Posts
Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies
Peltz Gallery at 43 Gordon Square, London
November 11, 2013
The next Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies event
will feature Tabitha Sparks (McGill) presenting on “The Symbolic Economy of
Disease in Sensation and Satire: Lady Audley's Secret and Dr Phillips: A Maida
Vale Idyll” on Monday November 11, 2013 from 6:00-8:00pm in the Peltz
Gallery at 43 Gordon Square, London, UK, WC1H 0PD.
Julia Frankau's Dr Phillips: A Maida Vale Idyll (1887) has generated a range of
convincing explanations for this Jewish novelist's belligerent treatment of late-century
London Jews. Attention to the novel's generic signs, and particularly its
echoes of Mary Braddon's foundational sensation novel Lady Audley's Secret
(1862), however, can inflect Frankau's text with a somewhat different
interpretation of its explicit racism. This paper follows the fortunes of the
anti-heroines and the relationships between errant sexuality and medical
management in both novels, and treats Braddon's and Frankau's representations
of hereditary disease –
insanity and syphilis –
as narrative registers of moral censure and irony, respectively. This
perspective tilts Dr Phillips towards parody, and so destabilizes a
straightforward reading of Frankau's racism.
