LIFE AFTER DEATH: APOPLEXY, MEDICAL ETHICS AND THE FEMALE UNDEAD

Abstract

The undead make frequent, spectral appearances in Victorian fiction, yet their presence is often offered a natural—rather than a supernatural—explanation. Figures like Miss Havisham, Bertha Rochester, Lady Audley and Anne Catherick testify to the levels of invention that authors were capable of using in order to create undead imagery without portraying paranormal activity. The image of a character coming back from the dead had been a staple part of popular fiction for centuries but, in the nineteenth century, vital resurrections appeared to be driven mainly by ideas derived from medical science. Madness, in particular, seemed to replace ghosts and ghouls as the main source of Gothic tableaux. As with the fears surrounding live interment, such episodes suggest that it was possible to experience being undead by undergoing a range of debilitating psychological conditions. Such notions—though derived from the “hard facts” of science—lost none of their potential to disturb. This essay argues that the period's understanding of apoplexy, a condition believed to cause various states of psychiatric aberration, became a worrying idea comparable to the superstitious legends that had had a similar ability to make the skin crawl. Mrs Henry Wood, in particular, was an author who was willing to draw on theories of apoplexy in order to invoke images of the undead. In so doing, she conjured the spectres of ethical issues that had as much power to unsettle readers as the vampires, ghosts and other dismals did in earlier Gothic fictions. What the novels of Wood demonstrate, when considered alongside scientific examples, is that such imagery allowed female writers to enter into the male arena of science through the use of popular fiction. Andrew Mangham argues that, when dead women are resurrected in the novels of Mrs Henry Wood, the female author makes important and innovative contributions to debates that were, in the Victorian period, a predominantly male arena.