"Pain has an element of blank:" Interpretations of and Judgments on Female Illness in the Nineteenth-Century British Gothic

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: Nineteenth-century gothic novels teem with female illness. From typhus to tuberculosis, madness to melancholy, ill women are abundant. And yet, mainstream feminist scholarship insists that these illnesses must be read as metaphor only. This thesis integrates traditional feminist theory with disability theory to create a more complete discourse. Examining Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, we consider illness as illness and disability as disability. We thus learn a great deal about not only the world in which these novels were created but also the continuing unspoken attachment of readers to the ideal heroine as necessarily able-bodied.

Type of resource	text
Date created	June 2020

Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/dh481dr5511

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Preferred Citation: Ehrlich, Jennifer. (2020). "Pain has an element of blank:" Interpretations of and Judgments on Female Illness in the Nineteenth-Century British Gothic . Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/dh481dr5511

Stanford University, Department of English, Undergraduate Honors Theses

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