Artigo de Kelly Bezio

Th N n t nth nt r r nt n N rr t v

Kelly Bezio

Literature and Medicine, Volume 31, Number 1, Spring 2013, pp. 63-90(Article)

P bl h d b Th J hn H p n n v r t PrDOI: 10.1353/lm.2013.0007

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63Kelly Bezio

Literature and Medicine 31, no. 1 (Spring 2013) 63–90© 2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

The Nineteenth-Century Quarantine NarrativeKelly Bezio

Awaking in quarantine one Sunday morning, American author Nathaniel P. Willis speaks, surprisingly, of his contentedness and the charming company he keeps: “We are all out of doors, and my com-panions have brought down their mattresses, and are lying along the shade of the east wall, talking quietly and pleasantly; the usual sounds of the workmen on the quays of the town are still, our harbor-guard lies asleep in his boat, the yellow flag of the lazaretto clings to the staff, everything about us breathes tranquility. Prisoner as I am, I would not stir willingly to-day.”1 Unexpected tranquility within the confines of quarantine proves an intriguing—and understudied—phenomenon within the annals of nineteenth-century travel writing. This essay exam-ines the literary and political consequences of Willis’s story and other narratives of healthy individuals kept in quarantine.2 Willis’s account appeared in The New-York Mirror in August 1832 as a part of an ongo-ing series regarding his travel abroad—for which he was paid $10 per letter chronicling his experiences and reimbursed $500 for expenses.3 An unprecedented writing gig, these letters (collectively referred to as “First Impressions of Europe”) represented a new approach to publish-ing in which a single periodical paid a journalist to send copy back to the United States.4 The letter containing the description of Willis’s quarantine takes up approximately two pages in the Mirror; it begins with his arrival in Avignon, details his attempts to avoid a stay in quarantine, and concludes with a nearly full-page narrative of life in the Villa Franca lazaretto (a prison-like building used to hold both the sick and the quarantined).

Over his lifetime, Willis enjoyed a reputation as a talented, prolific writer, composing poems, plays, essays, short stories, and a novel in addition to serving as the editor of numerous periodicals. By the time he began working for the Mirror, Willis had won prizes for poems published in The Boston Recorder and the Philadelphia Album and later

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for his play Bianca Visconti (staged in 1837). British publisher George Virtue contracted him to write landscape sketches for inclusion in William H. Bartlett’s 1840 American Scenery; or, Land, Lake, and River: Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature. Lauded for his insight into the read-ing public’s taste, Willis knew that accounts about quarantine would garner America’s interest as much as pieces about gossip, fashion, travel, and the beauty of the nation’s landscape.5

The nineteenth century was an unusual time for quarantine. Employed since the 1400s, this temporary form of detention was used at ports from Asia to Europe and, eventually, in the Americas to aid local quarantine officials tasked with preventing the spread of epidemic disorders, especially yellow fever, cholera, and plague. Many claimed—without definitive proof—that these diseases were transmitted person to person by touch, hence their classification as contagious or infectious.6 A foul bill of health identified ships coming from potentially infectious locales, necessitating the detainment of their passengers and the airing of their cargo. Individuals who remained well after a designated period were deemed non-contagious and allowed to continue on their travels. Those who fell ill stayed in the lazaretto until they either recovered or died.7 By the early 1800s, however, a school of thought known as anticontagionism had captured the minds of medical practitioners and laypersons alike. Its proponents argued that the “big three” epidemic diseases were transmitted through poisonous miasmas generated in a particular place rather than through physical contact with sick persons. Anticontagionist thinking carried potentially devastating consequences for quarantine, a practice that had been relied upon to halt disease transmission for over three hundred years, virtually unchanged. Sud-denly, lay anticontagionists suspected this respected institution was, at best, ineffective. Taking a more pessimistic stance, anticontagionist physicians blamed unsanitary lazarettos and filthy living quarters on board ships as likely sources of epidemic disorders.8 Nevertheless, beginning in the 1830s, recurrent cholera outbreaks across the globe demanded action of some kind and, in the absence of any viable al-ternatives, civil authorities in the United States and abroad continued to insist on centuries-old quarantine practices as a protective measure, despite this new aura of fallibility.9

For readers of the American press avidly consuming cholera news, European reports appeared to confirm that strictly enforced quarantine regulations were failing to deter cholera’s westward march from Russia through Europe and finally across the Atlantic. And indeed, the nineteenth century saw a lethal series of cholera epidem-

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ics in the U.S., first in 1832, then again in 1849 and 1866. American travel writers voyaging abroad during the 1830s and 1840s delighted in substantiating accounts of quarantine’s inefficacy by sharing with those back home their decidedly non-pestilential sufferings in foreign lazarettos. Set in a medical milieu but invariably written by laypersons, these reports took a variety of prose forms, including letters, essays, and narrative fiction.

Appearing in newspapers and magazines in the United States, these pieces were authored primarily by itinerant Americans, including titans of the antebellum periodical scene, Knickerbocker writers Willis, Theodore S. Fay, and Henry T. Tuckerman. Ties to New york, a talent for writing witty, genteel prose, and a commitment to developing a national literature characterized those dubbed Knickerbockers, a moni-ker honoring Washington Irving by way of reference to his fictional creation, the quintessential Dutch New yorker Dietrich Knickerbocker.

As contributors to weeklies and monthlies, Willis, Tuckerman, and Fay found themselves at the center of the exceedingly popular periodical print culture of the 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s that was dominated by presses in New york City, Philadelphia, and Boston.10 By 1860, periodicals from New york accounted for one third of the circulation in the U.S., nearly three times the output of its closest competitor in Pennsylvania.11 Tuckerman was a highly regarded essayist and an editor for the Boston Miscellany of Literature and Fashion.12 (He is often remembered today for refusing to publish Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”). Along with Willis, Fay edited and wrote for The New-York Mirror, the weekly magazine that John Paul Pritchard describes as having an “incalculable” influence during its first fifteen years of publication, “since it reached both literati and populace, and was read not only on the seaboard but also west of the Alleghenies.”13

The popularity of Tuckerman, Willis, and Fay—and that of the other, anonymous writers recounting their experiences in quarantine—was cemented by the fact that they were travel writers. The American appetite for travel accounts during the nineteenth century was im-mense. Before 1900, Americans published roughly 1,800 travel books, nearly 700 of which appeared from 1800 to 1868.14 Interestingly, writers proved less keen on the genre than their reading public. As Alfred Bendixen points out, “almost every major American author made a statement condemning, ridiculing, or at least questioning the idea of foreign travel.”15 Their ambivalence did not prevent them, however, from putting pen to paper while on the road, since “almost every one of them produced at least one travel book.”16 But literary fame


meant nothing to the quarantine officials whose job it was to sentence any traveler suspected of infectiousness to ignominious confinement.

The predominantly white, male, and well-educated authors of quarantine narratives underscored the absurd and onerous nature of the quarantine rules they encountered overseas. In doing so, they evoked the complaints of anticontagionist physicians back home. Laza-retto physician of the Port of Philadelphia, Thomas D. Mitchill, for example, sought to reform quarantine practice in the United States by introducing sanitary measures: “I would not therefore altogether abandon quarantine regulations, but if these are not conjoined with rigor [sic] and determinate regulations for the purity and cleanliness of every part of a city, I should consider the former as perfectly nugatory. . . . Vessels should never be detained at a quarantine station for a longer space of time than is requisite to effect a thorough cleansing.”17 Travel writers confirmed that too much time was spent in quarantine and that too little was being done to ensure the cleanliness of cities. Dwelling in quarantine, however, provided these privileged writers with more than quaint anecdotes about their travails as tourists. As this essay argues, their narratives more importantly interrogated the larger conceptual ties between, on the one hand, medical practices that contained (ostensibly) diseased outsiders to protect a population’s health and, on the other hand, discursive practices that excluded (seemingly) dangerous foreigners to protect a nation’s integrity. Like their counter-parts in the medical profession, anticontagionist travel writers believed that contact zones—lazarettos, quarantine stations, and port cities—could be rendered salutary. But whereas physicians pushed sanitation as a measure in need of implementation for such a goal to be achieved, the authors of these quarantine narratives showed how sites of containment were already healthful and, moreover, producing beneficial effects for national self-fashioning through cross-cultural mingling. In short, their point of view as non-infectious travelers from faraway places enabled them to conceive of a robust sense of national belonging as in fact arising from promiscuous foreign contact.

These fascinating stories from inside lazaretto walls constitute an important sub-genre of travel writing that I am calling the quarantine narrative. This essay examines twelve texts, once fashionable but now little-known and understudied, published between 1832 and 1847. These works collectively disseminate an anticontagionist perspective that derides a perception of outsiders as “dangerous elements” in need of quarantine in order to protect a population’s well-being. Linked together by an exposé prose style aimed at demystifying and

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debunking medical detainment, and by the use of irony intended to prompt new thinking about national identity formation, these nar-ratives convey a surprisingly positive attitude toward foreign influ-ence during an early period of global travel, commerce, and cultural circulation. This sub-genre, in short, leveraged a medical hypothesis about disease transmission into a sociopolitical manifesto about how to belong responsibly to a national community that was also inextricably and increasingly linked to like collectivities from all over the world. It did so by focusing on the temporary, motley, and oddly congenial domesticity that emerged when strangers of far-flung origins were detained together in a lazaretto.

In contrast, contemporaneous contagionism was not so easily mo-bilized to create a nationalistic literature: the very statistics capable of providing proof of contagion occluded the individual lives that made up a larger community. Contagionists’ statistical conceptualization of individuality transformed unique persons into interchangeable victims (or vectors) of disease—an unthinkable proposition to a physician like Charles Meigs, who insisted that “there never were, nor can be two absolutely similar [medical] cases.”18 Indeed, contagionists rejected the long-held belief that “disease was a protean and dynamic condition . . . [in which] mental, moral, climatic, and hygienic factors all interacted continuously to vary the manifestations of disease.”19 Statistical thinking may have been a life-saving intervention if, like Oliver Wendell Holmes, one were trying to prove the iatrogenic etiology of puerperal fever, but denouncing the radical particularity of disease placed contagionists at the crux of a literary as well as a medical dilemma.

To accept contagionism, it seemed, was to deny the imaginative acts needed to instantiate community. After all, storytelling in novelistic form was made possible by its celebration of the unique individual. But in a case like Holmes’s “medicated”—and, I argue, his contagion-ist—novel Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny (1861), he undermines the genre’s purpose by revealing how, as Jane F. Thrailkill asserts, “the novel’s formal commitment to the particular is actively damaging.”20 As a result, the text “humanize[s] Elsie (the sort of thing novels do, according to Dimock, Poovey, and Nussbaum)” at the same time that it “make[s] her just like everybody else. . . . Elsie can be human, but not particular, or particular, but not human.”21 And yet, to be particular and human—to balance individuality with abstract iden-tity—is precisely what is necessary for persons to become a “people.” As Benedict Anderson argues in his seminal Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, the modern nation


arises from a communal act of imagination in which its members “will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”22 Holmes’s novel evinces a “vexed legacy,” then, not only in terms of its uneasy balance between a narrative particularity that can “honor individual lives” and the “impersonal methods of modern medicine” that can save them, but also in regards to its ability to propagate national belonging.23 In short, this type of contagionist fiction failed to help create an imaginative connection between the individual and a national collective.

Because it was trying to prove—against popular anticontagionist wisdom—the very real presence of disease in instances of person-to-person contact, explicitly contagionist literature tended to foreground the possibility of imagining a community’s death, rather than its birth. The disturbing truth of a novel like Elsie Venner arises from the real-ization that the community produces its own destruction, in the form of physicians who are responsible for their patients’ demises. Only in cases in which contagion fails to occur—against all the odds—do contagionist narratives mitigate against their own self-destructive po-tential. An account published in The Knickerbocker in 1844 titled “The Plague at Constantinople,” for instance, reprises a common contagionist narrative of infection followed by communal dissolution: “So dread-ful is the malady, so surely contagious, and so mortal, that so soon as attacked, the unfortunate being is deserted by relatives and friends, and when dead, two or four porters beside a priest were generally the only persons who attended the body to the grave.”24 Contrary to his own contagionist logic, however, the narrator (identified only as J. P. B.) survives his bout with the plague, and furthermore fails to spread it to his nurse Aleukâ, who was “determined” to remain by his side “until [his] sufferings were ended.”25 The story concludes with the narrator restored “in health and full powers,” claiming the “devoted Aleukâ” as his “loving and much-loved wife.”26 Contagionist truths fail to preserve the characters in this story. Instead, the introduction of anticontagionism (in the form of an inexplicably avoided infection) saves them and, by extension, the possibility of an imagined com-munity represented by the metaphor of marriage.27

Fomenting nationalism through medicalized storytelling, the quar-antine narrative finds its corollary—and, ultimately, its epistemological antithesis—not in the literary contagionism of its own era, but in a form that would develop out of germ theory: the “outbreak narrative.” After robert Koch’s discovery in 1876 that microorganisms caused

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disease, the quarantine narrative came to be supplanted by fast-paced, triumphant tales of medical detectives who worked to protect kin and country by successfully tracking and containing disease. According to Priscilla Wald’s compelling monograph Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, these early narratives evolved into a “para-digmatic story” after the identification of HIV.28 That story “follows a formulaic plot that begins with the identification of an emerging infection, includes discussion of the global networks throughout which it travels, and chronicles the epidemiological work that ends with its containment.”29 This more familiar narrative presents quarantine as unambiguously capable of its protective mandate.

Whereas the outbreak narrative traces the tragic escalation of a virus and the deaths it causes in order to arrive invariably at a site of Foucauldian containment, the quarantine narrative in contrast begins at such locales and dwells in a leisurely, often comedic fashion on the non-emergence of a deadly disease. Travelers in a quarantine narrative endure a tediously dull delay of days, weeks, or even months only to discover what they knew all along: that infectious diseases were nowhere in evidence. In 1835, for instance, the Mirror reprinted a brief autobiographical account written by an unnamed Englishman detained at Calais, France, who, despite “reiterated protestations and expostu-lations of ‘Mais, Monsieur, je ne suis pas cholerique!’” bears witness to a sound and fury of epidemiological activity that ultimately signifies nothing: “how busily fumigation was carried on by a bunch of sanatory [sic] officers, peering out of a temporary hut, while, baboon-like, they made a cats-paw [sic] of a poor doctor . . . . [W]e were given over by the medical authority to the civil—by the civil to the military, and finally handed over to no authority at all, but shut up pell-mell in the old dismantled fort, to live or die, as it might happen, under the protection of the yellow flag.”30 Unlike outbreak narratives, which cast disease as ultimately controllable, the quarantine narrative describes an earlier time during which disorders were considered mysterious and undiscoverable, and individuals could be easily disconnected—at least temporarily—from the global networks that were ostensibly responsible for the transmission of dangerous diseases, cultures, and ideas.

It is important to note that the quarantine narrative does not portray some provincial period in the United States’ early history when the country was striving for but not quite achieving a stable national identity; it flourished in a period of globalization no less potent than our own.31 In this prior era of globalization, the quarantine narrative worked to depict the common humanity of all nationalities as a source


of comfort rather than a distressing sign of national dissolution. In our own time, however, Wald describes quarantine as a solution to a ho-mogenizing globalization that is often perceived as a threat to discrete national identities. The modern outbreak narrative figures quarantine as “the most apparent assertion of the nation on the epidemiological landscape”—a coercive system of isolation, exclusion, and expulsion.32 Before the rise of germ theory, though, the quarantine narrative took pleasure in the lazaretto’s inability to enforce distinctions between na-tions. “you would have been amused to see our motley band of men and women, of all nations and degrees,” says the writer imprisoned at Calais, demonstrating that, rather than preventing indiscriminate mixing, quarantine promotes it.33 The disparate collectives that coalesce in the quarantine narrative thus foreground the natural, salutary, and inextricable interconnections of nineteenth-century nations—an amalgam-ated reality reiterated in The New-York Mirror’s publication of a British story because it expressed ideas commensurate with American values and therefore was considered worthy of inclusion in pages otherwise dedicated to creating an elite national literary culture.

In the following analysis, I elaborate the distinctive character-istics of the quarantine narrative in contrast to both travel writing and outbreak narratives. Although often embedded within works that chronicle long voyages stretching across multiple countries, the quar-antine narrative testifies instead to the significance of stasis: interludes of enforced immobility that allow the itinerant to inhabit—rather than merely visit—the foreign. The quarantine narrative slows down the hurly-burly renderings of places seen and people met in order to fondly detail a foreign domesticity, thus providing a discursive space akin to the lazaretto itself. Unlike outbreak narratives, these assertively anticontagionist reports preclude the pathologization of imagined “oth-ers”; their protagonists may be detained in extraterritorial ports, but they are invariably returned to their travels as disease-free as before their containment. Rather than figuring a nation as an inviolate or uncontaminated domestic domain, the quarantine narrative describes, counter-intuitively, the salubriousness of “infections” resulting from contact with peoples from strange lands. While scholars such as Anderson, Paul Giles, and Étienne Balibar tend to underscore the role hard boundaries play for modern nations, writers of quarantine narratives envisioned a vitally strong, permeable version of American belonging.34 That vision was an important facet of the United States’ collective self-fashioning at midcentury.

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Quarantine narratives emphasize an unglamorous yet unavoidable aspect of world travel: waiting. Perhaps unsurprisingly, delay and de-tention have been almost entirely unexamined by scholars, despite their ubiquitous integration into travel texts. Instead, critics have focused on how Americans craft their identity by way of fleeting, often picturesque encounters with the foreign while passing quickly from space to space.35 Placing mobility at the center of travel writing has helped to establish what Terry Caesar refers to as the essential homelessness of all travel texts, especially those in which American travelers “discover their own otherness in other countries as they . . . use these countries in order to invent themselves.”36 Immobilization in a lazaretto or on board a quarantined ship, however, unearths travelers’ similarities, despite their origins in different countries and their disparate destinations. Hold-ing still, the quarantine narrative reveals, precipitates a home away from home, impermanent but unexpectedly rejuvenating for some. A contributor to the Southern Literary Messenger, identified only as “M.,” writes to her sister in 1840 about the “new and clean” lazaretto she stays in during ten days’ quarantine at Tenos, Greece:

The buildings, which are commodious and extensive, are one story high, surrounding a large square, into which all the doors and windows open, and where the temporary prisoners take air and exercise. . . . Our rooms were separated from those of the public by high palings, that left us a private walk, which we enjoyed very much in the bright moonlight evenings . . . . I did not find myself at any loss for amusement. Every day we had visiters [sic], whom we received in the court . . . . After telling you of the charms of our quarantine life, I must add, that we lived in two rooms with ground floors, and bare stone walls. But really, the time passed so rapidly and pleasantly, that I might have fallen in love with the ground floor and a life of poverty.37

The quarantine narrative’s descriptions of domestic scenes such as these are striking for travelers’ lack of discovery of “their own otherness” integral to Caesar’s equation of travel and homelessness. Even as the language of imprisonment in a strange land seeps into this author’s description, the pleasant trifles of quotidian life overwhelm any indica-tion that travelers to Tenos should be treated, or regard themselves, as frightening, pathogenic outsiders.

While the experience of quarantine was never completely free of dehumanization, the quarantine narrative uses irony to resist its effects. In such stories, detained travelers actively complain about the myriad ways quarantine officials deny their humanity, whether by


treating them as prisoners and animals or by disregarding their physi-cal well-being and personal property. Writing about his quarantine in Marseilles, correspondent and novelist Theodore S. Fay (remembered today for his novel Norman Leslie and its unkind reception by Edgar Allan Poe) depicts being utterly at the mercy of civil officials: “We were aroused this morning at daybreak by the pilot, to await the quarantine physician, in order to be driven into the cabin like a flock of poultry, counted, and fumigated. . . . Some of us were asthmatic, and suffered real alarm at the prospect of being suffocated with heaven knows what poisonous chemical abominations.”38 Purification proce-dures such as fumigation, which aimed to “smoke out” any lurking seeds of contagion, represented to anticontagionist writers not only bad science, but more importantly the unwarranted power quarantine officials had over those hapless individuals arriving in their ports. The incarcerated, therefore, took every opportunity to subvert that authority. A travel writer for a sporting magazine called the Spirit of the Times, identified only as “Rambler,” enjoys toying with his Maltese captors, telling readers that they “could not have been more careful had we been rattle-snakes,” but even a “beardless youth” like him “had but to turn round suddenly to scatter a half-dozen portly whiskered and mustached fellows, looking brave enough to beard a lion.”39 Using humor and irony, quarantine narratives acknowledge and push back against the degrading bureaucratic procedures associated with enforced detention.

While these examples represent an alienating experience of dog-matic supervision and confinement with sinister strangers (if only to make light of it), most quarantine narratives describe a time of bond-ing during which friendships grew, romance blossomed, and ad-hoc families developed. “Our company, at least, were soon established on the intimate terms of a family,” writes essayist and novelist Henry T. Tuckerman in 1838, from a Neapolitan quarantine, “and the indiffer-ent observer could scarcely have augured from appearances that we were but a knot of strangers, brought together by the vicissitudes of travelling.”40 Even “indifferent observer[s]” (such as the quarantine of-ficials who had the group under surveillance) would have witnessed a significant phenomenon: the amiable cohabitation of diverse nationali-ties, even under unpleasantly impoverished conditions.

In these narratives, then, quarantine provides the opportunity to conceive of prolonged contact with strangers not in terms of possible infection (literal or metaphorical), but instead in terms of reunion. Willis for instance records “dinners en plein air” in an Italian lazaretto

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that “would convince a spectator that we were a very merry and suf-ficiently happy company.”41 He also recounts conversations that reveal past associations among those who considered themselves strangers until they were detained together. “The surgeon has been in Canada and the west of New-york,” he writes, “and we have traveled the same routes, and made, in several instances, the same acquaintances. . . . I turn to our Parisians, whom I find I have met all last winter without noticing them at the parties.”42 These fortunate discoveries depend on quarantine’s slow time as well as quarantine’s confined space. Time spent in detention provided the conditions for domestic happiness unachievable through the frenetic encounters of unhindered movement from city to city. No wonder, therefore, that Mark Twain, a master at avoiding Mediterranean quarantine in The Innocents Abroad (1869), succeeded in his search for “something thoroughly and un-compromisingly foreign—foreign from top to bottom—foreign from centre to circumference—foreign inside and outside and all around” in Tangier, whereas his quarantined contemporaries found something much more unexpected, yet decidedly welcome: intimate companion-ship with foreigners.43

The tales of travel writers such as Fay and Willis character-ized the world as becoming increasingly familiar as more and more individuals were gaining access to it through tourism, trade, and the written word—antidotes to our modern focus on the outbreak narra-tive. When looking back to this earlier time in the history of global epidemics, that is, it can be tempting to map onto an account of a specific occurrence the outlines of the outbreak narrative. For instance, in Charles Rosenberg’s definitive history of cholera in the United States, he identifies the mobile immigrant population moving south from Canada in 1832 as responsible for carrying the disease across the border into the poorer districts of New york at the same time that, as the Evening Post recorded on July 3, 1832, the “roads, in all direc-tions, were lined with well-filled stage coaches, livery coaches, private vehicles and equestrians, all panic struck, fleeing from the city.”44 But the quarantine narrative challenges this tendency to cast outbreaks as macabre versions of travel writing in which the mobility of diseases among global networks justifies a community’s fears of contact with other cultures. Indeed, quarantine narratives complicate the now-familiar narrative of fearful exodus with accounts of pleasurably promiscu-ous contact, despite the possibility of dangerous mixing. renowned English travel writer Julia Pardoe, for example, describes joking with a young woman, headed elsewhere, who shared their conveyance to


the Orsova lazaretto. Highlighting the irony of being thrown together with a denizen of the country that was intent on “purifying” Pardoe’s party, she recounts how the traveling companion “laughed heartily at my pressing invitation to her to share our imprisonment.”45 From the perspective of the relaxed, disease-free circumstances that defined lazaretto life arose a narrative structure for resisting the demonization of foreigners even during times of epidemic disease—a point of view apt to be elided in scholarly criticism favoring a brand of storytelling commensurate with the microbial truths of the outbreak narrative.

Contra Caesar’s argument, then, that the American traveler feared becoming “an emigrant who renounced the only, true New World,” the quarantine narrative tells a surprising story about the absence of such alienation in foreign circumstances.46 revealing the wisdom of that old adage “home is where the heart is,” it figures the world as one big, sprawling residence in which it was possible to feel at home no matter how far-flung the traveler. These narratives show how the practice of quarantine—which may look to modern eyes like a system for policing geo-political boundaries—was in fact part of the vast, rapidly growing networks of multinational interconnections that constituted what many conceived of, at midcentury, as a globalized world.

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The New-York Mirror typically combined serious discussions of the arts with notes on fashion and gossip about the Broadway scene; rarely did the magazine feed the public’s appetite for cholera news. On August 11, 1832, however, Willis’s description of his stay at a lazaretto in Villa Franca, Italy was certain to resonate with his brethren in cholera-stricken New york. “We are all here in this pest-house,” the essay declared, “and a motley mixture of nations it is.”47 Willis’s phrasing likely evoked both contagionist fears that indiscriminate mix-ing was responsible for the spread of disease and anticontagionists’ suspicion that pest-houses and other sites of containment accumulated poisonous miasmas within their walls. His anecdotal style refutes the contagionist position by revealing that direct contact with strangers in his lazaretto was transmitting nothing more than congeniality: “Our small quarters bring us in contact continually, and we harmonize like schoolboys.”48 More difficult to comprehend—especially from a modern perspective deeply influenced by the logic of the outbreak narrative—is how such anticontagionist authors could read quarantine spaces both

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as a domestic hearth uniting the denizens of the global village and as a potentially sinister cesspit, belching out noxious effluvia and other foul contaminants while contagionist physicians engage in the fool’s errand of searching for the responsible persons or cargo. This seem-ing contradiction, however, indicates a way of thinking grounded in a presumption of health completely alien to the assumed presence of pathology that fuels contagionism.

More than simply denying that direct contact is the cause of disease transmission, the quarantine narrative works against the medi-cal and cultural pressure to approach the world’s inhabitants solely in terms of their potential infectiousness. As much as the authors of the quarantine narrative believed that miasmas, often generated in the enclosed spaces typical of buildings or ships used to hold those required to undergo quarantine, were responsible for epidemic disease, they saw this problem as one easily remedied. Sites of medical detain-ment, if properly managed, did not have to be sources of infection, according to anticontagionist physicians: they just needed to be kept clean. Writing to Richard Bayley, the health-officer of the port of New York, in a letter published in the United States’ first medical journal The Medical Repository, American physician Thomas D. Mitchill argued that “the never-failing method of house-cleaning should be applied to ship-cleaning” and “when sea-vessels shall be kept as clean as genteel habitations on shore, their crews and passengers will suffer as little by infection and pestilence; and then the dream of importing diseases from foreign countries will be forgotten, or insisted on no more as reality.”49 To imagine pestilence being overcome with something as simple as house-cleaning was to understand pathology as a minor problem in scale and scope.

Contagionists saw the matter differently. As we well know today, contagionism dictates that pathogenic elements are the ultimate villains, and they must be stopped regardless of the costs. Anticontagionists resisted both of these tenets. In a report to Congress in 1803, Mitchill deplored the fact that “the nations of the earth . . . often looked upon each other as lazars or lepers,” recognizing that fearing one’s national neighbors as the bearers of devastating epidemics justified the perpetration of any number of horrors against innocent travelers and immigrants.50 Dr. Charles Caldwell, another important proponent of anticontagionism, describes in 1834 the lamentable tragedy that an ostensibly protective verdict of quarantine sets into motion: “not only have thousands of persons, suspected of contagion, been sickened and destroyed, by tyrannical and needless confinement in foul and loath-


some places, under the influence of depressing passions, unwholesome food, and other grievous and wasting privations; in their attempts to escape from the power of their oppressors, not a few of them have been slain.”51 Caldwell portrays here a thanatopolitical medical totali-tarianism that, driven by its need to defend itself from those it deems potentially pathological or pathogenic, cannot even recognize how its exercise of power has become as deadly as any epidemic disorder.

The quarantine narrative stands as a remarkable bulwark against contagionist narratives that, in their effort to quell cultural anxieties about pandemics and other threatening cross-cultural influences resulting from globalization, find pathology wherever they look. Instead, the quarantine narrative attempts to release its readers from the self-destructive obliga-tion, precipitated by fears that cholera could appear at any moment, to be constantly searching for signs of potential illness in themselves and others. Through its vignettes of quarantine life, it trains readers to see that there is more to the world than potential sources of epidemics—a point emphasized by illness’s absence from the quarantine narrative. It can be a strange experience to read through the examples of the quarantine narrative only to come to the realization that neither the authors nor those they meet in quarantine are sick. yet it is true: all of the lazarettos and ships’ holds the quarantine narrative depicts prove healthy according to both contagionist and anticontagionist standards. Whereas the engine driving outbreak narratives is the discovery and containment of pathogens, carriers, and their analogously pathogenic cultures, the quarantine narrative unfolds through the exposure of the diseaselessness of lazaretto interiors. Quarantine narratives thus enact their own relentless pursuit, but their endgame is, disconcertingly, the discovery of precisely nothing.

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Whether using humorous or serious stories, Knickerbocker-style writers used the quarantine narrative to undermine both the medical and political implications of a belief that persons—rather than miasmic spaces such as the roman Coliseum, or a swampy part of Boston, or a fetid lazaretto—conveyed deadly infections. More often than not, they mobilized the subject of transmissible disease to amuse and de-light the reading public—while contributing to a body of work they saw as expressing core American values. American travel writers who wrote quarantine narratives were especially aware of how the lazaretto

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represented authoritarian and anti-democratic politics. Their stories took the opportunity to unmask the un-American principles at play in medical detainment, and warned against the infiltration of tyrannical tendencies into their national character, which, ideally, extended its democratic doctrine to the tolerant treatment of all kinds of people. regardless of authorial nationality or a writerly preference for a light-hearted or more serious tone, the quarantine narrative critiqued insular or exclusionary forms of nationalism that could signal a downward spiral into authoritarianism or even totalitarianism.

For instance, Tuckerman’s account of the 1837 cholera outbreak in Sicily is written as a quarantine narrative in order to spin out a cautionary tale for collectivities that defined themselves by who they were able to exclude. “The Cholera in Sicily” begins with the requisite detailing of the innumerable dead piling up in the streets (character-istic of many outbreak narratives), but quickly becomes a story about how the country’s “rigid and absurd quarantines” represent not only a medical error, but also an untenable basis for maintaining a viable national community.52 According to Tuckerman, the government put the quarantines in place to prevent the importation of cholera from Naples—but because it was unwilling to take any additional preven-tive measures, many died from the epidemic. To make matters worse, the Sicilian populace concluded that the cholera outbreak in fact resulted from a poison introduced into their wells by their French Bourbon rulers with the express purpose of “ridding themselves of a superfluous and burdensome population.”53 In response, they staged an ultimately unsuccessful revolution under “the yellow flag . . . of Sicilian Independence” during which leaders of a long-term movement against Ferdinando II’s rule were executed, bringing an abrupt end to “the gradual, healthy spread of liberal sentiment.”54 Although ascrib-ing to the cholera different origins, both the foreign government and the native population relied on contagionism’s model of importation. But all either group had to show for their protectionist efforts, in the end, was an extraordinarily high number of the deceased. In Tucker-man’s view, such was the fruit of power authorized by tyrannical force and exercised to keep pure the national community; such was the dangerous potency of a person-centered, contagion-based model of disease transmission.

For American globetrotters, examples of tyranny abroad were of particular interest given their own nation’s recent bid for freedom; cases such as Sicily’s abortive 1837 revolution undoubtedly struck a chord with the recently-minted citizens of the United States reading


about it back home. But for the writers of the quarantine narrative, the point was not getting to see, in a voyeuristic sense, the priva-tions of the disempowered (as might be expected from a genre that provided picturesque descriptions of striking peoples and the places they lived). Instead, the quarantine narrative showed white and/or well-to-do travelers experiencing what it was like when their forms of privilege failed to obtain and they became—temporarily—the subjects on whom tyranny was exercised.

Irony was the primary literary technique writers used to achieve this effect: casting their imprisonment and physical privations as un-justified, they slyly acknowledged the transient nature of these hard-ships. The horror with which they detailed such temporary injustices pointed to the more permanent abuses endured by the unprivileged. For example, after enumerating the abuses he suffered upon his arrival at Villa Franca, including “near suffocat[ion]” as a result of fumiga-tion, poor quality food, and a “desolate” lazaretto with no furniture, Willis reports, “our imprisonment is getting to be a little tedious.”55 In this passage, Willis creates a rather complex moment of dramatic irony in order to unveil how the privileged can become dangerously self-important. Willis presents the contagionist lazaretto official as de-luding himself into thinking that suffocating and starving his charges was actually preventing the spread of disease, knowing all the while that his sympathetic anticontagionist audience would enjoy feeling superior to the petty, power-hungry Mediterranean official employing bad science. However, Willis’s complaints about his tedious impris-onment, if read with the proper tone, can also come across as the whining of a conceited buffoon who has confused a minor delay with criminal punishment. Willis uses irony on the one hand to underscore the pointlessness of these temporary forms of detainment and, on the other, to critique the notion that a collective identity requires some individuals, as prisoners, to perform a “sacrifice of life” in order to achieve “the citizen-subject’s transcendent humanity.”56 As his and other stories show, identifying some individuals as requiring exclusion, even only temporarily, will ultimately divide a community rather than help it to coalesce.

When authors of the quarantine narrative used humor to make light of their situation, the resulting quips tended to strike deep, im-plicitly critiquing dangerous social inequities. Authors of the quarantine narrative, for instance, would even come to realize how their experi-ences in quarantine were small doses of the kinds of harsh conditions racial “others” endured every day of their lives. Forced to put up

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with the arbitrary rules and privations of quarantine, the authors of the quarantine narrative become aware of similarly illogical mistreat-ment of those with black skin. Quarantined outside Lubeck in 1843, the pseudonymously identified British travel writer Benjamin Bunting jokes, “We were now obliged to pass our time as well as we could; and tried to do it after a certain Sambo’s plan; who, when asked by a friend how he passed his time, politely remarked, ‘Me no pass me time; me cock up me leg, and let time pass me.’”57 Disturbingly racist as this joke is, its placement within the quarantine narrative serves a decidedly serious, anti-discriminatory purpose. It unmasks slavery as a perpetual quarantine, a life sentence imposed by those who can hardly bear the thought of two weeks in a similar circumstance. In reading an account such as Bunting’s “Ten Days in Quarantine,” appearing in the Anglo-American Magazine in 1843, Americans gained insight into true democratic egalitarianism akin to that which black travel writers sought in their travels abroad. For black authors, narratives about tourist trips to Africa, for example, enabled them to rewrite the journeys that led to their (or their ancestors’) enslavement as voyages of liberation and discovery of an obscured cultural past.58 Inversely, quarantine hinted to white readers the depths of slavery’s inequities, pointing to (but not fully elaborating) how enslaved blacks were unjustly “contained” in the United States.

The quarantine narrative also demonstrated how inculcating irra-tional fears of other races was an affront to America’s stated sociopo-litical ideals. As if confessing to his Boston readership, the anonymous author of “Quarantine in a Convent” admits to being relieved to move from his quarantined ship to a lazaretto because, he explains, “there was on board of the Emmet, in the combined capacities of cook and steward, a native of the island of Madagascar, upon whom I could never look without shuddering.”59 Another case of situational irony, this passage underscores how this native of Madagascar is free, along with the rest of the ship’s crew, to continue on his voyage (in this instance, at least), while the white American must endure poor food, boredom, imprisonment, and fumigation. This context leads the author to an epiphany about the injustice perpetrated against people of the “wrong” skin color: “Moreover, the tremendous truth, ‘Of such, are those in bonds,’ had not then flashed upon my mind, and disclosed to it the wrongs inflicted on his race—else, my fear might have be-come facetiousness, and I, even, have added wrong to wrong.”60 Of course, he knows—and expects his audience to agree—that he is being facetious and has done wrong fearing “Madagascar,” as he dubs him, simply because he is black.


While not an explicitly abolitionist genre, the quarantine narra-tive circulated alongside the tracts of a burgeoning antislavery move-ment in the United States, promoted in periodicals like William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator (published from 1831 to 1865) and Frederick Douglass’s The North Star (published from 1847 to 1851). An episode like this encounter with “Madagascar” no doubt resonated with the abolitionist assertion that a slave society corrupted an “individual’s capacities for dignity, self-control, and self-respect.”61 The quarantine narrative thus demonstrated how the American national community’s ability to imagine itself as inclusively democratic was deeply impaired by the exclusion of racial others.

The many uses of irony in the quarantine narrative provide a means for working out the medical and political contradictions of a contagionist approach to disease transmission and community forma-tion. Contagionism aims to protect populations by identifying those other populations that are a threat to it. But its methods of isolation and purification do more harm than good, especially when translated to non-medical realms. Thus, even though contagionism will eventu-ally “win,” historically and scientifically speaking, after the advent of germ theory, the quarantine narrative reveals the non-inevitability of both the outbreak narrative and its corresponding politics. The irony of the quarantine narrative, capable as it is of speaking to both the contagionist and anticontagionist sides, works against the discursive linkage between contagious disease and contagious cultures that would be cemented together in the outbreak narrative. Indeed, authors of the quarantine narrative worked against contagionism’s dire and potentially tragic consequences for their national character.

*

Charmingly paradoxical anecdotes of homey lazarettos in exotic locales and a cleverly ironic evisceration of contagionist medical science set the stage for the quarantine narrative’s larger point: that Americans’ efforts at national self-fashioning were headed down the wrong road when they sought to define their collective identity in terms of its dif-ference from other nations’. Instead, the quarantine narrative aimed to remind its audience back home that the United States’ heterogeneous foreign roots—which made possible its constitution as a democratic republic—remained its key source of identity and character formation. Tuckerman, for example, presents his traveling companion Delano as transcending “the idea of thrift, the eager sense of self-interest, and the

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iron bond of local prejudice, which too often disfigure the unalloyed New-England character” because these attributes “had been tempered to their just proportion, in his disposition, by the influence of travel and society.”62 The Knickerbocker writers, prone as they were to for-eign adventures, saw that national independence should not mean a country’s isolation from the rest of the world—even as the introduction and spread of cholera seemed to justify such a move. Theirs was an unusual stance to take in an era that scholars such as Giles and Anne Baker have described as highly anxious about the nation’s fluctuating and unsettled boundaries.63 Nonetheless, these writers insisted that permeable boundaries should not be a source of fear, but rather one of strength and national integrity.

It may seem contradictory for an anticontagionist sub-genre to use metaphors of infection, but in this context these metaphors end up representing the salubrious permeability existing amongst the dif-ferent nations of the world. Verbal irony deconstructs contagionist logic through the playful repurposing of the image of infectiousness in order to show that good can come from cross-national mixing. As might be anticipated in stories that celebrate unforeseen domesticity found in overseas lazarettos, the quarantine narrative turns to marriage plots and other tales of romance in order to unsettle assumptions that the foreign is diametrically opposed to home and that strangers are intent on doing harm. In these stories, the enforcement of strict barri-ers between those undergoing quarantine and a country’s inhabitants is never capable of keeping separate those who are attracted to one another. Enlivening Willis’s Italian quarantine, for instance, is Carolina, “the guardian’s daughter, who stands coquetting on the pier just outside the limits.”64 The author of “Quarantine in a Convent” describes the “prescribed limit” of quarantine as difficult to obey “when visited by a dark-eyed damsel or two,” which causes him and his companions to feel “strangely tempted to resist restriction” but for the guard pre-venting them from engaging the women in more intimate conversa-tion.65 These men and women evince no fear of each other’s potential physical or cultural infectiousness. (Indeed, although the victims and villains in moralistic tales, coquettes and Lotharios become the heroes of the quarantine narrative, which uses the language of attraction to conceptualize foreign influence as desirable.) Such tales of flirtation in the context of quarantine undermine the implicit pathologization of those locked inside the lazaretto, reminding readers that quarantine barriers are temporary and fleeting, while the connections between nations are much more enduring.


As that first, horrifying cholera epidemic in the States receded into memory, the quarantine narrative became more focused on providing fictional narrative structures for seeing foreign influence as an integral part of America’s future. In 1842, Willis returned to the quarantine narrative, this time to tell a light-hearted fictional story about falling in love abroad. His “Flirtation and Fox-Chasing,” published in Godey’s Lady’s Book, imagines a romance blossoming between a backwoods Kentuckian and an English lady, despite the barriers put in place by class and country. This narrative is in fact a story within a story and a quarantine within a quarantine. Detained in a Maltese lazaretto, Tom Berryman helps to pass the tedious days by telling his former school chum, who is also the unnamed narrator, about his “embargo” at Castle Tresethen where he had recovered from a feverish distemper under the care of Lady Caroline and her family:

you smile—(Tom said, though he was looking straight into the wa-ter, and had not seen my face for half an hour)—but, without the remotest hope of taking Lady Caroline to Kentucky, or of becoming English on the splendid dowry of the heiress of Tresethen, I still felt it impossible to escape from my lover’s attitude—impossible to avoid hoarding up symptoms, encouragements, flatteries, and all the moonshine of amatory anxiety.66

Willis here adapts a storyline first assayed by Tuckerman, whose auto-biographical “Love in a Lazzaret” narrates how the American Delano and the Italian Angelica De Falco become engaged to be married. Delano, like Berryman, presents “the most incontestible [sic] symptoms of love.”67 rather than a frightening story of falling victim to the deadly charms of a foreigner (typical of early seduction narratives like Susanna rowson’s Charlotte Temple, a bestseller in American literature well into the nineteenth century, according to Michael Winship), the transatlantic seductions of the quarantine narrative end happily—Tuckerman’s with Delano’s impending nuptials and Willis’s with Berryman recovering from his crush to attend, with pleasure, Lady Caroline’s wedding.68 All fear of foreign infectiousness is overwritten with narratives of enduring friendships or wedded bliss. In the context of expanding transatlantic networks, then, the quarantine narrative casts stories about the bonds that can grow between strangers as models of how nations should interpret their own inevitable encounters with foreigners.

Modern readers might feel ambivalent about an international romance characterized as “infectious” (a characterization made by

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both Tuckerman and Willis). The term perhaps invokes our view of outsiders as Janus-faced bearers of both much-needed genetic diversity and fearful contagions—interlopers who must be carefully assimilated into our community so that we might derive the invigorating benefits of the former while avoiding the deadly consequences of the latter.69 But these conceptual double-edged swords are largely absent from anticontagionist thinking. Blissfully unaware of both genetics and microbes, these writers used flirtation or marriage plots as literary devices more (or even completely) free of the kind of paradoxes that would become the norm after the advent of germ theory. Metaphors of infectious international love (whether it results in a union or not) defuse fears of foreign influence precisely because they emphasize how non-deadly such influence is. The comedic form of stories of flirtation shows that falling in love across national boundaries is nothing to be afraid of—and neither is using one’s exposure to the foreign to craft a better version of one’s national self. Thus, although Alfred Bendixen may be right that Americans did not travel with the express purpose of being influenced by the foreign, the quarantine narrative makes clear that not all itinerants from the United States insisted on maintaining a strict distance between themselves and those they met abroad.70 Some in fact actively sought intimacy with the foreign.

The authors of the quarantine narrative were not usually very specific about what benefits would accrue from acquiescing to foreign influence, despite being clear that it was nothing to be afraid of. They did not offer a tired formula to be followed by every unimaginative traveler who retraced their footsteps. Instead, they insinuated that the future of the United States, as a nation capable of holding its own on the global scene, depended on its ability to recognize how the na-tions of the world make up one extended family and that they should treat each other as such—a position exemplified in Tuckerman’s work. One year after “Love in a Lazzaret” appeared in The Knickerbocker, Tuckerman published Isabel; or Sicily. A Pilgrimage, a poorly disguised travel book masquerading as a novel by virtue of a narrative frame describing how Isabel Otley, traveling with her uncle Clifford Frazier, goes abroad to find her father. In a storyline similar to his earlier travel essay, Tuckerman’s Isabel describes a cross-national engagement between the American Isabel and Sicilian native Count Vittorio, whom she meets in quarantine at Messina (the subject of the novel’s first chapter). It isn’t until the end of the novel that Vittorio unknowingly reunites the Otley family when he brings home a friend for Isabel to meet: “There was a quick, short cry of recognition, and the next


moment she was in the arms of her father.”71 The constitution of this American family occurs thanks to the agency of a foreigner in a foreign country. Isabel’s marriage to this foreigner, then, is not a rejection of her national home, but the promise of its future: “Beneath that emblem of her far distant country, the marriage vows of Isabel were uttered.”72 Although far from home, Isabel remains loyal to it. Cross-national marriage thus provides the quarantine narrative with a structural device for understanding how nations can exist and develop as a result of their contact with each other.

Willis and the other authors of the quarantine narrative proved themselves capable of taking the comedic forms of Knickerbocker writ-ing to political realms—without becoming pedantic or preachy. They used their art to showcase their knowledge of the nation’s pressing concerns, whether those concerns arose in the form of a medical de-bate, a culture war with condescending European literary elites, or the tyrannical oppression of black-skinned peoples. Unlike the authors of the outbreak narrative, for whom the “conspicuously imagined commu-nity” was a requisite form of immunity, they sought not to envision themselves as invulnerable to and therefore safe from the foreign found within and outside the nation’s borders.73 Instead, they created ways of imagining productive infections that crossed porous boundaries—but made each collectivity the stronger for it.

*

Sometimes when reading anticontagionist writings it is impos-sible for us not to cringe, imagining the infectious disorders given carte blanche while their victims chased after that elusive phantasm, the miasma. We can admit that there is a certain relief to be found in the medical truth of microbes, in being able to look under a mi-croscope and discern the organic causes of transmissible diseases, a level of assurance that remained unknown, although ardently pursued, for most people living during the nineteenth century. But the quar-antine narrative also harbors important truths—not scientific truths (at least not as we would judge them today), but important insights into therapeutics, morality, society, and politics. For every wrongly diagnosed cause of an epidemic disorder, the quarantine narrative helped to show, alongside anticontagionist medical texts, how sanitary conditions would promote health amongst those who were or might become ill. The quarantine narrative thus proved remarkably attentive

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to the cause of ameliorating individual suffering, whether it arose from medical or sociopolitical sources. Contagionists, too, were concerned with safeguarding the integrity and autonomy of the individual. But they lost track, in anticontagionists’ view, of the personhood that needed fully as much protection as the physical bodies representing the nation. The quarantine narrative therefore holds and exposes the medical, moral, and political contradictions of contagionist thinking while simultaneously releasing from “captivity” the diversity requisite for the flourishing of human communities. Individual and national sovereignty, the quarantine narrative teaches its readers, depends in the long-term on the absolute necessity of recognizing and respecting individuals’ humanity, no matter from which port they might hail.

NOTES

If not for the much-appreciated assistance of many careful readers, these stories would have remained merely a pile of print-outs in a binder. I would like to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Jane F. Thrailkill for her assistance with this project at all stages. I also want to thank the reviewers and editors at Literature and Medicine; Elizabeth Maddock Dillon’s working group at the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College (2011); tireless readers of early versions Ben Bolling, Angela M. Calcaterra, Harry Thomas, Ashley reed, and Jenn Williamson; and Humanities Librarian Tommy Nixon at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who offered invaluable research support.

1. Willis, “Letters from France,” 45.2. For a study of Australian and Western Pacific examples of diaries, letters,

and petitions written by healthy detainees, see Maglen, “Quarantine.” 3. Schramm, “Nathaniel Parker Willis.” 4. Auser, Nathaniel P. Willis, 33.5. Healey, “Nathaniel Parker Willis.”6. For the etymology of the term contagion, see Pernick, “Contagion and

Culture,” 858–60. 7. It is difficult to determine how many individuals or ships were detained

in quarantine during the first part of the nineteenth century. For the most part, Charles rosenberg’s The Cholera Years notes only the imposition of quarantine mea-sures against ships arriving from infected areas, although he does mention that Troy, “an Erie Canal town, was forced to provide for some seven hundred quarantined immigrants” in 1832 (94). John Booker’s history of British quarantine provides some insight into the numbers of ships detained as a result of the first global cholera outbreak in the 1830s: “Whereas the average number of ships in quarantine in Brit-ish ports in 1826 to 1829 inclusive was 772 (almost all from the Mediterranean), the figure had risen to 1,106 in 1830, and 330 of those ships were from Russia. . . . By 20 August 1831, the date of the return by the Customs Commissioners, the figure for Britain had risen dramatically to 2,556 for the year to that date” (472).

8. Ackerknecht, “Anticontagionism,” 563–70. According to Ackerknecht, American anticontagionism developed primarily because of the 1793 yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia (which convinced Benjamin rush and Noah Webster of the disease’s non–contagiousness) and the influence of practitioners working in the


West Indies (such as refugee physicians from San Domingo like Jean Devèze, who directed the hospital at Bush–Hill during the 1793 epidemic) (570–71).

9. rosenberg, The Cholera Years, 4–25.10. Lehuu, Carnival on the Page, 25.11. Pritchard, Literary Wise Men, 165.12. Edens, “Henry Theodore Tuckerman.”13. Pritchard, 162.14. Schramm, “Nathaniel Parker Willis.”15. Bendixen, “American Travel Books about Europe before the Civil War,” 103.16. Ibid.17. Mitchill, “remarks on the Quarantine System,” 364–65. 18. Quoted in Thrailkill, “Killing Them Softly,” 684.19. rosenberg, The Cholera Years, 73.20. Thrailkill, 682.21. Ibid., 696–97. 22. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6.23. Thrailkill, 699.24. J. P. B., “The Plague in Constantinople,” 512.25. Ibid., 515.26. Ibid., 516.27. As the third section of this essay will show, anticontagionists emphatically

repudiated the kinds of “medicalized nativism” that Alan Kraut describes taking shape at the end of the nineteenth century (3). So, too, does a contagionist narrative such as “The Plague at Constantinople” refuse to promulgate a linkage between nationality and disease. The national identity of J.P.B. is never definitively established (although readers of The Knickerbocker might have assumed he was American or English), but it is clear he is an outsider relocated to Constantinople, Turkey. The plague he contracts from the Turkish widow, whose house and self–imposed quar-antine he shares, “found its way into [their] little family” without being attached to any party’s national origin or being described as the filthiness of a particular place or people (514). Moreover, in the case of childbed fever and Holmes’s depiction of the controversy in Elsie Venner, internal sources of infection are at issue, rather than “a fear of contamination from the foreign-born” (Kraut, Silent Travelers, 3).

28. Wald, Contagious, 2. Wald distinguishes between “the outbreak narrative” and “outbreak narratives,” the latter term referring to “earlier accounts of epide-miological efforts to address widespread threats of communicable disease” (ibid.). Likewise, quarantine narratives exist that can be differentiated from “the quarantine narrative,” which, nevertheless, share some of its characteristics. “The Plague at Con-stantinople,” for instance, is set within the narrator’s self–imposed “rigid quarantine” and details the daily activities during the scourge (511). Moreover, a recent article by Peter Vassallo analyzes quarantine poetry by Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, W. M. Thackeray, and John Henry Newman, underscoring that the quarantine narrative was only one of no doubt many aesthetic responses to lazaretto life.

29. Wald, 2.30. “Cholera Quarantine at Calais in 1832,” 72.31. For examinations of early American national identity, its fluctuations and

contingencies, see Giles, The Global Remapping of American Literature; Loughran, The Republic in Print; and Baker, Heartless Immensity.

32. Wald, 51. 33. “Cholera Quarantine at Calais in 1832,” 72.34. See Anderson, Imagined Communities, 7; Giles, The Global Remapping of

American Literature, 21–22; and Balibar, We, the People of Europe?, 1–5. 35. See Leed, The Mind of the Traveler, 21–22; Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 3–8; roberson,

Defining Travel, xi–xxi; and Stout, The Journey Narrative in American Literature, 13–18.36. Caesar, Forgiving the Boundaries, 43–44.

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37. M., “Letters to My Sister,” 763.38. Fay, “The Minute-Book,” 388.39. rambler, “A reminiscence of Malta,” 601. 40. Tuckerman, “Love in a Lazzaret,” 499.41. Willis, “Letters from France,” 45. 42. Ibid.43. Twain, Innocents, 76. 44. Quoted in rosenberg, The Cholera Years, 28.45. Pardoe, “A Quarantine on the Danube,” 143. 46. Caesar, Forgiving the Boundaries, 12. 47. Willis, “Letters from France,” 45. 48. Ibid. 49. Mitchill, “Thoughts on Quarantines and Lazarettos,” 254. 50. Mitchill, “report to Congress,” 460. 51. Caldwell, Thoughts on Quarantine and Other Sanitary Systems, 58. Access to

this volume provided by the National Library of Medicine’s History of Medicine Division and made possible by a travel grant from the Northeast Modern Language Association during the summer of 2011.

52. Tuckerman, “The Cholera in Sicily,” 49. 53. Ibid. For more on Bourbon rule and Sicilian politics from 1815 to 1860,

see the first two chapters of Riall, Sicily. 54. Tuckerman, “The Cholera in Sicily,” 50. 55. Willis, “Letters from France,” 45. 56. Smith, The Prison and the American Imagination, 13. 57. Bunting, “Ten Days in Quarantine,” 114. 58. Smith, “African American Travel Literature,” 213.59. “Quarantine in a Convent,” 25. 60. Ibid.61. Davis, Inhuman Bondage, 253. 62. Tuckerman, “Love in a Lazzaret,” 494.63. Giles, The Global Remapping of American Literature, and Baker, Heartless

Immensity. 64. Willis, “Letters from France,” 45. 65. “Quarantine in a Convent,” 26. 66. Willis, “Flirtation and Fox–Chasing,” 227.67. Tuckerman, “Love in a Lazzaret,” 497.68. Winship, “Two Early American Bestsellers.” 69. Leed, The Mind of the Traveler, 89; Wald, 57.70. Bendixen, “American Travel Books about Europe before the Civil War,” 104. 71. Tuckerman, Isabel, 228.72. Ibid., 229.73. Wald, 53. Emphasis in original.

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