Sunday, November 03, 2013

Special Event: Birkbeck Form “The Symbolic Economy of Disease in Sensation and Satire: Lady Audley's Secret and Dr Phillips: A Maida Vale Idyll” (11/11/2013)


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.