Reading Themselves Sick: Consumption and Women's Reading in the Early Republic, 1780–1860

Abstract

Reading Themselves Sick:Consumption and Women's Reading in the Early Republic, 1780–1860 Carrie N. Knight (bio) Sickness is the mildew of life. It mars the fairest hours of enjoyment. In the morning the spirits are refreshed—the heart is rife with ambition. Herculean obstacles cower beneath your touch. But a little exertion & fatigue spirits Ambition and all are gone and you wonder at the power that could have nerved you to make the effort which has now prostrated your strength. The fever mantles your cheek… pain in your side and chest and these are the precursors of a restless sleepless night. You change your position for ease but pain also changes—a dry hard cough breaks the monotony of a midnight hour and leaves you exhausted. —Middlesex Diary of Adaline Lindsley, August 26, 18411 When Adaline Lindsley set her pen to the diary she kept between 1840 and 1843, she was participating in a tradition that subsequent historians have used to piece together a picture of women's lives in the early republic that would otherwise be lost to time. Lindsley's diary is typical in its record of the daily encounters and occurrences that colored her life in Middlesex, New York. In other respects, however, it is strikingly singular. The diary reveals a woman of considerable literary proficiency, both in its style and manner of writing and in its record of Lindsley's prolific reading. The diary is also a narrative of disease. Adaline Lindsley was dying of consumption.2 Some would have said her reading was the cause. Consumption is essential to any discussion of life in the early American republic. In the second half of the eighteenth century, its presence first among colonists and then among citizens of the new nation was ubiquitous. Some historians have attributed this prevalence to population growth and commercial expansion, a theory supported by a peak in cases around 1800 in Atlantic coastal cities.3 And yet, little scholarship has been devoted to its study within this period. This inequity is the result of diverse factors including an early ambiguity surrounding the disease, skepticism or outright derision of illness narratives, and a historiographical bias toward the disease as it affected European populations—the last a consequence of the relative [End Page 37] dearth of disease narratives or pathology treatises produced in America relative to those produced in Britain and France at the time. In addition to these impediments, scholars have not sufficiently addressed how consumption in early America might have been differently understood and therefore exist as a separate disease from its European counterpart. Susan Sontag has sensitively observed that tuberculosis constitutes a set of cultural metaphors that evolve over time and space. Her observation supports the idea that the disease reflected the concerns and values of early republicans. These concerns and values confronted observable differences between life in America and elsewhere, as well as imagined differences rooted in feeling and sentiment. Difference was a volatile construct used to assert a national identity alternately set apart from and intimately linked with a European past. Citizens of the early republic grappled with how to reconcile these differences, to turn back or to look forward, choosing instead to fashion a hybrid culture responsive to a rapidly evolving national and global identity. The American response to consumption followed a similar trajectory, taking many of its cues from earlier European conceptions of the disease while shaping it to its own needs. Consumption and the marketplace were early partners in this process. By the late eighteenth century, the marketplace was a preeminent ground for testing America's hybrid identity. Regulation and policing of material consumption were conspicuously tested as forms of dissent and individuation as evidenced in earlier pre-revolutionary consumer boycotts of British goods.4 Proscriptive discourse against the consumption of foreign goods, particularly the tragic novels of Samuel Richardson and others British and French writers, persisted well into the early republican period, focusing its harshest criticism on the corrupting influence of such goods upon the polity, despite or perhaps in consequence of their continued popularity among American consumers.5 Janice Radway reminds us that "'to consume'… was originally understood to refer to fire...