syphilis and gonorrhea reached near-epidemic proportions, yet except for Henrik Ibsen and some of the
later naturalists, venereal diseases were hardly on the literary map. Syphilis, of course, was prima facie
evidence of sex beyond the bounds of marriage, of moral corruption (you could only get it, supposedly,
by visiting prostitutes), and therefore taboo. In its tertiary stages, of course, it also produced unpleasant
results, including loss of control of one’s limbs (the sudden, spastic motions Kurt Vonnegut writes of in
his 1973 Breakfast of Champions) and madness. The only treatment known to the Victorians employed
mercury, which turned the gums and saliva black and carried its own hazards. So these two, despite their
widespread occurrence, were never A-list diseases.
Well, then, what makes a prime literary disease?
- It should be picturesque. What, you don’t think illness is picturesque? Consider consumption. Of
course it’s awful when a person has a coughing fit that sounds like he’s trying to bring up a whole lung,
but the sufferer of tuberculosis often acquires a sort of bizarre beauty. The skin becomes almost
translucent, the eye sockets dark, so that the sufferer takes on the appearance of a martyr in medieval
paintings.
p. 217 3) It should be mysterious in origin. Again, consumption was a clear winner, at least with the
Victorians. The awful disease sometimes swept through whole families, as it would when one member
nursed a dying parent or sibling or child, coming into daily contact with contaminated droplets, phlegm,
blood for an extended period. The mode of transmission, however, remained murky for most people in
that century. Certainly John Keats had no idea that caring for his brother Tom was sealing his own doom,
any more than the Brontës knew what hit them. That love and tenderness should be rewarded with a
lengthy, fatal illness was beyond ironic. By the middle of the nineteenth century, science discovered that
cholera and bad water went together, so it had no mystery points. As for syphilis, well, its origins were
entirely too clear.
- It should have strong symbolic or metaphorical possibilities. If there’s a metaphor connected
with smallpox, I don’t want to know about it. Smallpox was hideous in both the way it presented and the
disfigurement it left without really offering any constructive symbolic possibilities. Tuberculosis, on the
other hand, was a wasting disease, both in terms of the individual wasting away, growing thinner and
thinner, and in terms of the waste of lives that were often barely under way.
Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, TB joined cancer in dominating the literary
imagination regarding illness. Here’s a partial list: Ralph Touchett in Henry James’s novel The Portrait of
a Lady (1881) and Milly Theale inp. 218his later The Wings of the Dove (1902), Little Eva in Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Paul Dombey in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son
(1848), Mimi in Puccini’s opera La Bohème (1896), Hans Castorp and his fellow patients at the
sanatorium in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain (1924), Michael Furey in Joyce’s “The Dead,” Eugene
Gant’s father in Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River (1935), and Rupert Birkin in Lawrence’s
Women in Love. In fact, Lawrence encodes his illness into the physiognomy, personality, and general