punishment, unfortunately. Just look at what people continue to say about AIDS. And if you went to that link and feel a little sick, here is a tonic: Blanche tells Rose "AIDS is not a bad person's disease." I'm still surprised and a little sad that line doesn't receive a standing ovation. Austen uses this familiar message of illness and punishment, but allows her characters to face death and repent, albeit their lives proceed more subdued and responsible than before.

In her essay "On Being Ill," Virginia Woolf writes about the transformative aspect of illness. It reveals undiscovered places within ourselves; precipices and flowering valleys, that sort of thing. Illness can change our relation to the world. Through a feverish lens, "friends have changed, some putting on a strange beauty, others deformed to the squatness of toads, while the whole landscape of life lies remote and fair, like the shore seen from a ship far out at sea." It is akin to a religious experience; we see, for the first time, things that have always been there, such as the clouds moving and changing shape, and we speak the truth of our body. "Illness is the great confessional."

In S&S, after her life-threatening illness, Marianne tells her sister that it gave her time to reflect: "It has given me leisure and calmness for serious recollection," and the result is her resolution to "atone" to God and her family, and to live less selfishly. She sees her illness as her fault: "brought on by myself," but her survival was a rebirth, and a chance for change. Contrast this with Col. Brandon's first love, the doomed Eliza, who was "seduced" into "a life of sin" and consequently "faded" and became "worn down by acute suffering of every kind," finally dying, of course, of "consumption." Her sins were greater than Marianne's, and her tragic life serves as a warning against the allure of sensual libertines. But it isn't a clear-cut anecdote. Eliza's story is as much a tragedy about awful marriages, where an unkind husband whose "pleasures were not what they ought to have been" can send a young and inexperienced woman with a lively mind into the arms of another man. And then another and another. And yet part of me smirks at the story-within-a-story. It is so over the top, not to mention cliched, that it seems like a joke. Coupled with Brandon's tiresome and maudlin delivery, I have to wonder if it is inserted as a sort of reminder of the tragic Romances that would have been popular with girls like Marianne; this is the sort of pulp they eat up, but also, this sensibility destroys lives.

In MP, Tom Bertram's illness also provides a renewal: "He was the better for ever for his illness. He had suffered, and he had learnt to think, two advantages that he had never known before." He became "useful," "steady and quiet," and learned to "not [live] merely for himself." But first it was necessary to suffer, which Austen views as an advantage. True suffering humbles the extravagant, and the ones who can and will repent, do.

Tom and Marianne made the most out of their time away from the world, whereas others, like Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Woodhouse, and Mrs. Churchill, fake illness as an escape. Woolf writes about the opportunity for escape in illness, saying: "We cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright." The ill are deserters, and escape the daily drudge. That release from responsibility can be appealing to those who are unhappy or just childish and selfish. It is also a way for those with little or no power to exert their influence.

This use of illness as a punishment is uncomfortable with me, after all the garbage I've heard about STDs through the past decade, but it is worth looking at as a plot device. In Austen's world, every action has a consequence, and yet I don't believe illness is used merely as a punishment. The emphasis is on the somewhat spiritual suffering the characters undergo to develop and grow. Fevers are a good way to externalize that suffering. If I were a historian or new more about 19th century literature, I'm sure I could write a more nuanced perspective on this topic. It might be a fun dissertation.