Syphilis in Victorian Literature and Culture

Medicine, Knowledge and the Spectacle of Victorian Invisibility

Monika Pietrzak-Franger

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783319495347
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319495354
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

 

© The Author(s) 2017

M. Pietrzak-FrangerSyphilis in Victorian Literature and CulturePalgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicinehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49535-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Ways of Seeing

Monika Pietrzak-Franger¹

(1)

Institut fùr Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

End Abstract

The crucial reason behind the socio-political and cultural potency of syphilis in the late nineteenth century lay in the tensions between visibility and invisibility that it produced. Meegan Kennedy argues that its cultural significance was not necessarily due to its high contagiousness but rather to its “paradoxical status as an open secret,” which turned the disease into an “appropriate icon for cultural criticism” (2004: 262) and a feasible political tool. In the “frenzy of the visible” that characterized the second half of the nineteenth century (Comolli 1980: 122), the equivocal symptomatology of the disease and the concomitant “conspiracy of silence” that surrounded it in public endowed syphilis with a particular discursive power, which had tangible effects on the lives of the Victorians and on their practices of self-definition. It is therefore not surprising that Elaine Showalter regards syphilis as “the symbolic disease of the fin de siècle” and stresses its centrality to the then all-encompassing sense of crisis (1986: 88). Yet, although often acknowledged, the profound impact of the disease and its intertwining with the Victorian visual imagination remains largely unexplored.

Agnolo Bronzino’s An Allegory with Venus and Cupid (ca. 1545), or more precisely, the history of its interpretations, exemplifies some of the crucial problems characteristic of the critical study of syphilis in general and of the inquiry into its cultural significance in late Victorian Britain in particular. It highlights the hermeneutic difficulties that have been an integral part of research into the visualization and cultural resonance of syphilis. Executed in the mid-sixteenth century, the painting was described by the ‘father of art history’ Giorgio Vasari a couple of decades later. While his interpretation has left the painting open to different readings, many took it as their point of departure. In view of the general agreement concerning the identity of the three central figures (Venus, Cupid and Time), the rival readings of the painting depend on the interpretation of the subsidiary characters (Healy 1997: 3). Vasari’s identification of one of these – to the far left of the canvas, behind Cupid’s back – with Jealousy had remained unchallenged for centuries until art historian J. F. Conway offered its path-breaking reinterpretation in 1986:

to the innocent eye, unconditioned by Vasari, this [identification of the figure as female] represents a fundamental misinterpretation: the relative absence of the subcutaneous fat which imparts a soft roundness to the adjacent female and pre-pubertal male figures, together with the brawny forearm, the bulging biceps and the deep muscular chest combine to indicate mature and unequivocal masculinity. (251)

Apart from reinterpreting the gender of the figure, Conway questions its identification with Jealousy. Taking into consideration sixteenth-century medical treatises, he argues that, rather than referencing La Gelosia, the figure bears signs of syphilis and embodies the dangers of love (Conway 1986: 254). This interpretation has been supported by subsequent studies (Healy 1997) and has been integrated into the official critical discourse around the painting.¹

This instance of centuries-long critical blindness highlights the intrinsic entwining of syphilis with the issues of (in)visibility and stresses the difficulty in deciphering and/or interpreting the disease. It also points out that a study that integrates the instruments and findings of more than one discipline, art history and the history of medicine in this case, is best suited for interpreting syphilis and its visualizations. Last but not least, it makes clear that the study of syphilis has been hindered by canonical interpretations that often remain unchallenged and that are indicative of some of the critical blind spots that have been part and parcel of the research into the cultural significance of the disease.²

Syphilis in Victorian Literature and Culture addresses these critical shortcomings in order to recover the complexity of syphilis and the scope of its influence and thus to review its implications for late Victorian culture. Taking as a point of departure the culture of the European fin de siècle, understood in a broader sense as the period between 1880 and 1910, this project addresses the evident but unexplored intertwining of visibility and invisibility in the discourses around syphilis. This approach makes it possible to see syphilis not only as an ambiguous object of Victorian concern but also as a means via which broader domains of (in)visibility were constructed. I argue that a rethinking of the disease with reference to its ambiguous status and the ways of seeing that it generated will help to reconsider the network of socio-cultural and political interrelations which were negotiated through syphilis, thereby also raising larger questions about its function in the (de)construction of national and imperial identities.

Syphilis in Victorian Literature and Culture is the first large-scale interdisciplinary study of syphilis in late Victorian Britain whose significance lies in its unprecedented attention to the multimedia and multidiscursive evocations of the disease. It is the underlying contention of this book that a continuing insistence on discursive and media boundaries in the study of syphilis has contributed to a partial misreading of the disease. Hence, the book counteracts existing critical logophilia and iconophobia as well as moving beyond well-established epistemological binaries. An examination of the heterogeneous sources that it offers, many of which have up to this point escaped critical attention, makes it possible to reveal the complex and poly-ideological reasons for the activation of syphilis imagery and its symbolic function in late Victorian culture. In this context then, I attempt what Kate Flint calls for in her book The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (2000), namely to unravel the vistas of invisibility that, in this case, accompanied the depiction of syphilis in the multimedia fabric of the late Victorian era.

Like in the nineteenth century, today, the tensions between the visibility and invisibility of the disease remain largely unresolved. Despite its demystification and media invisibility, syphilis remains a continual, if often unacknowledged, threat. In his historical overview of the socio-cultural function of syphilis, Claude Quétel asserts that syphilis “has lulled us into a state in which we no longer fear it, a state in which we even overlook it” (1990: 8). In a recent re-evaluation of this statement, R. M. Kaplan stresses that although the disease is “[w]ritten-off endlessly by its obituarists, syphilis abides” (2010: 22). The 2010 revelations about Guatemala syphilis experiments, like the debates surrounding the ethical implications of the Tuskegee and Oslo studies and more frequent reports about its persistence in the western world, show that, although its cultural significance has been diminishing, syphilis, absent as it usually is from news reports, continues to take its toll at the margins of public visibility.³ Since the beginning of the new millennium, medical authorities have continued to assert an increase in its incidence around the world.⁴ Although these concerns have resurfaced in awareness campaigns and sporadic media reports, popular culture today treats syphilis chiefly as a subject of sexual jokes.⁵ In view of this paradoxical status of syphilis today – a cultural disregard on the one hand and a continuing medical concern on the other – it is tempting to draw parallels with Victorian culture, in which the tension between the visibility and invisibility of syphilis was very prominent and highly complicated. Although syphilis has bequeathed its phantasmatic significance to AIDS, which is not only characterized in terms earlier reserved for syphilis, but which also partakes of its iconographic heritage,⁶ syphilis continues to haunt our present. Ultimately, a discussion of its socio-cultural significance in the nineteenth century therefore also sheds light on the mechanisms in the production and dissemination of knowledge about communicable diseases, spotlights changing attitudes towards them and outlines the continuity of their iconography.

Syphilis and Its (In)Visibility

The closing decades of the nineteenth century brought an intensification of popular and medical debates about syphilis, which were accompanied by a number of aesthetic and political problems concerned with its cross-media evocation. Changes in the structure of medicine allowed for a formation of syphilology as a separate branch of inquiry in France and contributed to a more systematic work on the disease’s pathology, aetiology and history across Europe. In Britain, popular debates about the Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866, 1869), the repeal campaigns (1870–85), along with growing concerns about the future of the nation, as well as the rise of feminist, purity and eugenic movements drew attention to the socio-cultural, economic and political impact of the disease. As a result of these developments, syphilis celebrated an unprecedented appearance in a variety of media, from medical treatises, atlases and museums to decadent and New Woman writing. Patrick Wald Lasowski highlights the phantasmatic ubiquity of syphilis in the French literature of the fin de siècle and links it to the issues of visibility and visualization that lie at the core of modernity: “[a]veuglante Syphilis dans le faux jour de l’anxiété, du phantasme, du désir: c’est bien elle le monstre au cœur du labyrinthe des idolâtries où la modernité se cherche” (1982: 10). Although the cultural resonance of the disease has been more readily discussed in the French context, I argue that the oxymoronic potency of syphilis was critical in addressing the exigencies of British modernity.

The ambiguous character of syphilis and the efflorescence with which its metaphors spread at the time were partly due to the tentative character of knowledge about the disease. With Philippe Ricord and Jean Alfred Fournier in France, Rudolf Virchow and Robert Koch in Germany and Jonathan Hutchinson in Britain, the nineteenth century saw an intensification of medical debates on the provenance, prevention and treatment of venereal diseases. This development was partly due to the shift in the structure of medicine, which brought with itself a transformation in the conceptualization of diseases. Besides advancements in t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Ways of Seeing
• 2. Aetiology and Etymology: Concepts, Bodies, Media
• 3. Recognizing Syphilis: Pornographic Knowledge and the Politics of Explanation
• 4. Facing Pathology: Modern (Re)Production of Difference
• 5. Prophylaxis and Treatment: Geopolitics of Differentiation
• 6. (Eugenic) Utopias: National Future and Individual Suffering
• 7. Conclusion: “Uncomforable Proximity” and the Ethics of Display
• Back Matter