Literature of Exhaustion: Representations of Mental Fatigue in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s „Against Nature" and Wilkie Collins’s „The Woman in White"

• Authors: Małgorzata Nitka

Title variants

PL

Literatura wyczerpania. Obrazy neurastenii w „Na wspak" Jorisa Karla Huysmansa oraz „Kobiecie w bieli" Wilkiego Collinsa

Abstracts

EN

A phenomenon known well before the onset of modern society, registered as a medical term not until the second half of the 19th century, when physiologists and psychologists inquired into physical and mental exhaustion resulting from excessive work as well as that which had no work-related etiology. Such condition of the severe mental fatigue which entailed deficiency of nerve-force was defined by American neurologist George M. Beard as neurasthenia. Taking into account scientific studies of enervation, the article examines some late 19th-century literary treatments of exhaustion in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White to present them as peculiar, decontextualized cases of exhaustion for exhaustion’s sake.

Keywords

PL

przemęczenie psychiczne; wyczerpanie; neurastenia; Beard; Huysmans; Collins

EN

mental fatigue; exhaustion; neurasthenia; Beard; Huysmans; Collins

• Publisher: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego w Katowicach / Śląsk Sp. z o.o. Wydawnictwo Naukowe
• Journal: ER(R)GO: Teoria – Literatura – Kultura
• Year: 2023
• Issue: 46
• Pages: 169-183

Dates

published

2023

Contributors

author

Małgorzata Nitka

• Uniwersytet Śląski w Katowicach

• https://orcid.org/0000000231557624

References

• Allbutt, Clifford T. “Nervous Diseases and Modern Life.” Contemporary Review, no. 67 (1895): 210–231.
• Beard, George M. American Nervousness, Its Causes and Consequences. A Supplement to Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia). New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1881. https://archive.org/details/americannervous00beargoog/mode/2up (2.02.2021).
• Beard, George M. A Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia), edited by A. D. Rockwell. New York: E. B. Treat, 1894. https://archive.org/details/apracticaltreat03beargoog/mode/2up (2.02.2021).
• Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002.
• Briggs Asa. Victorian Things. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988.
• Collins, Richard. “Marian’s Moustache. Bearded Ladies, Hermaphrodites, and Intersexual Collage in The Woman in White.” In Reality’s Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins, edited by Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox, 131–172. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2003.
• Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White, edited by John Sutherland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Greg, W. R. “Life at High Pressure.” In Literary and Social Judgments, vol. II, 262–288. London: Trübner & Co., 1877.
• Houghton, Walter E. The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957.
• Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Against Nature (À Rebours). Translated by Robert Baldick. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2003.
• Jordanova, Ludmilla. “‘A Slap in the Face for Old Mother Nature’: Disease, Debility, and Decay in Huysmans’s À Rebours.” Literature and Medicine, no. 15.1 (1996): 112–128.
• Joteyko, Josefa. The Science of Labour and Its Organisation. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1919. https://archive.org/details/scienceoflabouri00joteuoft/mode/2up (2.02.2021).
• McGuiness, Patrick. “Introduction.” In Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature (À Rebours). Translated by Robert Baldick, xiii–xxxvi. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2003.
• McIvor, A. J. “Employers, the Government, and Industrial Fatigue in Britain, 1890–1918.” British Journal of Industrial Medicine, vol. 44, no. 11 (1987): 724–732. https://doi.org/10.2307/27726482.
• Moore, H. F. The Fatigue of Metals. With Chapters on the Fatigue of Wood and of Concrete. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1927. http://www.archive.org/stream/fatigueofmetals00moor/ (28.01.2013).
• Pykett, Lyn. “Collins and the Sensation Novel.” In The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins, edited by Jenny Bourne Taylor, 50–64. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• Rabinbach, Anson. The Human Motor. Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
• Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey. Trains and Travel in the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Anselm Hollo. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980.
• Sennett, Richard. Flesh and Stone. London: Faber and Faber, 1996.
• Symons, Arthur. “The Decadent Movement in Literature.” In Victorian Prose. An Anthology, edited by Rosemary J. Mundhenk and LuAnn McCracken Fletcher, 449–454. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
• Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2003.

Identifiers

DOI

10.31261/errgo.11545

Biblioteka Nauki

26058127