Figures of migraine sufferers Auguste Vabre in Émile Zola’s Pot-Bouille (1882), and Trilby in George DuMaurier’s Trilby (1894), both transgress normative gender boundaries of their era. This paper explores the intersection of medical texts and the appearance of the migraineur in literary fiction in the nineteenth-century. Although nineteenth-century doctors started to realize the hereditary nature of migraine, they also started to “gender” migraine for example, Pierre-Adolphe Piorry concludes that male physicians, university students, and office workers were susceptible because of “brain work,” while women were more susceptible because of their “sedentary” lives. During the aura, a sufferer retains an acute state of consciousness while experiencing extreme sensory overload. These symptoms occur during the “aura” phase of the migraine, acting not only as a warning of the impending headache, but also marking the moment in which the sufferer falls into a liminal, indeterminate space.

Western medicine had long recognized migraine and its symptoms, and knew that it entailed more than headaches nausea (or “biliousness”), aphasia, scotoma (disturbances in the visual field), and paraesthesiae (the numbness or tingling of a hand or foot) are all symptoms attendant to migraine. In the nineteenth-century, British and French physicians and ophthalmologists began to pay more attention to the neurological condition variously known as “megrim,” “sick-headache,” “bilious headache” and “hemicrania,” cataloguing it under the term “migraine,” as we know it today. Rhetorical effect always prevails over logical consistency. The language gap and attendant problems of comprehension and translation are sometimes highlighted sometimes swept under the representational carpet, depending on the suspense-related needs of the moment.

Translation and multilingualism may already come into the picture within (source) texts and their fictional universe, potentially serving as a suspense-generating technique. The discussion of the two novels shows that multilingualism and translation are not just things that happen 'after' a suspenseful text and in response to it. The model emphasizes the variability of the reader's prior knowledge (in our case, linguistic knowledge) as a factor that turns suspense into a fairly unstable notion. An operational definition of suspense in narrative fiction is provided which attempts to combine an understanding of its cognitive and emotional effects with a repertoire of narrative techniques available to achieve these effects. This paper looks at two bestsellers from the 1890s: George du Maurier's Trilby and Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Daphne du maurier trilby