| Since the rise of the novel, readers have been trained to expect conflict and resolution, crisis and recovery, and beginnings that move (but not too quickly) toward ends. Such patterns have been likened to disease: narrative begins in a state of dysfunction and works toward the recuperation of order or the presumably healthy state of quiescence. However, underlying this traditional structure, which is embedded in the medical and fictional texts I analyze, is another sense of narrative, one determined by the vagaries to be found within plots of health rather than an inexorable trajectory leading from illness to cure. For health is more than a mechanism of closure or an absence of narrative. Health is a precarious state marked by uncertain chronology, invented plots, and hopeful characters and provides writers with narrative possibilities rather than simply an ending, an ongoing drama rather than a condition of stasis.;Fictions of Health charts this unexpected relationship between health and the novel, beginning with the figure of the chronic invalid, who holds a privileged---because detached---perspective on what it means to be well. Invalidism provides a vital mode of narration through which health can be seen as a dynamic element of storytelling. In Chapter two, Austen's Fanny Price both embodies invalid narration and marks, for the domestic novels that follow, the romantic trajectory toward health, which comes from the impulse not of cure but of prevention. By mid-century, as I show in Chapter three, Dickens creates social health when the characters in Little Dorrit find community and compassion in quarantine, offering therapeutic contagion rather than the prevention of disease; Gaskell's Molly Gibson concludes this project by learning, through a kind of medical training, that novelistic acts, the caring attention of a sympathetic listener, rather than medical treatment, bring about what is truly narrative health. |
