ABSTRACT
Illness is a particularly effective replacement for the taboo subject of female sexuality because as well as constantly foregrounding the physicality of the body and evoking the troubling unknowability of the female body in particular, it simultaneously gestures towards the unspeakable. This chapter discusses its ravaging and debilitating effects on the body that pose a challenge to nineteenth-century representational norms. It explores how Susan Sontag's claims for tuberculosis are foreshadowed in the role it plays in the nineteenth-century literary text. By emphasizing the literary resonances of the disease, Sontag not only reminds the readers that the rarefication of tuberculosis was linked with a talent for art or writing in the popular imagination. The chapter also discusses other ill bodies which are described by Zola throughout the text. It details how references to illness, particularly syphilis, are used to comment on the weak state of France during the Franco-Prussian war.
