Love unto Death: Fanny Burney's "Narrative of the Last Illness and Death of General d'Arblay" (1820)

Abstract

A Love unto Death: Fanny Burney's "Narrative of the Last Illness and Death of General d'Arblay" (1820) John Wiltshire The narrative that Frances Burney (1752-1840) composed describing her mastectomy in 1811 has rapidly become a classic text in the field of Uterature and medicine, widely known and commented upon.1 Though she is still most famous perhaps as the author of Evelina (1778), Burney's other novels have been enjoying a revival of interest, largely as a result of Margaret Anne Doody's Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (1988),2 but her other journal writings, which are rich and extensive (twentyfour volumes in the projected complete edition) have not yet received comparable attention. "The superiority of the Diary to the Novels" became axiomatic by the end of the nineteenth century,3 but Doody, reversing this emphasis, treats the journal material rather cursorily.4 Yet I should argue that many of Burney's journals are narrative achievements of at least comparable interest to her novels, equally skillful, equally dramatic—and almost equally fictional. In the diaries, letters, and journals, their author, noted for her genteel and retiring social demeanor, is energetically engaged in finding herself a voice, celebrating her own identity.5 Indeed, it seems plausible to suggest that the journal, in the form in which Burney practiced it, was virtually invented by her as a vehicle for her particular kind of autobiographical re-creation. On the pretext that what she is writing is part of the family archives, Burney is freed to write with less stiltedness, more freedom from convention and artificiality, and at a more controllable length than in her later novels. The mastectomy narrative, its thirty or so pages ostensibly written as a private letter, but its ritual preservation suggesting something deliberated and significant, is only one example of a form that Burney was to exploit further in such pieces as her "Waterloo Journal" (1815) and her "Ilfracombe Journal" of 1823. Literature and Medicine 12, no. 2 (FaU 1993) 215-234 © 1993 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 216 LOVE UNTO DEATH One of these journal pieces, which, in contrast to "A Mastectomy," is almost unknown, is her "Narrative of the Last Illness and Death of General d'Arblay" (1820).6 Yet this longer piece (some 70 pages or 25,000 words) is of perhaps even greater moment than the "Mastectomy," though the events it records are not as dramatic or horrifying, and its style is more in Burney's later highly charged and emotive mode. The "Narrative," which tells, as its title suggests, the story of her husband's last months, is exceptionally interesting, nonetheless, because of its compelling depiction of the protagonist (and the extraordinariness of her behavior) and because of the vividness with which it recreates scenes between the patient and his wife, and between her and the attending local doctors. Burney presents herself as never giving up hope, never admitting the fatal meaning of her husband's symptoms, and consequently locked in emotional conflict with everyone else, including, sometimes , the patient. The "Narrative," in fact, is a piece of self-creation, in which Burney represents herself as heroic nurse. In writing this pathography, she recuperates from her grief, but as she retells the events, she also makes herself (inevitably, for readers of the other journals) into their romantic heroine. And this means that her account raises questions of narrative strategy that are also questions of medical ethics, since Burney promotes a certain attitude toward dying and celebrates its triumph against all others. Though confronted with the authority of the Church and Medicine , she defies death, even over her husband's corpse. Burney reveals herself here as a woman of immense courage and strength of will, as Doody suggests, but also as narcissistic, neurotic, a person whose conduct , as depicted, sits on a knife edge between the heroic and the intolerable. I shall argue, too, that there are contemporary echoes to the questions of medical ethics her account raises. In 1815, after the defeat of Napoleon, General and Madame d'Arblay retired to Bath. They engaged Mr. George Hay as their medical attendant, since the General was still recovering from...