TY - JOUR
AU - Brophy,, Gregory
AB - Abstract This paper explores Victorian culture’s persistent associations between epilepsy and bodily expenditure to locate the place of the epileptic body within the Victorian ‘libidinal economy’. It centres on a reading of Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch (1872) as a highly original meditation on the implications of disability and visibility. In this novel, a reclusive silversmith named Oscar Dubourg curbs his post-traumatic seizures with silver nitrate, a remedy that causes a dark-blue discoloration of the skin. Behind the narrative necessity of this device, I locate an epistemological desire to render the condition of epilepsy visibly evident by saturating (and implicitly racializing) Oscar so that the inside shows through. The sporadic visibility of epilepsy confers a radically unstable identity upon its sufferer, one represented by the fluidity and anonymity of the unshaped silver and gold plates that Oscar moulds in his workshop. These plates inspire rumours throughout the community that Oscar is a counterfeiter. Oscar’s valuable metals, along with his health, are stolen in one fell swoop; the thieves brutally attack him, precipitating his traumatic epilepsy. The silver does not disappear, then, but is transmuted into Oscar’s affliction; these shifting metaphorical values of silver can be productively read in light of Victorian discourses of pathology, not least the widespread concern about malingerers ‘counterfeiting’ epilepsy. Can an afflicted body ‘pass’ as healthy? Can healthy bodies perform affliction? These are questions that Oscar’s story raises, with the help of a twin brother who exchanges identities with him in order to retain his fiancée’s affections. Collins’s sensational marriage plot, peopled with a cast of ‘problem bodies’, pulls the novel into critical conversation with a nexus of nineteenth-century medical and eugenic discourses dedicated to the surveilling of physical difference and the ‘policing’ of legitimate and illegitimate disabilities. Writing in 1874, the pioneering psychiatrist Henry Maudsley mused about the ‘interesting chapter’ that ‘might be written upon the mental characteristics of the epileptic neurosis’.1 One might expect an unembellished piece of non-fiction from Maudsley, but he clearly has the dramatic potential of epilepsy foremost in mind. Noting ‘the immense energy’ and the ‘singularly vivid imagination, which is apt sometimes to occupy itself with painful or repulsive subjects’ which commonly accompany the condition, Maudsley speculates: ‘Probably the invention of the modern sensation novel, with its murders, bigamies, and other crimes, was an achievement of the epileptic imagination’.2 For readers of Victorian culture, it should come as little surprise that Maudsley imagines fiction as a kind of medical condition. Nineteenth-century medical discourse suffered from an endemic need to pathologize cultural production, an obsession that would reach its nadir in 1892 with Max Nordau’s anti-art polemic, Degeneration. But Maudsley is not only diagnosing the ‘epileptic’ disorder of sensation fiction, with its ‘fitful’ and unpredictable twists of plot triggered by characters who are abnormally susceptible to ‘sudden and irresistible impulses’.3 He is also designating the ‘sensational’ nature of epilepsy – a fact that was certainly not lost on Victorian novelists, many of whom used epilepsy to infuse their narratives with heightened scenes of melodrama, accenting strange fits of passion with lightning flashes, conjectures of demon possession, and other Gothic tropes that accentuated the condition’s dramatic power.4 Recent criticism has illuminated the essential but often marginal positioning of characters with disabilities in nineteenth-century domestic fiction. Martha Stoddard Holmes’s Fictions of Affliction, a study at once sweeping in its scope and nuanced in its analysis of individual texts, asks how the mode ‘carefully map[s] out the terms on which disabled women’ might ‘enter the marriage plots they facilitate’.5 One of the salient caveats of this negotiation, she notes, is that such women ‘almost never become biological parents’.6 At variance with medical discourses of the period, which represented the condition as predominantly a female malady, novelists primarily invoked epilepsy to explore anomalous masculine subject positions. The uncertain social position of the male epileptic generates similar narrative trouble, though his involvement in the domestic novel’s family plots prompts a distinctly charged set of concerns over inheritance, a problem that is imagined both genetically and fiscally. The consistency with which the figure of ‘the epileptic’ becomes embroiled in dubious financial dealings and scandals suggests, in line with Victorian attitudes, that this peculiarly constituted subject sets in motion a different narrative economy. The figure is always finding his body tangled up in substitution plots, scams and shams that feature the epileptic either as impersonator or patsy, malign manipulator or defenceless dupe. Oliver Twist’s epileptic half-brother, Edward ‘Monks’ Leeford, hides his identity while conspiring to corrupt Oliver, destroy the surviving documents of his parentage, and defraud him of his inheritance. In Charles Reade’s The Terrible Temptation (1871), Richard Bassett taunts his epileptic cousin Charles, rival heir, by flaunting his infant in front of his childless contender; he stirs in Charles such a pitch of feeling that he pitches a fit. Griffith Gaunt, titular protagonist of Reade’s 1886 sensation novel, suffers a similar stress-induced epileptic seizure when he learns of his wife’s infidelity. Assuming the name of an illegitimate brother to whom he bears a superficial resemblance, he enters a bigamous marriage with another woman. When the corpse of his brother is later found and misidentified, Griffith’s ‘first’ wife is charged with her husband’s murder. Other sufferers, such as George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Brandon Mountford (1894),7 end up trapped within ‘wrong man’ plots: falling victim to infelicitous seizures that rob them simultaneously of consciousness and alibi, they wake to find themselves framed for theft or murder and considered likely suspects by a public swayed by popular fictions of the ‘epileptoid’ criminal. In each tale, the male epileptic hovers at the margin of the family. The marriage plots that typically manage character and conflict in domestic fiction cross wires with plots of detection, as fears of hereditary madness and affliction shadow narrative futurity with the spectres of latency, the disconcerting possibility that epilepsy’s hidden trace will come to light, embedded in the body of the child to come. 1. UNFIT: EPILEPSY IN VICTORIAN MEDICINE AND CULTURE Wilkie Collins’s novels are distinguished by their author’s boundless curiosity about the scientific questions of his time, and Poor Miss Finch, written in the wake of modern epileptology’s first wave, is no exception. In her introduction to the novel, Catherine Peters suggests the fourth edition of Thomas Watson’s Lectures on the Principles and Practice of Physic (1857) as a key source for Collins. A number of important mid-century studies on epilepsy would follow Watson’s lectures – chief among them Charles Bland Radcliffe’s Epilepsy and Other Convulsive Affections (1858), Sir Edward Henry Sieveking’s Epilepsy and Epileptiform Seizures (1861), and Sir John Russell Reynolds’s Epilepsy (1861) – marking a period of extraordinary scientific interest in the disorder. These texts laid the groundwork for our contemporary understanding of epilepsy as a neurological dysfunction owing to excessive discharge of nerve cells. Over the course of the following decade, John Hughlings Jackson’s attempts to investigate and localize the ‘discharging lesions’ whose explosive release was responsible for spasm and convulsion would help define the methods and means of modern neurology. Derived from the Greek, epilepsy names a body that has been ‘taken hold of’, ‘seized or gripped’. As early as the Hippocratic text, On the Sacred Disease (400 bce), Western medicine had laboured to demonstrate that these bodies were in the grip of a ‘natural’ disease, rather than suffering from divine possession, but superstitious dread about the condition – with its ancient attribution of the morbus sacer – persisted through the centuries.8 The nineteenth century marks the historical moment where the medical establishment first firmly seizes the epileptic. The institutionalization of epileptic sufferers within hospitals and asylums afforded a broad spectrum of patients for close clinical observation, augmenting and balancing the (often sensational) anecdotal cases that had long distorted medical considerations of epilepsy. Hughlings Jackson, who worked as a physician at the National Hospital for the Relief and Cure of the Paralysed and Epileptic from 1862 to 1906, helped to document and classify the surprising diversity of symptoms, causes and experiences once broadly referred to as epilepsy. Attempts categorically and institutionally to apprehend the epileptic body were frustrated not only by the fitful and unpredictable nature of epilepsy’s symptoms, but also by widespread anxieties about the difficulties of obtaining objective evidence of the reality of a condition that vacillated between invisibility and dramatic spectacle. In Poor Miss Finch, Collins plays with this question of visible difference by colour-coding his epileptic character, Oscar Dubourg, as a blue man. This bizarre detail is inserted into Collins’s plot in a manner that is at once scientifically accurate (Oscar’s dyschromia, a shocking dark-blue discolouration of the skin, is a side-effect of his silver nitrate treatments) and fictionally preposterous. Authorial decisions like this one certainly did little to redress earlier criticisms that Collins’s characters were ‘mere accessory colouring’ employed ‘to set off the central situation in his narrative’.9 Oscar’s strange blue hue has long been pointed to as a blemish on the text and a mark of the novel’s artistic and commercial failures. This paper, however, examines Collins’s surreal gesture as an historically important attempt to produce an external and indelible index of unstable physical difference. In doing so, he anticipates recent discussions within disability studies on the peculiar situation of epilepsy as a ‘non-visible disability’.10 Reflecting on contemporary experiences of disability, Ellen Samuels describes how invisible difference renders visible ‘the uneasy, often self-destroying tension between appearance and identity; the social scrutiny that refuses to accept statements of identity without “proof”’.11 In Collins’s historical moment, this tension was signalled by the tropes of feigned and ‘counterfeit’ epilepsy, sceptical diagnoses that expressed anxiety about the social and economic costs of disability. Within fiction of the period, and particularly Collins’s novel, male bodies are figuratively economized in ways that tacitly express societal concerns over the epileptic bodies marked as unproductive (in their presumed incapacity for labour, they were considered a drain upon the economy), but also as alarmingly reproductive: in a moment when epilepsy was thought to be primarily a hereditary disease, epilepsy triggered eugenic fears that, unless properly identified and isolated, disabled bodies would contaminate the general health of the social body. As Collins’s title suggests, the novel centres on Lucilla Finch, a young woman who – in the course of a tortuously complicated plot – passes from blindness to sight and back to blindness again. Critics such as Martha Stoddard Holmes have recognized the vital role that characters such as Lucilla Finch have played within the range of fictional texts that ‘addressed disabled people as a newly visible group within Victorian culture’.12 In its central depiction of disability, Collins’s novel remains true to the author’s stated mission to ‘exhibit’ the experience of disability ‘as it really is’.13 For Collins, grasping the reality of blindness meant letting go of the many conventions of characterization and plot that governed acceptable representations of disability. Rejecting the constraints of the ‘ideal’ and ‘sentimental’14 portrait of the noble sufferer, Collins refused to provide the contrived parable on the inherent virtues of the blind that might have gratified many readers. Few early assessments of the novel neglected to note the heroine’s shaky claim upon the reader’s interest and sympathy. The Saturday Review noted tersely: ‘the heroine fails to charm’,15 while the Spectator pronounced ‘the blind girl herself’ to be ‘one of the least attractive characters in modern fiction’.16 Such rash reactions bespeak the culture’s fraught negotiation of sympathetic feeling with regard to disabled bodies, and Lucilla’s chilly reception demonstrates the trouble that arises when characters breach the special laws of propriety that govern such bodies. The needs and wants of Lucilla’s body are neither idealized nor sublimated by Collins. He presents a woman whose disability does not obscure or disallow the complexity of her character and desires. Indeed, much of the interest in Lucilla’s character derives from her stubborn refusal to recognize any kinship or solidarity with the novel’s other character with a disability. Oscar is in effect doubly discriminated against in the novel, a figure of exile, driven out by his beloved Lucilla, a character who is in many ways an outsider herself. As such, his position anticipates the uncertain place epilepsy will come to occupy within the public and legal discourses on disability, as well as reflecting the marginal interest this condition has attracted within disability studies itself. If his bodily difference elicits ambivalent feelings from the novel’s protagonist and narrator – responses we will explore in depth below – Poor Miss Finch nonetheless uses Oscar Dubourg to deliver one of the period’s most humane and sympathetic depictions of epilepsy. Oscar is a reclusive silversmith with a mysterious past and an unnervingly intimate relationship with an identical twin brother named Nugent. Our narrator, intrigued by Oscar’s ‘gold and silver plates, and the strange tools’ of his trade, speculates that he has been ‘stained by numerous crimes’17 and is likely ‘an escaped criminal [whose] form of crime is coining false money’ (p. 25). This theory is quickly disproven when Oscar is robbed and assaulted in his home workshop. In one fell swoop, the valuable plates of silver are stolen, along with his health: Oscar develops a ‘tremble’ that quickly worsens, manifesting itself in a full-blown case of traumatic epilepsy. Of the many fits suffered by Oscar, Collins depicts only two. Narrated by Lucilla’s paid companion Madame Pratolungo but supervised by Oscar’s doctor, the first episode provides a careful balance of sensational spectacle and compassionate realism: As the words passed his lips, a frightful contortion fastened itself on Oscar’s face. His eyes turned up hideously. From head to foot his whole body was wrenched round, as if giant hands had twisted it, towards the right. Before I could speak, he was in convulsions on the floor at his doctor’s feet. ‘Good God, what is this!’ I cried out. The doctor loosened his cravat, and moved away the furniture that was near him. That done, he waited – looking at the writhing figure on the floor. ‘Can you do nothing more?’ I asked. He shook his head gravely. ‘Nothing more’. ‘What is it?’ ‘An epileptic fit’. (p. 93) Neurologist Patrick Wolf notes that Collins’s scene delivers a medically ‘exact description of a right versive seizure with secondary generalization’,18 but the novel also gives readers an accurate demonstration of how to respond to such an episode. Scattered throughout the scene are adjectives and adverbs (‘frightful’ and ‘hideously’) that serve to heighten the sensational aspects of scene and condition the reader’s response. And yet the episode’s seemingly supernatural elements (the ‘giant hands’ that seem to be twisting Oscar’s body) are quickly checked by medical explanation. If our narrator calls out to God, it is still the doctor who answers her cry, and his assurance that ‘There is no danger . . . there is nothing to fear’ (p. 96) quells superstitious panic and melodramatic sensation with dispassionate medical attention. Laura Fitzpatrick argues that, in a period where popular authors such as Dickens exploited epilepsy as an object of horror and an index of depravity, the mere fact that Collins ‘depicts realistic characters responding to the disease with . . . medically appropriate action’ is worth applauding.19 However, while the novel might well be commended for its humane depiction of epilepsy, Poor Miss Finch presses beyond the question of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ representations to experiment with the depiction of unrepresentable disabilities and invisible difference, refracting these problems through the ‘lens’ of Lucilla Finch’s blindness. Critical readings of disability in the novel have typically gravitated towards Lucilla – an understandable tendency, given that her experiences most fully realize Collins’s stated object in writing the novel: to demonstrate ‘that the conditions of human happiness are independent of bodily affliction, and that it is even possible for bodily affliction itself to take its place among the ingredients of happiness’.20 The primary ingredient of this happiness, but just as often its principal obstacle as well, is Oscar Dubourg, whose fragile constitution, shaken by the assault and shattered by his resulting epilepsy, repeatedly postpones their marriage. And yet the greatest threat to their relationship issues not from Oscar’s ill health, but from the remedy that makes his condition dramatically visible to others. Thieves have stolen Oscar’s plates, and Oscar thrusts aside his smithing tools, but the element of silver never truly disappears from this novel. Exploiting silver’s malleability at the level of plot, Collins engineers its traumatic return with suitably uncanny effects. Unbeknownst to Lucilla, Oscar has elected to treat his post-traumatic seizures with silver nitrate, an imperfect remedy that, once internalized, reveals the surprising mutability of the human body. Now it is no longer Oscar who works upon the metal, but the metal that performs its work upon him. As his earliest readers noted, Collins had to backdate his 1872 novel by 14 years in order to generate this startling spectacle of Oscar’s condition. By 1857, Thomas Watson was already naming nitrate of silver as a medication that ‘used to be highly thought of’, contending that the common side effect of ‘permanent discoloration of the skin’ was a ‘very serious objection’ to the medication. Watson cautioned that in ‘giving this nitrate of silver we run a great risk of obtaining its disfiguring effect, for the sake of a very small chance of curing the epilepsy’.21 As Catherine Peters observes, Oscar’s depiction is distinguished by Collins’s careful medical realism, the result of his thorough reading of mid-century work on epilepsy, including medical textbooks, clinical reports, and Watson’s lectures.22 Collins returns his plot, then, to an historical moment that forces upon Oscar a dramatic choice: no painless panacea, the silver obliges him to carefully weigh ‘the cost at which [he] had determined to purchase his cure’ (p. 114). That price takes a sharp spike when Lucilla receives a visit from Herr Grosse, a German oculist who is convinced that Lucilla’s blindness, the result of cataracts that developed during infancy, is treatable. This development introduces ‘a certain domestic difficulty’ (p. 209). Namely, Lucilla dreams of being restored to sight before her wedding day, while Oscar fears that, should his fiancée regain her sight, that day might never come. Knowing of her superstitious dread of dark colours (a fear that encompasses all ‘dark people’ as well), Oscar worries that the sight of his blackish-blue skin will terrify her. Lucilla has her way on the question of marriage, and the operation precedes their vows. Upon regaining her vision, she immediately confirms Oscar’s worst fears. Mistaking his twin brother for Oscar, she rushes to embrace Nugent. Then, catching a glimpse of the blue brother, she ‘point[s] towards Oscar with a gesture of disgust’ and demands that the doctor place the protective bandages back over her eyes. ‘Put it on again’, she pleads, while her true lover cowers in the corner: ‘I have seen too much already’ (p. 256). Finding that the restoration of Lucilla’s sight has failed to excise her superstitious, but deep-seated, aversion to dark colours, Oscar hatches a terribly ill-considered plot, in which Nugent proves invaluable. (What use is it to have a twin, after all, if one cannot be ‘duplicitous?’) The brothers switch identities. Stamped from the same mould, they press themselves into exchange with each other. Their two bodies are a perfect fit, and inevitably come to serve as each other’s counterfeit. Consumption of silver alters Oscar’s body’s value – though it is a price that he conspires to defer, if not avoid paying altogether. Having already taken a false name, Oscar struggles still to conceal his true colours from Lucilla. The brothers’ body-swapping generates the dramatic suspense of the novel’s second half, as readers wait for the penny to drop: when, if ever, will Lucilla see through these fraudulent twins? 2. BLACK AND BLUE AND BLIND: EXCHANGES BETWEEN RACE AND DISABILITY Many critics in Collins’s time dismissed the ‘blue man’ twist as one of the possible but implausible eccentricities of sensation plotting, and contemporary readers such as Catherine Peters have disparaged this convolution as one of the ‘superficial absurdities’ of plot that have kept the book from finding a wider readership.23 One particularly acerbic Victorian reviewer wondered: ‘For what is the aim of this story? That the blind should marry the dark-blue? There is then an excellent opening for some novelist, distracted for a plot, to write about the love of the color-blind for the jaundiced’.24 Another unsigned review in the Canadian Monthly & National Review would dismiss colour as a simplistic means of stock characterization. All that Collins needs, the critic complained, is ‘one or two strong daubs of colouring’ to ‘[mark] his men beyond the possibility of mistake’. After ‘enumerating his human stock-in-trade – a blind girl, two (twin) brothers, a skilful surgeon and a curious foreign woman’, the reviewer found that Collins had only to ‘[add] a little nitrate of silver, administered to one of the brothers to give him a blue face, for the purpose not of distinction, but of confusion’.25 Such comments wilfully depoliticize Oscar’s condition by translating human drama into a pictorial play of abstract colour. Pushing back against this detached abstraction, Lillian Nayder’s ‘Blue Like Me’ argues that ‘Oscar’s darkening hue’, rather than merely serving as a grotesque embellishment of plot, ‘is carefully connected to a racial subtext in which blindness and racism become indistinguishable’.26 Nayder traces the novel’s numerous connections between race and colour, from the ‘Hindoo’ dinner-guest who terrifies Lucilla early in the story, to the ‘retired Indian officer’ (p. 340) whose blue skin testifies to his own struggle with epilepsy, and whose loving family teaches Lucilla that her ‘horror of dark people and dark shades of colour’ (p. 19) is nothing more than a ‘morbid fancy’ (p. 168). This story of Lucilla’s dawning consciousness, from ‘blind’ prejudice to enlightened acceptance, substitutes shades of blue for hues that would prove more startling to Collins’s readership (black or brown, for instance) in order to smuggle in an argument about ‘interracial marriage’ that Nayder contends would be palatable to the Victorian reading public only ‘if the subject were conveyed subtextually’.27 Oscar’s tactics of self-representation thus offer a way of understanding Wilkie Collins’s own representational methods: just as Oscar attempts to ‘pass’ by disguising his ‘discolored’ body, so Collins desires to ‘pass’ his coded message to an unsuspecting audience by disguising the latent racial subtext within the manifest text of disability. In Nayder’s reading, both tactics – responding to perceived social necessities – are ambivalent responses that simultaneously undermine and affirm the status quo. Nayder’s reading is convincing, though it presents two key problems for readers who are interested in holding fast to questions about disability. Both problems stem from a reading of physical difference that is metaphoric rather than metonymic, and substitutive rather than associative. First, if we intercept Oscar’s condition as a ‘displaced approach to the subject of race relations’, prompted by Collins’s ‘reticence as a social critic’,28 the work of interpretation requires an act of reverse-substitution, replacing disability with race. Martha Stoddard Holmes has questioned the critical tendency by which characters with disabilities ‘are read as metaphors for the situation of some other group within Victorian culture’, asking why it might be that characters marked by race and gender are typically read as representative of ‘groups with historically particular social and political identities’, while characters with disabilities are typically consigned to the realm of metaphor, illustrating the drama of another’s existence, but denied any ‘historicity’ of their own.29 Using race to erase disability from the text is likely to trouble some readers, not least those who feel that Collins’s depictions of disability are among the most complex and important the nineteenth century has to offer. Rather than a simple erasure, however, Nayder recognizes that the substitutive relation she has discerned is marred by a certain allegorical residue. One cannot use one form of difference (disability) to figure another (race) without disfiguring both in the process. In Nayder’s reading of Collins, not only do ‘blindness and racism become indistinguishable’, but ‘racial difference is a disfigurement of sorts’.30 Strangely, disability does double-duty here in service of the problem of race: it represents the victims (in Oscar’s coloured body) as well as the perpetrators (Lucilla’s metaphorical blindness as a moral failing). Condensing the novel’s many figures of difference in this manner misleadingly narrows the representational scope of an author who does much to affirm the differences between differences. What does it mean to be ‘a person of colour’ in Collins’s novel? The answer is a complicated one that cuts across a broad spectrum of divergent and mismatched experiences – from genetic (inherited), to chemical (acquired and elective), to emotional (momentary and involuntary) – that are nonetheless drawn together in different analogies, affinities, and moments of sympathetic identification. Disability and race intersect in surprising ways within Poor Miss Finch. We cannot say that Oscar ‘becomes’ black, and yet the visible register of his condition repeatedly calls up this analogy, seemingly a popular one within nineteenth-century imaginations. Oliver Wendell Holmes, speaking of epilepsy and its strange remedies, marvelled over the spectacular nature of a condition and treatment that ‘turns a white man as blue as the double-tattooed King of the Cannibal Islands!’ (p. 188). In keeping with such racialized associations, Collins reveals that Oscar’s father ‘had been a dark man’ (p. 110), a detail that makes it easy to read silver as a precipitate, bringing to the surface Oscar’s recessive genetic traits. Behind the narrative necessity of this device, we can locate an epistemological desire to render the condition of epilepsy visibly evident by saturating Oscar so that the inside shows through. When the complexion of a fellow sufferer is described by Pratolungo as ‘hideously distinguished by a superhuman—I had almost said a devilish—colouring of livid blackish blue’ (p. 105), the adjective ‘blackish’ indicates Collins’s desire to borrow the embodied experience of racial difference imaginatively to correct a ‘problem’ with epilepsy that troubled Victorian medical, legal and economic discourse. Epileptic fits often result in a temporary blackening of the face, but Collins’s pharmakon threatens to enact that change permanently. Oliver Wendell Holmes would memorably describe silver nitrate as ‘a treatment . . . written in indelible ink upon a living tablet’.31 In his 1861 treatise on epilepsy, Sir John Russell Reynolds noted that the ‘peculiar, leaden, or slatey hue’ of complexion often produced by muscle contractions in the neck was not unlike ‘that produced by taking nitrate of silver’.32 Repurposed from its more popular use as a medium of photographic representation, silver nitrate fixes the sporadic and often ambiguous manifestations of epileptic symptoms into a more static portrait of a ‘visible minority’. Thus, chemical fixative and narrative fixation together accomplish what Barry Allen has elsewhere called the ‘implantation of impairment’.33 Allen’s phrase draws on Foucault’s work in the first volume of his History of Sexuality to provide a critical account of the discursive construction of disability, articulated by writers such as Robert Francis Murphy, who argues that ‘stigmatization is less a by-product of disability than its substance’.34 The Victorian discourse on epilepsy provides a striking demonstration of this key claim advanced by critical disability studies, in its turn from medical models of disability (which locate disability within individual bodies) to social models (which detect ‘disability’ in the social and institutional structures that accommodate and privilege certain bodies over others). Silver nitrate illustrates perfectly the uneasy accord made between sufferers and a medical establishment that would mark their bodies as ‘epileptic’. If blueness was an unintended and undesirable side effect of the medical response to epilepsy, it nonetheless realized a wishful habit of speaking about the condition. Tracing out the intersections of legal, medical, and literary discourses that converged on the ‘epileptic body’, we find they consistently imagined a stable index of this body’s meaning and identity, where none seemed to exist. Even a committedly balanced medical text such as Reynolds’s Epilepsy: Its Symptoms, Treatment, and Relation to Other Chronic, Convulsive Diseases deploys persistently the term ‘hereditary taint’, a suggestive term that connotes not only contamination, but also dying or tingeing.35 While Collins’s fiction has been praised for the ways in which both his able-bodied and disabled characters demonstrate the ‘dynamic change and profound instability’ that marks general human experience,36 the crux of Oscar’s identity is the stable sign of his ‘colour-coding’ as an epileptic. Silver stabilizes the volatile components of Oscar’s condition, transforming his epilepsy into an object of perpetual visibility for all around him, and calcifying his identity as ‘an epileptic’. If, as Samuel Lyndon Gladden argues, Oscar’s affliction is the text’s ‘open secret’,37 this paradox, and the dramatic irony it generates, is leveraged by Lucilla’s disability. Her blindness makes paramount the question of his condition’s visibility, marking it dramatically as something to be seen. This is Lucilla’s story, but the character’s blindness complicates Collins’s choices concerning narrative ‘point-of-view’. The novel is ‘focalized’ through Madame Pratolungo, who has arrived in the small village of Dimchurch to serve as Lucilla’s sighted companion. Pratolungo performs a similar task as our narrator, guiding readers through the village and the text. She turns out to be a more conscientious guide to readers than to the vulnerable girl she has been charged to assist, and her choice not to expose Oscar’s trickery to his misguided fiancée creates a schism between Lucilla’s knowledge and ours as readers. Thus, the dramatic tension between our narrator (who can see what is going on) and our protagonist (who, even after her sight is restored, is deliberately ‘kept in the dark’) makes Oscar’s visibility crucially important to the plot. Seeing what the protagonist cannot see, we wait, with desire and dread, for Oscar’s condition to ‘show itself’ in the inevitable moment of exposure. 3. COUNTERFEIT: EPILEPSY AND (DIS)SIMULATION Like its time, the novel is marked by a climate of suspicion concerning epilepsy. How does disability become visible, and how might it remain hidden? Can healthy bodies perform affliction, or can an afflicted body ‘pass’ as healthy? In raising these questions, Collins responds to a Victorian medical culture deeply troubled over epilepsy’s uncertain aetiology, sceptical about its largely invisible symptoms, and uncomfortable with its sporadic and violent manifestations. We find such medical suspicion expressed in the second volume of Scottish pathologist William Aitken’s 1857 Handbook of the Science and Practice of Medicine, where he voices the widely held medical opinion that ‘epilepsy is perhaps more frequently attempted to be copied than any other affection’.38 In his 1880 article for the American Journal of Insanity, Carlos F. MacDonald echoes this opinion, venturing that: ‘Among the long list of maladies that have been successfully imitated, that of epilepsy probably ranks first’.39 Consulting any nineteenth-century account of feigned illness, one finds epilepsy given pride of place. The opening pages of William Cullen’s second volume of First Lines of the Practice of Physic warn readers of ‘the Epilepsia simulata, or the feigned Epilepsy’ of which doctors have ‘so often taken notice’.40 In his Elements of Medical Jurisprudence, one of the first book-length studies of medical forensics, American physician Theodoric Romeyn Beck traces out a number of medico-legal intersections, probing bodies that blur the line between illness and illegality. Beck is particularly concerned with ‘malingerers’, patients who simulate sickness in order to exempt themselves from economies and institutions that depend on the productive labour of the male body.41 In the same spirit of public service, asylum doctor William Alexander Francis Browne reported in 1865 on the fraudulent performances of a ‘fitty pauper’ said to be ‘well known in certain parishes’, claiming that the impostor’s case was hardly unique. ‘Feigned epilepsy’, Browne warned, ‘is a profession, a source of revenue, an appeal to sympathy’.42 Concerns over the social cost of misreading this disability gave currency to the term ‘counterfeit’ epilepsy. John Hutton Balfour Browne’s The Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity (1871) employed the term to name feigned insanity from which pseudo-sufferers reap financial benefits. Extending his counterfeiting metaphor, while providing a glimpse of the outright sadism that typically marked diagnostic tests performed upon patients with epilepsy, Browne reasons that ‘When there are many false coins going about, a good shilling may now and again be refused; and one is not to be blamed if they give every sixpence a ‘ring’ on the counter’.43 The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal likewise employed the counterfeiting image to describe the fits of James Clegg (alias James Lee), the infamous ‘dummy-chucker’. This colloquial term was given to confidence men who faked fits for profits. Crowds of onlookers distracted by Clegg’s dramatic performances would find themselves pickpocketed by his accomplices. MacDonald, who recounted the details of Clegg’s career in both England and America for the American Journal of Insanity, notes that Clegg’s performance of epileptic seizures ‘lacked certain characteristic features, the absence of which stamped it as counterfeit’.44 Fear that individuals could exploit the public’s sympathies for personal gain led many physicians to generalize that any public manifestation of epilepsy was by nature suspect, a self-serving, exhibitionist performance. It was not only in the public square, however, that the exhibition of this physical infirmity was greeted with scepticism and resentment. In the realm of fiction, the epileptic body was judged to unfairly ‘excit[e] public curiosity’ and exploit the sympathies of readers. John Ruskin attacked such exploitative depictions of infirmity in ‘Fiction Fair and Foul’, maintaining that while these displays might ‘produce great commiseration on the part of observers’, they were beneath the talents of a true artist. Ruskin singled out Poor Miss Finch as particularly rife with ‘the normal disease which festers throughout the whole body of our lower fictitious literature’. The ‘anatomical preparations’ of Collins’s novel struck Ruskin as excessively morbid symptoms of the ‘modern infidel imagination’, which ‘amus[es] itself with destruction of the body, and bus[ies] itself with aberration of the mind’.45 In his brusque description of Collins’s plot, Ruskin rattles off the novelist’s record of offenses, condemning as perversely ghoulish a narrative ‘in which the heroine is blind, the hero epileptic, and the obnoxious brother is found dead with his hands dropped off’.46 Novelists who misused such ‘image[s] of familiar suffering’ for profit were in Ruskin’s view betraying a ‘personal weakness’ from which writers ‘of deep sensibility shrink’.47 In public and in print, the spectacle of epilepsy tends to be read as an exhibitionist ploy, exploiting bodies outside the productive requirements of capitalism and the aesthetic expectations of literary production. Ruskin allied Wilkie Collins with the malingerers, charging Poor Miss Finch’s author with capitalizing on the spectacle of fictional disabilities. Oscar’s performance displays the obverse side of this counterfeiting operation: pawning off his disabled body for a ‘normal’ one, he shams his way into the marriage market. Initial suspicions about Oscar’s literal counterfeiting and the ‘stain’ (p. 24) of his presumed economic crimes are muted quickly enough in the course of Collins’s narrative. However, rather than dissipating, these fears are absorbed via the silver into Oscar’s body, rendering material the manner in which the ‘counterfeit’ metaphor draws epileptic bodies into economic discourse. ‘Dummy-chuckers’ counterfeit the fit in performances that undermine legitimate exchanges of sentimental affect and charitable impulse. But Oscar’s fraud involves a more profound and intimate deception, attempting to pass off his brother’s body as his own, and thus pass on his own body’s hidden genetic inheritance. The spectre of the counterfeit evokes not what Oscar does, but what he is. 4. ‘QUICKSILVER ITSELF’: GENDER, DISABILITY AND LIBIDINAL ECONOMIES Collins’s desire to highlight the economic dimension of disability is made evident through his choice of Pratolungo as narrator. A sceptical Frenchwoman and the widow of a South-American activist, her prejudices and sympathies lie far outside the norm of the isolated countryside village of Dimchurch. Madame Pratolungo tends to read events of the plot with the same staunchly materialist scepticism of characters, motivation, and relationships that Ruskin displays in his critique of the novel. She rejects easy emotion and sentiment, embracing instead a strictly economic account of social relations in Dimchurch that divines pecuniary motives beneath affective acts. Untouched by the reverence and proprieties of English custom, Pratolungo’s bracing and humorous account demystifies the romance of the narrative. ‘Money’, so often capitalized within her narrative account, makes Madame Pratolungo’s world go round. ‘Do what one may in the detestable system of modern society’, she laments, ‘the pivot on which it all turns is money’ (p. 106). Pratolungo writes openly of the implicit economic interests of different characters, perceiving Lucilla as a commodity to be exchanged between her father and her suitor. Though this critique of Lucilla’s engagement accurately exposes the selfish motives of Lucilla’s family, just as often it would seem that she invents these interests herself, as she does when she accuses Oscar of ‘coining false money’ (p. 25), speculation that draws Oscar’s body into much more striking, immersive flow of currency. Pratolungo’s unrelenting anxiety over counterfeiting, which will not be dispelled by the revelation of Oscar’s trade, betrays her deep-seated desire for stable social values. In matters of class, she is a revolutionary. When it comes to gender roles, however, her notions are extremely rigid. Acknowledging that Oscar is ‘a handsome young man’, and confessing to a certain jealousy over his ‘creamy and spotless and fair’ complexion (p. 39), Madame feels nonetheless that he is ‘a little too effeminate for [her] taste’ (p. 39). Particularly revolting to Pratolungo are Oscar’s indecorous public displays of fraternal affection (p. 24) and emotional ‘weakness’ (p. 40). There is a thin line between pity and contempt in this novel, and, in Pratolungo’s hands, that line is often marked by gender. Recoiling from Oscar’s tears, she maintains that: ‘In common with all women, I like a man to be a man’ (p. 40). Samuel Lyndon Gladden’s queer reading of Poor Miss Finch provides an incisive account of Pratolungo’s attempts to police and penalize ambiguous sexualities, apprehending her as the ‘aggressor away from whom the effeminate Oscar retreats’.48 It is crucial to recognize, however, the insidious ways in which queerness and disability intersect in Pratolungo’s condemnation of Oscar’s fluid sexual identity. Her declaration that she likes ‘a man to be a man’ finds its social corollary in nineteenth-century culture’s insistent tendency to feminize men suffering from epilepsy. In his 1839 Lectures, for instance, John Elliotson would report that epilepsy ‘occurs much more frequently in females than in males’, with the caveat that ‘it will sometimes be observed in boys and men of very violent emotion’.49 A decade after the publication of Collins’s novel, Francis Galton would claim in his Inquiries into Human Faculty that the ‘highest form of emotional instability exists in confirmed epilepsy, where its manifestations have often been studied; it is found in a high but somewhat less extraordinary degree in the hysterical and allied affections’.50 Collins employs the figure of silver to represent the emotional and libidinal instabilities of the text. Spilled first into Oscar’s body, it quickly disperses amongst the novel’s other male characters: figures that excite in our narrator’s disgust, desire, suspicion and derision. Confounded by Nugent’s ‘perpetual shifts and contradictions’, Pratolungo muses: ‘Quicksilver itself seemed to be less slippery to lay hold of than this man’ (p. 286). Earlier in the text, on observing how Mr Finch’s mood lightens when she consults his expertise in a moment of crisis, Pratolungo remarks that his ‘deadly pale’ (p. 78) complexion ‘immediately brightened’ as ‘his own sense of his importance rose again, like the mercury in a thermometer when you put it into a warm bath’ (p. 79). ‘Quicksilver’ (or liquid metal mercury) is a volatile element, prone to sudden and unpredictable changes. Thus, it provides a serviceable simile for the mutability of character in Collins’s fiction, populated as it is by subjects driven and torn by impetuous and erratic shifts in disposition. Indeed, readers familiar with the sensation genre expect this sort of behaviour, and the stock metaphor of the ‘mercurial’ temperament is unlikely to raise an eyebrow. In Collins’s novel, however, the striking presence of Oscar’s blue body radically denatures this conventional figure. The ‘mercurial’ metaphor becomes literalized in Collins’s treatment of Oscar, first materialized in the substance of his trade, and then forcefully sublimated within his own body. Oscar’s silver body pathologizes the emotive conventions of the sensation genre. His seizures are loosely collected together with other fitful, emotional behaviour, as a kind of melodramatic syndrome: through the unsympathetic and often nauseated filter of Pratolungo’s perspective, we see in Oscar a man frequently given to weeping and other acts of affective excess. In particularly intemperate moods, as Pratolungo will breathlessly report to Lucilla, Oscar is given to gestures even ‘worse than crying’, frantically kissing his brother in public (p. 24). In moments such as this, Pratolungo’s eye queers the male epileptic body by associating emotional outbursts with transgressive homosocial affections. The abject revulsion with which Pratolungo monitors Oscar’s body is rooted in medical discourse that understood epilepsy as a morbid condition of emotional and physical ‘incontinence’. His porous body, accepting and releasing fluids in dramatic fashion, evokes contemporary concern with the various forms of bodily secretions (faeces, urine, saliva, semen) that accompanied epileptic seizures. If abjection, as Kristeva has argued, is an act of social exclusion typically levelled against female, maternal bodies, the problem of incontinent male bodies – especially when aligned with hysteria in a compound condition of catamenial or ‘hysterical epilepsy’ – triggers a special degree of disgust and impedes the sympathies of others.51 In a period where disability and femininity were often uncritically yoked together, the frequent narrative coding of epilepsy as male warrants attention. A sustained reading of the analogical connections between epilepsy, sexuality and commerce in Poor Miss Finch illuminates the problem of emotional and erotic excess within male Victorian bodies, and the tendency of Victorian authors such as Dickens, Eliot, Collins, and Stevenson to represent alternative expressions of masculinity (bachelorhood, autoeroticism, homoeroticism) in terms of unaccountable expenditure, loss and theft. In Collins’s plot, Pratolungo’s suspicion that Oscar is reproducing and circulating bad coins turns out to be wrong, but only insofar as she mistakes a biological and libidinal economy for a more strictly monetary one. Pratolungo expresses this confusion when, in the space of two pages, she not only accuses Oscar ‘of coining false money!’ (p. 35), but also of attempting to ‘decoy a young lady’ into his house (p. 38, emphasis added). Oscar’s counterfeiting is rooted in his body, and the threat of his stealthy assimilation and unsanctioned reproduction threatens to corrupt the novel’s marriage plot. The novel’s twin structure, highlighted by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, places on trial ‘Nature’s power to duplicate itself and to recreate the same’.52 The question of whether or not Oscar will be ‘allowed to procreate’ provides Poor Miss Finch with its key narrative and emotional tension. As Martha Stoddard Holmes notes, ‘the novel never broaches the question of whether or not a blind woman should marry (though it does posit that question in reference to Oscar once he has developed epilepsy)’.53 Oscar himself suggests that his fits render him unfit for marriage when he laments that Lucilla ‘is a woman forbidden to me while I suffer as I suffer now’ (p. 111). By the time of the novel’s writing, an end to that suffering was already available in the form of potassium bromide, first used by Queen Victoria’s obstetrician, Sir Charles Locock, to treat women with ‘hysterical’ (likely catamenial) epilepsy. One of the first successful anti-convulsants, the bromide not only suppressed fits but functioned as an ‘anaphrodisiac’, dampening sexual desire and causing temporary ‘reversible impotence’ in males.54 Indeed, in comments following Edward H. Sieveking’s 11 May 1857 presentation to the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society, Locock explained that he had initially prescribed the sedative because it quelled the sexual excitement thought to cause seizures.55 His small pool of patients found in potassium bromide provisional relief from both neurological convulsion and sexual compulsion, a pair of outcomes that confirmed for Locock and other physicians the moralistic connections they had made between epilepsy and sexual excess. Literary criticism has not neglected the conflict between reproduction and pleasure that shaped the discourse of hysteria in the nineteenth century, but the pervasive diagnosis of epilepsy as evidence of abnormal sexual behaviour has gone relatively unexplored. Most major medical texts on epilepsy tended to read John Hughlings Jackson’s pivotal diagnosis of ‘the abnormal liberation of energy in convulsions’ as ‘explosive discharge’56 in an unequivocally sexual manner. Victorian medical discourse laboured to position the epileptic body within the Victorian libidinal economy, establishing insistent associations between bodily expenditure and epilepsy, between the ‘petit mal’ of epileptic seizure and the ‘petit mort’ of orgasm. In the third volume of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex, for instance, Havelock Ellis cites Coelius Aurelianus, one of antiquity’s chief physicians, on the theory that ‘coitus is a brief epilepsy’.57 While Ellis is quickly dismissive of the theory that acts of coitus might contribute to epilepsy, he cites a case recorded by a French physician ‘of a youth in whom the adoption of the practice of masturbation, several times a day, was followed by epileptic attacks which ceased when masturbation was abandoned’.58 Joseph William Howe is far less equivocal in his 1888 text, Excessive Venery, Masturbation and Continence, where he warns that ‘epilepsy is one of the goals towards which all masturbators and libertines are hastening’,59 owing to the ‘over-excitation of the nervous system’ caused by ‘the secret vice’.60 Such attempts to find sexual perversion at the root of neurological dysfunction led many doctors to perform brutal attacks on the sexual pleasure of men and women living with epilepsy. The most notorious case of such abuse is documented in the 1866 monograph, On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy, Catalepsy, and Hysteria in Females, where respected gynaecologist and obstetrical surgeon Isaac Baker Brown, elected President of London’s Medical Society in 1865, provided detailed accounts of clitoridectomies he had been performing upon female patients suffering from seizures and other complaints as a matter of routine for the last few years in his private practice.61 Potassium bromide, the remedy most readily prescribed for epileptic seizures in 1872, would have been available to Collins, but his novel neglects even to mention this treatment as a possibility. And truly, what sensation novelist was ever known to prescribe a bromide when a more spectacular solution could be arranged? Disregarding the anaphrodisiac that would remove Oscar’s desire from the equation, Collins concocts a plot that brings the intersection of disability and sexuality to a head. In doing so, he submits a significant exception to the rule established by Jeannette Stirling in her recent survey of literary and cultural representations of epilepsy.62 Here, Stirling finds a recurring tendency in all the nineteenth-century English and Russian novels she has examined: the common trait of each epileptic character, ‘besides their vulnerability to seizure, is that none is allowed to procreate’ (p. 37). Contemporary medical discourse on epilepsy, particularly the apparent medical consensus that the condition was largely hereditary, could only have compounded this conservative convention by naturalizing the narrative ‘sterilization’ of characters such as Oscar.63 Francis Galton signals his eugenic concerns about epilepsy in Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, stating (falsely) that the condition ‘is a frightful and hereditary disfigurement of humanity, which appears, from the upshot of various conflicting accounts, to be on the increase’.64 It is in this 1884 study that Galton first coins the term ‘eugenics;’ coincidentally, the text also features Galton’s consideration of Poor Miss Finch on the subject of twins and genetic inheritance.65 If the ‘first object’ of eugenics was ‘to check the birth-rate of the Unfit’,66 critical disability studies such as Stirling’s have demonstrated the manner in which Victorian literature anticipates and enacts the eugenic prescriptions of later medical texts, routinely exiling characters with epilepsy to the margins of the marriage plots they inhabit, and often facilitate, but rarely participate in directly. Wilkie Collins’s fiction – which surprisingly falls outside the purview of Stirling’s Victorian study – works against the marginalizing forces of a canon determined, in the language of Galton’s eugenics, ‘to restrict, as much as possible, the marriage of the physically and mentally unfit’.67 Collins’s body of work mounts a series of progressive experiments with the emotional conventions of melodrama, presenting characters with disabilities whose desires direct the novel’s narrative thrust. Poor Miss Finch is a highly original, and deeply conflicted, meditation on the implications of disability, sexuality and visibility. On the one hand, it enlists readers in the surveillance of disability and the ‘policing’ of invisible differences such as epilepsy. (Lucilla’s blindness requires Oscar not only to show his true colours to his fiancée, but also that he name and confess them before marriage.) On the other hand, Lucilla does grow accustomed to the sight of Oscar’s blue complexion and, by the novel’s conclusion, the two are happily married with a number of children. The body of their first-born son, with his ‘round rosy face’ (p. 426), answers the charge of Galton’s eugenics, that disability renders individuals unfit to reproduce. Oscar’s blue motif has been transferred to a more acceptable trait in his son: the child’s ‘bright blue eyes’, now serve to confirm the genetic resolution of Lucilla’s blindness. (There is to be no eugenic cleansing of the romantic plot, but neither will there be any hereditary survival of the fits.) Furthermore, the child’s name, Nugent, honours his uncle’s memory, and implicitly endorses the brothers’ history of counterfeiting of each other. Nugent senior had conspired in Oscar’s attempt to ‘pass’ as a typical body, while Nugent junior marks Oscar’s inconspicuous act of passing into the general circulation of marriage and reproduction, his winding path from unfit, to counterfeit, to fit. DISCLOSURE STATEMENT No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Footnotes 1 Henry Maudsley, Responsibility in Mental Disease (New York, NY: D. Appleton, 1883), p. 243. 2 Maudsley, Responsibility, p. 243. 3 Maudsley, Responsibility, p. 170. 4 On Maudsley’s diagnosis of the ‘epileptic imagination’ in sensation fiction, see Owsei Temkin, The Falling Sickness: A History of Epilepsy from the Greeks to the Beginnings of Modern Neurology, 2nd edn (Baltimore, MD: Hopkins Fulfillment Service, 1994), p. 379. 5 Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004), p. 6. 6 Holmes, Fictions of Affliction, p. 6. 7 On the representation of cataleptic epilepsy in Silas Marner, see Martin Willis, ‘Silas Marner, Catalepsy, and Mid-Victorian Medicine: George Eliot’s Ethics of Care’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 20 (2015), 326–40; Jeff Nunokawa, The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). On epilepsy in Thou Art the Man, see Allen Bauman, ‘Epilepsy, Crime, and Masculinity in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Thou Art the Man’, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 4 (2008), n.p.; Joseph A. Kestner, Sherlock’s Sisters: The British Female Detective, 1864–1913 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). 8 Temkin, The Falling Sickness, p. 10. 9 ‘Unsigned review of Poor Miss Finch’, Saturday Review, 25 August 1860, 249–50 (p. 249). 10 Michael Oliver, The Politics of Disablement: A Sociological Approach (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990). 11 Ellen Samuels, ‘My Body, My Closet: Invisible Disability and the Limits of Coming Out’, in The Disability Studies Reader, ed. by Lennard J. Davis, 4th edn (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), pp. 316–32 (p. 316). 12 Holmes, Fictions of Affliction, p. 192. 13 Wilkie Collins, Poor Miss Finch, ed. by Catherine Peters (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 5. 14 Poor Miss Finch, p. 5. 15 ‘Unsigned review of Poor Miss Finch’, Saturday Review, 25 August 1860, 249–50 (p. 249). 16 Quoted in Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage, ed. by Norman Page (New York, NY: Routledge, 1998), pp. 21–22 (p. 21). 17 Poor Miss Finch, p. 24. Subsequent quotations from the novel will be noted parenthetically. 18 Peter Wolf, ‘Epilepsy and Catalepsy in Anglo-American Literature between Romanticism and Realism: Tennyson, Poe, Eliot and Collins’, Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 9 (2000), 286–93 (p. 292). 19 Laura Fitzpatrick, ‘Pushing Back at Perceptions of Epilepsy: The Interplay between Medicine and Literature in Three 19th-century British Novels’, Hektoen International: A Journal of Medical Humanities, 5.3 (2013). n.p. 20 Wilkie Collins, ‘Dedication’, Poor Miss Finch, p. xl. 21 Thomas Watson, Lectures on the Principles and Practice of Physic, 2 vols, 4th edn (London: John W. Parker, 1857), I, 659. 22 Catherine Peters, ‘Introduction’, Poor Miss Finch, p. xiii. 23 Peters, ‘Introduction’, p. xvi. 24 ‘Unsigned review of Poor Miss Finch’, Nation, 7 March 1872, 158–59 (p. 158). 25 ‘Unsigned review of Poor Miss Finch’, Canadian Monthly & National Review (May 1872), in Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage, ed. by Norman Page, p. 200. 26 Lillian Nayder, ‘Blue Like Me: Wilkie Collins, Poor Miss Finch, and the Construction of Racial Identity’, in Reality’s Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins, ed. by Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2003), pp. 266–82 (p. 270). 27 Nayder, ‘Blue Like Me’, p. 278. 28 Nayder, ‘Blue Like Me’, p. 278. 29 Martha Stoddard Holmes, ‘The Twin Structure: A Disability Studies Approach to Canonic Victorian Literature’, in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, ed. by Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (New York, NY: Modern Language Association, 2002), pp. 222–33 (p. 224). 30 Nayder, ‘Blue Like Me’, pp. 270, 267. 31 Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘Appendix to Currents and Cross-Currents in Medical Science’, The Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, 13 vols (Cambridge: Riverside, 1891), IX, 441–45 (p. 442). 32 Sir John Russell Reynolds, Epilepsy: Its Symptoms, Treatment, and Relation to Other Chronic, Convulsive Diseases (London: John Churchill, 1861), p. 76. 33 Barry Allen, ‘Foucault’s Nominalism’, in Foucault and the Government of Disability, ed. by Shelley Lynn Tremain (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005), pp. 93–107 (p. 93). 34 Robert Francis Murphy, The Body Silent: The Different World of the Disabled (New York, NY: Norton, 2001), p. 140. 35 Reynolds, Epilepsy, p. 122. 36 Mark Mossman, ‘Representations of the Abnormal Body in The Moonstone’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 37 (2009), 483–500 (p. 494). 37 Samuel Lyndon Gladden, ‘Spectacular Deceptions: Closets, Secrets, and Identity in Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 33 (2005), 467–86 (p. 470). 38 William Aitken, Handbook of the Science and Practice of Medicine, 2 vols (London: Charles Griffin, 1857), II, 4. 39 Carlos F. MacDonald, ‘Feigned Epilepsy’, American Journal of Insanity, 37 (1880), 1–22 (p. 2). 40 William Cullen, First Lines of the Practice of Physic, 2 vols (London: Murray, 1808), II, 175. 41 Theodoric Romeyn Beck, Elements of Medical Jurisprudence (Philadelphia, PA: Thomas and Cowperthwait, 1838), pp. 42–45. 42 William Alexander Francis Browne, ‘Epileptics: Their Mental Condition. A Lecture’, Journal of Mental Science, 11 (1865), 336–63 (p. 357). 43 John Hutton Balfour Browne, The Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity (London: Churchill, 1871), p. 275. 44 MacDonald, ‘Feigned Epilepsy’, pp. 21–22. 45 John Ruskin, ‘Fiction Fair and Foul’, The Complete Works of John Ruskin, 26 vols (Philadelphia: Reuwee, Wattley & Walsh, 1891), XVI, pp. 153–219 (166). 46 Ruskin, ‘Fiction Fair and Foul’, p. 164. 47 Ruskin, ‘Fiction Fair and Foul’, p. 161. 48 Gladden, ‘Spectacular Deceptions’, p. 475. 49 John Elliotson, Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Medicine, ed. by John Charles Cooke and Thornton G. Thompson (London: J. F. Moore, 1839), p. 374. 50 Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (London: MacMillan, 1883), p. 65. 51 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 28. 52 Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), p. 95. 53 Holmes, Fictions of Affliction, p. 89. 54 Mervyn J. Eadie and Peter F. Bladin, A Disease Once Sacred: A History of the Medical Understanding of Epilepsy (Bloomington, IN: John Libbey, 2001), p. 201. 55 Charles Locock, ‘Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society’, Medical Times and Gazette, 14, 23 May 1857, 524–26 (p. 525). 56 John Hughlings Jackson, ‘The Lumleian Lectures on Convulsive Seizures’, British Medical Journal, 29 March 1890, 703–7 (p. 703). 57 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex , 7 vols (London: University Press, 1903), III. 58 Ellis, Studies, p. 80. 59 Joseph William Howe, Excessive Venery, Masturbation and Continence: The Etiology, Pathology and Treatment of the Diseases Resulting from Venereal Excesses, Masturbation and Continence (New York, NY: E. B. Treat, 1888), p. 99. 60 Howe, Excessive Venery, pp. 96, 97. 61 On the ways in which much French medical literature of the period came to accept ‘the link between epilepsy and sexual pleasure’ as a simple ‘clinical fact’, see Peter Cryle, ‘The Aesthetics of the Spasm’, Sexuality at the Fin-de-Siècle: The Makings of a Central ‘Problem’, ed. by Peter Cryle and Christopher E. Forth (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2008), pp. 77–92 (p. 83). 62 Jeannette Stirling, Representing Epilepsy: Myth and Matter (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010). 63 While Reynolds notes ‘conflicting opinions among authors’ (Epilepsy, p. 122), he maintains: ‘the current belief among ancient writers, and among many at the present day, is that epilepsy is pre-eminently an hereditary affection’ (Epilepsy, p. 123). 64 Galton, Inquiries, p. 66. 65 Galton, ‘History of Twins’, Inquiries, p. 223. 66 Francis Galton, Memories of My Life (London: Methuen, 1908), p. 323. 67 Francis Galton and others, ‘Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope, and Aims’, The American Journal of Sociology, 10.1 (1904), 1–19 (p. 19). © 2019 Leeds Trinity University This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Fit and Counterfeit: The Volatile Values of Epilepsy in Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch
JF - Journal of Victorian Culture
DO - 10.1093/jvcult/vcz001
DA - 2019-12-06
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/fit-and-counterfeit-the-volatile-values-of-epilepsy-in-wilkie-collins-oWfxbj5WCD
SP - 535
VL - 24
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
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