Abstract
Roberta Barker's new book traces the theme of tuberculosis on stage from the 1820s to the 1970s starting in France and then moving to Great Britain and the United States. She identifies a ‘transatlantic consumptive repertoire’ of early, influential plays and shows how it developed and, like the disease itself, mutated as it moved across cultures and over time. La Dame aux Camélias (1852) figures prominently, of course, and Barker's chapter ‘Camilleology’ is a thorough and engaging examination of the various iterations of the play by Alexandre Dumas, fils. She unearths a number of less well-known plays as well and examines them in the light of both medical history and the history of the theatre. Barker's central premise is that staging tuberculosis allowed dramatists to externalise the internal state of the afflicted character. ‘Its symptoms served as signs not only of pathology but also of other kinds of inwardness’, she writes, ‘emotional sensibility, family history, and even racial, national, gender, and class identities could all be materialised by the cough and the bloodstained handkerchief’ (2).
Barker draws on earlier work about illness in literature, like Susan Sontag's seminal Illness as Metaphor (1978), but turning her attention to the theatre in a way that earlier cultural studies of illness in general and tuberculosis in particular have not, she opens up a rich and original field of inquiry. While Barker brings to this project a formidable command of the dramatic literature and theatre history, it is her profound understanding of acting and stagecraft that sets this work apart. The throughline of the book is clear and well-argued, and there are some fascinating sidetracks into Mlle Rachel, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekov, and nineteenth-century child actors along the way.
As Barker shows, the consumptive hero (and heroine) turned up as the drama turned inward, with the French Romantics, and consumption became a shorthand, an outward mark, of the ‘sensitive, creatively gifted, and/or spiritually elevated’ (9) soul of the patient. Tuberculosis as a character trait or a dramatic device would come to be associated with the sentimental conceits of the melodrama, but it would also transcend that subgenre and outlive even the medical discovery of the Koch bacillus and the mechanics of microbial rather than moral contagion. ‘Far from obliterated by the simultaneous rise of germ theory and theatrical realism in the late nineteenth century’, she contends, ‘many aspects of the consumptive repertoire were incorporated directly into the realist canon’ (3).
Barker shows us how this came to be in seven chapters arranged by overlapping chronological periods corresponding to the emergence, evolution, and transmutation of the tuberculosis theme. Citing medical treatises from the early nineteenth century onward, she demonstrates how the contemporary scientific understanding – and sometimes misunderstanding – of the disease reflected cultural anxieties about race, gender, and national identity that were in turn reflected on the stage. The medical community's working theory that heredity was a key factor in the transmission of the disease, for example, attached itself in France to a broad cultural concern about the weakening of bloodlines that would express itself in, among other plays, Edmond Rostand's L'Aiglon (1900). According to Barker, American medical practitioners of the mid-nineteenth century associated the disease with the vices of the urban population, chiefly their indolence. This prejudice fed suspicion and marginalisation of immigrant populations, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, blinded doctors to symptoms of tuberculosis in the largely enslaved agrarian Black population of the southern United States. The many adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) bear the marks of this second sinister misconception about the disease, as Little Eva's brave and patient suffering with tuberculosis confers on her a kind of sainthood, while at the same time, it obscures the more brutal misery of the enslaved Tom. The audience's pity was engaged by the individual agony of the little white child, upstaging the systemic subjugation of Tom and thousands like him.
In her analysis of twentieth-century tuberculosis plays, Barker identifies the traces of the original sentimental repertoire and its effeminate male sufferers in works by Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Charles Ludlam. ‘The sentimental poétique du poitrinaire functioned for these artists rather like the camp aesthetic that both Williams and Ludlam employed’, she writes, ‘as a lie that told the truth about inward subjectivity’ (184). Given this, although she does mention AIDS briefly near the end of the volume and touches on the 1996 musical Rent, I think Barker would have done well to expand on the ways in which AIDS on stage inherited from tuberculosis as a device that allowed dramatists to explore inwardness, especially given that the disease initially struck a community that was still largely closeted and lacking the means of self-expression. Seen another way, though, Barker has laid the groundwork for future work in that direction. In any case, Symptoms of the Self remains an impressive achievement.
