Jane Austen and the nervous temperament

Austens novels provide a focus on illness, in particular on the fashionable nervous disorders of this period. This thesis will offer a new interpretation, arguing that Austens interest in nervous disorders reflects her engagement with the issue of gender, as demonstrated in my analysis of the three novels: Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Persuasion. Austen challenges contemporary medical conceptions of the mind, brain and nervous system as gendered; the assumptions that the male is aligned with reason, intellectual prowess and strength, and the female with emotion, irrationality and weakness specifically manifested in a susceptibility to the nervous disorder of hysteria, suffered almost exclusively by women and famously characterised by Michel Foucault the hysterization of womens bodies. Austen, in Persuasion, challenges both female hysteria and male melancholia, connected to intense thought and inspiration through higher powers of intellect or genius, and typically found in literary men. My analysis is in the context of Thomas Trotters A View of the Nervous Temperament (1807). Austens challenge to male superior intellect is implicit in each novel, and particularly relevant to a female writer, who, like her character Anne Elliot, is aware of her own high intellect or seniority of mind, and also acknowledged a real judgement of her own powers. Austens initial mockery of her mothers illness is reflected in the summary dismissal of Mrs Bennets nervous disorder in Pride and Prejudice. However, evidence presented here demonstrates that Austen has depicted a character whose illness may in fact be real, and could now be interpreted as a mental disorder. Austens changing attitude to nervous illness is revealed in her letters from 1813 and in her later novels. Whilst there is no evidence that Austen had read Trotters work, aspects of his findings on nervous illness are explored in Emma and in her new emphasis in Persuasion on unconscious mental processes, and reveals her increasingly complex awareness and sophisticated representation of the interactions between mind and body in illness. Thus this thesis offers a re-examination of Austens response to nervous disorders within the context of medical and biographical history and cognitive science, and demonstrates, through an analysis of her writing, her challenging contribution to gender discourses of the period, and to fictional representations of consciousness