A faint impression

Charles Dickens loved to write about prostitutes. They were never the main subjects of his work, but the more you delve into his novels, the more you realize how consistently he features them as side characters, usually covered in chimney soot and espousing the hard-boiled wisdom of the streets. One might expect that such denizens of the underworld would have fairly strong constitutions, able to pluck birdshot from a baron’s buttocks if push came to shove. But in “Oliver Twist,” when a prostitute is relayed some particularly shocking information, she faints on the spot. Just drops like a sack of dead haddock.

 

If even sex workers are prone to fainting, then what hope is there for humanity?

 

Well if that’s the criteria, then a lot, as it turns out. Because nobody faints anymore. Not Southern belles, not children, not people who work with large quantities of meat. Nobody. At some point, it just stopped being a thing. 

 

Kind of. I mean, if we’re being totally honest, then it does still happen from time to time, mostly among the elderly and people with nervous system disorders. According to WebMD, fainting accounts for about three percent of all visitors to the emergency room. The other 97 percent were hit by projectiles thrown by Justin Bieber.

 

But that’s not the kind of fainting I’m talking about. I’m talking about the flushed swooning of London gentry, the breathless, “Gone With the Wind” kind of fainting that befalls a person struck by scandalous news. Over time, that particular affliction went the way of polio and scurvy, something experienced by the scowling Dust Bowl farmers of yellowed tintype photographs. Certainly nothing that would happen to someone reading tech blogs on their iPhone at a Chuck E. Cheese.

 

And this wasn’t a condition unique to movie damsels and Dickensian prostitutes. Nosiree. There’s an abundance of documented cases of this kind of thing, some of them found in the Journal Tribune’s very own archives.

 

In a couple of rambling run-on sentences published in the Biddeford Daily Journal in January 1914, a reporter – who I’d like to think was wearing a fedora – recounts two unusual occurrences at the close of hearings in a supreme court trial in Saco. The first was the burning of a hotel owned by the plaintiff. 

 

“(The) second,” writes the reporter, “was the fainting of the defendant while on the witness stand, Mr. Emerson becoming practically unconscious, his sudden illness necessitating his removal from the witness stand after his revival from the stupor into which the excitement had thrown him.”

 

A stupor! Holy cow! You know, I’ve been to quite a few court proceedings over the years. Sex crimes, murders, manslaughter. Not once have I been witness to an honest-to-goodness stupor. Fingers crossed, I guess.

 

So there it is, hard and fast proof that fainting spells were a real-life occurrence, not solely the stuff of melodramatic, bodice-ripping dime novels. But this begs a question that, by now, should be fairly obvious: Why are these types of fainting spells no longer as common? What happened?

 

I’ve read a fair amount about fainting over the past few days, which brings me close to having conducted actual “research,” a genuinely adult activity that makes me feel ashamed for decorating my windowsills with Ninja Turtles figurines. It would have been nice, during the course of this reading, to have discovered a satisfactory answer for why fainting now exists almost solely as an adjunct to some greater affliction. Such an answer, though, doesn’t seem to exist. The disappearance of Victorian artistocrat-style fainting spells has slipped by relatively unnoticed.

 

Which means I can attempt to explain it myself. Cue knuckle-cracking noises.

 

Obviously part of it has to do with an increased awareness of how to maintain one’s general health; let’s face it, fainting is pretty lame, and with better access to healthful foods and medical care, nobody collapses anymore unless something serious and non-lame is happening, like a heart attack, or a roundhouse kick to the head from Chuck Norris. But while knowledge is power, I don’t think that’s the whole story.

 

My guess is that fainting’s diminished role owes largely to desensitization. You can’t shock someone into unconsciousness if nothing shocks them. In the days of corsets and frilly teacups, when children were taught handwriting by monacled old men at their family’s estate in Pigbuttshire, a normal life was sequestered from scandal and intrigue. So when something even mildly dramatic and unexpected happened, like a handsome man splitting the seam of his pants dismounting a horse, then sure, let the swooning begin.

 

Now, nobody’s sequestered from anything. At six years old, kids are watching YouTube videos of would-be stunt bicyclists getting sideswiped by minivans. People play video games in which the object is to pry a shotgun from a dead farmer’s hands so they can mow down an army of zombies. At this point, there’s nothing a person can see or hear that would cause them to spontaneously faint, because they’ve seen and heard it all already. 

 

Technology and access galvanize us against shock, but the tradeoff is that we lose our innocence before we’re old enough to remember what it’s like to have it in the first place. There’s something a little sad about that.

Dickens had a vivid imagination. But even he couldn’t have predicted a world in which a child would have a stronger constitution than a London prostitute.