Literature of Exhaustion: Representations of Mental Fatigue in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s „Against Nature" and Wilkie Collins’s „The Woman in White"
Abstract
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
mental fatigue; exhaustion; neurasthenia; Beard; Huysmans; Collins
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University of Silesia in Katowice Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3155-7624
Małgorzata Nitka, Associate Professor in the Institute of Literary Studies, University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. Her research interests cover English literature and culture of the 19th century, particularly social and cultural aspects of the Industrial Revolution. Her major publication in this field is Railway Defamiliarisation. The Rise of Passengerhood in the Nineteenth Century (2006), an analysis of cultural changes following the development of the railway in the 19th century. She also published articles on Charles Dickens, George Gissing, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Reade, and Anthony Trollope as well as Andrew Ure. Her most recent work concerns the representation of the suburbs in Wilkie Collins’s fiction.
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