The Doctor in the Victorian Novel by Tabitha Sparks - 9781138275409

Taylor & Francis

Following the decline of the marriage plot in Victorian novels by a range of novelists, including Harriet Martineau, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, George MacDonald, and Bram Stoker, Tabitha Sparks argues that a narrative's stance towards scientific reason is revealed in the figure of the doctor. Novels with romantic doctors deny the authority of empiricism, while those with clinically minded doctors uphold the determining logic of science and threaten the novel's romantic plot. > With the character of the doctor as her subject, Tabitha Sparks follows the decline of the marriage plot in the Victorian novel. As Victorians came to terms with the scientific revolution in medicine of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the novel's progressive distance from the conventions of the marriage plot can be indexed through a rising identification of the doctor with scientific empiricism. A narrative's stance towards scientific reason, Sparks argues, is revealed by the fictional doctor's rel.