Romanticism in American Literature

Tennyson, in The Princess describes, infra the diagnosing of catalepsy, probable temporal role lobe epileptic dreamy states with deterioration which serve as a adaptor of internal and moral ambivalence, the poems central theme. It seems that Tennyson knew such(prenominal) captures from his own stick who had been attached a diagnosis of catalepsy. Poe gave his Bernice in the novella of the analogous backing a diagnosis of epilepsy as a debate for a unseasonable burial.However, there was a good deal of unlikelihood in this, and when he came to this theme in The Fall of the hearthst unrivalled of Usher and in The Premature Burial he chose instead a diagnosis of catalepsy which fitted better with the maculation. The fits of the entitle character in George Elites Sills orchestrateion, ignored as catalepsy, would to solar day rather be seen as epileptic twi igniter states. It would seem that this author drew from contemporary dictionary descriptions which set forth condit ions confusable to carriages fits under the heading of catalepsy.In Elites leg finale with a realistic treatment, the twilight states ar a central occurrenceor in the plot and explain expressive styles reclusion and passivity. In Poor Miss Finch by English realist Willie Collins, the postgraduates seizures of Oscar, i of the main characters, their cause, their treatment with silver nitrate, and the subsequent disconsolation of his kin ar central supporting elements of a sinlessly constructed plot. Collins gives an exact description of a right aversive seizure with secondary commonplaceization, and how to deal with it.In n unmatchable of these deeds seizures ar seen in a negative light. They rather evoke reactions of in tell apartect and support. Keywords Anglo-Ameri batch literary productions, disease in fiction, ro earthticism, realism, Tennyson, Poe, George Eliot, Willie Collins. INTRODUCTION The romantics were fascinated by unusual fashion and exceptional psychica l phenomena. Psychiatric illness was threatening and unexplored UT too had the attraction of the morbid and was a poetic trea accredited chest.For the writings in the realistic stay, illness prevailed an crucial theme in general because the dark sides of life were non to be neglected, and we can thank the cracking English realists for sometimes universe the introductory to give us De- chase after descriptions of pathological conditions, such as developmental dyslexia in Dickens Bleak House Jacob, 1992). For this reason it is non surprising to find epilepsy represented in literature written in the gist of the nineteenth century. Here we also comely the term catalepsy and a relationship in the midst of the two diagnoses warrants our examination.Address correspondence to hawkshaw Wolf, Plenipotentiary Bethel, Kline Mar l, Marriage 21, D 33617 Believed, Ger umteen. Tell +49-521-1443686. Fax +49-521-1444637. E-mail panorama. De. EPILEPSY & CATALEPSY IN ANGLO-AMERICAN LIT ERATURE 287 ALFRED TENNYSON THE PRINCESS Alfred Tennyson (1808-1892) was one of the main literary figures in the middle of the suffer century in England. The pair of terms seizures and catalepsy in his Princess (1847-1851), a capacious narrative poem, has gently been pursued by an American philologist, Barbara Herb Wright (1987), who is get married to a neurologist. The Princess freshman appe ard in 1847, and in a re encountered second variance in 1848. In the third edition in 1850, six songs were added between apiece of the chapters and in the fourth edition Weird seizures ar mentioned for the first time tho then as an essential element of the composition. The literary studies dispute nigh this elements artistic value and recreationction, as well as the authors refusal to comment on the perplexity, has been depicted in detail by Ms Wright. Tennyson called his work a medley.The structure is multifaceted, and it has allegorical, discursive and ironic elements. The story us es the story-in-story technique. On the first level, the story fabricator and a throng of fellow students consider the castle of one of the students. The student comes from a truly older family and has tack together an ancestor in his family tree, a lady who, miracle of noble womanhood (p. 154), has defended the fortress in full armor and weapons against its foes. At a garden party Lila, his friends child appears, half child, half woman (p. 55 the half ND half motif, the inebriate is a canonical motif of this work), and decorates the statue of a warlike ancestor with her head jack off and silk stole while talking most womens oppression and the grounding of a radical Amazon state. In the next s even off chapters the seven students tell the story of such a company The prince and princess of two neighboring kingdoms exhaust been engaged to marry since their childhood. When the father of the prince sends for the b wax-to-be with pomp and presents, her father writes a lette r saying she wants to live alone with her women, and not wed.When the elderly king, father of the prince, hears this, he wants to decl ar war but the prince sets off to clear up the situation himself. Two friends accompany him, also to table service him in the yield that he should open seizures. The seizures ar the result of a curse on his family, laid on them long ago by a man who a former ancestor had burned as a necromancer because he cast no ghost none of their blood should love the shadow from the substance, image from globe, and one should come to fight with shadows and to fall (p. 1 57).For this reason Waking dreams were an old and strange affection of the house (p. 57), and the curse manifests itself in the prince as Weird seizures (p. 157) which argon marked with deterioration delivers. The prince hears from the princess gentle, peace-loving father that she has secluded to their summer castle, founded a womens university and now holds a purely female approach no m ale being may enter the area under penalty of death. But the prince and his friends dress up as girls and go there. They are discovered and get to flee.The fact that the prince has saved the princess from drowning does not help. During this time period the prince has two seizures without the princess noticing. The first happens at their second meeting when he is overwhelmed by her royal appearance, her posterior on a tame leopard, before they ride out together. During their excursion his love, previously unnoticed, blossoms. The second seizure happens when he lets himself be despicably thrown out by her, even though he not only saved her life, but is also convinced by and leaveing to accept the equal rights of women.Both times the princess appears to him as a shadow in his seizures, whereas new(prenominal)wise he admires her for her uncompromising consistency and loves her because she sticks to her cause in a much straightforward manner than others. War is declared, the princ e and one of the princess brothers argue the princess fight against each other along with 50 of the best knights on both sides. The prince remembers the prophecy that one of his family will fight against shadows, gets a seizure, and goes into encounter although he is still in a dreamy state. He and his group of men lose the battle.He is seriously injured, and experiences his long recuperation period as a continuation of the seizure. After clearly winning the war, the princess becomes less p populateered in her attitude and takes care of the 288 PETER WOLF prince and all of the other injured on both sides. The prince and princess forgive each other and the question of dream or reality, shadow or substance, becomes a question or so who the princess unfeignedly is, what her essence is. Is it the masculine unwillingness to compromise with which she tries to demonstrate her rationalness or rather the other side, which allows for feelings of pity, gratitude, love, and duty?As this i s decided, the princes seizures cease and he changes into a stronger, more masculine soul. He can convince the princess that her prop a purely female court was not right for her, not genuine, only a copy of the male world. The prince and princess, until then both a cross between male and female, discover one another. They also both find their own selves in the recognition that man and woman remain incomplete, only half of a whole, as long as each attempts to be whole alone, or as long as one sees the other as the dominate or superior one.The court mendelevium diagnosed the princes seizures as catalepsy (p. 1 57). We now know that Tennyson used, or at to the lowest degree owned, Quinsys medical dictionary of 1804 (Wright, 1987)), which defined catalepsy as a sudden downsizing of front end and percept where the DOD is immobilizers (freezes) in its present position. This comes in seizures, lasts a few minutes, seldom up to a few hours, and at the end the patients do not remember anything that has happened during the seizure. It is as if they awake from sleep (Wright, 1987).Interestingly enough, the princes seizures are exposit completely differently Others notice nothing, he even fights in a battle during a seizure. Only his perception is altered. This change in perception usually only lasts for a short time. It seems to him as if he is surrounded by ghosts and he himself only a shadow of a dream. The princess appears to him as an incomplete sketch, her leopards as a fantastic painting, other the great unwashed as empty masks. Things are present and not present at the equivalent time, a scene only if experienced happened and at the same time did not happen.He is unable to tell the difference between reality and illusion. Ms. Wright (1987) was the first to suggest that epileptic seizures were being described here and she is without head correct These are focal seizures of the temporal lobe with illusionary experiences of De-realization and diversificatio n a type of seizure that was underscored in medicine at Tennyson time. How did Tennyson know about them? There were several cases of epilepsy in his immediate family, for example his father, as can be seen by a letter describing his situation which fits the diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy.We also know that doctors told the family that his seizures were catalepsy rather than epilepsy (Wright, 1987). This could puzzle been intended to calm the family or take away the diagnosis sound less threatening. On the other hand, it is also un cognise how clearly a distinction between the terms catalepsy and epilepsy was do in the early nineteenth century (Teeming, 1971)1. Trances also play a securing role in the rest of Tennyson work, and it is well known that he a lot set himself into patchs by repeating his own name.But the description of the subjective seizure experiences in the Princess, whose origin and terminology seem to be explained by Wright, stands alone, and the seizures ha ve their special literary sense as metaphor for the indecision and danger that leads to the main theme of the story. EDGAR ALLAN POE BERNICE, THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER AND THE PREMATURE burial The possibility that Poe was also a model for Tennyson and the use of catalepsy as a motif in his writings cannot be excluded.Tennyson was deeply affected by Poe, admired him, and contributed substantially to the literary acceptance of the American in England in nineteenth century something not to be taken for granted. (The 1 . Something similar may have been true, in the public mind, for the terms epilepsy and apoplexy. Thacker in vacuity Fair seems once to have mixed them up (Wolf, 1995), and simple-minded Joe Gagger, in Dickens Great Expectations says his father went off in a purple elliptical fit, obviously meaning apoplectic. 289 other way around, Popes lyric was influenced by Tennyson. Poe created a figure with he diagnosis of epilepsy, Bernice, in the story carrying her name in 1835. The story belongs to a group of dismal fatalistic novellas, and he unavoidably a progressive physical and mental illness for Bernice, which would also make it plausible for her to appear dead. The story is told in the first person from the catch of view of Usages. Usages lives in a lonely mansion with his beautiful cousin-german Bernice. Bernice has a species of epilepsy not infrequently terminating in trance itself trance very priceyly resembling positive dissolution (p. 172).In a reversal and projection that is not usual for Poe, Usages does not explain these trances but rather his own, which are trances or daydreams bring on by concentrating on coincidental objects or meditation on lower-ranking words. Bernice and Usages become engaged. In the progression of her disease Bernice loses her beauty. One day in her altered condition she silently stands in front of him. In an unanticipated smile of peculiar meaning her splendid white teeth which have remained perfect are exposed and their overleaf image becomes the focus of a monomania, a daydream of his lasting several days.During this time he is mistily aware that she has seizures one ironing. In the evening she appears to be dead and so is buried. His state of trance continues. Finally, he awakens out of his trance with a rotten feeling, a vague recollection of a deed, of the shrill cry of a womans voice. He learns from a menial who is wild with terror that Princes grave has been violated, and that she has been found in her grave still alive There is a spade leaning on the wall next to him.As he opens a fiddling box that he finds on his table without knowing how it got there, dental surgical operation instruments fall out together with thirty-two small, white, and ivory-looking substances (p. 77). Behind the similarity of Usages and Tennyson self-induced daydreams and trances no hidden allusions should be suspected. These things are a part of the type of psychic experiments that the romantic s were enthusiastic about. Nevertheless, the affinity in motif and the relationship to epilepsy that both authors created are worthy of being mentioned.Poe must have noticed that it was unlikely for individual known to have epilepsy to have seizures in a familiar surround in the morning and on the same evening to be declared dead and buried. He prepares the reader by mentioning some pages fore that Bernice, in most cases, recovered from her seizures surprisingly rapidly, but the construction remains dubious. mayhap this is the reason he gives Madeline of Usher another diagnosis to allow her to be mistakenly buried alive a few years after in The Fall of the House of Usher . She has transient affections of a partly cataleptic character (p. 82), and this leaves more room for the unlikely. Madeline appears only once before her unpatterned death. The narrator, a friend of her brother Redbrick, talks about her appearance she passed through a remote portion of the apartment, and, witho ut having noticed my presence, disappeared (p. 182). She is not described in more detail (unusual for Poe) foremost is the feeling her appearance leaves in the narrator and her brother observing her A sensation of stupor oppressed me as my eyes followed her retreating steps (p. 182). Her appearance causes her brother to sorrowfully bury his face in his hands.Later they lay her in her coffin although there still is a unsure blush upon the bosom and the face, as usual in all maladies of rigorously cataleptic character (p. 186). In spite of the improbability, Madeline manages to fight her way out of the coffin, and presents herself in silent reproach to her brother who must have suspected she had not really been dead. Poe must have been approximately obsessed with the idea of being buried alive It plays an important role, for example, in the early tale Algeria, and later on became a theme in a own story with the title The Premature Burial.This begins with reports about actual live b urials and leads to describing the revere associated with wake up in a coffin after being buried. The narrator, who believes that such things happen more often Han pack suspect, tells his own story of being ill with increasingly frequent and long cataleptic seizures, trances, semi-syncope, and 290 his growing fear that he will be buried in such a state. He takes extensive organizational precautions to prevent such an incident, but it does not calm him in the least.He talks about a further symptom, a disassociated awakening with very slow reorientation, preparing the scene for a cathartic experience ending the entire terrible episode He awakens one day in a tight wooden chamber in correspond darkness with the smell of damp earth around him, and experiences the real abomination of being ride alive. He remembers that he had been on a search excursion when a storm arose and that he fled to a barge squiffy with garden McCollum and went to sleep in a very tight berth.Now he can shak e away his fear and he also loses the catalepsy which had perchance been less the cause than the consequence of his fears (p. 271). Here the construction of the disease account statement e curiously with the final considerations is really convincing. Nevertheless, this tale is one of Popes less familiar stories and literally not fully satisfying due to the approximate agreement between reported facts ND fiction being only more often than not connected.Poe apparently did not use Quince for his catalepsy motif, but another source, since his descriptions are completely different. They seem to be based on a tradition that Could and Pyle (1896) summarize Catalepsy, trance and lethargy, lasting for days or weeks, are really examples of spontaneously developed mesmeric sleep in hysteric patients or subjects of incipient insanity. It is in this condition that the lay Journals find argument for their stories of premature burial.GEORGE ELIOT SILLS MANNER In furrow, it seems that Geor ge Eliot (pseudonym or Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880) also used Quinsys medical exam Dictionary or a similar source to describe the seizures of the title figure in Sills Manner (1861), because her description corresponds much more hardly to Quinsys definition than Tennyson. In Sills Manner the seizures of the title figure, a poor linen paper weaver, are an important structural element of the story. They are conditions that can last from a few minutes to an hour or more, and which are described in the book as trance or cataleptic seizures.When Manner has such a seizure he falls into an unconscious and snootiness cruelty with an empty look in his eyes. The seizures leave him with amnesia and Manner is not even aware of having had a seizure. At first, his community, a narrow spiritual sect, the middle point and content of Manners life, where he is respected for his faith and symbolical life style, interpret the seizures as a mark of his being specially chosen by God, as visitations of divine origin.But as the man who Manner thinks of as his best friend becomes his rival, he uses Manners seizures to discredit him in the community by indicating his seizures might also have satanic origins (p. 0). Furthermore, he deals a devastating blow by blaming Manner for a theft that occurs during a death wake when Manner is in a trance. Manner is exiled and emigrates to a faraway region where he sets up his weaving loom in a hut at the edge of the village (up. 11-15). There he lives a secluded hermit-like existence for 15 years.Despairing of God and his fellow man, he only thinks of his work and of his treasure of gold, sovereigns, that he has managed to scrape together by living so frugally. In this village he is also known for having fits and this contributes to his role as an outsider. When Manner leaves his hut on an errand one windy evening, someone steals his treasure, leaving him empty-handed for the second time. But in contrast to the first time, he becomes integrate d into the community because the members have pity on him (p. 03). Then a third event happens, when he is in a twilight state which falls over him while standing in the open door of his hut When he awakens from the trance he perceives a vague, gilded shimmer in his hut that he at first believes must be the expected return of his gold coins but it is the golden hair of a little orphan girl who has sought auspices in 91 the hut (p. 1 51). He accepts the child and raises her with the help of a neighbor and a happy time starts now and lasts into his old gage.The treasure is also found again. It is discovered and the reader is told this early in the story that the father of the child and the thief are the same person. both these motifs are woven together in a very mazy manner and build into an artful design interwoven with the golden weave that make a legend. In a letter to her publisher, John Blackfoot, George Eliot characterized the work as a sort of legendary tale which she bec ame inclined to give a more realistic treatment (Karl, 1995).The disease is of utmost importance in explaining the necessary silent and passivity of the title figure which would normally be unnatural. It also allows for incomprehensible events to happen which contribute to the storys legendary quality. Sills Manner is one of the most perfect of the literary works in which an epileptic disease is an essential rhetorical element. Today we use the term catalepsy to describe a condition of smooth rigidity which can occasionally be observed over a durable period of time with androgenic psychosis or with severe atrocious brain diseases.The seizures with impairment of consciousness from which Sills Manner suffered would today no longer be classified as catalepsy but as twilight states, and epilepsy would chiefly be considered the cause. A recent biographer of Eliot (Karl, 1995) talks about Manners epileptic fits as a matter of course. It seems as though Eliot did not use direct obse rvation in describing catalepsy but relied on the lexicographic definition. This included accredited epileptic phenomena and catalepsy and epilepsy were probably not strictly separated at that time.Earlier, catalepsy had even been considered a variant of epilepsy (Teeming, 1971). AS we have seen in the case of Tennyson, catalepsy may sometimes have been used as a euphemism for epilepsy (see above). WILLIE COLLINS scant(p) MISS FINCH Willie colitis (1824-1889), a mend of Charles Dickens, is considered together with Dickens and George Eliot to be one of the great English realists of the nineteenth century. His Poor Miss Finch (1872) is one of the books in which epilepsy plays a key role in the construction of the plot. Oscar loves the beautiful, capricious, and dim Lucille who also loves him.His twin brother, the ruthless Nugent tries to be his rival. Their voices are indistinguishable and they have he same features to someone who looks at them or touches them. An eye specialist a ppears on the scene who is able to make Lucille see by run on her. Like some blind people, Lucille can imagine colors, loves everything light and hates everything dark. This almost leads the bad Nugent to succeed because he argues that when Lucille will see Oscar she is sure to despise him His skin is disclosure to a blackish blue as a result of the treatment of his epilepsy with silver nitrate (p. 3). Oscar fears the day she will be able to see him but argues nevertheless unselfishly and generously for the controversial operation. Lucille then reacts completely different than expected and there is a happy end. In this novel Collins was particularly kindle in the discoveries that had been made throughout the 18th and 19th century about what people born blind or who became blind in early childhood could sense or experience and how, after successful operation on their eyes, they reacted and learned to create a visual environment.These reports deal extensively with theories about th e conception of space and the construction of visual space, and with Molybdenums problem, whether a congenitally blind person who had learned to extinguish and name forms like a sphere and a cube by touch would be able to distinguish and attain these forms visually if the faculty of sight was recovered (v. Sender, 1960). Collins was more interested in the sys- 2.The village doctor who has been called to the scene is mildly made fun of by the author the sages of the village urge Manner strongly to smoke a pipe as a practice good for the fits and this advice was ratified by Dry. Kimball, on the ground that it was as well to try what could do no harm a principle which was made to answer for a great deal of work in that gentlemans medical practice (p. 91). Manner follows this advice faithfully even though he actually dislikes tobacco and it doesnt really help. 92 ecological and moral responses of his characters to such an event. His description of the tests and tasks that are given his heroine by her doctor shows that he conducted thorough research for the story. Likewise, the epilepsy is not Just there but the result of a brain trauma (p. 68) from a robbery which has its own function in the carefully constructed story. In line of battle to make the blackening of the skin more credible people with the same coloring appear marginally twice in the story (up. 3,269). Is that hyperbolize? Apparently not.The treatment of epilepsy with silver nitrate was very common until the middle of the nineteenth century. One of the affected in Collins book says there are hundreds of people disclosure as I am, in the various split of the civilized world (p. 84), and the English neurologist Todd complained that so many patients showed in the disconsolation of their faces the indelible marks of the ineffective treatment they had undergone (Teeming, 1971). Collins thinks better of Oscar and allows the treatment to be successful His epilepsy is cured (p. 0). CONCLUSIONS Four aut hors from two consecutive epochs of literature in the English language gave four completely different pictures of illness In Poe, the romanticist, the epileptic and cataleptic conditions are more conjured up than described, whereas not the seizures themselves but the motif of a slow physical and mental deterioration are a point of focus. The epileptic and cataleptic states are essential elements to the muddied mood that seem to drive these stories into inevitable fatalistic catastrophes.Tennyson depicts subjective perception of seizures and has resalable found an authentic source so that we can correct the diagnosis of catalepsy. Eliot probably followed a lexicographic definition for her description of cataleptic semi-conscious or trance states fairly exactly, but this definition subsumes symptoms of a condition which would nowadays be classified as epilepsy. Collins is furthest away from Poe. He virtually gives us a clinical case study with a matter-of- fact description of a seizu re which begins with a wrenching aversive movement towards the right and the calm attitude of the doctor mastering the situation at hand.The diagnosis is given n a short and concise sentence, the aetiology and therapy are a part of the case history in this realistic novel. Whereas with the earlier authors the distinction between epilepsy and catalepsy appears somewhat blurred, which may be emblematic for the time, Collins description of (post-traumatic) epilepsy and a focal seizure is fully correct. These four meaningful authors from the middle of the nineteenth century also handle the function of the seizures in the structure of their works very differently. Poe uses seizures as a reason for the so-called death and subsequent live burial.Tennyson uses De-realization during seizures as a metaphor for his basic motif of half and half, and for the indecision in the main characters. Once these are overcome, the seizures disappear. In Elites work, the occurrence of recurring seizure s is necessary for the plot of the story, they are an important element for the legendary aspect and a reason for Sills Manners timidity and resolving power to fate. For Collins, who like Dickens laid special value on exonerated construction in his books, Scars epilepsy is a central supporting element which combines many associations in a perfectly structured story.In none of the authors works are the seizures indifferent, a mere curiosity or spectacle. Nor are they seen in a negative light. They rather evoke reactions of support, and sympathy with 3. A frightful torsion fastened itself on Scars face. His eyes turned up hideously. From his head to foot his whole body was wrenched round, as if giant hands had twisted it, towards the right. forward I could speak, he was in convulsions on the floor at his doctors feet. dangerous God, what is this I cried out. The doctor loosened his cravat, and moved away the furniture that was near him.