"Spotted Death":  Smallpox and Images of Women in  Three Literary Texts

Ann Henley (North Carolina State University)

“Spotted Death”: Smallpox and Images of Women in Three Literary Texts lman points out that disease has long functioned in visual and literary texts as a powerful code for the chaotic, the disruptive, and the inchoate (4). From Thucydides to Fracastoro to Dickens to Jose Saramago, writers have used accounts of plagues, epidemics, and illness to explore not only our corporate and individual fear of the collapse of the fragile tissue of civic and psychological stability but also our equation of otherness with physical and moral corruption. Far more commonplace, of course, are representations of woman as duplicitous corrupter, defiler of not just of men but of mankind itself. In this presentation—using reproduction of the title page vignette of a 19 th-century French translation of Fracastoro’s Syphilis as visual illustration—I examine the function of smallpox, which by the 18 th century was Europe ’s most devastating and feared disease, in three texts from the late 18 th and 19 th centuries. In each of the three—Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Lady Eleanor’s Mantle, and Emile Zola’s Nana—smallpox forges a dramatic link between these two image clusters. The diseased woman, the central character of each, becomes initially the image of her own inner corruption, the pox themselves characters that inscribe her evil for all to read. Subsequently the ravaged, disfigured female body functions as a metaphor for fatal dysfunction in the body of society.