The Doctor in the Victorian Novel

Following the decline of the marriage plot in Victorian novels by a range of novelists, including Harriet Martineau, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, George MacDonald, and Bram Stoker, Tabitha Sparks argues that a narrative's stance towards scientific reason is revealed in the figure of the doctor. Novels with romantic doctors deny the authority of empiricism, while those with clinically minded doctors uphold the determining logic of science and threaten the novel's romantic plot.