Staying Calm and Seizing the Iron: Contagion, Fermentation, and the Management of the Rabies Threat in Charlotte Brontë's Shirley

Rabies erupts in the narrative of Charlotte Brontë's Shirley (1849) when Shirley Keeldar is suddenly bitten by a previously friendly dog. On being told that the dog, Phoebe, is "raging mad" (426), Shirley runs to the kitchen, grabs an iron, and cauterizes the wound to prevent her own infection with rabies.¹ Through this action, Shirley seeks to protect herself from shame and pain, but her mortification of the flesh is also a measure to reassert the integrity of the flesh by blockading it against infection. Kathleen Kete notes "the special dreadfulness of the self-conscious [rabies] patient" (101), whose awareness of shame and loss of control constituted a significant component of the particular terrors of rabies. Newspapers in the 1840s described individuals dying in agony from the disease, detailing their painful convulsions and violent paroxysms in articles whose titles promised lurid details of a "Shocking," "Dreadful," "Lamentable," or "Frightful" death.² In September 1849, the Blackburn Standard documented a case in which the "deceased died raving, and requiring five or six men to hold him down" ("Dreadful Death"); Lloyd's Weekly told how the same man "requested that if in his ravings he should bite his mother, they would knock his head off the next moment. For some time before his death, he barked and gnashed his teeth just like a dog" ("Awful Death"). Whether by means of cauterization, straitjacketing, or restraint, the management of rabies predicated a need to install or reinstate the barriers and boundaries of the body. This strategy, I shall argue, also brings into sharp relief questions that are implicit throughout Shirley about the ways in which barriers and boundaries might be mobilized or defended as protection against a variety of hazards, from fermenting hysteria to incendiarism and rebellion.

Emily Brontë's bite from a "strange dog, running past, with hanging head and lolling tongue," after which she applied an iron to her arm to cauterize the wound (Gaskell, Life 214), has traditionally been considered the primary context for the episode in Shirley, one in a list of parallels between Emily and Shirley that Charlotte outlined to Elizabeth Gaskell (215) and that biographies such as Juliet Barker's have both noted and queried (Barker 612; see also Miller 204). Less often noted, however, is that Emily's bite took place at a time when the rabies threat seemed particularly immediate in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Although there were no reported deaths from the disease in London in the years between 1846 and 1853, an overall increase from 1846 occurred nonetheless, due to a rise in figures for Lancashire and the West Riding (Pemberton and Worboys 42–43). Rabies was a local and visible threat, and it was also symbolically potent in relation to the social and political context of those years.

Untrammelled dogs were powerfully emblematic of the rebellious forces of the Chartist movement, which Terry Eagleton identifies as "the unspoken subject of Shirley" (45). Neil Pemberton and Patrick Worboys have indicated the metaphorical associations between rabid dogs and the criminal classes in the 1830s (25); the veterinary surgeon and author of On Canine Madness, William Youatt, argued in 1830 that an increase in rabies in previous years had resulted from "the increasing demoralization of the country" (30), in which members of the "peasantry" were mingling with "the ruffian and the avowed thief" (31), mistreating and neglecting their dogs to the extent that the animals became rabid. An increased interest in animal welfare in the 1840s often produced pity for these mistreated dogs, rabid or not (Pemberton and Worboys 42; Ritvo 133–44); in Shirley, however, natural sympathy for dogs and concern for their well-being is combined with fear of the potential to transgress and to violate that they share with their owners. These two contexts—rabies and rebellion—occur in historical and geographical proximity to one another, and they directly intersect in Shirley.

Brontë's rabies narrative has attracted little critical attention. Elizabeth Gargano notes that Shirley's "fears of madness and a frenzied...