Publisher's Synopsis
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 victims-Marguerite Gautier in La Dame aux Came´lias and her avatar Violetta in La Traviata, Mimi` in La Bohe`me, Little Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Edmund Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night, to name but a few-are 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 practice-and of ideas about the self that still affect the way human beings live and die.