Charlotte Brontë and Contagion

A new scholarly book with Charlotte Brontë at its center:

Charlotte Brontë and Contagion

Myths, Memes, and the Politics of Infection

by Jo Waugh

Palgrave Macmillan

ISBN: 978-3-031-65139-7

August 2024

This book argues for the significance of contagious disease in critical and biographical assessment of Charlotte Brontë’s work. Waugh argues that contagion, infection, and quarantining strategies are central themes in Jane Eyre (1847), Shirley (1849), and Villette (1853). This book establishes the ways in which Charlotte Brontë was closely engaged with the political and social contexts in which she wrote, extending this to the representation and metaphorical import of illness in Brontë’s novels. Waugh also posits that although miasmatic theories are often assumed to have been entirely in the ascendant in the late 1840s, the relationship between miasma and contagion was a complex one and contagion in fact remained a crucial way for Charlotte Brontë to represent disease itself, as well as to explore the relationships between the individual and social, political, and cultural contexts. Contagion and its metaphors are central to Charlotte Brontë’s construction of subjectivity and of the responsibilities of the individual and the group.

This is the list of the chapters and the abstracts of each one: 

Introduction: Charlotte Brontë and Contagion

This introductory chapter sets out the argument that Charlotte Brontë was a writer aware of, interested in, and often anxious about, contagion. It establishes the claims that will run through the rest of the book: that the transmission of the diseases Brontë describes in her novels is a significant, and under-explored, aspect of those representations; that contagion as a concept in the 1840s and 1850s was a broad concept which encompassed many kinds of infection; that attending to Brontë’s depictions of contagion and infection offers potential more fully to understand her analysis and diagnosis of many other aspects of human interaction and society. The chapter offers context for contagion and its implications both metaphorical and literal in the period, and outlines Brontë’s particular sense of what health and its preservation entailed in the context of the epidemic and contagious diseases prevalent in her lifetime.

Modern Medical Knowledge: Brontë Biography and the Deaths of the Authors

Chapter 2 traces the representation of contagion in accounts of the Brontës’ deaths in biographies from Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë through the twentieth century and up to the more recent past. Brontë’s biography has a long and vexed relationship to Brontë’s scholarship, particularly in the case of 1970s’ and 1980s’ enthusiasm for retrodiagnosing Charlotte Brontë with hyperemesis gravidarum. That diagnosis, made by Sir Philip Rhodes in 1972, was reiterated in several biographies and proved influential, with some critics inferring the neuroticism then associated with that diagnosis in Brontë’s novels. Less controversially but equally importantly, this chapter argues, the ways in which biographers have at times downplayed and times emphasized the potentially contagious aspects of the deaths of Branwell, Emily, and Anne Brontë reveal much about the extent to which they have been willing to consider those writers as inhabiting a contagious world or even being vectors of contagion themselves.

 “One of the Most Insidious, and Fatal Diseases Incident to Humanity”: Fearing The “Flattering Malady”

Throughout her adult life, Charlotte Brontë described an anxiety bordering on obsession with consumption, or tuberculosis as the disease is now named. In Jane Eyre, however, she created Helen Burns, perhaps Victorian literature’s most famous consumptive. Helen is forbearing, ethereal, too good for this world: she expires painlessly and gently, and is often taken to be the archetype of the long-suffering yet patient sufferer of the disease. This chapter argues, however, that far from absorbing and replicating the tropes of literary consumption which Susan Sontag, Clark Lawlor and others have identified, the sentimentality and ethereality with which the narrative of Jane Eyre surrounds Helen Burns and her death make the case that even the most exceptional individuals are vulnerable to this insidious threat.

This chapter interrogates the trope of “romantic consumption,” traces Brontë’s anxiety about the disease in her correspondence from her teens on, and gives an overview of all the Brontës’ representation of consumption in their novels. It th

 

en argues that the sentimentality surrounding Helen Burns’ death is knowingly, and strategically, constructed, and that Brontë drew on the potential of consumption to individualize sufferers in the literary text primarily to make the emphatic case that the disease was a universal and undiscriminating threat.

Typhus and “Common Brotherhood”: Jane Eyre (1847), Contagion, Community, and Leadership

This chapter argues that the typhus epidemic described in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) shows Brontë engaging with, and offering answers to, questions about contagion, community, leadership, heroism, and martyrdom which were also in contention during the typhus epidemics in England and Scotland in the spring and summer of 1847. These epidemics generated significant coverage in local and regional newspapers, ranging from articles blaming the Irish poor for spreading contagion to reflective pieces on the responsibility of the better-off in society toward the poor, or on the dangers of assuming immunity from contagion. This chapter traces those arguments and highlights typhus’s uses in the literary text - including Charles Kingsley’s Yeast (1848) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853)—to suggest the interconnectedness of communities. The chapter then turns to Jane Eyre to argue that in this novel, Brontë dramatizes the ethical and moral implications of contagion, ultimately affirming the benefits of connectivity and community over individual heroics, or the contagionist impulse to quarantinism.

Ferment, Frenzy, Boundaries, and Barriers: Rabies in Shirley (1849)

The eponymous heroine of Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849) briefly worries that she has contracted the rabies virus after she is bitten by a dog. This chapter argues that the rabies episode in this novel represents a short but violent microcosm of the text’s broader interest in the ways in which incipient threats of various kinds might be controlled, mollified out of existence, quelled or quashed. In the pages which describe Shirley’s bite, self-cauterization, and recovery, boundaries of all kinds—cutaneous, emotional, and sexual—are challenged and ultimately fortified. Shirley is, this chapter argues, persistently engaged in exploring the ways in which dangerous influences may or should be repressed, and the ways in which dangers ferment. By focusing in detail on the rabies virus as it was understood in the 1840s, the chapter shows how associated concepts of fermentation and rebellion resonate throughout the novel. It concludes by pointing to the limitations of, and contradictions in, the text’s surface alignment between rabid dogs and insurrectionists.

 “Living Barometers,” “Dreary Fellowship,” “Petulant People,” and “Silly Fancies”: Weather, Equilibrium, and Health in Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853)

In her final novel, Villette (1853), Charlotte Brontë created a heroine who seems to be profoundly affected by air, weather, and atmosphere. Lucy Snowe’s encounters with contagion, by contrast, are rare. Lucy’s often “dreary fellowship,” described as exclusive to the unhealthy, with “the winds and their changes” (300) pervades the text. As several critics have noted, Brontë’s own belief that mind and body were affected by weather was legitimated by contemporary assumptions about the connections between atmosphere and health, and especially female health. Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) also presented Brontë as irredeemably sensitive to the weather, in ways which this chapter argues have come to form our understanding of the writer, her health, and her own sense of the connections between weather and health. In the 1850s, to be sensitive to the weather was not always considered a positive characteristic: such sensitivity was often presented either as an affectation, or as the result of an invalid’s self-imposed excessive protection from the elements. This chapter argues that in Villette Brontë offers an active critique of the qualities of the weather sensitivity and weather wisdom which Gaskell had attributed to her, and explores the tensions inherent in either quarantining oneself from, or exposing oneself to, the weather.

Epilogue and Conclusion: “Jane Eyre Fever,” Virality, Endemicity, and Contagion

Charlotte Brontë’s novels were written, published, and read, in a period in which contagious diseases were visibly present, politically contentious, and symbolically resonant whenever they appeared in the literary text. The questions contagion invites—what is our responsibility to the poor; how should contagion be managed; what does health mean, or look like, in the face of contagion; what are the risks and benefits of connection and interaction?—pervade her novels. Yet Brontë herself has often been presented in biography and some scholarship as somehow detached from contagion and all its metaphorical possibilities and political implications: accounts of her own health and death, for example, historically emphasized their connection to the weather, or her exceptional difficulties in pregnancy. Such accounts play a part in constructing a vision of Brontë as a unique, or at least exceptional, individual to whom the logic of contagion does not apply and who also did not understand the potential or implications of contagion, even though her representations of contagion and contagious diseases strongly suggest otherwise. Paradoxically, perhaps, this version of Brontë has circulated in contagious ways, and so too has her work—specifically and especially Jane Eyre. This chapter concludes the book by tracing some of those contagious and viral transmissions of ideas about the writer and her novels in popular culture and merchandising.