Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion: 'Our feverish contact' (review)

Taken from Arnold's poem 'The Scholar-Gipsy' (1853), the subtitle warns against contamination by carriers of 'this strange disease of modern life': 'fly our paths, our feverish contact fly!' Allan Christensen's major study of discourses of disease in nineteenth-century novels stretches Arnold's metaphor to its limits. In his book contagion is inescapable, ravaging, and omnipresent, referring literally to the spread of physiological disease, but more often metaphorically to the communication of emotion and desire, the transmission of ideas, and historical process: in fact, 'Any situation that demonstrates the largely involuntary susceptibility of a human being to influences coming from without may imply the ubiquitous contagious mechanism' (p. 19). Thus while Christensen draws on some medical and epidemiological history, this is less an interdisciplinary study in medicine and literature, than a contribution to the growing scholarship of influence mapped in Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's Victorian Afterlives (2002). Within Christensen's view of history as an endless series of 'struggles for power' (p. 155), contagion foregrounds the individual's relations to God, society, family, and the self. Such nineteenth-century conflicts are conventionally expressed as binary oppositions: 'faith and doubt, religion and science, freedom and necessity, teleology and chance' (p. 1). The introductory chapter, 'History as contagion', which theorises Christensen's project by reference to Girard, Baudrillard, Jameson, Foucault, et al, collapses and redefines the binary 'health/disease', recuperating the cultural meaning of disease: 'As a physical and psychological phenomenon – and a literal and metaphorical phenomenon – the plague is therefore propagated not only through the mechanisms of violence but through imitation, doubling, desire and sympathy' (p. 20). Contagion is not simply a way to read the world as represented in books, but a model for the writing of cultural history.

This study is a fittingly intellectually ambitious, provocative and original work to inaugurate the new Routledge studies in nineteenth-century literature series. Yet its foundation is surprisingly traditional: a comparative study of eight novels all treating the motif of plague or contagion. Christensen draws on English, Italian and French fiction, both canonical and less-read. The novels are: I Promessi Sposi (Manzoni, 1827, revised 1841-42); Old Saint Paul's (Ainsworth, 1841); Bleak House (Dickens, 1852-53); Ruth (Gaskell, 1853); Two Years Ago (Kingsley, 1857); Lavinia (Ruffini, 1860); A Strange Story (Bulwer, 1861-62); and Le Docteur Pascal (Zola, 1893). By examining unfamiliar novels with the scrutiny customarily awarded to canonical authors, Christensen – the author of full-length studies of Bulwer and Ruffini – indirectly makes a case for their recuperation. It is testimony to his sympathetic yet rigorous attention that he makes these lesser works sound so interesting you want to read them. (All, apart from Giovanni Ruffini's Lavinia, are downloadable from Project Gutenberg.)

What makes Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion distinctive is its comprehensively intertextual and comparative methodology. Christensen tracks the transmission of social and cultural forces not only within discrete novels, but between them: 'As the themes, the characters and the episodes in the various works interpenetrate and overlap, they are discovered to be versions and parts of a single master text' (p. 9). That 'discovered' is important: by locating individual novels in a simulacrum of the cultural context that helped form them, Christensen uncovers – or creates – a web of correspondences: how far the reader finds them revelatory will be a matter of personal opinion.

All eight novels are discussed – often from several perspectives – in each of seven thematically organised chapters: 'History as contagion'; 'Providence amidst pestilence and fire'; 'Swordsmen and needlewomen'; 'Physicians, nurses and patients'; 'Mothers, daughters and lovers'; 'Writers and readers'; 'Speakers, singers and listeners'. This enacts the author's commitment to the 'omnipresent contagious principle' (p. 27) as a model of influence, and his view of his project as simply one more 'reconstruction of history […] at an additional synthetic remove from the representations proposed in the eight individual narratives' (p. 10). Some readers will object that the book is contaminated by its...