小型研討會 --「健與美的歷史」研討會

Narcissistic Invalid or Heroic Genius? Typologies of Male Beauty and
Consumption in England in the Eighteenth- and early Nineteenth-Centuries

　This paper attempts to investigate the representations of tuberculosis in England in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries. In so doing, I will examine two relatively underdeveloped themes in the historiography of consumption, namely the role of the eighteenth century in the development of the disease metaphors, and the creation of specifically male image of beautiful consumption.

　In the earlier half of the nineteenth century, the disease called $B!H(Bconsumption$B!I(B emerged as a focal point of powerful and diverse cultural metaphors. While you have to think hard to name a well-known
consumptive before 1800, whether real or fictional, the nineteenth century abounds with mega-icons in the Western culture who died of consumption: it is difficult to miss John Keats and La Traviata. Manifold aspects of $B!H(Bconsumption and its metaphors$B!I(B have been analyzed in Susan Sontag$B!G(Bs now classical book, whose major materials come from the nineteenth and the early twentieth century. This does not mean, however, that the metaphors of consumption were suddenly forged with the advent of Romanticism. English patients suffering from consumption / phthisis had been sent to the South of France and Italy for a warm climate since the early eighteenth century and perhaps much earlier. Often combined with tours of Europe and visits to galleries and historical sites, this form of treatment developed a distinct association with the upper-class search for leisure and culture. From the mid- and late-eighteenth century, physicians and medical writers started to exploit the lucrative market by inventing a new genre of advice literature for consumptive patients, suggesting various resorts in Southern France and Italy and depicting their merits and attractions. (Tobias Smollett$B!G(Bs Travels through France and Italy was regarded as one of the earliest and the most successful specimens of this genre of writing.) I shall argue that those works consolidated the narcissistic image of beautiful consumption entertained by wealthy and genteel patients from the early eighteenth-century.

　My second point is about the development of the gender-charged representation of the disease. In the eighteenth-century, the metaphors of consumption were expressed in the language of class distinction, rather than that of gender. (Hence among early nineteenth-century literary figures, there existed a great confusion in how to interpret the death of Keats, who came from lower social origin and died young of consumption.) It was not until Thomas Carlyle$B!G(Bs lives of Schiller and Novalis, published and widely read in the 1820s (works which have been largely neglected in the historical studies of consumption), that the representation of the disease was polarized into masculine and feminine ones, or, to put it more precisely, an explicitly masculine beauty was found in certain types of consumptive patients. Contrasting Novalis and Schiller, both of whom died of consumption, Carlyle introduced the framework of polarized gender in the metaphors of the disease. I shall analyze this masculinization of certain types of consumption, putting it in the context of gender ideology in England in the early nineteenth century.

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