The title play, A Doll's House (1879), takes place over three days of Christmas in the comfortable Norwegian home of Torvald Helmer, a newly appointed bank manager, and his wife Nora, whom he treats as a charming pet, calling her his songbird and squirrel. Years earlier, when Torvald was gravely ill and doctors advised a year in Italy, Nora secretly borrowed the money from the lawyer Krogstad, forging her dying father's signature as guarantor.
Medical tag
Tuberculosis Consumption
Consumption/phthisis and its cultural meanings.
Works
Effi Briest opens at Hohen-Cremmen, the Brandenburg estate of the Briest family, where seventeen-year-old Effi, playful and still half a child, is suddenly engaged to Baron Geert von Innstetten, a thirty-eight-year-old district administrator who long ago courted her mother. Effi accepts, partly from ambition and partly from a wish for excitement, and the couple marry and move to Kessin, a small Baltic resort town in Pomerania.
Long Walk to Freedom is Mandela's memoir of childhood, political awakening, resistance, imprisonment, negotiation, and democratic transition. It begins in rural Transkei, with family, Thembu traditions, mission schooling, and the gradual widening of Mandela's world through education and urban life.
My Ántonia is presented as a memoir written by Jim Burden, a successful New York railroad lawyer, about a Bohemian girl he knew in his Nebraska childhood; a brief introduction by an unnamed friend frames his manuscript. Orphaned at ten, Jim travels from Virginia to live with his grandparents on the prairie near the town of Black Hawk.
The Personal Memoirs of U. S.
Sense and Sensibility follows two sisters whose temperaments represent the opposed values of its title. When Henry Dashwood dies, Norland Park in Sussex passes to John, his son by a first marriage, who promises to provide for his stepmother and half-sisters but is talked out of any real generosity by his grasping wife Fanny.
The Portrait of a Lady follows Isabel Archer, a young American woman brought to Europe by her aunt, Mrs. Touchett, and admired for her intelligence, independence and hunger for experience.
The Prince is a short treatise in twenty-six chapters that Machiavelli wrote in 1513, shortly after losing his post in the Florentine chancery, and dedicated, in its final form, to Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino. In the dedication he offers the Medici what he calls his knowledge of the actions of great men, gained from long experience of modern affairs and continual reading of ancient ones.
Wuthering Heights is a violent family romance told through layered narration. Mr.
Passages
- A Doll's House and Other Plays, A Doll's House, Act 2
Dr Rank speaks of the inherited disease destroying his spine and of the final examination he is making on himself.
- Effi Briest, Final chapters (c. Ch. 33–36)
Effi's decline after Annie's visit, Rummschüttel's letter to her parents, and her death at Hohen-Cremmen.
- Long Walk to Freedom, Later imprisonment and illness passages
Mandela's aging and health problems, including tuberculosis history, become part of the political story of captivity.
- My Ántonia, Book I (Russian Peter and Pavel chapters)
Pavel, ill and coughing blood, tells the story of the bride thrown to the wolves before dying.
- Personal Memoirs, Vol. I, Ch. II
A wasting cough before graduation and the family history of consumption, which later killed his younger brother and sister.
- Sense and Sensibility, Vol. II, Ch. 9
Brandon's account of the first Eliza, whom he found dying of consumption in a sponging-house.
- The Portrait of a Lady, Early Gardencourt chapters
Ralph's chronic illness shapes his observational life, his limited mobility and his imaginative investment in Isabel's freedom.
- The Prince, Chapter III
The extended analogy between foreseeing political trouble and the physicians' maxim about hectic fever: easy to cure but hard to detect early, easy to detect but hard to cure late.
- Wuthering Heights, Linton Heathcliff chapters
Linton's chronic frailty and manipulation by Heathcliff link invalidism to inheritance and coercion.
Quotes
“There was consumption in my father's family, two of his brothers having died of that disease, which made my symptoms more alarming”
“as the physicians say it happens in hectic fever, that in the beginning of the malady it is easy to cure but difficult to detect, but in the course of time, not having been either detected or treated in the beginning, it becomes easy to detect but difficult to cure”