Symptoms of the Self

Symptoms of the Self offers the first full study of the stage consumptive. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France, Britain, and North America, tuberculosis was a leading killer. Its famous dramatic and operatic victimsMarguerite Gautier in La Dame aux Camelias and her avatar Violetta in La Traviata, Mimi in La Boheme, Little Eva in Uncle Toms Cabin, and Edmund Tyrone in Long Days Journey into Night, to name but a feware among the most iconic figures of the Western stage. Its classic symptoms, the cough and the blood-stained handkerchief, have become global performance shorthand for life-threatening illness. The consumptive character became a vehicle through which standards of health, beauty, and virtue were imposed; constructions of class, gender, and sexuality were debated; the boundaries of nationhood were transgressed or maintained; and an exceedingly fragile whiteness was held up as a dominant social ideal. By telling the story of tuberculosis on the transatlantic stage, Symptoms of the Self uncovers some of the wellsprings of modern Western theatrical practiceand of ideas about the self that still affect the way human beings live and die.