Clare Beams’ debut novel The Illness Lesson is a smart story about an innovative school for young women in 19th century America, complex enough to defy simple analysis. Caroline is the central figure, old enough to be a teacher in the school, but a junior member of her adult circle. The school is the idea of her father and a colleague, and it is located in a secluded area of Massachusetts. These are idealistic people of high principle, but they also are rigid and liable to pontificate. Beams explains that her story is inspired by that of Louisa May Alcott and her father Bronson Alcott, who was an transcendentalist thinker associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Caroline’s father has similar ideas, and is keen to show that young women can achieve just as much as their male counterparts when given the opportunity. Their school is built on principles of learning through experience and exploration rather than through book learning. Their initial class consists of 8 girls aged 14 and 15. 

The experiment goes well at start, and draws out the girls’ energies and enthusiasms. But there are tensions between various people grouped together, and those tensions grow stronger as problems arise. The most notable pupil is Eliza, the daughter of Miles Pearson, an author of a popular pot-boiler, The Darkening Glass. This novel gained notoriety, and was a thinly disguised story about Caroline’s father and his marriage to his late wife, Caroline’s mother. Miles Pearson has died, so Eliza has experienced great loss, and she turns out to be particularly vulnerable. But she is also provocative and there is debate between those running the school about how to deal with her.

Caroline and her father are close, but their relationship starts to strain when the girls start to get ill, with what would have been characterized then as hysteria — displaying rashes, headaches, seizures. As the problem spreads, her father brings in a doctor who uses an innovative solution — vibrators to induce orgasms. This ‘cure’ has been described in various places, most notably in Rachel Maines’ The Technology of Orgasm. The doctor assures everyone that it will work, and that it is the best medical solution, but the women in the school especially had doubts. There is also the worry that their use of this ‘progressive’ treatment will become common knowledge, which could cause scandal. 

There’s a lot going on in The Illness Lesson — many characters, many ideas, and plenty of drama. Many scenes are lessons with the teachers setting out information for the students or taking them on a trip outside. There’s a character who arrives from outside their social and intellectual circle and supplies blunt judgments about their enterprise and values, which helps the reader gain some perspective. 

Beam writes with great precision, giving a semblance of the language of a 19th century novel, with some formality, despite some shocking scenes in the book. It takes some getting used to, but an impressive achievement. One might even be tempted to read the book twice, in hopes of working out some clear moral. As it is though, The Illness Lesson is perplexing. Presumably Beam is very sympathetic to the project of giving girls equal education to boys, but there is a sense here that it was doomed to fail for a host of reasons. 

Christian Perring is editor of Metapsychology Online Reviews. He teaches philosophy in the NYC area and is an APPA certified philosophical counselor.

Categories: Fiction

Keywords: fiction, literature