‘It has Devoured My Existence’: the Power of the Will and Illness inThe Bride of LammermoorandWuthering Heights

Many Victorian medical theorists shared the notion that the will functions as an intermediary, holding the mind and body in tension. Psychosomatic illnesses, physiological ailments rooted in mental distress, figure prominently in both Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Where Scott regards sickness as the product of a weakened will, Emily Brontë’s characters exercise their wills to facilitate illness, thereby exerting power over their circumstances. Scott depicts a society breaking its members, forcing them to lapse into illness and madness, troublesome and tragic symbols of disorder. Emily Brontë, in contrast, interprets illness not as a collapse, but rather an exertion of the will’s strength.