Illness as Character as Metaphor

Abstract: This essay takes the fictionalization of illness as an illustrative case study to explore certain limits in character studies, namely insufficient discussion of focalization and metaphor. Engaging four novels—Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801), Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811), Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and James's The Wings of the Dove (1902)—it retheorizes a character's narratological import to account for other characters' actions, attentions, and rhetoric. It also ventures a literary historical point: that over the nineteenth century, illness evolves from an unspoken factor in the marriage plot into the expressed basis for a mortality plot.