Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion

'Our Feverish Contact'

Allan Conrad Christensen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134237333
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Diseases & Allergies

This intriguing book examines the ways contagion - or disease - inform and shape a wide variety of nineteenth century texts and contexts.

Christiensen dissects the cultural assumptions concerning disease, health, impurity and so on before exploring different perspectives on key themes such as plague, nursing and the hospital environment and focusing on certain key texts including Dicken's Bleak House, Gaskell's Ruth, and Zola's Le Docteur Pascal.

1
History as contagion

The system of repression that derived from the Congress of Vienna failed to establish an authentic European stability. The restoration of order often seemed more like disorder and naturally it prompted many insurrections. In England the forty years between Waterloo and the outbreak of the Crimean War similarly offered to many observers the sorry spectacle of a peace that was phoney and sickly. At the end of Tennyson’s Maud, the speaker describes ‘a peace that was full of wrongs and shames,/Horrible, hateful, monstrous’, and one of the main characters in Charles Kingsley’s Two Years Ago asks, ‘“what if all the Anglo-Saxon world has been befooled, by forty years of peace”’: ‘“the history of the world has been as yet written in blood. … What right have we to suppose that it will be aught else … as long as anger and ambition, cupidity and wounded pride, canker the hearts of men?”’ (XXIII).

In its written texts the whole nineteenth century seems indeed to represent itself as perpetually embattled despite a contrasting effort to propose myths of peaceful progress, stability and ideological consensus sustained by a bourgeois hegemony. The fierce divisions and antagonisms of the ongoing debates have commonly been referred to such polarities as faith and doubt, religion and science, freedom and necessity, teleology and chance. Related to these is also the polarity of health and disease, in which, as in the pattern just noticed with respect to peace and war, the second term proves not to be entirely negative. As an instance of Bakhtin’s ‘symbolic reversal’, the apparently ‘negative term … is invested with positive cultural value’.¹ Physical disease and bloodshed may become beneficial when they help to cure the false health that masks the cultural disease ‘canker[ing] the hearts of men’.

That cankering cultural disease, to be sure, may remain a negative term that it would be difficult to invest with positive value. Matthew Arnold unambiguously laments the prevalence of the mal de siècle and urges the scholar-gipsy of the healthy seventeenth century to remain distant from ‘this strange disease of modern life’:

But fly our paths, our feverish contact fly! For strong the infection of our mental strife, Which, though it gives no bliss, yet spoils for rest.

Besides the scholar-gipsy, the Goethe that has suffered from the cultural disease in his youth and has then recovered becomes for Arnold a paradigm of health. As ‘Physician of the iron age’ in ‘Memorial Verses’, he also proffers an escapist remedy to others: ‘Art still has truth, take refuge there!’ The refuge may appeal, however, only to a certain élite, like the poet Elsley Vavasour in Two Years Ago, for whom the Sage of Weimar has become a cult figure: ‘Elsley had a dread more nervous than really coward of infectious diseases: and he had also (and prided himself, too, on having) all Goethe’s dislike of anything terrible or horrible, of sickness, disease, wounds, death, anything which jarred with that “beautiful” which was his idol’ (X). Here then it is not only cultural disease but disease of all kinds that remains an irremediably negative phenomenon.

As well as with the ‘beautiful’ Kingsley himself associates the ideal of health with moral virtue and physical strength. Instead of taking aesthetic refuge from ‘infectious diseases’, one should, he believes, fight physically and relentlessly to destroy their capacity for mischief. So the physician-protagonist of Two Years Ago, Tom Thurnall, differs from Arnold’s notion of the Goethean physician in that he confronts the iron age, as it were, with its own iron weapons. In angrily but also gleefully denouncing the sanitary criminals that have permitted the cholera to spread, he brandishes his own weapons in his own version of a military confrontation: ‘“I have got – and what greater pleasure? – a good stand-up fight with an old enemy”’ (XVII). The old enemy, dirt and disease, is further identified as ‘“my devil”’ – ‘“and I can’t help it, for the life of me, going right at his throat, wheresoever I meet him”’ (XIV).

The health for which Kingsley and his protagonists do battle involves a unity of body and mind that they associate with an even earlier period of history than that of the scholar-gipsy. In a lecture entitled ‘The Science of Health’, Kingsley directs attention to ‘the statues of the old Greeks; to their tender grandeur, their chaste healthfulness, their unconscious, because perfect, might;… these are tokens to you, and to all generations yet unborn, of what man could be once; of what he can be again’.² Similarly, Allen Fenwick, the physician and narrator of Bulwer’s A Strange Story, refers the condition of ‘perfect health’ to ‘the golden age of the poets, – the youth of the careless Arcadian, before nymph or shepherdess had vexed his heart with a sigh’. Such ‘health, to the utmost perfection,… cannot be enjoyed by those who overwork the brain, or admit the sure wear and tear of the passions’ and so has largely ceased to exist in modern civilization (XXIII). The normal condition of mature men and women, as G.H. Lewes observes at about the same time, is to be more or less ailing: ‘few of us, after thirty, can boast of robust health’.³

Classical images of wholeness and health exert of course an enormous appeal for nineteenth-century civilization, but many Victorians also recognize a possibly perverse beauty or ‘cultural value’ in the enemy of such health. Walter Pater, whose enthusiasm for the Greek ideal is surely unsurpassed by that of any of his contemporaries, thus appreciates the diseased faces of Leonardo too. ‘What may be called the fascination of corruption’, he notes of the Medusa, ‘penetrates in every touch its exquisitely finished beauty’. And against the ‘Greek goddesses and beautiful women of antiquity’, he defiantly sets ‘this beauty [of La Gioconda], into which the soul with all its maladies has passed’.⁴ The decadent strain, if one wishes so to denominate it, runs throughout the century. It may be related to the ‘Worship of Sorrow’ which Carlyle, Pater and others celebrate and to the many passages in literature of the period in which suffering is discovered to have a positive value. As a legacy of Romanticism, sickness becomes in Susan Sontag’s observation ‘a way of making people “interesting”’.⁵ One of the most prominent of nineteenth-century invalids, Harriet Martineau, seems in her popular Life in the Sick-Room further to identify sickness rather than health with goodness. As with Pater, then, the apparently negative term is invested with positive value:

The sick-room becomes the scene of intense conviction; and among these, none, it seems to me, is more distinct and powerful than that of the permanent nature of good, and the transient nature of evil. At times I could almost believe that long sickness or other trouble is ordained to prove to us this very point – a point worth any costliness of proof.⁶

In revealing the permanence of good and the transience of evil, the experience of illness can offer, according to Bulwer’s essay ‘On Ill Health and Its Consolations’, a Platonic awareness: just as ‘Plato retired to his cave to be wise[,] sickness is often the moral cave, with its quiet, its darkness, and its solitude, to the soul’. Human beings should even consider their earthly condition to be more fundamentally that of the patient than that of the healthy subject: in illness ‘we learn to think, with one of the most august of our moralists, that “earth is an hospital, not an inn – a place to die, not to live in.” Our existence becomes a great preparation for death’.⁷

Because sickness functions in the framework of natural or providential teleology, the Victorians may not, on the whole, have agreed with Kings-ley’s Tom Thurnall who so implacably vilifies disease as the devil himself. Indeed not only physical but also mental disease, as Bruce Haley has further argued in analysing contemporary notions of health, occur as ‘natural phases of a general life-pattern’.⁸ The sickness of the Zeitgeist too, which Arnold and others diagnose so gloomily, constitutes only a natural phase in a larger historical pattern. Although that pattern remains unclear and the efforts to define health and disease lead to no conclusions, the opposing terms continue in their symbiosis to require one another. As in the memorable line from T.S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’, they are ‘united in the strife which divided them’.

Especially through the mechanism of contagion, with which the present study is concerned, diseases were seen as participating with almost military aggressiveness in the ‘strife’. By the same token the non-medical versions of cultural conflict were seen as participating with contagious aggressiveness in their battles. The contagious phenomenon fascinated the imagination of the century to the point that one can discern, according to Athena Vrettos, ‘the ubiquity of contagion as a master narrative in Victorian culture’.⁹

The obvious material explanation of the fascination with contagion is the dramatic virulence of the series of epidemics during the middle third of the nineteenth century. In England these began in 1831–32 when cholera, as a seemingly new and especially inexplicable disease, struck with terrifying unpredictability and claimed some 52,000 lives. Between 1836 and 1842 there occurred major epidemics of influenza, typhus, smallpox, measles, whooping cough and scarlet fever, and between 1846 and 1849 further epidemics of typhus, typhoid and cholera. And the epidemic outbreaks continued while tuberculosis and venereal disease remained a constant cause of mortality as well. On the basis of Edwin Chadwick’s influential Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842), one deduces that in a particularly bad year (1839) eight deaths occurred from contagious diseases for every one death from other causes.¹⁰

The concern to understand the mechanisms of contagion prompted a widely engrossing debate between the proponents of germs and the infec-tionists or ‘miasmists’. The traditional, widely-accepted contagionist paradigm lost ground after 1832 to what R.J. Morris calls ‘miasmic thinking’, which attained the ‘high noon’ of its ascendancy in the summer of 1849. It then began to give way to the eventually victorious theories involving germs or bacilli. The debate was not conducted, however, on serenely rational, scientific grounds. The participants, as Morris indicates, could not agree on the nature of the problem and on what might constitute relevant evidence. Social pressures from outside the medical community, related to religious and political beliefs, economic issues, and the social class and gender of the participants, deeply influenced the arguments. The debate thus offers an interesting example of ‘the importance of moral and metaphysical assumptions in response to disease’.¹¹ It also demonstrates the vulnerability of science, in its study of literal contagion, to a metaphorical contagion emanating from other discourses.

The phenomenon of metaphorical or moral contagion operated similarly in the bitter public controversy that accompanied the campaigns to enact the Contagious Diseases Acts in the 1860s and later to repeal them. Sexist prejudice, that is, contaminated the arguments urged in support of the acts that provided for the compulsory examination and detention of women presumed to be prostitutes. While less than robust health may have been the normal human condition, this was particularly the case with women. Doctors of the period, according to Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, believed that ‘woman’s normal state was to be sick’: ‘this sickness is innate, and stems from the very possession of the uterus and ovaries’.¹² The sickness assumed especially virulent, contagious forms in the case of prostitutes, a ‘vicious and profligate sisterhood’.

The atmosphere in which the Contagious Diseases Acts were debated naturally informs many literary works of the 1860s and 1870s. Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (edition of 1862), which uses imagery of spreading contagion in connection with the disintegration of Arthurian culture, identifies the unchaste Guinevere as the primary source of the infection. In the words of Arthur’s denunciation,

‘Her station, taken everywhere for pure, She like a new disease, unknown to men, Creeps, no precaution used, among the crowd, Makes wicked lightnings of her eyes, and saps The fealty of our friends, and stirs the pulse With devil’s leaps, and poisons half the young.’ (‘Guinevere’, ll. 514–19)

Guinevere has taken refuge at this point, however, not amidst a ‘profligate and vicious sisterhood’ but with the holy sisters of Almesbury, where she hopes in nursing the diseases of others to redeem herself – to ‘“treat their loathsome hurts and heal mine own”’ (l. 680). Another notable example of the masculine ascription of blame to the woman for the moral contagion of the domestic environment is found in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879). Although Torvald Helmer does not in this case accuse his wife of adultery, he is convinced that it is primarily a wife’s deviance that pollutes a household: ‘A fog of lies like that in a household, and it spreads disease and infection to every part of it. Every breath the children take in that kind of house is reeking with evil germs. … Practically all juvenile delinquents come from homes where the mother is dishonest’ (Act I).¹³

In the realm of fiction, Donald Hall believes, the atmosphere of the Contagious Diseases Acts contaminates Great Expectations (1860–61). The novel seems to associate Miss Havisham and Estella with prostitution and to hint at a venereal infection that emanates from them. Hall also finds here that if the current debate about contagion has contaminated the novel, the novel has in its turn affected or influenced the external ‘social reality’. Dickens’s work not only represented but helped to produce ‘the shifting of blame from women to men that led to repeal of the CDAs’.¹⁴

An even more crucial novel with respect to the CDAs is one that figures importantly in this study, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853), for it struck Josephine Butler with the force of a revelation. She would go on to become the leader of the Ladies’ National Association (LNA) that united working-class and middle-class members in campaigns against the acts and eventually secured their repeal. The controversy, Judith R. Walkowitz suggests, provides an instructive example of how a ‘technology of power’ (as here embodied in the acts) provokes ‘a formidable social and political resistance’ (in Butler’s campaigns).¹⁵ The acts themselves, in our own application of the metaphor of contagion, represent the contagious menace against which Butler’s LNA manifests the immune response. As in the case of Great Expectations, the situation also shows, according to Hilary M. Schor, a compl...

Table of contents

• Routledge studies in nineteenth-century literature
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on citations
• 1 History as contagion
• 2 Providence amidst pestilence and fire
• 3 Swordsmen and needlewomen
• 4 Physicians, nurses and patients
• 5 Mothers, daughters and lovers
• 6 Writers and readers
• 7 Speakers, singers and listeners
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index