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  • Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion: ‘Our Feverish Contact’
  • Jill L. Matus (bio)
Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion: ‘Our Feverish Contact’, by Allan Conrad Christensen; pp. x + 350. London and New York: Routledge, 2005, £71.54, $130.00.

In Middlemarch (1871–72) George Eliot famously remarks that as difficult as it is to exclude the "tempting range of relevancies that is called the universe," she has to concentrate on "this particular web" ([Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965] 170). If your subject is contagion, however, the extent of its relevancies may be especially difficult to contain. In Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion, Allan Conrad Christensen certainly yields to the temptations of his subject's wildfire touch. As if to compensate for the limitlessness of the topic, he keeps a tight focus on eight novels that deal in some way with plague and pestilence: Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852–53), Edward Bulwer-Lytton's A Strange Story (1862), Charles Kingsley's Two Years Ago (1857), Giovanni Ruffini's Lavinia (1860), Harrison Ainsworth's Old Saint Paul's (1841), Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi (1827, revised 1840) and Emile Zola's Le Docteur Pascal (1893). Seven of the eight contain literal scenes of pestilential outbreaks, allowing Christensen to distinguish between the literal operation of contagion and the metaphorical instances of contagion in other episodes. The novels are mostly English (but with, in Christensen's words, a "European resonance" added by Zola and Manzoni [9]), and mostly written between 1852 and 1862 (again with Zola and Manzoni as the early and late bookends). This period is characterized—with reference to the work of Elizabeth Ermath and Thomas Vargish—as a decade of transition associated with the loss of a providential aesthetic, but whether these novels do, as Christensen claims, reconstruct a nineteenth-century European Zeitgeist is debatable, and while a case can be made for their assembly, the principle governing their selection is not entirely clear. Each chapter is thematically organized and entails a comparative discussion of these eight novels with only occasional references to other nineteenth-century texts.

At the outset, Christensen suggests a historical focus with emphasis on the epidemics of cholera, typhus, and influenza that beset the Victorian period; the higher death rate during the Crimean War from disease rather than losses on the battlefield; and the Contagious Diseases Acts and their repeals. Christensen touches on the horizontal West/East axis, and the vertical class axis of high/low in which the East and the lower [End Page 167] classes are almost always associated with contagious spread. Yet the particularities of Victorian history and the differences between English and continental constructions of disease in legal, medical, and literary discourse feature little in the ensuing chapters. It is, in fact, the conception of history as contagion rather than the history of contagion that occupies Christensen.

Drawing on a varied arsenal of poststructuralist theorists and critics, Christensen moves from history to the question of providence in the midst of pestilence; to swordsmen and needlewomen; physicians, nurses, and patients; then even more tangentially to mothers and daughters; writers and readers; speakers, singers, and listeners; and finally to money handlers and bookkeepers. In the chapter "Swordsmen and needlewomen" for example, Christensen begins with René Girard's characterization of the field of contagion as one of social disintegration and reintegration and Elaine Scarry's translation of the contagious process as an activity of "making and unmaking." In this process, the imagination is the key to maintaining and defending protective barriers for suffering humanity, a precept that then allows Christensen to focus on protectors and watchmen. Weapons against contagion are not only military spears and sanitary measures but "vigilant eyes." Moving from a Foucauldian recitation of the significance of that "unseen eye" (73), the Panopticon, to the "unmaking" campaigns of the military, the chapter meditates on sites of battle and fortified refuge. As this example suggests, Christensen has to do a lot of work to reach and rationalize the topic of each chapter, but when we actually arrive at a discussion of the texts, what he has to say is astute and informed, and he manages the comparative structure he has chosen impressively. The analysis of...

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