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LEAKY BODIES RECLAIMED: BIOFLUIDS, CONTAGION, AND VICTORIAN

ENGLAND’S STRANGE INTIMACIES

Anna E. MacDonald

B.A., The University of Ottawa, 2012

M.A. The University of Ottawa, 2015

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF

THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES

(English)

THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

(Vancouver)

August 2023

The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate

and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the dissertation entitled:

Leaky Bodies Reclaimed: Biofluids, Contagion, and Victorian England’s Strange Intimacies

submitted by

Anna E. MacDonald

in partial fulfilment of the requirements for

the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

English

Examining Committee:

Deanna Kreisel, Professor, Department of English, University of Mississippi

Co-supervisor

Suzy Anger, Professor, Department of English Language and Literatures, UBC

Co-supervisor

Judy Segal, Professor, Department of English Language and Literatures, UBC

Supervisory Committee Member

Miranda Burgess, Professor, Department of English Language and Literatures, UBC

University Examiner

Jessica Wang, Professor, Department of History and Department of Geography, UBC

University Examiner

Meegan Kennedy, Professor, Department of English, Florida State University

External Examiner

iii

Abstract

This dissertation revisits Victorian representations of fallen women to reimagine their

bodies as unexpected sites of liberatory possibility, and to reinscribe their biofluids as a medium

through which nineteenth-century authors negotiate deep-seated questions of material and

symbolic relation. A major contribution of Victorian studies has been to recognize how

narratives of fallenness served a regulatory function in the public management of England’s

social body. These scholars investigate how this cultural figure exhibits the dangers of the body’s

fluid, trans-corporeal flows. She thereby functions both as a cultural repository for Victorian

contagion anxieties about epidemics, as well as a justification for the broader disciplinary

mechanisms through which England managed the inputs and outputs of its citizens’ bodies.

Spanning works of poetry and prose, each of my chapters reexamines one archetypal

figure of Victorian fallenness: the drowned fallen woman, the poor seamstress, the fallen

breastfeeder, and the lady poisoner. I investigate how nineteenth-century fictional and medical

authors imaginatively interpolated these women’s bodily processes into epidemic diseases

through a fluid that was metonymic to both: they join lubrication and cholera through water,

menstruation and tuberculosis through blood, lactation and smallpox through milk, and vaginal

discharge and syphilis through poison. Rather than attempt to disarticulate femininity from

Victorian notions of fluidity and contagion, I explore one unexpectedly transgressive outcome of

this correlation. I do so by examining a series of popular midcentury authors who use these leaky

bodies to expand contagion narratives from sites of destructive to productive transformation.

My thesis is that Victorian authors demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of fluidity

that we tend to reserve for modern new materialist conceptualizations. My selected authors

(humans, nonhuman animals, plants, minerals, chemicals) as well as a state of fluidity between

material and symbolic phenomena (the latter encompassing feelings, affects, and words). These

authors, moreover, deploy their attunement to fluidity towards expansive models of contact,

communication, and community—forms of intimacy that emerge from (not despite) contagion’s

destructive effects. Such models of fluidity anticipate new materialist conceptualizations of

contagion in the post-Covid era.

Lay Summary

My dissertation complicates the modern assumption that Victorian narratives about fallen

women merely serve to maintain oppressive social and gender norms. I explore a series of mid-

nineteenth-century authors who take up this figure to imagine alternative possibilities for relation

amongst humans and between humans and their environments. These authors portray these

women as leaky bodies whose biofluids reveal the profound material connection that brings

Victorian strangers together in modern, urban life—infusing the water they drink, the mass-

produced clothing they buy, the milk they ingest, and even the poisons they unwittingly

consume. Moreover, these authors extend this material contact to sympathetic contact as the

basis for a symbolic community amongst strangers. This project contributes to cultural

conversations about how contagion can put us “in touch” in the post-Covid era, including the

ways that the contact inherent in contagion offers opportunities for imagining new forms of

connection, communication, and community.

Preface

This dissertation represents the independent, original work of the author, Anna E. MacDonald.

Some elements of the introduction of the dissertation will be published as a chapter written by

the author entitled “Lactination: Planetary Bodies and Their Fluid Encounters in the Early

Vaccination Narrative” in a collection called Planetary Health Humanities and Pandemics

Table of Contents

Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iii

Lay Summary ............................................................................................................................... iv

Preface .............................................................................................................................................v

Table of Contents ......................................................................................................................... vi

List of Figures ............................................................................................................................. viii

Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... ix

Introduction. “We’re in this Together:” Fluid Relations and Emerging Pandemics ..............1

Literature Review: Victorian Contagion and Trans-corporeality ............................................... 8

Methodology: Rhetorical New Materialisms ............................................................................ 15

Vaccination, Lactation, and Expansive Contagion ................................................................... 31

Chapter Descriptions ................................................................................................................. 41

Chapter 1. “Drink of it,/ Then, if you can!”: Contagion, Pathos, and the Drowned Fallen

Woman ..........................................................................................................................................48

Soiled Doves: The Drowned Fallen Woman in Life and Art ................................................... 52

Cholera’s Leaky Bodies and the Sanitation Movement ............................................................ 56

The Bridge of Sighs and the River’s Demise............................................................................ 59

A Tall Drink of Water: The Afterlife of the Drowned Fallen Woman ..................................... 63

Putting Figures in Touch: The Oxy-Hydrogen Microscope Show ........................................... 67

“Drink of it, then, if you can!”: Material and Affective Flows................................................. 74

Chapter 2. Blood, Sweat[shops], and Tears: The Biofluid Economies of G.W.M. Reynolds’s

The Seamstress (1850-1853) .........................................................................................................82

Bursting at the Seams: Seamstress Literature and Reform ....................................................... 89

vii

Bloody Rags: On Blood, the Blush, and the Hectic Flush ........................................................ 95

Blood Money: Transmissions and Transfusions ..................................................................... 108

A Nourishing Kind of Consumption: The Biofluid Currents of Sympathy ............................ 120

Chapter 3. “Behold the Paps we all have sucked!”: The Lactational Ecologies of Aurora

Leigh (1856) ................................................................................................................................131

Keeping Abreast: Bringing Aurora Leigh into the Material Feminist Era ............................. 138

Milk, Blood, and Books: Gendered Linguistic Expressions ................................................... 143

The Fount, the Improvisatrice, and Open Ecologies............................................................... 149

“Double Vision” in the “Double-Breasted Age”: From Fragmentation to Multiplicity ......... 161

Positive Transmissions: Resisting Contagion in the Nursing Dyad ....................................... 169

Chapter 4. Lady Poisoners, Syphilis, and Empire: Foodways and/as “Diseaseways” in

Armadale (1864-1866) ................................................................................................................180

An Abundance of Allans: Sifting through Armadale’s Slippery Identities ............................ 182

Toxic Loads and Loaded Toxins............................................................................................. 186

Adulterating the Law: The Lady Poisoner’s Motives ............................................................. 189

The Racialization of Poison and Poisoners ............................................................................. 192

Toxicity and New Material Feminisms................................................................................... 195

That “Loathsome Poison”: Syphilis as an Import in Armadale .............................................. 198

Lydia Gwilt: Poison and Paisley ............................................................................................. 205

Conclusion: To Culture a Pathology, to Pathologize a Culture.............................................217

Works Cited ................................................................................................................................227

Primary Sources ...................................................................................................................... 227

Secondary Sources .................................................................................................................. 234

viii

List of Figures

Figure 1. Toronto-Dominion Bank advertisement in Ottawa, Canada ........................................... 5

Figure 2. A letterboard sign in Dorset, England. ............................................................................ 5

Figure 3. An Arm with a Vaccine Pustule. ................................................................................... 36

Figure 4. The Cow-Pock—Or—The Wonderful Effects of the New Inoculation!. ........................ 38

Figure 5. Ophelia by John Everett Millais .................................................................................... 52

Figure 6. The Contents of Thames Water. .................................................................................... 62

Figure 7. Henry Anelay’s illustration of class divide in The Seamstress. .................................. 109

Figure 8. Aurora Leigh’s Refusal of Romney (‘The Tryst’) by Arthur Hughes .......................... 153

Figure 9. The Moth and the Flame by George Thomas .............................................................. 195

Figure 10. Illustration of a microscopic slide containing vibrio cholera .................................... 212

Figure 11. Red Paisley Shawl. .................................................................................................... 212

Figure 12. Syphiloderma Tuberculosis by George Henry Fox. .................................................. 213

Figure 13. Portrait of Fanny Holman Hunt……………………………………………………..213

Acknowledgements

It was during the summer of 2020 that I began coughing up blood. Rather eerily, I was revising

my chapter on tuberculosis at the time. As it turns out, the bleeding was caused by my persistent,

anxious coughing. It was in that moment that a tired expression became literal: I was officially

putting my blood, sweat, and tears into this dissertation. It’s been a long haul, and I wouldn’t

have been able to get here without an unmatched support network, both in and out of the

academy.

First of all, I want to thank my committee members. My eternal gratitude goes to my supervisor,

Dee, for your unwavering enthusiasm about my ideas, and for knowing when and how to rein

them in. Thank you, also, for being one of the main reasons I started this journey in the first

place. Suzy, thank you for your keen eye and for pushing me in all the right directions. Judy, I

can’t tell you how much of an impact your research has had on me. I’m so grateful for our work

together over these past years; it has been a great joy. Meegan Kennedy, thank you for your

incredibly generous and insightful feedback on this dissertation. Jessica Wang, Miranda Burgess,

and Robert Brain— thanks for engaging with this dissertation with such enthusiasm.

To my dear Masha Davidovic: you have been a foundational part of my thinking since my

master’s degree, from our very first conversation (about Kristeva, no less). Thank you for your

unwavering faith in me. Jess Lapensée, BFF and therapist extraordinaire; I count my lucky stars

that I have you in this life. Sara Press, wow, thank you for being my eternal hype girl and for

always reminding me that I had something important to say when I didn’t believe that I did; I

couldn’t have done this without you by my side. To Sammy Hacker, thank you for having the

kind of empathy that I strive to show my loved ones; you’re my forever ride or die. To Bronwyn

Fenton Malloy, thanks for being my spiritual guide in all things; you see me like no one else can.

Nathan TeBokkel, thanks for always laughing at my bad jokes, and for sparking the most

incredible conversations. Eve Preus, thank you for showing me how to honour my body and my

creativity on this journey. Hann Scurlock, thank you for welcoming me into your beautiful

Vancouver family, and for being the kind of friend that you’re amazed to find in your thirties.

Besides my chosen family, my biological family deserves special recognition, too. To my Mum,

thank you for always sending all your love “across the miles” and Dad, thank you for always

making me curious about the world around me and for cultivating a sense of wonder in me. My

precious big sister, Emily: thank you for teaching me from a young age that history and

feminism are cool. I’m so lucky to have you.

I’m a firm believer that passion projects can also be important projects. Thank you to SSHRC for

funding my strange project on Victorian bodily fluids. Doing a PhD takes an enormous toll on

both body and mind, and I’m so appreciative of my physical therapist Lily Wu and my therapist

Dawna Silvers, both of whom helped me through the hard times and joined me in celebrating

every small win.

There are a couple of other people who had parts to play in this dissertation: if you’re reading

this, I think you know you’re one of them.

Introduction. “We’re in this Together:” Fluid Relations and Emerging Pandemics

“The truth is, that as an Epidemick the disease is quite new. Let us hope, that like other pestilences, with which

Providence has from time to time been pleased to afflict mankind, it will prove only of temporary duration; and that

these Provinces will soon regain their wonted salubrity.”

James Jameson, Report on the Epidemick Cholera Morbus,

As is Visited the Territories Subject to the Presidency of Bengal, 1820

“We have never before seen a pandemic sparked by a coronavirus. This is the first pandemic caused by a

coronavirus. And we have never before seen a pandemic that can be controlled, at the same time… We’re in this

together, to do the right things with calm and protect the citizens of the world.”

WHO director-general Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’s opening remarks

on the March 11, 2020, briefing on COVID-19

In the year of 1820, the assistant surgeon and secretary to the medical board of British

Bengal, James Jameson, published a book reporting a “new” epidemic form of cholera. Despite

Jameson’s “hope” that the pestilence would blow over, this new epidemic would have neither

“temporary duration” nor limited reach. He could not know that the epidemic disease, believed to

have originated in the polluted Ganges River, would flow through the currents of human

digestive tracts to wreak havoc on English shores. Asiatic cholera (as Britons would call it)

forced its victims to excrete, vomit, and otherwise expel virtually every fluid in their bodies.

These fluids found their way into London’s primary source of drinking water, the Thames, which

by mid-century had become one colossal cesspool of discarded human wastes—a body of water

filled to the brim with a series of watery bodies of its own, from rotting animal carcasses to

lively microscopic creatures to the waterlogged corpses of drowned fallen women.

On March 11, 2020, two centuries to the year after Jameson published his findings on cholera,

the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic. The most recent virus to

emerge in a family of respiratory viruses called coronaviruses, Covid-19 passes from person to

person, often when a contagious person coughs or sneezes and releases infected liquid particles

into the air that are subsequently inhaled by an uninfected person. At the time of both epidemics,

scientific authorities and everyday people alike blamed the transmission of the disease on a series

of leaky bodies—their biofluids mapping the far reaches of human contact. This claim in itself is

nothing novel, building as it does on previous studies of outbreak narratives.

Perhaps more

unexpectedly, the discourses of both epidemics also, at times, enlist these leaky bodies for

liberatory ends—expanding what contagion means by considering how these leaky bodies and

their biofluids offer up innovative models for imagining connection, communication, and

community.

As a name, “the Novel Coronavirus” evokes newness, novelty, and modernity. Indeed,

for many “citizens of the world,” the rise of a global pandemic on the scale of Covid-19 felt

unprecedented—forever altering life as we knew it. With the worldwide spread of the epidemic,

our relationship with ourselves, other humans, nonhuman animals, viruses, and natural

environments seemed new and strange to us. The reigning theory on Covid-19’s origins is that it

is yet another zoonotic disease originating in nonhuman animals, like the majority of recent

pandemics such as mad cow disease, swine flu, and avian flu. What distinguishes this zoonotic

pandemic from these other ones is that it does not cross the human-animal threshold through

domesticated livestock, but likely through contact with wild animals in reaches of uncultivated

ecosystems that human existence seems barely to skim. For this reason, scholars working in the

burgeoning field of planetary studies have argued that this zoonosis has made humans as a

species more acutely aware—on a larger scale than ever before—of our intricate and intimate

relations with all planetary forms.

Through this single, small-scale event of contagion, then, we

are acquainted with the state of fluid, permeable, porous intimacies which characterize material

relations amongst human life and that of our fellow planetmates all over the globe.

The events of any pandemic are never strictly material, however. They transcend the

biomedical event of contagion to constitute the cultural politics of contagion more broadly—

cultural stories that we might refer to collectively as contagion narratives.

If the contagion

theory traces the biomedical event of transmission, then contagion narratives trace the cultural

meanings that are embedded in notions of “trans-corporeality,” that state of profound

I am thinking specifically of Priscilla Wald here (2008), but Susan Sontag (1978) was also foundational in making

this argument.

See Post-Covid pieces written by scholars in planetary studies, such as William E. Connolly (2020), Dipesh

Chakrabarty (2020), and Bradley Lewis (2021).

My definition of contagion narratives shares many resonances with Priscilla Wald’s concept of the “outbreak

narrative” (2008), but my definition of contagion narratives homes in on one aspect of those narratives: gender.

entanglement between all material phenomena that, for Stacy Alaimo, brings organisms and their

environments together into intimate relation (2010). Just as trans-corporeality comprises all

material forms (human, animal, plant, mineral, chemical, viral), contagion encompasses all kinds

of trans-corporeal contact, not just the pathological variety.

In this dissertation, my use of the word “contagion” develops from its etymological

usage. As scholars have noted, the word comes from the Latin “con” (“together”) and “tangere”

(“to touch”), meaning that, in the words of Claire Hooker and Alison Bashford (2001),

“contagion can put us in touch” (1).

Moreover, the word “contagion” has taken on numerous

denotative meanings over the centuries to convey many different and sometimes contradictory

acts of “touching together” within the fields of horticulture, animal reproduction, fabric dying,

and studies of ideological and emotional transmission.

While this multitude of diverse and

sometimes contradictory meanings has proven to be a difficulty amongst scholars writing on

contagion,

I regard it as a site of possibility when we recognize how these contradictory

meanings can work in tandem. For this proliferation of meaning demonstrates contagion’s

capaciousness. Throughout this dissertation, I will argue that Victorians take up contagion’s

overlapping and sometimes contradictory meanings to formulate contagion narratives which

model human contact and intimacy in the modern world. Moreover, I contend that this contact

and intimacy are neither inherently good nor bad in themselves, but merely a reality of an

increasingly connected and global world. Contagion could be simultaneously destructive and

productive, and contagion narratives, could thus be both oppressive and liberatory.

I turn to our most recent pandemic for an example of contagion’s expansive iterations.

Our heightened material awareness post-outbreak spawned unexpected conceptualizations of

contagion as contact and contact as community. In other words, the very material contagion that

makes the virus so destructive also reveals how we are all physically and imaginatively

connected in networks of human life and sometimes death, a connectedness that in itself is

See Hooker and Bashford (2001); Fahs, Stage, and Swank (2018).

See Margaret Pelling (2001) and Fahs, Stage, and Swank (2018).

Noting these vast denotative meanings, the editors of Transforming Contagion (2018) consider how “literary

scholars who have approached the term contagion in far-flung historical periods have grappled with the way the

term carries or connotes meanings that might appear purely figural, or metaphorical, to contemporary readers” (4).

Rather than see contagion’s expansiveness (material or symbolic? destructive or productive?) as a scholarly

limitation, I regard it as a site of possibility when we recognize how these contradictory definitions work in tandem.

neither inherently destructive nor strictly material. Having found myself in the unlikely position

of writing a dissertation on contagion narratives when a global pandemic struck, I have been

fascinated by the development of corporate and government slogans that reconfigure metaphors

of infection into a message of community. During the lockdown, we were to be “Together yet

Apart,” we were to engage in “‘Physical’ not ‘Social’ Distancing,” and always, in the back of our

minds, we were to recall the words of Dr. Anthony Fauci: “We’re all in this together.”

Whether

one interprets these sentiments as genuine or finds that they sorely overlook the fact that “we”

global citizens are not “one and the same” in our vastly different experiences of the pandemic

(Braidotti 2020),

such sentiments nonetheless evince a momentary zeitgeist of affective,

collective solidarity that is, paradoxically, a function of the same profound material

interconnectedness that makes us so contagious in the first place. The pandemic makes the

leakiness of our bodies palpable as we transmit the virus to one another through our infected

mucus and saliva. In a pathological sense, the virus is communicable, but that pathological

communicability has also provided a material basis for other forms of communicability. Such

messages of “pulling together” took hold in England and around the world.

In the context of social distancing, to be “Together yet apart” could mean to participate in virtual choir practice

(Daffern, Balmer, and Brereton 2021), to develop inclusion strategies within radiology departments (Planz et al.

2020), or mobilizing medical research institutions and experts worldwide to accelerate our progress against the virus

(Sacristán 2021); for texts endorsing the term “physical distancing” over “social distancing”, see Wasserman et al.

(2020); Das Gupta et. al (2020; in fact, these problematization of the term “social distancing” as a “misnomer” (Das

Gupta 2020) speaks to the very deep imbrication of material and abstract contact that I’m referring to here); Fauci

has repeated this phrase on many occasions, including getting Americans to work together to contain the spread of

the virus in June 2020, to encourage vaccine skeptics, particularly in the black American community, of the

vaccine’s effectiveness in January 2021, and in reference to the need for wealthy nations to provide medical

resources for India in April 2021.

See also Philippa Spoel et al. on Bonnie Henry’s “we’re all in this together” rhetoric (2022).

Examples of collective solidarity in England include the daily clap for the National Health Service (NHS) and the

NHS slogan itself: “Keep our distance, wash our hands, think of others and play our part. All together.” In May of

2020, Prime Minister Boris Johnston’s statement on Coronavirus March 23, 2020, enforcing lockdown: “Each and

every one of us is now obliged to join together. To halt the spread of this disease…We will beat the coronavirus and

we will beat it together” (“Prime Minister’s Statement on Coronavirus”).

While messages like these are dubious in the hands of corporate interests, they

nonetheless echoed a genuine, if fleeting, widespread hope during the early days of the pandemic

that an international epidemic of this scale could produce real, lasting change at virtually all

levels of global relation. The reality of government-mandated stay-at-home orders required

governments to fund emergency relief programs to replace income lost due to lockdown and

quarantining procedures, a reality which many progressive economists over the world hoped

would make headway towards the establishment of a universal basic income.

Solidarity became

a rallying cry in the wake of large-scale racial protests following the murder of George Floyd, at

which time activists mobilized the pandemic as a unique opportunity to turn the world’s

collective attention towards the pervasiveness of anti-Black police brutality and subsequently to

defund if not outright abolish the police.

Environmentalists all over the world marvelled at the

large-scale reductions in air pollution worldwide due to dramatic drops in travel and production

and alleged that “nature is healing.” Even if this healing was temporary, they argued, it

nonetheless opened new futures for the ecological benefits of virtual connection.

See Johnson and Roberto (2020); Patel and Kariel (2021).

See Bourne (2020); O’Rourke, Su and Binder (2021).

See El Zowalaty, Young, and Järhult (2020).

Figure 2. A letterboard sign in Dorset, England declares:

“It’s in our hands,” in reference a collective effort to limit

the virus’s spread. The message is ironic given that the virus

can be transmitted through physical contact. Photograph by

Christopher Furlong/Getty Images.

Figure 1. Toronto-Dominion Bank

advertisement in Ottawa, Canada, 2020.

Photograph by the author.

Taken together, these wide-ranging COVID-era sentiments about our current reality

testify to three overarching assumptions about the nature of material relations that this state of

mass contagion brought to the fore: 1) that all planetmates are materially connected in far-

reaching networks of contact and intimacy, 2) that this material interconnectedness constitutes us

as a symbolic community (which depending on the configuration, can variously denote national,

global, racialized, classed, human, and/or multispecies communities), and 3) that this material

and symbolic fluidity amongst all planetmates puts us into bioethical relations, both because it

materializes the connections that already exist, and because this consciousness of material

interconnectivity prompts new bioethical configurations for collectivity. In short, the global

pandemic revealed the extent to which “we’re in this together.” In this equation, contagion is not

exclusively the realm of destruction, but equally one of material and ideological productivity and

generation. Yet is this expansive model of contagion itself, like the coronavirus, novel?

This dissertation argues that is not. Rather, I look to a previous era similarly marked by

its own experience with epidemic and endemic disease, the Victorian age, for an earlier iteration

of this expansive contagion. I will argue that much like these Covid-era narratives, Victorian

contagion narratives exhibit an awareness of the material fluidity between physical bodies

(human, animal, plant, environment), as well as the material-symbolic fluidity between physical

and abstract phenomena (the latter referring to discursive, affective entities like words and

emotions). These two premises of fluidity inform what I call expansive contagion narratives that

envision productive possibilities in what is otherwise a destructive process.

In this dissertation, I will explore how a series of nineteenth-century British authors

represent the trans-corporeal exchange of biofluids as putting strangers in touch; they cite the

trans-corporeal act of contagion as the basis for intimacy. Two overarching claims form the basis

of my original contribution: the first is that Victorian discourses on gender collaborated with

Victorian discourses on contagion by ascribing female bodies and contagious bodies to an

interlocking topology of fluid expression. Building on a series of Victorianists who argue that

contagion and corporeal fluidity converge in the bodies of poor and fallen women, I consider

how a series of nineteenth-century authors feature a set of familiar Victorian archetypes in their

works: the dairymaid, the drowned fallen woman, the poor seamstress, the fallen breastfeeder,

and the lady poisoner. My archival research on Victorian gender and contagion has uncovered a

startling series of correlations: these authors interpolate a group of female-coded physiological

processes into a series of prevalent epidemic diseases through a fluid metonymic of both. They

appeal to milk imagery to inoculate lactation into the discourse of smallpox; they use water

imagery to cross-contaminate conversations about cholera and syphilis with texts on vaginal

lubrication; they use blood to transfuse menstruation into dialogues about tuberculosis. This

research led me in an unexpected direction which forms my second claim: rather than attempting

to disaggregate this correlation between femininity and contagion, these authors mobilize the

correlation towards expansive models of contagion and fluidity. To various extents, these authors

enlist these figures to complicate conventional contagion narratives, converting contagion’s

destructive capacities into productive ones.

The following sections of my introduction will set up a basis for my overarching

claim that Victorian contagion narratives are fundamentally narratives about intimacy. My

interest in historicizing and deconstructing contagion narratives emerges from two recent schools

of thought that both engage in this work: Victorian ecocriticism and new materialist feminisms.

My next section situates my original contribution within these schools of Victorianist

scholarship. Like these scholars, I argue that Victorians demonstrated sophisticated

conceptualizations of materiality, but my approach differs in that it makes this case through the

lens of gender. This departure leads me to my next section, which sets up the methodology I will

use as the theoretical framework for this dissertation: rhetorical new materialisms. I take up a set

of fundamental principles within new materialist feminisms to develop two concepts about

fluidity that I see operating within my selected works: material fluidity and categorical fluidity.

After defining these terms, I then discuss the rhetorical elements of new materialisms to frame

my intervention as a kairology—or rhetorical history—of mid-century Victorian contagion

narratives. I use this rhetorical framing to argue that the two dominant Victorian etiologies of

contagious diseases before germ theory, miasma theory and contagionist theory, both operate

using an expansive definition of fluidity encompassing liquids and gases.

In the proceeding section, I demonstrate how these concepts of fluidity developed out of

the early vaccination movement through a phenomenon I term “lactination,” a portmanteau of

vaccination and lactation. I argue that the early vaccination movement was pivotal in shaping

nineteenth-century contagion narratives because it formulated a model of contagion that

imbricated human and nonhuman transmissions into material and affective circulations. These

circulations were not destructive, but productive to health. I consider how, critically, both

proponents and opponents of vaccination writing in the decade after Jenner’s innovation

characterized this procedure with recourse to the body and the bodily fluids of the dairy maid.

They imaginatively cross-contaminate the process of lactation with vaccination and analogize the

transmission of cow lymph with milk markets. My archival findings in this section provide the

foundations for my subsequent chapters, particularly my fourth chapter, which investigates the

fraught role of cow and human milk mid-century in relation to poetic expression and

communication. I end with a breakdown of the texts and figures I examine in each chapter.

Literature Review: Victorian Contagion and Trans-corporeality

The overarching goal of this project is to flesh out a nineteenth-century history of leaky

bodies. As I will explore in the following section, I build on the nineteenth-century scholarship

within Victorian studies to argue that Victorians held sophisticated conceptualizations of

material fluidity that we tend to reserve for the modern era. I then consider how this nineteenth-

century attunement to material fluidity can transform our understanding of Victorian contagion

narratives, which center on the archetypal figure of the fallen woman. As my title indicates, I

demonstrate how Victorians “reclaim” leaky bodies as sites through which to negotiate relations

between human and the more-than-human world, a negotiation that anticipates psychoanalytic

feminist and new materialist models of liberatory fluidity.

To make this argument, I first build on the recent insights of historians writing on topics

of contagion and trans-corporeality and, second, I illustrate how my own archival and literary

research on the history of Victorian contagion narratives both speaks to and extends this

scholarship. Two areas are emerging within Victorian studies arguing that Victorians

demonstrated a sophisticated awareness of, and investment in, the trans-corporeal relations that

they understood as constituting their material existence. These two fields are studies of Victorian

contagion and studies of Victorian environment, the first of which I turn to now.

The twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship on the history of nineteenth-century

contagion is vast, so it is helpful to group authors according to subject (despite there being much

overlap). Michel Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic (1963) inspired many authors to consider the

biopolitical aspects of Victorian contagion, such as the intersection of contagion and empire

(David Arnold 1992; Bewell 1999; Bashford 2004; Jessica Howell 2014; Peckham 2015;

Bhattacharya 2012; Senior 2018; Kolb 2021; Kolb and Anjuli 2022), and the racialization of

contagious diseases (O’Connor 2000; Wald 2008). Some consider how international trade

produces contagion (Harrison 2012). Others study medical spaces as a method of limiting disease

spread, such as Victorian quarantine hospitals (Bashford 2004; Newsom Kerr 2017), the sick

room (Bailin 1994), and the clinic (Kennedy 2010). Still others look at how contagious disease

outbreaks informed notions of citizenship (Gilbert 2007; Jenson 2009). Some Victorianists look

at the metaphorical aspects of contagious disease, such as martial metaphors of disease

prevention (Servitje 2021; Otis 1999), metaphors of contagious reading (Gilbert 1997; Mann

2018), and contagion’s association with revolution and anarchy (Roberts 2016; Servitje 2018).

There has also been considerable scholarship treating the many Victorian epidemic and endemic

diseases individually, in works on cholera (Gilbert 2004, 2005, 2007; Hempel 2007; Carpenter

2010); syphilis and the related Contagious Disease Acts enacted to curb incidents of venereal

diseases (Walkowitz 1980; Spongberg 1997; Davidson and Hall 2001; Levine 2003; Carpenter

2010; Pietrzal-Franger 2018; Nixon and Servitje 2018); smallpox and smallpox vaccination

(Bashford and Hooker 2001; Durbach 2005; Carpenter 2010); and tuberculosis (Sontag 1977;

Lawlor 2006; Carpenter 2010; Byrne 2011; Tankard 2018).

Collectively, this body of

scholarship contends with the deadly aspects of Victorian epidemics and the innovative and

sometimes oppressive measures England enacted to mitigate the spread of disease.

I am not the first Victorian scholar to suggest that Victorians conceptualized contagion as

more than just destruction. In making a case for an expansive model of contagion, I am building

on scholarship that argues that Victorian contagion narratives are, in their essence, narratives

about intimacy between strangers as a reality of modern life within an industrial, urban,

capitalist, and increasingly globalized world. In fact, Historians writing across a range of periods

have touched on contagion’s expansiveness, insisting that the meanings of contagion have been

flexible enough at various points in history to encompass positive or at least neutral processes of

This list is not exhaustive; it reflects the authors with whom I engaged most directly in my chapters.

transmission as well as negative ones.

The Victorian period, in particular, has been a

productive site for this development.

Recent Victorianists writing on contagion have articulated contagion’s neutral, and

sometimes even positive, capacities. In his recent study, Victorian Contagion (2019), Chung-Jen

Chen accounts for contagion as both destructive and productive when he says that “[h]owever

much contagion was feared, it also offered the ideal of a world of shared community in which

human beings are all bound to one another—for better, or worse, for richer, for poorer, in

sickness, and in health” (12). Priscilla Wald similarly points out in her book on the outbreak

narrative (2008) that “[t]he interactions that make us sick also constitute us as a community” (2).

Likewise, Tina Choi in Anonymous Connections (2016) argues that “the period’s accounts [of

disease] often remobilized visions of disease’s transmission, transforming them into new

narratives of social cohesion and belonging” (8). The subtitle of Allan Conrad Christensen’s

Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion: Our Feverish Contact (2005) gestures towards the

contagion narrative as encompassing both contamination and community, while that of Kari

Nixon’s Kept from All Contagion: Germ Theory, Disease, and the Dilemma of Human Contact

in Late Nineteenth-Century Literature (2020) similarly captures the paradox of contagion and/as

intimacy. Nixon argues, for instance, that late Victorian authors write “fiction [that] subverts

germ theory specifically and unmitigated scientific authority more generally and [they do so] by

defiantly and consistently illustrating intimate relationships as fruitful and meaningful in spite

of—and sometimes because of—infectious contact” (6). Together, these Victorian scholars have

made headway in exploring the productive aspects of contagion to model social intimacies.

These scholars have explored well-known scenes in Victorian literature where authors

present epidemic disease transmission as the inevitable proof of connection and the grounds for

social belonging. There are two depictions that these scholars have returned to repeatedly. First,

there is Dickens’s representation of smallpox transmission in Bleak House (1853), when the

narrator remarks on the way communicable diseases constitute worldwide communities: “What

connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world,

Such historians include C.C. Wharram's work on the “proper contagion” of early variolation (2018), Annika

Mann's writing on eighteenth-century reading practices as communicating passions (2018), and Patrick Maley on

theatre’s history of productively contagious performance (2018).

who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought

together!” (189).

The second representation they consider is Thomas Carlyle’s parable of a sick

Irish widow in Past and Present (1843), who “proves her sisterhood” with her new Scottish

neighbours who refuse to help by transmitting her typhus to them.

Scholars have linked these

depictions of contagious disease transmissions to economic transmissions, social connections,

poor uprisings, and globalized networks. But what happens when we acknowledge how these

deadly disease transmissions and the sites of imagined possibility that they represent both take

shape through the bodies of poor women? It is heroine Esther Summerson’s “contagion” that

scars her face and the Irish widow’s typhus that devastates her local population. How might it

reshape our notion of Victorian contagion narratives to recognize these contagious figures also

embody a broader metaphorics of relation?

What brings these contagion scholars together is that, to a greater or lesser extent, they all

argue that contagion has some inherent value. To make such a claim—that something so

undeniably harmful and deadly as contagion can be beneficial—is controversial, to say the least.

Unsurprisingly, then, most of these scholars make this argument tentatively. They claim that

contagion has productive potential despite its destructive potential; that Victorian epidemics

reveal contact and communication and community, despite causing widespread contamination

and bodily harm. However, what I want to make a case for instead (in line with Nixon) is that

contagion can be productive not in spite of, but on account of, its destructiveness. Specifically, I

will argue that Victorians marshalled the event of material contagion (harm and all) as the basis

for affective contact and connection. This connection between material and symbolic intimacy

constitutes a material-discursive fluidity. Victorians employ this material-discursive model of

contagion as the groundwork for new bioethical relations. To argue for an expansive contagion is

not to discount the very real ways that contagion has caused and continues to cause individual

and collective harm, but rather, to recognize that the site of material contagion is also a

productive site on which to negotiate elemental questions about the relationship between self and

Victorian scholars who have read contagious disease in the novel as negotiating questions of community include

Michael S. Gurney (1990), Kathleen Blake (1997), Tina Choi (2015), Jennifer MacLure (2020), Lakshmi Krishnan

and Kari Nixon (2022), and Pamela K. Gilbert (2022).

Scholars who have examined these scenes of disease transmission as manifesting community include Ralph

Jessop (2018), Arnold Weinstein (2014), Tina Choi (2015), Paul E. Kerry and Marylu Hill (2010).

other, in all that “self” and “other” constitutes: one human and another, humans and nonhuman

animals, plants, bacteria, viruses, environments, elements, minerals, and chemicals.

I am indeed indebted to this group of Victorian scholars who consider the expansive

possibilities of contagion. However, I extend these developments through the lens of gender to

consider how the intersection of gender and contagion can offer sites of productive relation. I

thus depart from these scholars by considering how authors embodied these destructive and

productive aspects of this expansive contagion in poor and fallen women. Victorianists have long

argued that the fallen woman is a threateningly leaky body that signified moral and physical

contamination. However, a more expansive contagion model updates this enormous body of

work. By deconstructing the contagion ascribed to the fallen woman, I consider how her leaky

body’s very pathological contagion also carried productive possibilities for bioethical

transformation. I therefore cross-pollinate these recent Victorianist insights on contagion and

fluidity with new materialist theorizations of liberatory fluidity to bring about a new

understanding of the gendering of Victorian contagion narratives.

Contagion is only one facet of the many trans-corporeal exchanges that were of concern

to Victorians. If contagion can refer broadly to contact (“touch[ing]” “together”), we can open up

the meaning of contagion beyond pathological iterations to involve a host of trans-corporeal

transmissions from contaminations to poisonings to pollution. In this way, contagion invokes

public health measures outside of what we now perceive to be strictly biomedical ones, such as

sanitation control or food safety. While today, the domains of public health and public sanitation

tend to be separate civic concerns, Victorians saw sanitation as central to disease prevention,

which means that any study of Victorian contagion necessarily engages with the sanitation

movement and, by extension, Victorian ecologies.

I am not the first to employ new materialist methodologies in a Victorian context. While

not always explicitly evoking new materialisms, many Victorianists writing on the history of the

public sanitation movement have already established how people living in nineteenth-century

England demonstrated a surprising awareness of the entanglements between humans and

between human and more-than-human worlds. For instance, since the new millennium, there has

been a proliferation in scholarship written on the Victorian sanitation movement (Allen, 2008;

Jackson, 2014; Schülting, 2016; Chen, 2020) and the conglomeration of related topics, ranging

from water management (Law, 2010; Rosenthal, 2016), cholera outbreaks (Pelling, 1978;

Carpenter, 2010; Gilbert 2004, 2012; Hempel, 2004), to the Great Stink of London (Halliday,

2001; Ashton, 2017).

The work of these scholars demonstrates how transformations in the

material history of humans and their environments produced new attunements to relation. They

trace mid-century sanitation concerns back to rapid and widespread demographic shifts which

were a consequence of the First Industrial Revolution in the mid-18th century. Such shifts

resulted in mass urbanization, that reached an apex during the Victorian era. The shift from rural

to industrial labour meant that people flocked en masse from villages to cities in search of

factory work, congregating in new city centers like London and Manchester to labour and live.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, these demographic changes contributed to an

unprecedented concentration of human and industrial wastes without adequate governmental

structures in place for disposing of them (such as sewage systems), leading to the widespread

pollution of waterways.

These scholars of the sanitation movement consider how it developed out of a belief that

these polluted environments negatively impacted human health. Miasma theorists maintained

that cholera epidemics arose from human exposure to contaminated environments; contagionists,

meanwhile, theorized that epidemics resulted from humans consuming fecal matter from

contaminated drinking sources.

Both of these theories of disease transmission, which

dominated the Victorian era, therefore presume a deep imbrication of human bodies, biological

matter, and their environments. In Chapter 1, I consider how the Victorian sanitation movement,

which centrally involved sanitizing the Thames, testifies to a notion of human bodies in

permeable relation with one another and their environments, and that the figure of the drowned

fallen woman signifies a nascent a site of trans-corporeality. Arguably, Victorians were more

attuned to the social lives of their wastes than we are today; they wrote on them in depth and

Mary Poovey's foundational study on the emergence of the social body (1995) was elemental to many of these

works, including mine.

Within England and Wales, the percentage of those living in cities jumped from 17% in 1801 to 72% in 1891 (see

SA Elias, 2017, 457).

As Pamela K. Gilbert relates, “With the hypothesis of fecal-oral contamination, urban residents were forced to

consider what had, in fact, long been obvious, if not as feared, that the water of the city travelled and retraveled

through individual bodies from mouth to anus, just as the city's sewage flowed out to sea and back into Londoners'

drinking cups with the tides” (2004, 116).

painstaking detail,

and they described the myriad ways they recycled these wastes into new

consumer goods.

One such waste was used clothing. In London Labour and the London Poor, Henry

Mayhew implements a recycling model in his argument that “nothing must be wasted” (6). He

celebrates the thriftiness of his society to turn soiled, dirty rags into fertilizer that would help

grow crops, saying that “we have the remains of the old garment in our beer or our bread” (32).

His sentiment indicates a Victorian understanding that human wastes could re-enter human

bodies with positive rather than destructive effects.

In Chapter 3, I consider how social problem

authors like George W. M. Reynolds portray the trade of mass-produced clothing as an

imaginatively trans-corporeal process of blood sharing. The clothing producer’s life energy

becomes constituent of the clothing that is purchased by the consumer. I read Reynolds’s

indictment of a pathogenic slop trade in conversation with Victorian discourses on transforming

human wastes (including soiled and decrepit rags) from the raw material of pathology into the

materials of wellbeing.

While historians writing on the nineteenth-century sanitation movement have laid the

groundwork for the argument that Victorians were cognizant of trans-corporeal relations between

human beings, I enlist an emerging school of Victorian ecologists to expand on how this trans-

corporeal awareness extends beyond human health to that of environment. This subset of

ecocriticism deploys new materialist methodologies to examine Victorian environmental

practices and representations such as sustainability, pollution, recycling, energy consumption,

and environmental utopias.

One of the major contributions of this emerging field has been in

establishing how Victorians like Mayhew were engaging in ecological questions and concerns

that we tend to designate as being uniquely “modern,” such as critiques of natural resource

In his foreword to Jamie Benidickson’s The Culture of Flushing (2007), Graeme Wynn considers the secrecy of

the modern bathroom: “In the First World, at least, the toilet is… designed to hide – in some countries it is still

known by the earlier, less euphemistic name of water closet – and to carry away, by the flushing action of water,

human excreta” (vii). Victorians’ usage of privies, outhouses, and chamber pots did not allow for this detachment.

Choi also considers the passage as indicative of Mayhew’s belief that “the city’s circulating waste could be

transformed from a polluting to a productive connective force” (2015, 8).

Significant contributors to this field include John Parham (2002), Allan MacDuffie (2014), Deanna Kreisel and

Devin Griffiths (eds 2020); collections by Grace Moore and Michelle J. Smith (eds. 2018); Elizabeth Carolyn Miller

(ed. 2018); Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison (eds. 2016 and 2019); Nathan Hensley and Philip Steer

(ed. 2019), and Barri J. Gold (2021).

exploitation in favour of renewable energy sources, or discussions of shared ecological futures.

These sophisticated ecological practices could only have arisen out of a considerable awareness

of the entanglement of human and more-than-human worlds. In this way, I see my project in line

with that of Deanna K. Kreisel and Devin Griffiths (2020). In their introduction to a special issue

in Victorian Literature and Culture on Open Ecologies (2020), editors Kreisel and Griffiths

consider how the essays in the collection “[turn] to the nineteenth century in order to weigh the

legacy of its holistic conception of systems and to resurrect alternative discourses of openness,

permeability, and indeterminate relation” (1). My claims about historicizing new materialisms

dovetail with those of Kreisel and Griffiths, who describe what they term Victorians’ “open

ecologies” as challenging the genealogy of new materialist accounts of “trans-corporeality” as

articulated by Alaimo, Bennett, and Haraway (14). They point to nineteenth-century discourses

on ecology as an essential precursor to these concepts.

My project thickens Victorian ecologists’ theoretical framing because it regards this

“holistic conception of systems” as being only one part of a larger equation of “openness,

permeability, and indeterminate relation” which incorporates both productive and destructive

modes of relation. On the one hand, Victorian ecologies model sustainability, symbiosis, and

holism; on the other, they encompass negative contagion models like contamination, pollution,

and poisoning. This second grouping of “open ecologies” anticipates new materialist models of

destructive trans-corporeality as expressed in Alaimo’s concept of “toxic bodies” (2008) and Mel

Chen’s notion of “toxicity” (2012).

I build on these two areas of scholarship, Victorian

sanitation and ecology, in my discussion of the drowned fallen woman in the next chapter, and I

consider new materialist notions of toxicity on my final chapter on the female poisoner.

Methodology: Rhetorical New Materialisms

Victorian scholars writing on contagion and ecology are not alone in expanding the

cultural politics of fluidity beyond sites of destruction and towards sites of possibility. This

remodeling is a central tenet of the theoretical school known as new materialisms. In this section,

In this way, my reconfiguration of Victorian contagion narratives takes up the authors’ refusal to regard “open

ecologies” as neither “preconcerted harmonies nor utopias” (14) but rather holistic systems incorporating both harm

and benefit.

I introduce two central theoretical concepts underpinning my study of nineteenth-century

contagion narratives, concepts I term material and categorical fluidity. I use these terms to refer

to both the overarching premises I see operating within new material feminisms and what I

believe to be their Victorian precedents. I regard both new materialists and Victorian scholars of

contagion as using these premises to invite new configurations of bioethical relations. Later in

the section, I extend my methodology beyond new materialisms, specifically, to rhetorical new

materialisms to account for the material-discursive entanglements I see operating within

Victorian representations of contagion. Centrally, I consider how pathos functions as a key

rhetorical strategy amongst authors and artists depicting an expansive contagion.

I thus challenge the “new” in new materialisms, pushing new materialism’s timeline back

into nineteenth-century England by investigating how a society continually ravaged by all

manner of ancient and emergent contagious diseases was coming to terms with trans-corporeality

and contagion as realities of modern life. I use Victorians’ sophisticated understandings of

materiality to demonstrate how they were already conceptualizing fluidity and contagion as the

means for rupturing dominant post-enlightenment constructions of liberal individual selfhood

(centrally, the notion of a stable, self-contained subjectivity)—a deconstruction that we tend to

reserve for postmodernist and poststructuralist theorists alone.

Amongst the massive interdisciplinary and politically committed school of thought

known as new materialisms, there is one subset of theorists we might refer to collectively under

the heading of new materialist feminists.

For these thinkers, post-Covid sentiments of

interconnectedness affirm insights on matter and material relations that they have been making

for well over a decade.

Many new materialist feminists have justified the “newness” of the field

as a departure in the history of the feminist tradition itself. They build on a critical insight of the

social constructionist school: the notion that nature has been historically disparaged as fixed,

Names for what I am calling new materialisms include the following: new materialism (Coole and Frost 2010;

Barad 2007 and 2011; Maclure 2018), new feminist materialism (Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Jackson and Mazzei

2012; Van der Tuin 2011), posthumanism (Alaimo 2016; Braidotti 2013; Hayles 2008); new empiricisms (Clough

2009; MacLure 2013, St Pierre, Jackson and Mazzei 2016); post-qualitative research (Lather and St. Pierre 2013; St

Pierre 2011); and the ontological turn (Denzin and Giardina 2016; Rosiek and Gleason 2017). I am indebted to

Rosiek, Snyder, and Scott (2020) for much of this bibliography.

Many new material feminists have applied their theoretical concepts to the post-Covid era including Braidotti

(2020) and Alaimo (2023).

passive, and destructively aligned with femininity and female bodies. Rather than flee from

nature as they claim the constructionists did, new materialist feminists seek new definitions of

nature.

They claim that recent and cutting-edge developments in such scientific disciplines as

physics (Barad 2007), climatology (Alaimo 2000, 2008, 2010), biology (Chen 2012), and

neurobiology (Wilson 2015), among other fields, invite new interdisciplinary cross-alliances

between feminism and science that promise innovative conceptualizations of matter and nature

as agential and vibrant forces. For these feminists, this return to rather than “flight from nature”

and its affiliated scientific disciplines (Alaimo and Hekman 2008) represents a historical

departure from feminist schools that have either risked essentializing nature as fixed, passive,

and biologically determined (psychoanalytic feminists) or denied the import of nature altogether

by turning away from the reality of matter, bodies, and their processes and exclusively towards

linguistic constructions of bodies and texts (constructionist feminists).

In part, new material feminists characterize themselves as “new” to simultaneously mark

a theoretical departure from—and indebtedness to—“old” material feminisms, a group of

second-wave psychoanalytic feminists (predominantly Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce

Irigaray) who share a theoretical investment in the historical degradation and political

reclamation of women’s corporeal fluidity.

Many of these constructions of women’s leaky

bodies (especially that of Kristeva) have their basis in the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas.

In her pivotal work Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966),

Douglas famously defines dirt as “matter out of place” (44), and she argues that any bodily

matter which transgresses the boundaries of the body represents a threat to the integrity of social

systems. Kristeva uses this concept of pollution as the basis of her concept of the abject. In

Powers of Horror (1980), Kristeva defines the abject as the human response (such as horror or

vomiting) to a threatened breakdown in the distinction between subject and object, self and other.

Kristeva’s primary examples of the abject include corpses, open wounds, menstrual fluid, feces,

and sewage. For Kristeva, all instances of the abject originate in female corporeality in

For excellent summaries of the early new material feminist tradition, see the introductions to the foundational

collections by Alaimo and Hekman (2008) and Coole and Frost (2010).

The Western construction of women’s bodies as leaky is premised on an inherent contradiction, given that this

construction simultaneously construes women’s bodies as fixed and predetermined, while men’s bodies are not.

childbirth. Kristeva links the abject to the stage of psychosexual development when humans

separate from the mother, when they gain awareness that there is a boundary between the “me”

and the “other”/“mother” (79). Other French psychoanalytic feminists writing at this time argue

for the disruptive power of women’s leaky bodies as productive and liberatory. Cixous’s concept

of écriture féminine or women’s writing (1975) encourages every woman to “write her self” in

the symbolic medium of breast milk, or “white ink” (817).

The constructionist turn in

feminism, spearheaded by Judith Butler (1990), led to dismissals of these material feminisms as

being rife with biological essentialism, and consequently, models of “leaky bodies” fell largely

out of favour amongst feminists.

That said, a couple of psychoanalytic and corporeal feminists carried on the work of what

we might term these “leaky body feminists” to consider how Western societies have historically

ascribed corporeal leakiness to women’s bodies. Many of these histories focus on how

nineteenth-century discourses on corporeal leakage served to codify who was included in, and

excluded from, subjecthood. These scholars argue that notions of liberalism emerging in the mid-

Victorian period privileged values of self-containment, individualism, and stable boundaries of

the self, values which ran counter to contemporary medical understandings of women’s

physiological processes as necessarily leaky.

The body of scholarship written on the

Contagious Disease Acts, a series of laws passed in 1864 and 1866 which instituted the forced

inspection and detainment of any woman suspected of being a venereal prostitute, demonstrates a

prime example of the Victorian correlation between women’s bodily fluids and contagion.

Elizabeth Grosz (1994, 2017), Astrida Neimanis (2017), and Margrit Shildrick (1997, 2002,

2022) consider how this cultural inscription of leakiness offers liberatory possibilities to

reimagine bioethical relations and ethical-ontologies.

I regard new materialist feminisms as

reclaiming the nascent potential of leaky bodies within these “old” materialist feminist

“There is always in her [the woman writer] at least a little of that good mother’s milk” (1975).

On corporeal subjectivity and citizenship, see Pamela Gilbert (2007), Lauren M. E. Goodlad (2003), and Elaine

Hadley (2010). On Victorian female corporeality as “leaky,” see Gilbert (1997) and Shuttleworth (1990). In “Female

Circulation” (1990), Shuttleworth argues that “While male health was believed to be based on self-control, woman's

health depended on her very inability to control her body (56-57).

See the works of Judith Walkowitz (especially 1982 and 1992) on this topic.

Grosz claims bodily fluids “attest to the permeability of the body” (193). On fluidity, gender, and geography, see

Robyn Longhurst (2000).

traditions.

Victorian studies of “leaky bodies” have overwhelmingly resulted in readings of

oppressed women, but I will illustrate how Victorians’ representations of corporeal leakiness

prefigure these liberatory possibilities for reimagining relation.

To build this argument, I will designate two central concepts about fluidity that I use to

theoretically frame my findings on Victorian contagion and which I also see as central premises

amongst new material feminist methodologies. First, these material feminists take as given the

profound entanglement of the human and the more-than-human environments, captured in such

concepts as Stacy Alaimo’s “trans-corporeality” (2010), Mel Chen’s “toxicity” (2012), and

Nancy Tuana’s “viscous porosity” (2008).

From this point on, I will refer to this state of fluid

relations amongst material phenomena collectively as material fluidity. Second, and relatedly,

many new materialists presume an inextricable entanglement of matter and discourse expressed

through concepts such as Donna Haraway’s “material-semiotic” (1992, 2003, 2016) and Karen

Barad’s “material-discursive” (2007). From this point on, I will identify this concept of fluid

relations between material and symbolic phenomena with the term categorical fluidity. Several

new material feminists, like Alaimo (2010) and Barad (2007), argue that we should implement

our theoretical recognition of the fluidity inherent within and among all earthly phenomena into

feminist praxis. For these theorists, this “new” consciousness of material and categorical fluidity

prompts new reconceptualizations of bioethical relations (upon which I will elaborate shortly).

These two premises of material and categorical fluidity serve as the theoretical

framework for this dissertation. However, my intervention is in attending to the earlier iterations

of these “new” conceptualizations of fluidity within the Victorian era. I thus follow recent

scholars in problematizing the “newness” of new materialisms by arguing for a more rigorous

historicization of its “discoveries.”

Just as new material feminists like Annette-Carina van der

Zaag (2017) warn that “situating this mode of thought [new materialisms] as new has the effect

of obscuring the feminist work that contemporary materialisms are embedded in” (4), so too, I

I regard psychoanalytic concepts of the abject and écriture féminine as informing new materialist feminist

concepts like toxicity, viscous porosity, and trans-corporeality.

Trans-corporeality underlines how “the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from the ‘environment’”

(2010, 2).

I am not alone in critiquing the “newness” of new materialisms. Other critics include Sara Ahmed (2008),

Sullivan (2012), van der Tuin and Dolplijn (2012), Astrida Neimanis (2017), Annette-Carina van der Zaag (2017),

Clara Fischer and Luna Dolezal (eds. 2018), and Nancy Tuana (2021).

argue, does designating this new material attunement to material and categorical fluidity as

uniquely “modern” diminish the sophisticated ways in which people of previous eras, including

the Victorians, were already conceptualizing the permeability inherent in matter and between

material and discursive phenomena. My challenge to the “newness” of these theoretical

assumptions is not to dismiss their import—quite the opposite. Rather, I challenge the novelty of

these theories to extend the theoretical scope of their applicability before the contemporary

advent of scientific discoveries like climate change awareness and environmental catastrophe.

therefore suggest that this conscientiousness does not represent an ideological shift but rather a

continuity in models of material and material-semiotic relation. By extension, I posit our

relationship with the Victorian era as being itself fluid, a relationship of continuity and

diffraction rather than rupture.

To open my theoretical discussion with new material feminist methodologies, I will

explore how Victorians anticipated new materialist accounts of what I collectively term material

fluidity: the state of fluidity between material phenomena, such as between human bodies; and

between humans, more-than-human bodies, and worlds. While material fluidity is at the core of

many new material feminist methodologies,

the most influential concept has been Alaimo’s

“trans-corporeality” (2010). In Bodily Natures: Science, the Environment, and the Material Self

(2010), Alaimo defines trans-corporeality as an “[i]magining [of] human corporeality […] in

which the human is always inter-meshed with the more-than-human world” (2). This imagining

“underlines the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the

environment’” (2) for Alaimo.

Alaimo continues by considering how trans-corporeality is both produced by and, in turn,

produces new ways of engaging with the human being not merely and but as environment:

It has been customary amongst new material feminists to cite modern “events” to demarcate a new materialist era.

As I will demonstrate, Alaimo cites the “advent” of climate change, while Barad cites the twentieth-century

discoveries of physicist Niels Bohr. This new materialist camp shares an investment with a theoretical and material

fluidity aligned with the poststructuralist and postmodernist movements. For instance, in Animacies (2012), Mel

Chen describes “the body’s former fictions of integrity, autonomy, heterosexual alignment and containment”

elucidated by poststructuralists theorists as a template for investigating the “porosity of biopolitical logics

themselves” (7, 8).

Related concepts include Mel Chen's “toxicity” and Nancy Tuana’s “viscous porosity.” Indeed, material fluidity is

a principle with resonances in new materialisms more broadly, such as Jane Bennett’s “vibrant materialism” (2012).

By emphasizing the movement across bodies, trans-corporeality reveals the interchanges

and interconnections between various bodily natures. But by underscoring that trans

indicates movement across different sites, trans-corporeality also opens up a mobile space

that acknowledges the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies,

nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors. Emphasizing

the material interconnections of human corporeality with the more-than-human world—

and, at the same time, acknowledging that material agency necessitates more capacious

epistemologies—allows us to forge ethical and political positions that can contend with

numerous later twentieth- and early twenty-first-century realities in which ‘human’ and

‘environment’ can by no means be considered as separate. (2)

Alaimo makes several assumptions about both the currency and currentness of “trans-

corporeality” here. In her words, trans-corporeality “reveals”—it illuminates connections

between beings, humans and nonhumans, that previously went unseen and unrecognized. Trans-

corporeality, therefore, functions to illuminate, to “reveal” the movements between and across a

myriad of agencies (human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents,

and other actors). Yet the nature of this disclosure is complicated by the fact that, per Alaimo, we

as modern citizens living through “later twentieth and early twenty-first-century realities” are

already cognizant of the fact that “‘human’ and ‘environment’ can by no means be considered as

separate” (2). Alaimo considers how the political mobilization of trans-corporeality elicits new

ethical futures, which she aligns with a “trans-corporeal ethics” (22).

For Alaimo, “trans-

corporeality” is a function of “new” materialisms because it is only within the context of late

twentieth- and early-twenty-first century scientific understandings that we as humans have the

means to conceptualize the relationship between human, nonhuman, ecological, chemical (and I

might add, viral) bodies and worlds.

See Braidotti's Posthuman Glossary (2018) for an excellent breakdown of trans-corporeality.

In her book, Alaimo identifies these “twentieth- and early twenty-first-century realities” with a global awareness

of environmental impact (climate change, environmental racism, toxicity). She thus aligns “trans-corporeal ethics”

with movements of “environmental justice and environmental health” (3), movements which (she posits)

“reconceptualize material agencies” as the “interconnected actions of environmental systems, toxic substances, and

biological bodies” (3).

In other words, trans-corporeality is the answer to the question that she poses in the

description of her book: “What does it mean to be human in these times, with bodies that are

inextricably interconnected with our physical world?” Alaimo’s question, however, collapses

both the awareness and the material reality of trans-corporeality into “modern” phenomena. Of

course, human bodies have always been inextricably interconnected with their physical world. It

is my position in this dissertation that Victorians were engaged with this question of what it

means to be human in their own time, that they demonstrate a working knowledge of trans-

corporeality, and even that their own ethical responses were shaped by a cultural awareness of a

“movement across bodies” encompassing the human, nonhuman, and the environmental. One

goal of this project, then (in line with a more scrupulous historicization of “new” materialisms),

is to push back the historical genealogy of trans-corporeality from twentieth- and twenty-first-

century “realities” to those of the nineteenth century.

While material fluidity represents a fundamental tenet of many new material feminist

methodologies, another of the school’s central tenets is what I am calling categorical fluidity. In

other words, feminist new materialisms posit a fluid relationship inherent not only to matter

(human and nonhuman organisms, plants, minerals, chemicals, viruses), but between matter and

abstract entities (such as language, affects, and semiotics). This fluidity finds form in Karen

Barad’s central concepts of “material-discursive” and “naturalcultural” entanglements (2007),

which I turn to now.

In their immensely influential Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the

Entanglement of Meaning and Matter (2007), Barad provocatively claims that “matter and

meaning are not separate elements. They are inextricably fused together, and no event, no matter

how energetic, can tear them asunder […] Mattering is simultaneously a matter of substance and

significance” (3). Barad sees this “material-discursive” entanglement playing out in

contemporary physics, specifically quantum physics, and their book traces the history of this

This dissertation is, above all, a historical study. As one facet of new materialisms, new environmentalist theories

also demand more rigorous historicization. Recent environmental theories on “the planetary” have been

symptomatic of this trend toward novelty. William E. Connolly calls the modern challenge “facing the planetary”

(2017), and Dipesh Chakrabarty similarly argues that the planetary is an “emergent humanist category” (2019). In

line with Christophe Bonneuil (2021), however, I query this “radical novelty” of the planetary encounter (2021) and

instead aim to “historicize planetarity” to illuminate how people living in the nineteenth century were reckoning

with planetary scales of space and deep time.

principle in the discipline from its origins in Danish physicist Neils Bohr’s “philosophical-

physics”

of the 1940s to technological progress that experimental metaphysicians have made

within the previous decade.

Barad examines and elaborates on this history to construct their theory of “agential

realism,” which they define as “an epistemological-ontological-ethical framework that provides

an understanding of the role of human and nonhuman, material and discursive, and natural and

cultural factors in scientific and other socio-material practices” (26, emphasis original). They

coin this phenomenon “naturalcultural.” Central to this theory is Barad’s notion of “intra-

actions.” As opposed to inter-actions, intra-action “signifies the mutual constitution of entangled

agencies” (33). Barad argues that because of this entanglement, we can no longer recognize “the

primary ontological unit […as being] independent objects with independently determinate

boundaries and properties but rather what Bohr terms ‘phenomena’” (33, emphasis original).

Since the act of “mattering” is a material-discursive process, reasons Barad, agential realism

stresses the imbrication of science and ethics in producing what Barad terms an “ethics of

mattering” (36), which has resonances with Alaimo’s concept of “trans-corporeal ethics.”

As a concept borne out of “new” materialisms, agential realism shares some crucial

similarities with trans-corporeality. Like Alaimo’s trans-corporeality, Barad’s historicization of

the material-discursive only considers scientific innovations in the twentieth century.

Also like

Alaimo, Barad reasons that politically mobilizing this “new” conscientiousness of fluidity can

usher in similarly new ethical modes of relation. Again, I trouble this historicization to ask: Are

humans only able to perceive the deep “entanglements of meaning and matter” now, due to the

enlightenment offered by scientific equations in quantum physics, or were humans aware of this

concept before the twentieth century? If Barad’s interdisciplinary strategy, like that of many

feminist new materialists, is to suggest a cross-alliance between feminism and the “hard

sciences,” then must we limit ourselves to current, authoritative ways of knowing (such as

Barad maintains that Bohr’s complementarity principle “[calls] into question an entire tradition in the history of

Western metaphysics: the belief that the world is populated with individual things with their own independent sets of

determinate properties” (19) and therefore “calls for a rethinking of the very nature of knowledge and being” (23)

which Barad engages in with their theory of agential realism.

Some new materialist theorists have argued for new material conceptualizations of matter before the twentieth

century. For instance, Iris Van Der Tuin performs a diffractive Baradian reading of French philosopher Henri

Bergson (1859-1941) to construct a “different starting point” for her onto-epistemology (2011).

contemporary quantum physics) to provide the cultural authority to disclose these material-

discursive truths? Or might we recognize that Victorians could come to this same realization

through their own technoscientific enterprises, even ones that we might conceive of now as the

debunked, misdirected “pseudosciences” from previous eras?

For instance, we might consider how the Victorian sanitation movement was borne out of

a recognition of the Thames as a naturalcultural phenomenon. The scientific theory undergirding

the sanitation movement was miasma theory, the principle that “bad air” (not infected biofluids)

was the culprit for epidemics like cholera. Miasma theory recognizes human bodies in intimate

relation with their environments like the River Thames and even atmospheric conditions. Despite

this being a false scientific premise, the infrastructural transformations that emerged from it were

nonetheless largely successful in reducing disease outbreaks. The reason for this effectiveness is

that miasma theory registered an attunement to human and nonhuman imbrication, which, in

turn, confirmed a recognition of the imbrication of natural phenomena and governmental

intervention that we might label naturalcultural. Miasma theory ruptures individual human

subjects into amorphous climate patterns that can be measured and controlled. Material and

categorical fluidity provide a language to consider Victorian conceptualizations of material and

material-discursive relations. If, as I will argue, Victorians had a working understanding of these

concepts of fluidity, then that opens up the possibility that they, too, like new materialists, could

marshal these premises to conceptualize new ethical possibilities for relation.

How might an attunement to nineteenth-century prefigurations of new materialisms teach

us something new about how Victorians articulated intimacies? New material feminisms—with

their investment in the inherent fluidity of and between material things— extend the insights of

what I have called leaky body feminism. In this way, they corroborate the findings of some 30

years of scholarship on Victorian leaky bodies and the gendering of Victorian contagion

narratives. In itself, this parallel is not new or ground-breaking, for it does not teach us anything

new about Victorian contagion narratives. By definition, contagion itself assumes a fluidity

between things as the principle for transmission. However, what sets new material feminists

apart from other new materialisms is that their investment in the inherent fluidity of and between

material things serves as the basis for a feminist praxis. For many material feminists, to reclaim

the material, leaky body is to rescue it from the grounds of misogyny and essentialism to which it

has been cast down. This reclamation is not only a means of disrupting the historical denigration

of marked bodies such as those of women, but it is also a template for entirely recalibrating our

modes of relation premised upon the notion of bodies and natures as inherently “leaky.”

To claim that Victorians prefigure the fluidity that would become central to new

materialist feminists is thus to open up the possibility that they, too, could imagine how this

fluidity disrupted the material and ethical relations between bodies. These new materialist

methodologies help to illuminate how Victorian authors used contagion to imagine material

modes of relation beyond the destructive and oppressive in ways that defy our expectations about

the cultural work that Victorian contagion narratives could perform. In other words, in line with

Choi and Nixon, I contend that contagion narratives did more than merely manifest cultural

anxieties. One of the reasons that contagion produces anxiety is its disruptive power, and

disruption is also the catalyst for change. The authors in these chapters depict material contagion

as a site to formulate new ethical possibilities for relation—possibilities based on a shared

recognition of profound material entanglement. Put simply, the notion that “we are all

connected” is the basic premise of contagion theory. Yet, it is also the basic tenet of Victorian

systems theories more broadly, from scientific ideologies like organicism to related concepts of

evolutionary theory, natural theology, and ethical ideologies like that of Christian charity.

To turn now to the word “narrative” in “contagion narratives” involves asking questions

about what stories Victorians were telling. To do so, I enlist the discipline of rhetoric: the study

of persuasion. This dissertation considers “fluidity” not only in a material sense, but as referring

to a series of ideological encounters, boundary crossings, and cominglings. I take up Jules Law’s

central claim that “the Victorians were obsessed with fluids” (2010, 1) to consider how this

cultural obsession anticipates our modern obsession with fluidity as a master metaphor for

rupture and reconstruction—an obsession that has its origins in postmodernism’s

deconstructionism, new materialism’s trans-corporealities, and also, as I will argue here,

rhetoric’s new materialist turn.

The Victorian period and our own are similarly characterized by

Ella Mershon (2020) writes on nineteenth-century organicism: “Through an analogy that likened all systems to

living organisms, organicism produced a vision of self-organizing holism, where the whole—be it a mollusk, a

poem, or a nation—achieved organic totality through the coordination of interdependent parts” (273).

Fluidity, particularly the fluidity pertaining to notions of selfhood, represented a master metaphor amongst

poststructuralists and postmodernists, who regard the self as a single and coherent entity as a construct. Metaphors

states of flux (technological, epistemological, and ontological)—flux that is both informed by

and informs a cultural preoccupation with fluidity: the fluidity of bodies themselves and the

flows between them, the fluidity between humans and their environments, and even the fluidity

between matter and discourse.

One of the central aims of Science and Technology Studies is to

disrupt teleological models of history as continual progress,

and Bruno Latour famously goes

so far as to claim that “we have never been modern” (1991). Latour argues that Western societies

developed the notion of modernism in the seventeenth century to distinguish themselves as

culturally superior based on the scientific method. Latour thus characterizes modernism as an

assumption that everything that comes before is obsolete (69), and that science can be severed

from society, nature from culture, subject from object. Instead, Latour endorses a kind of

“nonmodernism,” or understanding that scientific knowledge emerges from an understanding

that there is no a priori distinction between nature and culture.

In a sense, this dissertation similarly disrupts the notion of scientific progress. It takes up

Latour’s famous claim that “we have never been modern” to argue for the “historical present” of

the Victorian era, by making a case for a Victorian conceptualization of contagion that signifies

both contamination and what Benedict Anderson has called “imagined communities” (1983). At

the same time that I attend to this historical parallel, I am also deeply invested in the historical

particularity of the Victorian contagion narrative, which came out of a set of specific

sociocultural contexts.

of fluidity characterize many important concepts: for instance, Derrida's concept of “free play” (1966), Foucault's

notion of biopower as diffusive (1978), Deleuze and Guattari’s theorization of “flows” (1972), Haraway’s argument

for the fluidity of categorial boundaries inherent in the “cyborg” figure (1985), and Butler’s gender “trouble” (1990).

Consider Margrit Shildrick’s central argument that poststructuralism “deconstructs the boundaries between

categories, be they ontological, epistemological, ethical, or material; and it demonstrates the inescapability of the

leaks and flows across all such bodies of knowledge and bodies of matter (1997, 3).

My strategy of flattening the historical periodization between modern and postmodern eras has been influenced by

Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern (1991) and can thus be described as a kind of “nonmodernism” (47).

This fluid historicization also implements Michel Serres’s concept of “topological” rather than linear time (1990),

which Amy Koerber employs in her rhetorical history From Hysteria to Hormones (2018). She describes her

topological approach as “unfold[ing] from the assumption that underneath the smooth surface of a forward-moving,

ever-progressing history of beliefs, there are undercurrents of backward movement and places where old ideas stand

still (2).

Early scholars in STS deconstructed the notion of scientific objectivity. See Latour and Woolgar (1979), Haraway

(1985), Emily Martin (1991), and Evelyn Fox Keller (1985).

In showcasing expansive contagion narratives, those presenting contagion as destructive

and productive at once, this dissertation examines how authors persuade their readers to view

contagion and its representatives as both troubling and sympathetic. In other words, the study

engages rhetoric: the art of persuasion. By investigating the visual and literary rhetoric at work in

Victorian representations of biofluid exchange, this project constitutes a kairology of nineteenth-

century contagion narratives. In Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine (2005), Judy Z. Segal

introduces the term and understanding to the field of rhetorical studies. Segal stresses the

necessity of considering historical context when articulating the cultural construction of medical

concepts like health and illness. For Segal, to engage in this contextualizing practice is to reveal

“historical moments as rhetorical opportunities” (23), which are dependent upon the concept of

“kairos,” or “the principle of contingency and fitness-to-situation” (22). While Segal embarks on

a long-spanning kairological account of biomedicine, understood as “the ‘official’ medicine of

the Western world” (23), my project represents one humble facet of that undertaking: a kairology

of mid-century Victorian contagion narratives. Segal’s kairotic accounts have inspired this

rhetorical historicization,

as have Amy Koerber’s kairologies on breastfeeding practices (2013)

and hysteria (2018). I have also been informed by rhetorical histories of medicine, chiefly those

by Priscilla Wald on outbreak narratives (2008) and Ian Hacking on psychiatric disorders (1998,

2002).

What sets my kairology apart is its engagement with new materialist methodologies as a

way into those rhetorical histories. This project thus takes up an emerging cross-methodological

approach that S. Scott Graham identifies with “rhetorical new materialisms” (2015, 2020), a

“unified field theory” which seeks to bridge medical rhetoric with the recent theoretical turn

toward new materialisms that has dominated Science and Technology Studies (STS) within the

last decade.

Since the rhetoric of medicine examines the ways that rhetors (physicians, patients,

On migraine (2005), female sexual dysfunction (2015, 2018), and drug advertisements (2019).

Hacking's argument of dynamic nominalism also informs my approach because his concept grants that material

and discursive forces are mutually constitutive towards definitions of illness (1999, 2002).

Annemarie Mol’s concept of “multiple ontologies” (2002) was foundational in the development of rhetorical new

materialisms. Earlier on, Graham and Carl Herndl articulated a basis for a rhetorical new materialism when they

wrote that “the reality you engage is determined by the kinds of actions you habitually perform and the material

context in which you act” (2010, 13). See also Graham (2015) and Graham and Herndl (2013, 2015). Other scholars

working within rhetorical new materialisms include Christa Teston (2017) and David Gruber (2015). For

rhetoricians who engage specifically with feminist aspects of new materialisms, see Barnett and Boyle (eds. 2016);

government bodies, consumers) employ persuasive strategies to define health and illness, then

we can recognize how rhetoricians of medicine have long granted the profound imbrication of

discourse (rhetoric) and matter (biomedicine). One critical juncture linking medical rhetoric and

new materialisms, then, is the understanding that discourse and matter are mutually productive of

one another, a premise that is central to my claim that Victorian contagion narratives elucidate

material and material-discursive intimacies—between humans, between humans and the more-

than-human world, and between matter (diseases, biofluids) and symbol (literary texts, affects).

In thinking about material-discursive intimacies, what makes this project specifically

rhetorical is my focus on one of the three modes of rhetorical appeal, pathos, or the appeal to

emotion, within these contagion narratives. Specifically, I consider how authors invite a

sympathetic connection between their subject of female contagion and their readers to forge an

unexpected correlation between pathos and pathology. This connection focuses on a fluid

exchange between bodies, the character’s body and the imagined body of the reader.

Rhetorical analysis also provides a framework for historicizing contagion and fluidity.

Corroborating the kairological histories outlined above, I trouble the “medical progress

narrative,” which assumes that scientific knowledge functions according to a continually

improving teleology of progress (see Segal 2005, 22-23). To be attuned to new materialist

methodologies in the construction of contagion, I take my lead from both S.T.S. scholars and

theorists in feminist science studies,

in arguing that a central aspect of troubling the medical

progress narrative involves a recognition of our own situated present as taking place within

Card, Kessler, and Graham (2018); (2018); Booher and Jung (eds. 2018); Melonçon and Scott (eds. 2018); Molly

Kessler (2020), who employs Barad’s concept of “intra-action.”

My primary influence from S.T.S. has been Ian Hacking's writings on historicizing medical conditions (1995,

1998, 1999). One of the significant contributions of the school of feminist science studies has been to recognize the

institution of science not as objective and impartial but rather as a function of what Donna Haraway terms “situated

knowledges” (1988); see also Evelyn Fox Keller (1985, 1990). This decentering of the subject in history has

influenced prominent feminist new materialists such as Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, and Iris van der Tuin; van der

Tuin claims that Haraway “planted the seeds of what are now called ‘Feminist new Materialisms'“ (2015, 21). Tuin

also challenges the teleology of generational feminism (“waves”) in her methodology of “jumping generations,” one

that “avoids linear conceptualizations of time and place and the trap of non-exhaustive dichotomies” (2009, 25).

(rather than outside of) history. This acknowledgement demands that we ought to be suspicious

of those methods of theoretical interpretation which purport to be “new” in the first place.

What makes nineteenth-century England such a productive site for rhetorical inquiry is

that it is an era that stages dramatic contests for disease etiologies that attempt to explain the

epidemics which ravaged whole populations relentlessly and seemingly indiscriminately.

Miasma theorists like Edwin Chadwick sought to prove that “bad air” from rotting organic

matter was the culprit for scourges like cholera. In contrast, contagionist theorists like John Snow

proclaimed that epidemics spread by direct or indirect human contact through the medium of

infected biofluids. While it has been customary to historicize these dominant Victorian etiologies

of disease transmission as both mutually exclusive and incompatible, evinced by the lasting

thematic division between the literature on Victorian epidemic diseases on miasma and that on

contagionism,

I want to problematize this opposition to suggest a core rhetorical current that

runs through miasma and contagionist theories—a shared principle of fluidity as the cause of

epidemic disease.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a “fluid” as “[a] substance whose particles move

freely among themselves, so as to give way before the slightest pressure,” with the stipulation

that “[f]luids are divided into liquids, which are incompletely elastic, and gases, which are

completely so" (B.1.a.). This definition of fluids is essential for my purposes because it

encompasses “liquids” and “gases.” While using “fluid” to describe a gas is not in current

parlance outside of physics, it would have been familiar within a common nineteenth-century

English lexicon. This usage is an antiquated form from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,

found in such texts as John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and Alexander Pope’s Temple of

I am not alone in critiquing the “newness” of new materialisms. Other critics include Sara Ahmed (2008),

Sullivan (2012), van der Tuin and Dolplijn (2012), Astrida Neimanis (2017), Annette-Carina van der Zaag (2017),

Clara Fischer (2018), and Nancy Tuana (2021).

For some excellent accounts of how the miasma theory informed public health reform, see Christopher Hamlin

(1998), Stephen Halliday (1999, 2001), Louise Penner (2010), Lee Jackson (2014), Laurence W. Mazzeno and

Ronald D. Morrison (2016 [eds] and 2019). For some excellent historical accounts of how the contagionist theory

informed public health measures, see Sandra Hempel (2004, 2007), Pamela K. Gilbert (2012), Matthew Newsom

Kerr (2017), and Chung-Jen Chen (2019). Gilbert troubles this historical binarization in much of her work.

Fame (1715).

This expanded meaning of a “fluid” thus accommodates the differences between

miasmic and contagionist approaches towards disease by recognizing that the elements that they

study (liquid and air) exist within a common fold of “fluid” entities. Thus, while at first glance,

miasmists and contagionists use seemingly incompatible premises to construct their arguments

(the first, that inhaling bad air causes illness, and the second, that ingesting harmful fluids causes

illness), these two premises actually both operate through the medium of pathogenic “fluids,”

broadly understood. In other words, a person who internalizes (that is, inhales or ingests) bad

“fluids” (be they air or liquid) is liable to contract an infectious disease.

This expanded notion of Victorian fluidity similarly expands what makes a contagion

narrative. If the goal of the medical rhetorician is to ask, “‘Who is persuading whom of what?’

and ‘What are the means of persuasion?’” (Segal 2008, 2), we might first expand our

understanding of the “what” that makes up representations of epidemic disease beyond medical

depictions of actual cases and the list of biofluids that frequently make up their symptomology

(phlegm, blood, vomit, diarrhea).

Suppose we grant that this expansive fluidity is at the core of

Victorian epidemic etiologies. In that case, any text which deals with fluids (from those dealing

with the Thames’s vapours and water, to cow’s milk, to poison) becomes a site of potential

epidemic discourse. As far as the “who,” we might look beyond these figureheads of etiology

like Chadwick and Snow towards everyday rhetors who were trying to make sense of these

epidemic times: authors, poets, and visual artists preoccupied with what they saw as the

increasingly fluid relationships between bodies and things in their historical moment. What

makes kairos a particularly useful rhetorical tool when applied to Victorian etiologies is its

ability to account for specific moments in time and space: it can provide “a good account of local

and present knowledge” (Segal 22), but also “a way of making sense of both the medical past

and the medical present” (36) given how it resists a straightforward teleology.

Milton: “Spirits… Cannot… mortal would Receive, no more then can the fluid Aire” (VI. 349); Pope: “Thro

undulating Air the Sounds are sent,/ And spread o’er all the fluid element” (38). I am indebted to the O.E.D. entry

for these historical examples of this denotative meaning.

Scholars in Science and Technology Studies (S.T.S.) have explored Victorian epidemics, especially Timothy

Alborn (1995), Robert Peckham (2015), and Charles Rosenberg (1992).

An incredibly influential model for my understanding of kairological histories has been Amy Koerber’s metaphor

of topological history as a Möbius strip, which depicts history not as linear but continually folding on itself (2018).

To return to Victorian narratives of contagion equipped with the insights of both new

feminist materialisms and the rhetoric of health and medicine is to deconstruct the notion of

contagion itself for its composite parts—some of which evoke negative descriptors like disease

transmission, pollution, and contamination (all of which are not new to the Victorianist

tradition) and others which evoke positive descriptors like communication, interdependence,

interconnectivity, mutual need, and shared material futures (which have hardly been considered

in relation to Victorian contagion, and have not been considered in relation to gender). It is the

latter grouping that interests me the most. What I have found to be most surprising in developing

these chapters is how consistently these positive possibilities are embedded within the very

fabric of contagion narratives in which women’s so-called leaky bodies are front and center.

Vaccination, Lactation, and Expansive Contagion

This section grounds my theoretical claims about Victorian contagion narratives within a

nineteenth-century context by examining a cultural phenomenon that I term “lactination,” the

interpolation of lactation imagery in the early vaccination movement. This historical episode

testifies to a cultural grasp of three modes of fluidity that have structured my chapter—material

fluidity, categorical fluidity, and expansive contagion—some two hundred years before new

materialists formulated these conceptualizations. Generally speaking, this dissertation represents

a Victorianist project that homes in on a short period between 1844 and 1866. Nevertheless, the

story that this dissertation tells, and the story which put this dissertation into motion, begins

somewhat earlier, at the turn of the nineteenth century, when I first uncovered a peculiar

correlation between gender and contagious disease within England’s literary and visual rhetoric

on vaccination. This episode defamiliarized contagion by (paradoxically) linking it to something

intimately familiar. I regard this contagion narrative as a pivotal episode in exhibiting the merits

of contagion for promoting well-being.

By the late eighteenth century, the ancient disease smallpox had decimated the English

population with tremendous fervour, having wiped out some 400,000 people a year by the end of

the century.

Smallpox had long been endemic to England, but its people had virtually no

I am indebted to Nicolau Barquet and Pere Domingo (1997) for this statistic (636).

measures to combat it until the 1700s when English aristocrat Lady Mary Wortley Montague

introduced the procedure of variolation to Europe. This ancient procedure from China and Africa

involves the administration of active smallpox matter from a mild human case into a healthy

individual’s body.

Though effective, variolation is considerably dangerous; while the procedure

rarely leads to fatalities, it often results in subsequent disease outbreaks.

The invention of vaccinations at the turn of the nineteenth century involved English

physician Edward Jenner deliberately infecting humans with cowpox, a zoonotic virus from

cows’ udders, to protect them from smallpox. What made these two inoculation processes so

counterintuitive and, consequently, so controversial amongst English people was that they both

signify a deliberate act of contagion carried out for the benefit of health. Contagion had

heretofore only been detrimental to health. While variolation first opened the doors for this kind

of “proper contagion,” as C.C. Wharram terms it (2018), vaccination alone “broke the species

barrier,” in the words of Tim Fulford and Debbie Lee (2006, 147). That is, vaccination uniquely

necessitates a state of fluid interspecies relations between humans and cows.

For Jenner’s procedure to take in England, vaccinators needed to persuade English people

that incorporating a cow’s infected biofluids into a healthy human body was not only safe but

beneficial to human health. Historians have located the ways anti-vaccinators frequently used a

bestiality metaphor in their early representations of this human-cow encounter; disparaging the

vaccination process as a monstrous sexual encounter between cow and human.

I want to make

the case that there is a crucial alimentary metaphor at work in the early vaccination narrative that

positions vaccination as analogous to human and animal lactation and cow-lymph to milk, a

correlation that I term lactination. What makes cows and humans biologically analogous is their

shared categorization in the order of Mammalia, a word that famed naturalist Carl Linnaeus

coins in his 1758 publication of Systemae Naturae to refer to a class of animals whose female

members feed their young using lactiferous teats. Like breastfeeding, cowpox inoculation

involves a trans-corporeal transmission of biofluids from one mammalian body to another.

Variolation is an ancient Chinese practice dating as far back as 1000 AD, a fact that Western vaccination histories

have erased. See Alicia Grant’s Globalisation of Variolation (2019).

On the perceived risks of nineteenth-century variolation and vaccination, see Nadja Durbach (2005).

Fulford and Lee (2000, 2006); Nunn (2006); Boddice (2018); Wing Lau (2020).

Inversely, like vaccination, breastfeeding troubles the relationship between self and other by

blurring the lines between the donor and recipient of biofluids. Granted, humans have been

practicing breastfeeding and consuming animal milk since time immemorial. However, early

vaccination proponents latch onto these positive cultural associations of lactation to convey cow

lymph as a health-giving fluid. By chronicling the transmission of cow lymph from the cow’s

udder to the milkmaid’s body to subsequent humans, proponents of vaccination coopted

contagion’s association with female bodies in such a way as to recalibrate the destructive cultural

value assigned with contagion and render it productive to health, even prompting a renegotiation

of bioethical relations between humans and their more-than-human kin.

While scientific accounts credit Edward Jenner with the invention of vaccination, cultural

accounts trace the process to milkmaids and their biofluids. The story about the discovery of

vaccination goes by the name of the “myth of the milkmaid.” The year is 1796 in the rural

southwestern county of Gloucestershire, England. English physician Edward Jenner came across

a young dairymaid, Sarah Nelmes, who was suffering from what the locals called Cow Pox, a

mild skin eruption from handling the infected udders of dairy cows.

The English milkmaid was conventionally a sexualized and sometimes morally

ambiguous figure. Alicia Carroll argues (2003) that her connection to processes of animal

lactation metonymically connect her to processes of human lactation and, by extension, the

sexual connotations of human breasts. These associations linking milkmaids to fallen woman and

milk markets primed Nelmes’s body to be a site of trans-corporeal and even contagious

transmission. Yet, for centuries, English milkmaids were also famous for their clear

complexions, unblemished by the disfiguring scars of smallpox. At thirteen, Jenner is said to

have heard a dairymaid boasting, “I shall never have smallpox for I have had cowpox. I shall

never have an ugly, pockmarked face.”

Supposedly bearing the milkmaid in mind, Jenner puts

the theory to the test. He harvests matter from cowpox lesions on Nelmes’s hands and deposits it

into shallow cuts he makes in the arm of an eight-year-old boy, James Phipps, who had never

previously contracted cowpox or smallpox. The boy becomes sick with cowpox for nine days but

Quoted in Howard Markel (2020, 268). The quote appears in many historical accounts, but I was unable to

determine its origin.

fully recovers. About two months later, Jenner reopens Phipps’ arm, this time depositing matter

from a smallpox lesion as is the practice in variolation. Unlike after variolation, though, Phipps

never develops symptoms, thereby confirming the milkmaid’s theory that cowpox provides

protection against smallpox.

Jenner would distinguish cowpox from smallpox with the addendum vaccinae after the

Latin “vaccinus,” meaning “of or from the cow,”

referring to the biological material collected

from the cow’s udder. The myth of the milkmaid was born, and it continues to feature in

virtually every historical retelling of vaccination since John Baron published his biography of

Jenner in 1838, despite the story’s veracity recently being up for debate.

While we cannot

know for certain why so many people latched on to the milkmaid story, we can certainly

examine the impact this story had in gendering the early vaccination narrative, and by extension,

in shaping a new kind of contagion narrative.

Examining the discourse on vaccination that followed Jenner’s experiment, I found

myself struck by the actual and imaginative connections that took shape between cow’s milk,

human milk, and cowpox fluid. I found that early proponents of vaccination affix their procedure

to the female bodies of cows and milkmaids by aligning vaccination with the physiological

process of lactation. Two years after harvesting Nelmes’s biofluids, Jenner publishes his

landmark text on his procedure, An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolæ Vaccinæ

(1798). The decade following Jenner’s publication are replete with visual and literary pieces

intended to sway English people either in favour of or against vaccination. This visual and

literary rhetoric centers on alimentary metaphors of vaccination as a kind of lactation.

In his Inquiry, Jenner establishes a bizarre link between cowpox inoculation and

processes of animal and human lactation in a way that naturalizes the human internalization of

cow lymph and establishes a familiar—even familial—relationship between human recipients

and bovine donors. Opening by describing England as “this Dairy Country” famous for its milk

(3), Jenner traces the cowpox lymph to the cow’s udders, through which milkmaids contract the

Based on the translation by Abbul K. Abbas, Andrew H. Lichtman, and Shiv Pillai (2021, 1).

See especially Boylston (2018).

disease and pass it onto the other livestock and domestics.

“The animals become indisposed,”

he writes, “and the secretion of milk is much lessened. Inflamed spots now begin to appear on

different parts of the hands of the domestics employed in milking, and sometimes on the wrists,

which quickly run on to suppuration [pus]” (3). Jenner observes a correlation between the

cowpox’s progress and the animal’s lactational output here: the cow’s secretion of milk is “much

lessened.” In its place, we have the "run[ning]" of another biofluid, pus, from the bodies of

infected milkers like Nelmes. The production of cowpox lymph is, therefore, a by-product of the

dairy industry mediated through the bodies of its milkers. Jenner’s goal is to extend this

transmission from cows and milkmaids to the population at large.

At first glance, this cow lymph holds no such value as a biofluid compared to England’s

glory, cow’s milk, yet by 1800, Jenner reveals it to be “an antidote capable of extirpating from

the earth a disease which is every hour devouring its victims” (182). Thus, while the contagion of

epidemic diseases like smallpox inspires dread, even in cases of variolation, Jenner celebrates the

transmission of cowpox and thereby inverts the contagion narrative, all while retaining its central

emphasis on female bodies and their physiological processes. In her very contagion, the

dairymaid’s body holds the key to eradicating an ancient, global scourge. Jenner premises his

new procedure on the assumption of an expansive contagion—a transformation in the meaning

of contagion that emerges from an awareness of the pre-existing state of trans-corporeal relations

between human bodies and between those bodies and the more-than-human world. This pre-

existing state of trans-corporeal relations is couched in lactational bodies and processes.

Allow me to flesh out this correlation further. While Jenner’s depiction of cowpox

centers on the cow’s udders, his representations of the cowpox eruption on the human body bear

a striking resemblance to the human breast. Consider the breast-like appearance of the vaccine

pustule on one William Pead’s arm (below), which Jenner had vaccinated with cowpox lymph.

Jenner notes that “[t]he efflorescent blush around the part punctured in the boy’s arm was so

truly characteristic of that which appears on variolous [cowpox] inoculation that I have given a

representation of it. The drawing was made when the pustule was beginning to die away and the

While Jenner acknowledges that milkers are male and female, he describes the transmission process through

milkmaids. Victorians align the milkmaid's body with human and animal lactation as well as contagion, since they

were often figures in narratives of fallenness; See Carroll (2002).

areola retiring from the centre” (38). Pead’s case is consistent with Jenner’s fourteen other

accounts of cowpox’s progress, in which the punctured area undergoes a process of

“inflammation” and “maturation,” until a central rosy “areola” develops and releases the cow-

lymph matter.

Jenner’s diction is evocative, particularly his use of “areola.” The Oxford English

Dictionary defines “areola” as “a circular spot; a coloured circle such as that around the human

nipple, and that which surrounds the vesicles or

pustules in eruptive diseases.” Swiss anatomist Caspar

Bauhin is the first to use the term areola to describe the

coloured space around a human nipple, areola

papillaris, in 1605. Jenner’s usage of the word in 1798

is quite possibly the first recorded instance of “areola”

being used to describe a pustule. Whether or not Jenner

coins this meaning himself, his pathological usage

carries the earlier connotation of mammae. What is

noteworthy is that Jenner does not describe the

smallpox pustule as being surrounded by an areola,

reserving it only for the progress of cowpox. In

differentiating the cowpox pustule by associating it

with the mammary gland, Jenner affiliates the cowpox

with the breast and the breast with his form of

expansive contagion. Jenner’s supporters

enthusiastically took up his appellation, with William Woodville explicitly comparing the

appearance of the cowpox scab to the “areola papillae” (the space around the human nipple) in

1799 (44). After Inquiry, “areola” becomes the standard medical term for the mature cowpox

pustule.

While we cannot know whether Jenner’s parallel was deliberate, its implications for

the gendering of this new kind of deliberate contagion are substantial.

Jenner (1800, 26); De Carro (1800, 306); Pearson (1802, 91); Bryce (1802, 47-51); Copland (1866, 1457).

Figure 1. An Arm with a Vaccine Pustule.

Coloured etching by Edward Pearce.

Reproduced from the Wellcome Collections

London. Reference: 20120i.

The resemblance between the cowpox pustule and the human breast has not gone

unremarked: Matthew Newsom Kerr (2013) makes a passing reference to the similarity in his

study of nineteenth-century representations of smallpox. Summarizing a typical description of a

cowpox pustule later in the century, Newsom Kerr illustrates how this aestheticization lends

itself to an analogy with the human breast: “its singular mark characteristically rose to a peak

resembling a nipple, after which the apex descended and a blushing, beautiful areola spread

around the pulpy, concave, hardening cicatrix” (138). I build on Newsom Kerr’s observation by

suggesting that Jenner inaugurates this breast metaphor, and that this metaphor extends to milk

production. The word pox originates from “pockes,” meaning “sacs,” referring to the fluid-filled

pustules. If, as Newsom Kerr contends, Jennerians liken the cowpox pustule to a human

“nipple,” then by extension, this nipple’s expression of cowpox lymph resembles a lactational

expression of milk. In other words, the recipient of the cowpox lymph (which, like milk,

originates from the cow’s nipple) fittingly transforms into a living embodiment of the biological

process that unites humans and cows as mammalia, putting species into fluid (literally biofluid)

relation. If the emblem of this disease is the breast, more aptly, the lactating breast, then the

metaphor for its deliberate contagion is the trans-corporeal act of breastfeeding.

These early representations of vaccination provide the grounds for making a case that

Victorians had a working knowledge of trans-corporeality. Looking back to the turn of the

nineteenth century, both proponents and opponents of vaccination register an attunement to the

state of fluid relations between not only individual human bodies but between human and more-

than-human bodies: in this case, humans and cows. Proponents insisted on vaccination’s safety

by pointing to timeless historical precedents in the human-to-human and animal-to-human

biofluid exchanges within lactational processes. In contrast, anti-vaccinators proclaimed that

vaccination signified a dangerous new era of human-animal trans-corporeality where humans

could literally transform into their bovine donors.

To analogize cow lymph with maternal breastfeeding certainly taps into a long English

history that both valorizes the country dairy and endows mother’s milk with quasi-mythic

powers (up to and including the Madonna nursing Christ). Nevertheless, milk’s cultural value is

fluid, much like its state. Jenner’s Inquiry may depict the dairy as an untapped resource for

humanity’s improvement, but his critics paint the dairy in an alternate light. They suggest that

humans who consume this bovine matter are jeopardizing their health and even risk taking on the

characteristics of cattle. The most vehement anti-vaccinators were variolators who feared for

their livelihoods if vaccination took over. Anti-vaccinators thus sought to malign the human-

animal intimacy that vaccination demanded to distinguish it from variolation, which only

required human biofluids. Jenner’s chief opponent, a variolator by the name of Dr. Benjamin

Moseley, worries about the contagion that Jenner’s theory spread on an ideological level,

claiming that an epidemic of “Cowmania” has come to England—a term that indiscriminately

refers to the spread of vaccination and the spread of vaccination ideology.

The human breast

continues to haunt such negative portrayals. However, here it functions as a medium for

cowpox’s dangerous ideological and physiological transmissions, reinscribing conventional

narratives of destructive female contagion in the process.

By far, the most famous image depicting “Cowmania” is James Gillray’s 1802 caricature,

“The Cow-Pock – Or-The Wonderful Effects of the New Inoculation!” (left). While the scene

has produced a wide range of

interpretations linking

vaccination to gendered,

classed, and even species

transgressions,

no scholar

has explored its evocations of

human and animal lactation as

metaphors for this

destabilizing contagion. The

scene depicts citizens lining

up to consume a ladleful of

“Opening Mixture” from a

wooden pail. A woman sits

In 1800, Mosely was inconsistent with his use of the term, using it to refer to both the vaccination process itself

(181) and, subsequently, the public fascination with the procedure, claiming that “Though I am ready to admit that

the Cowpox is not contagious…yet I know the Cow Mania is” (qtd. in Lee and Fulford, 10).

Wing Lau (2020); Nunn (2006); and Lee and Fulford (2000, 2006), respectively.

Figure 2. The Cow-Pock—Or—The Wonderful Effects of the New

Inoculation! James Gillray, 1802. Reproduced from the Wellcome

Collections London. Reference 11755i.

front and center in the tableau, her breast exposed, while Jenner uses a lancet to administer

cowpox lymph into her awaiting arm. While Suzanne Nunn reads the figure as a gentlewoman

(86), all aspects of her dress indicate that she is a milkmaid.

This role is significant given that

the woman, like Nelmes, is positioned as the focal point of the vaccination’s “Wonderful

Effects.” These literal cow pox are a far cry from Jenner’s beautified renderings; however, the

growths do exhibit a likeness to human breasts (consider the woman directly above Nelmes,

whose eye bulges into a rounded, sagging, fleshy growth). Recalling Moseley’s vision, miniature

cows emerge grotesquely out of these growths while the recipients themselves take on a cow-like

appearance. The wooden pail filled to the brim with white “vaccine pock hot from ye cow”

recalls the act of milking, which Jenner references some twenty-four times in Inquiry as the

primary mode by which cowpox travelled from cow to human. The recipients’ internalization of

the pail’s contents thus suggests a perversion of milk consumption. While the chaos of Gillray’s

scene revolves around the human intake of bovine matter, the woman’s prominently exposed

bosom inculcates human lactation into these biofluid economies. After all, the animal’s fluids

were first mediated through the milkmaid’s body, making the biofluid both animal and human in

its origin, and once again engendering the vaccination process through the biofluid of milk.

As several scholars persuasively argue, “Wonderful Effects” conveys how vaccination

forges a new trans-corporeal relation between cows and humans,

but it also demonstrates the

subsequent trans-corporeal relation established amongst human recipients of cow lymph. Since

cowpox in cattle was infrequent, vaccinators required human donors to transmit cowpox matter

to other recipients after they received the vaccination. This necessity extends the metaphor of

lactination from simply lactation alone (the leaking pustule resembles a lactating mamma) to

human and animal milk markets (“milk” from the lactating mammae “feeds” recipients). At the

pustule’s mature stage (full of fluid), the vaccinator would obtain the matter for further

inoculations. Put differently, the vaccinator, in a bizarre imitation of the dairymaid’s duty, would

Collectively, the woman’s dress (a checked blouse, exposed bosom, waist apron, long skirt, and the frilly white

mob cap) represent the milkmaid’s signature attire, consistent with contemporary illustrations like Jean-Marie

Mixelle’s La Laitiere (c. 1790), Isaac Cruikshank’s The Enraged Politician or the Sunday Reformer or a Noble

Belman Crying stinking fish (1799), Charles Turner’s Going out Milking (1800), and the Richard Phillips’s Milk

Below! (1804). Moreover, the setting, London’s Inoculation Hospital at St. Pancras, which served the poor, makes it

unlikely that the woman is a gentlewoman.

See Lee and Fulford (2000, 2006); Nunn (2006); Shuttleton (2007); Boddice (2018); and Wing Lau (2020).

ostensibly “milk” the human pustules and deliver their contents to the subsequent recipients, who

would, in turn, develop cowpox pustules to be “milked” in turn for future use. Then the cycle of

human farming would begin again.

The Cowmania epidemic, as portrayed by Mosely and Gillray, testifies to a nineteenth-

century cognition of material-semiotic entanglement. For Mosely, Cowmania interchangeably

and inextricably represents two modes of contagious transmission: the biomedical event of

vaccination itself and the discursive event of the spread of this “catching” idea through England.

This example of nineteenth-century categorical fluidity anticipates concepts like Barad’s

“material-discursive” in the way that it represents “matter and meaning” not as separate elements

but as “inextricably fused together” (3). Indeed, Jenner intended to spread his ideology through

the process of spreading cowpox all over the world. Throughout his lifelong vaccination

campaign, Jenner sought to vaccinate all English citizens and the world. The material act of

vaccination becomes central to nationalistic and imperialist ideologies that justify England’s

continued global expansion through a medicalized white saviourism. England’s colonial

strongholds, like India, mandated the procedure amongst all colonized citizens. Patriotic

depictions of Jenner show him spreading the “Milk of Human Kindness” throughout all reaches

of the globe,

bringing global citizens together into one enormous, global family joined by

biofluid networks. The material and categorical fluidity within the early vaccination movement

therefore served as the basis for promoting new bioethical relations worldwide. The “matter” of

vaccination, then, was inextricably material and ideological.

This event is critical for understanding mid-century contagion narratives because the

intertwining of contagion and milk exemplified in this phenomenon of lactination is not an

Granted, the use of human lymph donors predated vaccination, with violators having widely employed the

practice, yet Gillray paints cowpox inoculation as uniquely dehumanizing because it necessitates that human bodies

imitate the dairy cow in their production and dissemination of cow lymph. Furthermore, the physical transformation

of the vaccinated extends beyond incorporating animal alterity to that of racial difference, as many of the vaccine

recipients exhibit the facial features (especially prominent lips) used in racist caricatures of Africans. The

dehumanization of this procedure thus replicates modes of biofluid exploitation amongst humans. Like enslaved

American “mammies” forced to breastfeed their white charges, white English people are now systemically exploited

for their life-giving “milk.” Like the syphilitic Indigenous women of Columbus's voyage, English women's bodies

and their biofluids are at the center of these dangerous pathological transmissions.

See Isaac Cruikshank’s 1808 illustration, “Vaccination against Small Pox or Mercenary of Merciless Spreaders of

Death and Devastation Driven out of Society” for one such example.

isolated historical event. As I explore in my chapter on Aurora Leigh, the cultural value of both

human and animal milk only grew more and more unstable in the coming decades. This tension

between milk as a life-giving elixir and potentially pathogenic poison takes on new iterations

with the onslaught of rapid industrialization and biopolitical management. Come mid-century,

urban Victorians would be preoccupied with the ubiquitous practice of adulterating cow’s milk.

During the same years, urban Victorians also become panicked about the effects of “bad”

breastmilk on their infants, a discussion focalizing around the figure of the fallen wet nurse,

whose biofluids scientists believed to be capable of passing on anything from syphilis to colour

blindness to her small charge.

Like the anti-vaccinators at the beginning of the century,

mid-

century decriers of urban milk continue to align these mammalian biofluids with harmful forms

of contagion. However, this bizarre historical episode at the turn of the nineteenth century in

England irreversibly expands the contagion narrative such that it could take on these varied and

often conflicting configurations. The phenomenon of lactination defamiliarizes the intimate

relations between strangers that vaccination necessitates by, paradoxically, familiarizing them.

Lactination recognizes humans as communities joined together by strange new biofluid kinships.

Chapter Descriptions

While my argument is about Victorian contagion narratives broadly, the historical period

that is the focus of this dissertation spans a roughly twenty-year stretch of time, between 1844

and 1866. I focus on this period because it represents a conglomeration of cultural anxieties

pertaining to the corporeal ingestion and transmission of fluids. As the following chapters will

explore, these years were punctuated by shocking events, exposés, and laws about unsafe

drinking water, tainted milk, contaminated clothing, adulterated foods, intentional poisonings,

and venereal disease. The contents of London’s drinking water began to be suspect in the 1830s,

when oxy-hydrogen microscope shows and viral illustrations first revealed that drinking water

sourced from the Thames contains a myriad of microscopic bodies. By 1855, physician John

See Jules Law (2010); Steere-Williams (2014); Otter (2019); Matus 1995.

See Matus (1995); Berry (1996); Klimaszewski (2006).

Much like the contemporary opponents to the mandatory vaccination act of 1856, who argued that mandatory

vaccination infringed upon their personal liberties. The echoes of current anti-vax movements in the era of Covid-19

are uncanny.

Snow published his theory that London citizens were consuming their bodily wastes in drinking

water, which he concluded to be the cause of the cholera outbreaks that decimated England in a

third wave from 1846 to 1860. In 1850, social reformer Charles Kingsley published Cheap

Clothes and Nasty, a diatribe against England’s clothing trade which warned that cheap clothing

has a dear cost beyond the lives of poor seamstresses: one of any number of transmittable

diseases which passed from poor clothing producer to consumer. Not long after, in 1853, chemist

Arthur Hill Hassall released a treatise revealing the widespread practice of adulterating English

food and drinks. This text directly led to the Food Adulteration Act of 1860 prohibiting such

contaminations.

As fears surrounding food adulteration rage on, Victorians also become increasingly

preoccupied with the threat of accidental and deliberate poisonings, which lead to regulatory

measures regarding the sale of arsenic. Sensational cases of lady poisoners who slipped poison

into their husbands’ beverages took center stage in these accounts. Eating and drinking are

recurring motifs in this dissertation. One of my central claims is that contamination anxieties

around consumable goods are inseparable from contagion narratives, given how both threats

involve fluid ingestions. For instance, in 1859, The Lancet published a debate on the dangers of

hiring fallen wet nurses. Chief among these dangers was breastmilk’s capacity to transmit

syphilis to the imbibing infant. These fears were inextricable from fears of the fallen wet nurse

drugging the infant to get it to sleep. Likewise, threats of poisoning took on sexual connotations

during the years of the Contagious Disease Acts of 1862 and 1864, which mobilized the

language of syphilis as “poison” to decree that any woman suspected of being a prostitute could

be forced to submit to invasive medical examinations for venereal disease, and subsequently

imprisoned in lock hospitals if the “poison” is established.

My literary analysis tells the story of how these mid-century contagion narratives play

out on and through the bodies of poor and categorically fallen women. These figures have been

the topic of oppressive contagion narratives but not ones about reclamation. Chapter 1 begins by

considering the discourse surrounding the consumption of polluted Thames water mid-century

before I move into an analysis of the pathological bodily fluids travelling through England’s

prolific sweatshop trade. From there, I build on the unstable cultural associations of lactation lain

out in this chapter to investigate the figure of the fallen breastfeeder, paying particular attention

to the destabilizing power of human milk to redraw lines of communication. I then extend this

cultural preoccupation with dangerous ingestions to consider the rhetorical construction of

syphilis as a “poison” in the 1860s. Weaving in and out of these discourses at every turn are the

ostensibly “leaky” bodies of poor, fallen women, whose physiological processes—lubrication,

menstruation, and lactation—are inextricably bound up with a series of real and imagined fluid

economies (water, blood, and milk) and which pertain to a set of epidemic diseases (cholera and

syphilis, tuberculosis, and smallpox, respectively).

Consistent with the etymological meaning of contagion to “touch together,” the mid-

century Victorian authors that make up this study imaginatively put their readers “in contact”

with all manner of strange beings and strangers, like bodies floating in their drinking water, poor

seamstresses whose bodily fluids stain their garments, lady poisoners who might contaminate

their beverages, and even breastfeeders who figuratively express a lactational-poetry to their

readership. The authors expose these invisible, fluid economies to reveal material points of

contact between strangers. These points of contact are not exclusively sites of dangerous disease

transmission, however; they are also points of connection, mutual identification, and material-

ethical relation.

Focusing on how this relationship happens between character and reader, my analysis

spans several literary genres concerned with the material-discursive flows of their characters’

biofluids. These genres (sentimental poetry, social-problem literature, and sensation fiction)

implicate the readers’ sympathetic capacities. These authors posit that modernity’s new material

ordering ought to usher in a new order of sympathetic relations amongst strangers. They

demonstrate how narratives of contagion are also modes for articulating and producing new sites

of symbolic contact and community. My chapters center on a series of Victorian works, all of

which were immensely popular at the time that they were published, but some of which have

since been forgotten by all but a few Victorianists.

In Chapter 1, “‘Drink of it,/ Then, if you can!’: Contagion, Pathos, and the Drowned

Fallen Woman,” I consider the popular mid-century motif of the fallen woman who drowns

herself in the Thames River as an outflow of concurrent drinking water anxieties about cholera. I

draw a historical parallel between descriptions of female drowning deaths and descriptions of

water pollution to consider how the drowned fallen woman’s body is inseparable from both the

microorganism’s body and the body of water that is the Thames mid-century. Within Victorian

literature and art, the body of the fallen woman who throws herself into the Thames

simultaneously represents a site of sympathetic feeling and contagion, stemming from her dual

role as social and literal refuse. I venture that these narratives are not mutually exclusive but

rather mutually constitutive: sympathetic appeals and narratives about pathologies each revolve

around dramatizations of corporeal proximity and identification with this figure.

Thinking rhetorically, I posit a dual meaning for pathos to explain this phenomenon:

from the Greek meaning “suffering,” páthos is both the rhetorical appeal to emotion and the root

word for pathology, the study of disease. To feel pathos for another person is thus both affective

and physiological experience of feeling their suffering. It amounts to feeling for them but also

with them. In making this argument, I expand Meegan Kennedy’s study of the Victorian oxy-

hydrogen microscope show (2019) to consider how technologies of microscopic visualization

offer a way for audiences to sympathize with nonhuman “others” even if they are responsible for

making people sick. I consider how Thomas Hood’s well-known short poem "Bridge of Sighs"

(1844) depicts the drowned fallen woman as a sympathetic figure who is inseparable from the

material economies of industrial capitalism, even the pathological ones. Like a microscope

projector, Hood’s poem exposes how the everyday reader is materially bound up with the bodies

of drowned fallen women and uses this material enmeshment as the basis for an “open system”

of sympathy.

From an exploration of water and watery women, I turn to an investigation of real and

imaginative trans-corporeal blood flows in Chapter 2, “Blood, Sweat[shops], and Tears: The

Fluid Economies of G.W.M. Reynolds’s The Seamstress.” Mid-nineteenth-century authors

consider the poor needlewoman, like other destitute women, to be a vehicle for infectious

diseases because of the pathogenic conditions of her labour, coupled with her intimate contact

with the garments she produces and distributes. Even authors sympathetic to this figure, such as

Charles Kingsley in Cheap Clothes and Nasty (1850), imagine how the needlewoman’s bodily

fluids infect the garments she produces and pass onto consumers to give them fevers (like

scarlatina and typhus). This rhetorical strategy is intended to dissuade consumers from

purchasing this cheaply-made clothing called “slop.” Works like Kingsley’s represent a popular

subgenre of social-reform literature exposing the conditions of England’s lucrative slop trade.

They frequently employ an analogy of the industry as a form of large-scale cannibalism whereby

consumers would consume the life energy of these emaciated, overworked seamstresses, turning

them into veritable victims of the modern scourge of consumption—in both senses of

tuberculosis and capitalism. It is in this vein that socialist author George William MacArthur

Reynolds serially publishes The Seamstress from 1850 to 1853, a melodrama-cum-social-

problem novel that seeks to expose the invisible [under]currents of bodily fluids at the heart of

the slop industry. These biofluids supply the industry with the life energy that allows it to thrive.

Reynolds’s central preoccupation with blood makes his cannibalistic metaphors characteristically

vampiric, and indeed he designates slop owners as vampires who, like the slop consumers, feed

on these needlewomen’s very lifeblood. Reynolds conveys how seamstresses suffer a gendered

blood loss as an exploited underclass of workers; he adjoins menstrual depletion and tuberculosis

as interlocking forms of gendered bleeding. Befitting the edicts of decorum, Reynolds imagines

these pathological blood economies through the physiognomic (rather than physiological) blood

flows of his central protagonist, poor seamstress Virginia Mordaunt, whose blood expenditures

in blushing operate as an elaborate sign system for her declining health and worsening

consumptive condition. Reynolds enlists these metaphors of vampire capitalism towards a

destructive and pathological model of trans-corporeality in the modern era of consumption.

Nevertheless, he also gestures towards positive models of trans-corporeal relation that also take

the shape of bodily fluid sharing—tears and milk. Reynolds thus recalibrates the alimentary basis

for the public consumption of “slop” into a productive, nourishing ethics of care amongst the

working classes, encapsulated in their mutual sharing of the “milk of human kindness.”

I turn my focus from blood to breastmilk in Chapter 3, “‘Behold the paps we all have

sucked!: The Lactational Ecologies of Aurora Leigh.” This chapter builds on the environmental

concerns that saturate my chapter on drowned fallen women and extends the subsequent

chapter’s emphasis on the social circulations of blood and milk. I consider Elizabeth Barrett

Browning’s complex matrix of embodied metaphors for poetic expression and communication in

her nine-book magnum opus. From the earliest pages of this novel-epic, poet Aurora

contemplates what an embodied-discursive poetics would look like for a female poet when the

dominant metaphor of authorly production is phallo[go]centric, what Pamela K. Gilbert has aptly

termed the “spermatic economy of inspiration” (1997, 27). As a young poet suffering from

“mother-want” (a lack of both literal mother as well as poetic foremothers), Aurora subscribes to

dominant narratives of female leakage and contagion which inform her understanding of female

poetic production as a series of menstrual and abortive expressions which fail to thrive. Aurora’s

worldview changes when her destiny becomes intertwined with that of Marian Erle, a poor

seamstress who is swindled into prostitution, raped, and subsequently births an illegitimate son

in Paris. As I introduce above, the mid-century fallen breastfeeder conveys physiological and

moral contagion mid-century. Aurora’s internalized misogyny thus first leads her to superimpose

narratives of contagion onto Marian and her child. However, she immediately revises this

reading when she witnesses the profoundly intimate physiological communication between the

mother and child embodied in Marian’s act of breastfeeding. The nursing dyad becomes an

emblem of modern poetic communication for Aurora, one that she captures in shockingly

embodied ecological metaphors of breast-like volcanoes spouting lactational “lava-lymph,”

which brings all people together into a collective milk kinship. I argue that Barrett Browning

replaces destructive modes of contagion with metaphors of immunity, where the sharing of

biofluids (the so-called “lava-lymph”) anticipates contemporary notions of immunal properties in

human milk. This chapter therefore builds on the expanded modes of contagion that I examine

above in the historical episode of lactination.

It would be satisfying to conclude this story of mid-century Victorian contagion

narratives with Barrett Browning’s triumphant representation of trans-corporeality in Aurora

Leigh, but that is far from where the story ends. By the 1860s, the explosion in global trade

relations in Victorian England represents another locus for anxieties about fluid exchange. With

Britain’s imperial hold growing more considerable to the extent that “the sun never set on the

British empire,”

Victorians begin to worry about the dangers that international trade networks

pose for the spread of epidemic diseases like syphilis, alongside and even hidden within

desirable commodities. As Priscilla Wald persuasively argues (2008), cultural anxieties about

disease origins led nineteenth-century writers to make scapegoats out of cultural others. In this

chapter, I expand on Wald’s notion of the “outbreak narrative” to consider how Victorian writers

This saying is often attributed to Scottish author John Wilson in an 1829 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine.

characterized these scapegoats as leaky bodies with gendered and racialized delineations.

The

chapter, entitled “Lady Poisoners, Syphilis, and Empire: Poison, Foodways, and ‘Diseaseways’

in Armadale (1864-1866),” explores how a confluence of cultural anxieties about unsafe

ingestions in the early 1860s revolved around a discourse of “poison.”

I argue that Collins models an expansive form of contagion by using the female

poisoner’s body as a mode of corporeal and ideological disruption and dissolution. Collins uses

the lady poisoner’s destructive transmissions as the basis of a two-pronged attack on England’s

legal treatment of women and on Britain’s colonial ambitions. Mid-century, Victorians are

engrossed in the topic of poisonings. As an offshoot of preoccupations with food adulterations,

the prospect of accidental and deliberate poisonings captured the public imagination on account

of the many actual and fictional accounts of women who laced their husbands’ beverages with

arsenic or any number of other poisons at their disposal. This femme fatale figure and her poison

took on not only gendered but overtly sexualized tones since the word “poison” was also widely

used in rhetorical constructions of syphilis. Prominent physicians like William Acton frequently

use the term “poison” to refer to a syphilitic prostitute’s vaginal secretions, and throughout the

years of the Contagious Disease Acts from 1864 to 1866, this usage of the term “poison” features

widely, particularly referencing foreign prostitutes and those frequenting port towns. Thus, I

argue that as well as signifying literal and figurative poison, the lady poisoner gestured towards

the dangers of international trade, given the widespread belief that syphilis originated from

America through Columbus’s sexual contact with Indigenous prostitutes in the West Indies. All

of these concerns come together in Collins’s culturally ambiguous lady poisoner and villain,

Lydia Gwilt, who hails from the African continent and poisons men in her quest to inherit their

fortunes. This chapter explores the novel’s foreign lady poisoners within this topology of deadly

exchanges. In equal measure, however, I also take up new materialist arguments for the positive

mobilizations of toxicity to argue how Lydia’s toxicity holds promise for mobilizing political

action and dissolving oppressive systems. From this final chapter, I end with a short conclusion

investigating the broader implications of my argument about expansive contagion.

To consider how cholera travelled through a similarly international “diseaseway,” see Chris Hamlin (2009).

Chapter 1. “Drink of it,/ Then, if you can!”: Contagion, Pathos, and the Drowned Fallen

Woman

Amongst Victorians, the reigning belief about the Victorian fallen woman was that she

had few other options than to fall further,

sometimes even literally. The conventional fate of

this figure is now such a cultural touchpoint amongst modern readers of Victorian literature as to

make it something of a cliché. For the Victorian woman engaged in premarital sex, the wages of

sin is almost invariably death, usually by disease or suicide.

In the disease category, we have

prostitute Esther in Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), the eponymous character of Ruth (1850), and

Fantine of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862), all of whom are fallen women who succumb to

death after they contract endemic diseases (“cough,” typhus, and tuberculosis, respectively). In

the suicide category, deaths by drowning abound, with fallen women plummeting to a watery

grave. Nancy in Oliver Twist (1839), Martha in David Copperfield (1850), Maggie Tulliver in

The Mill on the Floss (1860), Lydia Gwilt in Armadale (1866), Mirah Lapidoth in Daniel

Deronda (1876), and Eustacia Vye in The Return of the Native (1878) all fantasize about, barely

escape, or succeed in drowning in rivers, specifically. What is the significance of these two

causes of death for our understandings of Victorian fallenness? What is the connection between

fallen women, contagious diseases, and rivers?

In this chapter, I consider the fallen woman’s two fates, epidemic disease or drowning, as

functions of the same cultural preoccupation with the fluid relations between strangers that she

signifies, both literal (corporeal, pathological) and symbolic (ideological, affective). In her

landmark study of Victorian fallen women, Amanda Anderson (1993) investigates this figure as

a focal point for cultural anxieties about the nature of selfhood. She claims that narratives of

fallenness both reify and resist the “atomistic and mechanistic models of agency” promoted by

mid-Victorian philosophies and social theories. The fallen woman, per Anderson, reveals “the

constitutive force of intersubjective practices” which make for “irreducibly social subjectivities”

(19). Drawing on Jürgen Habermas’s model of intersubjectivity as the relational exchange of

Marian Erle of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) is a notable exception, for reasons that I will

consider in my fourth chapter.

A third, less common fate for the literary fallen woman was a social death by exile to the colonies, such as Hetty

Sorrel of George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), whose death sentence is commuted to transportation to Australia.

Notably, she dies there of unspecified causes only six years later.

thoughts and feelings, Anderson takes up the term “intersubjective” to denote abstract, socially

constructed intimacies, characterizing “interpersonal and social relations” as well as “socially

constituted ethical and political ideals” (20).

While the fallen woman certainly evokes these

forms of intersubjectivity, this conceptual aspect of intersubjectivity is only one facet of the

intimacy that she embodies. This intersubjectivity is inseparable from the literal, fluid, inter-

subjective exchange inherent in the illicit sexual act itself, a material intimacy sometimes

manifested in her transmission of venereal disease. One subcategory of fallen woman

encapsulates this fluidity best of all: the drowned fallen woman.

This chapter builds on a constellation of differing yet interlocking discourses on

Victorian fallenness and public sanitation that originates with some of the earliest feminist

literary criticism. Victorianist scholars have established an important correlation between gender

and environment in positing that both the Victorian fallen woman and the polluted Thames

constituted public health hazards to be managed. These interpretations tend to characterize the

fallen woman (like the natural world) as the passive ground for patriarchal destruction and

intervention. Early on, Nina Auerbach (1982) established the fallen woman as a central Victorian

archetype whose gender subversions render her a social outcast, one that Elaine Showalter

(1985) aligns with Ophelia’s feminized madness. Scholars on Victorian suicide focus on the

iconography of female suicides which prominently feature drowning (Anderson 1987, Gates

1988). Judith R. Walkowitz (1992) explores how social measures deprived prostitutes of their

bodily autonomy, while Anderson (1993) considers how literary depictions of fallen women

stripped them of their agency. Pamela K. Gilbert (1997) investigates representations of popular

female authors and their works as contaminative, and Alison Bashford (1998) explores cultural

constructions of women “polluting” medical spaces. Corporeal and environmental pollution

explicitly overlap in some of these readings, with Gilbert later considering how Dickens’s

incontinent characters embody the polluted Thames and its transmission of cholera (2005), and

Gretchen Braun (2016) locating Dickens’s contaminated Thames as a feminized space. These

My usage of this term builds on the original philosophical coinage by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) to denote

thoughts and feelings exchanged between subjects by means of empathy. For an excellent history of the

psychological usage of the word, see Pamela Cooper-White (2014).

later readings point to a dual process whereby fallen women’s bodies are naturalized as sites of

literal and moral contagion and natural settings were conversely feminized as sites of pollution.

Charting the contamination both of women’s bodies and the natural world, these

Victorian accounts of fallenness represent an invaluable basis for understanding Victorian

accounts of contagion. Yet, in foregrounding fallen women’s lack of agency, they can offer us

only a partial reading of the drowned fallen woman. In contrast, new materialist approaches,

which are similarly grounded in these materialist traditions of female corporeality and

ecofeminism, are uniquely equipped to offer more comprehensive and even liberatory readings

of this cultural figure. Within early corporeal feminist accounts, the drowned fallen woman’s

fluidity can only serve misogynistic representations of corruption, contagion, and contamination.

A new material feminist framework expands this fluidity into a potentially productive space for

imagining new bioethical possibilities for relation.

Departing from conventional notions of female contagion which would diminish the

fallen woman to a site of destructiveness, I reconceptualize this figure as a precursor to recent

material feminist accounts that assume a radical interdependence of beings and interrelatedness

of phenomena which demand new bioethical models (Barad 2007, Tuana 2008, Alaimo 2010).

For instance, we might update Anderson’s notion that the fallen woman portrays intersubjectivity

to consider how she portrays trans-corporeality, a concept which can encapsulate both the

semiotic and material aspects of that relation, as well as both their destructive and productive

manifestations. Moreover, to investigate the drowned fallen woman as an emblem of trans-

corporeality affords more capacious definitions of human and nonhuman agency, encompassing

all of the living and nonliving bodies flowing through these narratives.

I begin my discussion in this chapter by exploring the Victorian phenomenon of the

drowned fallen woman as an outgrowth of mid-nineteenth-century discourse on drinking water. I

investigate how portrayals of this human body floating in the Thames replicated images of

microscopic bodies floating in drinking water. Both kinds of watery bodies reveal the extent to

which everyday Victorians recognized an enmeshment with their human and more-than-human

worlds through the daily act of drinking water. I then take up Thomas Hood’s sympathetic poem

“Bridge of Sighs” (1844) as a case study of the drowned fallen woman, who, I argue, exhibits a

tension between the destructive and productive capacities for trans-corporeality. On the one

hand, her body operates as vector for the spread of water-borne pathogens like cholera. On the

other, as an object of public consumption, her body figuratively brings bodies together by

revealing the extent to which they are always already materially enjoined.

This chapter explores an unexpected meeting point between the drowned fallen woman

and the waterborne microorganism. Through this correlation, I establish an unlikely affinity

between pathology and pathos that is rooted in the shared Greek root of these two words, páthos

(πάθος). A general term for “suffering,” páthos denotes “empathy” in rhetoric and “disease” in

medicine. I contend that the proliferation of visual depictions of the drowned fallen woman in

mid-nineteenth-century art parallels a proliferation in microscopic representations of waterborne

organisms, which originated in scientific circles and quickly spread to popular culture. I will

demonstrate how Hood’s enormously popular poem “Bridge of Sighs,” which stages the

discovery of the drowned fallen woman in Thames water, replicates the performance of the mid-

century microscope projector who reveals the hidden drama of microorganisms struggling to

survive and likewise perishing in their own watery grave.

Through an examination of Hood’s poem and its contemporary responses, I will explore

how Hood’s drowned fallen woman exhibits an affective tension between sympathy and horror,

two seemingly incompatible responses which nonetheless both involve a suspension of corporeal

boundaries. According to Meegan Kennedy (2019), the oxy-hydrogen microscope lantern show

primed Victorian spectators for early cinema by prompting them to establish an affective

identification with on-screen “characters,” even if these characters were decidedly “other.”

While Kennedy’s analysis focuses on the personification of microorganisms, I argue that these

visual modes of representing microscopic watery bodies also served to paradoxically humanize

the drowned fallen woman. These representations ask readers and viewers to identify with the

drowned fallen woman’s similarly othered, watery body. But how do we explain the cultural

preoccupation with this figure in the first place?

Soiled Doves: The Drowned Fallen Woman in Life and Art

The figure of the drowned fallen woman reigned in the Victorian imaginary: these so-

called “soiled doves”

seeped into all aspects of Victorian art and life. The visual and the

literary overlap in Victorian reincarnations of Ophelia. Pre-Raphaelites John Everett Millais and

Arthur Hughes breathe new life into her waterlogged form in their renowned paintings (1851,

Figure 3. Ophelia, John Everett Millais. Image courtesy of the Tate Museum, London. Item No. N01506

1852). Hood’s poem alludes to the figure in his epigraph—“drowned!, drowned!”—the very

words that Hamlet’s mother Gertrude proclaims upon discovering Ophelia’s corpse.

The term “soiled dove” conventionally refers to any disreputable woman, sometimes a prostitute. For this usage,

see Lady Charlotte S. M. Bury Campbell, Conduct is Fate; Volume 1 (1822, 150); L.E.L.’s poem fragment “The

Dream” (published in the Atheneum in 1824, 195) Ouida’s Under Two Flags (1867), John Camden Hotten’s The

Slang Dictionary (1873). Since the drowned fallen woman was immersed in water, this made her moral soiling

literal.

The seventeenth-century drowning scene may have resonated with Victorians in

unprecedented ways. Papers were littered with stories of unfortunate wenches “Found Drowned”

on the banks of the Thames, a common headline. Newspapers commonly report women’s bodies

washing up at the side of the river along Waterloo Bridge, which becomes so famous as the

precipice from which women would leap to their death that it becomes known colloquially as the

“Bridge of Sighs.” The figure of the drowned fallen woman was an ongoing talking piece

amongst artists and poets alike. But is this image a case of life imitating art or art imitating life?

Launching this artistic trend in 1844 is Thomas Hood’s “The Bridge of Sighs,” a short

poem depicting men discovering a drowned woman’s body floating in the Thames, with a

companion illustration by Millais portraying the unnamed woman moments before she plunges

to her death. The poem is loosely based on an event that happened earlier that year, when a

destitute seamstress by the name of Mary Furley attempted to drown herself and her baby by

jumping from Waterloo Bridge. Though Mary was rescued, her baby died, prompting a highly

publicized murder trial that captured the public imagination and sympathy.

“Bridge of Sighs”

spawned a plethora of literary and visual depictions of the pathetic archetype, including G.F.

Watts’s Found Drowned (c.1850), Augustus Egg’s Past and Present (1858), and Abraham

Solomon’s Drowned! Drowned! (1860).

How can we account for the cultural currency of such an icon? For despite contemporary

statistics which stated that men were much more likely to commit suicide than women (Radcliffe

465), Victorians were inundated with images of women whose sexual fall is literalized as they

throw themselves from Waterloo Bridge. Though authors and painters dramatize this act as a

desperate bid for ritual purification,

there is a sinister aspect to these tragic drownings. These

artistic renditions amount to a picture of countless female corpses floating in the river water, an

image which provides a counterpart to popular microscopic illustrations revealing how drinking

water contained a plethora of tiny, floating bodies which (at the very least) were an object of

disgust and (at the very worst) were responsible for transmitting epidemics known as “filth

In May of 1844, Charles Dickens published an article expressing outrage for Furley’s conviction in Hood’s

Magazine, the same place Hood also published “Bridge of Sighs.”

See readings of the drowning death by Gates (1988, 135), and Braun (2016).

diseases,” like cholera, so named because they were believed to arise from living in close

proximity to bodily wastes.

As feminist theorists on the body have established, many Western cultural discourses

(such as philosophy, phenomenology, politics, and medicine) have a long history of ascribing

corporeal fluidity to women as a primary marker of sexual difference, in opposition to the

dominant model of the liberal-humanist male subject as a stable, self-contained entity.

For fifty

years, theorists and literary critics have investigated the oppressive iterations of this gendering of

corporeal fluidity as it pertains to misogynistic cultural legacies of shame, impurity, contagion,

and (consequently) as the grounds for legal control over women’s bodies. Cultural studies on

female corporeality written on the period before the nineteenth century tend to focus on

menstruation and shame (Delaney, Lupton, and Toth 1976; Pasteur 1993), while in the Victorian

context, scholarship on leaky bodies centers on literal contagion,

with Judith R. Walkowitz’s

(1982) investigation of the 1860s’ Contagious Disease Acts being the primary example of a

Victorianist arguing that Victorians pathologized female-coded leakage.

This interpretation of women’s leaky bodies as contagious informs the scant criticism on

the Victorian drowned fallen woman. For instance, Braun’s illuminating study of the

feminization of the Thames in Dickens’ novels (2016) draws a parallel between purification and

management of the Thames and women’s sexuality to consider how “female Thames suicides

were largely economic detritus” or ‘moral refuse’,” akin to the other wastes polluting the river

(16). While these cultural anxieties are indisputable, and the subject of Victorian contagion

continues to be a productive site for cultural analysis,

feminist new materialisms have

developed novel conceptualizations of fluidity, permeability, and interaction

that invite a

reconceptualization of such leaky bodies beyond their destructive possibilities to consider their

productive ones—possibilities which have yet to be taken up in the context of this figure.

See the works of de Beauvoir, Audre Lorde, Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva, Grosz, and Shildrick.

See E. and E. Showalter (1970), Sally Shuttleworth (1990), Alison Bashford (1998), Alison Bashford and Claire

Hooker (2001), Pamela K. Gilbert (2005, 2007, 2012), and Allan Conrad Christensen (2005).

Recent investigations of Victorian contagion include Tina Y. Choi (2015), Matthew Newson Kerr (2017), Chung-

jen Chen (2019), and Kari Nixon (2020).

That is not to say that there were no suggestions of positive fluidity before new materialist traditions; consider, for

instance, Hélène Cixous’s notion of ecriture feminine, Elizabeth Grosz’s Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal

Feminism (1994), and Margrit Shildrick’s Leaky Bodies and Boundaries (1997).

For instance, while the drowned fallen woman epitomizes the way that Victorian society

disparaged women’s leaky bodies, Victorians did not exclusively regard women’s fluidity as

destructive. In her landmark study of Victorian suicide, Barbara T. Gates considers how

women’s common suicide method of drowning was largely romanticized “as a confirmation of

the Victorian ideal of the female self that dissolves into others” (127). In other words,

symbolically, the female subject was expected to disintegrate into her relations, both legally (her

rights dissolving in the marriage contract) and affectively (sacrificing herself for her wifely and

motherly duties). While this manifestation of women’s fluidity is overtly oppressive, the notion

that women’s bodies disrupt the dominant models of corporeality is potentially liberatory.

This feminine ideal of permeability was bound up in notions of sympathetic feeling. With

origins in the Romantic era, specifically Adam Smith’s formulation of sympathy as the

imaginative extension of the self,

Victorian sympathy was embodied in the act of shedding

tears—a form of figuratively “dissolving into others.” Sympathizing with others (feeling for

them and weeping for them) were forms of culturally sanctioned gendered fluidity. Victorian

moral codes deemed that women possessed a heightened sense of sympathy; they were credited

as being exemplary moral figures whose elevated compassion made them morally superior to

their male counterparts.

This Victorian construction of women’s heightened sympathy has been

widely analyzed.

Less discussed, however, is the extent to which this affective construction of

female fluidity clashed with notions of women’s materially “leaky bodies.” This contradiction

between the cultural exaltation of women’s affective expansiveness, on the one hand, and the

disparagement of their corporeal expansiveness, on the other, is embodied in the figure of

drowned fallen woman.

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1761), Smith writes that “the spectator must, first of all, endeavor as much as

he can to put himself in the situation of the other, and to bring home to himself every little circumstance of distress

which can possibly occur to the sufferer” (22). Smith’s definition of sympathy is more in line with what we call

empathy today.

This gendered construction helped to justify an economic system which required women to become legally

subsumed into others – their fathers, husbands, and children; yet women also used it to their own advantage in the

arena of female altruism, in which they justified their expansion into the public sphere by citing an expanded

circulation of sympathy from family members to slaves, orphans, prostitutes, and other of society’s most destitute.

For an examination of Victorian women’s roles in alliance and exchange, see Jill Rappoport, Giving Women; for a

look at the naturalization of women in philanthropic campaigns, see Audrey Jaffe’s Scenes of Sympathy.

For Victorian representations of female sympathy and tears, see Dillon (2001); Landridge (2007); Trubey (2005);

MacDonald (2019); and Marck Cantwell (2019).

What I wish to establish here is that the flipside of this feminine ideal of “dissolving into

others” is the drowned woman’s imagined reintegration into others’ bodies in ways that were

much more subversive. As Gates suggests, the drowned woman rehearses a mode of ideal,

romanticized femininity as both subject and object of sympathy, and yet, at the same time, the

drowned fallen woman embodies forms of corporeal breakdown that are far from decent,

namely, her premarital intercourse, and her physiological breakdown in river water to be drunk

by Londoners. To pity such a woman—to shed tears for and with her—requires the reader to put

their own material and affective circulations in line with hers. To drink of the Thames is to drink

of her, and as such, to recognize that fluid interactions with strangers is an unavoidable aspect of

the modern condition in an industrial London.

Cholera’s Leaky Bodies and the Sanitation Movement

In 1817, British soldiers stationed on the banks of the Ganges Delta in Jessore, British-

occupied India, first reported an outbreak of a deadly new disease they called Asiatic cholera.

While cholera had previously referred to any number of ailments causing vomiting, the

symptomology of Asiatic cholera was uniquely horrific in the way that it staged the body’s

leakiness: the victim, sometimes in the course of a couple of hours, would release all of their

bodily fluids through profusive vomiting and diarrhea, until their body became so dehydrated

that the blood congealed in their veins and they succumbed to the disease. While cholera was

endemic to India, the 1817 outbreak was unprecedented in its reach into South Asia, the Middle

East, and Eastern Africa through trade routes, killing millions, including a significant number of

British soldiers. Unsurprisingly, early British descriptions of the spread of the disease spout

Orientalist rationale, which blame the disease on the “primitive” practices of cultural and

religious others. The Ganges was a holy site of pilgrimage amongst Hindus, who ritually bathed

and drank the waters; yet the river was also a site of pollution for dumping bodily wastes.

Once Asiatic cholera arrived in England in a series of outbreaks beginning in 1832 (with

subsequent outbreaks in 1848 and 1849), medical maps revealed cases concentrating around

The first comprehensive report of Asiatic cholera was by Jameson (1820).

Jameson first blames the early outbreaks of Asiatic cholera on the Hindus’ sacred pilgrimages to the Ganges

(1820, xvi-xviii). On how these early portrayals of cholera contributed to anti-Asian racism, see Sagaree Jain (2020).

London’s River Thames.

English authors drew a geographic parallel between the Ganges and

the Thames, and a demographic parallel between the “primitive” Indian populace and the

“uncultured” English poor.

In England, the public sanitation movement that grew out of these

cholera outbreaks focused public attention on the proper management of public and private fluids

to mitigate outbreaks of the disease.

The 1832 cholera epidemics killed 52,000 people in England. The public response to the

initial cholera outbreak resulted in the sanitation movement in England, the first campaign of its

kind in Europe, lasting from the 1830s to the 1890s. The movement was informed by the miasma

theory and led by lawyer Edwin Chadwick, whose major concern was to eliminate sources of

“bad air” (polluted water sources and cesspits of sewage) to prevent fevers. These efforts to

cleanse the city concentrated on the management of London’s urban poor. For instance, in 1838,

Chadwick’s investigations into public health resulted in the Central Poor Law Commissions’

publication on the “physical causes of fever in the Metropolis which might be prevented by

proper sanitary measures,” according to its title. By 1842, Chadwick had published the Report on

the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain,

in which he reiterates

the correlation between poor living standards and instances of disease, proposing that the

government intervene by providing clean water, improving drainage, and authorizing the

removal of local household and street wastes.

The report was innovative in its use of statistics

to highlight the vast discrepancies in life expectancy amongst the different classes.

The movement promoted public governance of the social body and self-governance of the

physiological body.

The Report characterizes the poor as dirty, incontinent bodies, clothed in

I am indebted to Pamela K. Gilbert’s immense research on medical mappings for this claim (2002, 2004).

Gilbert’s body of work demonstrates a recurring interest in Victorian discourses of contagion, specifically cholera,

from the aforementioned contagion of female popular fiction authors (1997) and incontinent characters and the

Thames being shaped by cholera discourse (2004), how a construct of moral and physical continence shaped the

Victorian citizen’s body compared to the pauper’s (2007), biopolitical management of cholera epidemics (2008), to

a study of Victorian Skin (2019) as a permeable interface, a “porous boundary between self and world” which both

externalizes and internalizes contagious substances, among many other things (10).

See Benson (1893).

The following year, Chadwick would follow up with a supplementary report on the topic of internment, where he

attempted to dispel the notion that decomposing bodies could produce disease through their putrid emanations.

The Nuisances Removal and Diseases Prevention Acts of 1848, 1849, and 1855 demonstrate the causal

relationship assumed between human wastes and so-called “filth” diseases.

Working-class bodies fell under government management through related legislations of the New Poor Law, the

Factory Acts, and the Public Health Act.

filthy rags crammed into dirty, crowded, poorly ventilated hovels on filthy streets. These bodies,

who literally waded in their own wastes, required government interventions to effectively

manage the putrid human and animal wastes that surrounded them.

Material filth and moral

filth are intertwined, with Chadwick quoting authors’ reports of poor people’s “indolent and

filthy dispositions” and “filthy habits” (136),

such as urinating and defecating indiscriminately,

drinking, and engaging in premarital sex. Chadwick considers these circumstances to be the

perfect conditions for breeding fallenness. Quoting one Mr. Barnett, Chadwick writes that “girls

and youths destitute of adequate house-room, and freed from parental control, are accustomed to

gross immoralities.” By age 16, Barnett notes, most are prostitutes.

Chadwick later backs up

this claim with statistical evidence with a series of charts showing the rates of illegitimate

children amongst this demographic, numbers testifying to what he calls their “recklessness and

immorality.”

By intertwining physiological and moral “filth,” Chadwick’s reporting demonstrates how

poor women are shown to exhibit a gendered form of leakiness in their “gross immoralities.” In

life, the poor fallen woman therefore functions as a figure of both moral and physical

incontinence, and this corporeal fluidity amounts to moral and physical contagion: filth breeds

filth. The fallen woman’s capacities for moral and pathological contagion in life follow her to her

watery grave. Even in death, it seems, her body exhibits an inappropriate fluidity as a

disintegrating corpse. To fully grasp the Victorians’ working knowledge of material

entanglements, it is necessary to become acquainted with the Thames that these authors and

artists were representing in their work.

The word “filthy” appears 83 times in the report, and “dirty” appears 51 times.

Quoting reports by one Mr. James Gane and Mr. Pearson, respectively. Chadwick tells one story of one family

that “pourtrays the effects of this overcrowding on the morals of the population:” “The family, when they came in,

were observed to be of grossly filthy habits and of disgusting behaviour; I am glad to say, however, that their

general conduct and appearance is very much improved since they have become inmates of the workhouse. I without

scruple express my opinion that their degraded moral state is mainly attributable to the wretched way in which they

have lived and herded together as previously described.”

Barrett quoting one Mr. Sargeant: “What [sic] the condition of the girls?—The girls, when infants of seven years

of age, are turned out into the streets with fruit and all sorts of things; when they arrive at the age of 14, go to stay

stitching; then they sit in doors at home with their mother, and so on, until the age of 15 or 16, when they generally

become prostitutes.”

The 1842 report led to the passing of the Public Health Act in 1848 which established a General Board of Health

to oversee epidemic disease prevention methods.

The Bridge of Sighs and the River’s Demise

Much more than just a backdrop for the woman’s fall, the Thames is a central character

in her drama. Within the context of the ongoing sanitation movement, the drowned fallen woman

represents but one specimen in a whole host of human wastes floating in the Thames, wastes

which were themselves the by-product of massive demographic currents as live human bodies

flowed into the city. While the water was undoubtedly an eyesore, and both miasmists and

contagionists theorized that its foul emissions contributed to outbreaks of filth disease in the

surrounding areas, the average citizen remained unaware that the majority of their drinking water

came from sewage-laden stretches of the river until scandal erupted in 1827 on account of two

prominent exposés.

First, journalist John Wright writes a pamphlet exposing how the intake pipe of the Grand

Junction Water Works Company, which supplied much of London’s water, was directly adjacent

to a sewage outfall. Wright lists in detail the grotesque matter that found its way into the river:

“sweepings from butcher’s shops, dung, guts, and blood, Drown’d puppies, stinking sprats

[herring], all drench’d in mud [feces], Dead cats, and turnip-tops came tumbling down the flood”

(62). Significantly, Wright warns that the consumption of such contaminated water, beyond

being revolting, is known to cause all kinds of fevers and diseases (21-23). That same year, Sir

Francis Burdett submits a petition to the House of Commons claiming that the Chelsea Water

Works Company is “being charged with the contents of the great common sewers,” also listing

the wastes thrown into the river (126). Burdett reasons that as a result of this constant onslaught

of refuse, the water is both “offensive and destructive to health,” and, consequently, “ought no

longer to be taken up by any of the water companies from so foul a source” (126).

Wright and Burdett’s emphasis on the drinking water rather than its fumes as the origin

of illness may appear surprising given the dominance of miasma theory at this time. Yet their

belief in the dangerous properties of liquids illustrates how the coexisting Victorian

epidemiological theories (miasma theory and contagion theory) both center fluidity in their

models of disease transmission, as “fluid” etymologically refers to gas as well as liquid states of

matter.

Even though miasmists privilege the material state of gas over liquid, this theory

nonetheless conveys the same cultural anxiety about fluid transgressions that contagionists share.

Miasmists reasoned that the Thames was dangerous to health because it did not adequately

contain its own boundaries by releasing “bad air” into the atmosphere, in much the same way

that contagionists believed that an individual’s inability to govern their own fluid economies

resulted in disease transmission.

Wright and Burdett were not the first to reveal the leaky bodies floating in the Thames

water, but what they introduce is the disturbing reality that Londoners were taking these various

bodies into their own. Prior to such revelations, Londoners had assumed (or at least hoped) that

the river’s tidal flow was sufficiently powerful to carry the filth out to sea, as Pamela K. Gilbert

(2004) illustrates in her work on medical mappings of cholera. Unsurprisingly, the public was

outraged by the revelations, not least because these companies serviced wealthy parts of London

like Westminster. These scandals exposed Londoners’ consumption of drinking water as a

disturbingly social process, revealing unwitting residents as being in intimate relation with their

neighbours’ bodies as well as with all the other strange organic bodies floating in the river.

We might then consider the mid-century Thames in light of what Nancy Tuana calls

“viscous porosity” (2008). Considering the case of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Tuana defines this

concept as an “interactionist ontology” that allows us to disrupt the artificial nature/culture

binary and instead recognize the “robust porosity between phenomena” (192). For Tuana, this

inherent porosity serves both productive and destructive ends:

The boundaries between our flesh and the flesh of the world we are of and in is porous.

While that porosity is what allows us to flourish—as we breathe in the oxygen we need to

survive and metabolize the nutrients out of which our flesh emerges—this porosity often

does not discriminate against that which can kill us. We cannot survive without water and

food, but their viscous porosity often binds itself to strange and toxic bedfellows. (198)

While Tuana registers how modern scientists recognize natural disasters like Katrina as a

combination of naturally occurring events, anthropogenic climate change, and political

Refer to my introductory chapter for a more detailed explanation of how the miasma and contagionist theories

share the same central focus on fluidity in the causation of epidemic disease.

circumstances (191-192), Victorians did not require modern scientific paradigms such as climate

change to appreciate how natural phenomena represented material-social entanglements. For

mid-century Victorians, the Thames exposed the “robust porosity between phenomena” by

functioning as a site of both material and categorical fluidity. In the first case, since the

Victorians would (pardon my frankness) shit where they ate and drank, discoveries like Wright’s

and Burdett’s established how the Thames’ tidal currents were insufficient to carry human waste

out to sea. Gilbert (2004) argues that with this understanding, Victorians had to come to terms

with the reality that these wastes did not fully disappear elsewhere but were merely transformed

into a series of eternal returns into the bodies that consumed them.

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The outbreaks of cholera

that concentrated around the river’s edge drew attention to the inherent porosity of all human

bodies

101

that is always on display in the process of digesting and excreting water.

102

Victorians

authors like Wright and Burdett, who link the consumption of the river’s raw materials to

infectious disease, recognize that to drink Thames water midcentury is thus a process that

simultaneously enables and threatens human survival.

Secondly, the historic river Thames signified a material-semiotic entanglement for the

Victorians. An important center for human activity since Roman times, the Thames functioned

variously as an international trade route, means of transportation, and source of drinking water.

While we cannot credit the Victorians for making the Thames an important site of human

activity, they certainly understood how the river’s social circulations were connected to its

material circulations in ways that their predecessors did not. The sanitation movement, the first

governmental intervention of its kind, revolutionized the human relationship with the historic

river by placing its currents under human management. Amongst sanitarians like Chadwick, who

believed that human health was bound up with the Thames’ miasmic outputs, the river signified a

naturalcultural phenomenon composed of interlocking natural and social practices. Victorians

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As Pamela K. Gilbert relates, “With the hypothesis of fecal-oral contamination, urban residents were forced to

consider what had, in fact, long been obvious, if not as feared, that the water of the city traveled and retraveled

through individual bodies from mouth to anus, just as the city’s sewage flowed out to sea and back into Londoners’

drinking cups with the tides” (2004, 116).

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In Victorian Skin (2019), Gilbert argues that Victorians believed that the skin was a permeable membrane, as we

still do today.

102

This is a fact that still resonates in the aftermath of natural disasters (consider the cholera outbreak following the

2010 earthquake in Haiti).

recognized that the river’s natural and social flows were intricately bound together in what was

here, quite literally, a feedback loop of biological currents, human and otherwise.

The discourse on Thames water after these initial water scandals testifies to a Victorian

conceptualization of “viscous porosity” in which Victorians understood themselves to be

“strange bedfellows” with the Thames’s creatures. The scandals led to a proliferation in popular

images of the microscopic bodies floating in Thames water. Such print representations depicting

scenes of floating animalcules were modeled on an emerging technology of visual

representation: the oxy-hydrogen microscope lantern show, a cultural craze beginning in 1825

which projected the dramas of waterborne creatures to enraptured live audiences. We see one

such example in William Heath’s 1828 engraving of a fashionable woman dropping her teacup in

horror after seeing the

microscopic bodies floating in

it (right). The inscription

reads: “Monster Soup

commonly called Thames

Water being a correct

representation of that precious

stuff doled out to us!” Heath’s

designation of the water as

“soup” introduces a motif that

recurs well into the 1840s,

whereby Thames drinking

water has taken on the

properties of an entirely new

edible liquid on account of the

creatures inhabiting it. It is now a travesty of food: a soup filled with innumerable “monsters.” At

the same time, the allusion to food underlines the reality that the water which these companies

Figure 4. A woman dropping her porcelain tea-cup in horror upon

discovering the monstrous contents of a magnified drop of Thames

water; revealing the impurity of London drinking water. Coloured

etching by W. Heath, 1828. Wellcome Collection. Attribution-

NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).

provided was the basis of all sorts of food preparations from soup to tea, therefore underlining

the everyday impact of the companies’ mismanagement.

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In the years following these initial water scandals, 1831 and 1832, London would

experience its first massive cholera outbreaks, and although there was no conclusive correlation

linking contaminated drinking water to cholera outbreaks at the time, these images of bodies

floating in water articulate a cultural anxiety that London’s refuse could re-enter the bodies of

Londoners. In 1834, Sydney Smith tells one Lady Grey that “He who drinks a tumbler of London

water has literally in his stomach more animated beings than there are Men, Women and

Children on the face of the Globe” (qtd in Russell 163). Smith’s comparison of the river’s

“beings” to human beings was more than just provocative; it was foreboding. For the coming

decade would see an explosion in real and fictional depictions of women’s corpses floating in the

Thames.

A Tall Drink of Water: The Afterlife of the Drowned Fallen Woman

With a sense of the drowned fallen woman’s predominance and the Thames’ condition

mid-century, we are now equipped to turn to the poem around which, I venture, all of these

discourses orbited: Thomas Hood’s “The Bridge of Sighs” (1844). In his “enormously popular

and influential” poem, which Robert Browning declared to be “alone in its generation” (qtd in

Gates 135), Hood portrays the scene of men discovering “One more Unfortunate” (1)

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woman

who plunges from Waterloo Bridge to meet her end.

At just over a hundred lines, the short poem tells the story of a fallen woman’s downfall

from the perspective of a speaker who discovers her body in the river. Despite the woman’s state

of abjection, both socially and as a corpse, the speaker repeatedly urges his fellow men to make

contact with her: to “take her up” (lines 5, 13, 81), “lift her” (l. 6, 82), “Touch her” (15) “wipe”

her lips (29), “loop up her tresses” (31), “smooth” her limbs (88), “close” her eyes (89), and

“cross her hands” (101). This speaker, one of the men who “Take her up tenderly” (5) from the

river water, urges the other men (and the reader by proxy) not to speculate as to the “stains” of

103

On Wright’s condemnation, see “Dophin” (62).

104

See William Michael Rossetti’s edition of The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood (1871), pp. 1-4. All subsequent

references to this edition are noted parenthetically according to line number.

her past life (18), but rather to consider the family and society which have utterly abandoned her

on account of these misdeeds, leaving her “Houseless by night” (62), with the “black flowing

river” (66) as her only place of refuge in death. The speaker commands the man responsible for

this woman’s fate to think about her as he drinks the same river water in which her corpse was

found floating, evoking reader sympathy by emphasizing the extent to which every Londoner is

implicated in the death of the drowned fallen woman. In so doing, Hood presents the woman’s

body as a site of continued public consumption after death.

From the beginning of the poem, the speaker identifies the river as the fallen woman’s

natural environment. The opening stanza describes the men’s grim discovery of

One more Unfortunate,

Weary of breath,

Rashly importunate,

Gone to her death! (1-4).

The opening is significant in setting up the thematics of the poem for at least two reasons. In the

first place, the victim’s identifying mark, like the others, is her “rashness” (3), evinced by both

her lust and her decision to end her life. She is described again as “Rash and undutiful” in line

23. That she suffers specifically from “rashness” has multivalent meanings. The characterization

recalls the woman’s licentious acts but also hints at one of their potential outcomes: rashness

outwardly manifests on the body as a physical rash of venereal disease, both meanings being in

common parlance.

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“Rash” may appear innocuous, but Hood’s choice of this word places his

poem in dialogue with a discourse of female contagion that sets up both the filthy river and the

venereal prostitute as being dangerous to consume.

Secondly, Hood’s description that this is merely “One more Unfortunate” woman

drowned in the Thames paints a picture of the river as a resting ground for such unfortunates,

evoking news reports of women “Found Drowned” along the river’s edge. Contemporary

London newspapers commonly report this two-word description—1835: a young woman “Found

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According to the Oxford English Dictionary, to be rash is to be “hasty, impetuous; acting or speaking without due

consideration or regard to consequences” (n.5.a), but rash also refers to “a localized or generalized eruption of the

skin as in certain infectious diseases […] consisting of reddish flat or raised lesions, sometimes containing fluid or

pus” (n.4.a). William Acton makes use of both meanings in Venereal Diseases, 57, and 103, respectively.

Drowned”, about 22 years of age; 1837: Mary Shillingworth, aged 16; 1839: an unidentified

woman, between 25 and 35; 1840: two fallen twin sisters, aged 19; 1842: Emma Edmonds, 19;

1848: another unnamed woman, around 30.

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The overwhelming majority of these cases were

thought to involve so-called “fallen” women—women who had either been jilted by a lover or

left by a husband to a life of increasing economic desperation.

Even when fallenness is not established, it is written into the fabric of the narrative. As

Olive Anderson argues, “suicide by drowning was seen as the conventional aftermath of

seduction and betrayal” (198). The papers were so chockful of such ghastly tales that Gates

relates how British epidemiologist and Registrar-General William Farr describes them as a kind

of social plague in 1843, when he pleads for “some plan for discontinuing, by common consent,

the detailed, dramatic tales of murder, suicide, and bloodshed in the newspapers” (qtd in 42). The

following year, Hood would publish his own account of the drowned woman, a tale whose shock

value is tempered by its bid for reader sympathy.

Fictional depictions of the drowned fallen woman evoked a sympathetic response, in

spite of the subject’s moral failings. As David Clarke relates in his study of water and art (2014),

mid-century literature and art about drowned women operate within “the same discursive space”

(51). For Clarke, the literature’s “sentimentalizing tone” is reminiscent of artistic “images of

female suicide” in drowning, which, he argues, “tend to be realistic in style and concerned to

elicit a strong and perhaps not too subtle tug on the viewer’s sympathies” (51). The reader of

this poem or a viewer of this painting may be moved by its subject matter, but they are not

necessarily moved to action. As Carolyn Betensky has persuasively argued (2010), amongst the

bourgeoisie, the practice of reading stories about the suffering poor was often performative,

encouraging complacency as the mere act of “reading becomes something to do about the pain of

the other” (1). To think about sympathy in embodied terms, this performative sympathy may

bring the subject and reader in momentary proximity, but not in touch. It is a feeling for rather

than a feeling with, a distinction we might be tempted to read in terms of the modern distinction

between sympathy and empathy. Yet as Suzanne Keen points out in her study of empathy in the

novel (2007), since the eighteenth century, “what we refer to as empathy was covered under the

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For a survey of 42 of such newspaper articles, see Braun (29).

meaning of sympathy, meaning to feel with another” (42). Thus, while the act of sympathizing

may not be sufficient in itself to enact social change, to “feel with another” nonetheless prompts

a reconceptualization of one’s current relationship with the object of suffering, a new affective

relation.

I will argue that what makes Hood’s poem remarkable is that while newspaper accounts

and artistic depictions of the drowned fallen woman demand reader sympathy by bringing

observers into proximity with the figure, Hood’s portrayal, alongside microscopic images,

suggests a more radical connection by imaginatively putting these bodies in physical contact.

Hood demands that his readers recognize that they continue to consume her body, not just in a

metaphorical, affective, sense—in terms of the public thirst for such narratives that Farr

condemns—but on a material level as well.

I have been making the case that the drowned fallen woman was one of a series of bodies

floating in the Thames, but one important detail in the context of trans-corporeality is that many

of these waste products (from bones, to feces, to urine, to rags) were destined for public

consumption. Since the drowning here is not an isolated incident but rather “one more

unfortunate” case, the speaker normalizes the river as the habitat of such corpses, which emerge

from the waters as one of the many river’s products. Indeed, when the speaker instructs the men

to “take her up tenderly” (5), he evokes a net holding some precious, rare fish. The beautified

rendering of the drowned woman “Fashion’d so slenderly/ Young, and so fair” (7-8) is

suggestive of a mermaid, or at the very least some creature who belongs in the water, rather than

a waterlogged corpse.

The hoisting scene itself raises the question: what were these men doing on the banks of

the Thames in the first place? Perhaps they were fishermen harvesting fish from the waters, but

perhaps they had a grislier occupation. Though the speaker urges his men to treat the body with

care, the reality is that the men are miming the rather indelicate task of river scavenging. The

Thames offered a meager profit for the poor, who combed the river’s shores as mudlarks

scavenging the mud for waste products they could sell to be recycled into new commodities for

the burgeoning middle class—rags to make paper, bones to make gelatin, coals to make bricks,

and dog feces to tan leather, just to name a few. As a site of consumption, then, the river was not

only the major source of drinking water, but offered other kinds of sustenance: for what it carried

in its current was “meat and drink” for the working poor, as waterman Gaffer Hexam tells his

daughter Lizzie in the opening scene of Our Mutual Friend.

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Even grimmer, since the 1832

Anatomy Act legalized the trade in all unclaimed corpses, London’s booming trade in bodies

meant that a pristine corpse like the one Hood represents might “live on” in the symbolic

economies of scientific discourse.

108

Be they fishermen or mudlarks, these industrial-era traders

relied on currents to bring in saleable commodities, currents that were an amalgamation of liquid

and solid flows. In the poem, the resemblance of the men’s grim task to common practices of

river scavenging underscores this female body as a product which continues to flow through

material and affective economies in death.

Hood’s unexpected water sample might remind us of Heath’s sea-creature-laden

“Monster Soup,” but here, the recognition that the drowned fallen woman returns to human

circulations is meant to prompt a feeling of sympathy rather than disgust, a sympathy which

nonetheless evinces a tension between the aestheticization of the corpse and the dangerous

permeability which it represents. Both sets of possibilities—sympathy or disgust, beauty or

monstrosity—hinge upon whether the corpse can be limited to a discursive or a material body, a

literary or literal object, an affective or pathological circulation. In the following section, I want

to suggest that Hood considers the possibility that the figure represents a case of both/and rather

than either/or, that we arrive at an identification with the drowned fallen not in spite of, but

because of the contagion and contamination that she signifies.

Putting Figures in Touch: The Oxy-Hydrogen Microscope Show

Real and imagined public responses to live microscope shows similarly exhibit this

tension between horror and sympathy. These responses reveal how viewers simultaneously

identified with and recoiled from these watery specimens. The enormous size of the projections

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Dickens’ opening scene of Our Mutual Friend (1865) portrays mudlark Gaffer Hexam deriding his daughter

Lizzie for her distaste of the river, “As if it wasn’t meat and drink to you!”, Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (3). For an

excellent account of the Dickens’s engagement with sanitary issues pertaining to the Thames, see Gilbert, “Medical

Mapping,” 78-102. See also Mayhew, London Labor, Volume I (1851): 370-373.

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Choi considers how the Act brought up the prospect of recycling human corpses like Victorians did human

wastes: “Could the dead body be recovered like other material objects that had reached a natural terminus—like rags

and manure—into a similarly productive, controlled social economy?” (106).

made the creatures appear to be the size of humans, a reality which made them both relatable and

monstrous. The human size of the organisms lends itself to anthropocentric representation. One

1833 ad for the “Hydro-Oxygen Microscope” in The Gentleman’s Magazine describes how “The

external integument of a fly’s eye filled with thousands of lenses, appear in the dimensions of a

lady’s veil—that gentleman yclept the flea, swells into six feet…” (628). The microscope’s

visualizing technology thus translates insects into the forms of ladies and gentlemen. One 1835

article in the Morning Post personifies these microscopic actors as characters engaged in a series

of “Throes and struggles” which viewers “witnessed with painful distinctness, and many were

heard to utter involuntary comparisons between the dying pupa and those of a human sufferer in

his last agony” (“Carey’s Oxy-Hydrogen Microscope”). For Kennedy, such reactions “[bridge]

the gap between human viewers and the alien microscopic protagonists by soliciting viewers’

affective identification with the dramas playing out in its brilliant disc of light” (86).

While viewers here marvel at the enlarged size of these creatures, elsewhere, the insect’s

growth spurt also makes these organisms appear newly threatening to human bodies. One Punch

cartoon called “Microscopy for the millions” shows a crowd watching the show of giant, watery

creatures, with one viewer, Janet, too terrified of the content to watch, saying in a Scottish

accent: “What wad come o’ us if thae awfu’-like brutes was to brek oot o’ the watter!!”

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The

humour of the cartoon rests in the speaker’s belief that the enormous projection of the creature is

actually the creature itself. The irony is that the creature is already capable of wreaking harm on

the speaker’s body because she consumes this microorganism every day in her water. While

Kennedy stresses viewers’ “affective identification” with these creatures, this woman is horrified

by the thought of experiencing an unwanted material identification with this watery creature, like

the woman of Health’s illustration who spits out her tea in disgust. But both sympathy and

disgust here similarly attest to a recognition of trans-corporeal contact.

These images of the oxy-hydrogen microscopic show demonstrate how viewers of

Thames water personified and otherwise identified with the characters they witnessed onscreen.

If, as Kennedy claims, the subsequent “water-panics in 1838 and after were increasingly

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Kennedy cites this illustration in her reading (97).

and material identification are unstable. Kennedy notes that in “[v]iewing Thames water,

spectators were shocked not by imaginary monsters but real ones: [for] the operator

demonstrated what swam in their water, and in themselves” (99). In other words, like the

horrified figure in Heath’s illustration, projection audiences were forced to reckon with this alien

body being always already part of themselves.

In the poem, then, the corpse is fluid both because it is a material-semiotic entity and

because it is a materially porous body, much like the river is a materially porous body of water.

For one, the woman’s body and the river water cannot be disarticulated, posing a problem to

readers who seek to distinguish between a sympathetic and material affiliation with her. Given

that Hood’s speaker has so carefully sanitized his descriptions of the corpse, it is all the more

noteworthy in the moments that he fails to do so, when the speaker raises her from the water.

Here, in true gothic fashion, the corpse fails to contain itself from its environment. The water of

“the wave constantly/ Drips from her clothing” in a steady flow (11-12). Its mouth trickles and

its hair spills out, prompting the speaker to command his men to “Wipe those poor lips of

hers/Oozing so clammily” and “Loop up her tresses/Escaped from the comb” (29-32). Tellingly,

as a corpse, the woman is incapable of speaking for herself; she is left only with this oozing

expression. But is this ooze saliva, or river water, or some coagulation of both?

In typical Victorian fashion, unpinned hair functions as a shorthand for loose sexual

morals, but here, it also has the added effect of demonstrating how the woman was “undone.”

The drowning death was feminized in part because it was thought to correspond to women’s

fluid physiological processes according to a uterine economy. As Gates points out, the

“dissolution into a body of water” was a “female-associated type of death” because such women

were considered to have symbolically “drowned in their own tears, or returned to the water of the

womb[…]” (135). Here we see a convergence of women’s affective leakiness (in weeping) and

physiological fluidity (in returning to embryonic fluid). Even the hysteria associated with this

kind of self-destruction evokes its etymological root “hystera”: “uterus.” As Elaine Showalter

argues in her study of the Victorian Ophelia, the archetype is associated “with the irrational,

since water is the organic symbol of women’s fluidity: blood, milk, tears” (11). The gendering of

hysteria provides one way to explain Hood’s female-coded fluidity, but it does not account for

the gendering of the river itself.

Hood’s boundary transgression between human and river anticipates ecofeminist

arguments about the historical conflation of femininity and nature, which, according to Alaimo,

has so often disparaged women and nature as fixed, predetermined, “passive matter” (2), and

specifically, have often deprecated women’s bodies as “bodies of water” (Neimanis 2017). In the

poem, the drowned fallen woman’s fluidity and the river’s ascribed capacities as feminine make

it difficult for the speaker to decipher where one ends and the other begins. The reader is left to

wonder: has the woman been waterlogged by the river water, or has the river water been clogged

by the woman? In any case, with her “drip[ing]…clothing,” “oozing” lips, and flowing “tresses,”

and “muddy” eyes, the woman is not merely in but in some sense now is the river. Yet neither

Hood’s woman nor his Nature is “passive” here; indeed, the corpse’s capacity to continue to flow

even after death greatly distresses the men (who wipe her oozing lips and contain her flowing

locks). Rather, this watery body/body of water more closely resembles a new materialist

conception of agential nature which, according to Alaimo, “acts, interacts, and even intra-acts

within, through, and around human bodies and practices” (2016, 1). The body, even dead, and

the river, even inanimate, nonetheless flow, exhibiting their own kind of agency.

The poem’s form underlines the active matter it portrays.

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Grammatically, the most

dominant pattern in the poem is the sheer number of adverbs ending in “ly,” words which

function to modify actions (“rashly,” “tenderly,” “slenderly,” “constantly,” “instantly,”

“scornfully,” “mournfully,” “humanly,” “womanly,” “clammily,” “sisterly,” “brotherly,”

“fatherly,” “motherly,” “boldly,” “coldly,” “frigidly,” “rigidly,” “decently,” “kindly,” “blindly,”

“dreadfully,” “gloomily,” “contumely,” “humbly,” and “dumbly”). These adverbs can be divided

amongst four distinct agents who are performing the actions: the woman before her death, the

men who discover her, the corpse, and the river. Before her death, the woman goes “rashly” into

the water, “plunge[s]…boldly,” and perishes “gloomily.” The men “take her up tenderly,” and

“instantly;” they don’t touch her “scornfully” but think of her “mournfully;” they smooth her

limbs “decently, [and] kindly,” and fold her hands “humbly.” The corpse, meanwhile, is

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One way to frame this active matter is within new materialist deconstructions of the binary opposition between

subject and object (Bennett’s notion of vibrant matter or Chen’s concept of animacies, but one useful rhetorical

framing of this binary opposition is Kenneth Burke’s distinction between motion (which he aligns with the natural

world) and action (with he assigns to human activity); see Burke (1978).

“fashion’d…slenderly,” the lips “ooze…clammily,” the limbs stiffen “rigidly” and “frigidly,” the

eyes stare “blindly” and “dreadfully” and the hands pray “dumbly.” The river water meanwhile

drips “constantly” and runs “coldly.” What is noteworthy in these instances is the degree to

which the speaker uses adverbs to convey the actions of nonhuman beings as frequently as they

convey those of living humans. The corpse and the river are thus as much actors in this poem as

its animate creatures. Indeed, the woman’s lack of agency in life gives way to a different kind of

agency in death: the river reanimates her. The plummeting woman and the water, the corpse and

the men, all come together in what Tuana would call a “dance of agency.” To imagine the dead

woman’s body in Hood’s poem exhibiting an agential force in some sense is one way of

reclaiming her agency in a story that otherwise shows how she is stripped of it. If we allow that

Hood’s speaker recognizes the vibrancy of dead matter and the natural world, then that would

put his depiction in line with new-material feminist accounts reclaiming the passivity and fixity

historically ascribed to women and nature.

In suggesting this liberatory possibility in Hood’s representations of matter, I do not

mean to imply that Hood refutes the conventional narrative of female contagion; interestingly, he

actually subscribes to it. Hood’s speaker fantasizes that the drowned fallen woman has been

transformed in this process; the river has purified the soul of this once-ruined woman of

corruption: her “stains” are gone so that “All that remains of her/Now is pure womanly” (19-20);

she is “rash” no longer as “Death has left on her/Only the beautiful” (24-26). In conventional

symbolic terms, drowning in the river offers a means of moral purification, as a kind of

baptismal rebirth in death

This purification does not seem likely at a time when the River Thames is the notorious

hotbed of sickness and plague. In other words, we might ask: what were the real and imagined

effects of a corrupt woman slipping into a corrupted source of water? Charles Dickens suggests

an alternative fantasy to this ritual purification in prostitute Martha’s oft-quoted speech at the

river’s edge in David Copperfield (1850):

“Oh, the river!... I know it’s like me!” She exclaimed. “I know that it’s the natural

company of such as I am! It comes from country places, where there was once no harm in

it—and it creeps through the dismal streets, defiled and miserable—and it goes away, like

my life, to a great sea, that is always troubled—and I feel that I must go with it!... It’s the

only thing that I am fit for, or that’s fit for me. Oh, the dreadful river!” (69)

The historically-situated Thames that Dickens describes here is not some pristine river in which

to wash away one’s sins. Rather, what Martha craves is a means of dissolving her own body in a

disease-infested fluid with which she already feels an affinity.

While Hood’s speaker entertains the possibility of purification, it is difficult to imagine

how the Thames in its current state in 1844 could cleanse this woman of anything. Though plans

to embank the river were in the works by the 1840s, the Chelsea Embankment was only

underway from 1854 on, and it would not be until 1862 that civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette

would publish his report planning to embank its northern side, thereby diverting the sewage

eastward away from the metropolis. In the meantime, Edwin Chadwick’s efforts to treat raw

sewage at this time primarily consisted of dousing lime chloride to mask the smell which he

believed to be the source of disease. Despite these efforts, waterborne diseases like cholera and

typhoid continued to reign.

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So the question persists: how does Hood reconcile a sympathetic

response in his readers with one of disgust?

As I have suggested, the drowned fallen woman represents one of the many watery

bodies that authors and artists were depicting in their works on the Thames, whether it be

Wright’s catalogue of dead animals (dogs, cats, and sprats) or Heath’s microscopic animalcules.

Hood’s speaker’s act of “tak[ing] [the corpse] up tenderly” mimes the oxy-hydrogen

microscopist’s act of collecting of polluted Thames water, and the speaker’s bid that his workers

regard her “mournfully” replicates the projector’s bids for viewer sympathy. If Hood is aligning

the drowned fallen woman with nonhuman organisms (animacules) and substances (water, mud),

then he may be subscribing to a rhetorical strategy of dehumanization. According to Emily

Winderman and Jamie Landau in their study of rehumanization and pathos in medical rhetoric

(2020), dehumanization happens when “one group denies the humanity of another group, often

through social practices of emotional distancing” (62).

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Per Winderman and Landau, rhetorical

111

Cholera epidemics beginning in 1832 decimated the population again with massive outbreaks in 1848 and 1849.

For an in-depth account of the historical event, see Halliday (2001).

112

Winderman and Landau’s chapter in The Rhetoric of Health and Medicine As/Is: Approaches for the Field (2020)

examines the case of Henrietta Lacks, a poor African-American woman with cervical cancer whose cancer cells

were harvested and reproduced by scientific researchers to produce cell lines.

strategies for dehumanization prominently take on two figurations: the first is “likening of group

members to nonhumans, such as animals, machines, or other nonliving objects,” and secondly,

“the denial of ‘uniquely human’ attributes (e.g., capacities for language, morality, pain, and

emotional responsiveness)” (62). If we were to apply this strategy to “Bridge of Sighs,” then we

might assume that the speaker’s collapsing of human and nonhuman entities makes the drowned

fallen woman less relatable, so that he may establish an “emotional distance” between these

women and the speaker, and by extension the woman and the reader. However, the speaker’s

demand to “take her up” with “loving, not loathing” (13-14) rejects both emotional and physical

distancing in favour of identification with this creature.

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He thus has the opposite object in

mind: to bring the reader closer to the woman, to make her more human and relatable. How

might likening the drowned fallen woman to nonhumans paradoxically serve to humanize her?

I turn once again to the oxy-hydrogen microscope show for one possibility. Responses to

these images evince an unexpected relationship between biology and affect, such that Victorian

viewers could mourn the death of so insignificant a life as a water-flea. Kennedy’s study

registers how technologies used to visualize creatures in Thames water prompted narratives for

identifying with even the most unlikely and “othered” of those creatures, a kind of “narrative

absorption” (105) in and “communal identification” (107) with the plight of a microorganism,

even if that waterborne microorganism was responsible for making its drinker sick. This

relationship between biology and affect then extends to a relationship between pathology and

pathos.

I find the connection that Kennedy establishes between microscopic projections and

sympathetic characters to be entirely persuasive, and in the following section, I apply her and my

own archival findings to metonymically link these sympathetic microorganisms to the bodies of

drowned fallen women. I will argue that Victorians’ affective identification with bodies floating

in the Thames is also borne out of a recognition of their material identification with both kinds of

floating bodies, be they microscopic or human. I make this argument on the grounds that “Bridge

of Sighs,” in combination with my other primary texts on microscopic images, do more than just

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His other demands to treat her “tenderly,” “with care,” “decently,” and “kindly” all reinforce emotional

proximity.

suggest that viewers position themselves in relation to these creatures (in proximity), but also

that viewers recognize that these creatures are already constituent of themselves. Trans-

corporeality therefore happens on two levels within these portrayals: first, in the sense of

sympathetic connection, and second, in the sense of material enmeshment. The remainder of this

chapter will explore how Hood’s poem capitalizes on his readers’ readiness to engage in this

kind of twofold identification with watery bodies. All of these water samples acknowledge

material enmeshment; Hood’s poem poses ethical implications for what to do about it. Heath’s

illustration demands we spit out these watery bodies, but Hood’s poem suggests we take them in,

whatever the risks.

“Drink of it, then, if you can!”: Material and Affective Flows

Despite Hood’s impassioned portrayal, we can nonetheless detect the speaker’s anxiety

about the drowned woman’s capacity to break down and re-enter human circulations. For

instance, Hood’s speaker undermines the river’s purifying potential by alluding to its corruption.

When he describes the woman’s open eyes “Dreadfully staring/ Thro’ muddy impurity” as she

did in her final moments (90-91), Hood literalizes the woman’s symbolically clouded vision as

her tears intermix with the river’s muddy waters. Like her dripping clothes, oozing lips, and

spilling hair, the woman’s eyes have now become one with the Thames’s own “impurities.”

Though in its modern usage, “mud” connotes rather innocuous dirt and soil, during the Victorian

era, both mud and soil typically designated fecal matter. This is not some pastoral river of a

bygone era, then: it is explicitly aligned with human excrement and thus becomes a fitting

travesty of home for this “social refuse.”

Moreover, Hood’s speaker imagines that she sees an eerily distorted reflection of the

house lights “So far in the river” (57), and finds solace in the “dark arch” of the bridge (65) and

“the black flowing river” (66). Like Martha, this “stained” woman sees an affinity with the river

water once society has made her “Houseless by night” (63), perhaps even a lady of the night. The

associations of the river with darkness and night invoke the “night air” and “night soil”

associated with human feces, and which both miasmists and contagionists aligned with the

spread of cholera—for the former, through toxic inhalations, for the latter, through the fecal-oral

route.

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The viscous porosity of the drowned woman’s body underscores the porosity of all

bodies, whose evacuations and internalizations bring life and death.

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Whether theorists blamed cholera on mud or the bad air that arose from it, both the

“black flowing river” and the drowned woman now constitute part of its flow—a flow that was

deemed to be the hotbed of illness. Whether or not this woman was ultimately responsible for her

“stains” (27), the result is the same, and the possibility of her soul’s purification (“All that

remains of her/Now is pure womanly,” 19-20) is ultimately distinct from the reality of her body

as a site of pollution, as she reenters the bodies of Londoners (“lave in it, drink of it”). As social

refuse, she becomes the site of sympathetic feeling, but as literal refuse, she becomes the site of

potential infection. The woman’s exile in life is therefore short-lived on account of her body’s

capacity to re-enter human circulations after death.

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This brings us to the poem’s central irony: like Martha, who believes the river water

“goes away, like my life, to a great sea” (69), this woman throws herself into the river on the

grounds that she will be “hurl’d–/Anywhere, anywhere/ Out of the world!” (69-71). And yet, the

men’s discovery of her corpse testifies to the extent that her existence is still very much a part of

this world. On a somatic level, the woman’s corpse may enter all manner of economic, medical,

artistic, and affective circulations. On a microscopic level, the woman can never go “out of the

world” because her body will inevitably dissolve into organic components to be further

consumed, endlessly, much like Kennedy’s microscopic creatures. In any case, the woman

continues to exert a vital force upon humans as a corpse, as her body affects them in the senses of

both vibrant materialism (as an object composed of material properties) and affect theory (as an

object of sympathy).

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In 1855, Arthur Hill Hassall, working with John Snow, took water samples from the water supply and concluded

that the water “reveal[ed] to the microscope not only swarms of infusorial life, but particles of undigested food

referable to the discharge from human bowels.” John Snow would only begin publishing his theory On the Mode of

Communication of Cholera in 1849, but his work on English cholera outbreaks dates back to the 1830s when he

worked with surgeon Thomas Michael Greenhow.

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On her work on microbiomes, Jessica Houf (2020) considers how the cultural constructions of feces needed to

change drastically from a disgusting to a medical material with the emergence of fecal treatments used to treat C-

difficile.

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Many Victorian novels explore the idea of dead humans reentering human circulations with the trope of the

endless series of wills.

This representation of the drowned fallen woman’s infinite returns is consistent with

Alaimo’s conviction that “‘the environment’ is not located somewhere out there, but is always

the very substance of ourselves” (2010, 4). Not only are the Thames and the corpse inextricably

entangled here, but the reader becomes constituent of these flows. The speaker emphasizes this

reality in the thirteenth stanza, which imagines the woman “plung[ing]” into the “rough river”

(72-74). Crucially, more than merely asking readers to visualize the scene, the speaker demands

they immerse themselves in the idea of her death, just as she immerses herself in the river:

In she plunged boldly—

No matter how coldly

The rough river ran—

Over the brink of it,

Picture it—think of it,

Dissolute Man!

Lave in it, drink of it,

Then, if you can! (72-79).

The speaker’s words initially convey a horrifying revelation. The “Dissolute man” here,

presumably the male seducer, bathes in and drinks the very water of which this fallen woman

now constitutes a part, whether he is aware of it or not. Presumably, his awareness should make

him realize how he is imbricated in the suffering of such women. But it is not just one person at

fault: a “whole city full” of homes lacking “Christian charity” refused to help her (44-47). The

speaker therefore urges his own contemporary readers to recognize how they, too, are culpable,

however indirectly, for this woman’s demise in the river. By extension, the speaker challenges

all of them to engage in these daily acts of bathing in and drinking from the Thames water

without thinking of the poor women whose bodies populate it. If drinking in the river water is

commensurate with drinking in the woman, then consuming the water amounts to cannibalism,

the most violent form of trans-corporeality. The speaker suggests that we can no longer consume

such women in life, use them, discard them, and expect them not to haunt us in death.

At least one of Hood’s contemporary reviewers found this line particularly disturbing.

One contemporary reviewer of “Hood’s Poems” from Hood’s Magazine encapsulates the tension

between the literality and the metaphoricity of the speaker’s emphatic plea:

When Hood in his ‘Bridge of Sighs’—that ‘perfect Chrysolite’ [gem] of benevolent

intercession for the helpless and outcast of society—after describing the poor victim’s

last shriek, and plunge where ‘The rough river ran’ goes on indignantly to exclaim

‘Picture it—think of it/Dissolute man! Lave in it, drink of it/Then, if you can!’ he

unquestionably, in the last line but one, approaches the absurd; but let us ask this spier-

out of defects rather of beauties, how many like approaches to the incorrect, either in

sentiment or construction, can he detect. Few—very few—indeed. Shakespere [sic] has

his faults, and some of them, too, grave ones and conspicuous—his puns—his

anachronisms—his grossnesses—his false-quantitied and limping lines…So with poor

Hood, his faults are the merest exceptions to his rule of lofty thinking and melodious

utterance—some of them, in fact being the very proofs of his inspiration, which, in its

exaltation, and, as it were, frenzy, could not—or would not—stop to polish, adjust, or

correct some inapposite word, or exaggerated idea. (187-188)

“Indignant” is the word that this writer uses to describe Hood’s speaker here, capturing both the

speaker’s angry tone and his treatment of the female figure. For this writer, the speaker’s demand

for the reader to “Lave in it” and “drink of it”—the “it” here referring to ambiguously to the

scene of the woman’s grave and the river water itself— is a line that “approaches the absurd”

(187). The criticism is that this line is an inappropriately timed pun that plays on the doubleness

of the “dissolute” man drinking in the pathetic scene and drinking in the water. “Dissolute” as a

descriptor here is a reference to the man’s sexual licentiousness, in other words, he lacks sexual

restraint; but the word “dissolute” in particular, which has its origins in the latin verb dissolvere,

means “to dissolve,” establishing a link between the man’s moral incontinence and his

physiological incontinence. This reviewer may perceive Hood’s line as evidence of a tension

between literality (to physically consume the woman) and metaphoricity (to sympathetically

consume the woman), but the reviewer’s discomfort at the speaker’s demand that the man “Lave

in it, [and] drink of it” –“it” interchangeably referring to the water and the watery woman’s

story—both attests to a recognition that the man’s body and the fallen woman’s are leaky bodies.

In death, all bodies become “dissolute” regardless of their moral status.

For as horrifying as this image may be, the line also registers the speaker’s hope for

alternative ethical futures based on a recognition of our profound material interconnectedness:

that is, we are all leaky bodies. By urging his readers to “lave in” and “drink of” this corpse-

infested water, Hood calls for something more radical than just “Christian charity.” The speaker

goes beyond rehearsing the Golden Rule that we ought to treat others how we wish to be treated

because in consuming this water, the fallen woman’s body comes to constitute the drinker’s

body, and by extension, the corpse re-enters the “whole city full” of “homes” that rejected her in

life. The speaker therefore hints at a radical notion: the way that we treat others is also the way

we treat ourselves, for we are one material assemblage, for better or for worse. In the words of

Rosi Braidotti, writing on the deep imbrication of all earthly forms, “we are all in this together”

(2006, 16).

The “worse” of this profound interconnectedness is, evidently, the threat of contagion

which brings together human destinies in the modern industrial world. Aside from forcing the

reader to recognize that he is at fault, the speaker’s dare to drink the water “if you can!” evokes

the water’s “muddy” condition being not only unpalatable but potentially pathogenic. Even if the

river water appears clean to the naked eye, it nonetheless contains a horrifying secret, and the

reader might imagine the “dissolute man,” like the woman of Heath’s illustration, looking at his

cup of water with a newfound horror of what it contains.

Trans-corporeal exchanges with strangers were an inevitable reality of the modern

condition in industrial cities, and with these exchanges, the ever-present threat of infectious

disease. This modern condition represents the strange new intimacies of Victorian life, what

Choi calls “anonymous connections” with strangers, from “the neighbor’s excrement, [to] the

exhalations of the sick, [to] the microbial agent,” connections which, for Choi, meant that

“Victorians found themselves exploring the slippery divisions between self and other” (2). But

these anonymous connections unsettle more than just individual, corporeal boundaries: after all,

such fluid circulations carry on their currents a hodgepodge of naturalcultural phenomena:

human wastes (corpses, feces), animal matter (carcasses, microorganisms), ecological elements

(water, air), and affective circulations (disgust and sympathy)—currents which, in their viscous

porosity, trouble a whole series of ontological distinctions between human and non-human,

human and environment, matter and social construct, material and affective, in addition to Choi’s

basic boundary transgression of “self and other.” A river, in other words, runs through us.

Crucially, Hood relies on the fallen woman’s leaky body as the emblem of this material

and categorical rupturing. Given how central ecological campaigns were to the Victorian

sanitation movement, with the cleansing of the Thames being one of the leading public measures

to prevent the spread of cholera, it would be all too easy to equate Hood’s drowned fallen woman

to the river itself, to make the case that the speaker’s desire to sanitize this corpse is contiguous

with sanitary efforts to clean up that other leaky body: the Thames. There are certainly grounds

for such analysis, with recent critics like Braun aligning Dickens’ female characters with the

impure river. A standard “female contagion” interpretation of the poem would go something like

this: the speaker’s desire to sanitize this female corpse parallels concurrent sanitarian efforts to

clean up the Thames, just as it anticipates the Contagious Disease Acts of the following decades,

which similarly sought to sanitize prostitutes’ bodily fluids of venereal diseases. This reading

would be supported by Hood’s final stanza, where the speaker acknowledges that we must

“[own] her weakness,/Her evil behavior./And [leave], with meakness,/Her sins to her Saviour!”

(103-106). In other words: let humans acknowledge the woman’s fleshly sins, but let God alone

judge the sins of her eternal soul; let humans restore all on earth, and let God restore all in

heaven. If so, then the fallen woman’s rehabilitation (in life) is an act of public sanitation, by

preventing her drowning/pollution. Removing her from the river is an act of respect, but on a

practical level, it is also an act of cleaning.

There is a reason that this kind of feminist interpretation stubbornly persists: although it

is now out of vogue to talk about leaky bodies, Victorian cultural productions are full of them.

Figures like Hood’s drowned fallen woman reveal a great deal about how Victorian contagion

was feminized. To that end, the mid-century cultural obsession with drowned fallen women

attests to the emergence of a belief in the fecal-oral route of cholera transmission, just as it

foreshadows Louis Pasteur’s discovery of germs as the agents of contagious disease.

This is all true, but it paints an incomplete picture. Figures like Hood’s drowned fallen

woman tell us a lot about the Victorian cultural attitudes towards women and infectious disease,

but they also tell us, in equal measure, a great deal about the cultural capacities of leaky bodies

beyond corruption, contagion, and disease.

Which brings us to the “better” of viscous porosity. Hood’s poem suggests that trans-

corporeality in Victorian life is something that can never eradicated, nor should we wish it to be.

For the opposite of trans-corporeality is not health, but the abject isolation and alienation from

humanity which drives the woman to her death in the first place. Connection with other humans

may lead to fatality for victims of cholera, but for this fallen woman, it was a lack of contact

which led to her death. Midway through the poem, the speaker registers the woman’s utter

loneliness in a slew of questions about her family: “Who was her father?/Who was her mother?/

Had she a sister?/ Had she a brother?” (36-39). Hood tells us her kin severed all emotional and

material ties at the time of her moral digression:

Sisterly, brotherly,

Fatherly, motherly

Feelings had changed:

Love, by harsh evidence,

Thrown from its eminence;

Even God’s providence

Seeming estranged. (49-55)

Having fallen (thus far only socially), the woman imagines herself to be an isolated cell,

quarantined from all human life and “seeming [to be] estranged” even from God. The operative

word here is “seeming,” for she may have lost sight of her material and emotional

interconnectedness with humanity, but the very existence of the poem denies this, testifying to

her continued thing-power as a material and affective actant beyond the grave. The speaker’s

plea to drink the water suggests that where material connection is established, the

acknowledgement of ethical interconnection ought to follow. In this way, Hood registers our

profound material entanglement not as a lamentable reality of the modern condition, but an

ethical framework with which to reconfigure the way we move about the world, and the way we

perceive our connection with all manner of beings. The poem’s greatest tragedy may be that the

fallen woman who drowns herself is not “hurl’d […] out of the world” as she wishes, but caught

up in a current of literal and symbolic currents. Yet inasmuch as this dramatic ironic is tragic, it

is also redemptive. For Hood maintains that it is antithetical to human nature—in other words,

“cold inhumanity” (97)—to deny the reality of mutual need and care, a notion that is at the center

of feminist bioethical models such as Shildrick’s and Neimanis’s, which regard such leaky

bodies as models for new posthumanist modes of relation.

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Ultimately, what is remarkable about Hood’s portrayal is that his speaker is not asking

his readers to react in disgust, but in sympathy. He is not asking his reader to spit this woman

out, but to take her in. To sympathize with such a figure, to shed tears for and with her, is to

acknowledge a truly destabilizing reality that all bodies are leaky bodies, not least, the “Dissolute

man” who puts this tragedy into motion. It is a lesson that we are still learning in the midst of our

own pandemic: the contagion narrative betrays a great deal about our cultural biases, but it also

has the capacity to demonstrate our profound interconnectedness, revealing boundaries between

bodies, between nations, as always already arbitrary constructions. In an age when social

distancing necessitates that we exist “together yet apart,” that we are symbolically “all in this

together,” the very material interconnectedness which spreads the virus also represents an

opportunity for imagining new futures of relation. Even now, at a time when one the most

reliable predictors of community infection for COVID in a given demographic is to measure its

viral load of RNA shed through fecal matter into its wastewater,

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we have yet another iteration

of the story of watery bodies. This viral load may be the evidence of epidemic disease, but it

nonetheless reminds us as humans that our relation to one another and our imbrication in our

environments run deep.

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Shildrick’s Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and [Bio]Ethics (1997) explores how

women have historically been denied moral agency and subjectivity based on a notion of their inherent leakiness,

but Shildrick uses biomedical examples to formulate “ leakiness as the very ground for a postmodern feminist ethic”

(12). Shildrick currently examines the leakiness of somatechnics, because prosthetics force us to ask, “Why Should

Our Bodies End at the Skin?” (2015, 2022). Neimanis formulates a “posthuman feminist phenomenology” (2017) by

developing the concept of “watery embodiment [which] presents a challenge to three related humanist

understandings of corporeality: discrete individualism, anthropocentrism, and phallogocentrism” (3).

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For studies on wastewater-based epidemiology as a predictor of community infection, see Karthikeyan, Smruthi

et al (2021); Mandal, Pubali et al. (2020) and Polo, David, et al. (2020).

Chapter 2. Blood, Sweat[shops], and Tears: The Biofluid Economies of G.W.M. Reynolds’s

The Seamstress (1850-1853)

“[T]he menstrual period recalled and resembled the pulmonary haemorrhage which was considered the defining

image of phthisis [pulmonary tuberculosis]…. Female sexuality and consumption, then, were both symbolically

defined by an outpouring of blood.”

Katherine Byrne, Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination (2011, 32)

“Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more

labour it sucks.” Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One (1867, 257)

I juxtapose the above quotations so as to dramatize the material-symbolic flows that this

chapter examines: the outpouring of women’s blood in gendered and pathologized forms of

expenditure (menstruating and hemorrhaging) and the way it is subsequently “suck[ed]” into

capitalism’s exploitative mechanisms. Victorian literature on the suffering seamstress

interweaves these processes by imaginatively channeling the seamstress’s blood circulations into

economic circulations, metaphorically siphoning her bodily economies into financial ones. This

chapter complicates these straightforwardly oppressive representations to ask whether trans-

corporeal biofluid economies like this one are always necessarily exploitative under capitalism.

My previous chapter explored the symbolic and material medium of water as a fluid that brings

together live organisms and ostensibly nonliving matter into vibrant biological and affective

assemblages. I investigated how Thomas Hood takes up the drowned fallen woman as a site for

both negotiating the destructive aspects of fluidity (such as water-borne diseases like cholera)

and for harnessing the reclamational possibilities for fluidity, as far as reimagining bioethical

relations between bodies.

In this chapter, I extend this focus from water’s imagined “social life” to blood’s

economic circulations, shifting the gendered object of study from the drowned fallen woman to

another site of moral and physiological contagion: the poor seamstress. As in my previous

chapter, I employ a new-material feminist lens to consider the gendered facets of fluidity’s dual

destructive/productive capacity. Here, I take my lead from a number of new materialists who

recognize how earlier models of materialism have informed their approach.

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Specifically, I take

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Scholars who argue that new materialisms have their basis in Marx’s dialectical and historical materialisms

include Claire Colebrook (2008, 61); Jane Bennett (2010, 47); Sonia Kruks (2010, 260); Pheng Cheah (2010, 70);

up the argument that Marx and Engel’s formulation of dialectical materialism anticipates new

materialism’s premise of material fluidity, a premise which undergirds the school’s political

commitments in addressing capitalism’s exploitative impacts.

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I provide the literary grounds

for making this correlation between old and new materialisms by examining how George W.M.

Reynolds foregrounds material relations in his construction and deconstruction of England’s

sweated clothing trade. I will argue that his novel’s biofluid circulations—its blood, sweat, and

tears—are central both to his economic critique and to his reformulation of bioethical relations.

Within the study of signs and symbols known as semiotics, there is hardly any match for

blood, with its range of cultural associations spanning injury, violence, death, war, sacrifice,

vampirism, life, fertility, race, genealogy, and capitalism. It is for this reason that anthropologists

and cultural theorists have long been invested in drawing out blood’s rich cultural meanings.

121

Yet, in spite of this wealth of writing, remarkably few critics have interpreted the cultural

production of blood as informing (and in turn being informed by) the material study of blood in

medical sign systems.

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In the pursuit of material-discursivity, we might ask: what does

bloodshed mean, not just symbolically, but also symptomatically? What did Victorians take it to

mean? What are the limits of bloodshed as matter and as metaphor? How might these meanings

be co-constitutive? In a broader Baradian register of agential realism, how did real acts and

imaginative depictions of human bloodshed signify kinds of mattering, and how might they

shape ethical realities and pose ethical consequences for real, tangible bodies? In other words,

whose bloodshed mattered?

This chapter identifies throughlines between tangible bodily fluids (blood, tears, and

milk) and abstract fluid economies (currencies and affects) in a popular midcentury novel by

Jason Edwards (2010, 290); Alyson Cole (2018); Thomas Nail (2020); Elizabeth Grosz (2017); and Ryuji Sasaki

and Schauerte (2021). On Marxist scholars who incorporate new materialist methodologies in their work, see Paul

Cammack (2003); Slavoj iek (2014), Daniel Sullivan (2021).

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On new materialists who engage in anticapitalistic critique, see Bennett and Joyce (eds, 2010).

121

In the humanities, blood symbolism has featured centrally in anthropological studies (such as Douglas, 1966),

psychoanalytic interpretations (Freud 1930, Kristeva 1980), and biopolitical interpretations (Foucault 1978) and

cultural studies (Foskolou and Jones 2022); all of which have influenced Victorianist interpretations of blood (for

instance, Wiener 2004; Law 2010; Kibbie 2019).

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I regard this scarcity in medical accounts of Victorian bloodshed, particularly menstruating bodies, as being

symptomatic of the privileging of textual bodies over material bodies which has characterized the linguistic turn

more generally, as articulated by material feminists such as Barad (2007, 132), and Alaimo and Hekman (2008).

George W. M. Reynolds entitled The Seamstress: or, The White Slave of England. I argue that

Reynolds’s novel engages with the Marxist theory of dialectical materialism, a Marxist theory

which holds that political conflict and change emerges from material needs. I will demonstrate

how Reynolds’s brand of dialectical materialism anticipates new-materialist feminist concepts of

material-semiotic enmeshment such as Barad’s (2007). Reynolds was not only a prominent

Victorian author, but also a political radical who was highly influenced by the socialist writers of

his era. In his social problem novel, Reynolds capitalizes on blood’s cultural currency to

formulate a model of embodied economic currency. Reynolds characterizes England’s mid-

century sweated clothing industry as a trade in bloody rags involving a series of biofluid

economies, constructing a central metaphor of the bleeding seamstress to embody the ravages of

worker exploitation. This metaphor is itself part of the novel’s overarching embodied metaphor

of pathogenic vampire capitalism in which consumers suck the blood of seamstresses and, in so

doing, spread the modern scourge of mass consumption.

Yet Reynolds’s embodied metaphors are not just symbolic: contagion narratives

pertaining to biofluid-soiled fabric

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lend a material aspect to these metaphorical representations

of social intimacies, signifying the material-semiotic entanglements central to these fluid

economies. Reynolds’s novel follows the downward economic and physical decline of

seamstress Virginia Mordaunt as she works herself to an untimely death. In Reynolds’s

portrayal, concrete, biomedical conditions such as menstrual and tubercular forms of blood loss

are entrenched in abstract social conditions of workplace exploitation. To be sure, Reynolds

constructs an elaborate sign system in which his protagonist’s facial blood flows (in the act of

blushing) map onto her material degeneration as a destitute and tubercular seamstress drained of

life energy. In equal measure, they also map onto ostensibly abstract notions of economic

circulation and flow. While his rendering of a cannibalistic trade signifies a horrific form of

trans-corporeality, Reynolds nonetheless gestures to a positive iteration of this trans-corporeal

cross-feeding within a working-class ethics of mutual care which foregrounds a similarly

123

Harris writes that in late nineteenth-century texts, “the fear that clothing was transmitting contagious diseases to

the consumer became more urgent and more frequent, but it was always an inherent part of the narrative” (2003, 3).

Sheila Blackburn (2005) describes how one complaint amongst midcentury protective legislature campaigns was the

ease with which infectious diseases could be transmitted amongst workers (244).

material-discursive act of body-feeding. To consider how Reynolds may have used economic

theory to articulate a material-semiotic basis for flows is to recognize how Victorians anticipated

new-materialist attunements to material and categorical fluidity such as that of Barad.

While Reynolds certainly did not have access to the language of Barad’s material-

discursivity, I will demonstrate how the Marxist concept of dialectical materialism both informed

the “ultra-radical” author’s novel (Haywood 2004, 25) and anticipates new materialist

entanglements of matter and discourse in his exploration of the needlewoman’s oppression.

One of Marx and Engel’s central tenets was their materialist conception of history, a

widely known concept, but one worth reviewing to consider how it informed Reynolds’s

thinking. First articulated in German Ideology (1845), dialectical materialism purports that all

aspects of political thought (consciousness, discourse, ideologies) are secondary to the material

conditions of life out of which they emerge (“eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing”).

124

There are three tenets of dialectical materialism: 1) that everything that exists is material; 2) that

matter is in a process of continual change; and 3) that all matter is interconnected and

interdependent. The related concept of historical materialism, or what Marx and Engels first refer

to as the “materialist conception of history” in 1845, applies dialectical materialism to an

understanding of historical change as the result of material conditions rather than ideals (as

Hegel had previously maintained). Marx’s central claim that material conditions shaped ideals

(rather than the other way around) can be summed up in his statement that “the mode of

production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.

It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that

determines their consciousness” (1845, 20-21). There is a productive historical parallel between

dialectical materialism and new materialisms: dialectical materialism shifts away from a

methodology that privileges discursive concepts in the construction of reality (“social, political,

124

Marx and Engels were influenced by Hegel and the Hegelian dialectic, which they felt was too abstracted from

reality. The term dialectical materialism did not appear in their work but was coined by Engels in 1880’s Socialism:

Utopian and Scientific. Stephen Knight persuasively argues that Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London was informed

by many of Marx’s political texts including The Communist Manifesto (1848) (2019, 78). Dick Collins (2013) also

claims that Reynolds sought to emulate Marx (xvii). The Chartist movement as a whole was informed by Marx; in

fact, the first English translation of The Communist Manifesto was published in the Chartist periodical Red

Republican in 1850. Marx and Reynolds moved in the same circles, as Marx was friendly with and wrote for

Reynolds’s Chartist nemesis Ernest Jones. Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto in London in

1848, which introduces the materialist conception of history.

and intellectual life”) in favour one that privileges materiality in the construction of reality (food,

water, shelter, and clothing). Marx’s replacement of Hegelian idealism with the conviction that

matter is primary in the construction of ideology prefigures the recent materialist shift away from

the linguistic turn and towards a new kind of materiality, the “material turn” that I discussed in

my introduction.

In The Seamstress, Reynolds engages this materialist model in his attunement to the

needlewoman’s embodied working conditions. That is, his protagonist Virginia’s recognition that

her exploited labour cannot meet her basic material needs (for food, clothing, and shelter) leads

her (and by extension, the reader) inevitably towards class consciousness. What joins together

Marx and Engels’s theory to Reynolds’s literary narrative is an attunement to the imbrication of

material and abstract phenomena in the formulation of class struggle. Thus, we might say that

this so-called “old” materialism anticipates “new” materialists,

125

and indeed, many new

materialists have proclaimed the school’s debt to Marx’s dialectical and historical materialism.

126

And yet, to my knowledge, none have brought this historical correlation to bear on nineteenth-

century novelists like Reynolds who were heavily influenced by Marx’s materialist grounding of

125

Consider how Marx’s critique of Hegelian idealism anticipates the new materialist critique of the linguistic turn

in the following passage from German Ideology (1845):

Since the Young Hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness,

to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men… it is evident that the Young

Hegelians have to fight only against these illusions of consciousness. Since, according to their fantasy, the

relationship of men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are products of their consciousness,

the Young Hegelians logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for

human, critical, or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations. The Young-Hegelian

ideologists, in spite of their allegedly ‘world-shattering’ statements, are the staunchest conservatives. The

most recent of them have found the current expression for their activity when they declare they are only

fighting against ‘phrases.’ They forget, however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing

other phrases, and that they are in no way combatting the real existing world when they are merely

combatting the phrases of this world… It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into

the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the relation of their criticism to their own

material surroundings…The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly

interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life… In

direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to

heaven.

See also Tuana’s concept of “the materialism of the social” (2018).

political economy. Moreover, none have considered how this dialectical materialism operates in

novelistic representations of that most Marxian biofluid: blood.

If Reynolds’s novel represents the bare material necessities of life as food, water, shelter

and clothing, then he conveys the basic unit of life in the similarly tangible material of blood.

Just as capitalism deprives the worker of the former, so too does it deprive the worker of the

latter. The structure of this chapter approaches the novel’s material-semiotic flows in two parts: I

begin with an examination of Virginia’s physiognomic blood flows and move into a conversation

about how the novel’s trans-corporeal blood flows help to articulate Reynolds’s vision of

(un)ethical human relations. When we move from a consideration of individual to shared

experiences of bloodshed, the questions I asked above take on added political significance,

invoking a different but related question: what does it mean to bleed together? While blood as a

symbol holds an array of semiotic meanings, bleeding in particular typically connotes injury,

illness, and mortality.

Shared bloodshed holds significant political weight in conveying collective suffering.

Mid-century abolitionists appealed to the imagery of bleeding bodies to construct the “peculiar

institution” of slavery

127

as an industry of blood-for-money and, by extension, unite enslaved

Americans under a political and economic identity characterized by collective bloodshed.

Prominent abolitionist writers such as Fredrick Douglass (1845) and William Wells Brown

(1847) feature portrayals of enslaved people’s shared bloodshed as a metaphor for collective

suffering and exploitation. Symbolic blood loss registered the inherent, systemic violence of the

slave trade; at the same time, the images reflected the material violence that individual enslavers

enacted on the bodies of enslaved people, which featured gruesome acts of literal bloodshed.

128

Importantly, these were not just metaphors of individually (or even collectively) bleeding bodies

127

This term popularized by pro-slavery Southern politician John C. Calhoun in 1830.

128

Douglass (1845) describes witnessing his enslaver whip the female slaves as “the blood-stained gate, the

entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass” (13). Douglass refers to his own slavery as a

“bloody transaction” (19). Sarah Kent picks up on the correlation between slavery and bloodshed in her study of

black vampires (2020), where she claims that “envisioning vampirism’s bloody transactions in relation to slavery is

semiotically logical” (739). Harriet Jacobs uses the rhetoric of blood to symbolize racial difference (ie “African

blood”), and the slaveowner who pays into the Communion dish as paying “the price of blood.” The rhetoric of

industry as bloodshed and product as paid for with blood continues to characterize diamonds which are mined within

war zones, called “blood diamonds,” amongst different regions of Africa (including Angola, Central African

Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, and Sierra Leone).

but trans-corporeal metaphors

129

of blood-sucking economies spanning the globe and surpassing

the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Douglass’s designation of slavery as a “bloody transaction” was

taken up by authors writing on other exploitative forms of labour who similarly couched physical

work in terms of bloodshed, bondage, and slavery—namely, mid-century tracts on industrial

labour, which stipulated that society’s most vulnerable members supplied the life energy (blood)

for the capitalist mechanism to function.

130

Lynn Mae Alexander (2003) argues that the mid-

century discourse on seamstresses in particular was linked to abolition literature, as American

authors frequently charged British abolitionists with hypocrisy given what they deemed to be

England’s own forms of “slavery” (211-212). In turn, many English authors took issue with the

trade in these terms. Consider Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s goal in dismantling the dress industry

in 1842: “the liberation of thousands of slaves from a bondage which no English female ought to

connive at, or to tolerate for one moment” (362). Alexander claims that Tonna “is the first writer

to borrow the analogy of industrial worker as slave […] and to apply the term with all its

connotations directly to needlewomen” (7). American antislavery literature thus inspired classed

and gendered critiques of England’s industrial trades, particularly clothes production.

131

I will

demonstrate how the imagery of bloodshed featuring in antislavery literature was similarly

imported into England’s texts against sweated labour, with particular resonances for the imaged

of the wasting, tubercular seamstress.

Moving from racial to class “enslavement,” I move from America to England, from the

body of the enslaved African to that of the exploited seamstress in a novel whose title

nonetheless exploits the language of abolitionist literature: The Seamstress: or The White Slave

of England (1853), by G.W.M. Reynolds. Reynolds superimposes England’s economic

circulations onto the body of the poor seamstress, imagining affective economies as her bodily

129

For texts that characterize trans-Atlantic slavery as a form of vampirism, see The Calcutta Christian Observer

Vol. 8 (1839, 662); Nathaniel Gookin Upham’s Rebellion—Slavery—Peace: An Address Delivered at Conchord,

N.H, March 2, 1864 (36); William Whiting’s An Appeal to the Citizens of the Free States upon the Aspects of the

Slave Question, and the Claims of the Freesoil Movement, to their Support (1848, 7); James William Massie’s

Slavery, the Crime and Curse of America: An Exposition with the Christians of that Land (1852, 19).

130

For instance, see James Malcom Rymer’s The White Slave (1845), John C. Cobden’s The White Slaves of

England (1853), and John T. McEnnis’s The White Slaves of Free America (1888), all of which are about industrial

labour.

131

See R.B. Grindrod’s Slaves of the Needle (1845) on the needlewoman’s deplorable working conditions.

economies, its economic currencies her blood circulations.

132

The novel’s title thereby designates

the class of English seamstresses as “white slave[s]” not only because of their racial whiteness,

but because of their paleness—as their repetitive and exhausting labour has drained them of their

lifeblood in a pathological and gendered consumption.

133

Despite The Seamstress’s political motivations, the few authors who have written on the

novel tend to take issue with what they feel to be the novel’s lack of political direction. Samuel

Tindall claims that Reynolds “direct[s] his readers…to those injustices [of sweated needlework]”

but fails to offer a “practical remedy” (1966, 38 and 41). Rohan McWilliam calls the novel a

“moral cartoon” (2005, 102). Alexander considers the novel’s inconsistent concern with

Virginia’s plot to suggest “that Reynolds’s sense [was] that direct political critique did not really

interest the audience,” arguing that, after all, “the Cinderella story” is “essentially negative”

(144). To be sure, the novel is uneven in its political investments, often veering off into

melodramatic plotlines involving attempted murder, fraud, and dueling. By the end of the novel,

most of the characters including Virginia have died in a dramatic fashion. However, the

destructive trans-corporeal exchanges central to Virginia’s “Cinderella story,” as negative as they

are, also serve to model the positive forms of intimacy for new bioethical possibilities. These

possibilities are unfinished, but they are nonetheless present, and to examine them helps to piece

together some of Reynolds’s seemingly unrelated generic concerns linking the sensational

content of penny dreadfuls

134

to serious matters of social reform.

Bursting at the Seams: Seamstress Literature and Reform

When Reynolds previewed his newest novel that he would serially publish in Reynolds’s

Miscellany, he claimed that the tale will “expose one of the most fertile causes of oppression,

misery, and demoralization which belong to the many abuses characteristic of the social

132

This reading is inspired by Deanna K. Kreisel’s work (2012) exploring female-embodied metaphors for economic

circulation and spending in Victorian literature, specifically her reading of Ruskin’s Munera Pulveris (1862-3).

133

Of course, it should be acknowledged that constructions of whiteness and paleness were informed by notions of

racial difference; for instance, Pamela K. Gilbert considers how the act of blushing was used to evince the supposed

moral and cultural superiority of white Europeans (2019).

134

A pejorative term for serially and cheaply published stories that usually featured gothic and violent content.

Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London, published in 52 weekly parts from 1844 to 1845, was one of the most famous

examples of the genre.

system.”

135

That cause was poor needlewomen. Within mid-century social reform literature, the

poor seamstress was a central icon of economic oppression. The mid-century genre known as

Condition-of-England literature features the needlewoman as an important locus of classed and

gendered suffering. Like texts on the drowned fallen woman, texts on the suffering seamstress

constituted a popular mid-century subgenre: Alexander, for instance, estimates that the heroine

featured in more than twenty popular English works between 1840 and 1850 and was the subject

of more than fifty popular English illustrations and paintings between 1840 and 1900 (8).

The emergence of the figure as a subject for artistic representation was born out of a

dramatic increase in the number of real-life London seamstresses throughout the first half of the

century. Henry Mayhew estimated that there were 31,000 needlewomen in London by 1849.

136

From the early decades of the nineteenth century, the growth of a new middle class contributed

to an emerging demographic of consumers who demanded cheaply produced clothing known as

“slop,” as they could not afford custom tailoring.

137

By mid-century, slop production was a

booming industry which necessitated a massive labour force of sweated needle workers. In 1843,

a year before “Bridge of Sighs,” our very own Thomas Hood published an immensely popular

poem called “The Song of the Shirt,” which popularized the poor seamstress as an alienated

labourer in literature and art.

138

Indeed, the distressed needlewoman became such a stock figure

that she became the subject of entire books by Christina Walkley (1981) and Lynn Mae

Alexander (2003), and a collection edited by Beth Harris (2005). Harris observes that while this

character features in a range of genres from journalistic exposés to government reports, poems to

paintings to novels,

139

her narrative remains the same:

[The seamstress tale is] a story in which a healthy young woman, who has been recently

orphaned, or whose family has been reduced, leaves her life in the countryside to become

135

See Reynolds’s Miscellany, 16th March 1850: 128.

136

The Morning Chronicle (1849). Reynolds quotes this figure.

137

For excellent histories on the economical changes that created demand for seamstresses, see Alexander (2003),

Blackburn (2005), and McWilliam (2005).

138

Plays like Mark Lemon’s The Sempstress: A Drama in Two Acts (1844), Paintings include Anna Elizabeth

Blunden’s The Seamstress (A Song of the Shirt) in (1854), directly inspired by Hood’s poem, and, later, Frank Holl’s

Seamstresses (1875); the Great Exhibition of 1851 featured a Punch cartoon of a distressed needlewoman. For an

excellent survey of artistic examples of the needlewoman, see Susan P. Casteras (2005).

139

Tracts outlining the abuses within the dress trade include Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s The Perils of the Nation

(1842) and R.D. Grainger’s The Second Report of the Children’s Employment Commission (1843).

a seamstress in the city. There, the woman encounters a heartless and greedy employer

and begins an irreversible decline leading to illness and death and/or prostitution (2).

Within these fictional accounts, the seamstress sickens and dies most often from consumption.

140

The seamstress’s demise-by-consumption is a tragically ironic one, given consumption’s

dual signification as both an epidemic disease and an act of purchasing commodities. Both

meanings link tuberculosis to trans-corporeal acts: contagion and material consumption. Several

Victorian scholars have taken up tuberculosis as a metaphor for capitalist exploitation. Chief

among these scholars is Katherine Byrne (2011), who considers literary representations of

tuberculosis as the manifestation of a pathological capitalism, in which “consumption works as

both a disruptor of the capitalist commercial world, and a metaphor for it” within the Victorian

literary imagination (5). Yet given the centrality of blood to the iconography of both tubercular

consumption and capitalistic consumption, there is a scholarly gap on the symbolism of blood in

texts on the poor seamstress. Given tuberculosis’s conventional bloody end in the fatal

pulmonary hemorrhage, one might anticipate how consumption’s metonymic ties to bloodshed

might fit into these metaphors of capitalism gone awry.

Representations of the poor seamstress use Gothic tropes to convey the horrific state of

her work. In “Song of the Shirt” (1843), for instance, Hood fuses the garment and its maker

together to suggest that needleworker turns needlework in his emphatic line: “It is not linen

you’re wearing out,/ But human creatures’ lives!” (27-28).

141

In other words, the evil industry

which renders human “flesh and blood so cheap” (39) forces these poor, starving women to

effectively sew their own funeral garb out of their life-blood, producing “A shroud as well as a

shirt” out of their vital energies (32). I use Reynolds’s novel to consider how consumption is a

fitting end for this tragic character—for as scholars on the genre have established, her threadbare

existence made her a run-of-the-mill victim of capitalist consumption.

142

Amongst Engels and

140

Alexander attributes this representation to the reality that “in mid-Victorian England approximately half,

sometimes more, of all women fifteen to thirty-five years of age who died were killed by some form of consumption

[…] relevant because the Victorian age-specific death rates for the general population are very nearly equivalent to

rates for the working classes of the period” (12).

141

The speaker’s description of the worker, “With eyelids heavy and red,/A woman sat in unwomanly rags” (2-3),

presents a picture of the woman’s emaciated form lost in a heap of fabric. Interestingly, the woman’s bloodshot eyes

amid these soiled “rags” she must don evoke a menstrual kind of depletion.

142

On the seamstress in capitalist critique, see Beth Harris (2005), Nicola Pullin (2005), and Ian Haywood (2005).

Marx, the clothing producer evinced the wrongs of the modern condition.

143

I will examine how

the distressed seamstress’s labour is repetitive and exhausting, resulting in her separation from

herself, her fellow workers, and her product. In a tragic piece of irony, however, one of the

factors that renders Reynolds’s poor needlewoman so alienated from her product is that she has

given herself so fully to it; that is, she puts her blood, sweat, and tears into a garment that is

immediately snatched from her and placed into the awaiting hands of consumers.

Reynolds’s novel opens with an introduction to the seamstress in question, Virginia

Mordaunt, a beautiful, newly orphaned girl of eighteen who has begun work as a seamstress in

London. This backstory rehearses Harris’s script for the seamstress’s downward trajectory.

Virginia is working tirelessly to produce a velvet dress commissioned for one Duchess of

Belmont, but the dress passes hands from Virginia’s supervisor Mrs. Jackson to a series of

redundant middle-women who reduce Virginia’s wages by inflating the cost of the garments

before it finally arrives at its intended customer. This transaction passes between ostensible

strangers, for both the Duchess and Virginia are unaware at this time (as are we) that they are

actually mother and daughter. With so little earnings, Virginia is forced to toil day and night to

earn enough for her humble board and diet.

Scholars of the Victorian seamstress recognize her tragic status as a victim of capitalist

consumption, but they also consider how Victorian authors perceived her as a radical site for its

potential transformation. Harris and her contributors look beyond this tragic figure and her

predictable demise to consider how her “narrative was being called upon to negotiate and find

solutions for many of the painful changes wrought by industrial capitalism” (2-3). Sheila

Blackburn corroborates this claim in her historical survey on “Sweated Needlewomen and

Campaigns for Protective Legislation, 1840-1914,” where she argues that “reformers utilized

certain images of the [needle]women at specific times to manipulate public sympathy” (244). As

a symbol, the poor seamstress exhibits a classed and gendered position that made her a

143

Harris references a letter that Engels quotes from a man whose wife had to work at a mill while he sat home to

illustrate how authors worried that something was “gravely wrong” with the gender reversals (2005, 6). The Taylor

is a central icon of commodity exchange in Capital. Marx claims that the development of these specialist trades only

came to be under capitalism: “Wherever the want of clothing forced them to it, the human race made clothes for

thousands of years, without a single man becoming a tailor” (133). The coat takes on a “use-value” that is a

combination “of two elements, the material provided by nature, and labour” it took to make it (133).

radicalizing icon for her perceived capacities to promote a “leftist political agenda” (Harris 7).

This was especially the case in the England of the 1840s and 50s, with its tumultuous political

climate of working-class unrest and emerging female suffrage.

Harris, Rohan McWilliam, Ian Haywood, Ella Dzelzainis, and Sheila Blackburn have all

established how literary depictions of the seamstress written during these years fed the flames of

working-class uprising, as the figure was a central icon in the Chartist and Labour movements.

144

Harris turns our attention to her centrality in early feminist campaigns by Harriet Martineau and

Anna Jameson, who mobilize the seamstress as a symbol of patriarchy’s hypocrisy, which

“circumscribed women’s lives, preached that they should not work, and consequently made

almost no occupations open to them, while forcing them, at the same time, to work” (7).

145

matters of both class and gender, then, the seamstress represented a significant critique of the

current economic order, which relied upon the exploitation of working-class folk, especially

women, to supply the demands of middle-class consumers.

While these critics highlight the figure’s position at the intersection of class and gendered

oppression, their major concern has not been how those forms of oppression imaginatively play

out on and through these poor women’s bodies. In Reynolds’s novel, the common denominator

in all classed and gendered forms of suffering is bloodshed, a malleable symbol in its ability to

represent forms of physical drainage—at turns, tuberculosis, menstruation, and capitalism. I

argue that Reynolds illuminates the seamstress’s biofluid economies in a way that reveals the

invisible trans-corporeal networks of relation within Victorian consumer society. By attuning to

the seamstress’s body, I ground both her oppression and her revolutionary potential in material,

corporeal processes. To move from oppression to revolution, Reynolds must reckon with the

question of whether all trans-corporeal relations under capitalism are necessarily exploitative, or

whether the body of the seamstress might offer hope for imagining alternate futures for relation. I

will demonstrate how the very trans-corporeal exchange of commodities that is so destructive for

144

The Labour movement or trade union movement in Britain involved workers collectivizing to secure improved

working conditions and treatment by their employers; the Chartist movement held that these ends could only be

achieved through working-class (male) representation at the level of government; see Malcolm Chase (2007).

145

London dressmakers and milliners testified to the Royal Commission of 1843 that their long hours contributed to

getting ill and that shortened hours would help prevent illness (see Levine-Clarke 172-3).

the seamstress’s body also paradoxically serves as a template with which to replace an ethos of

worker alienation with one of embodied connection.

The seamstress’s tragic and radical associations would have been well known to Reynolds by

the time that he began writing The Seamstress in 1850. As a Condition-of-England novel steeped

in melodrama, The Seamstress is firmly situated in the tradition of mid-century social reform

literature. There is good reason to read the novel’s heroine in terms of this kind of radicalizing

capacity because its author was known for precisely this stance.

George William MacArthur Reynolds was a British author and journalist who lived in

Paris as a young adult, where he developed the revolutionary views that would eventually result

in his political career as a Chartist. As writers on Reynolds’s brand of politics have explored,

146

Reynolds was vocal about his socialist leanings; a Red Republican who supported the 1848

French Revolution, he was an avid follower of German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich

Engels. Reynolds was a lifelong radical founding several Chartist journals: Reynold’s

Miscellany, The London Journal, and Reynolds’s Political Instructor. Reynolds’s relationship to

socialism in practice was complicated: while he condemned the profiteers of capitalism, he

himself amassed a great deal of wealth as a writer.

147

In his day, Reynolds was more read than

Dickens, and his obituary describes him as “the most popular writer of our times.”

148

Reynolds’s

leftist beliefs, however, led Dickens to attack him as a political radical, ostracizing him from

literary circles, which helps to explain his obscure status today. Marx, interestingly, applauded

Reynolds’s radical publications, yet he despised him personally as a hypocrite.

149

Reynolds had a strong female working-class readership.

150

Of his fictional works, Reynolds’s

most famous was a penny blood or city mystery novel called Mysteries of London, which he

146

See Anne Humpherys’s and Louis James’s collection G.W.M. Reynolds: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Politics,

and the Press (2008), especially contributions by Andrew King, Michael H. Shirley, and Rohan McWilliam.

147

Reynolds features centrally in Ian Haywood’s The Revolution in Popular Literature (2004).

148

Reynolds’s obituary in The Bookseller (600).

149

Stephen Knight relates how Marx had mixed feelings about him, telling Engels that he was “a rich and able

spectator” and “a scoundrel,” but elsewhere crediting Reynolds’ Newspaper as “the one surviving mass circulation

working-class organ in Britain” (qtd in Knight 8).

150

With his popular penny dreadful series, The Mysteries of London, Reynolds is credited with establishing the

“urban mysteries” genre, which transposes elements of gothic fiction onto a Victorian city landscape peopled with

sympathetic working-class characters on the wrong side of the law. The cheap price of the penny dreadfuls, coupled

with Reynolds’s accessible prose, meant that he had a massive working-class following. See Anne Humphreys’ and

began writing in 1844. Reynolds’s political works span two magazines, Reynolds’ Miscellany

and The London Journal, both founded in 1846. In 1849, he founded the leading radical

newspaper of Victorian England, Reynolds’s Political Instructor. Sentiments of political

revolution were thus very much on his mind when he was publishing The Seamstress, a novel

which has received scant critical attention.

151

Reynolds transposes the penny dreadful’s generic preoccupation with body horror onto a

text about workplace alienation, showing how capitalism’s deadly forms of trans-corporeal

exchange (cannibalism and contagion) sever the needlewomen’s bodies from their product,

themselves, and their fellow workers. At the same time, Reynolds shows that one antidote to this

alienation paradoxically emerges from the same model of trans-corporeal relations that makes

capitalism so destructive. While explicit descriptions of tubercular and menstrual blood flow are

certainly not appropriate fodder for a respectable novel, Reynolds nonetheless features blood

centrally in two ways in The Seamstress: in his construction of protagonist Virginia’s

physiognomy and in his Gothic representations of the slop industry, the first of which I turn to

now.

152

Bloody Rags: On Blood, the Blush, and the Hectic Flush

“The blood is the life!,” the deranged Renfield famously declares in Bram Stoker’s

Dracula (1897), having sucked the vital fluids out of all the small creatures who have fallen into

his psychiatric cell. Renfield’s motto designates blood as the vital force animating all living

organisms, without which they would perish. This correlation of life and blood stems from its

Louis James’ collection on Reynolds’s life and work (2008). I credit Stephen Knight’s (2018) argument that the vast

majority of Reynolds’s readership was female (5).

151

Given Reynolds’s revolutionary writings, I consider the novel’s narrator as a mouthpiece for the author’s own

political ends, and therefore deliberately refer to them interchangeably in this chapter. While a number of texts

mention The Seamstress in passing, I have only encountered one standalone piece on the novel: Rohan McWilliam’s

chapter on “The Melodramatic Seamstress” in Harris’s collection (2005).

152

Given how explicit references to menstruation are virtually absent in respectable Victorian fiction, it is worth

considering why an author like Reynolds would concern himself with the topic. I consider the following reasons:

first, menstruation was intricately bound up with consumption, and consumption carried enormous metaphorical

weight in economic critique of capitalism as Susan Sontag has established (1978); second, Reynolds had a wide

female readership, and so menstruation would be more readily applicable as metaphor; and thirdly, while more

pedantic authors like Dickens would not stoop so low as to engage with these questions of menstrual blood loss,

Reynolds deliberately aligned his work with “lowly” genres which featured more bawdy subject matter.

obvious counterpoint, that of blood loss and death. Many Victorians witnessed firsthand how

blood sustained through an injury in a factory could result in a fatal hemorrhage. But as

Katherine Byrne maintains, bloodshed was not limited to bodily injury for the Victorians, to

whom “an outpouring of blood” could also signify a highly feminized disease, consumption, and

a highly pathologized physiological condition, menstruation. Blood filling the lungs constituted a

pulmonary hemorrhage while an injury sustained in the uterine cavity (such as in labour) denoted

a uterine hemorrhage—both of which beckoned death.

In the popular imagination, the tubercular’s bloody handkerchief functioned to

foreshadow the victim’s death, a scene popularized with John Keats’s words to his friend George

Armitage Brown in 1820, after he looked at his bloody handkerchief and said to Brown, “I

cannot be deceived in that colour,– that drop of blood is my death warrant; I must die.”

153

The

tubercular’s blood on the handkerchief is a lasting iconic legacy of Victorian tuberculosis,

154

but

such graphic accounts of pulmonary hemorrhage were hardly appropriate fodder for respectable

Victorian novels, especially when the tubercular in question was a woman, whose bloody rag

would hint at even more unmentionable forms of bleeding. The tubercular’s associations with

women and clothing make it a fitting disease to represent England’s poor seamstresses, but

Reynolds encounters a problem with genre: unlike his salacious gothic novel Mysteries of

London, The Seamstress, whose subtitle was originally A Domestic Tale, targeted a female

readership. How, then, was Reynolds to convey a class of tubercular seamstresses losing their

blood, their life energy, and their lives to capitalism without infringing on the edicts of

propriety?

153

Keats recognized the colour of arterial blood associated with pulmonary tuberculosis given his medical training.

Quoted from John Keats: A Literary Life (R.S. White, 2010: 208).

154

Nineteenth-century literary depictions of the bloody handkerchief are far too numerous to exhaust here, but some

key examples include the anonymous story “The Martyr Student” (published in The Parthenon in 1834), Joseph

Moyle Sherer’s Civil War story “The Broken Font” (1836); Katerina Ivanovna in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and

Punishment (1866) and Hippolite in The Idiot (1868-9), F.E. Reade’s Clary’s Confirmation: A Tale for Very Poor

Girls (1877), and Charles Reade’s Foul Play (1895, 68). For Victorian references to the bloody handkerchief in

medical accounts of pulmonary disease, see John Cheyne (1843, 172); “Dr. Morris’s Case of Hemoptysis Occurring

in Infants” in the London Medical Gazette, Volume 38 (1846); James Yearsley’s Throat Ailments (1856, 33); Hobart

Amory Hare (1897, 527); Hyde Salter in the British Medical Journal Volume II (1870, 185)’ and Charles Hilton

Fagge’s The Principles and Practices of Medicine (1888, 215). Cinematic representations of the bloody rag include

Captain Blood (1935), Moulin Rouge! (2001), Wuthering Heights (2009), Thérèse (2004), Bright Star (2009), Penny

Dreadful (2014), and Crimson Peak (2015).

I consider how Reynolds circumvents this issue by representing consumption’s

destruction through a woman’s face. Reynolds tells the story of Virginia’s failing health through

a complex physiognomic sign system; that is, he makes regular allusions to the blood flows

happening within her face: her habitual paleness, her frequent blush, and her hectic flush. I read

Virginia’s symptoms as amounting to a figurative blood loss that is the direct result of her labour

as a seamstress.

The medical and psychological associations of the blush make it both a physiological and

an affective event. The blush’s emotional significance has been of interest to Victorianists for

some time, with works like Mary Ann O’Farrell’s Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century

Novel and the Blush (1997) establishing the blush as “a temporal phenomenon that has been

taken to imply causality” (3). For characters within the novel and its readers, O’Farrell continues,

the blush becomes “a readable sign system,” delivering “an implicit promise to render body and

character legible” (4).

155

Of course, making bodies legible was not a practice exclusive to novels;

it was also the basic assumption of Victorian medicine, which maintained that physicians could

effectively “read” patients’ bodies, especially female ones, to arrive at a diagnosis.

156

While critics like O’Farrell have been invested in the affective aspects of this sign system

to communicate a character’s inner workings, they have been less concerned with the ways that

character and body intersect.

157

Literary representations of the blush also communicate a

character’s inner workings in regards to her biological body, making the female blush not merely

an affective sign but also a material-affective one interlocking physiological and emotional

states. This duality is consistent with Pamela K. Gilbert’s recent interpretation of the Victorians’

“physiological understanding of the blush” as “an expression of affect, [that] was implicated in

the larger discussion of embodied consciousness” such as “the evolutionary role of human

emotion” (2019, 64). As a mode of blood flow befitting the respectable novel, the blush, along

155

O’Farrell considers the blush an event which, depending on the context of the story, represents a physiological

manifestation of a character’s response to embarrassment, illness, anger, or alcohol (3). For O’Farrell, however, this

implicit promise would often go unrealized.

156

For an example of Victorian medicine reading bodies, see Torgerson (2005). For Victorianists who have

considered the female body as a legible text in medicine, see Vrettos (1995, 30), and Wood (2001).

157

On blush and shame, see Probyn (2005), Blushing and the Social Emotions, see W. Crozier (2006), on The

Psychological Significance of the Blush, see Crozier and Jong (eds, 2012).

with what Gilbert calls its “sister expression,” pallor (64), could serve as a literary tool by which

the reader could comprehensively assess a female character’s emotions and her overall health.

Mid-century physicians deemed a woman’s blush to be a barometer for her overall wellbeing.

The circulations flowing within her face offered a readable sign system indicating menstrual

regularity and even tuberculosis.

158

A blush conventionally denoted female beauty and health

given its longstanding cultural associations with fertility, and as one of the body’s blood flows, a

regular blush indicated a regular menstrual economy, while paleness signified anemia, thought to

be brought on by excessive menstrual flows.

159

In Charlotte Bront and Victorian Psychology

(1996), Sally Shuttleworth describes how prominent nineteenth-century physicians like George

Man Burrows argued that intense bouts of blushing could wreak havoc on both female body and

mind. Shuttleworth looks to Burrow’s Commentaries on Insanity (1828) for a dramatic example

of how strong emotions could lead to a rush of blood to the face, resulting in the obstruction of

the uterine economy. Shuttleworth relates how Burrows “distinguishes the mere blush of

modesty from the ‘suffusion of shame’: ‘the blood is here retained, in a peculiar manner, in the

capillary veins, as if the veins were constringed. This sensation will suppress the menses, or

other secretions, has occasioned insanity, and in some instances had even produced death.’”

160

This death by blushing presents a dramatic example of O’Farrell’s notion that the blush

makes the body legible, demonstrating how extreme affective states correspond to inner states of

unhealth. It also demonstrates how menstruation and blushing were understood to be interrelated

blood expenditures, such that excessive blushing represents a kind of vicarious menstruation,

with blood rushing to the head instead of the nether regions. If, as Shuttleworth maintains,

menstruation was an “external sign system” by which physicians could determine a woman’s

158

See Sontag on tuberculosis (1978).

159

Cf. John C. Peters’s book on Disorders of Menstruation (1854): “Anaemia, or simple deficiency of blood,

generally commences rather suddenly, and is usually owing to spontaneous or secondary losses of blood; in short, in

anaemia, we have simple diminution of the mass of the blood… (124). On the link between anaemia, consumption,

and menstruation, see Byrne (31-32).

160

Quoted in Shuttleworth, 77. Burrows’s example illustrates Amy Koerber’s (2018) rhetorical argument that the

womb is a “topological space” which medical paradigms continually reinscribe as an organ that is inherently linked

to the female brain. Nineteenth-century reprints of Aristotle’s and Galen’s works continued to replicate ancient

arguments about wandering wombs and humoral models of menstrual retention in a Victorian medical setting, which

are evident here in Burrow’s correlation between fits of blushing and female madness. For a study of women’s blood

migrations in the context of eighteenth-century Germany, see Barbara Duden’s Woman Beneath the Skin (1991).

physical and mental wellbeing (77), then blushing represented another such “external sign

system” providing a way into a woman’s interior state, but one that fell within the edicts of

propriety.

Blushing not only denoted menstrual health and unhealth; it was also a primary mode by

which physicians and readers alike could diagnose consumption. While the pulmonary

hemorrhage represented consumption’s most graphic signature, its other signature symptom (and

the one most appropriate for a novel) was also blood-related: the “hectic flush” portending

imminent death. Reynolds rehearses the story of consumption’s wasting effects on the body by

alluding to a series of irregular blood circulations within Virginia’s face. First, Virginia’s blush

of health fails, and she becomes habitually pale; eventually, she succumbs to the hectic flush,

indicative of the final throes of consumption. As I will demonstrate, such depictions paint a

picture of the seamstress’s drained blood supply, the physiological counterpart to an abstract

(and abstracted) notion of class oppression which haunts the novel.

The narrator of The Seamstress recounts Virginia’s blush with a physician’s astuteness. The

novel opens with the narrator asking the reader to “picture to yourself a pale and pensive girl of

about eighteen, – with a countenance as beautiful as the utmost perfection of features could

render it…” (1). There is nothing out of place in this description of a pure heroine, whose

paleness we might interpret as a mark of her fair complexion, but it also hints at overwork in her

occupation.

161

And yet blood still flows in Virginia’s face, as “her lips were of the pure red of the

rose” (1). Along with Virginia’s oft-described red lips, those “rosy portals of her charming

mouth” (3), Reynolds describes Virginia’s physiognomic blood flows obsessively.

162

Despite her

prevailing paleness, there is hardly ever a mention of her in the first half of the novel without an

allusion to her blushing (3, 10, 11, 45, 46, 47, 52, 53, 55, 60, 63, 64, 72, 94). Virginia blushes

when she is embarrassed, as when she feels self-conscious of male attention and “a blush of

maiden confusion” turns her a “vivid crimson” (13). While the person who witnesses a blush

161

While a fair complexion was a sign of beauty in women, paleness was also one of the signs of an emaciated

seamstress; consider James Malcom Rymer’s The White Slave (1845), which presents the woman whose “sad aspect

and pale face showed her at once to be one of the White Slaves of London,” or Rosie, “The Seamstress,” in Eliza

Cook’s Journal (1850), who becomes “a feeble remnant of womanhood—pale, wasted, almost ghastly” (19).

162

Again, while a literary scholars make a habit of distinguishing between narrator and author, I use them

interchangeably in this chapter because the views expressed by Reynolds’s narrator are consistent with his political

views on exploitative labour.

100

does not literally take it into their body, the blush is nonetheless intersubjective in that this blood

expression is also an affective expression read socially by others. These events of blushing in the

novel therefore dovetail with Gilbert’s claim that “blushing was evidence of ‘sympathy,’ as well

as a means of engaging it” (64), since, per Gilbert, “the representation of the self to the self as if

to an other is crucial to the development of the kind of moral judgement and sympathy that

Common Sense models of social life demand” (76).

163

Read in isolation from Virginia’s

precarious circumstances, these instances of blushing offer readers a means of making her body

morally legible as a modest, virtuous woman. Indeed, if the narrator did not tell us that Virginia

was a destitute needlewoman, we might simply interpret the heroine’s bouts of blushing in terms

of conventional models of feminine beauty, morality, and health, which dictate that a woman’s

timely blush can at turns convey charm, sexual naiveté, or virility.

Meanwhile, Virginia’s habitual state of paleness may be aesthetically pleasing, but it

bespeaks overwork. This paleness, which intensifies as the plot unfolds, would have been à la

mode given the dominant tubercular aesthetic arising mid-century, a trend amongst fashionable

women who sought to replicate the wan faces of famous tubercular artistic muses like Elizabeth

Siddall. Virginia’s paleness is no simulation for the sake of current fashion. We meet Virginia at

the moment before her good health departs her. The narrator describes how “[w]e said that she

was pale: but as yet it was not a pallor that had fixed its settled abode upon her cheeks” (2). He

continues: “thus it was apparent that if this poor orphan gentle girl could only be suddenly or

even soon rescued from the sad condition in which we find her” and “borne off into the country,”

then “the roses would come back to her cheeks to mingle with the purity of the lily which was

already there!” (2). Here, Reynolds identifies Virginia’s overwork as the cause of her paleness.

If, as O’Farrell maintains, “the blush is a temporal phenomenon that has been taken to imply

causality” (3), then we see an instance here of this cause and effect extending beyond the realm

163

Gilbert considers how “The inability to blush indicated a lack of what Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham saw in

the eighteenth century as fundamental to moral relations: the ability and instinct to feel from another’s perspective”

(68); she uses physician Thomas Burgess’s book on blushing (1839) to corroborate this perspective, for Burgess

claims that the blushing person elicits sympathy in the observer, “we feel as if we were ourselves concerned, and yet

we know not why” (qtd in 71). See also Paul White’s claim that the literary significance of blush was in honing the

reader's moral sympathy, because readers of fiction were “invited to enjoy the legible body, the activity, however

charged or fraught, of seeing and being seen” (300).

101

of affect (blushing as an outcome of Virginia’s embarrassment) to her health (pallor as an

outcome of overwork).

Indeed, these floral metaphors for fertility which capture Virginia’s facial blood

expressions, the “roses” of her lips and cheeks, also intimate menstruation. For centuries,

menstruation had been referred to as “flowers” in England and “fleurs” in French. For instance,

nineteenth-century physician Mary Putnam Jacobi described the menstrual cycle as the process

by which “the woman buds as surely and as incessantly as the plant, continually generating not

only the reproductive cell, but the nutritive material without which this would be useless” (1886).

Virginia’s red “roses” here describe a healthy blush, but they also recall Virginia’s monthly red

“bloom” of menstruation, which, like her blush, may have disappeared on account of her

demanding work. This irregularity in Virginia’s facial (and perhaps uterine) expressions of blood

is significant given how physicians like Burrows (1828) considered menstruation to be “the

moral and physical barometer of the female constitution” (199). Menstrual flows therefore

operate as a sign system which, like the blush, spans material-symbolic dimensions—physical

and moral, material and affective. Just as the blush (and its absence) could express physical

illnesses and emotional states, so too could menstrual flows (and their absence) signify

physiological ailments and moral transgressions, such as when immoral intercourse results in the

cessation of menses in pregnancy.

164

But where has pale Virginia’s blood gone? Reynolds suggests that Virginia’s work is the

cause of these irregularities by indicating that her needlework is a physical drain on her body.

This metaphorical seepage of energy takes the shape of a symbolic bloodshed which not only

foreshadows Virginia’s tubercular decline but intertwines that decline with a menstrual-coded

blood depletion. A Marxist analysis of Virginia’s labour would consider her physical exhaustion

as a symptom of the discrepancy between the labour she performs and her compensation; a

feminist analysis might extend that class reading to consider the relationship between time,

labour, and gender. Virginia’s physical exhaustion fits into contemporary notions of female

164

The cessation of menses still operates as narrative coding for pregnancy. Marian Erle of Aurora Leigh describes

how she did not realize that the cessation of her menstrual period meant that she was pregnant: “The rains had

swelled too large: it could mean that?” (Book 7, line 55).

102

workers in particular, which claimed that a relentless pace of work wreaked havoc on the female

reproductive system.

165

Working day and night, Virginia loses all sense of temporal markers. At one in the

morning, we see Virginia:

[W]e behold her toiling far into the night…. ready to sink with fatigue: her temples throb

violently—her back aches—her fingers are stiff—her limbs are rigid.… A feverish

excitement tingles in her blood and sustains an unnatural warmth throughout her entire

being: for she is pushing her physical energies to the extreme…. But she must not, she

may not pause thus!— She knows full well that if she once checks the unnatural tide of

over-wrought energies now hurrying her along, a complete paralyzation of the whole

powers, mental and physical, would instantaneously take place (2).

In this depiction, Reynolds moves from Virginia’s facial blood flows to those of her “entire

being” as she expends her energies into her needlework. Significantly, Reynolds formulates

Virginia’s energy as a torrent-like stream rushing from her body, one that (like the tide) is

impossible to stem, as is the damage it inflicts on her person. For the narrator declares that

“Virginia pursues the toil which is only too well calculated to produce in a few hours the effect

of as many years’ wear and tear upon her constitution” (2).

166

While the temporal cyclicality of

menstruation often lent itself to naturalized metaphors of the tide’s ebb and flows,

167

Reynolds’s

evocation of Virginia’s labour as an “unnatural tide of over-wrought energies” paints this form of

physical labour as a drain on her menstrual economy. The physical exhaustion brought on by this

unending work accelerates the effects of time on the woman’s body; Virginia’s “stiff” fingers,

“rigid” limbs, and the threat of “complete paralyzation” all foreshadow a corpse’s rigor mortis.

This untimely progression towards death combined with her wasting body suggests that

Virginia’s labour results in a kind of premature, menopausal aging.

168

165

See Marjorie Levine-Clarke (2004).

166

Virginia’s complaints echo those of contemporary needlewomen whose suffering from this sedentary work led to

insanity, the sitting position causing gastroenteric peritonitis, and poor eyesight. See Mayhew (1851).

167

On the Victorian correlation between menstrual and lunar cycles and the tide, see Ornella Moscucci (1990, 33).

168

This portrayal of menstrual wasting is consistent with other seamstress stories, like Rosie in “The Seamstress,”

who becomes “a feeble remnant of womanhood—pale, wasted, almost ghastly” (19).

103

Early on in the novel, the description of Virginia’s exhausting work (work that gives rise

to that “feverishness” which excites her blood) foreshadows the pulmonary tuberculosis which

will eventually claim her. Indeed, this expenditure physiologically manifests in her blood turning

her cheeks a vivid red, for “upon the pallor of her cheeks a hectic glow is gradually suffusing

itself. Her respiration becomes short and quick; her veins tingle as the blood courses through

them like lightening” (2-3). Is this invigorated blood flow akin to the roses that return to

Virginia’s cheeks when they are exposed to the country air? Evidently not. Rather, this early

passage sets up a key polarity in the signifying capacities of female blood flows: while a rose-

like blush brought on by country air is a marker of vitality, this “hectic glow” portends death;

while Virginia’s crimson lips bespeak health, her unnaturally coursing blood connotes the

wasting effects of tuberculosis. This polarity points to a central contradiction in the signifying

capacities of bloodshed (health and sickness), but it is also a potentially productive contradiction

in that it suggests that the symbolic import of bloodshed can extend beyond physical injury and

illness and also indicate wellbeing. In this case, tubercular symptoms evoke a menstrual rhetoric

linked to time. Virginia may explicitly die of consumption, but this blood that “courses” through

her veins simultaneously hints at her blood “courses,” the common euphemism for menstruation.

For the verb “course” denotes the “flow” of blood, while a “course” indicates a period of time, as

in the case of a menstrual period or course. The symptomology of tuberculosis and menstruation

come together here to invoke a gendered over-expenditure of blood at one’s work. The

implication is that this relentless, draining work turns workers into living (short-lived) corpses.

Significantly, it is needlework that is the catalyst for these health changes, prompting the

reader to ask: what it is that makes this employment particularly draining? The mechanistic,

repetitive nature of the labour offers one explanation. If female health is linked in large part to

the temporal regularity of menstruation, then women’s health was intricately bound with time.

169

The “unnatural tide” of Virginia’s work here represents a perversion of the “natural tide” of

Virginia’s menstrual economy, which was a common concern amongst critics of the trade.

170

169

In 1843, a milliner by the name of Miss H. Baker petitioned the Royal Commission for shortened work hours and

no work at night, describing how needlewomen “often sit at work when they are so ill as to be scarcely able to stick

to their needle” (qtd in Levine Clarke, 172).

170

Levine-Clarke indicates how other physicians were concerned that sedentary occupations like sewing could have

the opposite effect on time by slowing down puberty. She cites one Dr. William Watts writing on the lace trade, who

104

meet her quota for productivity, Virginia must “ply the needles with a sort of automaton

accuracy” (3), the narrator describing how “‘[t]is now a mere mechanical process with her” (3).

Like an automaton, Virginia must take on a mechanized work cycle which puts her own

menstrual cycles out of order. This fear of the seamstress’s blood drainage is consistent with

William Blanchard Jerrold’s valorization of “The Iron Seamstress” (or sewing machine) in

Household Words (1854), which the author hopes will “drive the seamstresses of (not much)

flesh and blood to more remunerative employments” (576). As Virginia is not a machine, the

repetitive and demanding temporality of her work throws the temporality governing her uterine

economy out of sync, expending itself needlessly in this quite literally consuming occupation.

171

Virginia’s work demands an unsustainable pace which does not afford her time to rest, thus

wreaking havoc on her blood circulations and expending her energies at an accelerated pace. The

metaphor of bloodshed holds particular resonances within the Victorian medical accounts of

female physiology.

If the work exhausts her, then it is shown to literally exhaust her pumping heart; for the

narrator relates how “the ebb of the tide of energies so unnaturally forced in the same channel for

so many hours, begins in terrible earnest. The sensation is as if the warm blood were receding

from her heart and flowing out of the veins, bearing away all the vital powers on its crimson

current” (3). Virginia’s health relies on the economical circulation and expenditure of her blood,

but her occupation requires that she “spend” too much of it on producing her garment, effectively

meaning that she is metaphorically channeling her blood into a garment with the result that its

price is a blood price. We have already encountered the language of this expenditure of energy as

a “tide”; here, it becomes explicitly aligned with her blood. The metaphor of her blood as the

argued that “the uterine functions [of lace workers] are greatly deranged; difficult and scanty menstruation is the

most common disturbance. The period of menstruation is often delayed two or three years or more beyond the

natural period” (qtd in Levine Clarke 32)

171

Levine-Clarke argues that “The general medical opinion in the parliamentary evidence was that the female body

was in fact less suited to industrial labour than the male body because of its peculiar, delicate, and weaker

constitution” (27), and that medical men like Charles Aston Key also claimed that industrial work would impact “the

general health by interfering with the functions of [the reproductive part] of the system” (qtd 26). Levine-Clarke’s

own findings of working women’s own testimonies contradict this popular conceptualizations of women’s working

having a disruptive impact on their menstrual cycles, and women being less fit for work because of their physical

constitution. Rather, “They saw the regular functioning of their menstrual cycles as tenuous, but they also perceived

their bodies to be naturally strong, rather than weak” (182).

105

coursing tide of a “crimson current” connotes menstrual and tubercular modes of depletion alike.

Her emaciation thus presents itself as blood loss brought on by repetitive labour.

While her body tells the story of emaciation, Virginia’s continued decline is also written

on her face. Through a series of misadventures, in which she must seek employment elsewhere

after fleeing from her suitor Charles (whom she has been tricked into suspecting of infidelity),

poor Virginia finds herself in lodging house whose “pestilential atmosphere” (88) could have

been taken straight from Chadwick’s depictions of pathogenic living conditions of the poor.

172

Virginia takes on a deplorable position as a slop producer for an abominable company called

Messrs. Aaron and Sons. She now toils for eighteen hours a day earning only sixpence three

farthings, “out of which she had to purchase the thread” (88). The narrator continues to describe

her physical transformation in terms of blood loss:

[H]ow changed is she! Gone are the roses which the fresh air of Regent’s-park had

brought back to her cheeks during the day-dream of her love; and the lilies have taken

their place. Pale—yes, pale as alabaster is she—as if all vital colouring had fled from the

presence of a withering illness; and yet ill, in the strict sense of the term, she had not

been. Only the illness of the mind—the cankering disease of the heart—had she

experienced, – accompanied by the gradual waste of the frame which is produced by

sorrow, by poverty, by famine, and by crushing toil! Pale—oh! yes—pale as a statue is

Virginia Mordaunt!…. Her naturally slender shape had become thin and wasted…. And

as she sate upon that stool which had no support for her aching back, and plied her needle

with a celerity that must have resulted more from a sort of mechanical skill than from

physical energy, her hand as she raised it was so thin that it seemed transparent…. Too

delicate to bear any association with the idea of health… Her lips are thin and have lost

their roseate freshness…. Oh! To recall the roses to those pale cheeks and bring back the

elasticity of youthful vigour to that drooping form! (87-88)

Reynolds draws a correlation between the affective and medical sign systems of blushing in this

scene, attributing Virginia’s paleness to emotional and physical suffering indiscriminately:

172

“The house, which swarms with lodgers, is situate in a court where the atmosphere is tainted, the drainage is

deficient, and the water is scanty in supply and unwholesome in quality… Dwelling as it were in the midst of

contamination, she remained pure and chaste…” (87, 88).

106

heartbreak, mental disease, overwork, and starvation. Although the narrator clarifies that this

paleness in not yet pathological, we as readers know that pathological blood loss, in the

tubercular’s pulmonary haemorrhage, is also the occupational disease of her trade. Although the

narrator employs the affective register of the blush to interpret Virginia’s body (reading the loss

of her “vital coloring” from her face as symptomatic of romantic loss), readers familiar with the

medical register of blush can regard these diagnoses as comorbid, indicating emotional despair

and also indeed a “withering illness” which is, as yet, unnamed. Still, she retains a kind of death-

like beauty: these roses have been replaced by lilies of alabaster, such that her body resembles a

marble effigy. As for her frame, it is literally “wast[ing]” away as her body’s vital energy is

consumed in the act of “mechanical” labour. With her permanent paleness and her wasted frame,

Virginia’s transformation into the Pre-Raphaelite tubercular woman is nearly complete.

Unlike the tubercular aesthetic, however, which promotes a tubercular appearance

amongst the leisured classes as an embodiment of heightened intellectual capacities, Virginia’s

condition bespeaks her depleting physical labour and the deplorable living conditions which

accompany it. This description therefore has its basis not in poetic suffering but in blatant

economic and gendered oppression which, for Alex Tankard (2018), constitutes a significant

literary undercurrent in Victorian representations of tuberculosis. While the dominant cultural

representation of consumptives depicted them as Romanticized bourgeoisie wasting away in

their sick beds,

173

the countertrend that Tankard identifies shows tuberculars for what they more

often were: labourers who spent much of their existence working, suffering, and bleeding (2).

Virginia’s vital coloring, her lifeblood, symbolically flows out of her body and is wasted on the

objects of her minute attentions: affectively, this object is Charles; literally, it is the object of her

trade. In any case, her death-like appearance indicates a body that has been drained of blood.

Yet the drained Virginia has one final blood expenditure left within her. In her final days,

her symptoms become undeniable. The chapter in which Virginia dies is aptly named “The Sign

upon the Cheeks,” reminding us how Virginia’s facial blood flows function as readable “signs”

that indicate future events to readers and physicians alike. The narrator lists how Virginia’s

“short hollow cough,” the “quick and irregular beatings” of her heart, but most of all, “the

173

For a history of Victorian cultural stereotypes of consumption, see Tankard’s second chapter (2018).

107

occasional appearance of a hectic tint upon her cheeks, remaining longer and growing more vivid

each time it came,” were all “signs which the suffering girl was too sensitive to mistake and too

intelligent to endeavour to conceal from herself!” (96). Virginia’s knowledge of consumption

indicates her familiarity with the “hectic tint” as a harbinger of death. The hectic flush was

deemed to be a particularly cruel symptom of the disease precisely because of the blush’s

cultural correlation with health. Hopeful family and friends of the patient frequently

misinterpreted the flush as a blush of health rather than an indication of the final throes of the

disease.

174

When the former lovers are reunited in her final moments, Charles, too, “could observe

there was a hectic flush of immense excitement upon her cheeks” (106) as she lay in her

deathbed. This rush of blood to the face stands in for the pulmonary haemorrhage: as a result of

her dehumanizing labour, Virginia’s pale face has metonymically transformed into a kind of

living white handkerchief in the late stages of her illness. Her white face marked with two

concentrated spots of bright crimson serves as a human embodiment of the bloody handkerchief,

the undeniable sign of consumption’s internal ravages.

While it is undeniable that Virginia dies of consumption, there are also grounds to read

her death as being associated with a kind of menstrual depletion due to the distorted cyclicality

that the trade demands on the bodies of its workers. The “hectic flush” thereby serves as a

narrative device to stand in for more graphic and violent forms of blood loss, both pulmonary

and uterine haemorrhage, neither of which were appropriate subject matter for the respectable

novel. I will argue that these causes of death are not mutually exclusive for Reynolds, but rather

mutually constitutive, as facets of a larger cultural preoccupation with blood economies reaching

beyond biomedicine to political economy. As an indictment of exploitative industries in general,

bloodshed serves as a powerful metaphor for class suffering, but as a critique of a particularly

gendered form of labour, bloodshed takes on additional gendered iterations that make Reynolds’s

critique not only about poor workers but poor female ones.

174

While a flush was typical of most fevers, the word “hectic” was most often used to distinguish regular fevers

from fevers associated with consumption, also known as “hectic fever” (Byrne 140). For instance, Sontag quotes

Thoreau who, in 1852, wrote that “Death and disease are often beautiful… like the hectic glow of consumption” (qtd

in Sontag 20).

108

Blood Money: Transmissions and Transfusions

So far in the novel, Virginia’s metaphorical blood loss is consistent with destructive

representations of bloodshed found in literature on enslaved people and vampires. If Renfield is

right that “the blood is the life,” then the passing of blood from one body to another represents a

transfusion of the giver’s vital life energy to the recipient. Other scenes in Dracula certainly

convey blood-sharing in this way, both in the novel’s scenes of literal vampirism and in the

blood transfusions that ailing Lucy receives from her depleted romantic suitors. But how could

Reynolds, writing in 1850, represent notions of trans-corporeal flow well before the practice of

blood transfusion became a medical practice?

175

In The Social Life of Fluids: Blood, Milk, and

Water in the Victorian Novel (2010), Jules Law designates blood as “the most personal” of his

three “social” fluids, in large part because “in the absence of any reliable or sustained technology

for exchanging blood, discourses about its social itinerary were bound to be largely metaphorical

and symbolic” (5).

Ann Louise Kibbie, however, challenges Law’s assessment in her book Transfusion:

Blood and Sympathy in the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (2019) by claiming that

nineteenth-century literary and medical texts on blood transfusion capitalized on earlier models

of embodied “transfusion” to speculate about the material effects of blood sharing even before

the technologies for transfusion were available. During the eighteenth century, she argues,

transfusion was already a widespread concept within the discourse of sentimentality, referring to

a sympathetic but nonetheless corporeal transference of the self into the other. While Hood’s

poem suggests that his reader can achieve a kind of embodied sympathy by “drinking in” the

other, Kibbie’s study alternatively suggests that a person could outwardly channel their feelings

into another person’s body. Throughout the nineteenth century, she argues, blood transfusion

“represents an unprecedented convergence of biotechnical innovation with the discourse of

sentimentalism that had already exploited a physiological model in order to represent the vital

exchange between persons” (13). By making the case that nineteenth-century representations of

175

The first successful blood transfusion was performed by James Blundell in 1818 to save the life of a woman

suffering from postpartum hemorrhage, but the practice was still in its experimental stages until the discovery of

blood types in 1900.

109

blood transfusion were premised on a model of affective embodiment and trans-corporeality,

Kibbie invites us to consider how Victorians imagined both biofluids and sympathy not only as

“vital” energies but also as material-affective circuits that brought human bodies into

sympathetic contact with one another, suggesting positive possibilities for blood exchange.

The notion of blood relations—either in the sense of genetic relationship or the

imaginative forms of blood transfusion that Kibbie portrays—is not the only way that Reynolds

imagines the intricate material connections between people, from family members to strangers.

In The Seamstress, Reynolds imagines these intimacies within the image of sewing itself, an act

that, while having the potential to signify human connections, only serves to tie humans together

in exploitative relations. One the fundamental forms of capitalist alienation according to Marx is

the worker’s alienation from their product, since the capitalist mechanism demands that their

labour is converted into a generic exchange value.

176

The worker thus experiences estrangement

(German: Entremdung) when, ironically, she is actually interpolated into a web of material,

economic relations with fellow workers, the owners of the means of production, and the

bourgeois who purchases her goods.

In the first of fifteen

accompanying

illustrations for The

Seamstress (left),

Henry Anelay

dramatizes the split

between working-

class seamstresses

on the one hand

(represented by

Virginia seated at

her work on the

176

Marx and Engels first describes their theory of workplace alienation in the Economic and Philosophic

Manuscripts (1844) and later in The German Ideology (1845).

Figure 5. Henry Anelay, Illustration from George W. M. Reynolds’s The Seamstress

(1853). Public Domain.

110

left), and the wealthy consumers of her finery on the other (featuring the Duchess, the Duke, and

their daughters on the right).

177

McWilliam refers to the scene as a representation of “the two

nations of rich and poor,” in reference to Benjamin Disraeli’s term for England’s class divide in

his novel Sybil (1845).

178

Anelay divides these two classes by an enormous pair of shears

resembling a wall, and he depicts a pile of thread, needles, and sewing equipment at the base of

the shears (Fig 5). He thus presents the great divide between these subjects, but he

simultaneously undercuts this divide. For in drawing the thread as spilling over the boundary that

separates the two sides, Anelay figuratively stiches them together, demonstrating how a material

interconnectedness between producer and consumer underpins every capitalistic exchange.

179

Anelay depicts this state of relations as exploitative, and yet Reynolds’s will positively

reconfigure the material interconnectedness at its core.

The shears literalize what Karen Barad would call an “agential cut” (2007), a distinction

we impose between phenomena that are always already co-constitutive, materially (corporeal

bodies) and ideologically (nature and culture). Sewing and weaving have proven to be productive

metaphors to convey the intricate connectedness between phenomena, such as Donna Haraway’s

“string figures” (2016) as an emblem of material-semiotic entanglements.

In The Seamstress, Reynolds reveals the material lines between producer and consumer

to be even more intimate than thread; these lines, he suggests, are drawn in blood. If Virginia’s

labour amounts to a bloody expenditure, then where does that blood go? One of the major claims

of my dissertation has been that the mass migration into city centers that accompanied rapid

industrialization made it difficult to uphold a fantasy that human outputs (including human

wastes) simply disappeared into an externalized environment of “someplace else.” This fantasy

177

Stephen Knight also examines how the piece is “contrasting the world of the worker and that of the rich

exploitative consumer” (2019, 142).

178

McWilliam claims that the threads “sew a relationship between the two protagonists [the duchess and Virginia],”

but that Reynolds’s narrative is an “‘unpicking’ of the relationship between the two” (102). I, on the other, hand see

the novel as identifying the material connection between the two women, and demonstrating how the basis of that

relationship hangs on more than just a thread, through shared blood.

179

Patricia Zakreski (2006) concludes of Anelay’s illustration that “The physiognomic similarity between mother

and daughter emphasises that the position of each on either side of the needle is a mere matter of circumstance, that

the reduced gentlewoman and the feminine ideal are exchangeable in all but means (36). As we have seen, the

seamstress spends her vital energies in the garments that clothe her social superiors, and here we can trace the

material connection from Virginia’s needlework on the left to the spools of thread in center to the fine clothes of the

partygoers on the right.

111

was replaced with the reality that human outputs were reintegrated and recycled into the bodies

of London citizens. In my previous chapter, I argued that the sanitation movement transformed

ordinary people’s understandings of what made up human versus “natural” environments

because the discourse on cholera interpolated leaky human bodies into bodies of water in the

construction of disease transmission. Thus, while an attunement to the biomedical aspects of the

seamstress’s blood loss is informative— establishing a basis for material and affective forms of

energy depletion—these instances of bloodshed in themselves are only part of the equation.

For ultimately, Reynolds mobilizes depictions of bloodshed towards political ends by

imagining its trans-corporeal circulations, using blood not only to symbolize individual workers’

exploitation, or even their collective suffering, but also to articulate intimacies between

consumers and consumed. Like Hood, Reynolds uses the current state of material

interconnectedness between strangers to imagine an alternative state of bioethical relations.

180

Reynolds contends that the seamstress’s blood symbolically enters a series of trans-corporeal

channels which power a vampiric capitalism.

181

Throughout Virginia’s life and after her death,

the author engages in a critique of the clothing industry that resulted in her death, and the death

of countless other “white slave[s]” of England. In this way, Reynolds participates in a trend in

seamstress literature whereby the public’s consumption of slop amounts to two destructive

modes of trans-corporeality: metaphorical cannibalism and pathological contagion. Although

these images of bloodshed are representational, they are nonetheless grounded in very real

material structures and the ways they inflict very real harm on tangible bodies.

Both of these destructive modes of trans-corporeality stem from the fact that the lifeblood

that poor seamstresses like Virginia spill in their labour does not just disappear into the ether,

just as Thames pollution does not disappear into the sea. Rather, for Reynolds, the result of the

seamstress expending her energies in her work is that she puts her blood, sweat, and tears into

180

Consider the announcement of the novel’s publication in Reynolds Miscellany: “The object will be to expose…

one of the most fertile causes of oppression, misery, and demoralization which belong to the many abuses

characteristic of the social system. All classes of society will feel—or at least ought to experience, an interest in the

topic to be thus dealt with: the fair sex in particular will accord their sympathy to the subject of the New Tale” (qtd

Harris in 114).

181

For an even more graphic American counterpart to this narrative, see Herman Melville’s short story, “The

Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (1855), which displays a New England paper factory that is

112

her finished product. The class critique is clear: an innocent woman’s blood is the price for cheap

clothing. This image of the seamstress’s biofluids infusing her fabric litters popular portrayals of

the distressed needlewoman. Alexander, for instance, relates how Punch in 1834 criticized the

slop owner Henry Moses by claiming that “Moses and his class were doomed to walk the streets

of London arrayed in their choicest ‘slops’ (blood-stained as the shirt of Nessus, but without its

avenging qualities)” (qtd in Alexander 52). Harris similarly relates how one writer in 1843

describes “the pale consumptive haggard milliner’s girl – the creature whose very life-blood has

been wasted on that finery that, in its showy lustre, mocks her misery” (133).

Yet one of the evils of the slop trade was that this life fluid was not visible. In Perils of

the Nation (1843), Robert Benton Seeley asks: “How would the fashionable lady loathe the

costume that she most delights in, were the tears, the life-blood of the poverty-striken [sic]

sempstress employed by her artiste in the details of its embroidery, and in the combination of its

shapely proportions, made visible upon its surface?” (415). Through their writing, social

reformist authors like Seeley sought to render these life energies visible on the fabric in order to

reveal the physiological currents inherent in economic currents. Since the human cost of labour

(the blood, sweat, and tears) is integral to the product itself, this is an industry in which bodily

fluids are for sale. Our modern term “sweatshops,” referring to clothing industries with

deplorable working conditions and pay, captures this sentiment that what is being sold in the

finished product is human suffering, epitomized in a human bodily fluid evocative of that

suffering: sweat.

182

Something analogous to the “sweatshop” happens in Reynolds’s critique of the Victorian

slop industry, except this sweatshop is a “bloodshop.” What this means is that the industry is

characterized by a figurative cannibalism, as consumers of slop are portrayed as consuming the

body and the life of the needlewomen who produce it. Reynolds’s very use of the word “slop”

182

Modern sweatshops exploit workers by outsourcing labour countries in the Global South such as Bangladesh to

maximize profit margins. The current social movement against “fast fashion” targets major clothing companies for

their role in global capitalism, demonstrating how this form of labour is dangerous, dehumanizing, and generally

destructive to human life. One dramatic instance of this bloodshed was the 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza in

Bangladesh which killed 1,134 workers. As mentioned, the term “blood diamonds” carries the same cannibalistic

denotations. It is worth noting that simply being cognizant of these conditions in sweatshops is not enough to turn

many modern consumers away from fast-fashion, but there has increasingly been a movement towards ethical

production. See Carolin Becker-Leifhold and Mark Heuer (2018).

113

captures this collapsing of commercial and alimentary consumption, as the term widely referred

to a “Liquid or semi-liquid food of a weak, unappetizing kind; applied contemptuously to

invalids’ spoon-food, tea, etc.”

183

Appropriately, then, the slop establishment fed blood to the

ravenous appetites of an emerging class of fashionable consumers.

If this trans-corporeal exchange renders the seamstress’s “life-blood” a consumable good,

then we can understand this cannibalistic trade more precisely through the metaphor of

vampirism. Reynolds’s depictions of Messrs. Aaron and Sons certainly appeal to Gothic tropes

of vampirism with bloodsuckers in command; Reynolds posits that “vampyre-like” factory

owners “[drink] the blood of men, women, and little children,” and that they “maintain their

palatial establishments with the bones, blood, and sinews of famished seamstresses and starving

journeymen-tailors” (93-94).

184

For a Victorian readership, the vampiric capacity of these owners

would have been hinted at in their very namesake. For Aaron is a primarily Jewish surname

(Reynolds confirms that the owners are indeed Jewish), and rampant antisemitism within

Victorian England was such that authors’ portrayals of Jewish-owned companies often aligned

owners with the iconography of blood-sucking parasites and vampires, particularly in the matter

of sweated labor.

185

Reynolds’s Gothic description of the Aaron and Sons’ emporium would certainly not be

out of place in a Victorian penny dreadful. The building’s very architecture attests to the

cannibalistic processes that enable it to thrive. Our first vision is of “[t]he towering edifice, so

grand without and so superb within…[as] a mighty monument which capital has raised to honour

the Genius of Competition” (88). Aaron and Sons is the crowning achievement of modern

industry, but beneath its majestic exterior lies a grisly secret:

to view it morally, its aspect is hideous in the extreme. Its foundations are built with the

bones of the white slaves of England, male and female: the skeletons of journeymen and

183

See the OED entry for “slop”.

184

Female owners were not immune to this vampiric characterization. American John Cobden (1854) targets female

employers that profit “from the blood and the life of the wretched creatures in their employ” (180).

185

Harris notes the frequency with which the evil-Jewish-factory-owner trope is used in seamstress texts “as evil

employers driven to make an enormous profit […] or later in descriptions of the filth of the sweatshops and the body

of the immigrant Jew” (4). For more on the antisemitic representations of vampires, see Carol Margaret Davison

(2004). It is worth noting that Reynolds was known to be sympathetic towards Jewish persecution in England and

typically resisted these antisemitic stereotypes.

114

poor seamstresses, all starved to death, constitute the door-posts and the window-frames;-

the walls are made of skulls—the architectural devices are cross-bones—and the whole is

cemented firmly and solidly by the blood, pith, and marrow of the miserable wretches

who are forced to sell themselves in the Slave-Market of British Labour (88).

In this description, the narrator portrays emporiums like Aaron and Sons as capitalism’s

monument to Competition. The factory’s ornamental and gaudy exterior conceals the human

suffering upon which it was built, and which continues to uphold it, in much the same way that

Seeley’s piece of slop clothing carries on it the invisible, vital energies of the seamstress. If

what’s on offer at Aaron and Sons is the life fluids of its workers (central among them the blood

of poor seamstresses like Virginia) then the producers of slop are forced to not only sell their

labour but ultimately sacrifice their own bodies to these dehumanizing ends.

186

To be forced to

“sell themselves” aligns this exploitative physical labour with a kind of coerced prostitution, one

that is exemplified by Virginia’s experience with a salacious manager, who tries to coerce her

into sexual acts or risk being fired (as she is after she denies his advances). Virginia may escape

a life of a prostitution, but Reynolds indicates that as a distressed seamstress, she must

nonetheless “sell herself” in this dehumanizing “Slave Market.”

Scores of drained workers, money-hungry overseers, a bloodthirsty industry—Reynolds’s

tale bears all the trademarks of an economic critique of vampire capitalism. There is a tradition

in economic texts of representing an unjust economic system as draining its workers of their life

energy, perhaps most famously in Karl Marx’s 1867 Capital, which features Capital itself as a

“vampire-like” creature which “only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more

labour it sucks” (257). The construction predates Marx, however, with Friedrich Engels

describing the “vampire property-holding class” in 1845’s The Condition of the Working Class in

England, and Voltaire representing the “stock-jobbers, brokers, and men of business, who sucked

the blood of these people in broad daylight” as early as 1764 (143-144).

187

Such metaphors of

186

Like Reynolds, Kingsley also appeals to the cannibal metaphor in Cheap Clothes and Nasty, calling the sweating

industry a process of “Man eating man, eaten by man, in every variety of degree and method!,” and asking

sardonically, “Why does not some enthusiastic political economist write an epic on ‘The Consecration of

Cannibalism?’” (9). Kingsley claims that the “thresholds [of consumers’ houses] are rank with human blood” (26).

187

In his engagement with Marx’s vampires, Mark Neocleous (2003) considers how the famed philosopher employs

the Gothic imagery of blood loss in Volume I to describe “the constant sucking of the blood of the Western working

class by the bourgeois class” (668). For an excellent historicization of the metaphor, see Neocleous.

115

blood-sucking capitalism have garnered much attention in criticism,

188

and here, the narrator’s

depiction attests to Reynolds’s own “red” proclivities, his attunement to exploitative working

conditions in the interests of establishing a shared class consciousness.

If the clothing trade is a trade in biofluids, then that makes its participants susceptible to

contagion. Blood could span matter and metaphor: transfusion encapsulates physical and

affective circuits, while vampirism links material and political economies. It is perhaps

unsurprising (given blood’s material-discursivity) that Reynolds’s depictions of blood also

straddle the line between literal and metaphorical contagion. As I have argued in previous

chapters, Victorian contagion anxieties are, in their essence, anxieties about the strange new

intimacies forged between strangers in the era of industry and mass urbanization. However, one

important qualification to make in this chapter is that unlike the popular consensus about cholera

after 1855, Victorians did not widely recognize tuberculosis to be a contagious disease, nor did

they regard menstrual fluid as a vector of contagion in the way that human milk and vaginal

lubrication were considered suspect.

189

Nonetheless, Harris argues that authors on the Victorian

seamstress construe the clothing industry as one that was catching;

190

they fashion the circulation

of clothing as a trans-corporeal blood exchange that results in an epidemic of moral

“consumption”—consumerism—which they held to be spreading throughout England. Virginia’s

contraction of tuberculosis at the hands of the clothing industry already testifies to the pathogenic

nature of mass consumption; she is forced to senselessly give her bodily fluids over to an

industry which turns them into commodities to be consumed, vampire-like, by the fashionable

classes. While her consumption, in itself, may not be literally contagious, Reynolds brings

together social anxieties about mass consumption’s metaphorical contagion with concerns about

literal contagion within the clothing industry. Like Hood with his drowned fallen woman,

Reynolds enlists the seamstress’s body as a site of transmission in order use the material contact

188

See, for instance, the works of Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger (1997), David McNally (2011), Aspasia

Stephanou (2014), and Nick Groom (2018).

189

On Victorian beliefs about menstruation as a source of contagion, see Elaine Showalter and English Showalter

(1970). On the Victorian belief that women’s vaginal fluids spontaneously generated venereal disease, see Mary

Carpenter (2010).

190

Harris writes that “in the debates about sweated labour from the late nineteenth-century, the fear that clothing

was transmitting contagious diseases to the consumer became more urgent and more frequent, but it was always an

inherent part of the narrative” (2005, 3).

116

as a precedent for reimagining how non-exploitative forms of trans-corporeal exchange between

strangers. In Reynolds’s case, the antidote to these destructive forms of trans-corporeality is class

consciousness.

While Seeley sought to imaginatively illuminate the seamstress’s bodily fluids on the

garment she produced, in reality, they were invisible. This invisibility was an uncomfortable

reality for consumers because they had no way of knowing whether the garment carried

infectious disease. Victorians recognized a whole myriad of diseases as being transmitted

through the medium of infected biofluids that dried on fabric, such as smallpox, typhus, and

especially scarlet fever (hence the common practice of burning bedsheets after someone in the

household recovered from the illness).

191

Naturally, then, an infected slop worker posed a threat

of disease transmission. Therefore, although tuberculosis was not widely recognized as being

contagious until 1882, the poor seamstress was still nonetheless considered host to a whole

constellation of workplace diseases spreading through fabric. By the mid-nineteenth century, the

narrative of the distressed needlewoman often featured this idea that the figure could transmit her

own illnesses into the finished garment, which would consequently infect the consumer.

Occasionally, authors suggested that the seamstress’s consumption was literally contagious,

192

but most authors, like Charles Kingsley, used general constructions of the seamstress’s contagion

as a rhetorical strategy in order to suggest that consumers who were oblivious to the suffering of

the seamstress were receiving their just deserts if they were infected with one of her occupational

diseases.

193

In Cheap Clothes and Nasty (1850), Kingsley writes:

Ought they [consumers] to take no security when they invest their money in clothes, that

they are not putting on their backs accursed garments, offered in sacrifice to devils,

191

The Sanitary Act of 1866 reveals the contagiousness of fabric to be firmly established, maintaining that “any

person who without previous disinfection gives, lends, sells, transmits, or exposes any bedding, clothing, rags, or

other things which have been exposed to infection from such disorders, shall, on conviction of such offence before

any justice, be liable to a penalty not exceeding £5” (89).

192

A warning in Punch in 1845 stated: “The question has been mooted, whether consumption is contagious. We do

not mean to assert that it is; and we would not frighten anybody […] unnecessarily; but we do declare than we

should not, were it consistent with our sex, at all like to be in the frocks of those whose dresses have wrought by

consumptive fingers” (“Punch on the Silkworm,” 92).

193

Kingsley’s Chartist novel Alton Locke (1850) uses the trope of infectious fabric as a means of doling out

narrative justice in this way; after Alton’s cousin George ruthlessly steals a coat from one of the dead bodies of the

Downes family, who have all died from fever, he contracts the fever from the coat, sickens and dies. George’s

demise serves as a lesson against his “buy-cheap-and-sell-dear commercialism” (372).

117

reeking with the sighs of the starving, tainted - yes, tainted, indeed, for it comes out now

that diseases numberless are carried home in these same garments from the miserable

abodes where they are made.... So Lord ---’s coat has been seen covering a group of

children blotched with small pox. The Rev. D --- finds himself suddenly unpresentable

from a cutaneous disease, which it is not polite to mention on the south of Tweed, little

dreaming that the shivering dirty being who made his coat has been sitting with his arms

in the sleeves for warmth while he stitched at the tails. The charming Miss C is swept off

by typhus or scarlatina, and her parents talk about ‘God’s heavy judgement and

visitation’ - had they tracked the girl’s new riding habit back to the stifling undrained

hovel where it served as a blanket to the fever-stricken slop worker, they would have

seen why God had visited them, seen that his judgments are true judgments... (xii-xiii)

Kingsley is no doubt sympathetic to these destitute workers—the smallpox-ridden children, the

“shivering dirty being[s],” and the “fever-stricken slop worker[s]” of the world, and yet these

workers are nonetheless “tainted,” just as their products become tainted, by communicable

disease, which is woven into the moral disease of a society that is figuratively sick with a

devastating case of consumption (as evinced by Kingsley’s reference to devil-worship).

While diseased child needleworkers may still convey innocence, moral and literal

contagion are harder to disarticulate in the case of the seamstress, who was often forced to

supplement her paltry wages by resorting to prostitution. In The Seamstress, Reynolds does his

best to disarticulate the seamstress’s physiological disease from her moral character, even if she

must resort to a licentious lifestyle. When Virginia first resorts to the needle for a livelihood, she

gets a glimpse into the avenues the poor seamstress must take to survive. Virginia’s fellow

seamstress and friend Julia Barnett supplements her own income by becoming a mistress to a

man who (ironically) gifts her fine dresses (a man whom we later find out is Charles). Julia is a

foil for pure Virginia, but both are bound by their similarly tragic fate.

Reynolds’s depiction of Julia is unusual amongst representations of fallen woman

because she is not only sympathetic but eloquent in detailing her own oppression. Julia

recognizes Virginia as one of “thousands of poor friendless creatures” who will succumb to

moral corruption or death (43). “With a slight variation here and there,” she tells her, “perhaps,

all this portion of your narrative is mine also: but I have advanced one step farther than you in

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the career of the seamstress… you have hitherto retained your virtue, whereas I have lost mine”

(43). Virginia’s first instinct upon hearing of Julia’s moral corruption is to “fly, as she would

from temptation” (43), fearful that she might contract her friend’s shame. However, once Julia

reveals that selling her virtue was the only way to survive,

194

Virginia recognizes how she might

face this dilemma herself, admitting, “I was just now disposed to blame you: but at present I

commiserate you—deeply, deeply commiserate you” (44). Like Virginia, Julia has suffered the

draining effects of this work, saying, “I have worked, Virginia, until my eyes have grown dim,

and my brain has reeled, and life seemed ebbing away from my heart!” (43). Even fallen, Julia is

a sympathetic character, and she provides a powerful defence of her choices—which channels

Reynold’s overall critique of the industry—when she demands:

Let those who blame me, act justly and blame the system of society. I am one of its

victims—not one of its modellers.… Go and gaze through the brilliantly-lighted windows

of the great mansions at the West End of the town, and watch the forms of the dancers as

they throw their shadows upon the curtains while bounding past: then say to yourself that

the gorgeous robe and elegant dress of every high-born lady there is stained by the life-

blood and infected by the pollution of the poor seamstresses who made them all! (44)

Julia characterizes clothing production as a profoundly physiological event by which the

seamstress’s “life-blood” stains her garment, as though she pricked her finger at the needle. In

turning her focus from the individual to the “system of society,” Julia articulates how the

clothing industry is a porous system that operates through a series of intimacies between

strangers, not unlike prostitution itself. High-born ladies do not recognize that in wearing their

costumes, they put themselves into intimate contact with the poor seamstresses who made them.

Julia, then, confirms Seeley’s argument: the seamstress’s bodily fluids not only exit her body but

enter the garment and, by extension, the body of its owner, making the transaction a deeply

embodied one.

195

Julia thus reveals the “Slave-Market of British Labour” (88) as a series of far-

reaching trans-corporeal networks that trade in the seamstresses’ biofluids. Julia attends to the

imagery of literal and moral contagion surrounding the seamstress and recalibrates it into an

194

Cf. Annie Besant (1876): “Men are immoral for their amusement; women are immoral for bread” (7).

195

On the relationship between clothing and disease, see David (2015) and Christensen (2005).

119

attack against the utter hypocrisy of this “Slave-Market.” She does not explicitly deny that the

seamstress is a diseased figure; she does, however, suggest that the pathology that the seamstress

exhibits is a direct outcome of a consumer demand for cheap products which does not provide

her with a living wage, necessitating her recourse to prostitution in the first place.

196

Ironically, it is Julia’s experience of moral corruption that has afforded her a heightened

sense of empathic connection with others like herself. She recalls: “[n]ever, never have I been so

much moved by profound feelings since the day on which I plunged into the abyss of what the

world calls shame.” She continues, gesturing to Virginia, saying, “Your own history first touched

a cord which long had slumbered in my soul;—and the vibration, which went to the deepest

confines of my being, aroused all the latent associations that slept in the profoundest cells of my

memory” (44). Julia’s disclosures to Virginia about the seamstress’s eventual “career” reveals

how the same narrative of fallenness that contributes to a parable of female contagion also gives

way to a profound sense of female community amongst women sharing a similar fate. Virginia,

whose initial impulse is to turn away from Julia’s contamination, eventually invites a contagion

of sympathetic feeling to enter her body, and Julia in turn experiences trans-corporeal connection

to Virginia, whose story profoundly touches a sympathetic “cord” in her, a counterimage to the

tenuous, anonymous connection between seamstress and consumer, a connection which quite

literally hangs by a thread.

Ultimately, the moral epidemic is more destructive than whatever epidemic diseases the

seamstress may carry. While Reynolds sympathizes with the fallen needlewoman, he is not able

to disarticulate a legacy of moral and pathological contagion singlehandedly; indeed, he explores

positive aspects of contagion that the seamstress embodies. Instead, he aligns negative forms of

contagion with the slop industry itself, the breeding grounds for contagion both real and

metaphorical. Indeed, Reynolds extends disease beyond the realm of ordinary pathology to

supernatural curse:

The palatial emporium is a colossal proof of the grinding tyranny which capital wields

over labour, and the influence which it exercises over wages. Upon ancient Egypt did

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Reynolds echoes this critique of hypocrisy later when he relays the statistic that nine-tenths of needle-women in

London must resort to vice to survive (93), that the current charitable efforts for fallen women frequently valorize

“female virtue” while thousands of women “have neither the power nor the inducement to be virtuous” (93).

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God in his wrath send the plagues of darkness, locusts, and murrain: but over modern

Europe has Satan diffused the far more awful pestilence of competition. And it is this

accursed system which makes the emporium of Messrs. Aaron and Sons flourish for the

benefit of its proprietors; while the vapours of demoralization, despair, famine, sickness,

and death emanate from its portal and infect the atmosphere that is breathed by a large

portion of the community. (88)

Capitalism, in other words, is the factory of pestilence, and Aaron and Sons functions as a

microcosm for capitalism’s “grinding tyranny.” This company flourishes by “grinding” down its

workers into a pulp, extracting their life energy and using it to feed the masses. Reynolds

constructs consumption (in both senses) as a morally contagious disease, a blight upon modern-

day society in which the poor seamstress is the innocent collateral damage and yet

simultaneously, inescapably, its central icon. These realities render the seamstress’s tuberculosis

contagious in two major ways; firstly, literally, in its association with a set of interrelated

contagious diseases, and second, metaphorically, in its association with a pervasive and

spreading moral corruption wrought by capitalism. Poor seamstresses might distribute diseases

with their handiwork, but this is but a tiny fraction of the immense pathological power that the

industry wields. To abstract Virginia’s labour from its blood price—that is, to regard her

bloodshed as symbolic only—is to reinscribe the process by which workers like herself are

repeatedly alienated from their own material productions, abstracting economic flows from

material ones.

A Nourishing Kind of Consumption: The Biofluid Currents of Sympathy

Is all hope truly lost in the world of Reynolds’s representation? Thus far in my reading,

the novel’s representations of leaky bodies and trans-corporeal exchanges have all been

negatively coded as functions of violent, biofluid economies, intimacies forged between

strangers who consume the blood of clothing producers and contract diseases from their tainted

commodities. Blood may join these workers together in their suffering, but the destructive

associations of bloodshed place limits on the available modes for imagining collective identity in

any way that is not violent or exploitative. If Reynolds envisions bloodshed as the embodied

metaphor for collective class suffering, of bleeding together, then how might he employ such

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biofluids to represent collective class healing? Reynolds presents an antidote to workplace

alienation in a construction of class consciousness that operates through similarly embodied and

material exchanges. Class consciousness replaces worker alienation, and the imagery of tears and

milk replaces capitalism’s bloody trans-corporeal exchanges between producer and consumer

with a notion of a collective social body composed of united workers who provide mutual aid

and needs-based care to one another.

The Seamstress’s evocations of trans-corporeality in cannibalism and contagion are

undeniably destructive, contributing to largescale disease and death, not least for our protagonist.

Yet these narratives also articulate the profoundly embodied connections between strangers as a

reality of the modern era, a reality which in itself is not inherently negative. For even in the midst

of such oppressive conditions, Virginia exhibits alternative modes of trans-corporeality—modes

that are productive rather than destructive. For Reynolds, the alternative to these violent modes

of trans-corporeal exchange is sympathy for one’s fellow worker, a simultaneously embodied

and affective entity flowing between characters. Gesturing towards the hidden economies of

tears and breastmilk that are shared willingly and freely within working-class networks, I end

this chapter by considering how Reynolds reconfigures a community of strangers into a

community of symbolic kin, anticipating feminist materialist ethics which have sought to disrupt

the dominant notion of selfhood as closed, individuated subjects and replace it with an

understanding of ethical practice as the recognition of a political mattering of inter- and intra-

acting “leaky” bodies.

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The seamstress’s draining blood is not the only instance of a fluid outpouring in the

novel; Virginia also frequently performs an embodied sentimentality in the act of shedding tears.

Informed by Rohan McWilliam’s argument that The Seamstress employs elements of melodrama

for radical ends, by encouraging readers “to identify with the suffering of others, whether slaves

or seamstresses” (100), I consider this melodrama’s sentimentality as being more than a feature

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This notion of a materialist feminist ethics has been informed by Margrit Shildrick’s Leaky Bodies and

Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and [Bio]Ethics (1997) as well as Barad’s “onto-ethical-epistemological”

scheming (2007), the latter originating in an understanding that “the primary ontological unit is not independent

objects with independently determinate boundaries and properties but rather […] phenomena” (33), representing a

departure from “liberal social and political theories and theories of scientific knowledge alike [which] owe much to

the idea that the world is composed of individuals—presumed to exist before the law, or the discovery of the law—

awaiting or inviting representation” (46).

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of “a romance whose purpose was to make readers cry” (which McWilliam reduces it to, 102),

but rather central to the envisioning of an ethical model of relation premised upon shared bodily

fluids. Virginia exhibits a profound sympathy towards her fellow suffering human being and, in

such moments, Reynolds sees her giving over another one of her bodily fluids, her tears,

willingly and freely as an act of care towards others. As a poor, working-class woman, Virginia

may not have much in the way of material goods to offer others, but what she does have is great

generosity of spirit, which Reynolds designates as a common trait amongst working-class folk.

This formulation of sympathy as something shared amongst rather than merely for the

Victorian working-classes is in keeping with Brigid Lowe’s account of Victorian authors’ usage

of the term. In Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy (2007), Lowe points out that

“Dickens uses the word [sympathy] most often with regard to the attitude of the poor towards

one another,” rather than a “vertical sympathy” which a social superior feels towards their

inferior, a fact that indicates “a sense of solidarity amongst the poorest which is less common

amongst the middle-classes” (7). I would argue that, like Dickens, fellow social critic Reynolds

also represents this possibility of “a sense of solidarity amongst the poorest” through their

sympathetic circulations, and in The Seamstress, these fluid circulations are distinctively

embodied. This reading of Reynolds’s material grounding of sympathetic relations goes against

the predominant model of Victorian sympathy as an abstract, disembodied experience,

popularized by Audrey Jaffe (2000) and developed by Rae Grenier (2012), and dovetails with

more recent accounts of Victorian sympathy as a phenomenological, corporeal, and, above all,

material act.

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As I explore in my previous chapter on the drowned fallen woman, Victorian sympathetic

economies were not only classed and embodied, but also markedly gendered. The most

conventional embodiment of sympathy is the act of shedding tears, and Reynolds underscores the

feminized nature of this sympathetic act by associating weeping with lactation as related

channels through which women express care. In The Seamstress, female sympathy typically

involves a woman’s outflow of tears, frequently accompanied by her heaving bosom. Whenever

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See Rob Boddice (2016), Tara MacDonald (2018), Pamela K. Gilbert (2019), and Rebecca Spence (2022), all of

whom argue that Victorian affect was entrenched in evolutionary conversations about human physiological

processes.

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Virginia weeps, the process enlists her entire body as a leaky vessel capable of expressing

compassion towards even the least deserving person. When Virginia’s previous landlord tells her

how desperate Charles was to find her, the narrator describes how “Virginia struggled hard to

keep down [her emotions], but they rose—they rose, defying all resistance; higher and higher

they surged, like gathering billows in the storm—until at length the tears flowed in torrents down

her cheeks—her bosom was convulsed in sobs—and she was melted into a tenderness so

complete that had her lover entered at that moment, she would have rushed into his arms” (92).

Moments later, “Virginia continued to weep and sob, while her hands were clasped firmly

together, and her bosom palpitated violently” (92). This frequent coupling of a weeping woman

and her heaving bosom,

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which is absent when male characters weep, reiterates the feminized

construction of sentimentality that I explore in my previous chapter, a sentimentality that

fashions women’s bodies as leaky in their sympathetic capacity to rupture subjective boundaries.

The bosom is the seat of feeling, of emotional expression,

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but as a synonym for breasts, the

bosom is also the site of processes of literal expression and circulation. Reynolds enlists the act

of weeping as a physiological process analogous to lactation, and weeping for others akin to

breastfeeding, which conveys a nourishing trans-corporeal exchange. In this way, he evokes the

polysemic meanings of the verb “to nurse” as an act of physiological and affective sharing and

caring.

The recurring image of Virginia’s heaving bosom hints at the possibility that this

sentimentality might serve to nourish others. Though perhaps bizarre to modern readers, the

image of a woman breastfeeding an adult was an ancient model of care, known as Romana

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There are numerous other examples. For instance, when the Duchess asks Virginia about her dead parents, “the

half-stifled sobs […] convulsed Virginia’s bosom” (12); when Virginia tells Julia about her mother’s sudden death,

“her voice had become broken and scarcely audible with the profound sobs that convulsed her bosom” (42); when

she considers her wedding day and grieves her lost family “she struggled with the feelings that were agitating in her

bosom: but they gained the mastery, and she burst into tears” (64); When she receives the false information that her

suitor, Charles is untrue, Virginia’s response is intensely physiological: “the full tide of her poignant anguish

swelled forth in torrents of tears and piteous lamentations” (86). During this time, the narrator notes: “how

frequently did she find the scalding tears raining down her cheeks and her bosom palpitating violently with the sobs

that half suffocated her” (87); moments later, he declares: “how bitterly she wept!—how profoundly her bosom was

convulsed with sobs!” (87).

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The novel frequently uses of the word “unbosom” to describe the act of sharing feelings with another.

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Caritas, or Roman Charity.

201

According to the story of antiquity, selfless Pero secretly

breastfeeds her aged father, Cimon, who is imprisoned and sentenced to death by starvation. The

narrative serves as an emblem of pietas, or filial piety. In a Christian context, the Roman story

lends itself to ideals of Christian selflessness which harken to medieval iconography of the

breastfeeding Christ, a nurturing stand-in for the savior’s cannibalistic, Eucharistic offering.

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the context of mid-century Victorian England, a woman breastfeeding an infant other than her

own was common practice, central to the booming wet nurse industry. As many critics have

pointed out, this was an industry which was built on the exploitation of working-class women

whose biofluids were commodified, to say nothing of the forced wet nursing amongst enslaved

women in the American context.

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Yet, offerings of breastmilk in place of flesh and blood,

freely given amongst working-class networks, represent a stark contrast to Reynolds’s depictions

of the forcible draining of biofluids that working-class labourers must undergo in capitalist

industries. As Susan Falls argues in White Gold: Stories of Milk Sharing Practices (2017), breast

milk sharing practices can represent a radical form of “need-based community making between

strangers in the context of contemporary commodity capitalism” (4). In the Victorian era, a gift

economy of biofluids (much like modern milk sharing networks) operates outside of exploitative,

financial economies. This gift economy offers a means of imagining alternative ethical futures

for relation beyond the exploitative vampirism of Reynolds’s imagining.

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In her illness, Virginia herself requires nursing. In her final days, Virginia is sick and

friendless; her evil employers, in addition to draining her of her life energy, have pitted her

against her working-class neighbours, depriving her of all friends. The illness begins to overtake

her to the extent that (despite not wanting to be a burden) she knows that she needs care.

Fittingly, devoid of vital fluids, Virginia is dying of thirst. The narrator notes: “Painfully did the

poor girl drag herself from the miserable pallet to procure some water to slake the burning thirst

that she experienced. She was ill—and she required attentions, necessaries, and comforts: but

201

In White Gold: Stories of Breast Milk Sharing (2017), Susan Falls considers the narrative of Romana Caritas as

an ameliorative model for milk sharing practices outside of economic transactions (73-75).

202

See Caroline Walker Bynum’s Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (1982).

203

See works by Law, Steere-Williams, Berry, and Carroll.

204

Reynolds also anticipates needs-based economies of blood; consider the slogan of the Canadian Blood Services:

“It’s in you to give.” On the role of tissue economies in capitalism, see Mitchell and Waldby (2006).

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there was no friendly hand to minister unto her—no voice to speak of solace and hope in her

ears” (95-96). Her isolation is soon complete: “Around her were the four cold, cheerless walls of

the chamber, seeming to frown upon the helpless invalid as darkly as her own fate…. how

suffocating were the sobs which convulsed that gentle breast of thine!” (96).

Virginia’s comfort in these final hours depends on the kindness not of family, but of

strangers. One by one, her poor fellow lodgers, beginning with a poor Irish needlewoman, set

aside their judgements and come nurse her, helping to give her some tea to quell her thirst. The

shift from internalized blame to empathy demonstrates the community’s development of a class

consciousness, an awareness of their own and others’ suffering as a function of class struggle.

The operative word to describe this process of subsistence is “nursing,” encapsulating both a

feminized act of care and a collective model of working-class milk kinship.

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Note the

generosity of Virginia’s fellow lodgers in the following passage, which I quote at length because

it provides a way in to understanding Reynolds’s vision of working-class solidarity:

The beverage was most welcome to the invalid and the Irishwoman insisted upon

remaining with her a considerable portion of the night. Next day every lodger in the

house, when informed of Virginia’s illness, did somewhat towards her succour and

assistance: one sent a little tea and sugar – another a loaf – a third some gruel – and the

poor Irishwoman went out and secretly pledged her shawl to purchase a scrag of mutton

to make the sick girl some broth. Thus it is that the poor assist each other in the hour of

need; – and those very persons who had laughed and jeered at Virginia… were now eager

and anxious to testify their good feeling towards her. For though poverty and the

extremes to which it drove them, had destroyed their delicate notions of morality, yet

their feelings were not blunted by the same influences: on the contrary, they who were so

cruelly oppressed, scourged, persecuted, tortured, and trampled-upon by their task-

masters, were full of the milk of human kindness towards a suffering fellow-creature! Oh!

How sublime is the disposition of the working-classes, not only in this country but in

every other; – and it is because they are thus generous, noble-hearted, thus magnanimous,

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In this way, we might consider how the word “nurse” provides a counterpoint to the word “haemorrhage,” which

is associated with a destructive feminine-coded experience of suffering, tuberculosis, and workplace exploitation.

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and thus humane, that the writer of this tale loves them so well –devotes himself so

fervidly to their interests –and swears by all that is sacred never to desert their cause so

long as he had the power the wield a pen or raise a voice to proclaim their wrongs and

assert their rights.” (96, emphasis added)

Tea, gruel, broth—these simple foods represent the most basic sustenance for the invalid,

providing a productive and nourishing counterpart to the “slop” that these workers are losing

their bodily fluids in order to produce—a slop which does not meaningfully feed the masses, but

rather feeds the frivolous appetites of the fashionable classes. Despite having so little to offer, the

working classes are willing to sacrifice their own meager sustenance—for a stranger no less.

Reynolds poses the question: with virtually nothing of their own, what can the poor offer by way

of care? In lieu of possessions, what they offer is an embodied sentiment. In a real sense, they

offer their own bodies in physical acts of care; symbolically, they offer “the milk of human

kindness,” freely given, from their sympathetic bosoms to the sick girl who is dying of thirst.

The fact that this kindness is a kind of “milk” reinforces the lactational quality of this nursing, as

the strangers nurse the infantile Virginia with nourishing foods as well as with their offering of

sympathy.

Reynolds presents an image here of the antidote coming from within. That is, care for the

most vulnerable in society also stems from the most vulnerable members of society. This

sentiment risks being reactionary, not radical, were it not for the fact that Reynolds (as I explain

below) is careful to clarify that this sharing is not a political end in itself, but a precondition for

transformation. First, he designates this sharing as a means by which the working classes develop

a class consciousness strong enough to organize collectively. Second, he considers this symbolic

milk-sharing to inspire middle-class activism, spurring writers like himself to “[devote] himself

so fervidly to their interests,” “proclaim their wrongs,” “assert their rights” (96), and otherwise

become an advocate for them.

This generosity on behalf of Virginia’s neighbours is not short-lived. We discover that

“[f]or nearly a month was poor Virginia stretched upon her pallet; – and all this time did she

subsist upon the benevolence of her neighbours” (96). Reynolds therefore hints that the remedy

to save this “white slave” is the white salve of breastmilk, an emblem for working-class unity

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and a trans-corporeal exchange that is not premised upon the exploitation of workers’ blood, but

a sustainable “subsistence” on their mutual feeling.

206

It is through this episode showcasing the generosity of her peers that Virginia develops a

vision of what a government supporting this natural state of generosity would look like:

She had now learnt that the men who often made night hideous with their drunken orgies,

were in reality good-hearted creatures, who were amongst the very first to club together

their pittances and procure for her use better food than they ever dreamt of purchasing for

themselves; and she found likewise that the female who were so ready with their gibes

and gests respecting her virtue and her prudence, were far from being the last to bring

comforts to her sick bed. And then she thought within herself, “O God! if there were but

a just government, an honest legislature, and a good social system in this country, what

wonders might not be wrought with a people in whose minds are already existing the

germs of every generous feeling and every moral excellence!—and Oh! that there shall

yet come an Hour and arise a Man to give freedom to those enslaved masses and evoke

all the grand and noble qualities which now lie concealed beneath the weight of tyranny

and oppression!” (96)

By thinking of the food provisions with which her neighbours supply her, Virginia imagines a

new social order in which the “plague” of capitalism is supplanted by the “germs” of universal

human generosity. Of course, the word “germ” did not yet connote a microorganism causing

infectious disease, but before germ theory, the word still referred to the causative agent or source

of diseases like cancer, and infectious disease like smallpox.

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Even the horticultural meaning

retains this sense of a “germ” as a causative agent of transformation when it is spread, as a germ

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Note that this form of symbolic breastmilk exchange is shared within the working-classes themselves, which

seems significant given that working-class peoples’ breastmilk was yet another bodily fluid (like blood) which was

exploited and commodified for middle-class use within the booming wet nursing trade mid-century. See Laura C.

Berry (1999) and Jules Law (2010) for literary representations of the working-class figure.

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The Oxford English Dictionary sites an instance in 1700 and 1845 referring to the “germ” of cancer, and

instances of the word used in 1764 and 1803 describing smallpox. The word was often used in the context of

miasma to describe the atmospheric spread of disease. For instance, in 1831, The Journal of the Royal Institution of

Great Britain (Volume 1) references a paper by one Dr. Jahinichen which concludes that cholera as “A germ or

miasma of cholera emanating from a diseased person exists in the atmosphere surrounding him” (cited in 567).

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of wheat is carried by the wind.

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Virginia’s words about spreading the germ of human kindness

thereby evoke a positive form of contagion. The meaning of consumption shifts in this scene

from pathology and commodity towards meeting the most basic human need: hunger for food.

Consistent with dialectical materialism, Virginia imagines political change as emerging from

basic material needs. Fighting for survival, poor communities demonstrate an inherent awareness

of the primacy of matter (food, water, shelter, and clothing) as well as its interconnectedness

(vampire capitalism’s “tyranny and oppression”). Virginia imagines how a “good social system”

would replace this destructive trans-corporeality with the kind of needs-based care already

modeled by the poor.

The poor class provide a model for care ethics, but Reynolds has already established that

alone they are incapable of improving their situation if not for the recognition of middle-class

and aristocratic readers. While Virginia’s community performs a trans-corporeal ethics of care

which Reynolds designates as the exclusive property of the working classes, it is Virginia who

represents the possibility of expanding this model of need-based care to all social classes.

Virginia is a fitting character for this interclass purpose, for in her final moments, it is revealed to

her that while she has been living as a poor, working-class woman, she nonetheless has noble

blood flowing through her veins: she is the biological daughter of a Countess and a gentleman.

Virginia’s noble birth means that she embodies an unexpected interweaving between the

fashionable classes and the poor seamstresses who produce their garments. In the final scene of

Virginia’s life, Reynolds thickens the significance of blood sharing beyond a destructive mode of

trans-corporeality within the slop industry and towards a revelation of the material bonds that

bring strangers together. Virginia realizes on her deathbed that the woman for whom she

produced the velvet dress at the beginning of the novel actually shares her blood: for the Duchess

is her biological mother.

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The Duchess has lived a luxurious lifestyle and is “reduced by

circumstances” on account of all of her purchases of finery (11), but with the realization that this

208

See the OED entry for “germ.” For how these meanings overlapped, consider DeLacy (2016). Snow uses the

analogy of flakes of dried fecal matter spreading cholera like germs of plants that spread on the wind (1849).

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Recall that the event which sets off Virginia’s decline is the production of this velvet dress. When Virginia

delivers the dress to the Duchess and proclaims her name as Virginia Mordaunt, the Duchess, who was forced to

give up her illegitimate daughter but arranged for a comfortable allowance for her, is horrified that Virginia has

taken up work as a needlewoman.

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anonymous seamstress is her own daughter, the Duchess is forced to come to terms with the fact

that her clothing is stained by her own daughter’s lifeblood rather than that of an anonymous

seamstress. The blood transaction that we are to assume takes place between strangers is,

therefore, actually a mother’s unwitting cannibalization of her own daughter. The change that

takes place upon the Duchess’s discovery of material (that is, genetic) relation with Virginia

reveals a hidden state of kinship between the two strangers. However, Reynolds’s novel reveals

how a material (that is blood) relation already establishes a blood-tie between producer and

consumer. But what is the relationship between these genetic and material intimacies?

After Virginia’s death, the majority of the aristocratic characters also meet their end, with

the Duke poisoning himself, the Duchess dying of shock, and Charles being slain in a duel for

Virginia’s honour. We might read this ending as a fitting comeuppance; these repentant players

willingly spill their blood to pay their blood debt to the suffering seamstress. But the family

reunion also holds more promising possibilities as far as the generative aspects of blood sharing.

Here, the sharing of genealogical blood which characterizes Virginia’s relationship with her

mother provides a means of transforming this relationship between consumer and seamstress

from one of strangers to one of family members. The trans-corporeal exchange of blood within

consumerist economies shifts from an exploitative vampiric relation to an equalizing blood

kinship, a process which, for Virginia, is rendered literal: blood ties become blood ties. These

literal blood ties serve as the basis for a new economic relationship between nobility and the

working class. Just as Virginia’s bloodline with the Duchess grants the seamstress access to

inherited wealth,

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Reynolds’s implies that the proletariat’s “blood” relation to the aristocracy

demands an analogous redistribution of wealth.

In spite of her mother’s wrongdoing, Virginia extends compassion towards her. The

seamstress’s discovery of her family in her final moments prompts one final burst of material-

affective flow; in spite of being drained, we read, the “emotions of joy, and gratitude, and

amazement… flowed up, wave upon wave, from the deep fountains of Virginia’s heart” as she

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The Duchess had arranged to secretly give money to her daughter over the course of her lifetime so that she may

live in comfort, but her banker Collinson pockets the payments, setting Virginia’s economic decline in motion.

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[reclined] upon her mother’s bosom, which she bathed with tears of elysian bliss” (128).

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To be

sure, Virginia’s dying moment underlines the dehumanizing outcomes of England’s “white

slave” trade, as the woman succumbs to the blood loss that is the occupational hazard of her

trade, that menstrual-tubercular wasting. But as the adult Virginia returns to her mother’s breast

in her last moments on earth, freely offering her mother her last remaining biofluids as a final

gift of sympathetic feeling, Reynolds suggests the possibility that not all trans-corporeal

exchanges between classes need be exploitative, if operate through an ethics of care rather an

ethics of exploitation. As yet, this reality remains unrealized by the novel’s end, as Reynolds’s

final lines inform us that while Virginia may now be at peace, “the toils of the white slaves

whom she has left behind her are still contributing to the colossal wealth accumulated within the

walls of that palace of infamy” (134). For now, blood, slop, and tears are (literally) the order of

the day.

Six years later, however, a poet by the name of Elizabeth Barrett Browning would

capitalize on the liberatory possibilities of human milk to formulate a model of bioethical kinship

in Aurora Leigh. My next chapter explores how E.B.B. expands these lactational models of

trans-corporeality to posit a new feminist poetics centered on a feminist ethics of care. In

Reynolds’s novel, these possibilities are only ever hinted at, in a future age when the

needlewoman’s sacrificed “blood, pith, and marrow” will be replaced in full by the “milk of

human kindness.” Aurora Leigh’s Marian Erle, who turns from poor seamstress to glorified

breastfeeder, embodies such a future.

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The narrator describes the scene as one of intermingling bodies fluids between classes: “the first effusion of

feelings was chiefly composed of transports: because all other ideas and considerations were absorbed in the one

thrilling, exciting, rapturous thought of being restored to each other. But even while the kisses so fondly exchanged,

were still warm upon the cheeks of all, --and while the tears of joy so plenteously poured forth were yet glistening

upon the lashes of every eye, – each heart sank suddenly beneath the weight of a crushing despair” (128).

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Chapter 3. “Behold the Paps we all have sucked!”: The Lactational Ecologies of Aurora

Leigh (1856)

In an 1823 letter to the editor of the British literary magazine The Athenæum, a 17-year-

old poet by the name of Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett submitted a short essay entitled “A

Thought on Thoughts.”

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The pithy piece provides a fantastical genealogy of the “Thought

family,” otherwise known as “the ancient and respectable house of the Words, lineal descendants

from the Alphabet and near connections of the Sylables [sic]” (181). The speaker introduces the

reader to “some [of these] old family relatives”: Mr. Philosophical Thought, “a Gentleman of

eccentric habits and singular disposition” who was “acquainted with Plato, Socrates, Cicero, and

Bacon” (181); and “Mrs. Poetical Thought, first Cousin of the Gentleman above mentioned,”

whom the speaker describes as “a venerable old Lady who boasts of having wet nursed Homer,

and led Shakespeare about, in leading strings” (182).

Even in this early work by the author who would become Elizabeth Barrett Browning, we

can detect a thematic preoccupation with literary lineage and origin that would saturate her

magnum opus, Aurora Leigh (1856). In both works, E.B.B. disrupts the presumed patrilineal

construction of this literary tradition—the language of literary forefathers—to recuperate a

female writerly tradition. While Mr. Philosophical Thought and his comrades evoke this classical

patrilineage, standing in for what Hélène Cixous would later call a “phallogocentric” literary

tradition, Mrs. Poetical Thought is an unexpected personage, a lost relation unknown to us. Mr.

Philosophical Thought may have rubbed shoulders with great thinkers with whom he is

“acquainted,” but Mrs. Poetical Thought’s relationship to the greats is far more intimate. She

fashions herself as a nurse to the most prolific poets in the history of literature, first and

foremost, Homer’s wet nurse. Her declaration is a “boast” as she uses it to signify her own part

in Homer’s and Shakespeare’s poetic creations. If her role as Shakespeare’s nursemaid indicates

that she taught the boy how to walk and perhaps speak his first words, then her role as Homer’s

wetnurse hints at a correlation between the communication of human milk and poetry, both

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The letter in its entirety can be found in Philip Kelley’s The Browning Correspondence (vol. 1, 1984, 180-183).

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expressed to him at a formative age. In other words, as wet nurse, Mrs. Poetical Thought

functions as the metaphorical fount of poetic inspiration for Homer.

It would be tempting to dismiss this metaphor of poetic transmission as nothing more

than metaphor, were it not for the fact that the vast majority of people in nineteenth-century

England fervently believed that human milk could communicate all manner of moral and

physical properties from feeder to drinker— in some cases, even communicating language

itself.

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As I argued in my first chapter, early vaccinators and antivaccinators metonymically

link milk to the deliberate contagion of vaccination, and the early vaccination debate therefore

foregrounds the ways that animal and human milk would become suspect by mid-century. These

concerns about milk transmission came to a head in the 1850s: a number of popular publications

exposed the widespread practice of cow’s milk adulteration (Dickens 1850, Hassall 1853), and in

subsequent years, middle-class families became suspicious of their wet nurses’ milk after

physician William Acton recommended these families hire unmarried wet nurses to provide them

with remunerative employment.

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Front and center in these debates are claims about breastmilk’s abilities to transmit ills

like syphilis, monomania, and even cursing. Responding to Acton, medical journalist Charles

Henry Felix Routh warned that “when a woman suckles a child she undoubtedly communicates

to it the distillation, as it were, of the vital essences of her own blood; and thus it is that a nurse

of confirmed vicious and passionate habits suckles a child, that child is in danger of having its

own morality tainted otherwise” (101, emphasis added).

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What milk “communicates” here is

more than material. Routh explicitly identifies tainted language as one of the nurse’s habits,

continuing: “How few have not contracted habits of swearing, intoxication and dishonesty; and

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Jill Matus (1994) describes how Victorians believed that immoral wet nurses could transmit moral as well as

pathological ills through their breast milk, including the propensity for swearing (161-162).

214

See Acton’s discussion of “Unmarried Wetnurses” in the Lancet (1859).

215

Routh suggests a link between the breastfeeder’s capacity to transmit syphilis and swearing to their small charges

in Infant Feeding and its Influence on Life (1860), when he parallels the pathological and moral ails that fallen wet

nurses have “contracted”: “Many of these [wet nurses] have at one time or other of their lives suffered from those

syphilitic diseases peculiar to their class. A few have contracted habits of swearing, intoxication and dishonesty…”

(119). The link between human milk and swearing occurs elsewhere, such as in John Mill’s description of “the

Arab” in Three Months’ Residence at Nablus and an Account of the Modern Samaritans (1864): “there is nothing

more shocking in their character then the universal habit of cursing. They all seem as if they had imbibed it with

their mother’s milk” (171).

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how few are there who, if the occasion again offered and proved remunerative, would not gladly

revert to their bad habits [?]” (103). Though contested,

216

Routh’s viewpoint presents the

breastfeeder’s linguistic expressions as being intricately bound up with her liquid expressions.

For her own part, Barrett Browning was entrenched in these discourses during these years, her

letters revealing her own anxieties about the effectiveness of the four different wet nurses she

and Robert hired to nurse her sole surviving child, Pen.

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Three decades after E.B.B. created Mrs. Poetical Thought, her 1856 novel-epic Aurora

Leigh shocked nineteenth-century readers with its graphic depictions of women’s embodied

experiences—lactation, menstruation, abortion, breastfeeding, and rape—experiences which are

central to early feminist readings by Cora Kaplan (1978), Helena Michie (1990), and Marjorie

Stone (1995). These critics claim that the epic’s “gynocentrism” is central to E.B.B.’s poetic

strategy

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as she tells the story of a female poet’s quest to capture modern society in poetry

when that society has historically degraded female poets and their productions as naturally

inferior. While these early feminist readings establish the significance of breast and lactation

imagery in E.B.B.’s subversion of a phallogocentric literary tradition (poetic creation as a kind of

lactational rather than spermatic expression), they do not account for the ways that E.B.B.

integrates the natural world within these lactational metaphors. Considering the ecofeminist

aspects of E.B.B.’s lactational metaphors allows us to expand E.B.B.’s poetic strategy beyond

merely adapting new metaphors of poetic expression that are still essentialist in nature (that is,

breastmilk replaces the phallocentric “ink” of semen), to one that interrogates the “nature” of

poetic communication itself.

216

Acknowledging the lactational transmission of diseases, Acton rejects Routh’s claims that habits like swearing

could be passed through bad milk: “What, Sire, has the transmission […] of cavernous or strumous tendency to do

with the transmission of the swearing, gin-drinking, or generally-otherwise-immoral diathesis [?]” (637).

217

In a letter to Arabella and Henrietta Moulton-Barrett, Robert reveals that he and Elizabeth have already hired four

wet nurses (4). Wet nursing is mentioned in the following letters all of which can be found in The Brownings’

Correspondence (Kelley): Robert Browning, letter to Arabella Moulton-Barrett and Henrietta Moulton-Barrett, 18

March 1849 (Letter 2779, vol. 15, 241-243), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (E.B.B.), letter to Arabella Moulton-

Barrett, 8-16 April 1849 (Letter 2783, vol. 15, 246-255), E.B.B., letter to Henrietta Moulton-Barrett, 23-25 May

1849 (Letter 2793, vol. 15, 277-286), E.B.B., letter to Henrietta Moulton-Barrett, 20 February, 1850 (Letter 2832,

vol. 16, 60-67), and E.B.B., letter to Eliza Anne Ogilvy, 3 September 1852 (Letter 3103, vol. 18, 207-208). It is

unclear whether E.B.B. would have elected to breastfeed had she not been debilitated by her illness and addicted to

opiates.

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Stone refers to them as a “gynocentric adaptation” of sage strategies (1984, 138) and Michie a “gynocentric grid”

(1990, 68).

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In this chapter, I will argue that E.B.B. defines poetic inspiration and communication as

trans-corporeal. As I outlined in my introduction, Alaimo (2010) defines “trans-corporeality” as

an “[i]magining [of] human corporeality […] in which the human is always inter-meshed with

the more-than-human world,” one which “underlines the extent to which the substance of the

human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment’” (2). In the introduction, I demonstrated

a nineteenth-century awareness of trans-corporeality through the historical episode of early

vaccination, at which time both proponents of and opponents to vaccination argued their position

with recourse to human-to-human and cow-to-human milk circulations. This chapter will

similarly illustrate how E.B.B. uses lactation metaphors which foreground trans-corporeality on

two levels: in the literal sense of the relationship between human bodies (“trans” meaning

“across” and “corpus” meaning “body”), and in the sense of the relationship between human

bodies and environmental bodies (nonhuman animals, ecosystems, and geographical formations).

By grounding these “old” material feminist (corporeal feminist) approaches in a new material-

feminist (ecofeminist) framework, we can attend to the ways that Aurora Leigh’s investments in

material embodiment continues to resonate with emerging waves of feminism. I will argue that

E.B.B. presents nature and poetry as a series of open ecologies, what Kreisel and Griffiths (2020)

refer to as those “discourses of openness, permeability, and indeterminate relation” (9) which

assume a “radical openness of natural and social systems” (8).

Barrett Browning arrives at this notion of trans-corporeal poetic communication by

transforming the body of the poet. Aurora’s poetic journey begins with her subscribing to the

notion of her own body as a “leaky body,” the poet as a stable, self-contained entity, and poetic

expression as a process of individual creation. It ends with Aurora embracing the poet’s body as

permeable and trans-corporeal—one that is in communication with all other bodies—and poetic

expression as a collaborative expression. Aurora’s journey is consistent with Kate Flint’s model

of the Victorian woman poet (1997), who rejects a notion of self-contained, singular authorship

as being characteristic of a male poetic tradition (where the poet’s “I” stands in for a singular,

male author), and replaces it with a figuration of poetic identity as “experimentally dispersed and

diffuse…stretch[ing] both writer and reader well beyond the bounds of personal experience”

(1996, 159). I consider how Aurora models this “diffusion” through lactational and

environmental imagery.

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My claim that Aurora develops a collaborative poetry is itself a collaboration between my

own reading and that of Kate Nesbit (2018). Nesbit refers to Aurora’s poetry as the “Shared

breath of poetic voice,” describing both her breath and “her poetry, as not entirely her own—as

shared, both unwillingly and willingly, with others” (214). But while Nesbit considers the breath

as the primary mode for this collaborative poetic expression, I see the breast—specifically the

lactating breast—as the icon for this multiplicity of voices. Aurora develops this understanding

through her interactions with two characters: first, in Book 6, when she witnesses Marian Erle’s

two-way prelinguistic communication with her suckling babe, and later, in the final book, when

Aurora applies this expansive understanding to her union with Romney, which she describes as

“Complete communication” (9.751). I will argue that it is through this reformulation of poetic

authorship as fundamentally trans-corporeal that Aurora rescues “leaky bodies” like her own

from the mires of destruction and contamination and reclaims them as sites of expressive

possibility.

Natural images of lactation appear early on in the poem: after the death of her Italian

mother when Aurora is four, her English father tries to provide her with a mother-substitute by

bringing her to the breast-like hills above Pelago. Here, he raises her on an education of classical

male authors, a diet which she calls the milk of “Pan’s white goats.” When her father dies soon

after and she is sent to live with her stern aunt in England, Aurora continues to be influenced by

her father’s library of classics, now a stand-in for a male literary paternity, which help her to

produce the early poetry that she later discredits as imitative abortions (3.245-250). After she

rejects a marriage proposal from her lofty philanthropist cousin Romney, who disparages her

work and women’s poetry as lowly, she sacrifices any chance at an inheritance and moves to

London to publish short pieces to make a living. However, her “mother-want” leads her to sell

her father’s library to finance a journey back to Italy’s maternal hills. Before she can get there,

she has a chance encounter with a fallen woman in Paris by the name of Marian Erle, whom

Aurora assumed had left Romney at the altar but who in reality is swindled into prostitution,

raped, and impregnated. Aurora, Marian, and her infant son move to Italy, where Romney

(recently blinded after his congregation revolted against him) comes to fulfill his obligation to

marry Marian. The latter refuses and Romney is free to marry Aurora, whose poetry he has come

to revere. As many critics point out, this marriage signifies a union of idealism (Romney) and

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materialism (Aurora), a poetic “double vision” (5.184) which amalgamates the spiritual, the

cerebral, and the linguistic with the earthly, the corporeal, and the material, without attempting to

reduce one to the other.

Aurora’s description of her childhood introduces a natural iconography of lactation that

finds its ultimate expression in Aurora’s representation of modern era, which she refers to as this

“full-veined, heaving, double-breasted age” that, volcano-like, erupts into the “lava of a song”

(5.215-216). The graphic nature of this image was controversial to say the least. Kaplan was the

first to bring attention to William Roscoe’s disgust in his review for the National Review (1857):

Burning lava and a woman’s breast! and concentrated in the latter the fullest ideas of

life. It is absolute pain to read it. No man could have written it; for independently of its

cruelties, there is a tinge in it of a sort of forward familiarity, with which, Mrs. Browning

sometimes, and never without uneasiness to her readers, touches upon things which the

instinct of the other sex prevents them, when undebased, from approaching without

reverence and tenderness.

219

English writers have aligned natural landscapes with the female body for centuries. Throughout

the genres of travel literature, epic and erotic poetry, and even geographical texts, there is an

abundance of similes and metaphors of female breasts as hills and mountains.

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Roscoe’s

outrage might seem unwarranted. Why is it appropriate for an author to convey a hill as a breast-

like structure and yet it is “almost savage” to convey an active volcano as a lactating one? We

might consider what makes Barrett Browning’s portrayal exceptional: first, this is a female

poet’s depiction of a feminized nature which complicates the male author’s straightforward

heterosexual objectification; a female poet’s “forward familiarity” with female matters therefore

verges on the obscene.

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Second, her description of this natural formation does not adhere to the

219

April 1857, p.245.

220

The examples of this simile are far too numerous to name here, but consult, for instance, Gordon Williams’s

entry on “hills” in his Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature (1994),

which notes that “the word, in the plural, is usually a poeticism for breasts,” and proceeds to list over a dozen early

modern texts by male authors who either sexualize women’s breasts as hills or describe hills in terms of women’s

breasts (665). At the level of geological naming, A.D. Mills (2003) maintains that the city of Manchester owes its

name to the Celtic word Mamucium meaning “breast-like hill” (316). The word “mamelon” is used in volcanology

to describe a specific form, while the archaic word “paps” is an archaeic which can denote both breasts and hills.

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For a look at how the culture(male)/nature(female) binary is enmeshed with a heterosexual/queer binaristic logic,

see Greta Gaard’s “Towards a Queer Ecofeminism” (2004).

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conventional renderings of feminized landscapes as passive and inert, the complement of what

Stacy Alaimo has catalogued as a conventionally feminized “nature” subject to male possession,

exploitation, and control. Rather, this breast-volcano exhibits an agential force which disrupts,

indeed obliterates, the presumed relationship between autonomous poetic subject and its passive

object, between matter and poetry, into a material-semiotic “lava of a song.”

This chapter explores Barrett Browning’s eco-lactational metaphors to ask: How did

Victorians negotiate the potential risks and rewards of trans-corporeal expression and

communication? I build on my overarching argument that Victorians writing on the topics of

contagion, fluids, and biofluids reckon with similar questions that new materialists are now

asking. This chapter considers that question through an ecofeminist lens: How might metaphors

of expression and communication disrupt cultural assumptions about how humans interact with

one another and with the more-than-human world? How might metaphors of poetic expression

and communication stage new intimacies, relationalities, and systems of connection?

This chapter argues that Aurora Leigh, Barrett Browning’s treatise on the historical

disparagement of female poetry, is inextricably linked to the historical denigration of nature. But

rather than attempt to disarticulate the cultural correlation between “woman” and “nature,” I will

argue that Barrett Browning mobilizes it towards a material-rhetorical strategy with which to

fundamentally disrupt cultural narratives about poetic production as an individuated, autonomous

act— persuading her readers to perceive poetic production instead as a collaborative, living

process. To recognize poetic production as a modern, living process is to expose it to the hazards

facing modern, living bodies, however. The trans-corporeal interactions of expression,

communication, and exchange at the basis of this embodied poetics are also the central features

of the outbreak narrative—that most damning argument against open communication. E.B.B.’s

material-rhetorical process thus involves convincing readers that the benefits of trans-corporeal

exchange outweigh the biomedical risks to corporeal integrity. If, as Wald claims, “[t]he

interactions that make us sick also constitute us a community” (2), then E.B.B. attunes us to

those interactions which “constitute us as a community” of readers. E.B.B.’s construction of

poetry writing and reading as expressive, trans-corporeal, and collaborative acts produces a

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notion of poetic community as a kind of symbolic kinship grounded in embodied metaphors of

lactation and milk exchange.

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Keeping Abreast: Bringing Aurora Leigh into the Material Feminist Era

While Aurora Leigh was immensely popular in its day—indeed, four editions were

already published before Barrett Browning’s death in 1861—the work all but fell into obscurity

by the twentieth century. That was until the 1980s, when feminists interested in recuperating

Victorian women’s voices landed on the remarkable novel-in-verse, which seemed to prefigure

notions of female embodied language or écriture féminine, notably Cixous’ lactational “white

ink.”

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Picking up on the work’s substantial reproductive imagery and concerns with

motherhood and authorship,

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critics have been able to draw connections between what Aurora

calls “women’s figures” and the text’s overarching concerns with poetic production and literary

heritage.

Breastfeeding has been a central focus in feminist readings of the novel-epic. In her

widely referenced introduction to Aurora Leigh (1996), Cora Kaplan opens with the poem’s

iconic “full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age” to suggest that the images of suckling are a

“multi-purpose symbol of nurturing and growth” for both woman and poet (15). Sandra

Donaldson (1992) links the breast images to Aurora’s metaphors of poetic birthing, her desire to

make her poetic creations living beings rather than dead abortions (59). Virginia Steinmetz

(1983), who reads the text psychoanalytically, links its “plethora of maternal images of suckling,

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Throughout her life, E.B.B. was preoccupied with disease due to her own chronic health issues which plagued her

and rendered her an invalid for most of her life, an illness which many biographers speculate may have been

anorexia nervosa or tuberculosis; see P. Dally (1989). Her illness drove her and Robert to move to Italy for its more

temperate weather, where they were residing when she wrote Aurora Leigh.

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Hélène Cixous first coined the term écriture féminine in her essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975), where she

famously argues that “woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which

they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies” (875). At times, the term “écriture féminine” has been

used interchangeably with the term “white ink” because Cixous develops the notion that “There is always in her [the

woman writer] at least a little of that good mother’s milk. She writes in white ink” (881). While many feminist

critiques of Aurora Leigh have considered its “female figures”, to my knowledge, no writer has drawn an explicit

link between Aurora Leigh and “white ink.”

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See, for instance, Virginia V. Steinmetz (1982), Marjorie Stone (1984), Alicia E. Holmes (1992), Patrick Murphy

(2006), Laura J. Faulk (2013), and Sarah. H. Ficke (2013).

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sour milk, of breasts and devouring” to a Victorian “obsession with origins” (352).

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Some

critics gesture towards the breastfeeding imagery as an extended metaphor for literary

consumption. For instance, Steinmetz zeroes in on the metaphors of reading as feeding in the

novel-epic to consider the “images of the writer-reader relationship as a nourishing interchange”

(355). Similarly, in her illuminating piece, Janet Montefiore (2005) intertwines the motifs of

breastmilk and poetic inspiration by suggesting that E.B.B. was literalizing the rhetoric of poetic

“expression” that Percy Shelley demanded of poets of the age.

These readings of the breast bring psychoanalytic and cultural feminism to bear on

Barrett Browning’s elaborate metaphorical language, revealing the work’s continued relevance

in conversations about women’s writing and experience. Such readings, while integral to my

approach, tend to assume that these “women’s figures” merely subscribe to pre-existing notions

of linguistic relation—that is, lactation materializes the female poet’s expression in a way that is

analogous to Romantic constructs of spermatic expression, and breastfeeding stands in for pre-

existing ideas about literary kinship and readerly communities. I argue, rather, that E.B.B.’s

women’s figures do more radical work. They challenge and disrupt the fundamental assumptions

at the basis of all trans-corporeal relations, asking: what does the communication of poetry/milk

reveal about the nature of material relations writ large? These readings thus tend to limit the

radical potential inherent in E.B.B.’s ebbs and flows, including the ways that Barrett Browning

is reimagining “nature” itself, the nature of things in both the senses of how material

arrangements currently exist in the world (nature being all aspects of the physical earth including

plants, animals, and landscapes), and how things must be (nature being the essence or inherent

features of something), two meanings that frequently overlap in critiques of E.B.B.’s text.

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225

Unlike other critics listed, Steinmetz sees the breast images “primarily as negative symbols reenforcing the theme

of deprivation and representing the poet’s need to bring obsessive infantile fantasies into light where they could

serve rather than dominate her” (351).

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Consider how numerous mentions of “nature” were in contemporary reviews of the novel-epic in reference to

E.B.B.’s “noble nature” (from Literary Gazette and The Leader), her “archaic nature” (The Spectator), the Dublin

University claimed that the novel-epic was true to E.B.B.’s “nature,” George Eliot claims that no poem takes “so

complete possession of our nature” (Westminster Review), Nichol claims that E.B.B.’s generic mixing goes against

laws that are “fixed by nature herself”, while Charles Hamilton Aidé speaks to her “rich and glowing pictures of

nature” (Edinburgh Weekly Review). Charles Carroll Eliot sums up this dual meaning of nature when he claims that

“The fact that Mrs. Browning has attained to such a height of poetic excellence, not in spite of her woman’s nature,

but by means of it shows that the difference which has been hitherto supposed to exist between poets and poetesses

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Thus, for all their interest in the body, feminist critics of Aurora Leigh tend to reduce the

materiality, the thingness, and the tangibility of these “women’s figures” to their discursive

aspects, no doubt in an effort to distance themselves from charges of biological essentialism.

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Yet in limiting “women’s figures” to a function of the discursive, the symbolic, and the linguistic

bodies which populate the text, these critics sometimes limit the ways in which Barrett Browning

was engaging with larger questions about matter, and to consider the latter possibility is to

consider how E.B.B. may have actually been working against (rather than with, or for) the very

kinds of essentialism with which she has been charged.

To reckon with ideas of women’s “nature” in Aurora Leigh is to reckon with Barrett

Browning’s representation of “nature” in both of its major senses; the nature of something can

refer to its biology or its essence, both of which come together in the notion of biological

essentialism. E.B.B.’s “women’s figures” have garnered critiques of essentialism because they

explicitly draw connections between women’s poetic production and labour, childbirth, and

breastfeeding (David 1985; 1990). On the other hand, until recently, E.B.B.’s representations of

the natural world in the novel-epic have been deemed so uncomplicated as to be worthy of only

passing reference.

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Arguably, though, Aurora’s awakening to her connection with the natural

world in Book One, in which she opens the windows and draws “The elemental nutriment and

heat/ From nature” (473-476) is as much a catalyst for her growth into a modern, female poet as

is her recognition of her own maturing womanhood. Recent ecocritics have taken notice.

Honsang Yeo (2006) introduces the first explicitly ecological reading of the epic, claiming that

“Barrett Browning incorporated the Romantic notion of prophet-poet and the correspondence

between human being and nature, which opens up the whole possibility of reading her work in an

ecological perspective” (85). Karen Hadley’s “‘Tulips on Dunghills’: Regendering the Georgic

in Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh” (2014) argues that Aurora appropriates elements of the

is not, so far as it relates to the matter of power, founded upon the nature of things” (North American Review). I am

indebted to Marjorie Stone’s detailed bibliography of the text’s reception history for many of these obscure reviews.

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In 1985, Deirdre David describes Aurora Leigh as “an integrated expression of essentialist and ultimately non-

feminist views of sex and gender, despite sharp attacks on sexual hypocrisy and devastating satire of women’s

education […] Aurora Leigh joyfully assumes a role inscribed in and by male-dominated culture and society” (114).

David goes on (1987) to criticize the text’s “fervent gynocentrism” as evidence of a confused politics.

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Nearly every interpretation of the novel-epic make some mention of the role of nature in Aurora’s poetic growth,

but given the proliferation of writing on the text, it is surprising that so few readings focus exclusively on this angle.

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Georgic, centrally, its metaphors of farming and cultivation, and uses them to “cultivate” her

own poetic aesthetic. Mary Sanders Pollock (2019) considers Aurora Leigh as one of Barrett

Browning’s “environmentalist poems,” which “suggest the difficulty of finding rhetorical

balance between representing the fragmentation of community attendant on modernity and the

contrary impulse to romanticize nature” (46).

Something fascinating happens when we move from ecocriticism to ecofeminism in order

to consider how Aurora Leigh’s “women’s figures” put gender and ecology in dialogue. We see

this dialogue happening most dramatically in E.B.B.’s breast-volcano, which fuses a feminized

physiological process with an ecological one in the construction of modern poetry. As I will

demonstrate in this chapter, E.B.B.’s ecological figures of lactation and breastfeeding illustrate a

radical enmeshment of human and more-than human kin, a reordering which fundamentally

disrupts the predominant construction of poetic authorship as a singular, discrete, autonomous,

and unidirectional process, and replaces it with notion of poetic production as diffused: a

feedback loop of living, collaborative, mutual coproduction between humans and nature.

Barrett Browning is thus not only prefiguring the French feminists in her notion of a

material-discursive poetics (women’s “white ink”), but also anticipating the material feminists in

their investment in notions of porosity, permeability, and trans-corporeality in the ordering of

reality (reclaiming a material fluidity with which women and nature have both been historically

disparaged). In this way, Stacy Alaimo’s ecofeminist concept of “trans-corporeality” (2010,

2016) represents a useful methodology with which to articulate E.B.B.’s material-discursive

poetics, because Alaimo, too, imagines fluidity at both levels of material (a radical enmeshment

of human and more-than-human natures) and conceptual (an entanglement of material and

discursive phenomena): “the movement across human corporeality and nonhuman nature

necessitates rich, complex modes of analysis that travel through the entangled territories of

material and discursive, natural and cultural, biological and textual” (3). E.B.B. prefigures trans-

corporeality in her lactational-ecological-poetical currents. Moreover, my intervention into the

text reconstructs the world of Aurora Leigh as an “open ecology” (2020), Kreisel and Griffith’s

term for “the messy, contested, and often violent histories through which cultural and natural

systems come to produce each other” (6-7). E.B.B. presents a series of ebbs and flows of fluid

channels that join together material and discursive currents, pathological and remedial streams.

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In many ways, Aurora Leigh represents a meeting point and consolidation of all of the

embodied flows and material-feminist lenses that have structured my study thus far. Like all the

other works I have examined, Aurora Leigh exhibits the same preoccupation with how bodily

fluid expressions and exchanges in the modern age dramatically transform notions of intimacy,

opening up new avenues for contagion and communication alike, at both discursive and material

levels.

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Like Hood’s ecological engagement with the drowned fallen woman and the Thames in

“Bridge of Sighs,” E.B.B.’s Aurora Leigh prominently features a fallen woman (and seamstress,

no less), Marian Erle, whose body occupies a liminal position between a productive trans-

corporeality and destructive contamination. As in Hood’s poem, female characters interact (and

intra-act) with complex and gendered environmental topographies, but where Hood identifies

that topography with a suspect feminine-coded river, Barrett Browning valorizes Italy’s breast-

like hills and volcanoes as sites of poetic sustenance and sometime destruction.

The texts I have explored thus far have all figured the trans-corporeal reality of the modern

era in terms of alimentary consumption (from drinking water to vampire capitalism), and these

texts locate this process of consumption in figures of edible women (the drowned fallen woman

and the poor seamstress, respectively). This chapter offers another such example in fallen

breastfeeder Marian Erle. As Hood and Reynolds consider the material-discursive imbrication of

biofluids,

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Barrett Browning intertwines literal and symbolic kinds of sustenance and energy

into complex networks of liquid-linguistic communication. Barrett Browning opens up embodied

metaphors beyond Reynolds’s broad gesture towards working-class kinship in “the milk of

human kindness”; in Aurora Leigh, E.B.B. fashions lactation and breastfeeding into the central

metaphors for poetic expression and transmission within a new “double-breasted” age—an age

defined by a profoundly radical communication demanding a radical feminist ethics of care.

Crucially, the poet animating these figures, Aurora, is neither lactating nor has any intention of

having children, suggesting that this embodied lexicon is not confined to use by female poets

who experience such processes, or indeed to female poets at all, but rather is openly accessible as

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As outlined in the introductory chapter, I consider the terms “expression,” “communication,” “transmission,” and

“intercourse” to encompass both material and linguistic processes.

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We might understand the new materialist emphasis on food through Annemarie Mol’s recent conceptualization of

eating in Eating in Theory as a mutual transformation between humans and environment (2021), distinct from Jane

Bennett’s notion of vibrant materlialism as Mol considers agency as a key feature of anthropocentrism.

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a feminist mode of communication. Thus, E.B.B. uses “women’s figures” not as a re-inscription

of women’s essential “nature” but as a material-rhetorical strategy

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to reclaim forms of

multiplicity and collaboration which have been negatively ascribed to women and to nature alike.

Milk, Blood, and Books: Gendered Linguistic Expressions

From her earliest recollections, Aurora Leigh establishes women’s bodily fluids as a vehicle

for linguistic expression. Aurora’s first years are spent in Italy, as the child of a Florentine

mother and English father. At the time of writing the poem, Aurora concedes that she is

…still what men call young;

I have not so far left the coasts of life

To travel inland, that I cannot hear

That murmur of the outer Infinite

Which unweaned babies smile at in their sleep (1. 9-13)

These early lines establish a relationship between poetic inspiration and breastmilk by aligning a

supply of Romantic creativity—the “murmur” of this fluid “outer Infinite”—with the suckling

infant and a prelinguistic mode of communication in smiling. Fittingly, Aurora introduces the

earthly source of this poetic inspiration alongside her only living memory of her mother “at her

post/ Beside the nursery-door, with finger up,” hushing her while her eyes “[take] part against

her word/In the child’s riot” (15-19). Aurora’s mother is the facilitator of her child’s prelinguistic

expressions here, regulating the flow of the infant’s nonsense syllables.

And yet, these positive images of mothering are immediately halted upon the death of

Aurora’s mother, who “could not bear the joy of giving life” and succumbs to the “mother’s

rapture” when Aurora is only four years old (1. 34-35).

232

This “new order” leaves Aurora

feeling both “a mother-want about the world” (39-40) and, as Virginia V. Steinmetz points out,

“a profound uncertainty about the good of creativity” (354). For Aurora claims that only

231

In making this case, I myself am adopting the language of the rhetorical strategy from Jane Gallop and Gayatri C.

Spivak, the first of whom claims that Luce Irigaray is mobilizing biological essentialism (mimesis) as a form of

political strategy (1983), while Spivak is the first to mobilize Irigaray’s towards a “strategic essentialism” for self-

representation amongst minority groups (1988, 1993, 1996). I adapt this language to emphasize the rhetorical

aspects of this strategy are inextricable from materiality.

232

Steinmetz considers the death as a result of childbirth, but Laura Faulk considers the cause to be ambiguous (43).

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“Women know/The way to rear up children” by “stringing pretty words that make no sense,/And

kissing full sense into empty words” (50-52). Thus, while mothers are the first teachers of

language, Aurora’s father, despite being well-read, is incapable of “nursing [her]” (1.94), so he

leaves Florence and takes her

Among the mountains above Pelago;

Because unmothered babes, he thought, had need

Of mother nature more than others use,

And Pan’s white goats, with udders warm and full

Of mystic contemplations, come to feed

Poor milkless lips of orphans like his own (1.111-116)

Aurora finds a mother substitute in the motherland of Italy, in whose geography she materially

grounds infant feeding processes. Aurora’s father presents the antidote for mother-want in a

maternal, nurturing force of “mother nature,” a wet nurse whose breast-like, flowing hills (232)

administer nourishment to Aurora’s “milkless lips.”

233

This construction of a lactating Mother Earth corresponds to the common, naturalistic

euphemism of flowing breasts as “Nature’s founts,”

234

imparting the notion that the natural

world, like the breastfeeder, provides life-sustaining energy. While critics tend to read Aurora’s

“mother-want” literally, as a sign of psychoanalytic stunting or manifestation of Victorian

maternity anxieties,

235

I align myself with a set of critics who have read this “mother-want” as a

reference to Aurora’s lack of poetic foremothers: a female literary heritage which Barrett

Browning herself found to be profoundly lacking.

236

This secondary meaning fits with the

mother-surrogates Aurora comes to find: for it is Pan’s goats’s udders, not mother’s breasts, that

provide Aurora with “mystic contemplations,” an allusion to Aurora’s paternal literary

heritage—her father’s early teachings of classical literature and Greek mythology out of which

233

The city name, Pelago, meaning “open sea” in Italian, adds to this sense of permeability.

234

The character Mr. Micawber describes them using these terms in Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850). See also

Tamara S. Wagner’s “‘Nature’s Founts:’ Breastmilk in Victorian Popular Culture” (2019).

235

Steinmetz links Aurora’s mother-want to “obsessive infantile fantasies” (351), Faulk to Aurora’s “connection

between motherhood and death” (43), and Burkett to “Victorian tocophobia, or the mid-nineteenth-century fear of

childbirth and procreation” informed by Malthusian population theory (34).

236

See Alicia E. Holmes (1992), Kate Flint (1993), Eleanor Reeds (2019). Consider Barrett Browning’s letter in

which she complains of the lack of poetic foremothers: “I look for grandmothers everywhere & see none” (Kelly

vol. 10, p. 14).

145

figures like Pan originate. For despite these metaphors being grounded in matter, they are still

only metaphorical: the breast-like hills do not actually feed her. The nourishment that Aurora

receives here are the “books among the hills” (1.187), referring to the classical literary education

her father provides for her, and on which, after his death, she “nibbled here and there” (2.838).

237

Reared on this exclusively male literary tradition, young Aurora unsurprisingly develops an

ambivalence towards her own female creativity as fluid expressions. This ambivalence manifests

in her oscillating interpretations of her dead mother, whose painting she gazes upon for hours

“half in terror, half/In adoration” (137-138). Based on Aurora’s growing knowledge of women

from “Whatever I last read or heard or dreamed,” the painting seems to transform from

“Pathetical, or ghastly, or grotesque” as her mother’s face shifts from “Ghost, fiend, and angel,

fairy, witch, and sprite” (1.148, 150, 154). One day, she appears to be “A still Medusa with mild

milky brows/All curdled,” with snakes dripping sweat-like slime; another, she is “Our Lady of

the Passion, stabbed with swords/Where the babe sucked” (1.157-161). Young Aurora’s

understanding of her mother is limited to her exposure to female characters in Greek mythology

and Catholic representation, and yet Aurora finds that this figure refuses to be contained within

these narratives. She describes the face as

That swan-like supernatural white life

Just sailing upward from the red stiff silk

Which seemed to have no part in it nor power

To keep it from quite breaking out of bounds. (1.139-142)

Even dead, the woman seems to possess agency as a “supernatural white life” that comes alive

on the canvas, exceeding her own corporeal boundaries, spilling out of her red dress as a swan

cascades over water. Aurora initially experiences her mother’s red and white appearance in terms

of awe, but her education transforms these colors into an experience of horror.

Aurora’s classical education has provided her with images of monstrous femininity, a set

of figures who reduce women’s expressions to “grotesque,” corporeal ooze. Aurora projects

237

Whether Mother Nature rears her figuratively by breast or Pan by bottle, the scene introduces the extended

metaphor of reading as “feeding,” foregrounding a rupturing between material and discursive flows (blood, milk and

words) which will inform Aurora’s eco-lactational metaphors of poetic transmission as an adult.

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these forms of leakage onto her mother’s painting: the white and red characterizing Aurora’s

early impression of her mother take on ghastly associations with the Madonna’s milk and blood.

These images exhibit Aurora’s understanding of female embodiment in terms of a set of

physiological expressions ascribed to women (menstruation and lactation) which, in lieu of

female-authored texts, she collapses with women’s linguistic expressions. While the first image

hints at lactation in Medusa’s “curdled,” “milky” brows, the second explicitly intertwines spilt

breastmilk and blood, white and red, in a disturbing picture of comingling female expression.

Together, these fantasies evoke destructive models of women’s leaky bodies in the

Kristevan abject. Their mixture of blood, sweat, and breastmilk provides a composite picture of

the monstrous feminine. The Kristevan abject, located in bodily fluids, is the destructive

counterpart to Cixous’s “white ink.” In Powers of Horror (1980), Julia Kristeva defines the

abject as the human response (such as horror and/or vomiting) to a threatened breakdown in the

distinction between subject and object, self and other.

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Kristeva’s primary examples of the

abject include corpses, open wounds, menstrual fluid, feces, and sewage. Kristeva links the

abject to the stage of psychosexual development when humans separate from the mother, when

we gain awareness that there is a boundary between the “me” and the “other”/“mother” (79). For

Kristeva, this boundary transgression is overwhelmingly negative and destructive, with links to

contagion anxieties, whereas new materialists postulate liberatory modes of human and more-

than-human relation in this breakdown in the distinction between subject and object (Bennet’s

“vibrant matter”), as well as self and other (Alaimo’s trans-corporeality).

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Aurora’s own

growth will dramatize this movement from destructive to productive models of female

expression.

Though Aurora’s projections about women’s expressions (broadly speaking) are rooted in

her father’s teachings of classical mythology and religious texts, Aurora need not return to

antiquated sources to find grotesque conflations of women’s liquid and linguistic expressions.

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Kristeva claims that the abject “draws me toward the place where meaning collapses” (Powers 2). She writes:

“These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death.

There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being” (3). The abject constitutes “what disturbs identity,

system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (4).

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Kristeva entertains such possibilities for abject representing a kind of expansive contagion. For instance, she

writes that “[The abject] is at once what produces the ideas, and the source of health, it is the poisoned cup which

man drinks death and putrefaction, and at the same time the fount of reconciliation…” (Powers 128).

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We already know that the popular Victorian belief in vicarious menstruation presents a startling

example of this collapsing of female expressions: physicians lent menstrual expressions an oral

quality in their assessments of menstrual fluid rerouted from the vaginal canal to the mouth in

vomiting, coughing, or bleeding of the gums (713).

240

The common Victorian gynecological

appellation of the vaginal canal as a “mouth” or “neck” is consistent with this collapsing of

women’s liquid and linguistic expressions,

241

as is Amy Koerber’s rhetorical history of hysteria

and hormones (2018), which describes the many cases of nineteenth-century physicians who

identify a pelvic cause of vocal problems in women on the basis that there was believed to be a

“connection of the uterine nerves with those of the larynx” (28). These examples are

representative of a larger medical construction of women’s bodies as categorically fluid,

permeable, and porous,

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attributes which not only featured centrally in discourses on women’s

pathologically “leaky” bodies, but were also central in the rhetoric of public sanitation, which

fashioned natural environments as being analogously open, and dangerously so.

In opposition to this boundless female expression, Aurora’s early understanding of the

male poet is as a stable, self-enclosed entity. When teenage Aurora “chanced upon the poets”

(1.844), she immediately perceives these men as objective figures of universal authority: “the

only truth-tellers,” “speakers of essential truth” as “opposed to relative, comparative,/And

temporal truths” (1.859-862). In them she perceives man’s ideal: “To find man’s veritable stature

out/Erect, sublime, —the measure of a man” (1.866-868). The only time that she considers male

poets to be expressive is when she asks them to infuse her with their seminal works: in

proclaiming that “Zeus’s thunder… has ravished me” (1.920), Aurora likens poetic inspiration to

a unidirectional process of insemination. Yet just as her father’s education fit her woman’s frame

240

Physicians actually preferred vicarious menstruation over an absence of menses, which, as one London physician

S. Ashwell wrote in 1846, represents “an excess of circulating fluid which if retained would certainly lead to

injurious consequences” such as internal bleeding and festering disease (qtd in Skultans 713). For a German context

for women’s mutable fluids, see Barbara Duden’s The Woman Beneath the Skin (1991).

241

For instance, Francis Henry Ramsbotham’s The Principles and Practice of Obstetric Medicine and Surgery

(1847) describes how the opening of the vagina is called “the mouth of the womb” (58), while Dr. Thomas Heslop

(1858) refers to the canal as the “uterine neck” (66).

242

See Shuttleworth and Taylor’s Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830-1890 (1998),

particularly Section III, chapters 1 and 2 on Defining Womanhood and the Uterine Economy, which illustrate the

popular conception of women’s bodies as sensitive psycho-biological systems. For a look at how the mind-body

connection may work towards a feminist political strategy, see Elizabeth Wilson’s Gut Feminism (2015).

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poorly, Aurora’s attempts to imitate male poets results in her early poems being failures, “mere

lifeless imitations of live verse” (1.974). She dismisses these creations as prelinguistic utterances

that recall her mother’s communication—as “a babe might blow between two straining

cheeks…to make his mother laugh” (1.991-992). As a female poet appropriating phallocentric

metaphors of artistic creation, saying she “played at art, made thrusts with a toy-sword”

(3.240),

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Aurora sees her creations as poetic still-borns.

Aurora’s education in England attempts to constrain her fluid nature. Like “A wild bird

scarcely fledged,” Aurora is “brought to her cage” (1.310), her flowing locks broken into braids,

and her “mother-tongue,” which often forgot itself as it “came up to float across the English

phrase,” also quashed, to be replaced by her father’s English (389). Without a mother, without

even the abstraction of a mother in Italian geography, the child’s only refuge is now in the

fragments of the undomesticated natural world that she can grasp at from within the walls of

Leigh Hall. It is here she proclaims, “I had relations in the Unseen, and drew/The elemental

nutrient and heat/From nature, as earth feels the sun at nights,/ Or as a babe sucks surely in the

dark” (473-476). Aurora sees the earth as a repository of the sun’s warming energy even in the

sun’s absence, in the same way that an infant “sucks surely” even when it is not at the breast,

knowing that they will have milk again as surely as the sun will rise. Aurora’s “relations in the

Unseen” reiterate her early image of the “outer Infinite” which “unweaned babies smile at in

their sleep.” Both attest to Aurora’s psychic connection to her origin and her source of

sustenance in nature, which stands in for this lactating figure of poetic nourishment. One day,

looking out her window, she gazes on the estate’s manicured lawn, remarking how the view

could not be different from “My multitudinous mountains, sitting in/The magic circle, with the

mutual touch/Electric, panting from their full deep hearts/Beneath the influent stars” (622-625).

The picture underscores multiplicity and the reciprocity of relations as the Tuscan hills collect

the flow of an ethereal fluid from the heavens that influences all earthly life, suggesting a

continuum between the material realm and the “outer Infinite” through a fluid transmission.

244

But Aurora cuts her poetic verse off by remarking, “Italy is one thing, England one”:

243

Romney reiterates this phallic characterization: female poets merely “play at art, as children play at swords”

(2.228-229).

244

The OED sites this usage of “Influent” from Aurora Leigh.

149

On English ground

You understand the letter, –ere the fall

How Adam lived in a garden. All the fields

Are tied up fast with hedges, nosegay-like;

The hills are crumpled plains, the plains perterres,

The trees, round, wooly, ready to be clipped,

And if you seek for any wilderness

You find, at best, a park. A nature tamed […] (626-634)

245

Like caged bird Aurora, England is a domesticated, ornamental garden, evoking one of the oft-

remarked Victorian fantasies of the decorative garden as a space to contain and control nature—

with all of the colonizing implications inherent in “civilizing” exotic flora, and the gendered

connotations of dominating “undomesticated ground” (Alaimo 2000).

246

This juxtaposition of

Italy and England positions Aurora as a wild Italian plant transplanted into English soil, where

her excesses must be trimmed so that she may live a neat, individual existence.

The Fount, the Improvisatrice, and Open Ecologies

The association between lactation and poetic inspiration may strike modern readers as

being far too progressive for a Victorian readership—an invention of the 1980s’ French feminists

in their search for écriture féminine, perhaps, but hardly the stuff of the Victorian imaginary.

However, metaphors for literary production have long been couched in terms of the body, and

the gendered body at that. In his study The Yard of Wit: Male Creativity and Sexuality, 1650-

1750 (2013), Raymond Stephanson draws our attention to the tradition of phallic metaphors for

literary generation, what he plainly terms the “pen-penis/ink-semen trope” which characterized

legitimate authorship as a male pursuit (139-140). According to Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of

Influence (1973), another manifestation of this literary paternity has been the characterization of

the canon as a patrilineal heritage that passes between literary “father and son” (11). Famously,

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979) pick up on both these constructions of male authorship

245

Aurora’s characterization of England’s hills as being broken up may be a reference to England’s Enclosure Acts

which, beginning in 1801, partitioned land such that pasture animals could no longer freely graze on it.

246

For a look at the relationship between gardening, domesticity, and women, see Page and Smith (2011).

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in their study of the nineteenth-century English tradition, devoting their entire first chapter to

describing how the process of poetic creation is bound up with notions of male power

represented by the phallus, with the result that throughout the nineteenth century, the “poet’s pen

is in some sense (even more than figuratively) a penis” (4). In her book on women’s popular

Victorian literature, Pamela K. Gilbert (1997) corroborates that reading of phallic generation

when she describes how the Victorian male author could appeal to a “spermatic economy of

inspiration,” symbolically “inseminating the text with his ideas” (27,23). This phallic language

continues to pervade the everyday rhetoric with which we talk about the literary canon in terms

of a series of “seminal” texts

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— a singular fount of culturally-sanctioned (verbal) ejaculations.

While female Victorian authors and poets were excluded from these metaphors of embodied

literary production, they also had access to a collection of embodied metaphors that had emerged

within the Romantic poetic tradition. Inspired by Madame de Staël’s French novel Corinne, or

Italy (1807), a series of English female poets, led by Leticia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.) and

Felicia Hemans, repurposed a culturally disparaged model of women’s bodies as leaky vessels—

corresponding to what Gail Paster (1993) would later term women’s “excessive verbal fluency”

(25)—by carving out a space for female poets as figures of the Improvisatrice,

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vehicles for an

embodied, free-flowing, and spontaneous poetic expression. These poets capitalized on both the

Romantic valorization of the natural world

249

and the historical feminization of nature to self-

fashion as free-flowing fountains, a characterization that Isobel Armstrong calls the “gush of the

feminine” (1995).

Barrett Browning was heavily influenced by this tradition, having written poems in ode to

both Landon and Hemans early on in her career.

250

The female poet’s self-fashioning as

Improvisatrice poses certain complications within the context of Victorian England, however,

given that the construction of female literary expression as natural and spontaneous conflicted

247

Interestingly, this word has since been replaced in some circles with the word “germinal,” which carries botanical

and pathological associations as far as transmission.

248

L.E.L. introduced the term when she published her collection The Improvisatrice, and Other Poems (1824), in

which she considered the famous Greek poet Sappho to be her predecessor. Barrett Browning would do much the

same in her own poetic odes to L.E.L.

249

In Lyrical Ballads (1798), William Wordsworth describes how poetic process should represent “the spontaneous

overflow of powerful feelings” (98).

250

See “Stanzas Addressed to Miss Landon and Suggested by Her ‘Stanzas on the Death of Mrs. Hemans’” (1835)

and “L.E.L,’s Last Question” (1838). Rachael Isom argues that E.B.B. was moved by her reading of Corinne (2020).

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with the emerging reality of a Victorian literary market where authors could now earn a living by

their work, as Aurora must do when she moves to London. That is to say that while Landon and

Hemans predominantly wrote for leisure, distancing themselves from the economic market and

its immoral impact on women,

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it was difficult for Victorian female authors to maintain their

moral reputation if they lived by their pen. Female poets could not maintain that they were

spontaneously expressing art when they were also deliberately, often periodically producing

works to make a living wage, and this was true of female authors of all kinds. The female

author’s association with the market resulted in the popular metaphor of the female author as

whore according to Catherine Gallagher (1991) and Pamela K. Gilbert (1997), leading to

negative constructions of her literary expressions as venereal, pathological fluids—to quote

Hugh Stutfield (1895), the “erotomaniac fiction” of her “diseased imaginings” (837).

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Barrett Browning adopts and adapts these models of female literary expression in Aurora

Leigh for the purpose of deconstructing the assumed male literary heritage and introducing a new

set of embodied metaphors for poetic creation which privilege notions of free flow and

collaboration. E.B.B. showcases how the figure of the Improvisatrice fundamentally undermines

the dominant idea of poetic authorship as singular and self-contained by replacing the notion of

the poet’s body as a site of integrity with that of the poet’s body as a permeable entity in a

continual process of sympoiesis or “making-with” nature,

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in all of its forms.

The correlation between female poets and the natural world is evident early on in Romney’s

arguments with Aurora about women’s poetic abilities. Critics have noted the correlation, but

they have not explored how that correlation manifests in metaphors of fluidity that disparage

women’s physiological and linguistic expressions. At the beginning of Book Two, Aurora

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In 1824, after Landon’s father died, she briefly began to write poetry to support the family, a reality which

reviewers claimed reduced the quality of her work (Thomson and Thomson 1860, 153).

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Gallagher reads Aphra Behn’s persona as playwright-prostitute to consider her poetic transmissions as sexual

transmissions, and how Behn’s critics compared her poems to gonorrhea (30); elsewhere, she argues that George

Eliot poses “the threat of the prostituting, ‘amusing’ author who purveys poison, spreads disease, and generates

unnatural passions and excessive appetites” (1991: 45); Gilbert (1997) looks at how the popular reception of

women’s texts take on this pathological characterization, that “sexuality [itself] is represented as a contagious

disease” (8) in Lady Audley’s Secret and Braddon’s Doctor’s Wife. Patricia Murphy considers the whore metaphor

in New Woman fiction (2016).

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I borrow the terms here from Donna Haraway (2016).

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crowns herself with the poet’s laurel wreath of evergreen ivy on her twentieth birthday, when

Romney returns her book of poetry she had left by the river. He tells her that he found her book

In the hollow by the stream

That beech leans down into—of which you said

The Oread in it has a Naiad’s heart

And pines for waters. (2.81-84)

The scene registers Aurora’s poetic influences in both the classical and Improvisatrice traditions.

The wreath hints at Aurora’s alliance with a male poetic tradition, as an ivy wreath would crown

the Greek winner of a tragedy.

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Yet the references to Greco-Roman figures of the Oread (a

male nymph that inhabits the mountains) who had the heart of a Naiad (a female nymph that

watches over streams) dramatizes Aurora’s conflict between her male and female poetic heritage.

Like an Oread, Aurora lives in the mountains, off of the milk of “Pan’s white goats”

(1.114), but Aurora’s Naiad’s heart that “pines for waters” implicates her in the tradition of the

Romantic Improvisatrice whose poetry was typically characterized in terms of the gush of the

feminine.

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Romney extends the comparison by aligning Aurora’s green wreath with her

“inferior” female poetry, whose life is as fleeting as that of a plant. When Romney warns Aurora

to “Keep to the green wreath,/Since even dreaming of the stone and bronze/Brings headaches,

pretty cousin” (2.93-96), he introduces a binary opposition which will continually structure

Aurora’s autobiography, between women’s poems on the one hand as being earthly, humble, and

fleeting, and men’s poems, on the other, as being aligned with lasting cultural productions made

of stone and bronze, evocative of Greco-Roman sculpture. This distinction of gendered poetry in

terms of natural (feminine) versus cultural (masculine) corresponds to the distinctions between

women’s and men’s proper poetic genres: women’s poetic forms, like the lyric and the ballad,

represent the expressions of the heart, the earthly, and the personal, whereas men’s epics achieve

the spiritual, the cerebral, and the universal.

254

See Margaret Reynolds’s explanatory footnotes on the leaf symbolism in her edition of Aurora Leigh (40).

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Given how naiads conventionally guarded streams, it is unsurprising that the Improvisatrice poets Hemans and

Landon referred to the figures in their own poems: see Hemans’s “Imelda” (1828) or L.E.L’s “The Vow of the

Peacock” (1835).

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In the same conversation, Romney thus claims that women cannot “generalize” because

they are “so sympathetic to the personal pang” that they regard each suffering being, rendering

them “incapable/ Of deepening, widening a large lap of life/To hold the world-full woe” (2.183-

189). “All’s yours and you/All, colored with your blood[…]” (96-97), he says of women, such

that their poetry is incapable of capturing “the great sum/Of universal anguish” (2.208-209).

Romney’s points are all standard fare in slanders of female poets, but Romney’s claim that

women’s blood stains their

poetry recalls the Naiad’s

preoccupation with the

flowing, ever-changing stream

as the subject of study.

Romney therefore assigns

women and moving water to

the realm of the immediate and

the living: Aurora is the Naiad

“pining after the streams”

when she is expected to be the

Oread keeping watch of the

eternal, spanning mountains,

and in striving for both she

reaches neither.

Arthur Hughes captures

the scene’s water imagery in

his 1860 painting, “Aurora

Leigh’s Refusal of Romney

(‘The Tryst’)” (left). Painted at

the behest of Barrett

Browning’s friend, Ellen Heaton, the painting depicts Aurora holding her book of poetry after

rejecting Romney’s marriage proposal to live a poet’s life. Hughes opts to trade Aurora’s white

dress for one of sea-green to complement the colour scheme: Aurora stands “With [her] gown in

Figure 6. Aurora Leigh’s Refusal of Romney (‘The Tryst’), Arthur

Hughes (1860). Image courtesy of Tate Museum, London. Item No.

N05245

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the dew” (2.21)” in the grass that has been flooded by a stream of blue water. Symbolically, the

juxtaposition of author’s poetry and the water imagery reiterates Aurora body as an extension of

the stream and her poetry an extension of its free-flowing expression.

Even while Romney sees male poetry as superior to women’s, ultimately he does not

believe that the current age is worth capturing at all, for it is “mad with pain/ And sin too!…”

(2.203-204). Besides, he believes that one’s time ought to be spent on philanthropy rather than

poetry. He uses a horticultural metaphor to argue that his own era is not fertile for the production

of poetry: “The civilizers spade grinds horribly/On dead men’s bones, and cannot turn up

soil/That’s otherwise than fetid” (2.265-267). This description of the poet attempting to cultivate

poetry on “fetid soil” evokes miasma, suggesting a correlation between the production and

transmission of disease with that of poetry in an age such as this one of “a million sick” (216). It

is a monstrous picture of trans-corporeality as the dead rise to infect the living, but Aurora

counters his claim by invoking God as master farmer: “He who makes/Can make good things

from ill things, best from worst,/ As men plant tulips upon dunghills when/They wish them

finest” (2.284-287).

This response

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undercuts Romney’s characterization of modern poetic inspiration as

noxious by appealing to a logic of Victorian sustainability, specifically, the notion of human and

animal wastes as fertilizer. Human and animal fertilizer, which sanitary reformists theorized as a

source of vital energy on which plant life would flourish, was a means of relocating organic

wastes that were responsible for disease outbreaks from cesspools and dustheaps to farm plots,

where they would be transformed into life-sustaining food.

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Given how Victorian sanitarians

blamed the inhalation and otherwise ingestion of stagnant human wastes as the root cause of

cholera epidemics, it may seem counterintuitive that Victorian authors like Mayhew urged that

256

Karen Hadley interprets this speech as Aurora updating the Georgic “for her own more optimistic view of her

creativity and the civilization in which she lives and labours” (417).

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Refer to Ursula Kluwick’s chapter on “The Cultural Sustainability of Victorian Waste” (2019) for a look at how

Victorians used human excrement that was previously collected in cesspools and nightsoil heaps as manure, a

system known as the “dry conservancy method” of disposal as opposed to an emerging system of water-borne

sewage removal that sought to divert waste into the Thames. Kluwick relates how proponents of the dry

conservancy method “deplored the loss of ingredients of nightsoil valuable for agricultural purposes, and regarded

the water-borne system of sewage removal as inherently wasteful,” as they regarded nightsoil as nutrient-rich (184).

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humans repurpose such wastes into compost for future trans-corporeal uptake.

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However,

Victorian sanitarians and social reform authors alike saw these ecological practices as

transforming this matter from the stuff of disease into the stuff of health, in much the same way

that early vaccinators used cow-lymph to transform contagion from a deadly process to a life-

saving medicine. Aurora’s evocation of fertilizer reflects a worldview in which organisms and

their wastes are mutually entangled, so that the humblest matter is capable of producing the most

valuable poetry.

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Aurora’s poetic vision at this early point is incomplete, however; for despite being

culturally aligned with a feminized nature and exposed to a masculine literary tradition, Aurora

does not yet know how to articulate a complete poetry that enfolds together the earthly and the

spiritual, the natural and cultural. Indeed, both characters disregard the gendered positionality

ascribed to them (culture and nature, respectively) to invest exclusively in its diametrical

opposite: much like Reynolds, Romney throws himself into the minute, economic realities facing

the poor classes,

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denying the importance of literary writing such as poetry as a vehicle for

social progress, while young Aurora seeks out poetic works that she believes will allow her to

transcend her earthly, thereby female, form (along with the limited, material opportunities she

has been granted as a female poet). She looks back on her early relationship with Romney as

described in Book 1 by appealing to this gendered bifurcation:

…Always Romney Leigh

Was looking for the worms, I for the gods.

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The process of recycling human feces into fertilizer was not new to the Victorian age, but cholera was. The

Victorian correlation between cholera epidemics and the ingestion of human wastes means that nineteenth-century

constructions of human feces were newly linked to contagion and dangerous trans-corporeal flows.

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As I mentioned in the introduction, the Victorians’ knowledge of transforming fecal matter (which they

associated with the spread of filth diseases) for productive in fertilization anticipates the cultural transformation of

the notion of human feces from pathogenic substance to medical resource (see Houf 2020).

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Young Romney’s brand of Christian socialism is typical of political economist writings such as Charles

Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850), which focus on the material realities resulting from underpaid labour. Aurora

considers her poetic career to be a “higher” vocation than the political economist yet grants the latter’s importance

claiming that poetry writing is “Most serious work, most necessary work/As any of the economists” (2.259-260).

See Dalley’s piece on gender and political economy in Aurora Leigh (2006), which considers the novel-epic as a

reflection on women’s place within a broader liberal economic framework. While I agree with Dalley, I see E.B.B.’s

engagement with economic questions as only one facet of her concern with women’s cultural productions.

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A godlike nature his; the gods look down,

Incurious of themselves; and certainly

‘Tis well I should remember, how, those days,

I was a worm too, and he looked on me. (1. 551-556)

In terms of both class and gender, Romney’s elevated status as heir apparent to Leigh Hall grants

him “godlike” stature, allowing him to regard himself as detached from earthly goings-on;

conversely, Aurora’s poor status as a female orphan positions her as the lowly worm who strives

to reach heaven. Both are architects: the first divine, the second earthly. Aurora’s earthliness is a

function of both her femininity and her poverty: her gender and class come together as two

interrelated vectors of abject corporeality which, according to Pamela K. Gilbert (2007), are

“defined by their openings and inappropriate exposures and excretions” (55), two vectors which

coalesce in the body of the prostitute with which she is compared. From his lofty vantage,

Romney is incapable of perceiving nuance and multiplicity, regarding his poor congregation as a

homogenized, nondifferentiated sum, one “great mass/ Of universal anguish” (208-9). Aurora,

meanwhile, has internalized the cultural precepts which [m]align women and nature with a

dangerous fluidity, permeability, and openness and she superimposes that trans-corporeality onto

the abject bodies of the poor. In Aurora’s descriptions of the poor at Romney and Marian’s failed

wedding mass, these bodies, like her mother’s face, are closer to nature than Romney’s culture.

These bodies, like Aurora’s impressions of her mother, cast off all attempts at containment and

bend towards grotesque relations and destruction. Poor bodies indiscriminately excrete and

infect. The oft-quoted scene of Romney’s failed wedding to the poor seamstress Marian Erle

offers a vivid picture of how such dangerous trans-corporeality is ascribed to poor, feminized,

and naturalized beings. As in previous chapters of this dissertation, this trans-corporeality is

couched within a conventional contagion narrative.

Romney visualizes class inequality as a bleeding orifice that ought to be sewn up, telling

Marian to “Compress the red lips of this gaping wound” by marrying him (4.127). The menstrual

image of these bleeding “red lips” affiliates abject poverty with the feminine abject: the red lips

of the social body produce waste from its mouth and vagina interchangeably, corresponding to

Romney’s earlier assumptions about women’s lesser poetry as carnal. It also betrays Romney’s

impulse to break down class boundaries at any cost even if doing so involves violence, which

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overwrites the realities of situated experience: sewing two lips into one.

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This wedding turns

out to be a spectacular failure, however, and Marian, in failing to show up, merely renders this

“gaping wound” of class conflict all the more apparent.

Aurora projects her disgust at her own leaky body when she describes how the poor folk

of Marian’s relations enter St. James Church like a tide of contaminating filth. She refers to these

bodies as “humours of the peccant social wound/ All pressed out, poured down upon Pimlico”

(4.544-545), with “the moil of death upon them” (4.550). The correlation between organic filth

and miasma echoes Romney’s previous disparaging of the modern age as unsuitable for poetry,

and indeed Aurora’s subsequent description of their entrance is far from elevated verse:

They clogged the streets, they oozed into the church

In a dark slow stream, like blood [and they…]

Crawled slowly toward the altar from the street,

As bruised snakes crawl and hiss out of a hole

With shuddering involution (4.553-4, 4.566-568).

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Recalling Aurora’s body as a “worm” (1.556), this snake-like current casts bodies of the natural

world as sites of dangerous viscosity and flow. While critics have been quick to read this scene

in terms of excrement and poverty,

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they have been less attuned to its correspondence with the

menstrual abject. This negative classed portrayal is also a negative gendered portrayal. Like a

social wound, the poor are a single, homogenous flow of blood streaming into the building, but

this thickly-clotted, oozing blood more closely resembles the viscosity of menstrual fluid than

blood rushing from a wound. The “hole” pushing out snakes certainly evokes defecation, but is

also strangely reminiscent of vaginal birth, complete with “pants and pauses” and the appearance

of “an ugly crest/Of faces” (4.569-570) – a monstrous birthing/aborting/menstruating of a

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The depiction of these “red lips” bears a striking resemblance to Luce Irigaray’s formulation of “two lips”

(1980), a model of feminine multiplicity and interaction as an alternative to the dominant discourse of a singular

phallogocentrism. This has been a contentious metaphor because it connects female expression to genitalia (labia),

but critics like Gallop have persuasively defended the metaphor against charges of essentialism by suggesting that it

is part of Irigaray’s “rhetorical strategy” (see Gallop 1983).

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Amy Karhmann Huseby considers the scene of the “crammed mass” (4.571) in terms of dangerous crowd.

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See Sabine Schülting’s reading of the mob as “over-determined Gothic phantasmagoria” (2016).

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nondifferentiated mass of human beings. The intertwined “menstrosity”

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of women and the

poor is fitting when we understand Aurora’s wedding vision as a projection of her own fraught

relationship with embodied expression, her internalized notions of female poetry as a wasteful,

monstrous bodily creation akin to feces, menstrual fluid, and miscarried fetuses. Consider

Aurora’s description of her early poems as human waste: as menstruation (the “rhythmic

turbulence/Of blood and brain swept outward upon words” (1. 897-898)), and as abortion: “I

ripped my verses up,/And found no blood upon the rapier’s point;/The heart in them was just an

embryo’s heart, Which never had yet beat, that it should die” (3. 247). The scene conveys the

abject in both senses of the abject feminine and abject poverty.

Importantly, Aurora suggests that the poor’s verbal expressions are not only menstrual

but lactational in her subsequent description of the crowd as

Babies hanging like a rag

Forgotten on their mother’s neck,—poor mouths,

Wiped clean of mother’s milk by mother’s blow,

Before they are taught her cursing. (4.576-579)

Aurora suggests a linguistic aspect to lactation here as poor mothers wean their infants off of

milk and replace this oral feeding with a diet of “curses” instead, another of the poor’s wasteful

expressions. If this scene, like Romney’s previous speech, presents the modern age as a pile of

organic waste, then poet Aurora’s employment, like the “worm[‘s],” involves mulching the soil

and refuse and using it to turn out her poetic verse.

This description may appear negative, and at this stage, Aurora certainly thinks of it that

way. However, if we turn back to Aurora’s earlier glorification of agricultural fertilization (itself

borne out of waste), then even this scene provides the material (in both senses of literal material

and subject matter) for Aurora to produce a living poetry that captures the modern age.

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Consider Jane Bennett’s reading of worms as literally ground-breaking political actants: “They

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I am using Susan Walsh’s (1992) term for political metaphors employing menstrual imagery to convey monstrous

forms of anarchy. Walsh’s reading homes in on menstrual imagery as a subset of waste imagery, but it does not

consider the ecological underpinnings that underwrite these images of wastes transformed.

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Romney describes how he once “beheld the world/As one great famishing carnivorous mouth,--/A huge,

deserted, callow, black bird Thing, -/With its piteous open beak that hurt my heart,/Till down upon the filthy ground

I dropped,/And tore the violets up to get the worms./Worms, worms, was all my cry: an open mouth,/A gross want,

bread to fill it to the lips,/No more!” (8.395-403).

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make [history] by making vegetable mold, which makes possible ‘seedlings of all kinds,’ which

makes possible an earth hospitable to humans, which makes possible the cultural artifacts,

rituals, plans, and endeavors or human history. Worms also ‘make history’ by preserving the

artifacts that humans make” (96). In a mid-nineteenth-century context, E.B.B.’s representations

of worms are consistent with those of natural historians

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who view lowly earthworms as

integral collaborating “agents,” representations that inform Charles Darwin’s construction of

earthworms as those “small agencies” which, Bennett argues, “participate in heterogenous

assemblages in which agency has no single locus, no mastermind, but is distributed across a

swarm of various and variegated vibrant materialities” (96).

The wedding scene, with its evocations of human waste and worms, indeed evokes the

threat of boundless trans-corporeal exchange in its “tide of contaminative filth”, and that is why

it has most often been taken up by critics as standard Victorian fare of disparaging poor bodies as

producers of destructive filth and contagion.

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However, despite Aurora not recognizing the

potential for human waste at this point, I contend that she comes to discover that the body’s

expressions may produce disease but also great poetry (though as yet, her poetry is incomplete,

lacking the spiritual aspect necessary for a poetic “double-vision”).

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More than just

foreshadowing the kind of subject matter that Aurora will come to use in her poetry, the scene

hints at Aurora’s eventual transformation of authorship itself into a kind of heterogenous

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For instance, consider English natural historian Charles Fothergill’s account of the importance of earthworms in

his Essay on Natural History (1813): “The utility of worms, indeed, really consists in fertilizing the earth, though

they act also as correctors to our rich soils… By cleansing the surface of the ground they inhabit of those vast

quantities of leaves, fibres of plants, and decaying vegetable matter, which, at certain seasons, cover the earth, they

make the best possible preparation for reproduction… Both farmers and gardeners form very erroneous conclusions

on this subject; and are never more blinded by prejudice, than in their persecutions of these useful agents, who

convert what would otherwise be unprofitable, into the best materials for a fertile soil…” (185-187).

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Marjorie Stone (1985) considers the wedding scene to both reiterate and further add to “a collective discourse of

the poor” (163). Anna Williams (2017) contrasts the “dramatic poet” with the “unpoetic multitudes” of poor

attendees in this scene; Brent Shannon (2006) explores E.B.B.’s representation of the London Poor as consistent

with developing notions of the social body; Doreen Thierauf (2020) claims that the wedding scene imitates middle-

class reporting on poverty that “ Aurora Leigh, despite its sophisticated narrative ironies, does not ultimately

revoke” (451).

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Aurora uses a combination of blood and agricultural metaphors to describe her finished book: “If life-blood’s

necessary, —which it is,/ (By that blue vein athrob on Mahomet’s brow,/Each prophet-poet’s book must show man’s

blood!)/If life-blood’s fertilizing, I wrung mine/On every leaf of this…” (5.353-357). For historical usages of

menstrual blood as fertilizer, see Nathalie Rose Dyer (2020, 103-104).

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assemblage, a kind of collaboration central to Aurora’s poetic vision.

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Aurora as worm

becomes author, but it is a form of authorship that is diffused across agencies rather than

originating from a cohesive, closed self.

For our purposes, it is crucial to note how Marian’s body (albeit absent here) is at the

center of this transformative process. At this point in Aurora’s career, Marian signifies the

dangers of trans-corporeality in contagion. The wedding scene presents poor people like Marian

in an appalling orgy of bodies whose physiological emissions are only productive of bodily

injury: pus, miasma, blood, feces, mother’s blows and curses. The contagion narrative that

Aurora describes in this scene is limited to destruction, and while Aurora’s understanding of

what Marian represents here is limited, it will later serve to rewrite the contagion narrative as the

site of profound, embodied communication. From poor seamstress to unwed breastfeeder,

Marian moves through different yet overlapping narratives of human intimacy: if her ostensible

fallenness makes her a stock character of the “outbreak narrative” (per Wald), then it also

registers how London is now an “imagined community” constituted by myriad physical

interactions. These interactions reveal the growing industrial city as an analogously

“promiscuous” social space where people were “literally and figuratively bumping up against

each other in smaller spaces and larger numbers than ever before” (Wald 14). If, as Wald

maintains, the contagion narrative functions to shape and reshape “imagined communities,” then

at the heart of that narrative is a narrative of physical intimacy in the modern world. It is this

reshaped world that Aurora seeks to capture as a modern poet of her age. She captures it by

rupturing material boundaries (between bodies), but also by rupturing boundaries between

material and discursive phenomena—the gods and the worms.

While Aurora will come to celebrate human intimacies as open ecologies, she does not

endorse the obliteration of all boundaries between self and other to form a nondifferentiated

coagulation. Indeed, Romney’s subsequent failure as a social reformer, when his flock rebel

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Darwin’s central discussion of worms happens in The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of

Worms (1881), long after E.B.B. had died in 1861. However, horticultural metaphors of poetry were commonplace.

Consider how earth features in Harriet Waters Preston’s 1899 description of Aurora’s life after her spine was injured

at fifteen: “She absorbed knowledge, in her seclusion, as naturally as a plant absorbs moisture and aliment in the

most unlikely-looking soil; transmuting what she appropriated, with plantlike unconsciousness, into color, fragrance,

and wonderful intricacies of form” (The Atlantic).

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against him, stems from this fractured perspective of poor people as a homogenous collective

(“great mass”). Ironically, it is only once Leigh Hall is burnt down and Romney is blinded that

he gains this dual perspective. He tells Aurora that “each individual man/remains an Adam to the

general race” (8.854-855), literally envisioning an atomized (or more aptly, “Adamized”) system

of government which simultaneously recognizes “society [as]…but the expression of single

men’s lives,/The loud sum of the silent units” (8.875-877). In her reading of the poem, Amy

Kahrmann Huseby regards these two models of aggregation in terms of either “collection” or

“diffusion” (2) and concludes that Aurora Leigh “refuses statistical smoothness in favor of a

mathematical form of aggregation characterized by internal divisions, one that prefers collection

to fusion” (3).

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An aggregate, defined as a whole that is formed by combining several, often

disparate, elements, contains within it a myriad of perspectives joined together (in this case, the

humans, worms, and gods). While statistician Romney quantifies this heterogenous assemblage

in terms of mathematical aggregation,

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poet Aurora captures it in words, specifically, in

metaphor, materializing multiplicity in the figure of multiple, lactating breasts, and embodying

the notion of communication across difference through the icon of a nursing dyad. These are

models of heterogenous assemblage which trouble corporeal boundaries without erasing internal

difference.

“Double Vision” in the “Double-Breasted Age”: From Fragmentation to Multiplicity

At the beginning of Book 5, Aurora has a revelation that the female fluidity that she has

repressed has been central to her poetic perspective all along. Rather than dismiss the earthly in

favor of the heavenly, she recognizes that she must learn to integrate both perspectives at one

time, saying:

…poets should

Exert a double vision; should have eyes

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For Huseby, “Barrett Browning’s aggregates formally exploit poetry’s inherent ability to quantify in ways that

retain plurality and categories without flattening, smoothing, or fusing. In Aurora Leigh, Barrett Browning refuses a

model of absorption that produces uniform wholes because this would homogenize heterogenous elements into a

single category, which can then become the basis on which incorrect or even dangerous social responses are made;

absorption risks silencing individual voices, the poet suggests, by transforming them into a single, fused voice” (2).

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Romney argues that the world “must be developed from its one,/If bettered by its many” (8.859-860).

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To see near things as comprehensively

As if afar they took their point of sight,

And distant things as intimately deep

As if they touched them. Let us strive for this. (5.183-188)

This “double vision” represents a synthesizing of two vantage points (“near things” and “distant

things”) which nonetheless retains the distinct vantage point of each. To view “near things […]

comprehensively” is to see the individual in tandem with the whole, while to view “distant things

[…] intimately deep” is to see the whole in tandem with the singular. To “exert a double vision”

is thus to amalgamate the earthly with the celestial, the “intimate” with the universal, without

losing sight of either, without ever reducing one to the other.

Critics of Aurora Leigh have long been interested in how the work deals with notions of

duality, what Amy Kahrmann Huseby (2018) terms its “combinatory logic […that] unites

disparate pieces in order to do its political work” (3).

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After all, Aurora’s life is characterized

by a series of seemingly contradictory subject positions, and she feels she must opt for one at the

cost of the other: woman or artist (2.4), heart or brain (2.111-112), wife or poet, poetry or love?

Critics have taken this “double-vision” to mean an array of different things, all of which

convey how a poet can (and ought to) contain multitudes, whether that be multiple nationalities

or multiple poetic traditions. Alison Chapman (2015) links the poem’s motifs of doubleness to

both Aurora’s and Barrett Browning’s double-nationality as expatriates of England living in

Italy, literalized in Aurora’s case of having an Italian mother and English father. She picks up on

Aurora’s claim that “A poet’s heart/Can swell to a pair of nationalities” (6.50-53) to suggest that

the expatriate female poet possesses a “slippery, and inconsistent sense of patriotism” produced

by “multiple symbolic affiliations” (91-92). A number of critics have considered the generic

hybridity of the novel-epic in their readings (Natasha Moore, Donald Hair, and Monique

Morgan). Linda M. Shires regards Aurora’s/E.B.B.’s double occupation of a female poetic

tradition and a masculine poetics as a “cross-dwelling” or “ability to live in incommensurate

identities” (331); but the androgyny reaches further.

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Consider also Caroline Levine’s (2011) reading of the poem’s investment in producing “a meaningful unity out

of multiplicity” (46).

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I regard “Double vision” in the text as a comprehensive metaphor that reconciles its many

binary oppositions—self and other, poet and reader, male and female—by suggesting that they

are not mutually exclusive categories but rather mutually constitutive, free-flowing, and

enmeshed. “Double vision” is the means by which Aurora frees trans-corporeality from the

constraints of the contagion narrative to productive material and conceptual configurations of

fluidity. The Aurora who witnessed the failed wedding in Book 4 is an inexperienced poet who

has internalized misogynistic female authorship. This Aurora can only conceptualize her own

poetic expressions within the confines of messy, filthy, contagious bodies.

In Book 5, however, Aurora begins to experiment with how she might transform

destructive images of women’s leaky bodies into powerful metaphors of poetic creation that is a

coproduction of human and natural expressions. Aurora begins to formulate this emblem of the

breast-volcano in Book 5, which for Karen Hadley (2014) represents the “structural heart of the

poem” where Aurora “moves to formulating her own, very earthly, poetics” (474). Up until this

point, Aurora’s references to lactation and breastfeeding have been fraught, either denoting

passivity (Italy’s hills) or outright destruction (poor women cursing and harming their suckling

infants).

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In Book 5, Aurora intermingles metaphors of feminized nature and the naturalized

feminine to rework both into startlingly original images of what Donna Haraway might call

“material-semiotic” figures (2016). Such figures render fluid the boundaries between not only

human and environment, but matter and meaning.

Aurora proclaims that poetic inspiration figuratively springs from a breast-like volcano as

liquid “lava-lymph” that “trickles down successive galaxies” from heaven (5.3-5). Ecologically,

the volcano speaks in tune with “the ground/Tormented by the quickened blood of roots” (8-9);

bodily, it originates “with mother’s breasts,” which “round the new-made creatures hanging

there,/Throb luminous and harmonious like pure spheres…/With multitudinous life” (5.16-18).

From galaxies to planets, from soil to infants suckling from moon-like, lactating breasts, these

are all visions of “multitudinous life”: life that is not inescapably singular, nor gloriously

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Aurora’s aunt looks on her “like the sucking asp to Cleopatra’s breast” (2.864-865); Aurora describes villainous

Lady Waldemar in a way that recalls the poet’s monstrous mother, with “Those alabaster shoulders and bare

breasts,/On which the pearls, drowned out of sight in milk,/Were lost, excepting for the ruby-clasp!” (5.619-621)

Marian later defends Waldemar’s humanity by claiming that she is “A woman…not a monster… both her

breasts/Made right to suckle babes” (6.1182-1184).

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nondifferentiated, but rather inherently relational and symbiotic. This vision regards phenomena

as an endless feedback loop of fluid communications that joins together the celestial, the

linguistic, the environmental, and the physiological into an interconnected ecosystem of

continual energy transference and exchange. It is the modern poet’s vocation to recognize and

celebrate this profound entanglement. Aurora’s breast-volcano is an early metaphor of poetic

creation as a heterogenous collection of voices.

It is only after Aurora encounters the figure of Marian Erle, a poor fallen woman, that she

is able to fully reconceptualize an understanding of poetic creation. Marian’s prelinguistic and

lactational communication with her infant provides Aurora with the means of recognizing how

poetry production is one of multiple authors and thus multiple views. Aurora’s “double vision”

opens up the possibility of heterogenous collectivity over nondifferentiation (the crowd) or

fragmentation (the perception of individuals as units unto themselves). By heterogenous

collectivity I mean the recognition of multiplicity that does not attempt to minimize internal

differences such as those of gender and class; it anticipates actor-network theory’s notion of the

“actant,”

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which Jane Bennett claims “never really acts alone” because “its efficacy or agency

always depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive inference of many bodies and

forces,” displacing notions of individual agency (21).

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“Double vision” therefore endorses an ideology of “both/and” (collaboration) as opposed

to one of “either/or” (incompleteness) or “both/but” (that is, a unity which systemically erases

important markers of situated difference, one that proves disastrous for Romney’s philanthropic

efforts). Importantly, these dualities map onto an overarching binary opposition of gender

difference: on the one hand, masculine (spiritual, celestial, elevated, universal, English) and on

the other, the disparaged category of feminine (material, earthly, humble, personal, Italian).

Aurora’s “double vision” provides a rhetorical strategy with which to recognize how these

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Actor-Network theory (ANT) is a methodology developed by Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars

(predominantly Michel Callon, Madeleine Akrich and Bruno Latour), and it considers how animate beings and

inanimate objects all exhibit forces that come together to shape natural and social worlds. ANT has many resonances

with new materialist theories because it assumes a material-semiotic basis of relations.

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Bennett continues: “A lot happens to the concept of agency once nonhuman things are figured less as social

constructions and more as actors, and once humans themselves are assessed not as autonoms but as vital

materialities” (21). Bruno Latour’s and Michael Callon’s usages of the term “agent” pertain to the notion of actor-

network theory which is similarly invested in the principle of diffused subjectivity, with some overlap with material

feminisms and other new materialist theories.

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categories are slippery, porous, and permeable.

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That Aurora’s breast can “swell to a pair” of

nationalities implies that her cultural hybridity makes her uniquely equipped to take on multiple

poetic perspectives, but it also explicitly aligns female breasts with that capacity for multiplicity.

To capture the porosity of communication, E.B.B. uses mixed metaphors like the breast-volcano

which break down the boundaries between humans, between humans and the more-than-human

world, and between matter (blood, excrement, milk) and discourse (poetry). All of these actants

orbit around images of lactation and nursing.

As I set out to prove in my introductory case study of the cultural correlation between

vaccination and lactation, human milk markets were an apt metaphor with which to articulate

both destructive and productive modes of intimacy in the modern world. E.B.B. constructs

poetic expression as a kind of lactational expression and poetic communication as a kind of

breastfeeding.

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A cautioning word of poetic humility frames the beginning and the end of Aurora’s

speech beginning Book 5, “Aurora Leigh, be humble” (1, 42). Yet it is the humble, the earthly,

the visceral, that is missing from modern poems which draw on an elevated male poetic tradition.

Humility, moreover, is one of the few qualities that society grants to women, but something that

this lowly worm has overlooked by “looking […] for the gods” (1.557). Rather, Aurora exclaims

that modern poets must celebrate that which has been disparaged: the physiological. They must

catch

Upon the burning lava of a song

The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted age:

That, when the next shall come, the men of that

May touch the impress with reverent hand, and say

“Behold, - behold the paps we all have sucked!”

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In this way, E.B.B. anticipates Eve Sedgwick’s notion of “normative dualisms,” which she claims “actually

subsist in a more unsettled and dynamic tacit relation according to which, first, term B is not symmetrical with but

subordinated to A; but, second, the ontologically valorized term A actually depends for its meaning on the

simultaneous subsumption and exclusion of term B; hence, third, the question of priority between the supposed

central and the supposed marginal category of each dyad is irresolvably unstable, an instability cause by the fact that

term B is constituted as at once internal and external to term A” (1990, 10).

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Barrett Browning’s correlation between lactation and language not only prefigures the French feminists but more

particularly, Madeleine Grumet’s evocation of human milk as the central image of feminist pedagogy in Bitter Milk:

Women and Teaching (1988).

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This bosom seems to beat still, or at least

It sets ours beating; this is living art,

Which thus presents and thus records true life. (5.215-222).

If the fact that E.B.B. is explicitly describing a woman’s breast was not disturbing enough for

Victorian readers, then the comparison of a lactating breast to an active volcano certainly would

be. Human, animal, and landscape coalesce in the word “paps”: variously, an archaic word for

nipples, a reference to animal teats, and geographic hills which resemble breasts (such as the

Paps of Anu in Ireland). In describing her own age, E.B.B. is referencing the historic Vesuvius

volcano which destroyed the ancient city of Pompeii, Italy, while paradoxically preserving it.

Aurora indicates that this eruption suspended the city and its inhabitants in a moment of time,

creating a monument.

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Just as many Victorians currently behold the archeological site in real

life, Aurora grants that “the men of” the next age may also witness this amalgamation of human,

animal, architecture, and molten rock.

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E.B.B.’s depiction of “living art” conveys how a natural

disaster illuminates the interrelationality between different orders of being, rendering human

bodies inanimate and inert matter agential.

In this way, Aurora’s depiction speaks to Nancy Tuana’s interactionalist ontology of

“viscous porosity” (2008), which “attends to the process of becoming in which unity is dynamic

and always interactive, and agency is diffusely enacted in complex networks of relation” (13). As

a child, Aurora fantasized about nondifferentiated matter, the “flood” which “abolished bounds.”

In contrast, adult Aurora’s volcano metaphor preserves the integrity of the individual parts as its

flow, like Darwin’s worms, “‘makes history’ by preserving the artifacts that humans make.” In

this case, some of those human artifacts include the living humans, which come together with all

the other materials to form a heterogenous assemblage. This “living art” is thus both in processes

of perpetual becoming (temporally) and becoming-with (spatially).

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Not all the reviews of the image were negative. In 1862, poet and essayist Gerald Massey would commend the

image of “the lava mould of that beautiful bosom found… amongst the ruins of Pompeii”, indicating how divisive

the image was for critics (North British Review, 36, May 1862, pp. 517-18).

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Pompeii was a popular tourist destination during the 19th century. See Thomas Henry Dyer (1867).

167

To deconstruct agency in this way, moving away from single, self-contained identities to

heterogenous assemblages, is to alter the way in which poetic creation itself is understood, from

that of a single, hermetically-sealed creator to a collaborative process of mutual becomings.

Aurora features the nursing dyad as a model of poetic transmission which troubles the integrity

of the poetic subject, posing complications as far as accounting for authorship because

inspiration comes from multiple sources. Aurora uses the works of Homer as a model to

demonstrate how poetic production is a collaborative process. She reprobates literary critics like

Friedrich August Wolf, who in 1795’s Prelegomena ad Homerum, theorizes that Homer’s works

were not composed by a single author. Rather than defend Homer as the sole originator of these

poems, Aurora celebrates this work, like all literary productions, as a collaborative process. Wolf

himself, she claims, “floats in cream, as rich as any sucked/From Juno’s breasts, the broad

Homeric lines/And while with their spondaic prodigious mouths/They lap the lucent margins as

babe-gods/Proclaim them bastards” (5.1250-1254).

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Aurora constructs Wolf’s source as a lactating woman, much like Mrs. Poetical Thought,

whom young Barrett identified as Homer’s wetnurse. In this case the lactating woman is Juno,

whose milk, according to Greek mythology, is said to spill out into the night sky to create the

Milky Way. Milk is thus poetic inspiration flowing through and between all poets. The image of

poetic inspiration is not limited by what came before in Aurora’s estimation, but indicates an

interactive relationship between past, present and future. To capture this “heaving, full-veined,

double-breasted age” is to understand its continued living state within the poetic lineages that

came before it (as “record”), the current poets who “present” true art, and “the next” ones to

come, on a continuum. The standard female author’s metaphor of birthing a text merely replaces

the notion of literary paternity with literary maternity, and therefore leaves the construction of

the self-enclosed author intact. However, Aurora’s “double-breasted” lactational metaphor

dramatizes the multiplicity of authorship.

281

280

See Montefiore’s (2002) and Stone’s (1984) interpretations of the milk imagery in this passage.

281

In read E.B.B.’s use of “women’s figures” in line with Jane Gallop’s reading of Irigaray’s gynecological imagery

(“two lips”) as a “rhetorical strategy” (1983), fragmenting the unitary logic of phallogocentrism by privileging

multiplicity.

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The natural world is a constant feature of this multiplicity. As a child, Aurora experiences

Italy’s free-flowing hills in terms of a lactational, pre-linguistic expression; as an adult, Aurora’s

recollection of Italy informs her construction of the nursing dyad as a symbiotic, free-flowing

communication between author and reader. Aurora’s mother-want as an adult leads her back to

her homeland of Italy, which she addresses thus:

And now I come, my Italy,

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My own hills! Are you ‘ware of me, my hills,

How I burn toward you? do you feel to-night

The urgency and yearning of my soul,

As sleeping mothers feel the sucking babe

And smile? (5.1266-71)

Aurora’s address to Italy’s hills furthers the maternal ecology that she alluded to in her

childhood, not least because “My own hills” could refer interchangeably to Pelago and Aurora’s

own adult breasts. In an ecofeminist register, Aurora’s designation of Italy as a motherland to

commune with rather than to possess repurposes a feminization of natural landscapes which has

historically objectified women and rendered the natural world as something to be owned,

penetrated, and exploited.

283

While Aurora’s desire to possess these lands (“my Italy […] my own

hills”) indicates a desire for possession, Aurora’s construction of her hills as mother resists this

patriarchal formulation because it positions Nature in terms of kin rather than sexual conquest—

a continuum to be acknowledged rather than a categorical other to be conquered. This minor

distinction has major implications. Aurora recognizes rather than denounces women’s

282

Interestingly, Aurora referred to the same subject matter in her early poems, for in Book 5 she maligns the

success of her “descriptive” poem called “The Hills,” which may be a reference to E.B.B.’s own early poem “The

Lost Bower,” about the Malvern Hills of Elizabeth’s childhood above the garden at Hope End. In it, E.B.B. ponders

on the notion that wandering in nature is productive for the poet, considers feminine expression as poetic inspiration

(“Rinaldo’s lovely lady…Rosalinda, like a fountain, laughed out pure with solitude” XIV), and anthropomorphizes

Nature in conventionally feminine terms (XXXII). The speaker, as a child, seeks out the source of music which is

sweeter than that of Pan or Faunus “which has sucked the milk of waters at the oldest reed” (XXXVII), and

eventually discovers it in an illusive bower atop the hill which she can never find again.

283

See for instance, Francis Bacon’s characterization of nature as a female body, whose secrets are like milk “locked

in the bosom of nature” (124) or “laid up in the womb of nature” (99) a construction echoed in Victor Frankenstein’s

desire to “pursue nature to her hiding places” (81), inspired in turn by his professor’s description of the scientific

endeavor as a metaphor of sexual violation, where the scientist’s job is to “penetrate into the recesses of nature, and

shew how she works in her hiding places” (75). For a summary of scientific metaphors of nature, see Anne Mellor’s

foundational reading of “Frankenstein: A Feminist Critique of Science” (1987).

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association with nature, recognizing a new kind of nature as active force rather than simply a

product of culture (law, symbolic order). The nature of this force operates within a decidedly

different form of agency than what we regard as human agency: deliberate, premediated,

intentional.

284

By recognizing the awareness, urgency, and yearning in the hills of Pelago,

Aurora animates these hills as an agential force with some order of cognition in which it is

enmeshed with actors, only some of which are human. Yet the image of poetry as a transmission

of free-flowing milk would not have been unproblematic in mid-century England, where the

communication of milk across bodies was fraught with danger.

While Aurora is able to produce powerful ecological representations of female poetry,

ones that signify poetry’s trans-corporeal reaches, Aurora must come to terms with the contagion

narrative head-on if she is truly to undo her self-hatred towards her own leaky body. And to do

so, she must encounter a central icon of that contagion: former seamstress, fallen woman, fallen

breastfeeder, and unmarried mother Marian Erle.

Positive Transmissions: Resisting Contagion in the Nursing Dyad

As I have explored in my introduction and earlier in this chapter, both animal and human

milk markets were highly suspect by the mid-nineteenth-century. A number of Victorianists have

remarked upon this cultural shift in the perception of milk markets. As Jules Law relates in The

Social Life of Fluids (2010), Victorian authors like Charles Dickens warned of the dangerous

effects that industrialization and urbanization had on the trade, which saw country cows who

once frolicked in country pastures made into urban cows who lived in cramped conditions (7).

Richard Horne’s 1850 essay in Household Words titled “The Cow with the Iron Tail” calls

attention to the rampant adulteration of milk. The title alludes to the process by which cow’s

milk was diluted with water, but since the diluted milk appeared thin, other additives were mixed

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This feminization of an active nature/feminine prefigures current conversations happening in materialist

feminisms, and specifically it anticipates new material notions of agency as diffused. In Undomesticated Ground:

Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (2000), Alaimo considers how her revisioning of nature forces us to ask: “How

it is possible to understand agency without a subject, actions without actors? How can we rethink matter as activity

rather than passive substance?” (245).

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in: calves’ brains for creaminess, “mysterious […] orange red balls” for a yellowish tint, and

snail slime to resemble froth (11).

285

The prospect of tainted milk was not only revolting to consumers; its effects upon the health

of those who consumed it were unpredictable.

286

From the early to mid nineteenth century, it was

common for milking cows to be infected with transmittable diseases like tuberculosis, a disease

contaminating much of the milk produced. While Louis Pasteur would develop the practice of

pasteurization in the 1860s to eliminate the threat of tuberculosis in cow’s milk by gently heating

it, mid-century Victorians were cognizant of the dangerous effects of tainted milk well before

Robert Koch identified the tubercle bacillus in 1882, in much the same way that they were aware

that water was a vehicle for cholera transmission before Koch identified the bacillus responsible

for its transmission in 1883.

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The dangers of consuming cow’s milk were of great public concern, for milk consumers

were predominantly children and infants. Cow’s milk was used to feed orphaned babies in cases

when wet nurses were not readily available, and the high infant mortality rates, which were even

more dismal amongst orphaned infants raised on cow’s milk, can be at least partially explained

by the fact that bovine milk is an efficient carrier of disease. Without infant formula to speak of

until 1865,

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Victorians readily recognized that breast is best when the only alternative almost

invariably led to infant death. However, it was not just cow’s milk that fostered these contagion

anxieties, as the question of whose breast could mean the difference between sustenance and

sickness.

289

285

For accounts of Victorian milk adulteration, see various works by Jacob Steere-Williams (2010, 2014), Chris

Otter (2019), Kreisel’s chapter on “Self-Sacrifice, Skillentions, and Mother’s Milk” (2012), and myself (2015).

Producers of infant feeding products have come under fire more recently, for instance with the 1977 Nestlé boycott

on the grounds that the company was unfairly profiting off of marketing infant formula to mothers in third-world

countries; see Tehila Sasson (2016).

286

Given that most additives were relatively harmless to consume, the inherent quality of the milk itself was up for

debate. We now know that non-pulmonary TB can be transmitted from animal to human through the vehicle of

infected beef and dairy products, commonly cow’s milk.

287

In 1855, the Commission on Adulterations related how one Dr. Normandy of London “saw from thirty to forty

cows in a most disgusting conditions, full of ulcers, their teats diseased and their legs full of tumours and abscesses

– in fact, quite horrible to look at; and a fellow was milking them in the midst of all this abomination” (91). The

author concludes that “This was by no means an exceptional case, a great many dairies being in the same condition.

The milk, in consequence, is really diseased milk…” (91). Normandy draws a correlation between the sickness of

the cows themselves and the pathogenic quality of their product.

288

See Stevens, Patrick and Pickler on “A History of Infant Feeding” (2009), 18.

289

For an excellent history of the moralizing rhetorical strategies in infant feeding practices, see Koerber (2013).

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While it was cow’s milk at the center of these controversies, with R. Taylor Mason

estimating by 1890 that tubercular milk was responsible for half of all infant deaths, human milk

was not immune to these characterizations. Scholars like Alicia Carroll have considered how

concerns about contaminated cow’s milk spread to human milk, as the fantasy of the purity of

either “milk market” could no longer be maintained.

290

Carroll’s consideration of human and

animal lactation processes within the shared concept of “milk markets” is illustrative of the ways

that contamination anxieties were continuous across lines of animal and human milk production.

In this regard, there is a striking parallel between the Victorian dairy cow and the Victorian wet

nurse. Just as we can detect a cultural transformation in the Victorian conception of the dairy

cow from Carroll’s pure, healthy, rural cow producing pure milk to Law’s promiscuous,

diseased, urban cow who produced tainted milk, we can also see a contemporaneous

transformation in the cultural associations of the wet nurse from the rural, chaste, married, and

experienced mother to the urban, diseased, fallen woman.

Jill Matus (1995) has described how this new wet nurse was enmeshed into mid-century

conversations about illicit sex, affairs with employers, and even infanticide. The wet nurse’s

potential engagement in these acts was seen as evidence of a moral impurity that could be

transmitted to her small charge, making her “a conduit through which contaminating moral and

hereditary influences could flow” (160). The common denominator between these two

transformations in milk providers is a cultural shift in the perception of milk markets from rural

to industrial processes, as mass migration brought humans into continuous intimacies which

produced milk anxieties that live on in modern-day human milk banks.

291

290

In her study of “Human Milk in the Modern World” (2002), Alicia Carroll considers how Victorians could not

maintain the illusion of milk production in terms of a Romantic “cult of the dairy” when the industrialization of milk

markets was now a source of cultural anxiety. Carroll considers how this anxiety informed literary representations of

disastrous human lactation in Adam Bede and Tess of the D’Urbervilles, where milkmaids and breastfeeding women

face tragic ends.

291

In “Suspect Bodies, Suspect Milk: Milk Sharing, Wetnursing, and the Specter of Syphilis in the Twenty-First

Century” (2018), Shannon K. Carter and Beatriz M. Reyes-Foster consider how the legacy of nineteenth-century

breastfeeding anxieties taints modern discourses of milk sharing. They bring up the question of breastfeeding

women providing milk for free to human milk banks for for-profit companies as raising the same central questions

about the commodification of bodily fluids that came to the fore in nineteenth-century England. For instance, the

parents surveyed indicate that they are suspicious of people who charge money for breastmilk because it seems

morally suspect; they see this as an indication of potentially poor-quality and diseased milk. Also see their other

work on milk sharing practices (2020).

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These contagion anxieties—and their transformation—play out on the body of Marian

Erle. By all accounts, breastfeeding fallen woman Marian Erle should be representative of “bad

milk,” for her fallenness (even though it is a result of rape) would render her body impure

according to Victorian standards, and liable to transmit venereal diseases like syphilis through

her breastmilk.

292

When Aurora first encounters Marian Erle in Paris, she believes that she has

just seen a vision of her own dead mother. Aurora feels as if she were gazing upon a pond

“When something floats up suddenly, out there/ Turns over… a dead face, known once alive…/

So old, so new!” (6.235-240). Aurora’s comparison of Marian to a drowned body in a pond

evokes the drowned fallen woman’s fluidity. And just as Hood’s observer’s first instinct is moral

judgement, Aurora, upon recognizing Marian and meeting her illegitimate son, immediately

passes judgment on her as a fallen woman, using the familiar language of “guilt,” “sin,” and

“vice,” implying that her arms are “[un]clean,” and refusing to touch the child.

At first, Marian’s role as breastfeeder is central to Aurora’s horror at the scene, as she

sees Marian looking at her sleeping infant’s “baby-mouth,/shut close, as if for dreaming that it -

sucked” (6.575-756). However, Aurora’s initial judgement of Marian as a licentious woman

whose immoral intercourse resulted in this corrupt product (6.618-624) gives way to awe during

two significant and overlapping instances of feminine expression: Marian’s retelling of her tragic

story and her breastfeeding of her child as she “let the babe/Slide down upon her bosom from her

arms” (6.618-624). Marian discloses that she did not willingly enter the brothel but was forced

into it, thus the birth of this child was the result of rape. Marian claims to be “cursed,” saying

that she found the child “in the gutter, with my shame” (6.673), and that the rape has

symbolically killed her (8.648).

Marian’s description of her rape and her subsequent pregnancy recalls Aurora’s early

conviction that human waste can produce life. Marian is alive by the end of the novel-epic,

unlike Hood’s drowned fallen woman and Reynolds’s dead seamstress. Marian repeatedly

characterizes her rape as killing her, turning her into a corpse: she is “murdered” (6.771),

“Marian’s dead” (6.813), “I’m dead” (6.819), and “I [am] dead” (9.391). Marian describes her

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The character of Marian is highly exceptional in the Victorian canon because she is a fallen woman who is

allowed to survive.

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corpse as contagious: it lays in “corruption, cheek to cheek” with other dead bodies (6.1197). Yet

after Marian discovers that the rape resulted in pregnancy, she describes the event as an example

of the way God produces life out of death in the natural world: “he overblows an ugly

grave/With violets which blossom in the spring” (7.58-59). Though the construction is

problematic by modern standards, Aurora thus comes to understand Marian’s symbolically dead

corpse as the “grounds” on which new life springs, and therefore the icon of an embodied poetry

produced from human waste, waste that is transformed from pathology to production.

While Aurora’s imitative poetry failed to speak to her reader, Marian’s prelinguistic

communication with her infant demonstrates a two-way, trans-corporeal exchange, echoing

Aurora’s early recollections of her own mother:

She leaned above him (drinking him as wine)

In that extremity of love, ‘twill pass

For agony or rapture, seeing that love

Includes the whole of nature…

Self-forgot, cast out of self,

And drowning in the transport of the sight,

Her whole pale passionate face, mother, forehead, eyes,

One gaze she stood: then slowly as he smiled

She smiled too, slowly, smiling unaware,

And drawing from his countenance to hers

A fainter red… (6.559-611)

Imagery of fluidity, in “drinking” and “drowning”, characterizes this relationship between the

mother and child. Significantly, the nursing dyad’s communication is not a one-way fluid

transmission but a feedback loop: just like the infant suckles from Marian’s body, so too does

Marian “[drink] him as wine.” The scene registers a reciprocal mode of expression and

communication across difference—different bodies, but also different sexes, suggesting the

mode of fluid expression is not essentially female, but like our connection to the “Outer Infinite,”

it is something we are all born with.

Aurora, as author of this autobiographical poem, makes writerly decisions in this scene

that reveal her shift from seeing poetry expression as the product of a single author. When

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Aurora tells Marian’s story earlier, she opts to paraphrase it because she wants to tell it “with

fuller utterance” (3.828), finding that the lowly Marian’s words display “the gaps of any

imperfect phrase/ Of the unschooled speaker” (4.153–154). Aurora’s dismissal of Marian’s

simple mode of communication at this time recalls the way Aurora had dismissed her own early

poetry as being akin to a mother’s prelinguistic communication with her baby as “mak[ing] no

sense” (1.50). In this book and the following one, however, Aurora significantly allows Marian

to tell her story directly in her own words without poetic modification. Aurora’s autobiography

thus becomes a work of collaboration rather than the work of a single author.

293

It is only after

Aurora recognizes Marian’s two-way communication with her child that she is able to model

such a collaborative poetry in her own writing.

Aurora’s shift in attitude towards Marian completes her shift towards a trans-corporeal

and collaborative poetics. However, how can Aurora reconcile human milk’s potential for

modeling expression and communication with its capacities for pathological transmission?

294

When Romney and Aurora first search for Marian after the failed wedding, Aurora hints at a

possibility that the human breast (as both human organ and organ of expression) resists this

contagious transmission. Romney worries that “poor Marian” will come to ruin, to “soul and

body-plague,” in her exposure to the immoral world, and become a “ruined creature.” Aurora

responds by stating that

Some natures catch no plagues. I’ve read of babes

Found whole and sleeping by the spotted breast

Of one a full day dead. I hold it true,

As I’m a woman and know womanhood,

That Marian Erle, however lured from place,

Deceived in way, keeps pure in aim and heart,

As snow that’s drifted from the garden-bank

293

Nesbit claims that “[t]he voice of Marian’s story, told in Aurora’s (and E.B.B.’s) image-rich, highly allusive

blank verse, is distinctly not Marian’s” (224).

294

What is important to note about this transmission in breastfeeding is that the most common route of infection is

not from the feeder to the infant, but from the infant to the feeder. See Beatriz M. Reyes-Foster and Shannon K.

Carter (94). Because of the common practice of hiring a wet nurse, Victorians tended to focus predominantly on the

dangers of maternal feeding to the infant rather than the other way around.

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To the open road. (4.1064-1071)

In her description of an abandoned baby who has been unharmed by suckling from the breasts of

a diseased, dead woman, Aurora paints a picture of Marian’s metaphorical immunity against

moral harm. But the moral aspect of this metaphor is only half of the equation, for after all,

Romney worries about Marian contracting both “soul and body-plague.” Just as Elizabeth Barrett

Moulton-Barrett’s lactational metaphor for linguistic expression gestures towards a belief in the

material-semiotic capacities of breastmilk, Aurora’s description of metaphorical immunity in this

scene attests to the ways that medical authorities recognized milk as a kind of liquid and

linguistic expression. Moreover, the early vaccination movement constructed vaccination as a

lactational process; here, Aurora demonstrates lactation as a kind of “vaccinational” process.

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Aurora demonstrates a working knowledge of what we now call immunity. While

Jenner’s cowpox vaccinations—that dose of milky fluid administered to infants and adults

alike—was recognized as providing protection from the human variation of the illness

(smallpox), the notion that this principle of protection applied to other diseases was not widely

theorized. After all, it was only in the twentieth century that vaccinations against potentially fatal

diseases (particularly amongst infants and children) like tetanus, measles, and polio were

invented. Yet acquired immunity was a topic of concern around the time Barrett Browning

published Aurora Leigh. There was a severe outbreak of smallpox between 1851 and 1852,

which prompted the Vaccination Act in 1853, introducing compulsory smallpox vaccinations

free of charge, with children’s vaccination records connected to their birth registers.

What provides the infant with this miraculous immunity in this scene? Carolyn Ann

Jacobson (2008) argues that Barrett Browning is experimenting with ideas of natural immunity

in Aurora Leigh. Jacobson claims that E.B.B. was informed enough about the ongoing concerns

with cholera epidemics that she “was able to move beyond contemporary understanding about

the disease to theorize independently about the potential for individual immunity” (129-130).

While Jacobson argues that Barrett Browning is theorizing the possibility of natural immunity, I

consider how this description suggests the notion of acquired immunity. The most conservative

reading of this passage would infer that Aurora grants that just because a woman has an

295

On the complexities of herd immunity in relation to the responsibilities of vaccination, see Eula Biss (2021).

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infectious disease, it does not mean that she must transfer it to the suckling baby (who may

possess natural immunity). A more radical reading of the passage would take Aurora’s words to

imply that a woman’s breast, even in death, provides some protection against death and disease,

that Aurora is suggesting that breastmilk itself has properties of immunization, so that the infant

may “catch no plagues.”

When we defamiliarize ourselves from our own modern understandings of vaccination,

we can recognize how counterintuitive a process it really is: matter from a diseased individual is

extracted and implanted into the body of an otherwise healthy individual, which (rather than

making that individual sick) protects from the illness in question. To apply this principle of

protection to this scene, a diseased woman is administering her bodily fluids to an infant who,

rather than succumbing to it, retains its health. Could Aurora be suggesting that like the

milkmaid who transfers her cowpox to the suckling babes to protect them against future disease,

the body of a syphilitic woman is capable, not of infecting her infant, but offering it some kind of

bodily protection through the medium of breastmilk?

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In any case, Aurora presents a strong

case against the contagion of breastfeeding here.

Aurora’s image of lactation in this scene anticipates her later construction of modern

poetry as a breast-volcano. Specifically, the poet’s imagery of vaccinational milk is reminiscent

of the poet’s declaration of poetic inspiration as “lava-lymph” that “trickles down successive

galaxies” from heaven (5.3-5). The mixed metaphor enlists a strange combination of rhetoric,

where the discourses of ecology, biology, and pathology meet. At its most conventional,

“lymph” here can refer to a stream of water, which is consistent with Aurora’s preoccupation

with the source of poetic inspiration as Improvisatrice. But “lymph,” unlike say, “stream” or

“fount,” has an array of specialized meanings.

297

Most commonly of all, “lymph” refers to a class

of colorless bodily fluids, specifically those collected from infected tissues to use in the

vaccination process.

298

Thus, the lactational-lava that Barrett Browning is describing here is not

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With the success of cowpox vaccination, some Victorian scientists attempted to develop vaccinations for other

infectious diseases, such as cholera, but they were unsuccessful.

297

Interestingly, another ecological denotation for lymph was a colorless sap from plants.

298

Edward Jenner on vaccination distribution in 1810: “I send out a great deal of vaccine lymph on ivory points; but

my stock is exhausted, and I am now reduced to bits of quills” (letter 28 Feb in John Baron Life of Edward Jenner,

Volume 2 (1838): 368. The fact that Jenner fills quills with vaccine lymph creates a literal white ink. See also the

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only a nourishing substance but a restorative elixir—one that has its source in the celestial, the

natural, and the lactational indiscriminately.

299

Aurora therefore indicates that to read the

lactational poetry of this “double-breasted” age amounts to a symbolic vaccination as well as a

feeding, both of which are entwined in the image of this trans-corporeal fluid exchange in

breastfeeding. Of course, it is significant that this “lava-lymph” should have a lactational quality,

since it was cows’ udders which first provided this kind of miraculous material. Barrett

Browning thereby counters the anxiety of the associated contaminating aspect of fluid

transmission with her construction of poetic inspiration as a dual suckling/vaccination. In fact,

this notion of using the lactating breast as a method of safely administering potent medicine is

reflected in common practices within women’s own breastfeeding knowledges. For instance,

Isabella Beeton in her famous Book of Household Management (1862) urges breastfeeding

women of sick infants to consume the medicament themselves so that it may effectively pass

through their breastmilk in a medium that is safest for the child’s consumption. Aurora therefore

suggests that contamination may be the necessary risk of communication, but she offsets the risk

by imagining poetic inspiration not just as lactation, but as a kind of lactational vaccination,

another instance of lactination, which here anticipates current understandings of the antibodies in

breastmilk.

300

Aurora brings this new awareness of poetic creation as a collaborative process into her

final conversation with Romney at the end of the poem. After Romney admits he was mistaken

about her, Aurora acknowledges her own mistakes, that she was “Passioned to exalt/The artist’s

instinct in me at the cost/Of putting down the woman’s” when it takes “A handful of the earth/To

make God’s image!”(9.645-647, 9.651-652). Here she acknowledges her denial of her female

identity, recognizing that just as the lowly matter of dirt makes divine things, so too can her

woman’s expressions produce great poetry. The pair come together in union of bodies echoing

the fluid, two-way communication of Marian and her infant, with Aurora asking:

OED entry for “lymph” https://www-oed-

com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/view/Entry/111599?redirectedFrom=lymph#eid

299

Fittingly, today, “lymph” refers to white blood cells, which are responsible for fighting infection.

300

Of course, we now know that human milk contains a multitude of antibodies that protect the infant against

sickness and its chemical makeup even transforms according to the suckling infant’s nutritional needs. For a look at

how this female knowledge has been mobilized rhetorically, see Koerber’s “From ‘Wives’ Tales and Folklore’ to

Scientific Fact: Rhetorics of Breastfeeding and Immunity in the Mid-Twentieth Century” (2006).

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Could I see his face,

I wept so? Did I drop against his breast,

Or did his arms constrain me? were my cheeks

Hot, overflooded, with my tears, or his?

…There were words

That broke in utterance…melted in the fire,-

Embrace that was convulsion,.. then a kiss

As long and silent as the ecstatic night (9.714-722)

The two agree “to work” together (9.851) and promise to “Distort our nature never for our work”

(9.860) as “wedded souls” (9.882). They envision Aurora’s poetry producing social change as

Romney tells her to “press the clarion on thy woman’s lip” and “breathe thy fine keen breath

along the brass/And blow all class-walls level as Jericho’s” (9.929-932). Romney, once

disparaging of Aurora’s embodied expressions, now asks her to use her fluid breath to rupture

class divisions; her once miasmic effluvium takes the shape of an instrument for social

transformation.

This brings us, in a roundabout way, to the larger concerns which began this dissertation.

At the center of the communication of disease is the notion of communication itself. The

narrative of disease transmission is a narrative about interaction and communication, involving a

myriad of interactions with other humans and the more-than-human world. Victorianists

interested in ecology have located nineteenth-century England as a place of intense ecological

conversation, but most recently, they have turned towards what Deanna K. Kreisel and Devin

Griffiths term “open ecologies” (2020), that is, notions of ecologies which do not subscribe to

holistic systems of harmony and cooperation, such as those offered by natural theology and

organicism, but “the messy, contested, and often violent histories through which cultural and

natural systems continue to produce each other” (Kreisel and Griffiths 6-7).

The other end of harmony, unity, and symbiosis is contagion, pollution, toxicity—both

extremes are evidence of a reality of mutual constitution which increasingly characterizes the

modern era. If recycling is partly about the valorization of the relationship between the human

and the more-than-human world, its symbiosis and harmony, like the tulips that spring from

“dung-hills,” then there must also be room to talk about the negative, destructive, cataclysmic

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aspects of that system, captured in terms like Alaimo’s “toxic bodies” (2008) or Chen’s

“toxicity” (2012)—ontologies which do not regard these positive and negative models of

ecological systems as mutually exclusive but merely different iterations of the same system. At

the level of metaphor, the question of the transmissibility of literature raises the same questions

as the transmissibility of milk: if reading takes the shape of alimentary consumption, then the

intimacies that are produced by these transmissions might be destructive, poisonous or even

pathological, but they might—in equal measure—be unifying, healing, and nourishing. For

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the rewards outweigh the risks.

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Chapter 4. Lady Poisoners, Syphilis, and Empire: Foodways and/as “Diseaseways” in

Armadale (1864-1866)

“She was sentenced to death in such a scene as had never been previously witnessed in an English court of

justice. And she is alive and hearty at the present moment; free to do any mischief she pleases, and to

poison, at her own entire convenience, any man, woman, or child that happens to stand in her way. A most

interesting woman!” Wilkie Collins, Armadale, 529-530

So ends the account detective James “Jemmy” Bashwood gives to his father of Lydia Gwilt,

poisoner extraordinaire of Wilkie Collins’s sensationalist novel Armadale, and one of the most

notorious villainesses in Victorian fiction. Bashwood the younger describes how Lydia “cheated

the gallows” by using public sympathy in her favour, charming newspapermen to write “heart-

rending articles” (530) to sway doctors, barristers, and jurors to overturn her conviction of

husband-poisoning. Lydia is now free to poison once more, an act she relishes again and again.

In the 1866 Foreword to Armadale, Collins warns his readers that his novel may be

disturbing to them because it is “daring enough to speak the truth;” moreover, that it “oversteps,

in more than one direction,” the “Clap-trap morality” of the day (Collins 7). In her biography of

Wilkie Collins (2005), Lyn Pykett describes the author as “a proto-feminist whose portrayal of

such transgressive, independent women” as Lydia was “part of a more general exposure of the

social constraints on women” (223). Collins does not clarify what “truth” his novel reveals, but if

we are to grant that the novel’s major challenge to his society’s moral schema is its central

villain, Lydia Gwilt, then we have reason to consider her character as more than just fodder for

sensation novel and as a potential site of social critique.

This chapter extends the ingestion anxieties that were central to my chapters on Thames

drinking water and milk into a consideration of literal poison. Just as the mid-century discourses

on corpse-infested drinking water and fallen women’s breast milk mobilized immoral women’s

bodies as sites on and through which to negotiate narratives about unsafe ingestions, so too did

the poisoning debates revolve around the morally troubling figure of the lady poisoner. Like both

the drowned fallen woman and the fallen breastfeeder, the Victorian lady poisoner signifies

material disruption and social transformation. I read the act of poisoning as a trans-corporeal

event analogous to the transmission of contagious disease from one human body to another.

Poison, like contagion, thus reveals the inherent permeability of corporeal boundaries. The lady

poisoner’s body therefore operates as a leaky body. She signifies an expanded contagion

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containing both destructive and productive possibilities for relation. What sets the female

poisoner apart from the other fallen women I have explored was that her fluidity is frequently

racialized. I demonstrate how Collins uses the contagiousness of this figure—detestable and

irredeemable as she may be—to interrogate and deconstruct England’s treatment of both its

female subjects at home and colonized subjects abroad.

This chapter weaves together the various critical threads on the novel into a constellation

of poison, gender, race, and syphilis in Armadale and in the wider cultural imaginary of Collins’s

readers. I do so by tracking the changing face of the poisoner in all of her gendered and

racialized dimensions, extending scholarship on Victorian poisoners

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by linking the lady

poisoner’s toxicity to literary and medical texts on the topic of venereal syphilis. Conventionally

an Orientalized character of imperial harem narratives,

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the figure of the lady poisoner took on

the guise of an unassuming middle-class domestic woman with the mid-century food adulteration

hysteria, and in the 1860s, she developed the characteristics of a fallen woman with the rise of

the Contagious Disease Acts (1864, 1866), which rhetorically constructed venereal disease

transmission as a poisoning. I argue that remnants of this racialization and sexualization not only

survive but reinforce one another in Armadale’s portrayals of lady poisoners. By considering

how the attributes of leakiness “stick to” racialized as well as female bodies,

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this chapter

builds upon the recent work of feminist new materialist theories of corporeality which

incorporate race and sexuality, centrally Mel Chen’s theory of toxicity (2012). I thus extend and

complicate the gendering and classing of leaky bodies that has structured my previous chapters.

The concept of toxicity provides the framework for an intersectional feminist intervention into

the study of Victorian contagion narratives like the Contagious Disease Acts. Historically,

scholarship on the acts has focused on gender to the exclusion of race,

304

but I will demonstrate

the mutual imbrication of these positionalities.

301

See Pal-Lapinski (2005), Ebru (2016), and Mittag (2017).

302

Ebru argues that female poisoners were typically orientalized in travel texts like Turkey and its Destiny (1850).

303

I borrow this phrase from Sara Ahmed (2004).

304

On gender and the Contagious Disease Acts, see especially Walkowitz (1980), McHugh (1980); Brown (1991);

Mort (1987); Lee (2012), Ward (2014); Sanders (2015); O’Brien (2021). Both Lee and Sanders describe their work

as a “revisiting.” Works on the Victorian racialization of venereal disease in the context of empire include Jochelson

(2001), Kumar (2005), and Howell (2005).

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By arguing that Collins’s representation of poison is liberatory, my chapter builds on

Helen Williams’s argument (2013) that Collins’ depictions of poison challenge the “discrete

fixity of bodies” which is at the basis of England’s “medico-legal authority” (1). Reading

Lydia’s poisonous enterprises, Williams argues that “Collins’s interests extend beyond exploring

femininity and the female body as supposedly porous (and inherently dangerous)” (1). Williams

argues that Collins uses poisons instead “to highlight the essentially fluid and fluctuating states

of [all] bodies,” and “more importantly, to pose challenges to the medical and legal frameworks

which sought to dispel such indeterminacy as a means to cementing their own knowledge and

authority” (10). I align myself with Williams’s reading of Collins’s poisoning plots as a means of

undermining the integrity of legal and medical systems, but I see Collins’s interest in the

gendering of these constructions of fluidity and porosity as being integral to this challenge. I will

demonstrate how Lydia’s acts of poisoning, and the novel’s other female poisoners, embody a

physical transgression that is also necessarily a political transgression.

An Abundance of Allans: Sifting through Armadale’s Slippery Identities

Before we consider the food adulteration panic, lady poisoners, and exoticized depictions

of syphilis in Armadale, it is necessary to have a working knowledge of the novel’s plot, not

least because the name Allan Armadale actually denotes an astounding four different characters.

The novel’s plot in the narrative present develops out of an important backstory involving the

previous generation. This generation centers on one Allan Armadale (whom I will henceforth

designate as Allan 1). Allan 1’s godfather, the wealthy owner of a plantation in Barbados, makes

Allan 1 his heir after his son, Allan 2, disgraces the family. Allan 2 takes vengeance on Allan 1

for disinheriting him by marrying the woman Allan 1 intends to marry, Jane Blanchard, who

lives in Madeira, an island off the African continent. Allan 1 further retaliates by murdering

Allan 2. Allan 1 and Allan 2 each have a son by the name of Allan Armadale (3 and 4,

respectively), though the son of the murderer (thankfully) goes by the name of Ozias Midwinter,

by which I will henceforth refer to him. Allan 4 rescues Ozias and the two become friends, but

Ozias keeps their family connection hidden from Allan 4 for fear of losing their friendship. Ozias

is nevertheless haunted by a letter from his father before he died, in which Allan 1 foretells that

Ozias would kill the son of his father’s rival. Superstitious, Ozias is afraid of being in close

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proximity to Allan 4 for fear of harming him, and when the two stay overnight aboard a

shipwreck, Allan experiences a nightmare involving three figures, in which a mysterious

“shadow of a man” and “shadow of a woman” poison him. Ozias immediately takes this dream

for a prophecy. Not long after, three members of Allan’s family die under bizarre circumstances

(including one who drowned after rescuing a woman trying to drown herself). These deaths

result in Allan 4 inheriting the Thorpe-Ambrose estate, where he moves with Ozias as his

steward. There, Allan falls in love with Neelie Milroy, the daughter of one of his tenants, Major

Milroy.

From this point on, the narrative focus turns to Lydia Gwilt, a beautiful, deceptively

young-looking “charming woman” (161) who, as a child, is Jane Blanchard’s maid in Madeira.

Between Lydia’s diary entries and her correspondence with friend Maria Oldershaw, a

cosmetician, we learn that Lydia is a murderess and fortune hunter who is implicated in Allan 2’s

original plot to trick Jane’s father into marrying her under the pretense that he is Allan 1.

Lydia’s body is fluid, moving through the confines of space and time with ease. While

her crimes span two continents and two generations, Lydia is a product of toxic circumstances.

From a young age, lower-class Lydia is exploited by those in a higher social position than

herself. Born an orphan in England, Lydia is “beaten,” “half-starved,” and “exhibited” in the

“marketplace” before Jane Blanchard takes pity on the girl and brings her to Madeira as her

“plaything” (521). By twelve years old, Lydia is “a marvel of precocious ability” (34), and Jane

takes advantage of her “wicked dexterity” (34) to force her into forging a letter that will deceive

Jane’s father into letting her marry Allan 2. Jane promptly dismisses the orphan, leaving her

penniless.

Lydia’s betrayal by her superiors sets off her life of crime. She poisons her first husband,

Waldron after he “treat[s] her with almost unexampled barbarity,” but escapes a murder charge

with a lesser sentence of burglary. Lydia marries a Cuban Captain Manual (529), but she soon

realizes that her new husband is already married; their marriage was a sham so that he could steal

the meager inheritance her first husband left her. Penniless and deserted again, Lydia goes the

way of fallen women and attempts to drown herself (566). However, unlike the drowned fallen

woman, Lydia survives, and, moreover, she reinvents herself anew as Lydia Gwilt.

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Fluids, once nearly the vehicle of her own demise, become Lydia’s weapon of choice in

her plots to poison and drown those keeping her in poverty. She harnesses fluids to enact her

plan of vengeance against Allan 2 for “all the wrongs” she has “suffered at his mother’s hands”

(549). She feels entitled to the Armadale-Blanchard family wealth as compensation for her

troubles.

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First, Lydia schemes to marry Allan 1’s son in order to murder him and inherit his

fortunes as his widow, but finding that Allan is already smitten with Neelie, she resolves to

marry Ozias instead (given that the men have the same name) then poison Allan 4 to steal his

inheritance and pose as his widow. After both failing to poison Allan 4’s drink herself and hiring

her ex-husband Manuel to drown him, Lydia decides to trap him in a room full of poisonous gas

while he is sleeping at a sanitarium. This plot, too, fails, as Allan and Ozias have swapped rooms

for the night, and Lydia, having developed genuine feelings for Ozias, pulls him to safety and

poisons herself as an “atonement” (666). The novel ends with Allan marrying Neelie and Ozias

remaining a bachelor.

Of Wilkie Collins’s four “most enduring” novels of the 1860s,

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Armadale has inspired

considerably less critical interest than The Woman in White or The Moonstone.

307

While

scholarship on the novel is scant, Armadale deserves critical attention if only for Collins’s

remarkable representation of Lydia Gwilt. Despite Lydia’s self-characterization as wicked (666)

and possessing “sexual sorcery” (383), many contemporary readers have argued that her

transgressive characterization makes her a sympathetic and even feminist figure.

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Lydia certainly pushes the limits of reader sympathy: her morally “venomous” nature (373) is

evident from a young age as an orphan in Madeira. Yet Lydia is only one of the novel’s female

poisoners, and these characters bring together many of the thematic threads central to Collins’s

more critically analyzed novels, expanding upon gender concerns that Collins first raises in The

Woman in White (1859-60) and foregrounding the questions of empire that are later central to

305

Sutherland goes so far as to argue that the Blanchards sexually abuse the young girl (2006).

306

See Melisa Klimaszewski (2011).

307

Armadale was the third in the series of novels that Collins published after The Woman in White (1859-60) and No

Name (1862), but before The Moonstone (1868).

308

See Donald Hall (1996), Lyn Pykett (2005), Niles (2010), Lauren M.E. Goodlad (2015), Choudhury (2016).

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The Moonstone (1868).

309

Intersectional readings of Armadale bring together two critical threads

on the novel: Collins’s subversion of gender roles and his representation of racial inheritance.

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For instance, Monica Young-Zook (2006) develops an intersectional reading of what she terms

the novel’s “British colonial patriarchy” (235) that investigates Lydia’s romantic relationship

with biracial Ozias as a convergence of “gender transgressions” and racial “[o]therness” (237).

While I agree that Ozias and Lydia’s relationship embodies this intersection, I do not think we

need to move beyond Lydia to see how gendered and racialized subjectivities join together.

While the few critics writing on the novel reference its poisoning plots (Talairach-

Vielmas 2007; Pamboukian 2012; Williams 2013; Wood 2020), to my knowledge, only Piya Pal-

Lapinski (2005) brings together the novel’s treatment of race, gender, and poison into an

intersectional “cultural topography” (37).

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While Pal-Lapinski draws together race and gender

through her reading of the female poisoner’s “hybrid body,” she does not consider how this

“cultural topography” of gender, race, and poison in the novel relates to the novel’s other

dominant threat against the corporeal body: syphilis. Collins constructs syphilis transmission as a

“poisoning,” and I argue that this construction is neither incidental nor simply metaphorical.

Collins presents this venereal poison as originating from far-flung countries, and he locates it in

the bodies of deceptive women.

This chapter applies Young-Zook’s and Pal-Lapinski’s intersectional approaches to a

consideration of the novel’s poisoning plots—“poisoning” understood broadly here to mean

offering tainted food and/or transmitting venereal disease. Collins’s novel capitalizes on cultural

anxieties regarding hazardous consumption which features in public discourse about both foreign

foods and foreign poisons in the 1860s. Collins constructs Lydia’s body itself as a kind of

foreign poison, the author positions Lydia’s transatlantic movement from the Canary Islands to

England alongside other dangerous international trade networks that indiscriminately constitute

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The majority of the critical pieces written on Armadale engage with the novel’s complex representations of

imperialism, from essays on England’s colonial guilt (Reitz 2000), to Collins’s depictions of liberalism in relation to

the slave trade (Hensley 2009), to the novelist’s allusions to the Indian Mutiny (Choudhury 2016).

310

On gender roles, see Talairach-Vielmas (2007); Bachman and Cox (2006); Niles (2010); Williams (2013). On

racial inheritance, see Reich (2018); Wood (2020); and Om (2021).

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Pal-Lapinski argues that poison “signified various kinds of border-crossings--especially racial otherness” and,

using this claim, she investigates Armadale to argue that the “female poisoner's hybrid body insinuates itself within,

and challenges discourses of exoticism, empire, and ethnology” (35, 37).

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foodways and what I am calling “diseaseways,” the pathological networks that make syphilis,

like food, commodities of globalization. Poisonings in the novel—both literal (cyanide,

strychnine) and figurative (syphilis transmission)—enter the bodies of English men in a way that

illuminates the invisible interactions and intimacies that global capitalism demands.

Armadale is a novel about many deceptive matters—murder, forgery, mistaken identity—

but perhaps its most insidious subject matter of all is poison, which bookends the story and

saturates many of its plots. In the first pages, as he lies dying of syphilis, Allan Armadale 1

relates how he survived a deadly “negro poison” as an unruly young man in Barbados. Allan 4’s

dream of being poisoned (141) almost happens when Lydia Gwilt tries to poison him on two

occasions: first, by slipping poison into his lemonade, and, later, by attempting to lock him in a

room full of poisonous vapor. In the novel’s climax, Lydia, the repeat offender, whom we know

to have killed at least one of her past husbands by slipping him a lethal dose, poisons herself.

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While Lydia’s poisoning schemes may appear sensational, they nonetheless express very

legitimate concerns over food adulteration arising in the late 1850s.

Toxic Loads and Loaded Toxins

To understand the enormous power that the figure of the lady poisoner wields over the

Victorian imaginary, one must first have sense of the historical context producing the conditions

for this figure to emerge. The surge in the public worries over poisoning that began in the middle

of the century can be partly explained by the endemic cultural anxieties about food safety.

Victorian poisoners typically hid poison in food, but even the most innocuous food was already

suspect by mid-century given the new wave of food adulteration panics.

The subtitle of James C. Whorton’s ambitious study (2010) on nineteenth-century

arsenic, How Victorian Britain was Poisoned at Home, Work, and Play, presents a startling

reality: for Victorians, there was simply no escape from being poisoned on some level, at

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It may seem arbitrary to draw a connection between the novel’s poisoning and syphilitic plots, but the

resemblance between poisonings and disease is built into the poisoning narrative itself, since Victorian poisoners

relied upon the side effects of slow poisoning (vomiting, diarrhea, fever) to simulate the effects of fever and thereby

clear the poisoner of any suspicion. This was especially true in the case of arsenic poisoning, which mimicked the

effects of gastric fever, explaining why serial killer Mary Ann Cotton could get away with poisoning so many of her

children (11) as well as three husbands before being caught and executed. Martin Connolly (2016) details the events

of her life and trial.

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virtually all times and in all places. A burgeoning public consciousness at mid-century about the

toxic contents of everyday items led to a series of governmental acts beginning in the late

1850s,

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eventually resulting in the Sale of Food and Drugs Act (1875). While the English legal

system has since divided the management of food and drugs into separate jurisdictions, other

English-speaking countries like the United States and Canada continue to operate with a Food

and Drug Administration and Health Canada (respectively), organizations whose purpose to this

very day is to oversee the safe trade of all manner of consumable goods from vaccination doses

to dairy foods to cosmetics. Institutions like the FDA are far from perfect (toxic substances

frequently slip through the cracks of such governmental institutions

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), yet before these

governmental regulations, Victorian-era cities like London were veritable minefields of toxicity.

Toxic substances like arsenic were omnipresent in all manner of everyday Victorian

household objects: wallpaper, confectionaries, rat poison, and face products, to name but a few

examples.

315

While the effects of oral poisoning were well known, the fact that human skin could

absorb and slowly accumulate toxic substances was only partially understood.

316

Even in cases

where substances were known to cause bodily harm, like arsenic, there were no laws in place

before the 1850s obligating vendors to disclose that their products contained harmful substances.

It was common practice amongst food producers to add chemical compounds to their food to

maximize profits, including known toxic substances like arsenic. Additives served an array of

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Fredrick Accum first brought the dangers of contamination into the public consciousness with Treatise on

Adulteration of Food and Culinary Poisons (1820). The subsequent work by major players like Arthur Hill Hassall

and Henry Lethanby led to the first parliamentary enquiry on food adulteration from 1855-6. Mid-century

parliamentary acts against adulteration include The Arsenic Act (1851), the Adulteration of Foods Act (1860), the

Bill to Prevent Adulteration of Seeds (1869), the Licensing Act (1872), and the Sale of Food and Drugs Acts (1875).

For an excellent survey of on nineteenth-century Food Policy in England, see E.J.T. Collins’s foundational essay on

the subject (1993).

314

Take, for instance, the recent lawsuit aimed at pharmaceutical giant Johnson and Johnson on the grounds that talc

in their baby powder caused cancer, which resulted in millions in settlements (see Owen Dyer 2019). Talc is widely

used in cosmetics and antiperspirants, despite growing concern that the material is often unknowingly contaminated

with asbestos, a carcinogen. See David Rosner, Gerald Markowitz, and Merlin Chowkwanyun (1971).

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Some chemical additives were not recognized as being toxic. For instance, Gloucester cheese was coloured with

red lead, and candies were popularly colored with green copper arsenite.

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Consider Erin O’Connor’s (2000) discussion of the unknown impacts of industrial toxins which contributed to

occupational diseases, such as matchstick makers whose exposure to phosphorous led to a condition known as

“phossy jaw,” literally making the workers glow like their product (7).

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purposes as thickening agents, emulsifiers, and fillers, and arsenic provided vibrant colors

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and

flavors to preserved foods.

The public recognized the true extent of these additives and the complications they posed

for health only after Arthur Hill Hassall published a landmark study in 1857 entitled

Adulterations Detected; or, Plain Instructions for the Discovery of Fraud in Food and Medicine.

Written for a popular readership, Hassall’s book summarized his research as a British physician,

chemist, and microscopist investigating water and food safety.

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Hassall’s reports on food safety

were first published in The Lancet and as a collection in 1855. These influential texts were

directly responsible for the Food Adulteration Act in 1860 and its subsequent legislation.

At first glance, the ingestion of poison seems to be unrelated to the transmission of

disease. What is the connection between contamination and contagion? There is a vast and rich

body of literature written on the topic of Victorian food adulteration.

319

However, these scholars

tend to argue that Victorians only developed the idea that food was a vehicle for contagious

diseases at the fin-de-siecle, after Louis Pasteur discovered that boiling beverages like milk and

wine prevented people from getting sick after consuming them. Granted, Pasteur theorized that

food sickness could result not just from poisonous additives, but pathogenic organisms

inhabiting food—an important link inaugurating germ theory. Victorians had already established

a connection between poisonous and pathogenic beverages, however, ever since John Snow

theorized that cholera spread by means of a contaminated water pump. By exploring how

Victorians connected syphilis to adulterated foods through a discourse of “poison,” I consider

how mid-century Victorians anticipated Pasteur’s correlation between beverages and

communicable disease. At this time, food adulteration concerns most often centered on women.

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The dangers of food dyes continue to be a subject of governmental regulation; consider the recent banning of the

popular dye Red no. 2 in 1976 after the FDA concluded that high levels caused cancer in female rats (for more on

the toxicology of food dyes, see Kobylewski and Jacobson 2012).

318

Hassall first entered the scene with his 1850 publication A microscopic examination of the water supplied to the

inhabitants of London and the suburban districts, which became a central text in the promotion of water reform.

319

For instance, on parliamentary laws pertaining to food purity, see Collins (1993); on swindling, see Wilson

(2008); on cow’s milk, see Steere-Williams (2014) and Otter (2019); on fruit, see Stern (2003); on German sausages

(Waddington 2013); on candy (Wood 2017); on dyes (Cobbold 2019).

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Adulterating the Law: The Lady Poisoner’s Motives

Between her cosmetician friend and her opium habit, Lydia Gwilt has many dangerous

chemical substances at her fingertips, but was her access to poisons realistic? Victorian women’s

role as household managers certainly gave them access to arsenic for household and cosmetic

usages, and their central role in food preparation made them more likely poisoners. In this way,

Victorian food poisoning (either intended or accidental) belies the idealization of Victorian

domestic space as a safe haven from the dangers of the public market. Randa Helfield theorizes

that poison’s “popularity as a murder weapon was […] probably due to the fact that a woman’s

social role as mother and nursemaid gave her full control over the preparation of meals in the

household, rendering her exposure as a poisoner less likely” (57-58). In other words, vendors had

no way to determine whether their female customer would apply arsenic to her porcelain

complexion or her husband’s porcelain teacup.

However, when poison was the suspected cause of someone’s death, women often

became persons of interest because they were conventionally in charge of food preparation. In

Armadale, this gendered proximity to food and access to poison helps to explain why Lydia is

charged with the poisoning of her first husband, Mr. Waldron. Jemmy tells us that prosecutors at

Lydia’s trial conclude that “the one person in the house who could by any human possibility

have administered the poison was the prisoner at the bar” (529). Collins leaves no doubts as to

Lydia’s guilt, and her reasons for poisoning Waldron dovetail with three popular motives for

husband-killing: eloping with another man, inheriting money, and escaping domestic violence.

Female poisoners have been motivated to use poison to pursue romance and flee violence

since time immemorial, but the Victorian era provided them with unique economic motives. As

critics like Krysta Lysack have established (2008), middle-class women enjoyed new economic

mobility: female shoppers represented a significant consumer demographic and women’s

products, such as health pills and cosmetics, were becoming profitable industries. Women freely

visited the pharmacy to purchase arsenic for their own usage. Occasionally, these women did

(literally) capitalize on that newfound economic freedom by poisoning their husbands to inherit

their wealth; this was Lydia’s motivation for killing Waldron (unbeknownst to her, he severely

limited her inheritance once he suspected her). The economic motive for arsenic poisoning was

so well established that Sandra Hempel titles her book on Victorian arsenic poisonings The

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Inheritor’s Powder (2013). Indeed, some widowed women enjoyed a relatively high social

standing and degree of economic freedom compared to their single or married counterparts, and

they were often permitted to take over their husbands’ businesses after their death.

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In addition to inheritance, there were also new economic motivations for poisoning

family members specifically arising mid-century. As Whorton relates in The Arsenic Century

(2010), the rise of affordable insurance industries provided starving women with an incentive to

poison their husbands and children. The advent of burial clubs, in which members paid a small

fee to cover the costs of a burial upon death, provided a motivation for infanticide if poor

mothers needed the payout. Ian Burney (2006) describes how the burial club, known as “The

‘Death Club’ came to be regarded as the ‘prolific mother’ of arsenical murder, the institution

from which ‘a new race of poisoners has sprung’” (128). The English female poisoner was

therefore caught up in a conglomeration of interrelated cultural anxieties about women’s

increasing economic mobility, particularly the new opportunities that middle-class female

consumers enjoyed, and poor, desperate women resorted to. Women’s access to poison thus

became a topical concern. In 1851, the House of Lords tried to pass a law forbidding women

from purchasing arsenic. That same year, Parliament had passed the Arsenic Act, which obliged

all vendors of arsenic products to note their customers and intended uses, and decreed that the

product must be dyed with indigo or soot for easy detection. While the law preventing women

from purchasing arsenic never passed, it nonetheless indicates how women were at the center of

these poisoning concerns.

One pivotal case made Victorians both paranoid about and fixated on the figure of the

lady poisoner. In 1857, a beautiful twenty-one-year-old by the name of Madeleine Smith

appeared to be one of the most eligible Scottish socialites on the marriage market. Unbeknownst

to all, she was having an affair with a clerk named Emile L’Angelier, whom she intended to

marry. Her unknowing parents arranged that she marry her father’s friend instead, and Smith

broke off the affair, but not without L’Angelier threatening to expose their love letters and

thereby ruin her marriage prospects for good. In early March, Smith purchased arsenic at a

pharmacy which she indicated was for ordinary cosmetic purposes. A couple of weeks later, in

320

See Bredesen (2014, 222).

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the early morning of March 23, L’Angelier was found dead from arsenic poisoning. In what was

called “the trial of the century,” Madeleine was charged with murder, as it was widely believed

that she had poisoned his hot cocoa with the arsenic, but the jury declared her guilt “not proven”

on account of there being no witness to the crime.

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Madeleine’s trial attracted a great deal of public sympathy, but not because people

overwhelmingly felt that she must be innocent. Ironically, many people, women especially,

sympathized with her alleged crime. According to the official report of the trial by one John

Morison (1857), one of the major reasons that the public sided with Madeleine was their

“contempt of the man whom she was accused of murdering” (vii). The author notes: “How

prevalent was this latter feeling, that one frequently heard the remark, ‘Well, if she did not

poison him, she ought to have done it” (vii). Thus, even though the lady poisoner as a murderer

was more morally reprehensible than the drowned fallen woman, she could still attract sympathy,

especially amongst women who felt that her actions were justified since as a woman, her

economic prospects were limited to her marriage prospects.

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After Smith’s trial, the figure of the lady poisoner continued to fascinate Victorians

throughout the latter half of the century, and there were many news reports of women slipping

poison into their unassuming lovers’ or husbands’ beverages. In 1862, Mary Elizabeth Braddon

stirred the pot by publishing the sensationally popular novel Lady Audley’s Secret, in which the

titular character contemplates killing her second husband by overdosing him with opium.

Smith’s own controversial trial inspired Wilkie Collins to write the detective story The Law and

the Lady in 1875 (Macheachen 135-138), but Collins’s fascination with lady poisoners began

with Armadale. Poison proved to be great fodder for the sensationalist novel and it was

overwhelmingly the woman’s weapon in real life: while the murderers in cases of spousal

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These facts are supplied by Douglas MacGowan’s (1999) and Brian Jenkins’ (2019) books on the case. The “not

proven” verdict, also known as the “bastard verdict” is unique to Scottish law and made the case especially

controversial as it does not establish the innocence of the defendant, merely the prosecution’s inability to prove

guilt. In Armadale, the central poisoner Lydia Gwilt, then going by Mrs. Waldron, is cleared of guilt for poisoning

her husband in much the same way as Smith, because the jury cannot confirm his cause of death (530).

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Mary Hartman claims that the trial afforded women “opportunities for vicarious fulfillment of unarticulated

desires… Women write letters to the judges, and to newspapers, sign petitions, form defense organizations and

openly attack courts and society on such issues as the double standard. The accused murderess, it would appear, had

acted out what many of these women, in their most secret thoughts, had hardly dared to imagine” (intro to Victorian

Murderess 1977, 84).

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homicide were overwhelmingly male, with more than 90 percent of cases involving men killing

their wives (Robb 176), men resorted to poison in only 5 percent of cases compared to 55 percent

amongst women (Whorton 34).

Lady poisoners have captured the attention of Victorianists as much as they did

Victorians. Many modern writers conclude that the widespread panic about the lady poisoner

stemmed from her subversion of gender roles. The rise of women’s rights raised alarms about the

fall of patriarchal authority as women advanced their legal and economic rights.

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Without

discounting this reality, I want to consider how fears about this “new race” of lady poisoners also

evokes racial as well as gender subversions. Even if she is white, the lady poisoner’s choice

poisons are typically derived from exotic goods hailing from far-flung colonial outposts—

cyanide from South African bitter almonds, strychnine from East Indies upas seeds, arsenic from

copper ore mines, and opium from Indian and Turkish poppies—all of which were typically

served up in the medium of similarly exotic poisoned drinks such as teas from China and India,

or coffee or cocoa from South and central America.

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Considerable critical attention has been

paid to the intersection of Victorian empire, poison, and contagion,

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but few critics have

examined the racialization of the Victorian lady poisoner. Of those who do,

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authors tend to

focus on Orientalized depictions of the lady poisoner rather than the material currents that

delivered poisons to England shores. The female poisoner may have delivered the goods, so to

speak, but these goods overwhelmingly came from faraway lands, a reality that imparts a foreign

“flavour” to even the most “domestic poisoner,” to use George Robb’s (1997) expression for

English poisoners.

The Racialization of Poison and Poisoners

The preparation of food was a factor in poisoning hysteria, but the origins of the food

also featured centrally in adulteration discourse. While middle-class women’s real and imagined

323

For works that deal with lady poisoners in the context of Victorian poisonings generally, see Watson (2004),

Burney (2006), Whorton (2010), and Price (2019); for pieces on lady poisoners in particular, see Helfield (1995),

Robb (1997), Nagy (2015), and Mittag (2017).

324

It ought to be noted that while Victorian England’s arsenic supply was produced as a by-product of mines all over

the world, the majority of was a domestic product sourced from a copper mine in the Tamar Valley (Wharton 297).

325

Most of these readings center around Sherlock Holmes; see Harris (2003), Siddiqi (2006), and Fisher (2019).

326

Piya Pal-Lapinski (2005), Aykut Ebru (2016), and Martina Mittag (2017).

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proximity to food meant that they were often suspected in cases of poisonings, texts on food

adulteration metonymically linked non-English and racialized peoples to the broader networks of

global trade through which people and food alike travelled.

The racial and cultural otherness of the female poisoner was a central feature of imperial

harem narratives, where, as Ebru Aykut (2016) relates, popular travel writers like Scotsman

Charles McFarlane in Turkey and its Destiny (1850) argue for “the pervasiveness of domestic

poisonings in the Empire” (114). McFarlane’s text features Turkish wives openly discussing

poisoning their husbands out of rage and abortion-providing “hags” who are also knowledgeable

in the art of matricide (114). Per Aykut, these narratives of Orientalized poisoners fed the flames

of the “poisoning mania” back in England, in which “wives murdering their spouses and female

poisoners in general were considered particularly subversive compared to their male

counterparts” (115). These Orientalized characters are examples of what Pal-Lapinski calls the

“poison-woman” who is “able to penetrate and dissolve the permeable boundaries of the male

body while remaining impenetrable herself” (108). Aykut and Pal-Lapinski’s arguments both

illustrate how poisoning narratives imbricated concerns over both female agency and colonial

uprising. In a sense, English female poisoners were exhibiting non-feminine behavior that was

explicitly aligned with cultural otherness. This construction is ironic at best: while a major tenet

of the ideological justification behind Britain’s imperial expansion into the Middle East was the

promotion of Christianity over Islam’s reign of perceived violence and oppression against

women,

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we know of course that the material impetus for British imperialism was in securing

natural resources for increasingly global trade networks. And one of the most profitable natural

resources was foodstuffs.

The majority of foods featured in Hassall’s Adulterations Detected are not of English

origin. Hassall spends whole chapters discussing the dangers of tea, coffee, and cocoa. Hassall

reminds us that tea is “specially cultivated in China, Japan, parts of India […] and in West

Africa” (92); coffee “Indigenous in Southern Abyssinia,” the beans imported from Arabia,

Martinique, Bourbon, East India, West India, Brazil, and elsewhere (145); cocoa “Indigenous to

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This humanitarian concern remains one of the justifications for Western interference in and occupation of the

middle east, despite the material incentive largely being control over oil.

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the West Indies and Central America” (191). Writing on Britain’s appropriation of other food

cultures, Annette Cozzi (2010) argues that food “reveal[s] how Britain’s identity is dependent on

colonization,” that “food provides a literal and metaphorical example of Britain’s dominance, the

result, to some extent, of Britain’s ability to absorb other cultures and their resources, ultimately

recreating and reevaluating them as something uniquely British” (5-6). This may be so, but

Hassall’s anxiety around foreign beverages prompts the question: what happens when Britain’s

foreign imports prove to be dangerous for the Britain citizens to consume? While the ideological

transformation of non-British foods like tea into naturalized British foods signifies Britain’s

ability to “absorb” other cultures into itself, the adulteration and poisoning hysteria which

prominently orbited around non-English foods challenges that narrative of easy digestion.

These gendered and racialized fears surrounding tainted food come to a confluence in the

quintessentially British act of serving tea, which represents a task of female domestic food

management that involves an imported food. Women were customarily involved in tea

preparation, whether as household servants (cooks or maids) or female occupants who acted as

the managers of kitchen staff in large households and the cooks in smaller ones. Indeed, the

preparation and serving of tea was a central aspect of ideal femininity.

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In Armadale, the ladies

of the house serve the tea and coffee, and the men never explicitly make it themselves.

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In the context of England’s poisoning hysteria, where tea became a highly suspect

beverage, these cozy scenes take on an unsettling quality. Indeed, in one of his illustrations for

the novel, “The Moth and the Flame,” George Thomas portrays the scene of Lydia making tea

for a concerned-looking Ozias (below). Lydia’s spoon, which hovers over her teacup, evokes her

twin roles as both preparer and poisoner of such beverages. Lydia’s preparation of suspect

beverages demonstrates her gender subversion but also codes her as racially other. Like the tea

she serves, Lydia is of mysterious cultural origins, undermining any notion of “purity.”

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Julie E. Fromer points out in her history of British tea drinking (2008) that the formulation of “female tea makers

and male tea drinkers” pervaded both Victorian literature and life (180).

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The only occasion in the novel’s six depictions of tea drinking where a woman does not explicitly prepare tea or

coffee for a man is (notably) not at a home, but rather in an inn where a waiter serves tea to Mr. Bashwood and his

son, presumably after a scullery maid had made it in the back kitchens.

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Spending her

formative years in

Madeira, the orphaned

Lydia is an English

import. Contemporary

readers also would have

perceived adult Lydia’s

appearance as exotic.

Lydia’s signature attire is

a “black veil” she uses to

conceal her identity and a

“red paisley shawl,” a

fashionable garment

commonly called an “India shawl” because genuine articles were produced in India. Both pieces

echo Orientalized depictions of “Eastern” women. Lydia’s cultural otherness is also evinced by

her choice of lovers, from a Cuban desperado to biracial Ozias, alongside whom she plays the

“Dark shadow.” Like Lydia herself, the poisons she selects to murder Allan are also sourced

from faraway lands: cyanide from South America and strychnine from the East Indies. Scholars

today read Lydia’s foreignness as entrenching her in contemporaneous critiques about England’s

imperialist ventures. They interpret the figure as an image of colonial critique: an icon of

colonial guilt (Reitz 2000), an “exotic woman” embodying toxicity (Pal-Lapinski 2005), even an

analogue for a colonized rebel in the 1857 Indian mutiny (Choudhury 2016). These readings

provide a basis for considering Lydia in relation to the novel’s other poisoners, the West Indies

women who ostensibly poison Allan Armadale. Lydia’s gendered and cultured toxicity also lend

themselves to new materialist framing.

Toxicity and New Material Feminisms

The prospect of non-English beverages like coffee and tea being laced with similarly

foreign poisons prompts us to reconsider the cultural work that food and eating performed in the

construction of British identity, and to recognize the vast global networks implicated in the

Figure 7. The Moth and the Flame. Wood engraving by George Thomas.

Public Domain.

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consumption of foods that (in the case of tea) have been adopted and naturalized as British.

When we think about food poisoning, we defamiliarize ourselves from eating as an everyday act

of consumption, because poisoning underscores how all acts of eating involve suspending

corporeal boundaries to let in something foreign, in much the same way that global trade

suspends national boundaries to internalize foreign imports into the social body. New materialist

theories of food argue that eating negotiates the relationship between self and other, and that just

as our bodies transform food, food transforms our bodies.

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Related to these theories on food,

new materialist theories on toxicity provide the grounds for thinking about Victorian poisoning

narratives in the light of both oppressive and liberatory functions.

Mel Chen’s concept of “toxicity” as illustrated in their book Animacies (2012) provides a

useful framework for understanding how Collins’s representations of poisons and their

transnational circulations serve oppressive mechanisms. Chen’s concept is particularly useful

here not only because they use toxicity to map out international trade networks, but also because

they consider how cultural biases pertaining to sexuality and race map onto certain bodies which

are metonymically connected to commodities.

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In Chen’s words, “toxins participate vividly in

the racial mattering of locations, human and nonhuman bodies, living and inert entities, and

events such as disease threats” (10). For Chen, toxicity represents an “environmental [threat],”

and such threats are “represented associatively, in terms of animation, personification,

nationalization, integrity, and immunity, as well as in relation to other threats” (10). Chen argues

that nations most often exhibit fears about toxicity “during times of economic instability and

panic about transnational flow” (10).

According to Chen, foreign bodies (human or otherwise) take on a kind of toxic load,

whether real or imagined, by virtue of their exposure to transnational currents. Chen’s major

historical example of how toxicity “sticks” to certain bodies is the 2007 lead poisoning panic.

Chen argues that at this time, Americans associated children’s toys that were made in China with

Chinese bodies themselves. That is, by representing Chinese toys as dangerously “migrant”

bodies, American representations of the lead panic metonymically connected these toxic Chinese

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The works of Jane Bennett (2007) and Annemarie Mol (2021) are useful here. Bennett’s defines the act of eating

as “a series of mutual transformations in which the border between inside and outside becomes blurry” (49).

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Chen reasons that our “interests in toxicity are particularly (if sometimes stealthily) raced and queered” (10).

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bodies with those of Chinese immigrants and Chinese-American citizens. In Armadale, poison

“sticks to” Lydia by virtue of her non-English origins; the international currents that bring her to

England are the same ones that bring her choice poisons.

Just as contagion narratives can serve oppressive ends, toxicity narratives can contribute

to the stigmatization of certain bodies. My chapters so far demonstrate how contagion narratives

can also serve liberatory purposes, but toxicity pushes the logic of liberatory trans-corporeality to

its limit. Victorians may have reasonably been able to imagine positive reconfigurations of

pathological contagion, given the model of immunity established by vaccination, but how could

they (indeed, how could we) imagine poison as anything possibly other than destructive,

damaging, and deadly?

We might begin by considering liberation in a literal sense. The transmission of poison

and the transmission of syphilis are both trans-corporeal processes involving one body

transferring a harmful substance to another. Poison and syphilis are therefore liberatory in the

sense that they literally liberate or free the body from the social constraints of corporeal

integrity. The lady poisoner is therefore a transgressive figure given her ability to physically

transgress boundaries between bodies.

Physical transgression is fundamental to Alaimo’s notion of trans-corporeality. Both

words share a common Latin root of “trans” (“across”). Like trans-corporeality, a transgression

(originating from “trans” = “across” and “gradi” = “to go”) “goes across” boundaries and

borders, revealing them to be artificial constructions. For Alaimo, even in its most destructive

forms, trans-corporeality has the potential to be politically transgressive. In Exposed:

Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (2016), Alaimo develops the phrase

“dwelling in the dissolve” to capture how all earthly phenomena are exposed to toxicity. She

considers this dwelling as “a form of ethical engagement” (2) and argues that “to practice

exposure entails the intuitive sense or the philosophical conviction that the impermeable Western

human subject is no longer tenable” (5). For Alaimo, this act of deliberate exposure is thus an act

of resistance against social constructions of bodies as containable, nonporous entities.

Like Alaimo’s model of “exposure,” Chen also offers “toxicity” as a form of political

resistance. Though toxicity has been deployed towards racist, sexist, heterosexist, classist, ableist

ends, Chen also recognizes “toxicity as an animated, active, and peculiarly queer agent” (10). For

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instance, Chen reads “the constant interabsorption of animate and inanimate bodies in the case of

airborne pollution… [as] account[ing] for the physical nonintegrity of individual bodies and the

merging of forms of ‘life’ and ‘nonlife’” (10).

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“Dwelling in the dissolve” and inhabiting

“toxicity” both provide a theoretical basis for arguing that even an act as seemingly destructive

as poisoning can be politically productive. For toxicity enacts a radical form of connection.

Paradoxically, then, poisoning is productive by virtue of its very destructiveness; it breaks down

the boundaries of the self to make room for a new configuration of relations that are based on the

inherent fluidity of bodies. Yet to recognize these liberatory possibilities of contagion, we must

first recognize how they manifest in destructive, oppressive iterations.

That “Loathsome Poison”: Syphilis as an Import in Armadale

So prevalent was the language of toxicology in the mid-century cultural imagination that

it informed the rhetoric of venereal disease during the years that the Contagious Disease Acts

were passed, 1864 and 1866—the years that bookend Collins’s serial publication of Armadale.

Having explored the cultural dimensions of food adulteration discourse mid-century, both in

terms of the gendering of food preparation and the racialization of foreign foods as potentially

“toxic” imports, I turn now to a rhetorical history of syphilis as “poison” which extends these

gendered and racialized concerns about ingestion from alimentary consumption to venereal

disease. As I will show, medical and literary representations of syphilis portray the disease as a

foreign import, an unwanted consequence of trade imported to England through the toxic bodies

of morally suspect women, namely prostitutes. I frame this discussion around a close reading of

Armadale, using the rhetoric of “poisoning” in Armadale Senior’s syphilitic deathbed scene to

launch into a broader discussion of the novel’s central poisoner, Lydia Gwilt. To be clear, I make

no claims of Lydia being either a person of colour or a prostitute. What I do want to claim is that

Lydia’s representation as a foreign poisoner in England puts her in conversation with ongoing

discourses about foreign prostitutes “poisoning” English men with syphilis.

332

The fact that we all carry some kind of toxic load suggests for Chen that “the idea of toxicity proposes an extant

queer bond” (265). They write: “I investigate the potential to resignify toxicity as a theoretical figure, in the interest

of inviting contradictory play and crediting queer bonds already here: the living dead, the dead living, antisocial

love, and inanimate affection” (266).

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In the novel’s opening pages, Armadale 1 tells his West Indies backstory as he succumbs

to the effects of late-stage syphilis. The history he tells of his youth contains ambiguous

references to being poisoned. In a novel that is so concerned with secrets, it is apropos that

Allan’s disease is never named outright. We know of his symptoms only through the doctor, that

Allan’s “wild” and “vicious life” (15) as an enslaver in the West Indies resulted in his current

state of paralysis as his spinal cord wastes away, a prognosis which will kill him in under a week.

Armadale’s deathbed symptoms are consistent with descriptions of tertiary syphilis. The

diagnosis has been well established by critics of Armadale,

333

and while I agree with their careful

attunement to the symptomology in the scene, I believe that there is much more to say about how

this early episode in the novel primes the reader for Lydia Gwilt’s poisoning escapades for the

remainder of the novel.

Collins’s focus on syphilis was timely, for the novel’s serial publication, between

November 1864 to June 1866, overlaps almost uncannily with the years of the passing of the

Contagious Disease Acts of 1864 and 1866, a series of laws which instituted the forced

inspection and detainment for any woman suspected of being a prostitute carrying venereal

disease.

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The question of how syphilis was transmitted was also on the cultural radar at the

same time that Collins was serially publishing his book. In fact, pages from the novel were laid

out side by side with descriptions of syphilis in the October 29th, 1864, issue of the British

magazine the Athenaeum. Gracing one of the pages, a Cornhill Magazine advertisement for the

forthcoming November issue promises the first three chapters of Armadale. This ad runs parallel

to another ad for The Journal of the Anthropological Society of London, announcing an issue on

“the Introduction of Syphilis.” It is in these first serialized chapters that Armadale succumbs to

the disease, a disease that he contracts well before the novel begins, in the temporal space of the

backstory that he dictates to his friend Mr. Neal.

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On two separate occasions (2009, 2019), Laurence Talairach-Vielmas interprets Allan’s paralysis – which

expands outwardly from the man’s lower spine into his hands and face – as a benchmark description of syphilis;

other recent readings of the novel from Nathan K. Hensley (2009, 626) and Helena Ifill (2018, 123) also allude to

Allan suffering from the venereal disease.

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I use the term “prostitute” deliberately here, rather than the modern term “sex worker” because I want to

deliberately situate this figure in the socio-historical context in which it was rare to elect this form of employment.

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As Allan dictates the letter, he paints a picture of his dissolute past life for his young son

to read when he comes of age. Born as the only surviving son of a plantation owner in Barbados,

Allan recalls growing up on the island: “My boyhood and youth were passed in idleness and self-

indulgence, among people – slaves and half-castes mostly – to whom my will was law” (28).

Allan continues to relate his wanton lifestyle: “I doubt if there was ever a young man in this

world whose passions were left so entirely without control of any kind as mine were in those

early years” (28). It is left up to the reader to imagine what kinds of behavior would result from

Allan’s unbridled passions combined with his desire to dominate his racial subordinates.

After becoming heir to the West Indian property at twenty-one, Allan’s appetite for “base

pleasures” continues to grow as he sees a miniature of the woman he is to marry, a sight which

quiets his “animal self” (30). Evidently, then, we are to understand that these unbridled passions

are of a sexual nature, and his passions eventually get him into trouble with the islanders. When

the young man is “struck suddenly by an illness which threatened both my reason and my life”

(31), Allan does not know whom to blame, since he admits: “There was more than one woman

on the island whom I had wronged beyond all forgiveness, and whose vengeance might well

have reached me at that time” (31). In reality, the likely culprit is Allan 2, who has befriended

Allan 1 in the disguise of one Fergus Ingleby, and wishes to stall Allan so that he can go to

Madeira to court Jane himself. Nonetheless, Allan 1’s first impulse to blame West Indies women

for the poisoning is telling given what we now know about his licentious lifestyle, and it

introduces an important connection between poison and illness. For Allan conceives of this

poisoning as an illness, and indeed he discovers that it is a result of a “known negro poison in

those parts,” one which can only be cured by his “old black nurse” with her “negro antidote”

(31). What constitutes illness and what poisoning was often ambiguous. Syphilis in particular

was known as “The Great Imitator” because of the way its symptoms could take on the guise of

many sicknesses, including poison.

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Conversely, arsenic poisoning could result in scrotal skin

eruptions mimicking the effects of syphilis.

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It is thus worth pausing on this initial outbreak of

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Herbert M. Shelton, in his germinal work Syphilis: Werewolf of Medicine (1962), describes how syphilis was

historically called the “Great Imitator” or “Great Masquerader” because its late-stage symptoms resembled so many

other diseases, meaning that it was frequently misdiagnosed.

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Ironically, there were also a myriad of purported cures for syphilis which used what we now know to be poison,

like mercury.

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illness to consider how it might pertain both to the illness to which Allan eventually succumbs,

and the novel’s larger concern with lady poisoners.

There seem to be two possibilities here. If Allan believes that his spiteful lovers poisoned

him by mouth, then his lack of surprise suggests that he must have recently consorted with these

women, giving them ample opportunity to slip the “negro poison” into his food. But this is no

ordinary food poisoning. Given Allan’s mental and physical symptoms, it is also entirely

possible that the “poison” he is referring to is syphilis, and that he has been suffering from the

disease all along. At the time, physicians believed they could cure syphilis with the application

of mercury, while in reality the disease would often merely become dormant with or without

treatment for long stretches of time, sometimes for decades. Eventually it would flare up in a

tertiary and final form, which we see at the novel’s opening. Indeed, the secretive manner in

which Allan “confesses” his “wild” Barbados lifestyle to his doctor echoes Collins’s own

experience having to confess to his doctor that he had contracted venereal diseases from

prostitutes.

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In any case, the ambiguity here (poison or syphilis?) is productive rather than

limiting. It obscures the difference between sicknesses that are a result of sexual intercourse and

those that are a result of literal poisoning. Whatever it is, this illness is one that Allan reasons

that black people, specifically black women, know intimately. Whether or not the Barbados

women Allan believes to have harmed him are slaves, half-castes, or creole, Allan associates

their cultural otherness with their possession of a “negro poison” they administer to the

plantation owner. Moreover, whether their poison is literal (a liquid vial) or euphemistic (a liquid

transfer of infected fluids), the fact remains that Allan believes they are likely responsible for

physically harming his body.

Allan Senior’s references to his illness as an exotic “negro poison” make more sense

when we consider popular nineteenth-century theories about the origins of syphilis. In Voltaire’s

Candide, Or Optimism (1759), the eponymous character describes how syphilis originally

arrived in Europe. As the story goes, after Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean shores,

one of the female prostitutes he frequented gave him the disease. As Candide’s friend Pangloss

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In his letters to close friend Charles Dickens, Collins relates his own experiences with sexually transmitted

infections. Like Dickens, Collins was notorious for his extramarital affairs. See Andrew Lycett’s biography of

Collins (2013, 138).

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suffers the ravages of syphilis, the men trace its “strange genealogy” from Pangloss’s lover

Paquette, all the way back to “one of the companions of Christopher Columbus” (18). While

Candide rues the day that syphilis arrived on European shores, the optimist Pangloss does not

believe that the illness was an unfair trade, saying instead:

If Columbus had not in an island of America caught this disease, which contaminates the

source of life, frequently even hinders generation, and which is evidently opposed to the

great end of nature, we should have neither chocolate nor cochineal (18).

In this satirical description, Pangloss claims that syphilis was a fair price to pay for the global

trade networks that provided the West with cocoa beans and cochineal (the insects used to make

expensive red coloring). Pangloss thus suggests that syphilis was an exotic good like any other,

which travels aboard trading ships to become a household staple in Europe.

In Armadale, Allan’s station on an eighteenth-century slave plantation emphasizes his

implication in these international trade networks. The sugar that his enslaved people produce out

of raw sugarcane is exported to European vendors, where it dissolves into countless cups of tea.

Like Pangloss’s stipulation that the cost of chocolate was syphilis, Allan’s international ventures

cost him dearly, resulting in a bad deal in which he receives this most undesired of goods.

Allan’s death by syphilis serves as a picture in miniature for the Columbian theory of syphilis,

registering a larger narrative that England’s international conquests—including sexual ones—

have come at a dear price.

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One way to understand Collins’s conglomeration of poison, gender, and race in these

early scenes is to engage with the rhetorical history of the word “poison” itself as it featured in

the discourses of contemporary medicine and empire. Prominent medical texts written in the

1860s use the word “poison” to refer to syphilis and women who transmit syphilis as

“poisoners.” We often find this diction in texts that either deal directly with or allude to

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Not much has changed about the dominant origin story of syphilis since Voltaire’s novel. The Columbian theory,

which holds that syphilis was originally picked up in Columbus’s first contact with New World peoples and returned

to Europe alongside tobacco, captive Natives, and other “commodities,” has continued to be the reigning historical

narrative up until very recently. In her chapter on Victorian syphilis, Mary Wilson Carpenter (2010) traces the

Columbian theory back to popular sixteenth-century folklore which attributed syphilis to the Native Americans as a

New World disease (2010, 77). Proponents of this theory carry into this day. Interestingly, as Carpenter points out,

the Columbian theory represents an inversion of the process by which Europe introduced smallpox and measles to

Native Americans with devastating results (77). For more on eighteenth century narratives of Columbus bringing

syphilis to England, see Nixon and Servitje (2018).

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England’s syphilis epidemic: these authors blame the crisis on prostitutes who, refusing to seek

medical attention for their venereal symptoms, knowingly “poison” their unwitting clientele.

Unsurprisingly, misogynistic assumptions about female impurity blamed women’s bodies for the

source of this “poison.” According to Mary Carpenter (2009), mid-century Victorian

“[p]hysicians and public health authorities became increasingly convinced that the female body

was itself the source of contagion and could even spontaneously generate venereal disease” (73).

On a material level, then, the stuff of syphilis was ostensibly infected vaginal fluid, and

the act of poisoning took the shape of careless prostitutes administering a lethal venom to their

male patrons. We find this rhetorical collapse in William Acton’s Prostitution Considered

(1857), where the physician describes the disproportionately high rates of disease among the

British navy. In his chapter dealing with “Existing Provision for the Control and Relief of

Prostitutes,” Acton speculates that if one out of every four London prostitutes is diseased, then

“we have among us more than 1500, at a moderate computation, human beings daily engaged in

the occupation of spreading abroad a loathsome poison” (74).

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Acton describes one instance of

syphilitic men aboard the (aptly named) Prince Consort. When the ship was halted at Yokohama,

the men were free to roam Japanese brothels, which were frequented by “a mixed crowd of

Chinese, and sailors, and adventurers of all nations,” to disastrous effect. The surgeon aboard

relates the following:

[W]hether it is owing to the effect of this indiscriminate, unclean, and common

intercourse, or to some concentrated specific form of syphilitic poison existing amongst

the Japanese themselves, shut up as they have been so long from communication with the

external world, the poison not having been modified and weakened as in Europe by

transmission through multitudes, certain it is that the disease contracted in Japan is about

the worst form of syphilis known, and followed by the most lamentable consequences.

(qtd in Acton 66, emphasis mine)

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Acton’s intended readership, British men (predominantly soldiers) who ought to be warned against venereal

prostitutes, anticipates Robin E. Jensen’s argument (2010) that sex education campaigns from 1870 to 1924 typically

revolve around messages aimed at white men against contaminative (often foreign) women.

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These are but a few of Acton’s countless references to syphilis as poison,

340

but in all of them,

who does the poisoning remains consistent: prostitutes, with prostitutes of colour offering up the

deadliest dose of venom.

Acton is not alone in describing syphilis as poison, for the Act itself uses the term.

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Neither is he alone in exoticizing and even racializing this “poison.” Even if the prostitute is not

explicitly racialized, her cultural otherness is written into the fabric of her “poisoning.” Take, for

instance, Henry Mayhew and Bracebridge Hemyng’s section on soldiers’ women in London

Labour and the London Poor (volume 4, 1861), where the authors describe the ravages of

syphilis as a foreign poison. They relate one story of "[a] woman [who] was pointed out to me in

a Music Hall in Knightsbridge [London], who my informant told me he was positively assured

had only yesterday had two buboes lanced; and yet she was present at that scene of apparent

festivity, contaminating the very air, like a deadly upas tree, and poisoning the blood of the

nation, with the most audacious recklessness” (243). Though never explicitly racialized, the

woman is described as the upas tree, or the nux vomica tree, a tropical tree native to southern

Asia, found in India, Sri Lanka, and the East Indies. According to travelers’ tales, it is allegedly

poisonous to approach, and it is said to be the most poisonous tree in the world. Upas seeds also

produced poisonous products delivered to England: the popular Victorian poison strychnine is

derived from the upas tree, and this is in fact the poison that Lydia Gwilt unleashes in Allan

Junior’s bedroom during her final heist, a scene that re-enacts Allan Senior’s imagined poisoning

at the hands of his Barbados lovers.

While Collins’s representations of the poisonous West Indian women are consistent with

these misogynistic contagion narratives, they also demonstrate how the novel’s female poisoners

harness toxicity as a means of exerting some agency and power. Reynolds’s construction of

340

In his discussion of the Acts later on, the physician describes how the “deadly character of the disease” is not

matched by the current “means at our disposal for supplying an antidote to the poison” (83). When he describes how

Italian physicians inadequately treat syphilitic women with a rushed application of mercury then release them, Acton

relates how the diseased “secretion” is “allowed to exist for any length of time, in order that the system may thus be

purified from the poison, which has been introduced into it” (153). And again, later: soldiers who refrain from sex

with prostitutes are “saved from the poisoning of the syphilitic virus” (196). Elsewhere, if the government takes

steps to prevent disease, it would “depriv[e] prostitution” of its “physical venom” (49).

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The Act reads: “What right has a woman suffering from syphilis to continue her trade, blasting her own body and

that of her fellow sinners with loathsome disease? have we a right to interfere with her ‘liberty’ of administering

poison, and shall we not stop her in the much more dangerous attempt to damage herself and her users?” (26-27).

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poison—encompassing both chemical and sexual material—is therefore liberatory in the sense of

offering limited freedom to the marginalized people who use them. I am certainly not condoning

poisoning or the deliberate transmission of venereal disease as liberatory acts in all

circumstances. However, in the context of transatlantic slavery, under which enslavers like Alan

1 “[know] no law but the law of [his] own caprice” (28), these acts represent powerful forms of

resistance because they turn the inherent toxicity of the institution onto those who profit from it.

Allan’s fears of a “negro poison[ing]” plot evoke real-life plots amongst enslaved peoples in the

West Indies. One famous case happened just four years before the novel’s original backstory, in

1828, when five enslaved people in French-colonized Martinique confessed to using poison for

the purpose of “entirely ruining” two of the island’s plantations.

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Much like Kingsley (1850)

considers the slop consumer’s contraction of disease from the poor slop producer to be God’s

“true judgement” (xiii), the “wronged” West Indies women who contaminate Armadale with

their “negro poison” enact a kind of retribution through contagion. To a lesser extent, Lydia,

though not enslaved, employs poison to grant her a degree of freedom in a life where her

gendered and classed positionality has otherwise severely limited her economic opportunities.

The poisoning of her husband frees Lydia from his “barbarous treatment” (528), and she views

the act of securing Armadale’s wealth as “breaking the chain that binds” her from a “past life”

she feels enslaved to (433). Even Ozias, who is kind to her as a husband, seeks her subjection

after she wrongs him, saying, “She has denied her husband tonight…She shall know her master

tomorrow” (630). Thought in these terms, poison has historically been the woman’s weapon

because it is a weapon of the oppressed and the downtrodden. I thus end this chapter by making a

case for Reynolds’s representations of poisoning (even self-poisoning) as a potential expression

of self-determination and agency.

Lydia Gwilt: Poison and Paisley

All of these concerns with poison which I have elaborated so far—the feminized role of

food preparer, the cultural threat of foreign foods, the rhetorical history of syphilis as a

342

For more on the event and on enslaved people’s uses of poison in nineteenth-century Martinique, see John

Savage (2007).

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“loathsome poison,” and the characterization of this “poison” as a foreign import—come

together to inform our understanding of Armadale’s central poisoner, Lydia Gwilt. My

correlation between Lydia and the events of the novel’s backstory may seem arbitrary, but we

must remember that the deceptively aged Lydia actually plays a central role in the original

deception plot. Young maid Lydia’s ability to forge documents is essential to her lady’s schemes.

While Lydia is no prostitute, the fact that Lydia is both a fallen woman and a lady poisoner

offers the grounds for considering her representation alongside the discourse of venereal poison

that I have described so far.

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Lydia’s roster of poisonings is extensive: she successfully poisons her former husband

with arsenic, and she attempts to poison Allan Junior, not once but twice—first with doctored

lemonade and second with strychnine gas. A femme fatale in the most literal sense, Lydia is

poison to the men around her.

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As a literary figure, nineteenth-century femme fatales like John

Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (1819) were metonymically linked to the poisons that they

sometimes administered to their unsuspecting lovers. Interestingly, historians also postulate that

the femme fatale served as a metaphor for the devastation of syphilis.

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The sexual appeal that

these figures like Lydia possess, and which ostensibly leads men to their demise, brings together

fears about literal and venereal poisoning through female sexuality.

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Lydia’s fluid body is a

harbinger of death wherever and whenever she appears. Carrying her own toxic secret (that her

forgery precipitated a series of devastating events), Lydia regards her presence in the lives of

others as a kind of contagious disease.

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Like the Great Imitator, syphilis, Lydia is a shapeshifter

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As Judith R. Walkowitz (1982) and Nina Attwood (2015) have argued, the major case for feminist outrage as a

response to the Contagious Disease acts was that women who were not prostitutes would be perceived as such and

forced to undergo invasive examinations, so Lydia’s exclusion from the category of prostitute would not make her

any less suspect.

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Notably, Lydia’s role as poisoner is also metaphorical, as Mrs. Armadale fears that she will “poison [her] son’s

mind against [her]” (71).

345

See Elizabeth Wilson and Joanne Entwistle (eds. 2001, 205).

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Consider, for instance, how Lydia is linked to venereal disease in her association with her older friend, Mrs.

Oldershaw, who helps fallen women conceal venereal infections through cosmetics. It is no leap to suggest that

Lydia signifies the threat of literal poison, but I want to push that construction further to suggest that her acts of

literal poisoning serve as narrative coding for the threat of syphilitic transmission, one that, like foreign poisons,

reveals the dangers of Britain’s colonial ambitions.

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Lydia remarks that Allan, in avoiding her on the street, “treated me as if I was plague-struck, and as if the very air

about me was infected by my presence” (451). When her marriage with Midwinter becomes unhappy, she wonders,

“Are there plague-spots of past wickedness on my heart which no after-repentance can wash out?” (546).

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who takes on many different guises, preventing those she impacts from identifying her.

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turns, she is Miss Gwilt, the governess; Mrs. Waldron, the infamous husband poisoner; the

nameless “drowning” woman Arthur Blanchard dies to rescue; Mrs. Armadale, wife of Ozias

Midwinter; and Mrs. Armadale, feigned widow of Allan Armadale. What unites all of Lydia’s

different guises is her signature presentation: a red paisley shawl. Dressed in her red paisley

shawl, Lydia, like syphilis, brings destruction and death everywhere that she goes.

In this novel full of doubles, Collins constructs Lydia as a double of the Barbados

poisoners. Like Allan 1’s imagined poisoners, young Lydia is an agent of deception, forging a

letter from Allan’s mother to Blanchard’s father that would enable Allan Armadale (2) to marry

Blanchard under false pretenses (27).

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Even if Lydia is of European origin, Collins narratively

codes her as racially other as the novel’s “Shadow,” the counterpart to mixed-race Ozias

Midwinter’s dark figure in Allan’s dream-cum-prophecy. Mirroring the West Indian woman’s

poisoning scheme, this dark Shadow poisons Allan in his dream, prefiguring Lydia’s two

attempts to poison him. And just as her shadowed face continually obscures her identity, it also

signifies racial otherness, and a symbolically dark moral center. Contemporary reviewers of the

novel appeal to this moral colorism, with one reviewer underscoring Lydia’ association with

darkness by calling her “one of the hardest female villains whose devices and desires ever

blackened fiction” (qtd in Niles 66, emphasis added). This “blackness” suggests more than just

evil but could also allude to her dark clothing: a “black veil, a black bonnet, [and] a black silk

dress” (105). Lydia’s “black” apparel contributes to her racial coding.

By figuring the poisoner Lydia as a dark “shadow” in Allan’s dream, Collins implies that

Lydia’s poisoning at least partially signifies a threat of racial infiltration. It is worth considering

the dream sequence at length because of the way that the author associates this darkness with

poison. The night Ozias reads his father’s letter warning him of his cursed connection to Allan 4,

Allan 4 has a dream which shifts to three visions involving Lydia, dreams which Ozias

(correctly) presumes to be prophecies of Allan’s demise, although the man escapes all three of

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Interestingly, Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox (2002) argue that Lydia “represents an unspeakable

pathology of male homosocial desire” (319).

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Their obvious similarity is in their shared penchant for poison, but there are more. When Armadale 1 describes

pursuing Miss Blanchard as a young man, he introduces her maid, Lydia, “an orphan girl of barely twelve years old”

who turns out to be “a marvel of precocious ability” in her “imitative” and “wicked dexterity” (27).

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Lydia’s attempts on his life. Allan dreams that water fills the cabin of a ship and that he and the

male stranger with him sink. The dream proves prophetic as Lydia will later attempt to drown

him like this. The dream then shifts to the first vision: Allan sees a “broad, lonely pool” with “the

Shadow of a Woman” standing on its outskirts (this woman turns out to be Lydia).

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In the

second vision, Allan sees “the Shadow of a Man” reach out towards a statue which falls to pieces

(mirroring Ozias breaking a statue when he and Allan later argue over Lydia in his room). Here

is the third and final vision from Allan’s recollection:

The darkness opened for the third time, and showed me the Shadow of the Man and the

Shadow of the Woman together. The Man-Shade was nearest; the Woman-Shadow stood

back. From where she stood, there came a sound as of the pouring of a liquid softly. I saw

her touch the shadow of the man with one hand, and with the other give him a glass. He

took the glass, and gave it to me. In the moment when I put it to my lips, a deadly

faintness mastered me from head to foot. When I came to my senses again, the Shadows

had vanished, and the third vision was at an end. (142)

When Ozias and the physician Mr. Hawbury interpret the dream afterwards, the physician

explains the events rationally, as memories coming from Allan’s subconscious, rather than as

some terrible prophecies that Ozias rightfully believes them to be. In the case of the third vision,

Hawbury reasons that Allan must have been thinking back to earlier that day when he had indeed

fainted after Lydia gave him some lemonade. At this time, Allan’s collapse was not on account

of the poison that Lydia secretly slipped into the drink, but as his habitual reaction to the smell of

brandy, which Lydia had also added to it. Ignorant of Lydia’s tampering, Allan dismisses the

vision in which Lydia had played the role of the “Woman-Shadow,” poisoning his drink in

secret. Lydia’s construction as a shadow also underlines her corporeal fluidity in being able to

move effortlessly through space unrecognized.

Lydia maintains her innocence when Ozias questions her about the incident. Privately,

however, she as much as admits to having poisoned it: “I laid a great stress on my innocence—

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Interpreting the vision, Mr. Hawbury refers to this woman as “The Lady of the Lake.” The Arthurian figure’s

mystical associations with water and drowning invoke the drowned fallen woman of our previous chapter, especially

since Lydia actually does feign a suicide attempt by jumping into the water in order to kill off one of the Anthrope

inheritors. Of course, Lydia also arranges to have Allan drowned. Therefore, this allusion to Arthurian legend is

apropos given how Lydia is also a beautiful but deadly figure who lures men to their deaths.

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and with some reason too […] I was innocent—so far as the brandy was concerned. I had put it

into the lemonade, in pure ignorance of Armadale’s nervous peculiarity, to disguise the taste

of—never mind what!” (563). Lydia’s central role in food preparation also gives her the access

to poisoning drinks. Yet Lydia’s admission that the poison is bitter tells us something rather

important: she is not using arsenic, which has no bitter taste, but is likely opting for the

notoriously bitter cyanide. As well as telling us that Lydia seeks to kill Allan instantly rather than

gradually over time (as arsenic required), Lydia’s use of cyanide, like her later use of strychnine

originating from the upas tree, aligns her with a trade in exotic goods.

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Lydia’s poison, like her

body, therefore invades the permeable boundary of the English social body.

This is not the only instance in which Collins aligns Lydia with dangerous foreign

imports. Lydia’s signature attire is a “red Paisley shawl,” which Collins describes her wearing no

fewer than ten times throughout the novel. Picking up on Chen’s argument that toxins

“participate vividly in the racial mattering of…disease threats” (10), this final section will

explore how the patterned shawl also alludes to contemporary images of contagious disease,

specifically syphilis, both microscopically (in terms of a pathogen) and somatically (in terms of a

syphilitic rash).

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The same trade routes that shipped shawls from Indian producers to English

consumers were also responsible for transmitting contagious diseases such as syphilis—the result

of direct and indirect trans-corporeal intimacies that such trading demanded. As I examine in my

chapter on the clothing industry, fabrics were readily identified as a carrier of diseases, especially

smallpox, making shawls potentially suspect. Yet, infected biofluids were not readily visible.

As I argue in my chapter on Thames drinking water, Victorians hypothesized that

microbes contaminated drinking water, making them the invisible causative agents for epidemics

like cholera.

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While contagionists and miasmists disagreed about how exactly people contracted

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While naturally occurring arsenic could be found in mineral deposits virtually anywhere, sodium cyanide must be

isolated from specific fruits, most commonly bitter almonds, which are native to Iran and its surrounding countries.

Bitter almonds were a common ingredient in Victorian English confectionaries. The almonds were pressed for oil to

make essence of almond used in small quantities in baking (see Burney 2006).

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Her veiled face showcases the kind of Orientalized exoticism that Edward Said connects to “depth, secrecy, and

sexual promise” (1978, 222).

353

As early as 1820, American agriculturalist William Walker hypothesized that germs cause disease in animals,

writing: “the microscope, which increases images up to several million times, enables us to see minute objects

whose very existence we should not have suspected. Some of these images are of living creatures such as microbes;

these can cause many diseases, and the possibility of detecting them often enables us to combat them” (56).

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cholera, there was never any question that syphilis was a contagious disease spread through

sexual intercourse. Wilkie Collins was well versed in the contemporary discourses on disease

transmission. Moreover, he was acutely aware of the contagious nature of venereal diseases,

having contracted several such illnesses from extramarital affairs, diseases which he alludes to in

his correspondence with Charles Dickens.

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There is also reason to believe that Collins was

knowledgeable in early germ theory and integrated contagion narratives in his fictional works.

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Laurence Talairach-Vielmas (2009) makes a convincing case for reading Collins’s Moonstone

(published only two years after Armadale) as a meditation on emerging germ theory.

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separate works, Jenny Bourne Taylor (2006) and Talairach-Vielmas (2009) both argue that

Collins employs the concept of transmission to explain invisible forces at work in his novels.

Rather than focus on Collins’s invisible forces, I want to consider how he uses a concrete,

material entity—Lydia’s paisley shawl—to visualize the process of venereal “poisoning” in

much the same way that current microscopists were visualizing the unit of disease transmission

in the realm of early cellular pathology. Lydia’s paisley-covered body spreads across time and

space, wreaking havoc on the bodies she encounters. It is the last thing that Arthur Blanchard

sees before plunging to his death (79),

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and it features in the subsequent police report, causing

Ozias to wonder: “That woman wore a black veil, a black bonnet, a black silk gown, and a red

Paisley shawl… Is there a fatality that follows men in the dark? And is it following us in that

woman’s footsteps?” (105). Ozias’s characterization of Lydia as a “fatality” covers more than

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Biographers have suggested that Collins and Dickens both likely contracted syphilis and gonorrhea through

prostitutes when they travelled on what Dickens called their “Haroun Alraschid” expeditions throughout the 1850s.

See Lycett on Dickens’s comment that Wilkie “will soon begin to see land beyond the Hunterian ocean” in 1855:

“Wilkie, but not many others, would have realized that his friend was referring to John Hunter, the great surgeon

and anatomist of the previous century, who was also a pioneer in the treatment of venereal diseases. Hunter is

believed to have given himself syphilis in order better to understand the symptoms. The ‘ocean’ was probably a

reference to the unpleasant discharge (associated with both syphilis and gonorrhea) that was curtailing Wilkie’s

social life” (138). The name “Haroun Alraschid” was Dickens’s coinage, which Lyn Pykett references in her

biography of Collins (2005). The name alludes to the fifth Caliph of the Abbasid dynasty, modern-day Baghdad,

Iraq, so Dickens was essentially claiming that he and Collins could play at foreign royalty.

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There numerous references to contagious disease in Armadale aside from the syphilis scene, such as Midwinter

contracting an infectious “fever on the brain” (32), to Dr. Downward describing how “epidemic disease” might

infect the rooms of his Sanitarium (305).

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Talairach-Vielmas’s central argument about the eponymous moonstone is that “the cursed gem's supernatural

force […] functions as an invisible germ mysteriously carried in the air and over the seas; once transported to

Victorian London, the curse is adapted to that civilized nation, like a mutating virus” (77).

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Arthur describes the woman as follows: “She was neatly dressed in black silk, with a red Paisley shawl over her

shoulders, and she kept her face hidden behind a thick veil” (79).

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just her poisoning attempts but her other use of fluids (in this case water) as a murder weapon. If

Lydia is a “fatality,” then her red paisley shawl is her modus operandi.

The standard shapes featured in paisley shawls, a botanical Indian motif known as the

buta, resemble images of microbes. In 1854, Italian biologist Filippo Pacini identified a

microorganism in the intestines of cholera victims and theorized that this vibrion was the

causative agent of the disease. While miasmists dismissed Pacini’s theory, his widely circulated

paper nonetheless provided the grounds for contagionists to theorize that microorganisms were

the vehicle for communicable diseases like syphilis. In Figure 10, a microscopic slide features

the red, comma-shaped vibrions that Pacini identified. Figure 11 shows the kind of red paisley

shawl that Lydia would have worn, featuring the comma-shaped butas. Like the vibrio, the butas

are comma-shaped bodies. The buta’s shape corresponds to the features of a single cell

organism: an inner nucleus, an outer membrane, and hair-like cilia (which enables the cell’s

movement).

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Granted, this juxtaposition compares paisley to cholera bacterium, while the

pathogen producing syphilis would only be discovered in 1905. Even so, in her study of

Victorian syphilis (2017) Monika Pietrzak-Franger reasons that there were “continuous attempts

were directed at finding the causative organism” long before Fritz Schaudinn identified it (33).

Granting that some of Collins’s readers may have understood that syphilis was transmitted

through an unidentified pathogen, then those readers may have made a connection between

Lydia’s paisley-patterned costume, her status as a femme fatale, and the incidents of syphilis

“poisoning” in the novel.

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These description are based on Pacini’s detailed drawings of the organism in his paper, “Microscopical

observations and pathological deductions on cholera” (1854). Buteh themselves are of Persian origin but presenting

them in clusters is uniquely an Indian design.

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Figure 9. Red Paisley Shawl produced around 1830. Note

the comma-shaped, red butas. Image reproduced from

Los Angeles Country Museum of Art.

A more readily visible association between paisley and syphilis can be drawn at the level

of identifiable symptoms. To move from a microscopic to a somatic level of observation, we find

that the spotted garment recalls the colour and pattern of the “bright crimson” rash that was one

of the trademark signatures of syphilis. Consider the resemblance between Lydia’s scarf and

syphilitic flesh in Henry Ashby and George Arthur White’s description of the disease (1893):

“The commonest rash in hereditary syphilis is a roseola [rose-shaped spots], which may take the

form of a bright-red diffuse rash with sharply defined edges surrounding the genitals, with

perhaps patches of similar redness about the body or face, or there may be roseolous spots or

maculae about the body” (398). The roseola and maculae also mark the secondary stage of

venereal syphilis in adults. George Henry Fox provides a visual for the medical description in his

portrait of a woman whose back is quite literally wrapped in a layer of Syphiloderma

Tuberculosis, in one of the first ever photographs depicting syphilis (Figure 12, from Fox’s 1881

Photographic Illustrations of Cutaneous Syphilis). This skin affliction bears a striking

resemblance to the patterns featured on popular “Indian” shawls. Compare Fox’s photographic

depiction to the winding pattern on the red paisley shawl covering the body of Fanny Holman

Figure 8. Illustration of a microscopic slide

containing numerous curved Vibrio cholerae

bacteria, or Pacini’s “vibrions” (1954). Note

the comma-shape of the bacilli. Public domain.

Reproduced from the Centre for Disease

Control Public Health Image Library. ID:5324

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Hunt in her husband William Holman’s portrait of her from 1866-1867 (Figure 13). Lydia’s red

paisley shawl thus evokes both the microscopic agents of communicable disease and the somatic

symptomology of syphilis. The shawl’s connections to communicability are appropriate, given

how this commodity is weaved into the very fabric of international trade networks that also trade

in communicable disease.

Given this pathogenic poison, it is fitting that Lydia’s final scene should depict her

bearing her “Purple Flask” of poison, wearing her Paisley shawl, and fighting a “fever-heat [that]

throbbed again in her blood” (665). Lydia’s feverish form invades the bedroom of her would-be

lover (significantly, the space of sexual contact) to infect him with a deadly poison. When she

discovers Ozias, not Armadale, sleeping peacefully in the room, she is horrified at the prospect

of poisoning him, and momentarily becomes the opposite of a femme fatale as she carries the

unconscious Ozias to safety (664). She then “shut[s] out the poisoned air from pursuing them

Figure 13. William Holman Hunt (British, 1827–1910), Fanny

Holman Hunt, 1866–68. Toledo Museum of Art (Toledo, Ohio),

Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of

Edward Drummond Libbey, ID: 1977.34

Figure 10. “Syphiloderma Tuberculosis.” George

Henry Fox (1881). Plate XXV. Reproduced from

the Wellcome Collections London.

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into the passage” (664), and “taking off her shawl, made a pillow of it to support his head” (665).

Lydia scrawls a final note to Ozias, empties the rest of the poison “to the last drop left in the

Flask,” and willingly enters the toxic room. Enveloped by her own “poisoned air” (666), she dies

of apoplexy (671), a stroke.

Lydia is a perplexing character, and her final act might be her most perplexing one. Lydia

remains something of an enigma amongst critics: does her representation serve as shock value or

political critique? These two motivations, to shock readers or to call them to political action, are

not mutually exclusive; all my authors from previous chapters try to shock their readers into

awareness. Whatever Collins felt about Lydia personally, he did not relish killing her, writing

that “Miss Gwilt’s death quite upset me” (qtd in Sutherland 2004, xiii). There appear to be three

possibilities here. The first is that Lydia is an utterly irredeemable character, that she is indeed

“one of the hardest female villains” who ever “blackened fiction.” As one critic in The Spectator

concluded of Armadale, Collins “gives us for its heroine a woman fouler than the refuse of the

streets” (qtd in Sutherland xix), a sentiment which presents Lydia in reactionary terms as a

standard figure of female contagion.

The second option, as several critics have argued, is that Lydia is ultimately a

sympathetic figure who is a victim of circumstances, that her suicide endears her to the reader’s

sympathy. Lydia herself might scoff at this reading, having played the victim of “helpless

woman” (397) for much of the novel to attain her economic ends, including feigning that pathetic

figure of the drowned fallen woman;

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“throw[ing] herself overboard” into the river (79) so that

an innocent man may drown, and so that she may come one step closer to an inheritance.

The third option is that Lydia’s subversiveness makes her a proto-feminist character who

functions to critique the colonial system that provides England access to poisons, a patriarchal

system that provides English women the motivation to use them, and a legal system that then

blames these women for doing so. In her suicide letter to Ozias, Lydia acknowledges the harm

she has wreaked on those around her, claiming that she is “worse than the worst” (665).

However, she also claims that she “might, perhaps, have been that better woman…if I had not

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Lydia is self-aware of her imitation of pathetic literary figures, writing that she invents her tragic backstory to

Ozias inspired by “the commonplace rubbish of the circulating libraries” (491).

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lived a miserable life before you met with me” (666). Lydia’s “miserable life” made her a

product of her own circumstances; the harm inflicted on her from such an early age, and the

desperate economic position that it left her in, accumulated a toxic load that she carries in her

body until her death.

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Real-life female poisoners like Madeleine Smith illuminate women’s

economic precarity in relation to their male counterparts; female poisoners thus took on a

feminist role whether they chose to or not. Should we read Lydia alongside real female poisoners

who reached for poison in a desperate bid to prevent their social death and economic ruin?

I do not see Lydia neatly falling into any one of these single interpretations so much as

encompassing them all. Lydia’s character thwarts interpretative containment much like her body

resists corporeal boundaries. Whether or not Lydia is redemptive, her role as female poisoner is

physically and politically disruptive, and in its disruption, she embodies a mode of relation that is

premised on “the physical nonintegrity of individual bodies” (11) rather than a notion of

individual and national bodies as impermeable (or perhaps more appropriately, selectively

permeable only when it benefits them to appropriate). Lydia’s dramatizations of the body’s

“physical nonintegrity” (11) are not only literally but politically transgressive, since the physical

integrity of the body is a basic premise of England’s legal system, which seeks to pin blame on

individual bodies like Lydia for isolated acts of violence rather than diffuse the blame across the

systems that produce that the conditions for that violence to occur in the first place.

Collins’s ending seems conventionally moralistic: Lydia’s punishment for a life of

poisoning is to die of poisoning. It is problematic to argue that death is liberatory on the grounds

that it liberates the individual from an unjust world. However, the fact that Lydia poisons herself

of her own volition, rather than being poisoned by accident or by someone else, strikes me as an

important distinction. Lydia decides to expose herself to the poisonous fumes of her own

creation; in doing so, she opts to literally “dwell in the dissolve” (2016). Even after death,

Lydia’s identity escapes categorization: the coroner’s inquest performed on her body comes up

with a verdict “attaching no blame to anybody” (671). Moreover, “nothing has been inscribed on

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Lydia is in dire straits economically. She calls herself “the victim of sad domestic circumstances” (385) after

having been “thrown on the world” (546). Risking bankruptcy, she says that becoming Allan’s widow would be

“more than triumph—it is the salvation of me… Just five pounds left in the world – and the prospect next week of a

debtor’s prison” (447). By the end of the novel, she only has three shillings and ninepence left to her name (488).

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[Lydia’s] tombstone, but the initial letter of her Christian name, and the date of her death” (672).

Lydia’s fluid body dissolves and diffuses into thin air, much her strychnine gas. In this way, her

final act can be read as an act of resistance—resistance against the mechanisms of confinement

that sought to contain her. A further complication of this reading of narrative closure is that

Lydia as a character does not actually meet her end in this novel. On the contrary, Collins

reincarnates this femme fatale for a theatrical adaptation of the novel which bears Lydia’s name

as its title, Miss Gwilt (1875). Evidently, Armadale cannot contain someone like Lydia.

Like the other figures of contagion I have examined, the Victorian female poisoner

contains destructive and productive capacities that cannot be separated. Like contagion, the

toxicity that Armadale’s lady poisoners employ reveals the membranes of the English corporeal

and social body to be permeable. In Armadale, wronged women like Lydia who have been

exposed to the toxicity of empire and of patriarchy redirect that toxicity towards the English

corporeal and social body, wreaking havoc on the systems which kept them down. Collins’s

characterization of Lydia may represent the most liberatory form of contagion in all of my

selected authors, in the sense that poison “liberates” the English corporeal body and social body

from the illusions of integrity and self-containment. The lady poisoner—who is the most difficult

of my selected figures to sympathize with—may also paradoxically signify the most far-reaching

and long-lasting forms of connection.

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Conclusion: To Culture a Pathology, to Pathologize a Culture

The humble dairy maid, the drowned fallen woman, the poor seamstress, the ruined

breast-feeder, the lady poisoner—what do all of these familiar Victorian figures have in

common? All of these characters, I have argued, put Victorians “in touch”—that is, their bodies

and their biofluids bring Victorians into material and symbolic relation. The women who

populate my dissertation all inhabit bodies that enact the innumerable trans-corporeal flows

characterizing everyday life in Victorian England’s urban centers.

Each of the literary texts that make up my chapters center one of these cultural figures,

and each author marries their chosen figure materially and metonymically to a set of fluids and

biofluids that loomed large within the mid-century Victorian cultural imagination: cow’s milk,

human milk, drinking water, vaginal discharge, blood, menstrual fluid, and poisoned beverages.

These liquids range from what Jules Law terms “alienable” (2010) public fluids like drinking

water and cow’s milk, which physically travelled through trans-corporeal networks of

consumption, to private biofluids like blood that may not have literally moved from one body to

another, but nonetheless symbolically travelled through economic, literary, and affective

circulations in the form of embodied metaphors. Despite this variation in the literality of these

fluids, the authors I enlist in this dissertation are all deeply invested in the materiality of bodies

and material processes. They investigate the destructive impacts of this modern state of fluid

relations on Victorian citizens’ bodies: physical violence, bodily deterioration, death, and, most

consistently, contagious disease. In equal measure, these authors explore the productive

potentialities embedded in these material relations—relations which they use to model contact,

connection, communication, and community.

Throughout this dissertation, I consider fluidity to be a wholesale model of disruption,

destabilization, deconstruction, and reconstruction. That said, I focus on how fluidity operates

across space to trace connections between strangers living in the same historical moment. And

yet my study also models how fluidity operates across time, formulating a historical

correspondence between Victorian and contemporary constructions of leaky bodies. I link spatial

fluidity to temporal fluidity to suggest points of contact and connection between strangers in

ostensibly unrelated historical moments. Putting people from different historical moments “in

touch” in this way troubles constructions of Western history as a straightforward teleology of

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forward progress. My diffractive approach to history dovetails with Amy Koerber’s

conceptualization of history as topological (2018), the notion that history continually returns to

literary formulas and stock characters that nonetheless expand and mutate over time. I am

particularly indebted to Koerber’s visualization of history as a Möbius strip, a model which

conveys history not as linear but as continually folding in upon itself: a temporal fluidity. The

Möbius strip also provides a template for spatial fluidity. For the model features prominently in

Elizabeth Grosz’s Volatile Bodies (1997) as a means of inverting psychoanalytic and

phenomenological constructions of sexual difference “from the inside out and from the outside

in” (189). For Grosz, the Möbius strip signifies a volatile body because it enacts “rotations on

itself, a doubling that makes it problematize and extend its own boundaries” (189). I am struck

by the similarity between Koerber’s and Grosz’s formulations of the Möbius strip and earlier

models of fluidity which disrupt boundaries of space and time. Aurora’s vision of modern poetry

as a breast-volcano dramatizes spatial and temporal fluidity. Spatially, this icon of trans-

corporeality joins all people together through their shared intake of a lactational “lava-lymph.”

Temporally, it enfolds past, present, and future voices into a multiplicity of voices speaking back

to, being present with, and looking forward to one another.

One of the ways that this project troubles a teleological model of history as progress is by

challenging the notion that theoretical movements become irrelevant just because they go out of

fashion. On one level, my title, “Leaky Bodies Reclaimed,” refers to the reclamation of leaky

bodies within the Victorian era, but it also refers to the reclamation of leaky bodies within

current feminisms. In line with Van der Tuin’s notion of feminist waves “jumping generations”

(2009), this dissertation makes waves between the different feminist waves by arguing for the

continuous cultural relevance of leaky bodies within negotiations of corporeality, subjectivity,

and relation. Since the rise of social constructionism, the study of leaky bodies has fallen largely

out of favour on charges of biological essentialism. However, my aim has been to demonstrate

that leaky bodies contain the capacity to model modern, inclusive feminisms, and even to

contribute to coalitionary strategies between these feminisms and other disciplines centered on

bodies (such as critical race studies and queer studies). The nineteenth-century authors I examine

in my chapters capitalize on the longstanding correlation between women and contagion. Yet

rather than attempting to disaggregate femininity and contagion, these authors use this

219

correlation to develop expansive models of contagion and fluidity—models that offer affirmative

and liberatory possibilities for leaky bodies to rupture and deconstruct oppressive structures of

selfhood and relation. Beginning in the 1980s, French Feminists took up this work of reclaiming

leaky bodies, and now, the new materialists have taken up the mantle. These models of reclaimed

leaky bodies thus fold on themselves, reappearing in different guises at different historical

moments.

My hypothesis then prompts the question: if models of fluidity re-emerge, then who

features in modern contagion narratives? Who is the female figure that English culture currently

vilifies as a threatening leaky body?

To begin to answer this question necessitates inspecting England’s current stance on

leakiness. The fantasy of a hermetically sealed body certainly lives on in England’s cultural

politics. The ideal of a stable and impenetrable physiological and social body survives despite

the obvious trans-corporeal realities of global pandemics and globalization which show this ideal

body to be untenable.

361

Under the conservative leadership of former Prime Minister Boris

Johnson, England has sought refuge in becoming an economic island unto itself, maximizing

financial inputs but minimizing outputs.

362

These isolating tendencies culminated in Brexit,

which the Tories promised would transform Britain into “a fully independent, sovereign

country.”

363

Pro-Brexit conservatives regarded the United Kingdom’s departure from the

European Union on January 30th, 2020, as a measure to stem the flow of Britain’s financial

hemorrhaging, a bid to stop England from losing jobs and capital to vampiric foreign interests.

364

361

Pamela Gilbert (2022) writes on corporeal integrity after the coronavirus: “Now, we […] find that we must think

about global community within the terms of COVID-19 (and climate change)—precisely when regressive fantasies

of self-enclosed, homogenous nation are being peddled by some of the most politically reactionary governments the

West has seen in decades” (283).

362

This construction of England’s economy as a female body hoarding financial flows corresponds with Kreisel’s

readings of Ruskin’s feminized metaphors of economic management (2012). Kreisel juxtaposes Ruskin’s

embodiment of a stagnating economy as a prostitute’s body (a “money-chest with a slit in it”) with a free-flowing

economy (a wisely spending body “who has a purse for a body”) (qtd in Kreisel 7).

363

See “Theresa May – her full Brexit Speech to Conservative Conference,” The Independent (October 2, 2016).

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-may-conference-speech-article-50-brexit-eu-a7341926.html

364

Like Reynolds’s antisemitic depictions of vampiric factory owners, British politicians continue to appeal to

metaphors of blood loss to characterize cultural and ethnic others as economic parasites. Take Conservative Member

of Parliament Enoch Powell’s infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech (1968), which criticized Commonwealth

immigration to the United Kingdom and forecasted visible minorities taking over England. After the 2016

referendum, there was a surge in discrimination towards Polish people which led to some 150,000 Poles leaving

Britain due to uncertainty. On the British discourse of [im]migrants as parasites, see Andreas Musolff (2022).

220

Brexit closed borders as migrants from EU countries were no longer freely permitted to gain

entry and work in the United Kingdom. However, the fantasy of Britain’s self-imposed isolation

was short-lived. Only two months later, the global pandemic showcased the inevitability of

continued transnational, trans-corporeal flows. Like many nations, the United Kingdom

tightened its borders in response to the virus, locking down the country in March and then in

November of 2020. Lockdown simultaneously revealed the necessity and the impossibility of

stopping up the [social] body’s flows.

While mandatory lockdown represented a progressive, disease mitigation strategy, Brexit,

on the other hand, was symptomatic of a broader wave of Conservative nationalism sweeping

England. One of the central features of this nationalist trend has been for England’s right-wing

demographic to define itself against the international progressive movement for Lesbian, Gay,

Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) rights, a movement which has otherwise become largely

mainstream within Europe and the Americas. Although England has made advancements in the

areas of same-sex marriage (which was legalized in 2014), the country has continually been the

seat of fervent anti-transgender sentiment at both political and popular levels, notably, even in

otherwise progressive circles.

365

This brings us to England’s currently disparaged leaky bodies. One branch of this

reactionary movement, who have been labelled Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists

(TERFs),

366

claims that transwomen represent a threat to ciswomen and feminism altogether.

They employ fearmongering strategies to argue that transwomen are actually deviant men who

seek entrance into “female-only” spaces, such as bathrooms, so that they can prey on “real” (that

is, cisgender

367

) women. These transphobic discourses convey “female-only” spaces as newly

vulnerable to invasion through a construction of transgender and gender-nonconforming people

as dangerously fluid invaders. A case in point is the so-called “bathroom debate.” Transgender

365

The most famous figure of this anti-trans sentiment is English author J.K. Rowling, who made numerous remarks

on Twitter denying that transwomen are real, such as stating on her website that it would be unsafe to allow “any

man who believes or feels he's a woman” into bathrooms or changing rooms (2020). Rowling supports the Labour

Party and has voiced her opposition to the Republican party under Donald Trump.

366

Prominent organizations in the UK include LBG Alliance, Women’s Place UK (WPUK), and Transgender Trend.

An opposition to transgender rights has become the mainstream “feminist” position within UK politics, compared to

most other Western countries where anti-transgender ideology is associated with the far-right.

367

Cisgender is the term used to describe individuals whose gender identity matches the one they were assigned at

birth. See Julia Serano on the transmisogynistic misconstruction of transwomen as sexually deviant men (2020).

221

activists advocate that people should be free to use public bathrooms which align with their

gender identity, whether or not that identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth. Their

opponents, however, claim that to do so would contribute to safety risks; that is, they claim that

transwomen would pose a risk to ciswomen.

368

These reactionary discourses orbit around fears

about dangerously permeable bodies and spaces. According to this transmisogynistic caricature,

transwomen use their bodies not only to invade women’s bathrooms, but to permeate stalls and

invade ciswomen’s bodies.

369

Public restrooms meet a need that all bodies have to relieve

themselves, regardless of gender. However, these discourses weaponize transwomen’s bodies

and bodily functions against them, such that transpeople’s bodies are depicted as threateningly

leaky, especially in the context of public spaces that are deemed too porous. This vilification of

transpeople’s bodies contributes to a brand of transmisogyny which simultaneously denies

transwomen their womanhood but does so by paradoxically subscribing to and reinscribing the

same misogynistic constructions that have been historically damaging to cisgender women.

The fluidity that these discourses ascribe to transgender and gender nonconforming

people is not limited to a spatial fluidity but also extends to a temporal fluidity—a trans-

corporeality where “trans” indicates bodily movement across time, as in the word “transition”

itself. Genderfluid people (whose experience of gender may vary depending on the day)

represent an obvious example of temporal fluidity, but many transgender people must officially

alter governmental identification to align with their gendered experience. The U.K.’s legal

system imposes limits on this fluidity. In January of 2023, the Conservative United Kingdom

government blocked a Scottish bill

370

that would have made it easier for transgender people to

legally change their gender on their birth certificates. U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak made the

unprecedented decision to invoke the Section 35 Order to prevent such a modest law from

passing. His decision testifies to England’s anxieties about transgender people’s transformational

capacities—not only to transform themselves but to transform Britain’s legal system.

368

In reality, the proven dangers that transwomen face in being forced to use men’s bathrooms outweigh any

imagined risks that transwomen would pose in women’s bathrooms. On the harm these bathroom restrictions cause

to transgender people, see Beatriz Pagliarini Bagagli, Tyara Veriato Chaves, and Mónica G. Zoppi Fontana (2021).

369

On the history of the medicalization, pathologization, and criminalization of transgender people, see Dominic C.

Locantore and Nesa E. Wasarhaley (2020).

370

The Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill sought to extend the UK. Gender Recognition Act (GRA) to

allow individuals to self-identify on their birth certificates.

222

These constructions of trans people’s threatening fluidity have informed a modern

version of the destructive contagion narrative which targets transgender and gender

nonconforming people as ideologically and even physically contaminating.

371

Like the early

nineteenth-century antivaccinators who claimed that the world was being overrun by

“Cowmania,” this reactionary movement characterizes the political shift towards trans inclusion

as a form of pathological-ideological contagion: a social contagion of “transgenderism” that has

an unfounded and problematic medical basis. This movement sees a trans “epidemic” sweeping

the nation, invading the minds of society’s most vulnerable and least ideologically inoculated

members: children. Propelled by a debunked 2018 paper by Lisa Littman, the movement

considers the very physical existence of trans youth as a threat to their peers. They believe the

former are liable to spread a spurious medical condition called “rapid-onset gender dysphoria.”

Like Mosely’s take on the Cowmania “epidemic,” this movement regards what they refer to as

“transgender ideology” as nothing short of a national and international threat to the future of the

human species.

372

The legacy of destructive Victorian contagion narratives clearly lives on in

these contemporary transphobic constructions.

And yet, just as Victorian authors reconfigured contagion narratives by transforming

fallen women’s leaky bodies into a catalyst for social change, modern transgender authors and

advocates are recuperating the fluidity and contagion at the center of these hateful narratives and

transforming them into progressive models of material and ethical relations. Currently one of the

most marginalized groups of women, transwomen, particularly transwomen of colour, have

nonetheless historically been at the vanguard of the fight for gender equality.

373

Transgender

activists continually disrupt the binaristic logics central to the mechanisms of patriarchy,

371

The stereotype of transwomen and gender nonconforming people as pathologically infectious has persisted since

the HIV crisis began. Since transwomen have and continue to experience economic precarity and difficulty securing

stable employment, high-risk sex work has been one of the few options available to them, and a disproportionate

number of transwomen are resultingly HIV positive. See Vivianne Namaste (2012, 2019) as well as Locantore and

Wasarhaley (2020).

372

In 2018, so-called “radical feminist” Sheila Jeffreys went before UK parliament and claimed that transwomen

were “parasitically occupy[ing] the bodies of the oppressed” when they “claimed[ed] to be women.” See Kashmira

Gander, “Academic Says Trans Women are Parasites for ‘Occupying the Bodies of the Oppressed” (Newsweek,

March 15, 2018). A former professor at the University of Melbourne, Jeffreys had previously cowritten a book

arguing against sex reassignment surgery with Lorene Gottschalk (2014).

373

For instance, Martha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were both transwomen of colour and activists who fought for

gender equality in their advocacy of gay and transgender people beginning in the 1960s.

223

cisnormativity, heterosexuality, and gender conformity.

374

Crucially, many of these scholars

believe that the term Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism is actually a misnomer, for

transgender studies has in large part grown out of the work of radical feminists like Irigaray,

whose notions of leakiness have been used widely amongst trans scholars to disrupt essentialist

logics that have been so damaging to ciswomen and transwomen alike.

375

Moreover, transgender

activists model a productive disciplinary fluidity in their ability to bring about coalitionary

alliances between branches of activism that are similarly grounded in bodily autonomy and

concerned with material-discursive structures and practices: gender studies, critical race studies,

and climate justice.

376

Transwomen may thus represent the disparaged leaky bodies of modern

England, but their very existence and resilience testifies to their capacity to enact continual social

and bioethical transformation.

Given the fluid nature of my project, it seems fitting that my concept of leaky bodies is

itself flexible in who and what it constitutes. Just as cultural representations of leaky bodies

expand beyond ciswomen, so too do they expand beyond the category of women altogether. My

chapter on Armadale extends the Victorian conceptualizations of material and categorical

fluidity beyond the realm of gender to consider how Victorian contagion narratives also engage

leakiness to negotiate questions of race, empire, and globalization. My archival findings on the

cultural alterity of female poisoners provide the basis for a more comprehensive Victorian

history of leaky bodies, which extends beyond just the bodies of white English women to

consider the intersectional aspects of such figures. Revisiting Victorian contagion narratives such

374

The persistence of the gender binary is most obvious in the continued existence of gendered bathrooms and sports

categories, both of which have been central arenas for trans debate.

375

Judith Butler’s work on the social construction of gender, which has been foundational in the development of

trans studies, has been consistently informed by Irigaray, specifically Irigaray’s notion of “mimicry” (Butler 1990,

1993). Scholars in the field of trans studies whose work has recuperated French wave feminists include Gayle

Salamon (2010, 2013), Danielle Poe (2011), Astrida Neimanis (2017), and Amy Ray Stewart (2017). A notable

exception is Tim R. Johnston (2015). For a powerful quasi-autobiographical work on trans embodiment that

employs new materialist notions of leaky bodies, see K.J. Cerankowski’s Suture: Trauma and Trans Becoming

(2021). Many scholars working in transgender studies have taken up new materialist frameworks (see Salamon

2010; van Midde 2015; Barad 2015; Hayward and Chen 2015).

376

On the coalitional approaches of transgender studies with ecological studies, see Jeanne Vaccaro (2014), Eva

Hayward (2008), and Douglas A. Vakoch’s collection of essays on transecologies (2020); with feminisms, see Susan

Stryker (2006, 2008, 2022), Julia Serano (2007), Jaqueline Gomes de Jesus (2014), Edward Davies (2018); with

critical race studies, see C. Riley Snorton (2017) and V. Varun Chaudhry (2019); with imperialism, see Vivianne

Namaste’s collection (2005); with critical disability studies, see Mog and Swarr (2008), Puar (2014), and Clare

(2017). This is by no means an exhausting list.

224

as the Contagious Disease Acts in this way builds on the cross-disciplinary approach that has

been constitutional to new materialist feminisms. Chen’s concept of “toxicity” (2012) provides a

useful theoretical framing for engaging in this kind of work because it employs an interlocking

approach spanning queer studies, critical race studies, and disability studies to recognize whose

bodies and whose bodily fluids are considered toxic. One further application for this research,

then, would be to examine how leakiness as a dually oppressive and liberatory mechanism

operated in the social construction of not only health and gender but also race, heteronormativity,

and physical and cognitive ability.

The Covid-19 pandemic provides a dramatic example of “disease-ways,” including the ways

that contagion narratives employ racist logics to characterize certain people as occupying

dangerously leaky bodies. Chen developed their concept of toxicity out of the historical context

of the 2007 lead poisoning panic in the United States. However, toxicity has taken on a whole

new cultural life with the global epidemic. The speed with which the novel coronavirus took hold

of the world is a testament to the speed of globalization, revealing the movement of human

bodies and foods across the world as a multitude of direct and indirect trans-corporeal encounters

that are sometimes deadly. In a post-Covid world that has recently become obsessed with the

transits of biofluids, the study of leaky bodies seems more germane than ever. Furthermore,

studying how leakiness is mobilized towards constructions of difference seems all the more

urgent.

By ending with a chapter that gestures towards contagion’s liberatory possibilities in a

novel, Armadale, where this contagion proves fatal to virtually every character it touches, I am

especially cognizant of the controversial nature of my argument. Broadly, I make a case for

contagion’s liberatory and even feminist possibilities. However, this argument relies on the

interpretation of a series of literary texts which most often present dead and dying women’s

bodies as the catalyst for this liberatory possibility. Indeed, it is troubling that three out of four of

the figures I examine must die to demonstrate the positive possibilities of trans-corporeality—

and even the symbolically “dead” Marian does not come out unscathed. Then again, the fact that

everyone must die, and that the human corpse’s disintegration is the most dramatic

representation of the imbrication of human and more-than-human worlds are fundamental

225

premises within new and vibrant materialisms.

377

Moreover, I am acutely aware that it may seem

controversial (even in poor taste) to suggest that contagion has liberatory potential at a time

when we are still experiencing the long-term destruction of a global epidemic which has claimed

countless lives all over the world. How can I make such a positive claim about contagion at such

a time?

As I explore in my introduction, my working thesis on expansive contagion actually

materialized out of a kairological moment, or a moment of rhetorical opportunity, that I

witnessed during the early days of Covid-19. These days were simultaneously marked by two

seemingly contradictory affects: on the one hand, a widespread sentiment of anxiety towards the

emerging virus’s trans-corporeal capacities and on the other, an unprecedented spirit of

collective international identity. Like the mid-nineteenth-century context that I examine in these

chapters, the early period of the outbreak—with all its hopeful discourse about healing nature,

abolishing the police, and establishing a universal basic income

378

—represented one such

moment of rhetorical opportunity for social reformers to imagine new intimacies grounded in

embodied care and mutual need. These new ways of relating materialized for modern global

citizens (as they did for the Victorians) not in spite of, but because of contagion’s capacity to

bring us together through pathogenic and pathological networks. That initial zeitgeist

encapsulating contagion’s dual capacities for destructive-productive transformation may be over,

but the world has been forever changed. In this sense, the novel coronavirus has ushered in a

novel world—or at the very least, a new awareness of a world that has long since existed.

For this reason, the global pandemic has spawned a proliferation of scholarship across

virtually all fields. Within the humanities, the epidemic has been an especially productive site of

analysis amongst new materialists and historians of contagion. For new materialists, the

coronavirus corroborates the school’s foundational premises about material and categorical

fluidity. Much as the event of the Anthropocene galvanized public awareness about planetary

377

On new materialist articulations of human death troubling the boundary between living versus inanimate matter,

see Jane Bennett’s thoughts on the vibrancy of death (2010); Mel Chen on the animation of “dead” matter (2012);

Rosi Braidotti’s notion that “death is the inhuman conceptual excess” (2013); Haraway’s argument that “We are all

compost” (2016); and Margrit Shildrick on “Queering the Social Imaginaries of the Dead” (2020).

378

On the early hope for a universal income, see Johnson and Roberto (2020); and Patel and Kariel (2021). On the

murder of George Floyd as a catalyst for police reform and abolition, see Bourne (2020); O’Rourke, Su and Binder

(2021). On the momentary sentiment that “Nature is healing,” see El Zowalaty, Young, and Järhult (2020).

226

interconnectedness, they argue, the event of Covid-19 sharpened that awareness about planetary

permeability: the mutual imbrication of past, present, and future (van der Tuin 2020), human life

and the Sixth Extinction (Braidotti 2020), and the extent of trans-corporeality (Alaimo 2022). At

the same time, historians specializing in contagion, chiefly Priscilla Wald, consider the

importance of contextualizing our current pandemic within the history of outbreak narratives to

recognize how the stories we are still telling replicate xenophobic and racist legacies.

379

For

Victorianists specializing in contagion, the coronavirus brings new import to the study of

nineteenth-century infectious diseases and, in turn, offers an opportunity to investigate what

people in the nineteenth-century can teach us about surviving, even thriving, in a world that is

increasingly characterized by strange intimacies.

380

In the post-Covid era, what possibilities lay

ahead for the study of leaky bodies? These possibilities, like the bodies themselves, are open.

379

See Wald and Althschuler (2020); Wald (2020); Wald (2021a); Wald (2021b); Wald (2021c); Wald (2022).

380

Introducing a roundtable in Journal of Victorian Culture on “Outbreak: Contagion and Culture in the Victorian

Era” (2022), Kari Nixon and Lakshmi Krishnan write that “Victorian understandings of contagion acquire fresh

relevance to us” in light of the global epidemic (2022: 277). The roundtable includes illuminative pieces by many of

the authors featured in this dissertation, namely Gilbert, Kolb, Nixon and Lakshmi Krishnan, and Pelling.

227

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