Symptoms of the Self: Tuberculosis and the Making of the Modern Stage

by Roberta Barker

Overview

2023 Le Prix Ann Saddlemyer Award, Winner

Symptoms of the Self offers the first full study of the stage consumptive. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France, Britain, and North America, tuberculosis was a leading killer. Its famous dramatic and operatic victims—Marguerite Gautier in La Dame aux Camélias and her avatar Violetta in La Traviata, Mimì in La Bohème, Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Edmund Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night, to name but a few—are among the most iconic figures of the Western stage. Its classic symptoms, the cough and the blood-stained handkerchief, have become global performance shorthand for life-threatening illness.

The consumptive character became a vehicle through which standards of health, beauty, and virtue were imposed; constructions of class, gender, and sexuality were debated; the boundaries of nationhood were transgressed or maintained; and an exceedingly fragile whiteness was held up as a dominant social ideal. By telling the story of tuberculosis on the transatlantic stage, Symptoms of the Self uncovers some of the wellsprings of modern Western theatrical practice—and of ideas about the self that still affect the way human beings live and die.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609388621
Publisher:	University of Iowa Press
Publication date:	01/04/2023
Series:	Studies Theatre Hist & Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	292
File size:	27 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Roberta Barker is associate professor of theatre in the Fountain School of Performing Arts, and member of the joint faculty of the University of King’s College and Dalhousie University. She is author of Early Modern Tragedy, Gender, and Performance, 1984–2000: The Destined Livery. Barker lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Table of Contents

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction. The Symptom, the Stage, and the Transmission of the Self Part I. Consumptive Poetics Chapter One. “La Poétique du Poitrinaire”: The Making of the Stage Consumptive, 1828–1833 Chapter Two. Death and the Working Woman: Subtexts of the Consumptive Heroine, 1848–1855 Part II. Sentimental Transmissions Chapter Three. Camilleology: The Stage Consumptive as Transnational Vector, 1852–1877 Chapter Four. The Ills of the Parents: Heredity, Sentiment, and the Stage Consumptive Child, 1852–1900 Chapter Five. Ailing Nations: Consumption, the Stage, and the Body Politic, 1857–1900 Part III. The Sentimental Survival Chapter Six. Sentimental Resistance: The Stage Consumptive in the Age of the Bacillus, 1879–1906 Chapter Seven. The Con That Tells the Truth: The Consumptive Repertoire and the Autobiographical Impulse in American Theatre, 1912–1977 Afterword. A Living Repertoire Notes Bibliography Index

Editorial Reviews

Rooted in detailed readings of plays and their production histories, Barker’s investigation reveals how the melancholy tropes and sentimental archetypes of the stage consumptive both fed into and sought to satisfy the circulatory demands of a rising affective economy. Through such adept and sensitive readings of the archives of the consumptive repertoire, one feels at times that they, as a reader, are being transported back to the nineteenth-century stage itself, with its parade of coughing heroines, flushed and brooding heroes, and empathically suffering publics. By the end of the book, one wonders whether the modern Western theatre would itself have even come into existence without the corresponding rise of such a horrific disease.”—Amy Holzapfel, author, Art, Vision, and Nineteenth-Century Realist Drama: Acts of Seeing
 

“Roberta Barker assesses the interplay of disease, dramaturgy, and subjectivity in theatrical depictions of tuberculosis, deftly tracking the ‘consumptive repertoire’ as it grew and transmuted on French, English, and American stages in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beyond its historical value, Barker’s book is beautifully written; it renders the categories ‘reading for pleasure’ and ‘reading for research’ nearly indistinguishable from one another.”—Meredith Conti, author, Playing Sick: Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine
 

“Symptoms of the Self has much to offer the medical and health humanities. Barker’s resourceful engagement with archival sources and her extensive background in medical theory, theatre/performance studies, and social history allow a rich, interdisciplinary account of a period in medicine, society, and the arts when the contours of the modern were defined and contested. Its transatlantic narrative illustrates the circulation and adaptations of idea, narratives, and affective relationships with speaking eloquently to the erasures that define such a history. . . . it reminds us that disease has its meanings, stories, and fashions. Illness is never just a medial matter, and a simple cough can define an era.”—Journal of Medical Humanities

“Symptoms of the Self offers an original, deeply researched, and beautifully written analysis of the emergence and endurance of pulmonary tuberculosis as the primary theatrical representation of illness from the nineteenth century to the modern era.”—Le Prix Ann Saddlemyer Prize Committee

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