Symptoms of Insurrection: Contagion, Disease, and Social Disorder in Maria Edgeworth's Ennui
Central to the biopolitics of Edgeworth’s novels and her conception of society is a model of health that can be attributed to or shared with her physician brother-in-law, Thomas Beddoes. In his Hygëia; Or, Essays Moral and Medical, on the Causes Affecting the Personal State of our Middling and Affluent Classes (1802), Beddoes lays out a view of health primarily ‘an object of regulation’. Understanding the doctor to function as a sort of moral guardian, Beddoes’s conception of health ‘promote[s] activities that lead people toward healthy, cohesive experiences, and to suppress those that have the unhealthy effect of dissolving the relations he holds to be vital to physical, ethical, and social health. The greatest threat to the healthy society, therefore, is any kind of dissolution of the static order of relations into fluidity melting the hierarchical alignment of social members. This conception of health not only establishes the parallels between moral and physiological health that shape the critique and representation of society in Ennui, but, more importantly, it enacts the type of social surveillance that Edgeworth sees as key to maintaining the social health of the body politic. Drawing on the biopolitics of Beddoes, Edgeworth’s novel uses the language of infection and contagion to describe the threat of rebellion and insurrection amongst the broader body politic, associating it specifically with an ‘improper’ body, in order to underscore the need for a biopolitical regime that surveys and manages these potential feverish outbreaks.
Bio: Matthew L. Reznicek is Associate Professor of English and Medical Humanities at Creighton University, where he holds joint appointments in the College of Arts and Sciences and in the School of Medicine. He has published widely on the relationship between gender, illness, and citizenship in early nineteenth-century fiction. His teaching draws on the capacity of literature to reveal developments in medicine and politics, as well as the capacity to represent the social determinants of health. He is Associate Editor of The Journal of Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine and serves as the Vice President of the American Conference for Irish Studies. Today's seminar comes from research for his second monograph, Healing the Nation: Gender and Medicine in the Romantic National Tale.
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