Embodied Interdependencies of Health and Travel in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Abstract

As embodiment plays a central role in Victorian novels exploring women’s journeys, the interdependence of health and travel comes expressly to light in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). In both novels, protagonists navigate possibilities and perils of motion while embarking on international voyages and rural wanderings. On the one hand, the mobility of Isabel Archer and Tess Durbeyfield merges a focus on the proliferation of transportation technology and medical tourism in Victorian society with depictions of movement as an enabler of female autonomy. On the other hand, the heroines’ exertions are contrasted against their family networks, male characters suffering from illness, and infant deaths intertwined with immobility. In this respect, the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty provides insight into the embodied enactment and somatic sensation of physical motion. Centred around three elements of movement, the ailing body, and maternity connecting James’s and Hardy’s publications, Natasha Anderson’s chapter examines Isabel and Tess navigating interdependencies of illness and mobility as the young women encounter freedoms and limitations of health in the familial sphere alongside gendered allowances of movement spanning physical activities and transnational travel.