Concept of Health and Sickness of the Spanish Gypsy Population: A Qualitative Approach

The Roma community (RC) has poor health indicators, and providing them with adequate healthcare requires understanding their culture and cultural differences. Our objective was to understand the concept of the health and sickness of the RC in Spain, and for this, a qualitative study was conducted. A content analysis utilizing an inductive approach was used to analyze the data. Twenty-three semi-structured interviews were performed, and four main categories were obtained after the analysis of the data: perception of the state of health, the value of health, what was observed, and causal attribution. The inter-relations between the categories shows that the RC have a dichotomous worldview split between non-sickness (health) and sickness mediated by causal attribution. Their worldview is polarized into two values: not sick/sick. When not sick, optimism is prioritized along with happiness, and these two emotions are highly valued, as they also play a physical and social function. When a person becomes noticeably sick, this is understood as being in a negative and severe state, and when there are visible physical implications, then the need to act is made clear. When faced with the need to act, the behavior of the RC is mediated by causal attributions, influenced by nature and religion, timing, concealment by not mentioning the disease, and the origin of the healthcare information. For the organization of an adequate health response for the RC, it is necessary for healthcare systems to be able to merge culture and health care.

Steps Towards an Ecology of Experience: Empiricism, Pragmatism and George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy

Chapter 4 makes the case that the work of Eliot and Lewes exemplifies a pragmatist understanding of knowledge that is centred on the idea of “experience as experiment” (Jay) or “experience as a craft” (Sennett). Distinguishing between two main senses of ‘experience’, practical wisdom and intense awareness, the chapter traces the manifold implications of that term through G.H. Lewes’s five volume fragment Problems of Life and Mind, Samuel Butler’s Life and Habit and George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy. Moreover, close readings of these texts are interwoven with references to the philosophical tradition of American Pragmatism, as represented by the work of William James and John Dewey. Briefly, my main argument is that these Pragmatist writers shared with their Victorian predecessors an ecological view of experience as an incipient pattern, an advancing middle between the past and the future as well as inside and outside, or subject and object, that essentially lacks anything like a firm ground.

History’s Second-Hand Bookshop

This chapter argues that George Eliot too conflated religion with race as a resource for secular individualism, but also that she thought more deeply about what consequences this move held for a major liberal keyword: reading. Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy (1868) and Daniel Deronda (1876) both stage a character’s recuperation of ethnic inheritance (Gypsy and Jewish, respectively) but only in Deronda does this recuperation successfully yield a many-sided individuality. This is because, as Eliot sees it, Judaism’s scriptural dimension allows one to fashion an idiosyncratic relationship to its racial history. Yet this valorization of scripture as the site at which one can personalize one’s relationship to tradition also runs up against Eliot’s long-standing wariness toward Protestant private interpretation—a fact that Deronda tries to get around by evaluating characters, not according to how well they interpret texts, but by how they relate to books as material metonyms of the past.

Amours de Voyage

Chapter 4, “Amours de Voyage: The Verse-Novel and European Travel,” reflects on the expansive generic geography of the form. Like the influential ur-text Don Juan, almost all verse-novels exhibit what Clough calls amours de voyage. The chapter considers overlapping thematic and structural aspects of travel in a group of explicitly cosmopolitan verse-novels (Clough’s Amours de Voyage, Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, Owen Meredith’s Lucile and Glenaveril, and George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy): their use of the railway, of guidebooks, of epistolarity, and of plots involving hybrid heredity. The spatial energies of verse-novels often avoid not only the epic teloi of nation founding and empire building but also the novelistic telos of the courtship plot: marriage. These works travel in order to destabilize both their generic terrain and their ideological certainties. A postscript considers William Allingham’s Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland, an exception to this travelling spirit that proves the rule.

Antislavery Afterlives: Changing the Subject / Haunting the Poetess

This chapter examines mid- to late-Victorian attempts at self-distancing from triumphalist (and literalist) early antislavery promises, focusing in particular on how the themes of haunting, displacement, and denial threaded through many later Victorians' patriotic invocations of liberating empire. Drawing on emerging pedagogical and scholarly revolutions in studies of nineteenth-century British relations to slavery, the chapter considers histories of disciplinary reticence dating back in part to the Victorians themselves. It also discusses the increasingly iconic histories of the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention and J.M.W. Turner's painting Slave Ship as well as Elizabeth V. Spelman's Fruits of Sorrow and her notion of “changing the subject.” Finally, it explores the discipline termed “ethical refocalization” by turning to three parallel scenes of interrupted Poetess performance, in Germaine de Staël's Corinne, or Italy; Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, and George Eliot's Spanish Gypsy.