12 - Bodily Narratives: Illness, Medicine and Healing in Middle English Romance

Summary

Among the motifs that approach, call into question and transgress the boundaries of romance are illness, medicine and healing. They can mark dramatic narrative shifts and elicit new modes of understanding, recalling the fragility of the human, but also proving individual strength, and gesturing towards the boundary between life and death. They also stand at the boundaries of romance in their links to other discourses: natural philosophy, medical writing, theology and other literary genres, in particular devotional writing and hagiography. The limits to human intervention in illness in this period, and the enigmatic nature of sickness and cure, illuminate the powerful role of destiny or providence in human existence, but also encourage responses that draw on alternative, illicit powers. In the sphere of folk belief particularly, magic and medicine blur. Romance provides a space in which these various aspects of illness, medicine and healing come into play: writers imaginatively engage with the actuality of such experiences, with the moral and providential questions they evoke, and with their potential for transformation of different kinds. Written on the body of the sufferer, the process of sickness and health becomes a narrative of affective and didactic power.

Michel Foucault in his study of the history of madness writes memorably of ‘the lyric glow of illness’. From the classical period onwards, illness has figured in literature as a heightened or transitional state that opens the way for the creative act, or as a state of intensity in which the sufferer is taken out of himself, paradoxically to come to a new state of self-realisation or understanding of the world. This is most evident in classical representations of madness as divine frenzy. Thus in Plato's Ion, Socrates famously persuades the rhapsode that his poetry results not from reason and learning, but from the madness of divine inspiration. The notion is sustained in medieval depictions of love-madness: Troilus's passion for Criseyde, for instance, is reflected in his composition of lyric poetry. Medieval writers also play on the connection between madness, penance and self-realisation in their portrayals of Nebuchadnezzar and of the great Arthurian knights, Yvain, Launcelot, Tristan.4 In the post-medieval period, the association between madness and creativity is disturbingly present in the poetry of Smart, Cowper, Blake, Clare, and later Lowell, Berryman and Plath. But illness more generally can fuel the creative imagination and play an epiphanic role in literature.