Harriet Martineau’s Sickroom Narrative

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Victorians Journal 101 Harriet Martineau’s Sickroom Narrative by Shu-Fang Lai Thomas Carlyle wrote to Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1837, terming Harriet Martineau “one of the strangest phenomena” in the history of English literature and a “genuine little Poetess” (9: 220). More mockingly, he subsequently remarks: “Harriet Martineau in her sick-room writes as if she were a female Christ, saying, ‘Look at me; see how I am suffering’” (Reid 1: 435). Carlyle’s comments highlight Martineau’s roles as both a radical, prolific author and a chronic invalid. Martineau’s Autobiography (1877) details her peculiar physical condition and the extent to which she suffered from ill health throughout her life: she was deaf by fifteen, lost her senses of smell and taste, and endured physical pains caused by tumors and other diseases.1 Indeed, she claims, she could not go out alone for fear of having a stroke and dying on the street; the sudden death of her fiance in 1827 no doubt aggravated the constant threat of illness. The diagnosis of terminal heart disease (1855) prompted her to write her autobiography—as it turned out, twenty years before her life ended. Yet this “deaf woman from Norwich,” as Lord Brougham called her (AB 1: 133), suffered no intellectual impairment, nor did her physical condition hinder her from travelling to America, Europe, and Egypt, advocating 2 reforms, and enjoying a prolific literary career. Among Martineau’s works, Life in the Sick-room: Essays, by an Invalid (1844) and Letters on Mesmerism (1845) provide the1 2 1 The autopsy revealed a large tumor that pressed on her internal organs, replicating what appeared to be heart disease. 2 For chronological listings of Martineau’s books and articles, see Deborah Logan's fivevolume CollectedLetters (2007); see also Logan's Further Letters (2012), for a complete list of periodicals writing. For Martineau’s 1,642 Daily News articles, see Elisabeth Arbuckle (1994), who updates R.K. Webb’s initial study. 102 Victorians Journal most telling evidence of her intellectual force, so powerful as to rise above the discomforts of illness. Brief as it is, Martineau’s sickroom narrative is unique in that it demonstrates how she transcends physical confinement to present a philosophical perspective on life and its meanings. She notes that the great interests of life are common to all, including “Duty, Thought, Love, Joy, Sorrow, and Death,” and suggests that “moral considerations are all in all” (95, 96). Before this work, Martineau had shown her long-term preoccupation with health issues in a number of periodical pieces, including Letter to the Deaf and the series published as Health, Husbandry and Handicraft. However, these writings and her autobiography (in which she also addresses her experiences as an invalid) are retrospective accounts that she composed when she was not so drastically ill. In contrast, Life in the Sick-room was written during her most intensive confinement in Tynemouth, during what she called her “passive period” (from 1839 to 1844). This book is significant, then, for revealing Martineau’s immediate response to her illness. Life in the Sick-room embodies Martineau’s philosophical reflections on her individual physical condition and, more broadly, her exploration of the potential for personal growth afforded by illness through particular narrative and rhetorical techniques. Borrowing from Hayden White’s argument in “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation or Reality,” in which narrative takes precedence over theory as a vehicle for moral teaching, Elisabeth Arbuckle suggests that “Martineau succeeds as a journalist partly by her use of literary and narrative techniques...[that] help to explain her high reputation as a theorist and moral teacher” (xviii-xix). Life in the Sick-room has been read as an exemplary text in cultural studies of nineteenth-century attitudes toward the body, illness, and gender, and examined in terms of its profound historical and philosophical contexts. But it Victorians Journal 103 should also be explored as a literary work emphasizing Martineau’s authorial capacity and narrative techniques. In her excellent study of Life in the Sick-room, Maria Frawley addresses the relationship between Martineau’s identity as an invalid and her self-representation, pointing out that the book is distinctively different from...