The Medical Science of Nostalgia and the Romantic "Science of Feelings"

Abstract

The Medical Science of Nostalgia and the Romantic "Science of Feelings" Chia-Jung Lee (bio) The perceptions of historicity and mortality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain have reshaped the forming representation of grief in poetry. This article attempts to study the cognitive assimilations of memory, mourning, and nostalgia by tracing the way William Wordsworth develops the grief-stricken instances of loss and death. In his "Note to The Thorn," the poet claims that "poetry is the history or science of feelings" (351). My reading will highlight this notion on the "science of feelings" manifested through the complexity of feelings in Wordsworth's textual confrontation with loss. Central to this notion is the "science of nostalgia" among the eighteenth-century medical taxonomies, registering the growing pains of historical existence within scientific discourses of military surgeons and practitioners of medicine. In many medical texts of the time, primarily the studies of naval and maritime medicine, "nostalgia" means a disturbing and even fatal disease or a physical revolt against any form of transience—caused by a desire to return home during wartime. This pathological phenomenon was also depicted in narratives of colonial exploration and travel narratives, and the patients suffering from the disease tended to be the returning travelers and those who had experienced forced migration. This clinical history gradually comes to be embedded within literature. In Wordsworth's literary presentations of one's longing for return or nostalgia for cultural pasts, we see his articulation about the human causalities, indicating a disease of displacement (for example, the Old Cumberland Beggar, the Old Leech-Gatherer, and the Soldier who mutters "inscrutable ciphers" with signs "of pain / or some uneasy thought" (Thirteen-book Prelude 162). These experiences of loss, grief, and bereavement have also been relayed by some medically trained writers at the time, like John Keats, to promote humanism in medicine and to examine discourses of trauma and disease through the scope of literature. These Romantic forms of grief and mourning, manifested physically and tormenting psychologically, best embody the transitory emotions experienced by those who suffered from loss and moments of insanity in an age of revolutions. [End Page 77] This article will look into the various attempts that have been made in Wordsworth's poetic experiment with representations of the figures mourning for deprivation. These poetics are experimental in the sense that the poet appears to reinterpret the cultural formation of grief and mourning for one's loss through his literary engagement with the medical conception of the disease "nostalgia" that has evolved from the seventeenth century. Such marginal figuration of historical content represented through Wordsworth's poetic writing signifies an individual's psychopathic desire amidst the wreck of time. That is, medical nostalgia comes to be embedded in the Romantic form of remembering as feelings of neurological disorder (which has been diagnosed as a disease by pathology in the eighteenth century). Such a sense of nostalgia reveals the trauma of bereavement. Wordsworth also relays similar nostalgic evocation of homeland in Descriptive Sketches; the melody of "Ranz Des Vaches" heard by the Swiss mercenaries in "foreign lands" brought about "the Swiss affect / With tender passion; leaving [them] to pine / … and die" ("On Hearing"). The noxious effects of remembering the native land, as Wordsworth claims, cannot be "reject[ed]" as being merely "fabulous." This nostalgic form of the disease, by indication, was widely noted at the time, epitomizing experiences of loss, rootlessness, and alienation caused by persistent international warfare and colonialism. "The science of nostalgia" provides the cultural background of this disease for the Romantic poetics of human sufferings. The interrelationship between the "medical science of nostalgia" and the Romantic "science of feelings" is at stake in this study. The dialogue between medicine and literature can play an important role in addressing a collective memory of our cultural past. The complex ways literary writers think through these ideas about the disease offer a more thorough and intricate picture of cultural manifestations than many other historical documents. Furthermore, this article intends to show that the poet's incessant textual representations of loss and death greatly reveal an insatiable desire (for the past or for the irretrievable referent) that has been made...