Nineteenth-century realism tends to position our recognition of feeling bodies diagnostically, via the authority of narrator, doctor, or court of law with which our own reading practices almost necessarily collude. Who, free indirect diagnosis prompts us to ask, is a qualified diagnostician? Such diagnoses often occur in novels with medical characters, and the reader’s collaboration with them suggests some of the ways in which we work in conversation with nineteenth-century cultures of science, medicine, and psychology. In my book project on reading pregnancy in the nineteenth-century novel, I explore what I call “free indirect diagnosis.” Free indirect diagnosis maps the cadences of a character who is a trained specialist with knowledge that presents as objective onto the increasingly subjective “authority” of a third-person narrator. For example,”Ella thought Susan’s dress was silly” rendered in free indirect discourse might read more along the lines of “Ella eyed Susan’s silly dress.” In the second rendering, the narrator’s perspective is hard to distinguish from Ella’s, and vice versa. One of the techniques par excellence associated with the nineteenth-century novel is free indirect discourse, a literary device in which the cadences of a character’s interior, subjective voice are mapped onto an authoritative, third-person narrative voice.
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