Academic literature on the topic 'Beddoes ; Thomas Lovell ; 1803-1849'

Thomas Lovell Beddoes' female dramatic characters are, for the most part, objectified and static, but these passive women perform a crucial narrative and thematic function in the plays. Alongside the destructive activity of the male characters, they dramatize masculine-feminine unions as idealized and contrived and, thus, unstable. Desire, power and influence, as well as the constrictive aspects of physicality, all become gendered concepts in Beddoes' plays, and socially normative relationships between men and women, including heterosexual courtship and marriage, are scrutinized and found wanting. In The Brides' Tragedy, Floribel and Olivia, the eponymous brides, represent archetypes of innocence, purity, and Romantic nature. Their bridegroom, Hesperus, embodies Romantic masculinity, desiring the feminine and aspiring to androgyny, but ultimately unable to relinquish masculine power. The consequences of Hesperus' attempts to unite with the feminine other are the destruction of that other and of himself, with no hope for the spiritual union in death that the Romantic Hesperus espouses as his ultimate desire. Death's Jest-Book expands upon the theme of male-female incompatibility, presenting heterosexual relationships in the context of triangulated desire. The erotic triangles created by Melveric, Sibylla, and Wolfram and Athulf, Amala, and Adalmar are inherently unstable, because they depend upon the rivalries between the males. Once those rivalries end, with the deaths of Wolfram and Athulf, respectively, Sibylla and Amala fade into nothing, their function as conduits for male homosocial relations at an end. In effect, these failed heterosexual triangles function as a backdrop for the idealized relationship between Melveric and Wolfram, whose desire for each other is mediated through their common pursuit of Sibylla, as well as through their blood-brotherhood. Once Wolfram's physical masculinity is deferred through death, the mixing of his ashes with those of Melveric's dead wife, and reanimation, Melveric and Wolfram descend into the tomb together, united for eternity.

Chapter six reads Thomas Lovell Beddoes’s 1849 gothic drama Death’s Jest-Book as a cynical insider’s take on Romantic medicine’s approach to death. A graduate of Göttingen and Würzburg medical schools, Beddoes harbored early hopes that medicine might solve the mystery of death. But he was disappointed by medicine’s failure to deliver on this promise and disillusioned by doctors who turned a profit in the burgeoning palliative care market. As doctors became more regular presences at the deathbed, patients worried that they were sacrificing agency over their own deaths for the sake of palliative ease. Beddoes satirizes these developments through a harrowing portrait of a failed suicide, denied his chosen death by the imperious decision of a medical professional. Looking ahead to health humanists who advocate for patients’ control over the stories that survive them, Beddoes offers writing as a way to preserve agency over life’s end when death cannot be prevented. When death is a ‘fictitious condition’, it cannot be coopted by rapacious physicians. Beddoes’s critique of managed death is a forward-looking defense of patients’ narrative sovereignty.