An exploration of the nature of Illness in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barto and Washington Irving’s short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Abstract

This essay examines the nature of illness as a state and condition in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Victorian novel Mary Barton and Washington Irving’s short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Through an analysis of the relation between space, language, and sickness in these texts, the essay employs the theoretical frame of the medical humanities to highlight the social hierarchies and constructions present in both the texts’ social contexts. For Gaskell, this essay examines the text’s Victorian medical context by framing its atmospheric theories of ‘miasma’ and ‘sanitationism’ to underscore Victorian society’s fearful perceptions of states of filth and sickness. For Irving, an analysis of ‘sounds’ and entrapping spatial features in Sleepy Hollow highlight the inhabitant’s anxious and paranoid mental states, as they are trapped under the village’s narcoleptic veil. This essay examines the inhabitants’ social discourses and consciousnesses in relation to space in order to criticize hierarchical social constructions and how these hierarchies affect societal narratives of truth.