Infectious Fiction: Plague and the Novelist in Arthur Mervyn and The Last Man

A dreadful plague in London was In the year sixty-five, Which swept an hundred thousand souls Away; yet I alive! --Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (248) In Curiosities of Literature (1791), Isaac D'Israeli observes: "a novel is a very dangerous poison in the hand of a libertine; it may be a salutary medicine in that of a virtuous writer" (241). D'Israeli's words capture both sides of the charged debate in the late eighteenth century over the value and responsibility of the novel. Proponents of the burgeoning genre regarded it as an aesthetic mode uniquely suited to represent the real issues and emotions of the human experience; for its critics, however, the novel was a pernicious influence, a malignant disease whose corrupt ideas spread uncontrollably through eager readers. Rhetoric that condemned the novel often likened its proliferation to the plague. (1) This was a potent comparison, indeed, for the 1790s experienced the first of a new series of epidemics that would terrorize the Western world throughout the nineteenth century. (2) This essay argues that two plague novels, Charles Broekden Brown's Arthur Mervyn (1799) and Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826), specifically respond to contemporary attacks against the novel by equating the practice of novel-writing with the promise of survival. In both novels, first-person narrators chronicle their experiences negotiating the plague that has ravaged the world around them. These narrators survive not merely because they are "structural necessit[ies] of the novel" (Melville 825), but because they have established themselves early on as novelists who write amid the informational void that unfolds during the turmoil of outbreak. Thus, Brown and Shelley suggest that the novel, rather than spreading its own moral plague, in fact provides medication against the world's real infections. Daniel Defoe's narrator in A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) takes readers through the horrors of the plague both statistically and episodically, but he is left wondering, "yet I alive!" (248). (3) The narrators who survive the plague in Arthur Mervyn and The Last Man echo the surprise articulated by Defoe's speaker. Brown's titular protagonist describes the curiosity of his recovery: "That, amidst an atmosphere so contagious and deadly, amidst causes of destruction hourly accumulating, I should yet survive, appears to me nothing less than miraculous" (166). Shelley's Lionel Verney similarly expresses that "not one person, attacked by the grim disease, had recovered. My restoration was looked on as a deception" (343). Brown and Shelley set the terms for surviving the plague in the act of writing, of telling the story of the plague and its human destruction amid the horror itself. Barbara Johnson argues that the plague is "at once that which stops all systems of meaning from functioning and that against which those systems are necessarily erected" (264). (4) When communication networks come to a halt during the frenzied fear of contagion, novelists survive to recreate history and to establish new meaning out of a human void. Bryan Waterman examines the "descriptions of rumor" in Arthur Mervyn to suggest that "words and the imagination--the very stuff of fiction--can have physical effects and even do bodily damage" (214). (5) I argue conversely that the "stuff of fiction," as read through the distinctive mode of the novel, can be restorative rather than destructive. This essay offers a new reading of Arthur Mervyn and The Last Man by suggesting that the novels are as much concerned with the recuperative power of writing as they are with the devastating effects of the plague. Brown and Shelley not only promote novel-writing as an antidote against contagion, but also suggest that novels--through their particular properties as popular, addictive, and enduring sources of information and imagination--could prevent future outbreaks. Scholarship on plague literature typically focuses on how the plague functions as an implacable equalizer. …