Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction (review)

Abstract

The "passion" in Jane Wood's Passion and Pathology is considerably broader than one might at first assume. Wood takes as her subject the elusive relationship between mind and body in nineteenth-century British fiction and neurology, studying some of the "ambivalences" and "points of contention" (2) in Victorian writers' and physicians' conceptualization of emotional and sensory experience. Although Wood devotes one of her chapters to a single disorder—neurasthenia—the rest of the book is organized neither diagnostically nor strictly chronologically. Instead, she considers such subjects as the gendering of imagination and emotional excess, changing conceptions of consciousness, and the relationship between neurasthenia and theories of degeneration in portrayals of the New Woman.