"Doleful ditties" and Stories of Survival — Narrative Approaches to Breast Cancer in Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth and Susan Sontag
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The article looks at two early nineteenth-century narratives concerned with breast cancer and reads them in the context of Susan Sontag's twentieth-century analysis of the cultural and linguistic over-determination of illness. Frances Burney's "mastectomy letter" (1812) is an early example of a patient's narrative which uses the discursive conventions of sentimental fiction to achieve female empowerment. By contrast, Maria Edgeworth moralizes illness in her novel Belinda (1801) and uses it as a cultural metaphor. While Edgeworth's and Burney's narratives share the historical moment of a shift in illness attitudes and in the technologies of medical diagnosis in the early nineteenth century, Susan Sontag, in her essay Illness as Metaphor (1978), analyses the articulation of an idea of individual illness as a hostile burdening of the individual person with guilt and responsibility. From a transhistorical perspective, all three texts provide further insights into the generic and gendered differences of illness experience and meanings.
Source: Gender forum
Author: Hartung, Heike
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7079020290
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