“One of the Most Insidious, and Fatal Diseases Incident to Humanity”: Fearing The “Flattering Malady”

Throughout her adult life, Charlotte Brontë described an anxiety bordering on obsession with consumption, or tuberculosis as the disease is now named. In Jane Eyre, however, she created Helen Burns, perhaps Victorian literature’s most famous consumptive. Helen is forbearing, ethereal, too good for this world: she expires painlessly and gently, and is often taken to be the archetype of the long-suffering yet patient sufferer of the disease. This chapter argues, however, that far from absorbing and replicating the tropes of literary consumption which Susan Sontag, Clark Lawlor and others have identified, the sentimentality and ethereality with which the narrative of Jane Eyre surrounds Helen Burns and her death make the case that even the most exceptional individuals are vulnerable to this insidious threat. This chapter interrogates the trope of “romantic consumption,” traces Brontë’s anxiety about the disease in her correspondence from her teens on, and gives an overview of all the Brontës’ representation of consumption in their novels. It then argues that the sentimentality surrounding Helen Burns’ death is knowingly, and strategically, constructed, and that Brontë drew on the potential of consumption to individualize sufferers in the literary text primarily to make the emphatic case that the disease was a universal and undiscriminating threat.