| Summary: | The profuse illness and nursing narratives in Victorian texts frequently feature
sympathy for physical suffering as a major cultural and literary trope. In a wide
variety of texts ranging from social reform writing to autobiographies, from novels to
poetry, physical suffering was often closely associated with a specific cultural form of
affect called sympathy. While earlier epistemologies of sympathy developed by
Scottish Enlightenment writers defined it as a free agent that autonomously flowed
through individuals, toward the mid-century, this model left its place to formulations
of sympathy as an alignment of affect between clearly separated subjects that could be
achieved through sympathetic imagination. This epistemological and cultural shift is
strongly apparent in both fictional and nonfinctional depictions of sympathy for the
sick. Critical works on the nineteenth-century culture of illness and medical care have
tended to focus on the community-building functions of the sickroom. However, the
illness-nursing dyad constitutes an affective structure through which some less
examined aspects of sympathy for physical suffering, such as the alterity and abjection
of bodies in pain, can be explored. Descriptions of physical suffering usually followed
certain narrative conventions that positioned the sufferers and their nurses as objects
or subjects of sympathy. This particular object-subject relationship facilitated the
construction, negotiation, and redefinition of collective identities like nationality,
gender, and class. While nursing memoirs and conduct manuals adhered to
conventional ideals of femininity, they also expanded definitions of feminity and
maternalism to include competence. In their war nursing memoirs, unprivileged or
marginalized women who worked as nurses were able to inscribe themselves as
professional women and national subjects by contributing to the national narratives of
the war with soothing narratives of their nursing experience. In Bildungsromans, their
sympathy for disabled male companions enabled socially and economically
disenfranchised male protagonists to reconstruct wounded masculinity as a hegemonic
masculinity model. Destabilized social identities, on the other hand, culminated in
novelistic examples of resistance to sympathy on the level of character or narrative,
which the authors used as a representational strategy to approach dilemmas for which
there are no solutions.
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