Colds and Carbuncles

Towards the end of Modernism and Physical Illness, Peter Fifield sketches out an early plan for the book: each chapter would be structured around a specific illness or disease in modernist literature, beginning with depictions of cancer, and moving through consumption and venereal disease before concluding, somewhat bathetically, with colds. Fifield’s outline of the book he didn’t write is key to understanding the one he did, for this is a study that seeks to resist the lure of a medicalized account of illness, where physical symptoms are sorted into specific pathologies, and where bodily experiences that do not fit existing categories tend to be overlooked or dismissed. Focusing on the work of five canonical and lesser-known British writers – Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Richardson, and Winifred Holtby – Fifield’s compelling and highly readable study uncovers a more varied and ‘generatively textured’ (3) account of ill health in the early twentieth century that is brought to the fore by modernism’s emphasis on embodied subjectivity, relationality, and non-normative experience. Fifield’s book joins a number of recent studies – including Maren Tova Linett’s Bodies of Modernism (2016) and Elizabeth Outka’s Viral Modernism (2019) – in seeking to counteract the dominant emphasis in modernist studies on mental as opposed to physical illness. Yet while the former text is focused on particular disabilities – blindness, deafness, mobility impairments – and the latter explores the cultural, social, and aesthetic aftermath of a particular illness event, the 1918 influenza pandemic, Modernism and Physical Illness is concerned with ‘small stories of fictional and actual individuals laid-up and struck down’ (26) with fevers and coughs, toothaches and skin conditions. Indeed, Fifield’s study begins, rather than ends, with a cold, the famous sniffle experienced by Madame Sosostris in The Waste Land – a detail that not only highlights ‘the mundane grubbiness of everyday modernity’ (1), but which also exemplifies modernism’s mixing of the high and the low, the sacred and the profane, the intellect and the body. This is not to say that the study is concerned only with Peter Fifield, Modernism and Physical Illness: Sick Books, Oxford University Press, 2020, 272 pp., £80 hardback, 9780198825425