Carolyn Jacobson
Dissertation Proposal
Advisor: Dr. Nina Auerbach
"Language is a Virus":
Disease and Narrative in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England
My dissertation explores fictional narratives created by novelists within the cultural context of the epidemics and medical debates of the mid-nineteenth century. I argue that as the medical discussion surrounding disease became increasingly focused on contagion, authors of novels dramatically linked diseases to the creative process itself. Seeing diseases as themselves narratives or in relation to narratives opened up their metaphoric possibilities for writers such as Dickens, Kingsley, Barrett Browning, C. Bronte, and Martineau, who, in the 1840s and 1850s contemplated how theories of disease could be used to explain other forms of human communication. Their depictions of fictional creation, indeed, became inextricably linked to the diseases that were sweeping the country. Ironically, these authors' senses of narrative often depended on elements of disease theory, even within the very novels which mourned the destruction of life brought about by the epidemics.
The cholera epidemics of 1831-2, 1848-9, and 1853-4 killed over 100,000 people in England and Wales. Typhoid and typhus killed thousands annually during the middle of the century, occasionally reaching epidemic levels, and diphtheria, tuberculosis, and smallpox also claimed thousands of lives each year. When the cholera epidemics first reached England in the 1830s, doctors lacked an adequate theory of contagion, and as a result were prevented from explaining and thus from curbing or preventing epidemics. The high incidence of fatal diseases in the 1830s, '40s and '50s inspired heated debates in Victorian medical journals about the contagious nature of diseases and the possibility of immunity and immunization. Opinions on these matters were by no means united, and the doctors argued their positions, presented their data, laid out their diagrams which indicated areas of high incidence of the disease in sections of the cities or in particular hospital wards, and argued their positions again. Some of the most embattled discussions centered on whether the diseases were transferable from person to person, and whether anything could be done to protect individuals from contracting them. Eventually, the contagionists won the day, but the fight was long and drawn-out, and the anticontagionists were only won over gradually. Charles Rosenberg identifies the shift from a belief in an anticontagionist theory of disease to a belief in contagious diseases as a critical shift in the history of medicine, and not surprisingly, this shift allowed for rapid progress in the fight against contagious diseases such as cholera. This shift represented more than simply a more precise scientific description of disease, however; accounting for contagion required a new way of understanding how diseases and human bodies interacted, which in turn led to a conception of human beings as more vulnerable to each other's presence and influence.
The repeated incidents of epidemics, as well as the heightened debates which swirled around the issue of contagion, made the topic one that many Victorian authors introduced into their narratives, either as a plot device or as a metaphor. The new theories of contagious diseases provided novelists with new ways to depict their characters, especially in their relation to each other. Contagious diseases were particularly fruitful illnesses in this context, because they imply that the illness is a repercussion of a particular action or contact, and issues of guilt and responsibility for actions or instances of contact were themes that Victorian novelists returned to over and over. Diseases are introduced into novels to provoke change, to make a lasting impression on those who survive, and ultimately to prove that people are vulnerable. My dissertation argues that a belief in--and even a reliance on--such vulnerability lay at the base of many Victorian narratives, making disease a potent source of inspiration. Since contagious disease spread through human agents, these diseases were also taken up by some Victorian novelists as an appropriate metaphor for the act of creating fictional narratives, an act in which a writer spreads his or her ideas through the contact provided by words on a page. As a result of this metaphor, contagious diseases take on an ambiguous role in these novels. On one hand, they cause the suffering of many of the characters, and yet on the other hand, they also represent the vitality and potential influence that the novelists hoped their own work would achieve.
The novels I have chosen for my dissertation are not simply Victorian novels which mention disease. In each of my five novel-oriented chapters, I will look at works in which references to and instances of disease are linked to the idea of narrative itself. I will begin in my first chapter by examining the medical debates which lay behind the authors' discussions. In my second and third chapters I will look at two authors who shift back and forth between contagionist and anticontagionist views of disease and narrative influence. Both Charlotte Bronte and Charles Kingsley write explicitly about miasma, a belief that diseases like cholera were caused by poisons in the atmosphere, but at the same time rely on contagionist theories when they consider the effects of novelists on readers. In my final three chapters, I will examine the work of novelists who more fully accept and make use of contagionist theories of disease: Charles Dickens, Harriet Martineau, and finally Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose theory of immunity surpasses that held by doctors during the time when she was writing Aurora Leigh.
Chapter 1--"Unaccountably Dangerous": Struggling for Narratives in the Midst of Epidemics
My first chapter describes the nineteenth-century struggle to make sense of the epidemic diseases that were spreading through the cities and villages of England, and in doing so, sets the stage for the rest of the dissertation. The medical journals of this period capture the doctors' often emotional efforts to understand what they were seeing in ways that could enable them to cure diseases and alleviate suffering. The records and reports reveal two different discourses. On one hand, the doctors painstakingly detail the conditions and symptoms they encountered. They note the number of people taken ill, the locations where cases occurred, and the order in which they occurred. In other words, the doctors were first attempting to accurately read the world around them. On the other hand, the doctors were using the facts they observed to understand how the diseases functioned; they were trying to make their data meaningful by using it to create written narratives about how diseases developed and spread. Doctors who only saw symptoms when looking at a patient had few options other than trying to suppress those symptoms, but doctors who could see the patient as one part of a narrative in which the disease moved from person to person could begin to think about how to prevent the spread of the infection. Constructing disease as part of a narrative process was the key to making sense of the overwhelming and baffling data. This chapter will describe the ways in which these doctors rethought diseases, paying particular attention to the dynamics of the narratives they wrote.
Chapter 2--Conflicting Theories of Disease in the Novels of Charlotte Bronte
Charlotte Bronte takes the way a human body responds to a disease, and uses it as a metaphor for the way her characters react to all of the events that occur within her novels. In Shirley, Bronte presents her readers with repeated examples of how she sees bodies interacting with disease. The disease must present itself physically to the body in question, and then only if the individual is emotionally predisposed will the body succumb:
How she had caught the fever (fever it was) she could not tell. Probably in her late walk home some sweet poisoned breeze, redolent of honey-dew and miasma, had passed into her lungs and veins, and finding there already a fever of mental excitement, and a languor of long conflict and habitual sadness, had fanned the spark to flame, and left a well-lit fire behind it. (Bronte, Shirley, 399)
In another example, Bronte writes:
She was not precisely in that state, when, if her constitution had contained the seeds of consumption, decline, or slow fever, those diseases would have been rapidly developed, and would soon have carried her quietly from the world. People never die of love or grief love; though some die of inherent maladies, which the tortures of those passions prematurely force into destructive action. (Bronte, Shirley, 205)
These emotionally-determined interactions present the reader with a paradigm of the way that Bronte's novels depict life occurring. In each of her novels, The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley, and Villette, Bronte quickly establishes her characters' personalities and their predispositions. When events then occur, these predispositions determine the outcome of the novel. For Bronte, how individuals respond to illness (or the threat of illness) becomes her model for how to represent the events of a character's life. Moving through life, then, becomes synonymous with walking through fields of miasma, and one's survival depends on one's emotional constitution. Bronte's use of the miasmatic theory of disease throws the readers' attention onto the response of the sick character rather than on whatever has made that character sick. For Bronte, I argue, the response is always more important than the cause of the illness, and this influences how she chooses to depict disease in her novels.
However, Bronte's use of disease extends beyond this particular anticontagionist metaphor. Being influenced mentally and emotionally in any way is explicitly considered a form of infection in this novel, a consideration which carries serious implications for authors who manipulate and influence the minds of readers, and which extends the ways that we can think about disease in relation to Bronte's work. Having a particular physical source for infection, as opposed to a general poisoning of the atmosphere, implies a contagionist theory of disease.
My chapter will discuss Bronte's notion of the artist as infector, particularly in regard to the relationship that she constructs between her narrators and her readers. In Shirley, Bronte depicts literature as one of the most powerful influences on the emotions, thus slipping it into the category of infectious materials. However, the narrators of Bronte's novels, rather than being other potentially-influenced individuals, are at many points distinguished from the readers who are perusing the pages. In Shirley, for instance, the generally omniscient third-person narrator occasionally steps into the first person, at one point refusing to "inflate [her] lungs" with the readers' "poisonous rancour" (Bronte, Shirley, 67). She thus establishes herself as immune to the types of influences to which she assumes both her readers and her characters are susceptible. I will also look at Lucy Snowe, the narrator of Villette, who continually puts up protective barriers between herself and her audience. In short, I will investigate Bronte's use of both contagionist and anticontagionist theories of disease, and the implications her choices have for her narratives.
Chapter 3--The Fermenting Narrative of Kingsley's Yeast
Charles Kingsley announces in his novel Yeast that England is in need of much improvement--financial, moral, spiritual--and he uses the language of illness to do so. From the first pages of the novel, disease functions in many ways: as a symptom of the extreme poverty present in the English countryside, as a metaphor for a host of problems facing the nation, and as a more general metaphor for incorrect thinking. A cure for the more metaphoric definitions of disease is repeatedly spoken of as a type of medicine, and within this context, Kingsley offers his novel as one possible antidote for the ills of England. Kingsley further complicates this view, however. For a book to have curative powers, it must also have the ability to function like a disease--to "infect" its readers through the contact the susceptible reader has with the author through the medium of the pages. In essence, Yeast is all about contact and resulting influence. A biological model supplies the basis for this dynamic--Argemone catches a fatal disease as the result of her contact with the sick, for instance--but the dynamic applies to all sorts of interactions in the book, including the dynamic between writers (or books) and readers. Narratives, then, can be very powerful (as powerful as diseases themselves), but they can also be dangerous (again like diseases), and the narrator warns fathers and clergy to be wary about what books boys are allowed to read.
Throughout Yeast, Kingsley constantly tries to balance two contradictory theories of disease, a theory of miasma and a theory of contagion. As the title of the book suggests, one concept upon which the book relies is a theory of fermentation. At times in the novel, the narrator presents education as a type of fermentation in which young men receive a number of conflicting ideas, undergo a process of intellectual struggle, and finally emerge as wiser human beings. The corresponding disease theory is that of miasma, the belief that certain poisons spread through the atmosphere, clustering most frequently in damp places, causing disease through their fermentation. A river named "Yeast" cuts through the landscape of the novel, and characters refer to the miasmatic illness that occurs as a result of villagers' proximity to the water. At the same time, however, disease manifests itself most explicitly in the novel in the form of contagion. For example, Argemone contracts her fatal illness not by spending time by the river, but by going to care for the sick. The novel pays lip service to a miasmatic disease theory, but presents both the spreading of disease and the spreading of ideas strictly as instances of contagion. My chapter will describe Kingsley's varying theories of disease, will look at his reasons for vacillating between them, and will investigate the implications of his choices.
Chapter 4--"A State of Ink": Documentation, Creativity, and Disease in Dickens's Bleak House
In this chapter, I will be discussing Bleak House, Dickens's novel which most explicitly addresses contagious diseases, documents, and the relationship that the human body has to both. Smallpox, the disease that Dickens uses in Bleak House, was the one epidemic disease of the early- and mid-Victorian period that was generally believed to be contagious. Dickens clearly presents his readers with a contagionist model of disease when Esther becomes sick after she has physical contact with the already-stricken Jo. However, the concept of contagion extends beyond physical disease. Documents can also be agents of infection, and Richard, sucked into the document-infested Jarndyce and Jarndyce court case, is presented as "infected" as surely as is Esther.
Dickens's main concern lies with the concept of communication--of information, of physical characteristics, of disease--and he presents an ambivalent portrait of it. For the most part, Dickens presents disease and documents negatively: smallpox causes much physical and emotional pain, and most people who become involved with written materials suffer as a result. But Dickens also presents communication as necessary and even desirable. For example, Jo and Krook, both illiterate, struggle to gain access to the written world around them, and Dickens effectively suggests the alienation they feel from being outside this world which others take for granted. Certainly, after her early years of loneliness, Esther's new life with Richard, Ada, and John Jarndyce represents just how comforting communication can be. Dickens never attempts to recuperate smallpox in any positive way, but he makes it very clear that certain types of physical communication are life affirming (the brief moments of physical contact between Esther and her mother, for instance). In the face of all the negative moments in the novel in which forms of communication are made suspect, Dickens provides the reader with emotionally powerful moments in which contact and communication, despite their many dangers, help fulfil characters' lives. That a novelist would portray communication in a positive light is not surprising, but the ambivalent portrayal of writing within the novel, made all the more ambivalent through the comparison made between writing and a horrible disease like smallpox, makes the role that writing plays less straightforward.
To complicate the relationship between disease and documents even further, Dickens extends their relationship beyond metaphorical boundaries in two ways. First, he depicts characters like Lady Dedlock getting sick from their interaction with letters. When she sees a letter written in a familiar hand, her response makes it seem as if the letter has physically infected her, thus blurring the distinction between text and contagious disease. Second, Dickens depicts Esther's face as a text after her encounter with smallpox. Bleak House is full of characters whose faces are being read figuratively. Caddy's inky face provides the novel's first example of a woman whose face literally becomes a text, and Esther follows suit, much more dramatically. Her scarred face, which various characters hold in their hands like a book, shows how she has been turned into a document, which parallels the way her life has been turned into one half of the huge Bleak House. (That Esther herself writes about her narrative as her body helps emphasize this parallel.) Dickens then plays a game with his readers, never letting us know the extent of Esther's disfiguration, while showing us scene after scene in which the other major characters first glimpse her face. Esther can't hide for long how smallpox has marked her, but Dickens shows us the more elusive quality of written documents, and avoids ever describing her to us. Without a visual image of Esther's scarring, we are left to wonder what her visage now communicates to those around her. In other words, smallpox is a disease that keeps on communicating long after a sick person survives the infectious stage, and this characteristic provides another similarity to written documents whose effects (like the multiple wills of Tom Jarndyce) communicate information (or confusion) long after the original writing.
Chapter 5--Spreading the Word: Language and Fever in Martineau's Deerbrook
In Harriet Martineau's Deerbrook, fever and gossip sweep through the town for which the novel is named, both doing much damage to its inhabitants. Martineau unsubtly implies the similarity between these two forms of "communication" which spread from person to person, and although illness and gossip are never far from any chapter of the novel, both "plagues" flare up at the end, when an epidemic threatens every living person, and gossip threatens to destroy the future happiness of the book's central characters. For Martineau, language is literally a virus, or at least, in mid-Victorian terms, a contagious fever.
As the novel progresses, the power of the central doctor, Dr. Hope, grows greater and greater, and his struggles are presented as taking place not simply against a disease, but against damaging language. As the fever spreads in the village, fortune tellers arrive, selling both quack remedies and predicting the fates of the villagers. As one character describes the situation, the sick "put more faith in charms than in medicines or care; and were running out in the cold and damp to have their fortunes told by night, or in the gray of the morning" (Martineau, Deerbrook, 472). Even the characters who stay away from the gypsies visit from house to house causing panic with their rumors. People are desperate to hear the words of others, and the plague seems to be circulating among people on two levels: the disease itself, and the dialogue about the disease, which has a life of its own. Hope has his own advice for how people should deal with the epidemic, and much of the end of the book consists in his efforts to be listened to by the townspeople. The book, then, becomes about how one "reads" disease, and in doing so, confers upon language the power to define reality.
Deerbrook explores how a contagious disease functions like language, but the novel exposes how disease ultimately works to opposite ends, destroying the communication and community that language can foster. People close their stores, hide inside their homes, and refuse to help their neighbors. Martineau doesn't paint language as a cure-all. Language is fragile--the large numbers of letters which are burned in this novel help emphasize this point--and can prove damaging, as in the case of the gossip spread by the women of Deerbrook, but the book ultimately champions those who try to verbally communicate truths of both emotional and medical natures. The novelist, then, is aligned in this book with the doctor who speaks the truth about disease, exposes those who lie or spread malicious scandal, and ultimately saves the day by presenting people with appropriate language and an accurate interpretation of the fever. Hope not only helps control disease, he ultimately gains control of the words being spoken in the town, and in fact, Martineau blends these two types of control together: on the pages of the novel, we more frequently hear Hope speaking about the fever than we see him actually practicing his medicine. Despite the wonderful care he may be giving people in the village, Hope's prowess is a verbal one rather than a clinical one as far as the reader is concerned. This chapter will investigate the power attributed to both language and disease in this novel and the extent to which both create and control reality.
Chapter 6--"Some Natures Catch No Plagues": Physical Power and Poetic Creation in Aurora Leigh
My chapter on Elizabeth Barrett Browning's verse novel Aurora Leigh will look at how Barrett Browning equates physical strength and endurance with the ability to create. I will look at Aurora's own theory of contagion, which anticipates a definition of natural immunity that was not yet being discussed within the pages of Victorian medical journals ("Some natures catch no plagues," as Aurora says in Book IV, line 1064), and I will look at how Barrett Browning's understanding of narrative helped her imagine that such immunity could exist when so many doctors could not yet conceive of the concept.
The verse novel contains two primary examples of human creation--a book of poetry and a baby boy--and through the use of repeated physical metaphors and allusions, Barrett Browning eventually suggests that both acts should be seen as testaments to the potential strength of the human mind and will. Creation, by the end of the novel, is shown to be something that can only occur once strength has been both metaphorically and physically demonstrated, and Barrett Browning uses disease to represent one of the tests of strength which can prove humans creators. One of the other ways that strength can be developed in this novel is by reading, and I will consider the implications this has on Aurora Leigh as a self-referential document.
The illness suffered by the characters in Bronte's Shirley lets the readers know that these are people who are capable of being influenced by and feeling love for others. Although Aurora must acknowledge her weaknesses before the romantic element of Barrett Browning's plot is resolved, the resolution of the artistic portion of the plot depends on physical strength rather than on any form of susceptibility. This emphasis on strength, rather than vulnerability (which plays such a large role in novels like Shirley and Yeast) allows Barrett Browning to imagine natural immunity. That she can do so signals her uniqueness in relation to the other novelists and doctors mentioned in earlier chapters of this dissertation. In this chapter I will briefly return to the doctors, describing the difficulty they had conceiving of natural immunity. The primary reason for this difficulty, I argue, is that for both camps of doctors, those arguing for and against the possibility of contagious diseases, immunity posed perplexing problems. For doctors who wanted to prove that diseases were contagious, immune individuals seemed to disprove the theory of contagion, and so these doctors tended to avoid mentioning individuals who did not get sick, and instead focus, for instance, on the large numbers who did get sick in one specific area. On the other hand, doctors who argued that diseases weren't contagious often argued that fevers were brought about by certain atmospheric conditions or unhealthy water. Since their case would also be weakened by the reminder of individuals who did not get sick (even though they breathed the same air as those who were dying), people who didn't catch diseases like cholera and smallpox were often ignored in medical texts. In other words, in the process of struggling toward a theory of disease that accommodated epidemics, doctors tended to ignore or fail to notice the cases that did not fit into their narratives. Once Barrett Browning brought resistance to disease into a narrative that also contained the Madonna-like Marian Erle, natural immunity became an unsurprising conclusion. My dissertation consists of novelists who made use of theories of disease within their narratives, but Barrett Browning is the only one who used her narrative content to develop her theory of disease. In the end, she sees further into the history of medicine than the doctors who were trying to write it.
Physical strength and resistance are not merely metaphors which Barrett Browning uses to describe the ability to write, however. Aurora Leigh struggles in the book to write her epic of "this live throbbing age," and in order to do so must brave, both in person and on the page, the contagion of the London streets (Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, Book V, line 203). The poet's creative efforts rely on disease not only as a metaphorical testing ground, but also as subject matter. Barrett Browning's sense of disease relies on her understanding of its narrative potential, and her narrative relies on disease to express her beliefs about poetry and the strength required to create artistic narratives.
Proposal Bibliography