Kept From All Contagion: Germ Theory, Disease, and the Dilemma of Human Contact in Late Nineteenth-Century Literature

Abstract

Kari Nixon’s monograph has the distinction of being a book about reacting to pandemics written and published right before the worldwide outbreak of COVID-19, thus challenging so much of our knowledge about the public and disease. While a fascinating study in nineteenth-century attitudes toward germ theory and contagion, the book is also interesting from a predictive standpoint as it addresses many of the controversies about protection and personal risk that have come to dominate current public discourse. Nixon’s book highlights the ways in which nineteenth-century authors defy principles of isolation from contagion and how fiction “subverts germ theory specifically and unmitigated scientific authority more generally by defiantly and consistently illustrating intimate relationships as fruitful and meaningful in spite of—and sometimes because of—infectious contact” (5). The idea of sanitization becomes connected to the antibiotic, a process that renders matter lifeless, and thus circulation is both proper and necessary for healthy human interaction and community.Nixon’s analysis ranges freely between scientific theory and literary fiction as well as across time periods in the nineteenth century. She organizes her chapters around specific diseases, which allows her to illustrate how each infection, from plague to venereal disease, becomes a vehicle for discussing the relationship between selfhood and society. Her work coverers an array of prominent nineteenth-century writers and offers new readings of works by Daniel Defoe, Mary Shelley, Henry James, Charlotte Brontë, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Henrik Ibsen, Thomas Hardy, and Grant Allen, among others. The breadth of the works covered allows Nixon to develop her analysis of how authors use contagion as a metaphor for social ills, from stopping the circulation of trade to the isolation of Victorian women and the constraints of nineteenth-century morality. Nixon reads against the grain of seeing those who treat illness through containment and sterilization as heroes and instead shows that in fiction these characters often foster the metaphoric ills of society through their unwillingness to participate in the wider community.Nixon’s arguments are especially compelling when she unpacks texts that have been traditionally seen as enforcing the status quo of the scientific savior. Her reading of Ibsen’s Ghosts, for example, provides an intriguing reexamination of the idea that the protagonist, Stockmann, saves the people of the town by shutting down the local baths after discovering bacteria in the water. Instead, Nixon asks us to examine the shaky evidence Stockmann provides, which indicates that a hero complex rather than a scientific certainty may be driving his actions. As she notes, while literary critics today are likely to read the play as the triumph of ignorance over science (the townspeople drive Stockmann away after his revelation), the Victorians would be more likely to take a satirical view of the scientist’s extremism. Such readings ask us to remove our typical associations with science as irrevocable truth and ask us to consider the alternative possibilities, that extreme measures of protection may cause more harm than good.While many of the readings provide a fresh approach to popular texts or an examination of overlooked ones, the sheer mass of readings can leave the project feeling uneven. Some sections, such as the reading of Jane Eyre, seem more perfunctory and would have benefited from a lengthier focus. Nevertheless, Nixon’s monograph will prove to be a great asset to scholars considering the literary implications of nineteenth-century medicine as well as challenging our understanding of canonical Victorian authors. As her premise indicates, by connecting authors who often are quarantined into separate critical traditions, such as Hardy and Ibsen, we do not spread infection but instead circulate ideas more widely, promoting a more creative and dynamic critical environment and avoiding the lifeless inertia that can bedevil scholarship.Of course, Nixon’s focus on the necessity of social interaction despite the risk of contagion seems problematic during our current moment in history. Nixon herself addresses concerns that avoiding the decontamination protocols that create “imagined membranous bubbles of safety” (214) is resonant of the contemporary antivaccination movement. As she notes, denying basic preventive measures is a perverse twist on the idea of protecting the individual without disregarding the needs of the community. Such individuals believe that they “can live safely in the epicenter of a somehow privileged, purified world, while sickened individuals are shuffled to its margins. . . . There is something rather antisocial in the sense that one can live within a population and not be affected by its endemic pathogens” (217). Thus, Nixon’s inquiry into disease and isolation is perhaps the most exciting result of her research, asking as it does for us to consider our connection to contamination and community and how infection can make us reexamine what we owe to each other.