Representations of Illness in the Brontës’ Works

Abstract

Framed by the biographical, cultural, historical and medical context of recurrent loss and sickness, this thesis traces the trajectory of psychosomatic illness and its cure across a selection of the Brontë siblings’ collective works. This thesis begins with the Brontës’ early imaginative approaches to illness in the juvenilia, focusing on the magical figure of the Chief Genii —who embodies all four siblings, and its ability to control, heal, harm and revive others—and then turns to their practical and imaginative responses to decline. This thesis also examines how this magical, once-dominant power dissolves into pseudoscientific attempts to cure and even revive dying bodies. In bringing together the Brontë siblings’ biographical, medical, cultural and historical accounts, this thesis aims to explore the representations of illness, environment and the sickroom in a way that has not previously been developed in Brontë studies, foregrounding the sickroom as an underexplored central site of narrative agency. The study further contends that Charlotte repeatedly shows that psychosomatic illness can be cured not by medical treatment but through the right vocation, movement and supportive companionship — forces that can help stabilise the mind, thereby challenging contemporary medical traditions and modern critical practices that approach their fiction in terms of pathology and decline.