Illness As Metaphor

Following the opening sentence about illness being the nighttime to health’s daytime, Sontag rarely discusses the relationship between health and illness. In Chapter 3, she writes that, in the face of TB’s aestheticization and romanticization by the public, “health becomes banal, even vulgar” (36). How has the relationship between illness and health changed through the history the book presents? Would the text have been improved by more references to the perceptions of health throughout history?

Throughout the book Sontag looks to prominent writers (novelists, poets, playwrights) to build up a social and cultural understanding of an illness’s perception. This approach privileges people who often already possess a social and political voice. Do you agree with her methodology? Could or should she have made a point of including accounts from “unknown” patients of TB and cancer? How would this technique have augmented the book?

TB was often understood as the disease of poets and artists, whereas Sontag writes of cancer that it “is a rare and still scandalous subject for poetry; and it seems unimaginable to aestheticize the disease” (20). Both diseases were, in different historical periods, mysteriously caused and often fatal, yet their cultural understandings are quite different. What accounts for the difference in how tuberculosis and cancer are written about, portrayed, and understood culturally? Support your argument using evidence from both within and outside the text.

As Sontag writes, “popular accounts of the psychological aspects of cancer often cite old authorities, starting with Galen, who observed that ‘melancholy women’ are more likely to get breast cancer than ‘sanguine women’” (53). One aspect that Sontag gives little attention to is gender. Does the book suffer from not including this lens, or does it serve the argument to focus more on a general perception of metaphors of illness? Keep in mind this book was written during a time when many female writers were questioning the phallocentric nature of language.

Is the language of warfare necessarily harmful like Sontag suggests, particularly when the cancer patient is often in a “battle” or “fight” for their life?

Sontag’s central argument is that we need an alternative to metaphors if we want to find the best and healthiest way of discussing illness. Yet, the book was criticized for making metaphors the main perpetuator of the problems surrounding the rhetoric of illness, in large part because metaphors are a necessary and important part of language and how language constructs meanings. Do you agree with this criticism? Why or why not?

Have society’s relation to cancer and the language surrounding it changed since the publication of this book? Think, for example, of fundraisers for cancer research or film/television narratives surrounding cancer or illness. Have these contributed to a more progressive attitude about illness, or do they serve to obscure illness further?

Can this book succeed in altering to some extent the language we use around illness or how we deploy metaphors of illness? Do you think it will help you rethink how you use such metaphors?