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

Abstract

“‘Kept From All Contagion’: Germ Theory, Disease, and the Dilemma of Human Contact in Late Nineteenth-Century Literature,” argues that the notion of the necessity of human connection and community is a crucial but long-overlooked imperative of fin-de-siècle literature, following upon the solidification of germ theory in the 1860s and 1870s and the subsequent development of bacteriology in the 1880s. Germ theory linked each illness to a specific microbe harbored in the human body and its waste, soundly rejecting the older miasma theory’s focus on unwholesome environments. Thus, germ theory moved the crosshairs of disease prevention from cleansing diseased spaces to cleansing or avoiding diseased people.

Building on recent historical analyses delineating contemporary resistance to germ theory’s conquest over miasma theory, my project fleshes out the cultural ramifications of such reactions, and uncovers the hidden narratives of disease in fin-de-siècle literature, revealing authors’ concern with the social impact of germ theory.

My project argues that a great many late-century authors (often seemingly unrelated one such as Hardy, Ibsen, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon) used their fiction to depict the stifling world that a culture of “sanitary” isolation based on germ theory seemed to encourage. Rejecting germ theory’s phenomenological implication that absolute purity is possible or desirable, Henry James, Ellen Wood, and others portray intimate relationships as fruitful and meaningful in spite of (and often because of) contaminating disease instead of portraying disease as evidence of failed sanitary preemptives. Human interaction may be messy, dirty, and even deadly, these authors suggest, but even potentially fatal interaction with the human community offers a more salvific life than germless isolation.