“I am not suffering any more…”: Tragic Potential in the Nineteenth-Century Consumptive Myth

The paradoxical construction of consumption within overlapping social, literary, and medical spheres (particularly as manifested in the nineteenth century) has been the subject of numerous works in contemporary scholarship, most notably in Susan Sontag’s seminal text Illness as Metaphor (1977). As Sontag and other theorists and historians have convincingly argued, consumption was a seemingly kaleidoscopic phenomenon, a unique and shifting blend of fact and fiction within the collective cultural imaginations of several Western populaces (France, England, and the United States chief among them).4 The writings of poets, novelists, social commentators, and even physicians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries demonstrate that consumption was at once constructed as the disease of passionate lovers, the rich, the young, the white, the brilliant and poetic, the penitent sinner, and the chaste and innocent. Consumption’s conceptualized (and yet inseparable) bond with human sensibility and the self, as well as its mythologized capacity for bestowing painless demises upon its victims, made it an exceptionally popular