FAITH AND HYSTERIA: THE DIAGNOSIS OF GEORGE MACDONALD’S ADELA CATHCART
FAITH AND HYSTERIA: THE DIAGNOSIS OF GEORGE MACDONALD’S ADELA CATHCART

Summary/Abstract: George MacDonald’s “Adela Cathcart” narrates the process of curing an ill young woman through storytelling. The individual stories subtly criticize the medical discourses and practices, social and gender roles and the spiritual and religious life of the era; Adela’s malady of “hysteria” is cured, eventually, by addressing and alleviating the sickness in the above fields. I compare and contrast diagnoses and cures of female maladies (both material and spiritual) prevalent in late Victorian medicine with those in the novel, demonstrating the extent to which MacDonald differed from his contemporaries and was, in fact, ahead of his time.

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