| Lovesickness is a common malady in British literature, but it is also an illness that has been perceived and diagnosed differently in different eras. The nineteenth-century British novel incorporates a lovesickness that primarily affects women with physical symptoms, including fever, that may end in a female character's death. The fever of female lovesickness includes a delirium that allows a female character to play out the identity crisis she must feel at the loss of a significant relationship and possibly of her social status. Commonly conflated with a type of female madness, the nineteenth-century novelists often focus less on the delirium and more on the physical symptoms of illness that affect a female character at the loss of love. These physical symptoms require physical care from other characters and often grant the heroine status and comfort.;Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens all use subtle variations in lovesickness to identify the presence or absence of a female character's virtue. Jane Austen established lovesickness as a necessary experience for female characters, who choose only if they reveal or conceal their symptoms to a watchful public. Elizabeth Gaskell established both a comic socially constructed lovesickness in which a female character can participate if she is aware of popular culture and a spontaneous lovesickness that affects socially unaware female characters and leads to death. Charles Dickens establishes lovesickness as culturally pervasive by writing a female character who stages lovesickness for the purpose of causing pain to others and a female character who is immune to lovesickness and the rhetoric of love, yet is consistently spoken into others' love stories. Lovesickness becomes a barometer of the soul in several nineteenth-century novels by which we read a heroine's virtue or lack of virtue and the depth of her loss. |
