Spasmodic affections: Poetry, pathology, and the spasmodic hero

Citation

Blair K (2004) Spasmodic affections: Poetry, pathology, and the spasmodic hero. Victorian Poetry, 42 (4), pp. 473-490. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40002747

Abstract
First paragraph: In 1787, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote to her sister Everina: Don't smile when I tell you that I am tormented with spasms. . . . I know they all arise from disordered nerves, that are injured beyond a possibility of receiving any aid from medicine- There is no cure for a broken heart! Although she stresses her genuine suffering from a combination of mental and physical factors, Wollstonecraft makes it clear that spasms are slightly comic symptoms, presumably in their bathetic relation to tragic heartbreak. Her deliberate emphasis on the emotional and affective cause of her illness suggests she is exploiting the perceived link between female emotion and bodily suffering: in retrospect, the reader might also smile at the idea that Wollstonecraft, later notable for brilliantly scornful dissections of the cultural relation between women and sickness, might have fallen prey to such a peculiarly feminine illness herself. Wollstonecraft was writing over sixty years before "spasm" and "spasmodic" became terms used to denote a particular literary movement, yet this letter is significant because it highlights accepted ideas about the relation between nervousness, heartbreak, and spasmodic attacks and because it additionally considers the association between spasms and gender. These ideas, as we shall see, went on to become a subject of considerable debate in the first half of the nineteenth century, and eventually came to haunt spasmodic poetry and its practitioners.

Journal
Victorian Poetry: Volume 42, Issue 4

People

Professor Kirstie Blair

Dean of Faculty of Arts and Humanities, AH Management and Support Team