"Doleful ditties" and Stories of Survival — Narrative Approaches to Breast Cancer in Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth and Susan Sontag

Abstract

The article looks at two early nineteenth-century narratives concerned with breast cancer and reads them in the context of Susan Sontag's twentieth-century analysis of the cultural and linguistic over-determination of illness. Frances Burney's "mastectomy letter" (1812) is an early example of a patient's narrative which uses the discursive conventions of sentimental fiction to achieve female empowerment. By contrast, Maria Edgeworth moralizes illness in her novel Belinda (1801) and uses it as a cultural metaphor. While Edgeworth's and Burney's narratives share the historical moment of a shift in illness attitudes and in the technologies of
medical diagnosis in the early nineteenth century, Susan Sontag, in her essay Illness as Metaphor (1978), analyses the articulation of an idea of individual illness as a hostile burdening of the individual person with guilt and responsibility. From a transhistorical perspective, all three texts provide further insights into the generic and gendered differences of illness experience and meanings.