Fit and Counterfeit: The Volatile Values of Epilepsy in Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch

Abstract

Abstract This paper explores Victorian culture’s persistent associations between epilepsy and bodily expenditure to locate the place of the epileptic body within the Victorian ‘libidinal economy’. It centres on a reading of Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch (1872) as a highly original meditation on the implications of disability and visibility. In this novel, a reclusive silversmith named Oscar Dubourg curbs his post-traumatic seizures with silver nitrate, a remedy that causes a dark-blue discoloration of the skin. Behind the narrative necessity of this device, I locate an epistemological desire to render the condition of epilepsy visibly evident by saturating (and implicitly racializing) Oscar so that the inside shows through. The sporadic visibility of epilepsy confers a radically unstable identity upon its sufferer, one represented by the fluidity and anonymity of the unshaped silver and gold plates that Oscar moulds in his workshop. These plates inspire rumours throughout the community that Oscar is a counterfeiter. Oscar’s valuable metals, along with his health, are stolen in one fell swoop; the thieves brutally attack him, precipitating his traumatic epilepsy. The silver does not disappear, then, but is transmuted into Oscar’s affliction; these shifting metaphorical values of silver can be productively read in light of Victorian discourses of pathology, not least the widespread concern about malingerers ‘counterfeiting’ epilepsy. Can an afflicted body ‘pass’ as healthy? Can healthy bodies perform affliction? These are questions that Oscar’s story raises, with the help of a twin brother who exchanges identities with him in order to retain his fiancée’s affections. Collins’s sensational marriage plot, peopled with a cast of ‘problem bodies’, pulls the novel into critical conversation with a nexus of nineteenth-century medical and eugenic discourses dedicated to the surveilling of physical difference and the ‘policing’ of legitimate and illegitimate disabilities.