Categories: Books

Tuberculosis’ Influence on 19th Century Literature

“The captain of all these men of death that came against him to take him away, was the consumption, for it was that that brought him down to the grave.”-John Bunyan: The Life and Death of Mr. Badman

Tuberculosis, for a very brief time in history, became a symbol for a tragic beauty that marked the social structure and literature, art and theater of the day. Although the disease was the most virulent and potent killer that transcended all races, classes and nations, it came to embody an unbridled passion of a sensitive soul; amazingly, tuberculosis, that drawn-out, painfully slow killer also known as “consumption,” became intrinsically linked with the passion that was the flip side of death. The British Romantics, especially, embodied this stylish disease, which shaped many of the classic works of the Romantic movement.

John Keats is the “poster boy” for the metaphors ascribed to the fatal disease. A gifted and talented poet, he died at the age of 25 from the same disease which had claimed his mother and three brothers. His association with the disease was present in many of his works, which swell heavily on the theme of life “as a tangle of inseparable but irreconcilable opposites” (Abrams). These opposites, such as love and cruelty, pervade his poetry and show an irresistible beauty found in the life cut short and the early death of a loved one. He shows a melancholy in delight, a pleasure in pain and portrays the highest intensity of love as approximation to death. It is this view that begins to explain the positive Romantic metaphors given to “consumption.”

In “Ode on Melancholy, ” which is probably Keats’s best known statement of his recurrent them of the mingled contraries of life, he implies that it is the tragic human destiny that beauty, joy, and life itself owe not only their quality but their value to the fact that they are transitory and turn into their opposites (Norton, 853). He clearly shows these opposites of beauty mingled with pain:

Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,

Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,

Or on the wealth of globed peonies;

Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,

Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,

And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty–Beauty that must die;

And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,

Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips. . . .

(Norton 854, 15-24)

This poem embodies this English Romantic view that permeated the very definition of “consumption;” in this horrible disease, there is a mutability that Keats had witnessed first-hand in his own life with the death of his mother and three brothers, and then with his own illness. However, even in a horrible, ugly death, there is a beauty to be found. Conversely, in his view, all beauty, even roses and peonies, die quickly. Rainbows end soon, and even one’s beloved dies. Pleasure may turn to pain; the real knowledge to be obtained from this pain, however, is that melancholy dwells with mortal beauty. This view manifested society, for Keats was widely read, and it became (largely due to his own poetry) the common view that the human destiny was tragic in that beauty, joy, and life itself owe not only their quality but their value to the fact that they were transitory and turned into their opposites (Abrams, 66).

This very Romantic view was also seen very publicly in the popular literature of the day, spreading the metaphoric beauty, romance and tragedy of tuberculosis to the mainstream public. In Jane Eyre, this romantic contrast of beauty and death is clearly shown:

While disease had thus become an inhabitant… and death its frequent visitor; while there was gloom and fear within its walls; while its rooms and passages steamed with hospital smells, the drug and the pastille striving vainly to overcome the effluvia of mortality, that bright May shone unclouded over the bold hills and beautiful woodland out of doors. Its garden, too, glowed with flowers: hollyhocks had sprung up tall trees, lilies had opened, tulips and roses were in bloom; the borders of the little beds were gay with pink thrift and crimson double daisies; the sweetbriars gave out, morning and evening, their scent of spice and apples; and these fragrant treasures were all useless for most of the inmates of Lowood, except to furnish now and then a handful of herbs and blossoms to put in a coffin. (Bronte, 45)

This passage shows the beauty, especially in nature, that the Romantic literary movement found even in the face of what was tantamount to a death sentence. Bronte’s own sister had died of tuberculosis, so she was very familiar with the disease. However, being a consummate Romantic, she gives a glorious and beautiful “spin” to a horrible killer she had witnessed first-hand: “…the illness which is removing me is not painful; it is gentle and gradual; my mind is at rest…by dying young, I shall escape great sufferings and will go greatly to the Universal Parent” (Bronte, 48).

The metaphorical meaning of this disease was woven intrinsically throughout the literature of the Romantic Era. The appeal of this wasting disease, which caused a slow progression of symptoms rather than an acute, short-term infection, was a proclivity for combining tragedy with a greater good; the need for “meaning” in this (at that time) incurable, nearly always fatal condition spun a web of mystery around a disease that turned its victims into tragic heroes or heroines. The pale and wan poets, especially Keats and Shelley, symbolized the romantic and consumptive youth of the 19th century. Romantics began to believe that consumption was associated with gifted and talented people. It was the professional and popular opinion then (before the discovery of germs) that consumption was a constitutional trait and was, therefore, a kind of “gift” – albeit a deadly one.