The last works of Jane Austen and Barbara Pym, written while each was knowingly dying, both continue and transform a discourse of illness and cure traceable through their canon. Illness figures both literally and metaphorically in their narratives; in Austen as failures in wholeness and in Pym as failures in love. After undergoing the metaphorically medical treatments of purging and vivifying in Austen and inoculating in Pym, their female protagonists achieve conditions of health and wholeness by closure of the narrative. In the dying works, individual metaphorical illnesses become a general societal condition of fragmentation, and cure becomes more elusive. The shared use of a village undergoing profound change reflects each writer's own bodily transformation as certain death approaches, and the restoration of health to the village-as-body becomes one of achieving balance or homeostasis. This is effected in the narrative by the hinted-at curative powers of nature in Sanditon and of restored faith in A Few Green Leaves. On a theoretical level, both texts reflect their narratives of dis-ease and cure. Pym's last text remained unpublished before her death and therefore "ill" because not functioning, but second opinions and faith in her reputation confirmed its public health. Austen's Sanditon as a fragment embodies its own discourse of dis-ease, or failure of wholeness, and requires a curative act on the part of the reader to restore it to some sense of ideal wholeness or health.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.27971 |
| Date | January 1997 |
| Creators | Staunton, S. Jane. |
| Contributors | Conway, C. Abbott (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001617063, proquestno: MQ37237, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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