Naming the Scourge and the “Sanatorium of the Imagination”

After tuberculosis became curable rather than a death sentence, it did not take long for this previously unimaginable reversal to appear in fiction. The moment of fictional change first appears in Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls. While such narratives written after the midpoint of the twentieth century are obviously historical in nature, they can be considered in two distinct categories: first, one in which the writers themselves are born early enough to bear witness to untamed tuberculosis, and second, those in which the personal memory of the disease no longer exists. The novels in the second category are, in Paul Ricoeur’s words, “retelling” rather than “telling.” They rely more heavily on the writers’ imaginations, moving us toward a point where tuberculosis is no longer being represented as simply itself. The most recent novel examined in this study, Mary Morrissy’s Mother of Pearl, offers what Morrissy herself calls a “Sanatorium of the Imagination” where tuberculosis itself is imbued with and used to convey metaphorical resonances and buried secrecies. In Morrissy’s narrative, written in 1996 against the backdrop of ongoing shocking revelations, tuberculosis leads us right into the dark heart of the continuing lingering conditions currently under examination in Irish Studies.