Thank god for haemorrhoids! Illness and identity in a seventeenth-century woman's autobiography

Abstract

This article focuses on one aspect of the autobiographical writing of a seventeenth-century Englishwoman, Alice Thornton. One of the ways in which Thornton constructs her autobiographical identity is through the attention she gives to her several physical illnesses. These illnesses are catalogued and examined with an almost pathological interest, and an attitude to the body which suggests that Thornton considered her physical history to be an essential feature of her identity. Her illnesses are frequently depicted as having occurred during or close to key events of her life, not only after childbirth, as we might expect, but on her wedding day, or as a premonition of the death of her brother, or soon after hearing of the serious illness of her husband. The positioning of these accounts of her illnesses is interesting in that they serve to point the reader very firmly in the direction of attending to Thornton's own physical existence at the very times when we might expect her, as author of “her” female identity, to be constructing herself in her expected role of self-effacing wife, mother, or sister.