health of his various alter egos. Not every one of these was labeled “tubercular.” Some were “delicate,”
“fragile,” “sensitive,” “wasting away”; others were said to “have a lung” or “suffer from lung disease” or
were merely identified as having a persistent cough or periods of low energy. A mere symptom or two
would suffice for the contemporary audience, to whom the symptoms were all too familiar. So many
characters contracted tuberculosis in part because so many writers either suffered from it themselves or
watched friends, colleagues, and loved ones deteriorate in its grasp. In addition to Keats and the
Brontës, Robert Louis Stevenson, Katherine Mansfield, Lawrence, Frédéric Chopin, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Franz Kafka, and Percy Bysshe Shelley form a fair beginning toward a
Who’s Who of artistic consumptives. In her study Illness as Metaphor (1977), Susan Sontag brilliantly
discusses the reasons for the disease’s popularity as a subject and the metaphorical uses to which it was
put. For now, we’re less interested in all the implications she identifies, and more interested in recognizing
that when a writer employs TB directly or indirectly, he’s making a statement about the victim of the
disease. His choice, while no doubt carrying a strong element of verisimilitude, also very likely houses
symbolic or metaphorical intentions.
This fourth consideration—the metaphorical possibilities a disease offers—generally overrides all others:
a sufficientlyp. 219compelling metaphor can induce an author to bring an otherwise objectionable illness
into a work. A good example would be plague. As an instance of individual suffering, bubonic plague is
no bonus, but in terms of widespread, societal devastation, it’s a champion. In two works written a mere
twenty-five hundred years apart, plague successfully takes center stage. In Oedipus Rex Sophocles has
Thebes hit by various plagues—withered crops, stillborn children, the works—but here as in general use,
plague carries with it the implication of bubonic. It comes to mean what we think of as plague, in fact,
because it can lay waste to whole cities in short order, because it sweeps through populations as a
visitation of divine wrath. And of course divine wrath is the order of the day at the beginning of
Sophocles’ play. Two and a half millennia later, Albert Camus not only uses plague, he calls his novel
The Plague (1947). Again, he is not interested so much in the individual sufferer as he is in the communal
aspect and the philosophical possibilities. In examining how a person confronts the wholesale devastation
wrought by disease, Camus can set his existentialist philosophy into motion in a fictional setting: the
isolation and uncertainty caused by the disease, the absurdly random nature of infection, the despair felt
by a doctor in the face of an unstoppable epidemic, the desire to act even while recognizing the
pointlessness of action. Now neither Camus’s nor Sophocles’ use is particularly subtle or hard to get, but
in their overt way they teach us how other writers may use illness when it is less central.
When Henry James has had enough of Daisy Miller and decides to kill her off, he gives her Roman
fever or what we would now call malaria. If you read that beautiful little novella and neither of these
names suggests anything to you, you really need to pay more attention. Malaria works great,
metaphorically: it translates as “bad air.” Daisy has suffered from figurative bad air—malicious gossip and
hostile publicp. 220opinion—throughout her stay in Rome. As the name implies, it was formerly thought
that the illness was contracted from harmful vapors in hot, moist night air; no one suspected that the
problem might lie with those darned mosquitoes that were biting them on those hot, moist nights. So the
notion of poisonous vapors would work nicely. Still, the older name used by James, Roman fever, is even
better. Daisy does indeed suffer from Roman fever, from the overheated state that makes her frantic to
join the elite (“We’re dying to be exclusive,” she says early on) while at the same time causing the
disapproval of the Europeanized Americans who reside permanently in Rome at every turn. When she
makes her fatal midnight trip to the Colosseum and she sees the object of, if not her affections, then at
least her interests, Winterbourne, he ignores her, prompting her to say, “He cuts me dead.” And the next
thing we know, she is dead. Does the manner of her death matter? Of course. Roman fever perfectly
captures what happens to Daisy, this fresh young thing from the wilds of Schenectady who is destroyed
by the clash between her own vitality and the rotten atmosphere of this oldest of Old World cities. James
is a literary realist, hardly the most flamboyantly symbolic of writers, but when he can kill off a character
in a highly lifelike way while employing an apt metaphor for her demise, he doesn’t hesitate.