本文是一篇英语论文，本文试从小说中的疾病现象入手，将《玛丽·巴顿》置于历史语境中，从病理学角度分析小说所展现的身体疾病与社会疾病，探究疾病的成因，并结合马克思主义理论分析疾病难以治愈的原因。
Chapter One Theoretical Framework
1.1 Rise of Literary Pathological Criticism
In the 1970s, literature courses were introduced into U.S. medical schools. It is intended not only to help physicians enrich their moral education so that they can develop skills in the human dimensions of medical practice but also to increase physicians’ narrative competence, to interpret the texts of medicine accurately, to provide empathy, and to foster a tolerance for the uncertainties of clinical practice. By including the study of literature in medical education, physicians can get more concrete and powerful experience about the lives of sick people through the literary accounts of illness, which helps physicians provide more targeted and personalized treatment to their patients. Moreover, great works about medicine enable physicians to understand the value and meaning of what they do, which contributes to their professional development. At the beginning of this century, literature was taught in almost three quarters of U.S. medical schools. After decades of practice, the field of literature and medicine have become vibrant and developed even further.
英语论文参考
In fact, in the early twentieth century, as the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud made significant contributions to psychopathology, his theories began to have a lasting effect on literary criticism. Freud’s psychoanalytical theories, including the idea of the unconscious, theories of sexuality, the Oedipus complex, etc., have been used to interpret literary works. Therefore, the interaction between psychopathology and literature has gradually increased. In addition, influenced by the deconstructionism, postmodernism, feminism, and postcolonialism that have emerged and developed since the 1960s, literary criticism has given more and more attention to marginalized people, including disadvantaged groups, homosexual groups, disabled groups and pathological people.
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1.2 Key Terms of Literary Pathological Criticism
In literary pathological studies, some key terms including “body,” “disease” and “cure” are used in interpreting texts. Before analysis, it is necessary to clarify the following key terms which will be used in this thesis.
The discussion of the concept of the word “body” has a long history that can be traced to the ancient Greek period. The philosophers in Ancient Greece were keen to explore the body, the soul, and their relation. In Pheado Plato first discussed the problem of the soul-body relation. He was concerned with the conflict and strife between the body and the soul. According to Plato, the body is “a hindrance for the rational capacity of the soul” (Karasmanis 1). Whereas his student Aristotle rethought the meaning of the body on the basis of this antagonistic soul-body relation. In contrast to his teacher, Aristotle emphasized the necessity for the union of the two. He held that the human body and the soul were inseparable. The body was not the enemy of the soul, and only through the body could the soul function (Porter 21).
By the Middle Ages, the meaning of the body was heavily influenced by religion, especially Catholicism. Influenced by Plato’s idea of soul-body relation, St. Augustine (354-430), one of the most significant Christian thinkers, regarded the body as a prison of the soul. For him, the soul was the master of the body, which is to say the soul could dominate the body, and the body was just a tool for the soul to function. As the dualistic ontologies of soul or mind over body permeated the Christian system of thought, the common perception in the Christian world at that time was that the material world to which the human body belonged was dominated by Satan and was intrinsically evil. Therefore, man must reject all sensual pleasures in life and torture his body so that his soul could finally be free from the bonds of the flesh and he could achieve salvation and eternal life. Hence asceticism prevailed for a long time, and a great number of activities related to the body were rejected during this period.
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Chapter Two Disease Symptoms in Mary Barton
2.1 Situation of Victorian Public Health and Social Reality
In the early nineteenth century, with the accelerate of industrialization and urbanization, emerging cities were so young and vital. By that time, cities replaced the countryside as the main part of Britain’s economic life. According to statistics, in 1800 there was no giant city in Britain with a population of 100,000 or more; by 1837, when Queen Victoria came to the throne, there were five, and by 1891, there were 23 (Briggs 59). However, the lack of planning and public facilities combined with the incredible population explosion in cities caused a health crisis. This crisis witnessed the deterioration of public health environment and the spread of epidemics.
The rapid population growth was directly responsible for the housing shortage in cities. The city streets were winding and narrow, and housing was overcrowded because of lack of planning for urban development and construction. Furthermore, any measure to improve housing conditions would mean an increase in rents, which workers could not afford at that time. Therefore, the only way to make working-class accommodationprofitable was overcrowding. In those emerging industrial cities such as Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester, workers’ housing was arranged in a particularly crowded way. In Condition of the Working Class in England Friedrich Engels describes the dwellings of workers in detail:
Every great city has one or more slums, where the working-class is crowded together. …These slums are pretty equally arranged in all the great towns of England, the worst houses in the worst quarters of the towns; usually one- or two-storied cottages in long rows, perhaps with cellars used as dwellings, almost always irregularly built. …The streets are generally unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and animal refuse, without sewers or gutters, but supplied with foul, stagnant pools instead. (70)
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2.2 Symptoms of Both Physical and Social Diseases in Mary Barton
The first half of Mary Barton is filled with diseases and death. At the beginning of this story, the heroine’s mother Mrs. Barton dies in childbirth, and the whole family is immersed in grief, which sets a melancholy and disturbing tone for the whole story. Later in the story, the depiction of various diseases of characters, including bodily diseases and mental diseases, is pervasive.
John Barton’s young son dies prematurely because he is not nourished in time after being attacked by scarlet fever. Barton is unemployed and failed to find the next job for several weeks because of the depression of trade. And he does not have much savings and has to live on credit. Therefore, Barton is unable to provide the little poor boy with good medical care or even nutritious food to strengthen his body, which eventually leads to his death.
Davenport, a former colleague of Barton’s friend Wilson, contracts typhus fever which was prevalent in Manchester in the early- to mid- nineteenth century. During an attack, the patient cannot stop shaking, talking nonsense, yelling and moaning. It is thought that typhus is “brought on by miserable living, filthy neighborhood, and great depression of mind and body” (Gaskell 59). Once the poor get this disease, they will certainly die because “in their crowded dwellings no invalid can be isolated” (Ibid.). In the novel, Davenport eventually dies because he fails to get timely treatment.
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Chapter Three Causes of Diseases in Mary Barton ........................... 23
3.1 Unhealthy Economy and Epidemic Diseases in Early Victorian England .... 23
3.2 Physical Diseases as Consequence of Economic Crisis in Mary Barton ....... 25
3.3 Social Disease Caused by Economic Crisis in the Story ................................. 27
Chapter Four Means of Alleviation to Physical Diseases in Mary Barton................ 30
4.1 Alcohol as a Method of Palliation .................................. 30
4.2 Opium as a Means of Relief ............................ 32
4.3 “Bloodletting” as a Way of Alleviation .............................. 34
Chapter Five Early Victorian Society’s Anxiety on Class Conflict .......................... 3
5.1 “Bloodletting” as Metaphor for a Cure of Class Conflict ................................ 37
5.2 Gaskell’s Prescription for Economic Problems............................ 39
5.3 Her Contemporaries’ Uncertainty over Class Conflict ........................ 41
Chapter Five Early Victorian Society’s Anxiety on Class Conflict
5.1 “Bloodletting” as Metaphor for a Cure of Class Conflict
The assassination of Henry Carson in the story is based on an unsolved murder occurred in Manchester in 1831 namely the killing of Thomas Ashton of Hyde. It was thought that Thoms Ashton, the son of a wealthy cotton spinner, was shot by three unseen men in revenge for the lowering of their wages. Gaskell uses this case in Mary Barton with linking “master’s immorality” and “union violence” by having Henry Carson as both “seducer of Mary Barton and victim of her father’s violence” (Easson 72). From the standpoint of the working class, it is the immorality of the middle class that makes their lives miserable. In order to eliminate the negative effects of this immorality on the health of society such as class conflict, a “cure” needs to be imposed on the middle class in some way.
In the previous chapter, “bloodletting” is explored as a way to mitigate the risk that Henry Carson’s “bad blood” further infects the outside world. Indeed, “bleeding” him is equivalent to “bleeding” the middle class for the reason that Henry Carson is thesecond generation of the middle class. And class conflict is a symptom of the diseased relationship between the two classes, and the middle class is to blame for it in the workers’ view. Therefore, it is necessary for the factory workers to “bleed” the middle class to improve the “health” of class relations, which means that “bloodletting” here is a metaphor for a cure of class conflict.
英语论文怎么写
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Conclusion
Mary Barton is a work about people in the particular context of social unrest, and it offers valuable insights into Victorian society in the 1830s and 1840s. Elizabeth Gaskell has made remarkable depictions of the lives of working classes suffering of poor, disease and death during the time. It is obvious that Gaskell, by depicting characters plagued by diseases and their hardship, shows the reader a society that is diseased and needs to be cured. It should be noticed that the disease of the working class is actually a manifestation of social disease. In other words, the physical disease of the working class is a metaphor for the threat to the health of the social body. And the social disease in the novel mainly refers to the huge discrepancy between the rich and the poor and the class conflict it caused in early Victorian society.
Social diseases, like physical diseases, have their causes. According to Gaskell’s description of the social condition at that time and the historical background, it is clear that the social disease of the time is inseparable from economic factors. In Mary Barton, the economic recession results in massive unemployment, and the ensuing starvation, disease and death ravage the society. When the working class witness the disparity between their living conditions and those of their masters, their hatred of the middle class is aroused, which eventually leads to conflicts. Outwardly, constant economic crises exposed the huge gap between the rich and the poor at the time and eventually intensified the conflicts between the working class and the middle class. In fact, according to Marx, class conflict is an inevitable result of capitalist economic development and a product of private property ownership. In other words, the social disease of class conflict is inherent in capitalist society, and economic crisis is just one of its triggers.
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