Rachel Conrad Bracken is Assistant Professor of Family and Community Medicine at Northeast Ohio Medical University. As a scholar of US literature and the health humanities, Bracken explores the intersections of literature and public health at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as contemporary speculative fiction, medical technology, and the rhetoric surrounding pediatric vaccination. Her academic analysis “Diagnosing the ‘American Girl’: Henry James's Daisy Miller as a Study in Illness Narrative” appears in the Fall 2019 Intima.
Whether formally written and published or only ever shared with our most trusted confidants—perhaps never even uttered aloud at all—narratives structure our understanding of the world and of our selves. As stories of cause and effect, these narratives ground us in time and space, establishing the who, what, when, and why of our most significant life events and shared, social histories. This is especially true of illness narratives.
Indeed, “we seek ways to create a coherent narrative out of trauma, illness, or injury—the ‘tick’—this happened, which causes the expectation of the ‘tock’—then that happened,” Josephine Ensign writes in “Witness: On Telling” (Fall 2017 Intima).
It is this urge to “create a coherent narrative,” to determine the specific “tick” that occasions the “tock” of Daisy’s illness and subsequent death from malaria, that motivates Henry James’s late nineteenth-century novella Daisy Miller, I argue in “Diagnosing the ‘American Girl’: Henry James's Daisy Miller as a Study in Illness Narrative” (Fall 2019). The question that lies just beneath the surface of Ensign’s essay and my own, however, is “who are these illness narratives really for?” Who benefits, that is, from the narration of direct, linear causality in stories of illness, health, trauma, death, and/or recovery? Ensign’s essay traces how her own illness narrative, the story she tells to herself and to others about mental illness and recovery, shifts through time. Ensign consciously reframes her narrative to serve different purposes, demonstrating how her story can function (following Arthur Frank’s taxonomy) as restitution, quest, or chaos, in turn.
A similar pattern emerges in James’s Daisy Miller, I observe, as Daisy’s friends and family offer up retrospective rationales for her death. These explanatory illness narratives are not neutral, I contend, but rather illuminate gender, class, and ethnocentric biases—“story happens within a social context, and story takes on social functions,” Ensign likewise notes. Thus, in probing how and why we tell stories about sickness and health in the ways that we do, both Ensign’s essay and my own draw attention to the function of what I refer to as “meta-narratives of illness”: illness narratives about the construction of illness narratives. The crucial difference between Ensign’s meta-narrative of illness and the novella Daisy Miller, however, is that Ensign is permitted to tell her own story and, in so doing, to reject linear narratives of causality in favor of fragmented chaos. “This [type of] illness narrative feels the closest to conveying the truth of my experience,” Ensign explains, but it “requires more effort on the part of readers, of listeners, of healthcare providers…to be able to listen to, to hear, these stories.”
Ensign’s own meta-narrative of illness leaves me to wonder, what would Daisy’s illness narrative look like if she could tell it herself? How would this story change if it were by and for Daisy, rather than to establish a comforting sense of causality or coherence for anyone else? Neither Winterbourne’s neat formula, nor Mrs. Walker’s formulaic morality tale, who would that story serve?
Rachel Conrad Bracken is Assistant Professor of Family and Community Medicine at Northeast Ohio Medical University. She received her PhD in literature from Rice University in Houston, Texas, where she was affiliated with the Centers for Critical and Cultural Theory and the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. As a scholar of US literature and the health humanities, Bracken explores the intersections of literature and public health at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as contemporary speculative fiction, medical technology, and the rhetoric surrounding pediatric vaccination. Bracken’s research appears or is forthcoming in English Language Notes (ELN), Public: Art | Culture | Ideas, Big Data and Society, Hektoen International: A Journal of Medical Humanities, and the collection Transforming Contagion: Risky Contacts among Bodies, Disciplines, and Nations (Rutgers UP, 2018).
© 2019 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine