Only to a point. What was "an aristocratic pallor" on someone upper class and/very wealthy was often "pasty" on someone poor and lower class. An "elegant pallor" in your boss was "pallid and sickly" in you and the other underlings.

Here’s the thing: there is plenty of books regarded as “literature” that are straight-up fanfiction, they are just mostly written by men. The Aeneid, fanfic of Homer; Ulysses, fanfic of Homer; The Inferno, self-insert fanfic of everyone Dante liked/hated; Romeo and Juliet, alternate-ending fanfic of The Tragical…

Fanfic writers get shit on (probably because it’s mostly a girl thing, no one ever told Dante he took his character obsessions too far, lol), but many of them bring up good points. I have seen several that do the same thing with Rey from TFA. Abandonment and near-starvation usually don’t produce sunny, happy people.

Re: men, I’ve also read that people believed men experienced a surge of creativity at the end stage of the disease. So, reductively, since it was a woman’s job to be beautiful and a man’s job to make things of value, I feel like the idea is that you climax as an entity right before dropping dead. Which is a pretty…

my 9 year old daughter just noted that diana in anne of green gables died of the same thing beth in little women had. she said, was that a thing then? yes, it was.

The whole poet dying of consumption thing was an established trope before Keats. He’s hardly an exception. Michael Bruce and Henry Kirke White are examples that came earlier. There were also romantic accounts of John Donne’s death circulating in the 19th century. The very idea was used as a marketing ploy by…

Robert Louis Stevenson and Edgar Allen Poe both had TB. The fashion for a sunken eyed gaunt feverish hero (or antihero)was certainly around in horror and adventure fiction during the Victorian era. Another was Patrick Bramwell Bronte. Balzac, Gorky, Chopin, Kafka. Even DH Lawrence.

I think they idea of a sensitive soul who was too fragile for the big bad world can be considered attractive in both men and women. If were are drawing the analogy to heroin chic then Kurt Cobain would be our Keats.

This! I was about to mention “La Boheme” as well. Aside from the logistical issues of singing operatically while dying of a lung disease, it’s interesting how TB / consumption is so intertwined with her kind of ‘fragile’ femininity. Rodolpho can be more of a Romantic lead when Mimi needs to be cared for.

The reference to men makes me wonder at what I’ve always thought regarding these particular beauty ideals as applies to women. I always reasoned that the consumption, heroin-chic-type- look
(as a comparison others are drawing below) was the preferred when men were much happier to envision their women as weak,…

Well, they tried "opium chic" but everyone just laid around all day.

Victorian literature is my jam. It was one of my main studies in college and what I wrote my thesis on. There is a big vein of “suffering animals and children” in it though.

I always feel like the “terminally ill love interest” is a bit of a cop out (unless the characters have a previously established relationship). It usually boils down to “we want all the drama and romance, but don’t want our male lead to actually settle down"

To be fair, it was a very of-the-times subplot (in terms of when the film was set); nothing was more grandly romantic than a love interest heroically, and beautifully, wasting away to nothing before one’s very eyes.

It applied to men too. Look at the lovingly rendered sketches of Keats on his deathbed.

I am always entertained by Victorian novel's obsession with TB. It's right up there with their fetish for orphans with hearts of gold (in literature, no one wanted to touch an orphan in real life). Although, funnily enough, they leave out the constant, irritating coughing and the, you know, drowning in your own lungs…

I was always meta-amused by La Boheme, where Mimi sings these beautiful arias as she is dying of a debilitating lung disease.

• Women considering abortions are required to personally execute a puppy with their bare hands, so that they can truly internalize the devastation to life that they are causing.

Don’t forget the hotels, travel expenses. Pretty sure that most poor people that live rurally can just make a number of trips to NO and hang around for a few extra days. No problem.

that’s really great because I’m sure there was no forethought leading up to the appointment with the healthcare provider, and it’s pretty easy for most people to get as many days off of work as they need so if they have to go back every 3 or 4 days until they have met this super chill requirement, what’s the biggie?