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Maria H. Frawley. Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. viii + 292 pp. 111. $39.00, £27.50 (0-226-26120-4).
Robert Louis Stevenson, a chronic invalid, observed that illness exposed "the real knot of our identity, that central metropolis of self, of which alone we are immediately aware"; taking a slightly different perspective, Thomas Carlyle proclaimed that "self-contemplation ... is infallibly the symptom of disease." These two statements, both quoted by Maria H. Frawley (p. 61), suggest the often conflicting attitudes toward suffering and subjectivity in nineteenth-century British culture, and the ways in which invalidism came to be seen as not just a physical condition but also a distinct identity with access to "special kinds of imeriority made possible by suffering" (p. 62). Frawley excels in charting the social boundaries, conventions, anxieties, and self-fashionings of this "invalid identity." She examines the different genres of invalid narrative, drawing upon a wide variety of literature produced by Victorian invalids themselves, including essays, memoirs, advice books, religious and inspirational tracts, confessional literature, and travel guides. Arguing that invalidism offered special kinds of narrative authority, she identifies some of the common (and occasionally contradictory) rhetorical features, assumptions about audience, and attitudes toward sickness and...