A new scholarly book with Brontë-related content:
Katherine Byrne, Julie Anne Taddeo, James Leggott
Manchester University Press,
Mar 22, 2022
This timely collection examines representations of medicine and medical practices in international period drama television. A preoccupation with medical plots and settings can be found across a range of important historical series, including Outlander, Poldark, The Knick, Call the Midwife, La Peste and A Place to Call Home. Such shows offer a critique of medical history while demonstrating how contemporary viewers access and understand the past. Topics covered in this collection include the innovations and horrors of surgery; the intersection of gender, class, race and medicine on the American frontier; psychiatry and the trauma of war; and the connections between past and present pandemics. Featuring original chapters on period television from the UK, the US, Spain and Australia, Diagnosing history offers an accessible, global and multidisciplinary contribution to both televisual and medical history.
The book includes the chapter:
Sarah E. Fanning and Claire Callaghan
University of Manchester Press
Our chapter investigates the notoriously maligned figure Branwell Brontë, the little-known brother of the Brontë sisters Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, as depicted in the BBC’s To Walk Invisible (2016). Written and directed by Sally Wainwright, the series validates the longstanding myth that Branwell was not simply the family failure, but a reprobate bent on wreaking havoc and misery on everything and everyone he touched. For many Brontë fans and scholars, Branwell was little more than a nuisance who left a black mark on the Brontës’ otherwise legendary reputation. In highlighting the domestic turmoil that plagued the Brontës’ lives throughout the 1840s, and shrewdly communicating the devastating impacts his destructive behaviour had on the Brontë household, To Walk Invisible brings into sharp focus Branwell’s ills, addictions, problematic behaviours, and psychological torment. Despite its popular and critical success, one of the more underappreciated features of the series is its strong evocation of the cultural politics of mental health in both the mid-nineteenth century and contemporary society. Victorian physicians’ understanding of Branwell’s symptoms, including substance abuse, behavioural inconsistencies, and emotional outbursts, were apt to be diagnosed under the umbrella of ‘madness’ or ‘insanity’, terms loaded with connotations of moral failings rather than any accepted medical disorder. Our chapter looks at the political ambivalence Wainwright evokes around the Brontë brother. We argue that the implied medicalisation of Branwell’s behaviour generates a long-overdue discussion about the extent to which history has unduly maligned him and the way that the drama’s informed retrospect generates an important debate about Victorian medical narratives more broadly.
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