Modernism and Physical Illness: Sick Books by Peter Fifield

Abstract

Reviewed by: Modernism and Physical Illness: Sick Books by Peter Fifield Jennifer Marchisotto (bio) MODERNISM AND PHYSICAL ILLNESS: SICK BOOKS, by Peter Fifield. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 249 pp. $80.00. Peter Fifield sets the parameters for Modernism and Physical Illness in his introduction. He is primarily concerned with close readings of physical illnesses as they appear in modernist novels (1-30). Fifield's analysis is deeply invested in the ways aesthetic representations of physical illness align with modernist sensibilities overall: "the greater part of the significance of illness lies beyond any strict or exclusive version of the medical. Indeed, in some cases the medical is felt explicitly as a framing perspective that distorts or overlooks qualities of experience and meaning that are created by illness" (27). One of the main tensions within the book is the relationship between the individual experience of and the socio-political ramifications of illness. Through his analyses of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Richardson, and Winifred Holtby, Fifield gradually shows the ways in which these authors draw on personal experiences of illness as a part of their creative oeuvres to position bodily sickness as both individual and collective experiences. Fifield's chapters are organized around individual authors, and each builds upon the previous ones as the authors increasingly engage with the social experience through their representations of illness. Fifield's chapters on Richardson and Holtby are the most generative in their discussion. In his analysis, Fifield shows how illness as a modernist aesthetic is not isolated but can also have sociopolitical ramifications. In the penultimate chapter, "'You ought to be supported by the state!': Dorothy Richardson and the Politics of Care" (145-82), Fifield argues, "[Richardson] uses illness to examine the nature of sympathy and the structures of responsibility in a complex, modern, urban society. Illness is depicted as a pressing issue for onlookers, an often-troubling demand for concern and treatment. … [I]n Richardson [sick bodies] prompt questions of care at individual, social, and political scales" (145-46). In his close reading of Richardson's Pilgrimage,1 Fifield ultimately concludes that the text builds on his reading of Woolf's "On Being Ill" (4-14),2 showing illness to be an individually overwhelming event while also situating it as part of culturally defined experience. The disgust with illness he locates in Eliot's work is now something requiring a response as part of our social responsibility to one another. Fifield's analysis of Holtby (183-222) further shows how representations of illness are connected to cultural attitudes towards sickness, particularly in the way a lack of representation aligns with the silencing of the female middle class (185). Fifield's close readings of both Richardson and Holtby are the most engaging, especially in the way he connects the authors' texts to contemporary social concerns about the body, hygiene, and class. [End Page 572] Situating their writings as part of more explicit cultural contexts gives further weight to his overall argument and leads to a dynamic engagement with the different valences upon which illness functions. Fifield's reading, with regard to the works of Richardson and Holtby, aligns closely with the social model of disability and would benefit from more engagement with disability studies. He explains his reasoning for not including disability studies as a part of the text in his introduction: "Disability therefore frequently implies continuity: it is stable and protracted, constituting a sustained, meaningful and fully valid form of living" (15). For Fifield, this definition excludes physical sickness which is more variable in its appearance and effects. Disability studies, however, have moved away from this definition and encompass the study of chronic illness (like many of those discussed by Fifield) as well as mental cognitive disorders. Researchers in feminist disability studies, including such scholars as Susan Wendell, Elizabeth J. Donaldson, and Jasbir K. Puar,3 have all taken up disability in expanded ways to account for the myriad usages in which it occurs that are often unstable. In his epilogue, Fifield concludes, "My illness is thus both private—this is my running nose or sore stomach and nobody else's—and collective—it is experienced in the first...