On Tuesday, when I posted an entry on the propensity of Ann Radcliffe heroines to faint at the most inopportune moments, I got about 15 replies. Of course, only one of them was on this blog: the rest were scattered about Facebook and Twitter (which is what comes of social media cross-promotion, I suppose!), but it was a very intelligent conversation, so I’d like to write a follow-up, including some of the comments and responding to them.
But first, a hilarious example from Udolpho:
[The invalid St. Aubert] bade the muleteer stop; and, pronouncing the name of Valancourt, was answered in a voice, that no longer suffered him to doubt. St. Aubert, who instantly alighted an went to his assistance, found him still sitting on his horse, but bleeding profusely, and appearing to be in great pain, though he endeavoured to soften the terror of St. Aubert by assurances that he was not materially hurt, the wound being only in his arm. St. Aubert, with the muleteer, assisted him to dismount, and he sat down on the bank of the road, where St. Aubert tried to bind up his arm, but his hands trembled so excessively that he could not accomplish it; and [the muleteer] being now gone in pursuit of the horse, which, on being disengaged from his rider, had galloped off, he called Emily to his assistance. Receiving no answer, he went to the carriage, and found her sunk on the seat in a fainting fit. Between the distress of this circumstance and that of leaving Valancourt bleeding, he scarcely knew what he did; he endeavoured, however, to raise her, and called to Michael to fetch water from the rivulet that flowed by the road, but Michael was gone beyond the reach of his voice.
This scene continues on for awhile, but I think you get the idea.
So, there were about three kinds of reply I got to the post.
The first had to do with medical condition, and it came from NF:
It could be medical. Remember, heroines of old were pale, thin and sickly looking. They might have TB or some other disease that was thought to be associated with ‘sensitivity’ and the female constitution.
But, it bears keeping in mind that …women tend to have a naturally lower BP then men.I know several ladies (myself included) with low enough BP to pass out at the drop of a hat. This actually can be seen as a survival advantage (rather than a disadvantage as you suggest) since we preserve blood flow to the brain, the most important organ we have.
Yes and no… Radcliffe’s novels are littered with sickly people (being described as “languid” is typically a death sentence), but interestingly her heroines are invariably healthy. They like spending a lot of time outside and engaged in physical activity, and rarely have any signs of illness. The question of blood-pressure makes sense in light of the second group of comments (see below), but I don’t think it conveys a survival advantage… unless by giving dashing young heroes an opportunity to rush in and save the day, and even they are not always available. In more than one case, the swooning happens on the point of assault, when the heroine is on the verge of calling for help, or on the point of escape, as in this scene from Romance of the Forest:
[Theodore] sprang forwards towards the room where Adeline remained, and while a serjeant and corporal followed him to the door, the two soldiers went out into the yard of the inn, to watch the windows of the apartment. With an eager hand he unclosed the door, but Adeline hastened not to meet him, for she had fainted almost at the beginning of the dispute.
The second group of replies was by far the most numerous, pointing out the corset as the culprit.
JBL writes:
Well, women DID faint a lot more then, because they were required to wear corsets, which do really bad things for your circulation, breathing, AND digestion. So I don’t know if it’s necessarily anti-feminist to have women fainting all the time, given that they were, in fact, required to wear that shit for a long, long time. Not knowing the books in question or when it happens, I may be off here.
MJ says:
I wonder whether fashion history might help illuminate the problem of Radcliff’s heroines’ excessive swooning: at the time when she wrote and published her novels, corsets were worn still, which meant that a corset would be tightened on a woman until she fainted and then loseened just enough for her to be able to take tiny shallow breath and stay sort of conscious, but constantly in danger of hyperventilatig, especially at moments of distress. After the French Revolution, a new radical idea of women’s clothing brifly reigned supreme – the empire-waists and all, which allowed women to breathe and move about freely -and happened to coincide with the time Austen’s novels were published…
This argument is intriguing for a couple reasons. First because it posits an answer that I hadn’t considered: that Radcliffe’s heroines (who, like Jane Austen’s characters, are typically financially-stricken members of the gentry) pass out and that this is an accurate portrayal of things.
I am familiar with the becorseted times and implications… but I still can’t completely commit to this explanation because activities that would seem far more strenuous (like fleeing through a forest from a band of mercenary pursuers) would be far more likely to cause exhaustion and unconsciousness than, say, hearing a gunshot. If the second would bring on a swoon, than the first definitely would, right?
But I don’t know whether corsets were more being omitted from novels by the time Jane Austen was writing… anyone care to help me out on that? For that matter, none of Radcliffe’s novels took place in England of her time. They were typically set in France or Italy during the 16th and 17th centuries… she might have presumed a more restrictive dress than she encountered in her daily life, in keeping with the medieval stylings of her prose. That said, Radcliffe never directly explains a swoon by way of clothing. It’s always a moment of intense emotion or impropriety.
At the very least, if Radcliffe knew fainting to be common among the women she knew, it would make sense that she would include it selectively as a way to heighten dramatic tension; to put her heroes and heroines in a more compromising position, and to keep information from both protagonists and readers.
The third kind of comment came from AL, and it was probably the most intriguing of all to me:
I remember that both Oliver Twist and David Copperfield fainted at moments of high emotion (Oliver Twist in particular seemed to keel over at the drop of a hat) and even Rochester in Jane Eyre almost faints when Jane returns (if I remember …correctly). So fainting isn’t an exclusively feminine gesture.
I read fainting in 19th century novels as a a tool for establishing character – fainting seems to code as high status, sensitive or artistic personality, and moral blamelessness – and think it’s best understood as an act somewhat under autonomous control (like crying) that no longer carries the same expressive significance as it once did.
It completely works as a general observation. At the same time, there is something in this comment that could be absolutely directed at Radcliffe’s writings in particular. Addressing a slightly different point — that of “sympathetic imagination” — Terry Castle writes: “to be a Radcliffean hero or heroine means… to be ‘haunted’ by the spectral images of those one loves.” Alternately, “the cruel and the dull… have no such hallucinations.”
While it is true that heroines faint in moments of high emotion while heroes do not, it is also noteworthy that antagonists (both male and female) never faint. If we consider, as AL suggests, fainting as a symptom of a refined sensibility, and if apathy and distance is the defining quality of a Radcliffean villain, then it stands to reason that fainting is a sign of love and consideration; that they are so alive with empathy that they short-circuit physically. In the generation of Mary Wollstonecraft this isn’t exactly a cutting edge feminist idea, but at least it gives more meaning and context to the swooning than simple physical weakness.
As I stated before, I don’t think Radcliffe can be called either decisively feminist or anti-feminist, even by standards of her own day. Her Gothicism deliberately plays up the courtly love ideal in which every worthy maiden wants and needs a valiant hero to rescue her. At the same time, the worthy heroes are themselves quite flawed. Radcliffe’s heroines are stubborn, resourceful, and careful to guard their property as closely as their reputations. They often possess a common sense about society and fortune that their paramours lack. There’s both a lot to admire and a lot that is off-putting from a 21st century perspective, and the combination of the two is frequently jarring.
But I do think that this conversation has enhanced my understanding of the role fainting plays in her work, and what a rich and complex problem it is, in and of itself.
“But I don’t know whether corsets were more being omitted from novels by the time Jane Austen was writing… anyone care to help me out on that?”
Corsets were a staple of women’s wardrobe throughout both Radcliffe’s and Austen’s writing period; styles certainly changed, but women didn’t stop wearing them until the 1920’s.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corset#History
I suspect that the relative scarcity of swoons in Austen as compared to Radcliffe comes down to a difference of literary rather than sartorial style, in that the gothic novel tends to sensationalize emotion while Austen’s brand of society novel embodies the same understated wit that its characters practice upon each other. It’s also consistent with the late 18th century understanding of the bodies that finely wrought sensibilities would better translate the motions of the mind into motions within the body.
I also wonder whether the swoons of sentimental fiction are very much different from the black-outs that plague hard-boiled heroes. That is, I wonder how often fainting is a mode of narrative feinting, as it were, both a means of punctuating high points and of shutting down scenes before too much is revealed or characters before their emotional display crosses the boundary between high drama and maudlin excess. If one can learn anything about 19th century fiction from contemporary college parties, it’s that passing out is an adventitious species of tact. Then the subject of literary sleep disorders reaches another stage of strangeness with Edgar Huntly….
Good article,very Good.