Plague’s Ecologies: Daniel Defoe and the Epidemic Constitution

Abstract

Daniel Defoe’s plague writings, particularly A Journal of the Plague Year and Due Preparations for the Plague (both 1722), imagine an ecology of vulnerability. Plague epidemics are natural disasters that serve as reminders of the human body’s absolute dependence on non-human things. For Defoe and many of his contemporaries, the interpenetration of the body and its non-human surroundings make absolute security and immunity impossible. Defoe’s writings turn away from fantasies of isolation and quarantine and instead treat plague both as a memento mori and as a natural phenomenon to mitigate and manage. Drawing implicitly on early work in quantitative social sciences, Defoe’s texts treat the city as an ecological system that can be made more responsive to emergent outbreaks of epidemic illness through the use of accurate information and an awareness of probability. Understood in this way, Defoe’s plague writings are not merely representations of disease but should be seen as crucial components in information networks that seek to mitigate natural disasters.