Kept from All Contagion

Kari Nixon

Published by State University of New York Press

Nixon, Kari.
Kept from All Contagion: Germ Theory, Disease, and the Dilemma of Human Contact in Late Nineteenth-Century
Literature.
State University of New York Press, 2020.
Project MUSE. muse.jhu.edu/book/76827.

For additional information about this book

https://muse.jhu.edu/book/76827

[ Access provided at 26 Dec 2021 14:17 GMT from University of Illinois @ Urbana-Champaign Library ]
 5

Humanity’s Waste
Typhoid Fever, the Failure of Isolation, and the
Development of Probiotics in Three Late-Century Works

It is the clear knowledge of the evils arising from harbouring decompos-

ing matter in the vicinity of our dwellings that has called forth, within
the last quarter of a century, certain legislative measures, the objects
of which have been to give powers to the local authorities to suppress
the evils arising from cesspools and other abominations.
—Purification and Utilisation of Sewage, 1876

DR. STOCKMANN: I have already told you that what I want to speak
about is the great discovery I have made lately—the discovery that all
the sources of our moral life are poisoned and that the whole fabric of
our civic community is founded on the pestiferous soil of falsehood.
—An Enemy of the People, 1882

Connectivity in an Age of Isolation

In this final chapter, I focus on a set of texts whose plots hinge solely on
the concept and value of isolation that I have discussed throughout this
book. In this collection, however, authors hone and shape their depictions
of what effective resistance to such hegemonic norms might look like. As
a set, they quite directly build upon the concerns played out by the works
in the previous chapter (i.e., that society as a whole is diseased, particularly

171
172 Kept from All Contagion

through and because of its efforts to appear pure and moral). Significantly, in
so doing, the texts in this chapter depict characters who attempt to eschew
this status quo through the same moral separatism they hope to resist.1
The main characters in the texts at hand construct for themselves spaces of
reactionary, countercultural moral isolation. Moreover, the authors of these
works drive their point home even farther by illustrating the abject failure
of these protagonists whose moral separatism—righteous or not—results in
their deaths and/or destruction. No matter the cause, then, these authors
suggest, individualistic practices that fail to consider the common good can
never succeed; even progress must be communal. To make their points,
these authors incorporate typhoid fever and discussions of sewage and waste
disposal into the fiction and drama covered in this chapter.
In this chapter, I will show that Henrik Ibsen and New Woman nov-
elist Grant Allen act with such commitment to this idea that they destroy
their own main characters to demonstrate that moral separatism can never
succeed. To conclude, I will highlight an odd, oft-reviled Hardy novel as
a surprising illustration of openness and connectivity. I have mentioned
that these texts develop the concerns laid out in the previous chapter; this
is because two of the three texts I cover here are later works by the same
authors and, in both cases, are the works they produced immediately after
penning the works covered in chapter 4. The third text I cover here represents
a separate author, Grant Allen, whose work, explicitly of the New Woman
genre of fin-de-siècle, necessarily addresses the ideas about disease and bacteria
developed earlier in the century, in addition to its concern with the role
of social mores in shaping the individual constituents of collective society.
This chapter will cover three texts, then: Grant Allen’s 1895 The Woman
Who Did, Henrik Ibsen’s 1883 An Enemy of the People (written one year after
he wrote Ghosts), and Thomas Hardy’s The Well-Beloved (written first in 1892,
and then rewritten in 1897, thus uniquely bookending Hardy’s problematizing
of Sue and Jude’s resistance portrayed in Jude the Obscure). In The Woman
Who Did and An Enemy of the People, I will demonstrate that the authors
shift the focus of their arguments and showcase individuals who attempt to
rise above the diseased cesspool of society by standing alone against it—and
both do so through contemporary discourse on cesspools alongside depictions
of characters who attempt (and fail) to stand alone against the status quo
with a like measure of countercultural moral isolationism. Both of their vivid
portrayals viscerally and movingly illustrate the utter failure of such isolated
resistance, highlighting the universal applicability of authorial claims against
self-interested isolation, even in the form of resistance to problematic norms
 Humanity’s Waste 173

and practices. That is, not only do these works demonstrate the problems
with germ theory’s isolationist quarantine models of human existence, they
transmogrify, in this later period, to include even like-minded, countercultural
constituents into their discussions. Even in their acts of resistance, then,
these authors highlight community and connection, signaling that no one
person can stand alone meaningfully against the community of which they
are a part. Rather, change must take place through connection with others
and in conjunction with the community itself. Movement, perhaps, can be
grassroots and individualized initially, but fulfilling and meaningful change
must ultimately be located in communal efforts and visions. I conclude the
chapter with Thomas Hardy’s novel The Well-Beloved, which, I will show,
highlights flow and connection over isolation through imagery depicted by
way of actual pipelines and sewage flow—aligning itself thereby with the
proto-probiotic movements of the late century. I will argue that these pro-
to-probiotic gestures in culture and literature were the beginnings of growing
acceptance of the vitalizing nature of risk and connection gaining momentum
after decades of ideological emphasis on isolation and self-preservation in
the wake of germ theory. These specific discussions on probiotics in sewage
came out of rampant typhoid infections caused by such sewage—fevers that
are encapsulated into the texts discussed here as they grapple with social
change, community, and isolation.

Moral Separatism as Abiotic in

Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did

Grant Allen’s 1895 The Woman Who Did is, on the surface, a straightforward,
arguably pedantic novella about Herminia Barton’s quest to pursue free love
in defiance of Victorian social mores. More specifically, she believes it is her
mission in life to change society by living monogamously with her partner
outside of the guises of marriage (the echoes of Sue and Jude’s determination
here are clear). Indeed, Hardy’s Jude the Obscure began in serialized format
in December 1894, while The Woman Who Did was published early in 1895.
Hardy read The Woman Who Did while the early issues of Jude were still
being published. He loved the book, and wrote to Allen to thank him for
writing it.2 As William Davis notes, in this letter, Hardy himself “added that
it ‘was curious to find how exactly [Allen] had anticipated my view.’ ”3 As
Hardy’s earliest version of the novel was significantly bowdlerized, it may have
appeared, in print at least, that Allen’s concerns predated Hardy’s. Regardless,
174 Kept from All Contagion

the two novels appeared nearly simultaneously in print, and they spoke to
similar concerns in tandem such that Spectator grouped them together as
jointly promoting a repulsive “new morality.”4 Given the similarities with
Jude the Obscure, the parallels between the two novels regarding moral iso-
lation should be readily apparent. This is even more so because Grant Allen
lends Herminia’s aims a more overtly self-righteous tone than even Jude
the Obscure’s heavy-handed moralizing. “It never occurred to me to think,”
Herminia tells her eventual partner, Alan Merrick, as they discuss her desire
to live together without marrying, “ ‘my life could ever end in anything else
but martyrdom. It must needs be so with all true lives and all good ones.”5
In one breath, Herminia likens herself to martyred saints, calling her own
mode of living a “creed,” and also claims that anyone who is not martyred
is incapable of goodness.6 When Alan accepts her terms of endearment, she
expounds about her philosophy of isolated moral superiority:

Brave women before me have tried for awhile to act . . . for

the good of their sex; but never of their own free will from
the very beginning. They have avoided marriage, not because
they thought it a shame and a surrender, a treason to their
sex . . . but because there existed at the time some obstacle in
their way in the shape of the vested interested of some other
woman. . . . Now, I have the rare chance of acting otherwise; I
can show the world from the very first that I act from principle,
and from principle only. . . . No other [woman] has voluntarily
risen as I propose to do.7

Based on early feminist principles though it may be, it’s hard to imagine
a more egocentric speech than this. Herminia wants to flout the status
quo, yes, but she aims to do so by envisioning herself as better than every
woman who has ever existed in the history of the earth besides herself.
While intersectional feminism and the claims of bell hooks and the like
against white feminism would be decades in the making, I find it hard to
imagine that even Victorian-era New Women would have found Herminia’s
sentiments palatable. Indeed, whether they promoted or panned the novel,
critics took issue with Herminia’s self-aggrandizing sense of her own moral
martyrdom. H. G. Wells mocked her, in spite of concluding that the book
itself was worth reading: “Her soul is ‘spotless.’ Never did she do anything
wrong. (And this is a ‘real woman’!).”8 Another more sympathetic review also
recommended the book, but warned that Herminia was “at times . . . too
 Humanity’s Waste 175

dogmatic for ordinary mortals.”9 A more negative review by Millicent Garrett

Fawcett nevertheless agreed upon this assessment of Herminia as character,
complaining that the “ ‘spotless woman’s’ moral grandeur is insisted upon ad
nauseum.”10 Continuing on about Herminia’s irksome “saintlike attitude” (an
epithet that is decidedly not intended as a compliment), Fawcett ridicules
Herminia’s moral superiority in thought and depiction:

She . . . [is] not . . . afflicted with any of the ills that flesh is
heir to, not having, for instance, washing bills like a mere woman,
she dressed in pure white from head to foot. She is not eager to
be happy . . . but “sets out in life with the earnest determination
to be a martyr,” keeping prussic acid as a last resort if the pro-
cess of martyrdom becomes uncomfortable. She converses in set
speeches several pages in length, and she repeats with tiresome
iteration on every alternate page or so, that she is the one woman
in the whole world who is really free. . . . She talks pages about
her “higher longings” and the “yearnings” peculiar to her about
the degradation of other women and her own vast superiority.11

Decrying the character-messenger separate from the message, contemporary

reviews of The Woman Who Did, whether positive or negative, clearly indicate
that Herminia’s approach to her philosophy was judged differently from the
philosophy itself. Particularly in the more positive reviews, we can glean a
clear sense of Allen’s insistence that the ends do not justify the means of
isolationist practice and thinking. Moreover, it is clear that his readers clearly
and rather uniformly cited her moral superiority as her fatal flaw, regardless
of their stance on her actual acts of resistance. “Its purpose is everything,”
an appreciative reviewer notes, while adding in the same sentence that “its
people [are] nothing.” The same reviewer continues on, arguing that while
“his remedy will, no doubt, seem to many worse than the disease; yet no
one but a fool can fail to admit the disease.”12
Although the reviewer here ascribes the remedy to Allen, I would
argue that the language of the reviews overall criticizes Herminia’s approach,
separate from their assessments of the absence or presence of a social dis-
ease in Victorian marriage norms. Thus, I would argue that the remedy is
Herminia’s, not necessarily Allen’s, particularly insofar as Herminia is killed
off at the end of the story. Critics and reviewers have, in fact, never been
sure what to make of Allen’s ending because of its very tendency to cast
his otherwise countercultural novel into the genre of fallen-woman fiction.
176 Kept from All Contagion

Wouldn’t this ending rather serve as a warning against her actions, like any
stereotypical fallen woman plot? The best explanation for this dissonance
is to separate, as the Victorians obviously did, Herminia’s choice of remedy
within the book from Allen’s authorial act of writing the book itself as a
formal diagnosis of this disease. She dies as a warning, yes, but no reader
of this explicitly and pedantically earnest New Woman novel could interpret
this as an admonition to embrace the “disease” of Victorian marriage norms
that the entire novel cries out against. It is possible to see her death as mere
tragedy—the sacrifice of an innocent amid an unforgiving world—but if we
take seriously the wide berth of Victorian reviewers who said, in one form or
another, that the disease may have existed, but her remedy was problematic,
it is possible to see her failure as the very isolationist thinking that enables
her to believe that she is morally superior to other women, and thus solely
and uniquely capable of saving the entire sex alone. In fact, this isolation is
no mere byproduct of her life, but an integral part of her disease “remedy.”
As I’ve mentioned, Allen’s novel develops the concerns highlighted in
Jude the Obscure (that of an inherently diseased society rotting away because
of its own moral hang-ups). The two novels handle disease somewhat dif-
ferently, however. That is, Allen’s novel attempts to envision what effective
and ineffective resistance to this society might look like. The rhetoric of
contamination undergirds the explicitly feminist aims of the novel, in spite
of the plot having very little to do with disease. While there is one death
by actual disease in the novel (of which more later), actual incurred illness
is largely discursively substituted with fears of contamination. Allen deftly
extrapolates common post-germ-theory concerns about disease into the
metaphoric potential of these fears as he illustrates the common human
tendency to tend toward self-righteous isolation that sees anything outside
the self as noxious and disordered. He virtually anticipates and pairs, thereby,
the Kristevan notions of the I/not-I abject and Mary Douglas’s famous
discourse on impurity as that which is labeled out of systemic order. Here,
Grant marries the psychological heft of Kristeva’s and Douglas’s theories to
demonstrate that there is no natural abject; rather, humans abjectify one
another in an attempt to preserve the personal subject’s order.
Crucially, in the novel, while these moments often occur predictably
when characters representing the Victorian status quo criticize Herminia, they
equally as often are Herminia’s own language, speaking of the contaminating
influences of the status quo. The voices of the moral hegemony unsurpris-
ingly discuss the possibility of Herminia’s contaminating influence on other
women. “You are not fit to receive a pure girl’s kisses,” Dolly shouts at her
 Humanity’s Waste 177

mother before leaving her for the last time, and her final words echo the
predictable Victorian language of sexual impropriety with contamination.13
More unexpected is Herminia’s casting of the same rhetorical stones back at
the hegemonic majority. She invokes the notion of filthy or contaminated
lucre by refusing to join her estates with Alan, refusing to taint their rela-
tionship with “any sordid stain or money, any vile tinge of bargaining.”14
Later, after Alan’s death, his father travels to Italy to see the two, and offers
Herminia money. She frantically shouts at him, “Don’t pollute my table!”
and demands that he take it back.15 The narrator joins in her rhetoric after
her return to England with her daughter, commenting on the “leprous taint”
of the status quo.16 Perhaps most powerful, however, is the scene early in
the novel in which Alan’s father disowns him, saying “in a chilly voice”
that he “must guard [his] mother and sisters . . . from the contamination
of this woman’s opinions,”17 which is neatly counterbalanced against one
much later in the novel in which the same man gives Herminia’s daughter
money, knowing that Herminia is struggling to make ends meet. When she
sees the coin, Herminia “ca[tches] her child up with a cry of terror,” and
then “change[s] the tainted sovereign . . . for another one.”18 If Herminia’s
motives here were not clear enough, the narrator immediately adds that “the
child who was born to free half the human race from aeons of slavery must
be kept from all contagion of man’s gold and man’s bribery.”19
This phrase is in fact the source for the title of this book. And it is,
I hope, clear by now that I believe many authors in this period strove to
indicate that no one—whether born to free the human race or not—can
ever be fully or profitably “kept from all contagion” issuing from their fellow
humans. To use Herminia’s own words, The Woman Who Did stands as an
antithesis to the idea that anyone can survive by setting their individual
“hearts against the world” and ignoring that social world of which they are
necessarily a part.20
Here are obvious connections, then, to Hardy’s and Ibsen’s works in
the previous chapter where the two authors invert the hegemonic language of
purity and contamination to affirm their own arguments about the internal
disease of Victorian purity itself. Allen counterposes these two viewpoints
(which he embodies in sets of characters scrambling to identify each other
as impure, however) and shifts the focus from that of the texts in chapter
4. Here, instead of an interesting subversion-via-inversion of claims to
purity and contamination, Allen rather demonstrates that anyone in power
will attempt to castigate an other as impure, while holding him- or herself
as situated in the isolated purity of moral superiority. As Douglas has so
178 Kept from All Contagion

famously explicated, ritual uncleanness and secular hygiene are essentially

one and the same. As she puts it:

If we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion

of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out
of place . . . where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the
by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter,
in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements.
The idea of dirt takes us straight into the field of symbolism
and promises a link-up with more obviously symbolic systems
of purity. We can recognize in our own notions of dirt that we
are using a kind of omnibus compendium which includes all
the rejected elements of ordered systems. It is a relative idea.21

Allen’s juxtaposition, then, of sets of parties accusing each other of contam-

ination reveals the self-interested nature of any and all claims to purity. He
demonstrates this inclination to be misguided and subject to fail through
Herminia’s eventual downfall. By paralleling both his countercultural pro-
tagonist and the voices of the hegemonic majority in their shared desire to
reify hierarchies of purity and righteousness, Allen castigates both.
After living monogamously, but unmarried with her partner, and
separating herself from a society she views as contaminating, she loses Alan
to typhoid fever, and ultimately loses even her daughter’s love and dies
alone—via suicide. At the conclusion of the novel, Dolly revolts against
what she admittedly correctly sees as her mother’s stifling exploitation of
her for her own philosophical ends. To the end, Herminia maintains an
egocentric view of the matter, even in her grief. She is shocked that “the
child predestined” in her own grandiose imaginings “to regenerate humanity,
was thinking for herself.”22 With polemics set as Herminia has constructed
them, Dolly has no real method of revolt except to veer to the other
extreme of society and incorporate herself into the status quo. Herminia
kills herself after Dolly leaves her for a traditional, lucrative marriage. Her-
minia’s death certainly signals the failure of the method by which she has
attempted to facilitate social progress. Her belief in purity via isolation is
proven thereby to be patently false. Moreover, her death by suicide indicates
even further the devitalizing nature of this means of attaining purity. Just
like the examples illustrated by all of the previous authors covered in this
book, Allen shows isolated safety—whether from contaminating morals or
contaminating pathogens—to be unsustainable. Life will simply not thrive
 Humanity’s Waste 179

in aseptic purity, which he reveals, like the authors covered here before him,
to be antibiotic—opposed to life.
The ultimate and unmistakable failure of her experiment works in tandem
with her defensive assertions that not only is the status quo impure but that
she (alone) is pure, to demonstrate Allen’s aims that a meaningful life cannot
be fulfilled in isolation. Make no mistake—just as earlier authors’ depictions
of the futility of risk-averse quarantine does not imply their endorsement of
intentional martyrdom and death via voluntarily acquired infection, here,
too, we have a similar reversal of a reversal. This ideology doubles back on
itself—Allen (and Ibsen and Hardy) pronounces that social progress against
and beyond the status quo cannot occur through the same self-congratulatory,
morally isolated route of superiority the status quo itself is built upon. This
does not, however, mean that these authors advocated acceptance of the status
quo. For one, any cursory reading of Ibsen’s or Hardy’s works, or that of the
New Woman writers, is evidence of this. More to the point: these authors,
in imagining what progressive social and moral solutions might look like,
warn against the same sort of extremism the status quo grounded itself in to
begin with. There may be social and moral diseases to cleanse, indeed, but
as Allen’s narrator admonishes in finely rendered scientific prose, “no unit
can wholly sever itself from the social organism of which it is a corpuscle.”23
The fact that Herminia’s partner, Alan Merrick, dies early in the novel
of typhoid fever is a key component to Grant Allen’s claims about isola-
tionist purity. Its presence is even more notable because typhoid is a disease
not typically named outright in Victorian texts, due to its associations with
the indelicacies of fecal matter and bodily excretions. In fact, not only is
the disease mentioned—a rarity in itself—but it is described precisely as a
pathogen linking humans to one another and to their environment. As a
“filth disease,” Victorians readily accepted that typhoid was caused by human
waste and contact with it.24 Allen incorporates these understandings into
his discussion of the days leading up to Alan’s death, describing Herminia’s
disgust with the town of Perugia, full, as she sees it, of “devouring wastes of
rubbish and foul . . . kitchen-middens [refuse piles].”25 Ironically, however,
though Alan dies in Perugia, the doctor and narrator both note that he
acquired his infection in Florence (which Herminia thinks of as a “dream
of delight,” and “pure gold”), once again signaling the misguided aims of
Herminia’s predilections.26 Not the least of her misperceptions here includes
her disgust with the “odours” of Perugia, which codes her as outdated in
her espousal of the older-order miasma theory, while she remains completely
ignorant of the real danger in seemingly pure Florentine water.27
180 Kept from All Contagion

In Perugia, the doctor pronounces his case. “This is typhoid fever,”

he determines, “a very bad type.”28 The omniscient narrator confirms the
pathogenic identification here, again affirming Herminia’s mistaken approach
to the world:

He spoke the plain truth. Twenty-one days before, in his bed-

room at the hotel in Florence, Alan had drunk a single glass of
water from the polluted springs that supply in part the Tuscan
metropolis. For twenty-one days those victorious microbes had
brooded in silence in his poisoned arteries. At the end of that
time, they swarmed and declared themselves.29

Grant Allen’s description of the “victorious microbes” is evocative and moving;

it bespeaks an epidemiological narrative closer to the The Hot Zone of 1994
than a fin-de-siècle novel from 1895. His pinpointing of water is not only
accurate according to contemporary scientific discourse of the day, but it
also highlights the inevitability of connection through the imagery of flowing
water that encircles and undergirds all landmasses. Perhaps more visceral,
so to speak, is that the imagery he evokes of water contaminated with fecal
matter, as Victorians knew to be the case when typhoid struck, again speaks
to the inevitability of our human connection, however uncomfortable that
fact may be. “It may seem too disgusting for belief,” one contemporary arti-
cle on typhoid explains, “but it is none the less true, that we receive these
diseases by inhaling from the air we breathe, or swallowing in the water
we drink, particles of fæcal matter.”30 Additionally, while Herminia’s death
emphasizes the failure of any and all isolationist endeavors, Alan’s death of
typhoid hints at possible successful modes of resistance. The inclusion of
typhoid signals innovative contemporary waste disposal methodologies, which
emphasized connectivity, openness to risk, and the vitalizing connections
with the others who might be abjectified and deemed impure.

Sewage, Flow, and Openness to

Risk in Late-Century Typhoid Discourse

This late period of the century was the so-called heyday of microbe hunting—
the popular zeal for germ theory. In this time, particularly after the CDA
had been repealed and it was an increasingly recognized reality that disease
does not obey gender or class boundaries, Victorian science saw a slow but
steady rhetorical shift away from isolationist ideology. Periodicals in this era
 Humanity’s Waste 181

bear witness to the early incorporation of language and practices that speak
to the impossibilities of maintaining purity in hermetically sealed vacuums
of isolation. Instead, scientific discourse of the very last parts of the century
slowly began to promote the same ideas that authors of anti-isolationist lit-
erature had been advocating for decades. That is, such perfectly quarantined
moral and biological antisepsis was not possible and, even if it were, would
backfire and disease the whole of society instead of protecting the purity of
isolated individuals. Typhoid in particular illustrated—perhaps more than any
other disease—the unsustainability of sequestering the “unclean.” After the
sanitation movement of the 1840s and 1850s, human waste was typically
dumped in closed, underground sewers that led to nearby rivers, the idea
being to get as much distance between communities and unwanted waste
as quickly as possible. An 1867 handbook on sewage disposal summarizes
this history quite well:

At th[e] [early] period in the history of sanitary reform, the

pioneers of science were so impressed with the enormity of the
evils arising from retaining decomposing matter in the vicinity
of our dwellings, that they were led to look upon sewage as a
nuisance to be got rid of as quickly as possible; so they poured
it into the nearest stream or watercourse, in the hope that the
stream would bear it harmlessly to the ocean, where it would be
entombed for ever from sight; but the result has proved different
from what we expected. Nature rebels against the waste.31

As historian Christopher Hamlin explains, this method involved “simply

pouring sewage into a large body of water and hoping for the best.”32
Such plans for sewage disposal (sequestering it and then shuttling it out
of sight and far away via waterways) obviously built upon the ideologies
of germ theory, which implicitly promoted the desirability of hermetically
sealing off, containing, and removing exposure to impurities. However, late-
century research into sewage and fecal-oral diseases began to demonstrate
that semi-open, aerated systems and probiotic development were the only
sustainable means of handling the millions of tons of human waste produced
daily in England. In addition to the concerns listed above with hoping
human waste would simply disappear in waterways, the closed-sewer system
was also despaired of. One discussion on the topic explains the dangers of
enclosed, sealed refuse: “the great evil to be guarded against . . . with either
water or sewage, is stagnation.”33 Another late-century treatise affirms the
value of probiotics, explaining that such beneficial microbes, which are “the
182 Kept from All Contagion

chief agents in setting up fermentative . . . changes,” fail to grow in closed

vacuums, and adding that “if sewage be placed in hermetically sealed flasks
and sterilized by heat it will be found that these changes do not occur.”34
Instead, a festering build-up and overflow would occur.
These conceptual changes also brought about shifting visual perceptions
of microbiological life. As early as the late 1850s, scientists began to take
a rather appreciative stance:

Collective specimens of this suspended organic matter may

be found in the quieter parts floating on the surface [of the
water]. When submitted to the microscope this . . . substance
presents an exceedingly interesting appearance. In it we have
collected . . . the graceful and varied forms of several species
of animal and vegetable infusoriæ. On closer examination it is
soon perceived that these minute creatures are busily engaged
in the work of assimilating . . . the softer parts of decayed veg-
etation into their own organism. In a word, what oxygen does
for extractive matter, it is clear that these infinitesimal creatures
are performing.35

Here, instead of a revolting fear of germs or disgust at their presence, they

are anthropomorphized as “busy,” effective workers in an environmental fac-
tory, “graceful[ly]” processing components of waste, so that they are not left
to fester. Instead of bogeymen, readers are presented with servicemen who
exist in wondrous and vital symbiosis to humans, rather than being cast as
undifferentiated, threatening “others.” In fact, a great deal of scientific and
engineering literature on the topic at this time not only promotes the value
of probiotic breakdown of human refuse and waste but also highlights its
utility as fertilizer. Suddenly bacteria were no longer universally to be feared
but were instead cast as essential in preventing overflow of waste, while also
being helpful in replenishing agricultural environments depleted by humans.
One long treatise, Bacterial Treatment of Sewage, explains this cyclical process:

Now just as soil contains these Economic Organisms whose role

is to complete the cycle of nature, removing the dead remains
of plants and animals and assimilating them in such a way as
to add to the fertility of the soil and recommence the cycle of
life, so also in sewage we have all the required organisms normally
present, whose business it is to render soluble the solid matters,
and to split up the organic compounds into their simple elements,
 Humanity’s Waste 183

and then as a final stage in the process to oxidise these elements

and so produce and effluent free from putrescible matter, but
containing nitrates and other mineral substances.36

Significantly, the agricultural environment itself is generally posited as the

best means of purifying the sewage, providing the best environment for
bacteria to do such work. This mutually constitutive cycle of earth-as-fod-
der for bacterial purification of waste, and purifying bacteria as food for
the same soil, notably functions outside of the Anthropocene. Of course,
treatises at the time looked for ways to harness these capabilities with the
help of human engineering, but their terminology about the benefits of
bacteria represent quite a discursive shift from earlier decades in the cen-
tury. In fact, aversion to such microbiological processes (often represented
by the sanitary-era water closet in these engineering tracts) is disavowed as
wrongheaded and unethical for its sheer wastefulness grounded in nothing
but self-interest—as Bacterial Treatment of Sewage explains, the presence of
bacteria in sewage “even in very large numbers, is not matter for regret but
far otherwise.”37 There was indeed a vocal movement against water closet
disposal of sewage, based somewhat on the popularity of “land treatment”
of sewage. In Sewage Purification Brought Up to Date, 1896, the author,
E. Bailey-Denton, acknowledges that “no one familiar with the subject”
could “den[y] that the most effective treatment of sewage was . . . passing
it through land.”38 Although several methods of probiotic sewage disposal
were used, most involved passing sewage through several layers of filtering
material of “flint, coke, and gravel,” and then passed through to “fine
grain bacteria beds” called “cultivation beds” or “contact beds.”39 For the
first time, bacteria are applauded and promoted—“cultivated” as any other
agricultural life form—not inside a sealed, sanitized laboratory, but in the
world of people, animals, and crops.
Generally this probiotic irrigation and fertilization still involved piping
the sewage in and, of course, using some amount of water as a vehicle.
However, the proven abilities of land itself to purify sewage and sewage
to fertilize land, respectively, brought about notions of the “dry closet” as
a possibility even superior to the water closet. Earth closets, as they were
also called, were essentially indoor outhouses using only dry earth to cover
human waste, and this retrograde movement toward approving an entirely
open cesspit demonstrates the rhetorical heft that the probiotic movement
gained in this last decade of the century. Obviously, the water closet has
prevailed, but nevertheless, waste piped to agricultural regions as a fertilizer
continued for some time, and the very advocacy surrounding the earth closet
184 Kept from All Contagion

at this time is testament to the new fervor about openness, aeration, and
connectivity. “Of all our domestic institutions,” one sewage handbook claims,

the water closet system is the most extravagant, the most wasteful,
and the most dangerous to human life. The W.C. system found
in the houses of the upper ten thousand is the most filthy and
hateful, and those as old as the hills, must soon disappear from
every household.40

Thus, in the late century, scientific and engineering discourse on human

waste inverted previously predominant rhetoric: the bacteria are busy, effec-
tive workers, ideologically aligned with the middle class, and the “upper
ten thousand” are wasteful and promulgate disease with their unwillingness
to see their own complicity in it. Instead, openness and connection are
emphasized as inevitable and healthy. As one treatise for the dry closet,
written by famed sewage engineer G. V. Poore expounds, “the principle
is . . . thorough exposure to the air, and if the sunlight have access also so
much the better.”41 Another advocate of the dry closet system of probiotics
opens his handbook with the provocative statement, “Well may the Chinese
call us barbarians; in that strange and curious country, containing, according
to some authorities, 500 millions of people, such a thing as a W.C. is not
to be found.”42 He continues:

In these days blood poisoning is very common, and in most

instances may be traced to the pernicious gases generated in the
sewers of towns, to which every W.C. largely contributes. It is
only a very few years since the health of our future king was
seriously jeopardized by the sewer gas arising from the W.C. at
Sandringham. Fortunately, the Prince survived the attack, and
this fact will do much to draw the attention of medical men
and sanitary authorities to the dangers attending the hateful
and filthy plan.43

As this passage makes clear, in the later parts of the century, typhoid
was the most-publicized consequence of improper waste disposal, particularly
after Prince Edward VII came down with a severe bout of typhoid in 1871.
His illness and recovery were widely discussed in periodicals of the time, illus-
trating in high relief the invisible connections among all humans—rich and
poor, aristocrat and pauper—that disease forces us to confront. Of course, his
father before him famously died of typhoid, something no Victorian reader
 Humanity’s Waste 185

was liable to forget. One handbook on typhoid titled Typhoid and Other Allied
Diseases (1876) opens with a reminder of these facts, noting that diseases of
“excremental filth” are “as common among the rich as among the poor; the
prince may fall their victim as readily as may the peasant, for their horrible
cause penetrates to the mansion or the palace as easily as it enters the cottage.”44
Increasingly, studies showed that bacteria themselves were the best
solution for breaking down infectious matter in sewage and, moreover, that
the kind of bacteria best at doing this needed airflow and contact with the
outside environment to do their job well. Whether dry or wet closets were
advocated by a given author, ventilation was always agreed upon as most
important—not simply distancing from the refuse or sealing it up. In How
to Make a House Sanitary, the section on water closets insists that “there
should be a ventilating tube through the roof,” adding that “windows should
be open” in addition, and the closet should never be sequestered “in the
basement.”45 The same handbook, in the following sections on privies, cess-
pools, and the pail system, always notes “it should be ventilated,” describing
the general rule that pipes as a whole “should act as ventilators.”46 G. V.
Poore, in his discussion of earth closets, similarly notes the importance of
“cross-ventilation.”47 Closed pipes were liable only to corrosion, and “ven-
tilated soil-pipes resist . . . this corrosive action for a longer period than
non-ventilated.”48 In general, most sewage handbooks agreed that periodically
placed ventilating devices on pipes were the best method, and such devices
are often still used today (see Figure 5.1).49

Figure 5.1. Image of Plumbing Ventilation Model, 1877.

186 Kept from All Contagion

Although, as Michelle Allen notes, “by opening a channel of com-

munication between the ‘outer air’ and the interior chamber . . . the
sewer posed a threat to the ideals of privacy and autonomy cultivated in
and represented by the home,” by this point in the century scientific dis-
course was aligning itself with the literary endeavors covered in this book
in insisting that such was not only inevitable, but necessary.50 The sewer
connected all people and was “an aggressively unifying force.”51 But as the
Golden Era of microbe hunting reached its twilight, the prevailing bioethical
admonition seemed to be to accept that this unity had always existed in
other forms and was, as the previously quoted sewer engineer put it, “not
matter for regret, but far otherwise.”52 This notion of planned, mitigated
exposures echoes Defoe’s much earlier. These findings served, perhaps more
than any studies since vaccination experiments and debates, to circulate
and promote the idea that bacteria are a risk that must be confronted and
even facilitated for healthy human life to thrive. Such findings about the
actual biological safety net provided by seemingly dangerous microbiological
organisms had vast ideological import for humans and their post-germ-theory
impulses to isolate themselves from risky and dangerous “other” human
bodies. The reviled abject was now publicly discussed as a necessary part
of the subject’s continued livelihood. That is, much as Defoe insisted so
many years earlier, controlled risk exposures are indeed necessary for the
maintenance of biological life. Authors such as Allen, Ibsen, and Hardy
incorporated such findings into their work metaphorically in their contin-
ued and ever-developing insistence that social risk aversion is devitalizing
(as did Defoe, Shelly, James, Wood, and Braddon before them). Others
insisted that attempting to maintain personal purity via isolation from
such perceived risks simply eats communities away from the inside out
and further diseases them, morally and biologically (those authors covered
here include Hardy, Ibsen, and Dixon).
In The Woman Who Did, these issues of sequestration and purity
are explicitly rendered in terms of morality and social decorum, thereby
extrapolating the concerns of the previous chapter. That is, in Ghosts and
The Woodlanders and Jude the Obscure, disease is laid as a palimpsest over
the characters who have tried to maintain a socially acceptable form of pro-
priety, communicating much about the futility of their aims and even the
poisonous nature of such agendas. In The Woman Who Did, Allen pushes
this metonymic principle even farther, simply referring to unwanted mores
as contagions themselves, and demonstrating the natural human tendency
to view all others as contaminating. His tragic story illustrates the damning
 Humanity’s Waste 187

nature of such beliefs, even when they serve the aims of resistance to the
status quo. The protagonist’s loss of her partner to typhoid indicates further
this insistence on community connections, but aside from this brief episode,
contagion and contamination are represented as figurative in the story. In
Ibsen’s 1883 An Enemy of the People, the pendulum swings precisely to the
opposite polarity, in that the presence of real, physical disease (the potential
threat of typhoid fever, to be exact) is the central action that moves the
plot, and the implications for human morality in isolation act as rather a
subtext to this drama and are easy to miss. In fact, I will present a revisionist
reading and argue that far too many scholars have missed this important
subtext and misread the play entirely.

Finding “The Folk’s Fiend” in Ibsen’s En Folkefiende

The plot of An Enemy of the People is deceptively simple. An 1895 New

York Times review praised Ibsen’s “superior constructive skill and facility as a
writer of stage dialogue,” but wryly noted that “the interest aroused” by the
plot was “never very deep or absorbing.”53 A year earlier, the London-based
Referee claimed that the plot was simply too boring to “command the sym-
pathy of an audience.”54 In fact, up to the present day, the play “has been
considered by many Ibsen supporters to be one of the thematically most
underdeveloped and baldly didactic of his plays.”55 Thomas F. Van Laan puts
the matter more gently, describing it as one of Ibsen’s “most straightforward
plays ever, lacking almost entirely the hallmarks of complexity and ambi-
guity” so typical of his work.56 Indeed, in her 2006 Key Note Presentation
at the International Ibsen conference, Merete Morken Andersen opens by
acknowledging that

it is as if the characters are not real characters, not the way

we are used to them in Ibsen’s plays; they seem to be more of
a type cast. Certainly they are more so than the characters in
Ghosts. . . . We do not get to know much about the inner life
of the characters, and there is not much nuance in the way
they act.57

The plot is simply summarized: in a town where the economy depends

upon tourists visiting the local therapeutic baths and spas, the newly hired
Dr. Stockmann has discovered bacteria in the water, which he believes
188 Kept from All Contagion

are linked to some previously observed cases of typhoid fever. Stockmann

announces his findings to the town authorities—a set of local journalists
and political figures—along with his recommendation that the baths must
be closed indefinitely. When he does so, he is convinced he will be regaled
as a local hero. He is shocked when he is met with anger and disbelief for
his findings. Later, he calls a town meeting to announce his findings to the
public, and again, is deemed no hero, but rather run out of town by a mob
shouting “En folkefiende! En folkefiende!” after him as he flees. Although
the majority of the town may indeed deem him “an enemy of the people,”
Dr. Stockmann closes the play seemingly unperturbed, concluding that “the
strongest man in the world is the man who stands alone.”58
It should come as no surprise that I will be arguing against the via-
bility of Stockmann’s closing assertion. But before explicating my longer
arguments and interpretations about the play, it is worth taking a moment
to review how Stockmann has traditionally been read: as a morally upright,
sole exemplar of ecocritical truths, the sole bastion of morality in a sea of
depravity. Interpretations of the play have cast Dr. Stockmann as a hero of
the people, and his epithet of “an enemy of the people” as uncomplicated
evidence of the corruption of the society around him. The title alone of one
2003 article on the topic, “Dr. Stockmann og Dr. Snow—to samfunnsmedisinske
helter” (Dr. Stockmann and Dr. Snow—two social medicine heroes) is quite
representative of this traditional reading.59 This article critiques some aspects
of Stockmann’s approach, but ultimately concludes that he is “velmmenende,
men naiv” (well-meaning but naive).60 A response article written in support
of this one casts Stockmann as “a symbolic beacon in the night for modern
public health activists.”61 A 2008 article describes Stockmann as a victim
of “greed and ignorance,” who is “battered by the gales of ignorance and
prejudice,” ultimately labeling Stockmann a “truth-teller.”62 A thorough
literature review of Stockmann’s interpretation can be found in Thomas F.
Van Laan’s 1986 article on the play, but his summation is worth quoting
here: “From its appearance,” he notes, “commentators have been inclined to
adhere to a single uncomplicated reading of the play” as a simple depiction
of a “protagonist’s struggles against a mob of ‘crooks and fools’ and his
ultimate spiritual triumph in the midst of practical and material defeat.”63
Such readings fail to take into account, however, Stockmann’s biopolitical
ideologies represented in both his scientific methodologies and the nature of
his town hall speech that directly precedes his forced exile. These elements
will compose the bulk of my own interpretation of the play. First of all,
 Humanity’s Waste 189

Stockmann perfectly espouses the isolationist imperatives of germ theory’s

insistence on quarantine and purity when he insists that the entire town
must shut down because of his isolated belief that the water is dangerous.
This becomes even clearer during his town hall speech, in which he proclaims
that he alone can access epistemological truths and should rule society as an
autocrat. Thus, the public outcry against him can itself be seen as the broad
embodiment of the aims of the literature covered in the previous chapters.
That is, by labeling Stockmann a “folkefiende”—a fiend of the folk, or, as it
has most frequently been translated, “an enemy of the people”—the townsfolk
are in fact labeling bacteriology’s ideology as the enemy of the people rather
than its savior. The authors I have covered in this book all speak out against
self-interested moral and biological isolation, a stance they conclude ignores
community needs and connection. As the embodiment of this movement,
the townsfolk in An Enemy of the People cry foul of germ theory’s fallout. If
this were not clear enough from the basic plot, Stockmann’s own speech to
the town makes this, I would argue, abundantly clear. When he meets with
the townspeople, ostensibly to persuade them of the need for the closure of
the town, instead of speaking of his own scientific findings, he spends his
entire stage time asserting the moral rectitude of leadership by an intellectual
elite who simply “know better” than the majority. He opens by suddenly
announcing that he has “more important things to speak about” than “this
petty business about the water-supply being polluted and the Baths standing
over a cesspool.”64 Instead, he tells the townspeople, he is going to discuss
the manner in which “our spiritual sources are polluted and that our whole
civic community is built over a cesspool of lies.”65 Thus far, it would seem
that An Enemy of the People simply reconfigures the concerns of Ghosts.
Stockmann’s unsavory motivations are quickly apparent, however. Rather
than discussing his disgust with the opposition he faces from the mayor
and local media (whose motivations are uncertain), he quickly moves on
to proclaiming that he, and intellectuals like him, should control society.
“The worst enemy of truth and freedom in our society,” he continues, is
“the damned, compact, liberal majority.”66 Coming on the heels of Ghosts,
this proclamation could well seem to be simply another condemnation of
the moral status quo and middle-class propriety. But Stockmann is far from
finished. His speech continues:

The majority is never right. Never, I tell you. . . . Who are the
people that make up the biggest proportion of the population—
190 Kept from All Contagion

the intelligent ones or the fools? I think we can agree it’s the
fools, no matter where you go in this world it’s the fools that
form the overwhelming majority. But I’ll be damned if that means
it’s right that the fools should dominate the intelligent. . . . The
majority has the might—more’s the pity—but it hasn’t right.67

So far, Stockmann does not appear in an entirely reprehensible light. But

he keeps talking. “I am right,” he declares, “I and one or two other indi-
viduals like me. The minority is always right.”68 While he reproduces the
society-as-diseased rhetoric seen in Ghosts, the more he speaks (and his
diatribe continues for pages), the more dissonant his rhetorical parallels
become. He claims that “this damned compact majority—this is the thing
that’s polluting the sources of our spiritual life and infecting the very ground
we stand on.”69 He calls “majority truths” a “moral scurvy,” which seems
rather in line with the messages presented in the previous chapter, that social
norms are themselves diseasing society.70 However, what critics have failed
to give adequate weight to are the logical conclusions Stockmann draws
from these presumptions. Like Allen, Ibsen presents here a character who
has possibly pinpointed a disease, but has grossly misjudged the remedy in
presenting himself as the sole savior of a society and the single source of
progress and change. As Stockmann continues, his proposed solution (rule
by the intellectual elite) becomes increasingly disturbing:

[It is] a rotten lie [that] . . . the common herd, the masses are
the very essence of the people—that they are the people—that
the common man, and all the ignorant and immature elements
in society have the same right to criticize and to approve, to
govern and to counsel as the intellectually distinguished people.71

It is possible, when selectively choosing his statements, to read Stockmann

as simply arguing against the status quo, as seen in chapter 4. However, as
his arguments develop, his shocking statements that only “the intellectually
distinguished” have “the . . . right to criticize and to approve” the goings-on
in the world around them cannot be taken lightly. He is not simply saying
that there are serious problems with the moral status quo, but that majority
is always in the wrong (thus speaking out quite distinctly against democracy
and enfranchisement of the poor), while he “and a few others like” him are
the only people ever to be trusted with power and authority. Considering,
 Humanity’s Waste 191

moreover, that he has called this meeting with the common people of the
town, he is in fact speaking to those who are already disempowered and
marginalized. This is decidedly so, since Norway was quite a poor country in
the nineteenth century, particularly in the rural areas such as the “miserable
hole of a . . . rocky wilderness” full of “poor half-starved creatures” where An
Enemy of the People is explicitly set.72 His elitism takes on eugenicist tones
as he draws an elaborate metaphor between himself as a purebred dog and
everyone else as mutts—he has in fact preemptively opened his speech by
claiming the populace would be better treated by a “vet” than by a doctor
like himself.73 This passage is worth quoting at length:

Look at the difference between pedigree and cross-bred ani-

mals. . . . Think first of an ordinary mongrel—I mean one of
those filthy, shaggy rough dogs that do nothing but run about
the streets and cock their legs against all the walls. Compare a
mongrel like that with a poodle whose pedigree goes back many
generations, who has been properly fed and has grown up among
quiet voices and soft music. Don’t you think the poodle’s brain
will have developed quite differently from the mongrels? You
bet it will! That kind of pedigree dog can be trained to do the
most fantastic tricks—things an ordinary mongrel could never
learn even if it stood on its head.74

He continues to insist upon rule by the elite, reiterating that “there’s a

tremendous difference between the poodles and the mongrels amongst us
men.”75 He then turns positively Kurtzian, arguing for the extermination
of all the masses:

When a place has become riddled with lies, who cares if it’s
destroyed? I say it should simply be razed to the ground! And
all the people living by these lies should be wiped out, like
vermin! You’ll have the whole country infested in the end, so
that eventually the whole country deserves to be destroyed.76

He maintains his belief in his own individual moral superiority to the end
of the play. Even after he is run out of town, Stockmann’s most horrific
memory of the violent mob is “the idea of the mob going for me as though
they were my equals—that’s what I can’t stomach, damn it!”77
192 Kept from All Contagion

Remarkably, nearly every critical writing on Stockmann, including

modern-day performances of the plays and adaptations of it, neatly sidestep
his quasi-fascist arguments. Arthur Miller famously redacted this entire
speech when writing a modern adaptation of the play, citing “discomfort”
with his support of “an evolving aristocracy of leaders with broad powers
to mould community standards.”78 At most, some sources describe him as
naive or bad at public communication of scientific findings to lay people
(a view, which, to my thinking, tends to reify Stockmann’s own disdain for
lay persons).79 Paul Lindholdt at least acknowledges “the troubling strain in
Stockmann’s speech,” but chalks it up to “the rudimentary state of anthro-
pology and the social science at the time.”80 Such excuses for Stockmann
fall flat, however, in light of the support for increasing enfranchisement in
the late periods of the century.
This rendering of the bacteriological biopolitical agenda is nearly
farcical as Stockmann proclaims, on the basis of his visual perception of
germs in the town water, that he and a select few men of science like him
have the right to authoritarian rule. Such claims are astounding. Perhaps
it is even more astounding that these claims have been comfortably elided
by interpreters of this play, who continue to uphold Stockmann as an
innocent victim of an evil society, a besieged whistleblower who attempts
to do good and save his town. In fact, although he has almost never been
seriously viewed as an enemy of the people (as I argue that he in fact
is), contemporary Victorian critics and audiences seemed at least a great
deal more willing to acknowledge Stockmann’s fascist agenda. I will argue
momentarily that this is because they were more connected to the scientific
processes of their own day; our own myopia of these methodologies allows
us to simply take his initial empirical observations at face value, and enable
easy, uncritical acceptance of his ultimate conclusions. Many reviews did
uphold the view of Stockmann as a hero; however, there seems to have
been less unanimity in this view in the nineteenth century than today. I
have earlier called his reasoning (from disease germ to dictatorship) farcical;
the Victorians tended to cast its extremism as satirical. “He leaps to some
startling convictions,” a 1909 review concludes, “concerning majorities and
democracy.”81 This same review remarks that he “comes off at last the moral
victor,” however, but goes farther toward at least acknowledging Stockmann’s
dictatorial ethos than present-day criticism.82 The play, it concludes, “may
be classed as a straightforward satiric comedy.”83 A much earlier review,
from 1893, recounts that “the piece was received with the wildest enthu-
 Humanity’s Waste 193

siasm” by the audience, even in spite of the fact that “the hero of it, as
is well known, does not believe in democracy.”84 In 1893, then, ten years
after the play’s first premiere, it was “well known” to nineteenth-century
audiences that Stockmann was antidemocratic, at best. A review a year later
dubbed the play, as many were wont to do, “a lumpish satire” in which
“Stockmann simply insults the meeting that had been called for a very
different purpose.”85 One reviewer utterly throws his hands up, exclaiming
that

nobody can pretend to analyze [Ibsen] for the very simple rea-
son that hardly any two people think alike about him. In this
case, for instance, he may have meant to indict the “compact
majority” and to establish the corollary of the man who stands
alone. On the other hand, he may have intended to exploit the
irrationality of extreme theory in practice.86

In his native Norway, An Enemy of the People was one of the first plays
produced during the first season of Norway’s National Theater.87 The the-
ater was built upon lofty principles of liberty and free speech, anticipated
eloquently during its construction:

Nationaltheatret har af den norske stat intent tilskud; det nyder af

staten ingen rettigheder—men har derfor på anden side ligeoverfor
staten heller ingen forpligtelser.

The National Theater receives no subsidies from the state. Thus,

while it has no rights accorded to it from the state, on the other
hand, it has no obligations to the state, either.88

It is certainly hard to imagine that this play would have been carefully
selected for the first season of a theater with incredibly liberal principles if
contemporary Norwegians saw the play as espousing aristocratic, dictatorial
reign.
Somewhere along the way, however, literary critics have lost the
ability or willingness to take Stockmann at his word, and have chosen to
either excuse or ignore his totalitarian philosophy that was readily apparent
to contemporary audiences. Instead, as a promotional poster from 1991
194 Kept from All Contagion

dramatically entices, he is cast and recast as a character who “is fighting to

reveal the truth—and save people’s lives” (see Figure 5.2).
Yet in his own words, Stockmann doesn’t seem to think people are
worth saving. Indeed, a careful review of his discovery of the germs in
the water reveals not his shock and horror at the dangers revealed, but
rather excitement that he will finally make his name as a famous scientist.
Throughout the play, Stockmann is consistent in his excitement that what
are apparently dangerous findings will bring him renown; he is much less
concerned about the supposed danger people may or may not be in. From
the first, he describes what should be distressing findings as “a great discov-
ery.”89 As he explains his findings with his wife, he talks with excitement
about his hopes for an improvement in his reputation:

Figure 5.2. Press Release for An Enemy of the People Production, 1991.
 Humanity’s Waste 195

DR. STOCKMANN: All right, to your grandfather, then. Yes,

now we’ll give that old boy something that will really open his
eyes. He’s another one that thinks I’m a bit cracked—oh yes,
there are plenty more with the same idea, I can see. But now
these good people are going to see something—they’re certainly
going to see something, this time. [He walks around rubbing
his hands.] What a commotion this is going to cause in town,
Katherine! You’ve no idea! All the pipes will have to be relaid.

In this excerpt, Stockmann is oddly excited about a discovery that, if true,

will mean financial disaster for all of his neighbors (we are told that the
remedies he suggests will cost “several hundred thousand crowns” and that
he demands the entire town be closed down while funds are raised and
improvements made).90 Well may the Victorians have called the play a
satire, as Stockmann imagines the downfall of the town while rubbing his
hands together like a villain from a melodrama. His tone is rather like a
gossipmonger as he envisions “the commotion” his scientific analyses will
cause in town, and he then returns to the mode of melodramatic villain as
he imagines the Baths as the “ ‘artery’ of the town,” its “throbbing heart,”
and simultaneously imagines himself stopping its pulsing flow.91 Circulatory
imagery has been used by many authors covered in this book, and it is apt
here as well. Stagnation is ubiquitously used by these authors to indicate
the poisonous putrefaction brought about by isolationist impulses. Here,
Stockmann’s moral isolation, like Herminia’s, is the cause of his downfall,
and he is cast in the first scene of the play as not only a proponent of
stagnation, of isolation and “purity,” but also as an actual murderer, fan-
tasizing about stopping a heartbeat. Of course, as the play later reveals,
he actually disavows the innate value of the hearts, minds, and bodies
of his fellow citizens. He deems them ill-bred dogs with no right to free
will and demands their extermination. Certainly the “beating heart” of
their community and its financial stability are expendable to him, as well.
His joy at discovering something potentially so tragic and his immediate
conclusions that such findings render him a fit dictator of an entire soci-
ety are, I would argue, unavoidably problematic. Is it really any surprise
that the townspeople run him out of town, calling him a public enemy?
Especially in light of the current Western political climate, it seems hard
to argue with the townspeople’s motivations. Although Stockmann does
not publicly proclaim his unique capabilities as a dictator until the play’s
conclusion, he excitedly imagines the ruin he will bring to the town and
196 Kept from All Contagion

his concomitant rise as a “man of science” (as he repeatedly calls himself )

brought about by his discoveries.92
Recall that this is the height of the figure Paul DeKruif called “the
microbe hunter,” a scientist-hero tirelessly venturing forth to shed light on
the foul effluvia infecting society. Pasteur had already gained great fame in
this manner, as had John Snow before him (and before germ theory itself ).
Koch bootstrapped his way to fame and fortune from humble beginnings
by entering the microbe-hunting trade.93 Stockmann clearly aspires more to
personal glory than to public safety. Moreover, one could even argue that
Stockmann is so eager to gain fame as a microbe hunter that he jumps the
gun, so to speak, employing questionable scientific methodologies according
to contemporary scientific standards—something not lost on Victorian audi-
ences. For one, he does not even perform his own microbe-hunting work.
As a self-proclaimed “man of science,” he admits that he does not have “the
necessary scientific equipment” to study the town water adequately himself.94
Instead, he sends the water off to a lab for “exact chemical analysis,” and
then tries to take credit for others’ microbe-hunting work.95 Moreover, “his”
findings are not necessarily replicable, a notion important to the scientific
method even at this time.96 The idea that the entire town must be shut
down immediately based on one single water sample, analyzed by one single
lab whose findings are provided secondhand, is dubious. At the very least,
it seems that the people of the town are more reasonable than otherwise to
question just how “scrupulous[ly] thorough” (as he terms it) his investigations
were, rather than accepting them as a matter of course.
Finally, his epidemiological reasoning is unsound to begin with.
Stockmann claims that he began to have “suspicions” about the water after
a “number of curious cases of sickness among the visitors . . . typhoid and
gastric fever . . .” the previous winter.97 His suspicions caused him to send
the water for analysis. After bacteria are found in the water, he claims his
suspicions are confirmed and the entire industry of the town must be shut
down. Koch’s principles, well established at this point, required that to assume
a given microbe was causing a disease, it had to be: (1) isolated from an
ill organism; (2) cultured in a Petri dish; (3) extracted from said media;
(4) inoculated into another living organism; and (5) observed to cause the
same disease in the second individual. Stockmann has not only not gone
through this process, he has outsourced the few observations he has made,
and he has made a huge assumptive leap by causally joining his empirical
observation of illness and separate, independent observation of “organisms”
(not necessarily typhoid bacteria) in water. From these unlinked observa-
tions, he sees fit to claim both authority as a microbe hunter via praxis
 Humanity’s Waste 197

(which he in fact outsources) and epidemiological reasoning (which he has

completely forgone). Instead of a linked chain of epidemiological evidence,
Stockmann makes two discrete observations and links them causally in lieu
of any further evidence suggesting the veracity of doing so.
Moreover, as mentioned earlier, contemporary studies of sewage and
waste disposal found that in fact many bacteria were incredibly helpful, and
many discussions of sewage from this period go to great lengths to convince
readers that bacteria in water did not necessarily indicate the presence of
disease. For one, most bacteria had been found by this time to be either
innocuous or beneficial. Secondly, scientists argued that Darwinian principles
of competition caused even the presence of harmful bacteria to be rather
inept due to crowding and resource competition in properly ventilated, will-
ingly cultivated sewer biomes. The Bacteriology of Sewage explains that, given

such a large quantity of organic matter as sewage contains . . .

there is but one reason why such a medium is not absolutely
ideal from a microbe’s point of view, and that reason is that in
sewage the vast numbers of bacteria present make the struggle
for existence exceptionally keen.98

The explanation continues: “Not only are the numbers incredibly large, but
we also find an extensive representation of species, including . . . non-
pathogenic and pathogenic.”99 After describing some common varietals, the
author concludes by urging his readers not to be overly concerned about
typhoid in sewage: “In crude unsterilized sewage it is clear that owing to
competition and the inimical effect some of the non-pathogenic species have
upon B. typhosus, that the death of that organism in sewage” is likely.100
Thus, not only are Stockmann’s reasoning faulty and methodology flawed,
but his findings have the potential to dangerously backfire. Probiotic sources
tend to break down B. typhosus, so without following any sort of protocol,
Stockmann risks instead “cleansing” beneficial bacteria, thus disrupting
the microbiome and allowing for an overgrowth and outbreak of the very
bacteria he claims to be concerned about. Once again, we see here a text
in which attempts at maintaining a perfect form of purity are ticking time
bombs causing stagnation, putrefaction, and overflow. The attempted rem-
edy causes the disease once more, as the authors covered in this book have
repeatedly demonstrated.
Indeed, contemporary reviews wondered at his claims. One Danish
review from 1883 describes his findings as “altfor trivielle” (“overly trivial.”)101
Moreover, the review adds,
198 Kept from All Contagion

Næsten alt hvad han siget i sin store Tale er enten meningløst eller
selvindlysende, de var unødvendigt at tromme saamange Mennesker
sammen for at høre det.

Nearly everything he says in his lengthy speech is either so

meaningless or obvious, that it was unnecessary to assemble
together so many people to hear it.102

Thus, while Stockmann presents himself as a “man of science” who does

“scientific tests,” he is not doing his own work, he is not doing the right
kind of work, and he is not doing it in the right order. And yet critics have
typically interpreted him, nevertheless, as a sort of example of moral fortitude.
I would suggest that if he is an example of any kind of moral fortitude, it
is only that of upholding the status quo of germ theory biopolitical impli-
cations (although not necessarily what microbiologists themselves would
have consciously intended), which suggests humans can exist and thrive in
a vacuum, while disregarding the rest of society (as his closing lines indeed
indicate). Instead, when read through the lens of other works of literature
resisting the biopolitical admonitions of the age, Stockmann is a straw man,
promoting the moral and physical quarantine that contemporary authors
and contemporary engineers revealed as explosive.
One other possibility needs to be addressed. While most critics of the
play either completely ignore Stockmann’s problematic fascist biopolitics
based on problematic scientific reasoning, some have read Stockmann as an
obvious stand-in for Ibsen himself and therefore intended by Ibsen to be
viewed positively. Ibsen did write An Enemy of the People directly after his
social critiques in Ghosts situated him at the epicenter of public disapproval.
Thus, many read Stockmann as Ibsen’s own self-portrait, of a valiant hero
trying to shed light on a corrupt society who castigates the hero for said
whistleblowing. Arthur Miller called this idea—that “Ibsen wrote the play as
a riposte to those who so violently attacked him as an enemy of society for
having written Ghosts—“an assumption that [he] never questioned.”103 Many
critics posit this idea as plain fact, such as Bernard Dukore, who says, “Dr.
Stockmann’s interpretation of events is Ibsen’s.”104 Paul Lindholdt acknowl-
edges that “consensus rests on a strongly autobiographical basis for Ibsen’s
composing An Enemy of the People.”105 However, Ibsen mocked Stockmann
as a character who was “strange,” “foolhardy,” and “muddleheaded.”106 When
asked directly if he agreed with Stockmann’s final sentiments in the play, Ibsen
quite matter-of-factly argued, “I am not responsible for all the nonsense which
 Humanity’s Waste 199

[Dr. Stockmann]” produces.107 When pressed about the seeming sympathy

between himself and his protagonist, he retorted: “Do you really think you
know that? Perhaps you are completely wrong,” further calling Stockmann
“muddle-headed.”108 Thus, as with Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did (and
as I will argue about Hardy’s The Well-Beloved), we must give Ibsen his due
as an artist capable of producing more than purely autobiographical fantasies.
Moreover, as Allen and Ibsen depict such obviously flawed characters who
fail at achieving their goals because of these flaws, critics and readers alike
would do well to separate the artist from the art. Particularly insofar as con-
temporary reception of both works picked up so universally on the doomed
strategies of these characters, highlighting such as distinct from the artistic
prowess of the authors, it seems worthwhile to consider that such authors
were capable of representing something outside of their own perspectives and
that they depicted fatal flaws and human failings precisely as such, and not
necessarily as heavy-handed, martyred autobiographies.
I have mentioned previously the connections between typhoid fever
and late-century sewerage developments. Of course, the most famous events
involving waste and disease in the Victorian era involved cholera much earlier
in the century. It is significant, then, that in An Enemy of the People, Ibsen
presents typhoid as the feared contagion, not cholera. This is, in fact, a point
many critics have used to support the autobiographical nature of the play, as
Ibsen apparently based the story on a cholera outbreak in a bathing town.109
However, I would conversely argue that this proves just the opposite, as
Ibsen’s update to his source material demonstrates that he elected to work
with more prescient concerns of his time. Moreover, it was cholera initially
that brought about some of the earlier modes of handling waste (such as
casting it into the river or locking it up in a sealed tank) which the later
typhoid investigations reversed, emphasizing instead openness and vented
systems with mediated exposure, contact, and risk. This open-flow system of
handling contaminants and ideologically threatening (if not biologically so)
germs functioned as a neat overlay for authors’ concerns about human society
in a world of risk. In fact, many contemporary critics highlighted Ibsen’s
play as one showing the failures of such extremism, demonstrated by his
insistence on perfect purity and his own moral superiority. The 1883 Danish
review proclaimed the falsehood of Stockmann’s extremism as statistically
impossible. Another review pokes fun at readers who agree with Stockmann
and clumsily read him as a hero, arguing that “if the ‘compact majority’
be a failure so stupendous as some people read it . . . and if the select few
know it all, there is obviously no middle course. The only retreat, then, is
200 Kept from All Contagion

to absolutism.”110 The aforementioned 1909 review insists that Stockmann’s

recommendations cannot be taken seriously by the populace or the audience:

[Ibsen] by no means intends to convey, all the time, that the

worthy doctor’s [bacteria] actually endangered [the town]. Some
of the time, on the contrary—if not a good part of it, he car-
icatures the doctor himself. Nobody knows better than Ibsen
that if some of the worthy doctors had their way we should
eat next to nothing and perish for want of water and all for
fear of [bacteria].111

Thus, when Stockmann insists that the strongest is he who stands alone,
Ibsen—by incorporating typhoid into his plot—is alluding to the unviability
of isolationist politics via implicit suggestion of the imagery of failed efforts
to seal off waste and contaminants that resulted in nothing less than festering
and overflow. A successful system mitigates this risk, avoids extremism, and
remains open to the outside world, and effectively leans into the inextricably
connection of one human to the world of other humans around them.

Sewage as a Metaphor for Free Love

in Hardy’s Final Novel

This brings me to my final text in this chapter, which I will cover only briefly
by way of conclusion, Thomas Hardy’s odd and oft-reviled (particularly by
present-day critics) novel The Well-Beloved. I’m concerned here chiefly with
Hardy’s theoretical and philosophical aims in crafting the nebulous figure
of “the well-beloved,” and will not cover the intricacies of the plot itself.
Written first in 1892 and then rewritten in 1897, both before and after,
then, the publication of Jude the Obscure in 1895, The Well-Beloved is the
story of Jocelyn Pierston, an up-and-coming sculptor who lives in the remote
Dorset island of Portland. During the novel, he leaves the island and moves
to London, joining the Royal Society as a famed artist. This, however, is
mere backdrop to the true plot of the story—the movement of Pierston’s
“well-beloved,” a palimpsestic euphemism describing the capriciousness of
his own sexual attraction. During the novel, Pierston falls in love with Avice
Caro. Then he falls in love with her daughter. Then he falls in love with
her daughter. Especially given Hardy’s own tendencies to become infatuated
with women much younger than himself, modern literary scholars tend to
 Humanity’s Waste 201

react with distaste to the novel. As I have argued with the previous two
authors covered in this chapter, however, I would suggest the value of setting
aside convenient interpretations of novels as thinly veiled autobiographies.
Hardy’s own quasi-lecherous tendencies aside, then, this odd pretext of a
plot provides, I would argue, a uniquely late-century view of society. In
the context of flow and openness, I’d like to highlight the nature of “the
well-beloved” as something explicitly tagged as symbolic in the novel. The
figure of the well-beloved as a disembodied but living figure is introduced
in nearly the first page of the novel as “a migratory, elusive idealization who,
ever since his boyhood, had flitted from human shell to human shell.” In
the 1897 version, Hardy omits the reference to human shells, but maintains
his insistence on the disembodied—I would argue symbolic—nature of the
well-beloved. His longer explanation of the figure, which follows on the heels
of this, remains mostly unchanged between the two versions:

To his Well-Beloved he had always been faithful; but she had

many embodiments. Each individuality known as Lucy, Jane,
Flora, Evangeline, or whatnot, had been merely a transient
condition of her. He did not recognize this as an excuse or as
a defense, but as a fact simply. Essentially she was perhaps of
no tangible substance: a spirit, a dream, a frenzy, a conception,
an aroma, an epitomized sex, a light of the eye, a parting of the
lips. . . . By making this clear to his mind some time before
today, he had escaped a good deal of ugly self-reproach [1897
addition: which he might otherwise have incurred from his own
judgment, as being the very embodiment of fickleness.] It was
simply that she who always attracted him, and led him whither
she would as by a silken thread, had not remained the occupant
of the same fleshly tabernacle in her career so far.112

Thus, I would like to suggest in closing that Hardy’s use of the well-beloved,
as any human entity whose value is suddenly made visible to an observer,
was a productive means of highlighting the fact that any human narrative
has value, if this value is only attended to. While, indeed, Pierston’s own
fetishization of women is often difficult to excuse, Hardy in fact makes no
excuses for it (as the above passage states rather blatantly). Rather, readers
must separate the character of Pierston from the narrative voice, and that
voice from Hardy’s own, all of which are capable of holding different values
of the women, both sexual and human. Pierston may make poor use of
202 Kept from All Contagion

the well-beloved, that is, but Hardy’s figuration of the well-beloved operates
by forcing attendance to and focus on the humanity of randomly selected
individuals, highlighting through this device (as his work is so wont to
do) the value of the small, unnamed experiences of the human, animal,
vegetable, and even microbial community around us.
The intensely regional flavor of The Well-Beloved also drives this point
home. Hardy is well known for highlighting the value of his native Dorset
community, all too readily filed away as “backwater” farmers to London
readers and other urbanites. More than most Victorian authors, Hardy is
always deeply invested with humanizing the Dorset locals and highlighting
the value of even those small, little-heard-of communities that may otherwise
seem foreign. Thus, readers of Hardy are privy to small-town pub scenes,
rural folklore, and folk music from Dorset—all in the name of upholding
the value of the small communities which Hardy was privy to. If we can
recognize the value of these esoteric practices, surely we can recognize the
value of all people in the human community.
If Dorset constituted regional fiction about a far-off area to most Brit-
ish Victorians, Portland constitutes its own incredibly isolated area within
Dorset. Set far off the coast, connected by only a small land-bridge even
today, Portland was incredibly insular in the Victorian Era (the land-bridge
having yet to be built). Hardy in fact prefaces his 1892 manuscript by
highlighting the intensely individual nature of the community in which he
sets the story, describing Portland as a “peninsula carved by time out of a
single stone, whereon most of the following scenes are laid, has been for
centuries immemorial the home of a curious and well-nigh distinct people,
cherishing strange beliefs and singular customs.”113 It is significant here
that Hardy immediately follows his identification of an isolated place by
explaining its relevance to a unique community worthy of devoting time and
attention to in his novel, in spite of—and Hardy likely would have said
because of—their “strange beliefs and singular customs.” He continues his
preface by anticipating concerns about the unpalatability or uninteresting
nature of his depictions, while simultaneously highlighting the symbolic
character of the well-beloved itself:

It is a spot apt to generate a type of personage like the character

imperfectly sketched in these pages—a native of natives—whom
some may choose to call a fantast (if they honor him with their
consideration so far), but whom others may see only as one that
gave objective continuity and a name to a delicate dream which
 Humanity’s Waste 203

in a vaguer form is more or less common to all men, and is by

no means new to Platonic philosophers.114

I have said that Portland is regionalized even within the regionalized Dorset;
Hardy insists that his protagonist is “a native of natives,” promoting early
on his narrative call to “honor” others with simple “consideration.” The
regionalism and careful attention to humble creatures and characters across
his entire oeuvre, and this novel particularly, insists that the vast array of
individualized lives (with which we live in constant communion) warrant
our attention. Moreover, his preface urges, readers would likely find that,
if given, this momentary attention would prove its own worth by raising
awareness of the intrinsic value of this community at large. As I’ve sug-
gested, for Hardy, this is only possible through intermittent but repeated,
hyper-focused and individualized accounts of experience of the community
and world that provide spaces of empathy and connection through narra-
tive. His emphasis on Platonic forms and types emphasizes his authorial
separation from Pierston, as he introduces the concept of the well-beloved
as something “common to all men” and familiar to Platonists. Pierston’s
odd philanderings are by no means “common to all,” and his odd fetishes
are certainly portrayed as just that—unique fetishes. Instead, I would argue,
we must take the narrative voice at its word, promoting some element
of Pierston’s experiences that can indeed be shared by all, and this is the
promotion throughout the novel of various human types—who represent
simply the form of humanity and its need for connection and empathy as
demonstrated through repeated, episodic, and highlighted focus on them.
The stone upon which the island is formed (mentioned in the first
line of the preface) is also integral to the novel’s suggestions about human
community, which I argue draw on sewage developments in the late century.
The landscape of Portland is radically different from the rest of Dorset,
constituted of neither the rolling dairy farms of the Frome Valley, nor the
beautiful sandy beachscapes on the west coast so popular with British tourists
today. The Island of Portland, rather, is imbued with a chalky whiteness that
pervades the atmosphere, and the beaches are comprised of rough shingled
stones. The chalky whiteness is owing to the island’s main commodity—
Portland stone—which is hewn all over the island. Portland stone is known
for its unique qualities as a mineral, and was used in late-century sewerage
innovations as a suitably smooth and nonporous material for pipes at this
time. Just as manuals on piping emphasized ventilation, they also emphasized
the import of nonporous surfaces which encouraged flow across them, rather
204 Kept from All Contagion

than absorption and stagnation. In regard to sewer pipes, one handbook

urges that “sewers should be made of glazed earthenware, or well-burnt,
impervious brick, set in Portland cement.”115 Most handbooks echo this
sentiment, emphasizing “enameled,” “non-absorbant,” or “smooth-glazed sur-
faces” alongside their emphases on ventilation.116 The image here emphasizes
well the ideological work that such smooth, nonporous pipes did toward
insisting on “perfect conductors” of flow (see Figure 5.3).117

Figure 5.3. Advertisement for Sewage Pipes, 1896.

 Humanity’s Waste 205

The figure of the well-beloved can be meaningfully read, I would argue,

as an awareness of human value that flits from being to being, alighting for
brief periods on individuals as a veritable human interest piece and then
moving on, embodying perfectly a flowing conduit highlighting individuals
connected through the invisible bonds of community as well as the invis-
ible microbiomes that tie them together. This is especially so, as the novel
in the 1892 edition concludes with a reflection on sewage piping. While
typhoid is never mentioned in The Well-Beloved, the first version of the novel
intriguingly concludes with this abrupt embedded epilogue:

[Pierston’s] business was, among kindred undertakings which

followed the extinction of the Well-Beloved and other ideals, to
advance a scheme for the closing of the old natural fountains
in the Street of Wells, because of their possible contamination,
and supplying the townlet with water from pipes, a scheme
that was carried out at his expense, as is well known. He was
also engaged in acquiring some old moss-grown . . . cottages,
for the purpose of pulling them down because they were damp;
which he afterwards did, and built new ones with hollow walls
and full of ventilators.118

The once-famous sculptor has ended his career innovating the sewers that
rely both on this intensely localized Portland stone and also on flow and
ventilation. Once again, we see a human and community setup in a plot that
involves the highlighting of human value and connection between humans,
overlaid with a palimpsest of the paradoxically relevant discussion of con-
temporary typhoid and sewerage innovations. Moreover, whereas Pierston’s
personal fetishized approach to the well-beloved is “extinct,” he instead opts
for more platonic (double-entendre intended) commitment to the human
community that had been symbolically suggested (and subjectively misused
by him) throughout the plot. Here, he engages in community improvement
projects that primarily highlight the value of flow, connection, and open-
ness to risk (through ventilation). This odd, seemingly irrelevant ending
to a novel apparently about very different things brings Hardy’s narrative
argument about ethical community behavior full circle. Although Pierston
may abuse his awareness of the well-beloved throughout the novel, Hardy
forces reader attention to the potential benefits of growing awareness of
the human community and willingness to engage in and improve it from
within, rather than from a place of isolated moral superiority.
206 Kept from All Contagion

In The Woman Who Did, readers are privy to the story of a woman’s
failed attempt to live in moral isolation—disconnected from her fellow
man and their plight. Here, typhoid, a disease of festering, sealed sewers, is
used to kill off her partner, thus isolating her even beyond her own desires
and thereby revealing the problems with attempting to attain purity via
isolation. In An Enemy of the People, a less-than-scrupulous scientist invokes
the specter of this same disease to insist upon his own dictatorial leadership
of the populace. Again, the main character’s insistence upon isolated moral
superiority leads to his downfall, and this tragic ending—in which he insists
upon the value of his isolation even as he is attacked by a mob—walks in
lockstep with his outdated notions of sealing away physical disease rather
than acknowledging the necessary and vital role of connection with risk
encounters. Thus, the human and the microbe mutually constitute the moral
outcomes of these plots and their implications—nothing is without risk,
and risk is in fact vital to humanity’s emotional and moral vitality. Finally,
in The Well-Beloved, Hardy turns the tables entirely—as is so characteristic
of his defiant plot stylings—and uses the idea of free love as a paradoxical
and provocative means of insisting upon connection and universal human
value. This constitutes a shift from Jude and Sue’s attempt at progress
through moral isolationism, and Hardy closes this book curiously (although
I hope it will no longer seem curious) with the only prolonged depiction of
cutting-edge sewage disposal that I have personally encountered in Victo-
rian fiction, one that insists upon flow, openness, and connection with the
seemingly threatening, all in pursuit of a life more meaningful than mere
biological existence. Counterintuitively, then, late-Victorian authors found
in representations of human waste a means of urging readers not to waste
their ability to see the humanity of others.