Why heroines die in classic fiction
To read classic fiction is to know that if the heroine gets wet, a swift descent into brain fever and death bed scenes is assured within a chapter or so.
But, dear reader, have you ever wondered what was actually wrong with these swooning creatures?
For, I confess, part of me has always longed to grab them and say: “You only got your slippers wet. For heaven’s sake, girl, just get a grip!”
I’ve also wondered what exactly the vapours were and why women used to swoon so much back then. Was it simply a plot device? Why do you think modern-day heroines don’t get the vapours? Is this a medical or psychological phenomenon? Or maybe a bit of both?
casa azahar 
maybe we don’t lace our corsets as tight?
🙂
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if at all?
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i think nursemyra is on the right track. take a look at what women used to wear most of the day.
ouch!
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well, i screwed something up there. one more time
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Yeah, I’ve heard about the tight-corset thing too, but in Jane Austen’s day the Regency dress was in fashion and doesn’t really look like the sort of thing you’d wear an extremely tight corset under.
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maybe this kind?
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just guessing, obviously
most people died at a young age (by our standards) during the early 19th century, hygienic standards being pretty much non-existent. maybe all it took to die of pneumonia was getting one’s slippers wet?
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The doctors in the article cite a plethora of possible diseases, but also how difficult it is to back diagnose, and how most likely it was a plot device. Like really high quality sci-fi (e.g. Phillip K Dick), the technical details aren’t important, what’s more important is the impact it has on characters and relationships.
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Yeah, I reckon plot device is the winner, Arnie. But did women really swoon that much back then to make it a believable ‘symptom’?
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i’m a redneck. always thought the ‘vapors’ was a digestive problem. and i the case of our young heroines, a r-e-a-l-l-y bad digestive problem.
i need to get out more…
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Good question. It makes me think a lot. 1st was going to post that there was a lot of very serious illnesses, plus ladies starving themselves to death, and that if some people were actually swooning do to these things there were surely some more who were faking for the swoon for the attention (maybe).
Then I got thinking – what actually makes a plot device believable – and who is it supposed to be believable to? To simplify, let’s assume that the intended audience is contemporary. So then by analogy we can think about our contemporary fiction – and are its plot devices believable?
One category that jumps out are action movies. The large scale destruction, injury and death that occur, would, in real life, be “national tragedy” type events – events that happen once in a lifetime. And yet with their ready occurrence in action movies, they appear as everyday events. So, from a detached (rational?) point of view, the typical action movie plot devices are completely unbelievable – but they are readily accepted and consumed.
I think it is easy to accept b/c the less believable events can be taken as “assumed” to be happening. So what we’re really interested in is the response to these events. We’re asking the question “Assume that the a secret criminal organization kidnaps my girlfriend and the police won’t help but a rogue bounty hunter will, what would I do?” Analogously, we ask the question “Assume in 1833 Sir X is courting Lady Y, but then she swoons. What happens?”
So I guess the short answer is they might not have been swooning all over the place – it might have been a rare event – but it was an event that occurred with frequency above some low threshold that it could be used as an assumption.
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I can understand imagining the vapours as a digestive problem, daisy.. 🙂
That’s interesting, Arnie. Yeah, I think we don’t always – or even usually – expect much verisimilitude when it comes to film and book plots. We are often ready to suspend our disbelief if a storyline grabs us.
Personally, if I were living in an era where no education or individual social life was possible and I had to spend day after day after day living a claustrophobic existence with my family and looking out of my window over a grey-skied rain-soaked landscape, wondering if I would ever find a husband, I’d get to swooning before too long.
I’m quite sure that women got to swooning a lot more after these books were published.
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Well, I always thought ‘Consumption’ was the old word for TB, which was rife at the time and a real killer.
Plus, without decent nutrition, medical care and hygiene, I should think even ‘flu was much more of a threat then than it is now.
But most of those women probably swooned out of sheer boredom and lack of exercise. Sitting around doing embroidery all day every day would be enough to put me into a coma…
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I think you’re right about consumption, truce. Here’s a quote from the article, from Professor Warbuoys
“Consumption – which we always take today to mean TB – was not a medical diagnosis in the Victorian era but referred to symptoms of wasting and coughing which were common to many respiratory diseases that afflicted 19th century Britain.”
I agree, the life sounds pretty terrible – hard to imagine how I wouldn’t be miserably depressed if forced to live like that. And depression certainly is bad for your health/immune system.
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