Chapter 1 - Nationalism and Acute Malaria in Transatlantic Fiction

Summary

In Martin Chuzzlewit and Daisy Miller, authors Charles Dickens and Henry James use endemic, acute malaria to highlight the wrongness of certain environments, namely the American south and Italy, for English and American subjects. This chapter traces the use of acute malarial illness in both authors' work in order to show how Victorian transatlantic fiction contributed to the nineteenth-century process of rescripting malaria from a domestic illness of Britain to one that occurred abroad. The authors depict Italy and the American south as places where individual and national fortunes are haunted by the potential of failure. However, they vary in their perception of the aesthetic and artistic merits of these disease-ridden landscapes. While Dickens depicts the local inhabitants of America and Italy as hopelessly backwards and the natural environment as swampy and foreboding, James draws upon the miasmatic and ruinous landscape in order to craft a malarial picturesque, pushing back against encroaching medical modernization. In this sense, their works show competing literary models of malarial viewing. Dickens depicts British subjects escaping the physical and social corruption of malarial environments. In contrast, James creates a fiction of sensory dilation, which embraces both the erasure of boundaries and the illness this erasure may bring.