Venereal Disease

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 14:16 GMT from University of Illinois @ Urbana-Champaign Library ]
4
Tainted Love
Venereal Disease, Morality, and the
Contagious Disease Acts in Ibsen’s Ghosts and
Hardy’s The Woodlanders and Jude the Obscure
It would be curious to [learn] . . . how much of the sickening

essence . . . Mr. Hardy has thought his . . . public could stomach.
—Margaret Oliphant, Blackwood’s, 1896
Ghosts is a medical clinic for the treatment of diseases arranged for

the stage by Henrik Ibsen, the eminent authority on human nature.
—New York Evening World, January 29, 1903
Like all of Mr. Hardy’s work, The Woodlanders contains much that is
positively repulsive. . . . and yet we read him because of something
that lays hold of the imagination lightly but firmly.
—The Critic, April 16, 1887
We know [Ibsen’s] defects, his lack of humor, of charm, his bourgeois

imagination . . . his lack of style; and we also know his power, relent-
less grasp of realities, his cruelty kin to that of the surgeon who heals
as he pains.
—The Sun, January 27, 1903
133
134 Kept from All Contagion
The Horror!
A repulsive attraction, a fixation with the lurid, exposed underbelly of

“decent” society: throughout the nineteenth century, critics repeatedly
described both Thomas Hardy and Henrik Ibsen in this manner. Victorian
critical assessments of these authors in many ways parallel the love-to-hate
assessments of reality TV shows made by contemporary media critics and
popular audiences. While opponents and supporters of both men scrawled
their aversion with one queasy hand, they illustrated a surprising ambidex-
terity as the other hand almost universally lauded the authors as geniuses
and masters of the craft. Even Margaret Oliphant, so famously horrified
by Hardy’s “impious” and “foul” books that dwell in “dark corners where
the amateurs of filth find garbage to their taste,” made sure to qualify her
critique in asserting that the true horror of the displays stemmed from their
origination in a “Master’s hand.”1
Janus-faced estimations of Hardy and Ibsen persist even today. I person-
ally can vividly recall being confronted at a party by a man—an academic,
no less—who demanded an explanation for my interest in Hardy, who was,
in his estimation, the single most depressing author in existence. Norwegians
have expressed similar sentiments about Ibsen, even as they tout him as a
national icon. Strangely, when asked to defend my enjoyment of Hardy
and Ibsen, I often find myself at a loss for words; but there is something
in the work of both men that demands witness, even as it repulses. Their
texts arrest the reader in a responsive limbo, compelling and yet repelling in
their alluring degradation and scenes of degraded allure. Something about
Jude’s story attracts—haunts, even—and readers have continued to follow
his morose footsteps even unto the threshold of the closet where his chil-
dren hang. Likewise, there is something in Hedda Gabler’s manic search for
meaning—her desperate desire to slough off the skin of her own ennui even
if it means blowing her brains out—that strikes true to us, rather stymied
in the middle echelons of class as the majority of us are. Somehow, a bullet
to the head isn’t enough to kill our empathy with Hedda’s dilemma, and in
these moments we find the source of the authors’ success.
By tapping into the hauntingly tragic, the dangerously dirty, and the
(hitherto) unspeakably depraved, Ibsen and Hardy have held audiences in
attentive stasis for more than a century and a half. There is active resistance—
aversion, even—to their entrancing worlds, but this resistance also engages
with dark truths that might otherwise be ignored. As William Archer said
of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, “Many—perhaps the majority—violently resented
the novel experience, but they could not elude it.”2 Through the dirty,
Tainted Love 135
the strange, and the diseased, Hardy and Ibsen recycled dingy and dismal
realities to force reader attention to the marginalized and disenfranchised
groups that undergird and bolster “polite society.” What is there in the
artistry of both authors that requires abiding the gutters behind the prim
manor houses? Why do both men insist that, as Hardy put it, “if a way
to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst”?3 What is it about
the foul and the filthy that gives their work cultural heft—such heft that
even those who deplored their indecency themselves harnessed the rhetorical
power of pathological and sanitary discourse?
Curiously, Hardy and Ibsen have virtually never been critically com-
pared, except in passing, in spite of significant parallels between them.4 For
one thing, both men lived during roughly the same time period (Ibsen,
1828–1906; Hardy, 1840–1928) and were thus exposed to similar cultural
concerns; while Ibsen’s Norway was arguably somewhat disconnected from
the cultural milieu of Victorian Britain, Ibsen spent most of his productive
years in Germany and Italy and thus shared a much closer cultural context
with Hardy than might otherwise have been the case.5 In addition, although
the men seem never to have met or corresponded, they shared a common
literary circle, as both were in close correspondence with Edmund Gosse
and William Archer.6 Most importantly, both men took up many of the
same thematic concerns: questions of social mobility, the role of women
in a changing society, and—my focus in this paper—the righteousness of
extant systems of social propriety. Finally, both men were keenly attuned
to the scientific discourse of their day and often used it to work to serve
their own ends and subvert systems of social propriety.
I intend this chapter to serve in part as a first foray into the uncharted
territory connecting Hardy’s and Ibsen’s work. I focus, however, on the
underbelly of their work—the sticky, messy, tangled-up subject matter
that both used as vessels for their thematic aims. In addressing two of the
most famous and controversial authors of the late-Victorian era, I establish
in this chapter the factors underlying their choices to use disease—here,
sexually transmitted disease—as a powerful channel to probe and critique
broader social conditions. In the previous chapters, I have shown texts and
authors that posited isolation not as safe and pure, but as stifling, and
possibly disease-ridden itself. In Defoe and Shelley, readers are privy to the
futility of quarantine, and, particularly through Defoe, its potential to allow
for greater disease growth through stagnant festering. James inverts this
dynamic in his depiction of a young woman who chooses isolation from this
risk-averse society in order to counter its very insistence on purity through
avoidance of risk encounters. The female authors in the last chapter deftly
use disease to show that isolation itself is the disease society ought to be
most concerned with. This thematic trajectory leads nicely to Ibsen’s and
Hardy’s use of disease, as both authors weave these strands of isolation, risk
aversion, and questions of social progress together in their considerations
of the performance of moral purity in a socially rigid age—considerations
that, as I will show, are communicated through the vehicle of the diseases
coded as most socially impure, venereal disease. My analyses reveal in Ibsen’s
case the spiritual anemia of social and moral isolation, and in Hardy’s the
salvific potential of engagement in the social world, even if it means crossing
moral and pathogenic boundaries.
Indeed, both Hardy and Ibsen could be characterized as “lovable literary
renegades,” insofar as their work remained popular even as it consistently
challenged the status quo—both by featuring incendiary subject matter
and by raising the question of what could be printed or even discussed in
“proper” social discourse—and thus incurred critical ire. That Hardy aban-
doned novel writing in reaction to critical assessments of Jude the Obscure
is a famous (if dubious) literary event. Arguably less famous, anecdotally
at least, are the reactions to Ibsen’s equally contentious works—works that
often dealt with many of the same themes as Hardy’s novels.7
Like many of Hardy’s texts, the 1891 English debut of Ghosts, the third
of Ibsen’s so-called problem-plays, was met with critical outrage.8 George
Bernard Shaw collected many of the negative reviews in his Quintessence
of Ibsenism: “absolutely loathsome and fetid,” “gross, almost putrid,” “liter-
ary carrion,” and “naked loathsomeness” were some of the milder epithets
attached to the production.9 Timothy Carlo Matos describes the backlash
against the play and its playwright as “one of the most inflammatory the-
atrical quarrels in European theatre history,” resulting in approximately five
hundred printed reviews and reactions.10 One oft-cited review, which appeared
in Daily Telegraph, deemed the play an “open drain . . . a loathsome sore
unbandaged . . . a dirty act done publicly; a lazar house with all its doors
and windows open.”11 The characters that populate the play, the reviewer
continued, “expectorate . . . in public, and air on the stage matters that a
blind beggar would hide under his patches.”12 Notably, Matos devotes an
entire article to exploring the curious fact that reviewers often responded to
Ghosts with vitriolic attacks using language typically associated with conta-
gious diseases, while virtually none used such language in assessing Enemy
of the People (first produced in 1893), a play whose action centers around
a cholera outbreak. Matos’s ultimate assertion is that cholera, though con-
tagious, does not threaten the public’s sense of decency in the same way as
an overt discussion of syphilis, the disease of interest in Ghosts.
Tainted Love 137
Matos’s point is well taken. Depictions of sexual impropriety and sex-

ually transmitted diseases (“STDs”) obviously contravened Victorian social
decorum. In fact, Evert Sprinchorn notes that the very word syphilis did
not appear in print until 1901.13 However, I would expand upon Matos’s
working hypothesis and argue further that critics analyzed Hardy and Ibsen
in language that made broad use of epidemiological discourse, whether
discussing a range of their texts or the authors’ fictional creations and the-
matic interests as a whole. Of specific interest here is my claim that critical
discourse took this approach because of the significant cultural significance
of disease and infection in the bacteriological age, collateral that Hardy and
Ibsen strategically cashed in on to bolster their socially subversive claims.
Disease in their works points unwaveringly at a diseased moral society, not
mere agentless microbes, as the true etiological source. In doing so, their
works also make claims about societal admonitions regarding moral and
bacterial purity, turning their arguments back upon themselves to show
that, paradoxically, these admonitions actually degrade society through their
misguided aims. Hardy went even farther, specifically upholding diseased
and contaminated relationships as more natural and potentially fruitful than
anything as unnatural and impossible as a perfectly sterile union.
The authors’ appropriation of disease discourse is so complex in its
rhetorical and thematic maneuvers—folding over and over itself like so many
polypeptides within a protein—that contemporary critics decrying the foul
filth of “Ibsenism” and Hardyism often found themselves trapped within—
and reliant on—their discursive web. Hardy and Ibsen so deftly repurposed
disease that their own thematic claims became culturally contagious, even in
the mouths of naysayers. Indeed, whatever power Hardy and Ibsen found
in discourses of pathology, reviewers evidently found equally persuasive, as
they made similar linguistic choices in analyzing their work. For example,
one essay, aptly titled “The Ibsen Bacillus,” insists that “the pity of ” Ibsen’s
popularity “is that a man who might have done much better should have
started or re-started a bacillus, which has infected . . . his pretentious
admirers.”14 Another reviewer likened Ghosts to spoiled food: a “highly
Rancid drama” for the author of “More Morbid than Ibsen.”15 Of Hardy,
one reviewer claimed that his work was full of “nauseous cant . . . false
sentiment . . . vulgar ostentation . . . probably . . . due to evil influence.”16
Reviewers also often spoke critically of Hardy using broadly scien-
tific and medical, rather than specifically pathological, discourse. Perhaps,
to take Matos’s point, this is because Hardy less overtly cast infectious
disease as a central structuring device for his novels. However, the use of
scientific terminology in contemporary reviews of Hardy’s work speaks to
the undercurrent of scientific and medical discourse that helps unify his
novels. For one reviewer, Far From the Madding Crowd was “a mutilated”
pastoral.17 Another deplored his “dissection” of the protagonists in Return
of the Native.18 In Jude the Obscure, “the anatomy of suffering” Hardy laid
out “becomes vivisection,” a term that evokes the issue of medical dissec-
tion of animals that was actively being debated late in the century.19 One
reviewer in particular warned against “contamin[ating]” young girls’ minds
with Jude the Obscure.20 As this chapter will show, contamination was readily
associated in the Victorian era with sexually transmitted disease, and one
of Hardy’s earliest reviewers lamented that “the author’s powers” were not
“extended, instead of being prostituted to the purpose of idle prying into
the ways of wickedness.”21
If Hardy and Ibsen were veritable “bacilli” due to their contagious
influences, there is no doubt that they infected the very reviewers who
critiqued them using similar disease rhetoric. Ultimately, I argue that Har-
dy’s and Ibsen’s treatment of the contagious nature of the illnesses in their
texts reveals the complex nature of their social critiques, as both authors
repurpose medical and scientific viewpoints to make their case. Indeed,
a careful reading of Ibsen’s Ghosts (1881) and Hardy’s The Woodlanders
(1887) shows that in the post-germ-theory world and the dawning era
of bacteriology both authors injected disease into that most intimate of
human relationships—marriage and sexual partnerships—precisely to invert
disease discourse. Rather than depicting scrupulous cleanliness, whether
of mind or body, as a laudable goal, both sought to show purity as con-
foundingly self-contaminating. Ghosts and The Woodlanders illustrate vividly
that those who try the hardest to uphold socially approved standards of
propriety in fact contaminate society with an infectious and insidious moral
degeneracy.
Risky Business: The Contagious Disease Acts in Context
Both Ghosts and The Woodlanders appeared at a time when social constructs
surrounding sexually transmitted disease were changing. In Britain, a series of
legal sanctions called The Contagious Disease Acts were enacted in 1864 in
an attempt to control the spread of syphilis. Any woman suspected of being
a prostitute could be forcibly detained by police and undergo “compulsory
instrumental introspection of her person” in search of signs of syphilis,
Tainted Love 139
which, if found, allowed police to incarcerate the woman in a hospital for

up to three months.22 The process entitled women to “no jury, no counsel”
and no ability to ask the apprehending officer “what . . . his ‘good cause’ ”
was.23 Importantly, the Contagious Disease Acts (“CDA”) were based on
similar, earlier legislation in France and Sweden—syphilis “was rampant in
Scandinavia in the 1880s.”24 The Contagious Disease Acts—which situated
prostitutes as the sole vectors of venereal diseases, with syphilis being the
chief concern—were repealed in 1886. The change came out of a growing
awareness that, without men to traffic in prostitutes, venereal disease could
not spread—an awareness I argue is necessarily linked to the predictable
epidemiological pathways made apparent by germ theory.25 Although Ghosts
was written five years before the repeal of the Acts, resistance and repeal
efforts had been underway almost since their inception. Before the repeal
efforts succeeded, however, the CDA was founded on and perpetuated a
worldview in which “prostitutes were seen as both physically and morally
responsible for the spread of venereal disease. They were seen not merely as
agents of transmission but as inherently diseased, if not the disease itself.”26
Indeed, even as Ibsen and Hardy used syphilis as a vehicle for their con-
cerns about the ideological moral purity of the hearth and home, those in
the Pro-CDA camp also conflated prostitution itself with disease: “It is a
necessary evil only in the same sense that poverty and disease are necessary
evils, and it is almost as impossible to eradicate one as the others.”27
The subject was incendiary. Entire periodicals were devoted to the
topic of repeal, The Shield being the most famous. Indeed, since their
passage, the CDA were instantly a topic of hugely publicized debates in
print, usually hinging on assertion or disavowal of the same set of top-
ics (e.g., that the Acts did or did not implicitly isolate women alone as
transmitters of the disease; whether or not men ought, by rights, also to
be policed; whether or not the Acts allowed for abuses of power when it
came to police inspection of women’s bodies) rather than disputes over the
veracity or interpretation of certain facts. Somewhat akin to vaccination
debates today, both sides of the CDA debates focused on the same sets
of concerns, with each party’s arguments essentially amounting to claims
of “no they don’t” or “yes they do.” The result in periodicals is therefore
dizzyingly repetitive; yet this insistent repetition of the same ideas renders
in great clarity the precise issues that concerned Victorians about the Acts.
The table of contents of one such treatise summarizes the issues volleyed
back and forth quite well:
I. Should we treat enthetic diseases at all?

II. Ought they to be treated by the Government at the public
expense?
III. Contagious Disease Acts
(a) Sanitary results28
(b) Moral and social effects29
(c) Do [the laws] increase clandestine prostitution?
(d) Do they interfere unduly with the liberty of the subject?
(e) Are they a form of license of prostitution?
(f ) Is their inequality as applying to only one sex a valid
objection?30
Given the biopolitical scope of this book, as well as the aims of the
literature discussed here, I will focus briefly on the portions of the debate
that dealt with moral and social justifications and outcomes (points I, II,
III[b] and III[d–f ]), rather than the aspects of the debates that addressed
its efficacy or lack thereof (points III[a] and III[c]). To the first two main
points, CDA supporters argued that compulsory vaccination, among other
public health mandates, set a precedent for such legislation.
In large part, the CDA as a whole were a relic of Victorian gender
binaries. Opponents of the Acts were well aware of the double standards
the CDA relied upon, and were quick to point them out to the reading
public. One pamphlet puts the matter thusly:
Male civilians are not under such despotism; and the Act is
quite silent about them. This may not be marvelous, yet it is
infamous. No epithet of scorn and hatred can be too strong for
this dastardly favouritism of the male sex. Who are the original
seducers of women? Men. Who cause disease in women, though
you heal them fifty times? Men.31
Another publication on the topic says indignantly, “The way to ‘stamp out
the disease’ is to stamp upon the guilty parties, male and female, the mark
of public disapprobation. Frown upon the men. Let them be hunted up, and
exposed, and punished.”32 Yet another echoes these sentiments:
Tainted Love 141
It is not unreasonable to suggest that the surveillance which is

proposed should be exercised upon the other sex. Let them suffer
the monthly indignity. Let the probationary course indicated be
applied to them. Let the police authorities have their names on
the roll [of registered offenders], and let them be furnished with
a certificate of health ere they are set at large. Why is legislation
to be all on one side? Why are those who by nature are the
weaker, the more sensitive, the more helpless, to be subjected to
the gross outrage proposed, and the others escape the ordeal?33
In the novel-writing world, Sarah Grand would later address this double
standard explicitly in The Heavenly Twins. However, as her novel addresses
these issues in quite a literal way and does so by promoting the necessity
of female sexual education, I have here chosen male authors who took up
the cause by addressing Victorian ideas of purity and moral superiority
(notions that were integral to the CDA); significantly, the authors I cover
here use disease itself as an apt stand-in for these social concerns. Typical of
the these particular debates, which allowed for the same facts but debated
their biopolitical significance, the pro-CDA pamphleteers merely denied the
relevance of the double standard, rather than denying that a double standard
existed. As Elizabeth Garrett put it, “There would be force in this objection
[regarding double standards] if there were any parallel class among men,
but in the absence of any such class,” such a double standard is the only
legislative option.34 Conversely, one pamphlet, neatly titled Some Suggestions
for Controlling Men as Well as Women, lays out clear and practical ways in
which a parallel class of men could indeed be identified (this author identifies
largely the armed forces—which were recognized by both sides as the most
“at risk”—as well as any civilian who customs a sex worker). The practical
suggestions in this treatise (requiring men who infect women to financially
support their treatment; quarantining all naval officers and requiring them to
pass medical examination before landing ashore; examination of new recruits
prior to their acceptance to the armed forces) stand as sound evidence to
the fact that it would in fact be possible to legislate the policing of male
bodies as well as women’s. Nevertheless, the author grimly acknowledges
that “the public will almost always be on the side of young men as opposed
to bad women,” and admits that “we are not sanguine enough to imagine
that our suggestions . . . will have much effect.”35
As I have said, in this chapter I will show the ways that Hardy and
Ibsen castigate Victorian middle-class morality. Specifically, I will demonstrate
that they do so by inserting disease into “pure” homes, thereby revealing

Victorian values of propriety and purity to be meaningless and, in fact,
diseased. In the Victorian marital home, the wife’s status as the quasi-vir-
ginal “angel of the house” was a synecdoche for this middle-class morality.
Of course, a married woman obviously had sex and bore children, but the
traditional Victorian aversion to female sexual enjoyment is probably one of
the best-known stereotypes of the period. Indeed, the very “confinement”
of visibly pregnant women attests to the premium Victorian society placed
on concealing female participation in the sex act. Yet the married man, by
virtue of being male, was seen as possessed by an unbridled and insatiable
sexuality. For all intents and purposes, then, family patriarchs had to repress
sexual urges directed toward their wives (thanks to the angel-in-the-house
construct), but were also viewed (and taught to view themselves) as sexually
insatiable and therefore given covert license to enlist the services of prostitutes.
This strange alchemical mixture, meant to solidify an ideal of golden purity,
in fact resulted in a leaden mess in which “good ladies” lacked desire, but
were partnered with “good gentlemen” who overflowed with it.
Prostitution is nothing new, of course, but in this context, middle-class
morality was virtually dependent upon the traffic of prostitutes for its
very survival. As with the other aspects of the CDA debates, both parties
seemingly agreed on this fact, with those supporting the Acts naturalizing it
and those arguing for repeal pointing the finger back at both the men who
trafficked prostitutes and also the moral codes of Victorian hearth-and-home
purity that seemingly justified this traffic. Charles Deakin, for instance,
opens his treatise on the defensive against this pointing finger, arguing that
“when we say that prostitution is a necessary evil, ‘we imply’ merely that
it will ‘always exist so long as the animal part of his nature preponderates
in man.’ ”36 Those who urged for the repeal of the Acts, however, insisted
that this very notion of animalistic men was the problem to begin with.
This moral code, positing frigid wives and insatiable husbands, insisted
that women as a sex were “supposed to be innately pure,” while “at the
same time thousands of them were needed to be available to service the
sexual needs of men.”37
Deakins upholds the status quo matter-of-factly, claiming that his
opponents “in dealing with this question . . . forget the difference in pas-
sion of the two sexes,” the difference being that “the sexual instinct is much
more powerful in men than in women as a rule.”38 He falls back on medical
reasoning to support his point, claiming that male ejaculation inevitably
occurs in the form of nocturnal emissions if waking desires are unmet. For
Tainted Love 143
Deakin, such claims are proof that men cannot control their sexual desires,
thus rendering prostitution the “necessary evil” he deems it at the beginning
of his argument. For their part, those urging the repeal of the Acts sneered
in disgust at this theoretical framing, particularly the idea that “a young
man is bound, in duty to his body, to consort with harlots”—and, regarding
nocturnal emissions, they argue that they promote and enable “chastity”
rather than stand as evidence of “a dangerous disease” and indicator of a
need for sexual intercourse.39 Opponents argued that belief in men’s uncon-
trollable urges made possible the CDA, which only served to preserve and
enable male vice and make such vice less of a risk encounter via policing
women’s bodies. The thematic connections to the previous chapters here
should be obvious. To enforce the Acts, one tract claims, is only to “fetter
[and] degrade” the women it affected, offering them up as veritable sacrifices
to the “animal gratification” of men, constituting nothing short of “a gross
pandering to the worst passions of depraved men.”40 The Remedy Worse than
the Disease adds to this argument, urging that “forced medical intervention”
serves only “to . . . continuance of the sin without its penalties [for men],
and to an extension of facilities for the perpetration with impunity, of the
grossest, vilest vice that heaven can behold.”41 Another tract, boldly titled The
Cure of the Great Social Evil with Special Reference to Recent Laws Delusively
Called Contagious Diseases’ Acts, brilliantly elucidates the issue:
“We must by any severity stop this contagion. You cannot stop
it by the ordinary process of law. This sharp malady needs sharp
remedies.” So far, we might agree. One might expect them to
add: “Therefore, we must spy out these respectable family-men,
arrest them, cleanse them, and break up the brothels.” But instead
of this, they reason: “Therefore, by operating on the women,
whether they like it or no, we must bring about that respectable
husbands shall find none but sound harlots in the brothels.” For
my part, I find this to be a very masculine argument.42
The pamphlet Licencing Prostitution goes so far as to deem the registration

and surveillance of prostitutes nothing short of “enrolling these soul-pos-
sessing but hapless victims as slaves.”43 The rancor of the author’s inclusion
of “soul-possessing” as a relevant qualifier for “victims” is an indicator of
the outrage the anti-CDA protestors felt in regard to the Acts. The use of
the term slaves in the period just after the American Civil War is another.
Indeed, many of the treatises note that, in spite of their natural delicacy,
“ladies young and old are filled with horror at the outrages offered to their
sex, and lay aside reticence” to speak out in protest of the legislation.44
As important as the sexual double standard, however, is the fact that
the CDA were based on notions of insuperable class boundaries. It was,
of course, comforting to believe that sexual vice—in this case venereal dis-
ease—could be safely confined to the lower classes and that the sanctity of
the middle-class home could be protected simply by regulating the activities
of the poor. Writers readily took up the cause of gender and paired it with
the obvious issues of class at play in the CDA. Such arguments built upon
concerns of gender-based exploitation, claiming that the Acts “encourage vice
by making it safe and easy to one class, while subjecting another to a cruel
and demoralizing espionage.”45 However, as efforts to repeal the Acts came
to fruition in the mid-1880s—precisely the period when the field of bacte-
riology was developing and bolstering understanding of germ theory—parts
of the public began to understand that venereal disease spread in part by
prostitutes was merely a symptom of a larger and more systemic problem:
an ethically diseased society whose standard of morality kept both men and
women in a state of sexual repression. In fact, this very belief system also
depended upon the idea that the middle class was impervious to the effects
of sexual vice, which they imagined to be situated in the lower classes. Many
opponents cast the Acts as effectually creating and maintaining a separate
class of women solely for male sexual use, and spoke explicitly about this
in moving terms. Even those in support of the Acts had difficulties avoid-
ing this implicit creation of an entirely discrete class of women in their
very attempts to assuage fears that “ordinary” women could be violated.
Over and over, pro-CDA treatises go to great lengths to insist that only
“the common prostitute is the person we wish to control,” and such texts
establish elaborate guidelines that aim to systematically identify “who can
be fairly included in the term ‘common prostitute.’ ”46 Numerous pro-CDA
tracts reaffirm this language of demarcating the “common prostitute” from
other women in support of their claims, assuring readers that “until we are
positive that the woman is a prostitute from one or more proofs,” she is
not medically violated.47 Indeed, the very act of setting apart this class of
women as separate, economically and morally, from others, allowed for sex
workers’ dehumanizing figuration in pro-CDA discourse.
Those arguing against the Acts particularly highlighted this ideological
creation of a class that was somehow separate from the morality, rights, and
humanity of other Victorians. They called attention to this specific shift over
time—“never before” had even this group of women been set aside as a class
that had “lost rights over her own person.” Rather, “to violate [sex workers]”
Tainted Love 145
in the past “was as criminal as to violate a chaste woman.”48 Other treatises

attempted to highlight the classed double standard of the laws, asking, “Which
of the advocates of the Act would face such a risk himself, or permit any
female relative to be examined with the same speculum used for diseased
prostitutes?” in this manner.49 This last qualification hearkens not only to
the penetration-based violation, but also the concern that women could be
diseased by the very act of the examination in an era where disinfectant
methods were nascent—and especially when their use impacted an obviously
vulnerable and exploited population whose personal liberties were already
being actively disregarded (recall chapter 3). Evidence of the dehumanizing
view of the female sex worker necessary to sustain support of the Acts is
indicated by the nature of supporters’ rebuttals to these arguments. “Can
we be expected to believe,” asks one author, “that women whose bodies are
free to all the world, will, if examined by a surgeon, feel misery?”50 When
opponents of the Acts raised questions about potential abuses of power on
the part of police and doctors, this same class bias was integral to pro-CDA
defenses. “It should be remembered,” one author expounds, “that the Act
is not enforced by common constables, but by superintendents of police,
men of tried character, of long standing in the force, almost invariably of
middle age, and married,” as if these aspects of gender, character, age, and
domestic propriety were certain enough insurance against their personal vices.
In the same breath, these socio-moral class distinctions are upheld because
the police “have no power over any but notorious sinners.”51
The debate over this creation of an underclass of citizens led naturally
to discussions of human rights violations and interference with personal
liberty. When the argument focused on double standards, those opposed to
the Acts argued for the equal human rights of sex workers, whereas those
supportive of the Acts struggled to situate these workers as exempt from
certain biopolitical rights. But CDA supporters often then shifted the terms
of the debate, arguing that, even allowing that sex workers’ human rights
were on par with those of others, human liberty at large is always subject
to the greater good of the government. As mentioned earlier, vaccination
laws were often brought to bear upon this subject. One pamphlet argues:
If my nextdoor [sic] neighbor chooses to have his drains in such

a state as to create a poisonous atmosphere, which I breathe at
the risk of typhus and diphtheria, he restricts my just freedom
to live . . . threatening my life; if he is to be allowed to let his
children go unvaccinated, he might as well be allowed to leave
strychnine lozenges about in the way of mine.52
“What right has a woman,” this same author continues, “suffering from
syphilis to continue her trade, blasting her own body and that of her fellow
sinners with loathsome disease? Have we a right to interfere with her ‘liberty’
of administering poison?”53 Generally, such points were bookended by the
conclusion that someone’s perceived liberty is always subject to restraint
when the common good is at stake, an argument unnervingly reminiscent
of the haunting statement in The Handmaid’s Tale that “better never means
better for everyone.” Of course, both statements necessarily imply that it is
generally worse for those most easily exploited by those in power.
A social machine that defines its own value in a manner that necessi-
tates the patronization of prostitutes surely finds it very convenient to locate
vice within these quarters, as the CDA did, rather than in the middle-class
home. However, burgeoning awareness of predictable epidemiological patterns
of venereal disease threatened to topple the house of cards upon which the
CDA was built. Emotional pleas for the “delicate and virtuous mother[s]” and
their “helpless infants” infected by middle-class husbands ring with pathetic
zeal throughout the CDA pamphlets, demonstrating growing awareness that
male sexual vice was not, in fact, limited to the lower classes.54 Thus, the
repeal of the CDA and the prior years of resistance caused a great deal of
anxiety, as the push for repeal redirected the manicule of vice toward the
seat of patriarchal authority: the middle- and upper-class husband. “Think
of the poor dear children!” contaminated with congenital syphilis, more than
one tract urges.55 If “malignant virus” could be “introduced into respectable
families,” the relevance of Victorian middle-class propriety diminishes, and
not simply because of sex workers.56 For one thing, as Mary Spongberg notes,
women ceased to be signifiers in this system, as “the purity of the mid-
dle-class female stood for nothing” within the new conceptual framework of
syphilis.57 That is, the original rules of the Victorian gender game posited the
ever-virginal mother and wife as the sine qua non of the moral middle-class
home. But if pure women could contract syphilis from husbands who were
now understood to be infecting them because of their traffic in prostitutes,
female purity or the lack thereof no longer assured family purity. Syphilis
thus not only ate away at the family unit but also insidiously degenerated
any faith in the social mores intended to strengthen family units. Within
this decaying system of gender norms and moral standards, female purity
did little to bolster the morality of the family and society; indeed, the entire
system became a satire of propriety and righteousness, confounding its own
ends and corroding from the inside out.
Tainted Love 147
Moreover, doctors, part of the patriarchy themselves, were burdened

with the question of where infected men fit into the old-order system of
domestic virtue.58 As J. Alfred Fournier—one of the most famous contem-
porary medical experts on syphilis, and one of the few doctors devoted to
protecting women from the effects of male sexual vice—noted, “a man who,
before marriage has contracted syphilis, may become dangerous in marriage
in three directions;—firstly as husband; secondly as father; thirdly, as head of
the social community which he constitutes by his marriage.”59 But even as
Fournier championed the health of women, he betrays his own preoccupa-
tion with the unraveling tapestry of domestic propriety that threatened to
leave the stronghold of the nation in tatters. Other doctors concerned with
the same question recommended privileging domestic ideals over women’s
safety. Jonathan Hutchison, for example, asserted that “where . . . a social
institution as vast as marriage is at stake, the surgeon must not push medical
scruples too far.”60 For Hutchison, the danger of syphilis was not half as
great as the fact that “anxiety about the disease could lead to regulation of
marriage, which ‘would be disastrous to social progress and would greatly
reduce the sum of human happiness.’ ”61 As Andrew Smith points out,
“Hutchison d[id] not deny that . . . the man . . . [was] largely responsible
for the spread of syphilis; he simply propose[d] its concealment” in order
to avoid unnecessary turmoil within the family unit.62 As Hutchison him-
self stated, “There can be no duty more imperative, in the exercise of our
profession, than that of abstaining from needlessly exciting in the minds of
our patients suspicions as to conjugal purity.”63
Amid this changing epidemiological understanding, the significance
of female chastity, manly virtue, the institution of marriage, and the entire
idealized domestic space in the middle class all fell into question. As Andrew
Smith puts it, within this shifting semiotic system, “the spread of the disease
seem[ed] to be a consequence of the inability of the male subject to prop-
erly commit to some abstract notion of bourgeois family life.”64 Notably,
fictional and nonfictional texts on the subject all seem to “nervously raise”
the question of “where real value . . . [is] to be found” if “some socially
dominant ‘norm’ becomes pathologized.”65
Paradoxically, Hardy and Ibsen repurposed this post-germ-theory
understanding of epidemiology but jettisoned its potentially deleterious social
implications. That is, rather than seeking to maintain purity and segregation
from the ostensibly diseased lower classes, both Hardy and Ibsen evinced an
astute epidemiological awareness that disease does not obey class boundaries
and showed that belief in the sanctity of the middle class and its values in
fact diseased society.
“We Are All Ghosts . . . Abysmally Afraid of the Light”:

The Impotency of Propriety in Ghosts
Ibsen’s Ghosts depicts the last moments in the life of Osvald Alving, a
young painter who returns to Norway from the Continent to live with
his mother, Helene. In Osvald’s absence, Helene (or Mrs. Alving, as she
is more often called in the play) has been planning the establishment of a
community orphanage dedicated to the memory of her late husband, Captain
Alving. As the play opens, Helene discusses the plans for the orphanage
with Pastor Manders, the man she has chosen to handle its business affairs.
During their discussion, Helene reveals—after years of pretending the con-
trary—that her ostensibly ideal and pure home was anything but, for her
husband was a drunken and licentious man who made her life miserable.
This opening conversation also reveals that Helene once attempted to leave
her husband—and that she fled to Pastor Manders, whom she loved, but
who instructed her to return home and fulfill her duties as a woman and
as a wife, “bear[ing] with humility that cross which a higher power had
judged proper.”66 Ever since the crucible of her married experience, Helene
has resigned herself to maintaining the illusion of her husband’s moral
scrupulousness, even participating in his “drinking orgies” to ensure that
he and his activities were “ke[pt] . . . at home in the evenings.”67 She also
sent Osvald away from the family home to the Continent, ostensibly to
keep him from the noxious influence of his father. However, her actions
are always also geared to maintain the illusion that her family meets a set
of externally defined social mores. She mentions, for instance, that she sent
Osvald away precisely when he could comprehend that his home was not
as perfect as she wanted it to seem; she “couldn’t bear” his presence once
he was old enough to “notice things and ask questions.”68 She describes
her entire life as an “endless battle . . . fought day after day” to keep the
truth of her husband and family a secret from the public and to maintain
popular belief in the sanctity of her home.69 Her life has been spent “doing
[her] duty, observing the proprieties.”70
Like her husband’s reputation and the Alving home, Helene Alving’s
reasons for erecting the orphanage are not what they seem; charity is the least
of her concerns. Helene has come up with the idea solely to spend her late
Tainted Love 149
husband’s fortune—a fortune for which, it bears noting, she was pressured
to marry him. Helene has “calculated . . . very carefully” the amount that
she must funnel into the orphanage to prevent Oswald from “inherit[ing]
a single thing from his father” and his life of vice and libertinism.71 Of
course, she adds that it also serves to “kill any rumors, and sweep away
any misgivings” as to her husband’s status as a pillar of the community.72
But Helene’s efforts are to no avail, for soon after Oswald returns, he
informs her that he has contracted syphilis, and he degenerates mentally
by the play’s close. Thus, all of Helene’s careful attempts to preserve for
her son a sense of their family’s morally upright status—through avoiding
any risky encounters with impropriety—have come to nothing. Likewise,
the orphanage, which Manders convinces her not to insure (because “it
would be so terribly easy” for the public “to interpret things as meaning
that neither [of the two] had a proper faith in Divine Providence”), is
destroyed in a fire.73 Thus, another attempt at propriety literally burns to the
ground.
Ibsen’s play addresses a very tangible social concern with middle-class
morality through the vector of syphilis. Further, and more importantly,
it also illustrates the metaphoric significance of syphilis in late Victorian
society. As Ross Shideler notes, Ibsen’s work often “reflect[s] th[is] tension
between . . . public effort[s] to sustain an idealized ‘holy family’ and the
realities of the latter half of the nineteenth century.”74 Ghosts makes it clear
that Captain Alving’s debauchery directly and literally infects his son with
his tainted blood—indeed, Osvald says as much when he says that the doc-
tor who diagnosed him stated that “there has been something worm-eaten
about [him] since birth.”75 However, it also demonstrates that Helene’s
attempts to maintain the façade of social propriety within the community
are equally complicit in Osvald’s decline. This system of supposed moral-
ity, built upon overdetermined gender-role performances and illusory class
boundaries, ostensibly bolsters the middle class by keeping disease and vice
ideologically at bay. But in actuality, its only effect is to inject disease and
corruption into the family unit.
Naturally, it would be problematic (as the Victorians were then dis-
covering) to blame middle-class women for the syphilis that their husbands
brought home. What could Helene have done differently, after all? Of course,
since this story presents an alternative ending to A Doll’s House, one’s first
instinct is to look to Nora and surmise that Helene could have refused
to return to her husband. Notably, such a course of action would unravel
the whole play, as Osvald was born after her return, but this only renders
Ibsen’s critique that much more scathing. This play and this moral infection
of “proper behavior” shouldn’t exist at all.
To this end, committed to the preservation of her son’s belief in his
ideal domestic home, Helene repeatedly cries, “What a coward I am!,”
as she shies away from telling Oswald the truth about his father.76 Her
cowardice persists even when she learns that much of Oswald’s despon-
dency results from his belief that he has caused his illness. In spite of his
doctor’s diagnosis of congenital syphilis, Oswald, deluded by his mother’s
lies, believes that he must have contracted the disease himself. “If only it
had been something inherited . . . something one couldn’t have helped,”
he laments; Helene simply watches him, too fearful even in the face of his
utter despair to relieve his suffering with the truth.77 Only when Oswald
prepares to marry Regine (who is his half-sister, conceived as a result of his
father’s philandering) does Helene finally intervene, for such a union would
only breed further disease by spreading the literal contagion of syphilis.
She thus shatters the illusion of the happy home as she tells Oswald of his
inherited illness, confirming his doctor’s original conclusion that “the sins
of the fathers are visited upon the children.”78
Although he is deceived by the “beautiful illusion” of his father’s moral
purity for much of the play, Oswald is in all respects the clearest-seeing
character. When he reflects back on his travels, for example, he bemoans
“that glorious, free life out there . . . smeared by this filth.”79 The “filth”
that besmirches the “glorious, free life” he envisions clearly emanates from
the very system of moral propriety that deceived him as to the true nature
of his father, a man whose literal filth has noxiously tainted Oswald’s own
blood. In this light, Oswald’s predicted/impending “softening of the brain,”
a euphemism he embraces as a comforting dilution of a truly ghastly prog-
nosis, seems to be the prognosis for society at large, which willingly deludes
itself into a sickly dependence on an outmoded, “worm-eaten” system of
ideals.80 Such ideals seep through bloodlines literally and through families
metaphorically, weakening society, turning brains soft through years of
unthinking acceptance, and reducing individuals to little more than the
invalid Oswald becomes—people who can do nothing for themselves, who
are effectively “turned into . . . helpless child[ren] who live at the mercy
of society’s whims.”81 Indeed, as A. F. Machiraju notes, “the transmission of
physical disease from parent to child is a powerful metaphor for the way
society transmits its mental diseases of delusion and conformity from one
generation to the next.”82 To this end, Machiraju quotes Michael Meyer
Tainted Love 151
as claiming that “what Ghosts is really about is the devitalizing effect of

inherited convention.”83
Oswald sees all of this for what it is and maintains his glibly morose
attitude until his catatonia at the play’s conclusion. Helene Alving sees the
same things, but only in shades, ghostly transfigurations of the problem that
are not ghastly enough to motivate her to action. She explains to Manders
her theory that society is built upon nothing more than ghosts:
I’m inclined to think that we are all ghosts . . . every one of us.
It’s not just what we inherit from our mothers and fathers that
haunts us. It’s all kinds of old defunct theories, all sorts of old
defunct beliefs, and things like that. It’s not that they actually
live on in us; they are simply lodged there, and we cannot get
rid of them. I’ve only to pick up a newspaper and I seem to see
ghosts gliding between the lines. Over the whole country there
must be ghosts, as numerous as the sands of the sea. And here
we are, all of us, abysmally afraid of the light.84
Oswald, however, can see, against the backdrop of the incineration of

the orphanage, that “everything will burn” in such a society because, as he
sullenly notes, “here am I, burning down too.”85 The effect of propriety on
his life is only too present for him. In the face of the imminent annihilation
of his intellect, Oswald predicts that his mother, too, will realize the error
of her ways soon enough. Just before he slips into dementia, he tells his
mother of his desire to die on his own terms, rather than those his father
bequeathed to him—he asks that his mother euthanize him rather than
allowing him to slip into dementia. He talks about his impending doom
and reiterates his request, adding that “meanwhile the sun will be rising.
And then you’ll know”—a prediction that comes to pass, as in the face of
Oswald’s catatonic stupor, and against the backdrop of the rising sun, she
finally sees the ultimate sterility of her devotion to superficial virtue.86
Yet propriety remains first and foremost to Helene up to the bitter end,
and the play concludes with a tableau of her indecision in response to her
son’s dying request. As Osvald slips into a nearly vegetative state, he eerily
and without explanation demands, “Mother, give me the sun.”87 The play
ends with his repeated demand, “The sun. The sun. . . . The sun. . . . The
sun,” which haunts Helene as it exposes her continued inability to break
free of the ghosts of social mores past. At the play’s end, Osvald is trapped
in a catatonic stupor, and Helene can only watch as he repeatedly demands

that she give him the sun, a task as impossible as success of the system that
supposedly knits together “perfect” middle-class families. His final words,
“the sun, the sun,” set against a sunrise, serve both as a chilling mockery
of the system of morality that has birthed every action in the play and as
a dark and ghastly prophesy of the fate of future generations—two images
in grim, sharp contrast.88
Out of the Shadows and into the Light:

Inoculative Restitution in The Woodlanders
Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders follows the paths of a star-crossed pair:

Grace Melbury, an educated, middle-class woman, and Giles Winterbourne,
a poor laborer. Like Helene Alving, Grace marries for money and social
standing in response to familial pressure. Rather than marrying Giles, her
first love, she marries Edred Fitzpiers, a cold and rather ghoulish doctor who
collects brains for a hobby. Her parents pressure her to marry Edred “based
less on his professional position . . . than on the standing of his family in
the county in bygone days.”89 Thus, while Edred is not extremely wealthy,
the marriage is still a mercenary one, founded on an attempt to accrue
respectability where wealth is wanting and motivated by nothing more than
“that touching faith in members of long-established families . . . irrespective
of their personal condition or character, which,” the narrator notes, “is still
found among old-fashioned people in the rural districts,” and “had reached
its full perfection” in Grace’s father.90
Like Captain Alving, Edred is chronically unfaithful. Like Helene, Grace
tries to leave her husband. Indeed, the marital careers of the two women
are virtually parallel, for Grace ultimately returns to him. However, in true
Hardyian fashion, Grace’s separation from her husband follows a dizzyingly
sensational course. Grace seeks a divorce after Edred abandons her (true to
form for a rakish scoundrel, he has run off to the Continent with a lover).
Nevertheless, her attempt fails; she is not granted the divorce. Later, Edred
returns to claim her, but she is unwilling to play the obedient wife. In an
effort to elude him, she flees to Giles’s one-room hut in the forest for help,
but then faces another dilemma when inclement weather prevents Giles from
taking her to a friend’s house: not only do they lack a chaperone, but there
is only one bed in the hut. To make matters worse, the two are not merely
strangers of opposite sexes; they were formerly romantically involved. What
Tainted Love 153
is more, Grace has slowly fallen back in love with Giles. Thus, the idea
that both might sleep in the hut cannot be countenanced, and, for three
chapters, readers are witness to their dilemma: How can both halves of this
would-be couple possibly find shelter with only one roof and a paralyzing
host of Victorian standards of social propriety? As Grace puts it, “I am a
woman, and you are a man, I cannot speak more plainly. I yearn to let you
in, but—you know what is in my mind, because you know me so well.”91
Like Ghosts, The Woodlanders becomes a novel about the bounds of
social propriety at this point, for Giles insists upon sleeping outside in the
cold, damp, and rain, in spite of a feverish illness. Indeed, Giles and Grace
are so meticulous in their adherence to social mores that Giles situates Grace
in his home “without so much as crossing the threshold himself.”92 From
outside the hut, he literally locks her in, such that she is safely secreted
from any male [physical] contact, including his own. From this point on,
Giles signals his presence when necessary by “tapping at the window,” and
he communicates with Grace only through this limited opening, which
(thankfully for their consciences) allows for considerably less proximity than
the doorframe.93 Though dangerously ill, Giles sleeps outside in the rain
for three nights, based on the necessities mandated by social decorum, and
he dies a few days later.
The text adroitly leaves ambiguous whether Giles’s stint in the rain
ultimately causes his death. When Grace asks Edred’s professional opinion,
seeking to alleviate her guilt for her complicity, Edred replies that “no human
being could answer,” though he adds that it is likely Giles would have died
in any event, given his advanced condition.94 Thus, while he owns that
“the balance of probabilities turn[s] in her favor,” he provides no definitive
answer.95 Whatever the cause of Giles’s death, what matters is that the dying
man suffered alone in the “damp obscurity” on the margins of Grace’s cozy
living space in order to protect the socially prescribed virtue of his beloved.96
Grace’s attempts to maintain a veneer of propriety fare as miserably
as Helene’s. To begin with, Hardy boldly inserted the possibility of divorce
into his text, a possibility that puts social and legal proprieties at odds,
revealing both to be arbitrary. Although shocked by the idea, Giles accepts
that “a new law might do anything,” revealing both a belief in the validity of
old-order customs and a blind faith in anything deemed legally acceptable.97
When the divorce is denied, Giles reacts with predictable acceptance of the
legal decree, and Giles and Grace separate, acquiescing in the mandate of
both the legal law and the law of social decorum until a fit of desperation
drives her back to him under less than proper circumstances. Grace’s flight
to Giles and away from the return of her husband causes her to begin to
chafe, however fitfully, at the bonds of social decorum. She flees to Giles
during a resurgence of her natural “Daphnean instinct,” which has been
“revived by her widowed seclusion” in Edred’s absence.98 More importantly,
the narrator notes, this instinct “was not lessened by her affronted senti-
ments towards . . . [Fitzpiers], and her regard for another man.”99 Thus, it
is not only her desire to flee from Edred but also, and more importantly,
her continued (though unconsummated) passion for Giles that leads her to
approach his home in the woods.
Once she arrives, though, Grace’s niggling sense of propriety kicks back
in, and she refuses to enter the hut, asking only for his help in traveling to a
friend’s house. Significantly, Giles has been ill since their last encounter, “the
result of a chill caught the previous winter, seem[ing] [to have] acquire[d]
virulence with the prostration of his hopes” of obtaining Grace in the only
socially sanctioned manner through the potential of her divorce.100 Thus,
his illness is literally an infection contracted from adherence to the code
of domestic morality, which mandates that the couple honor Grace’s legal
marriage, and he ultimately dies because he cannot loose himself from a
commitment to social ideals. Grace, on the other hand, slowly frees herself
from these fetters. Beginning with her flight to Giles’s hut, her devotion
to propriety begins to dissolve. When Giles, for instance, questions the
decorum of her actions, Grace is firm that “appearance is no matter when
the reality is right.”101
The change, however, is slow and faltering. Most notably, although she
still allows Giles to sleep outside for propriety’s sake, she begins to consider
the boundaries of social decorum while she herself is safe and warm in the
hut. Wondering about the “rightness” of the “reality” that mandates a man
sleep outside in the rain, she begins to question their setup. At one point,
she asks, with “renewed misgiving,” if Giles has a “snug place out there,”
and his answer temporarily quiets her conscience.102 The next evening, she
veers back toward appearances when she reiterates her resolution to adhere
to middle-class virtue, asserting: “You know what I feel for you, but as I
have vowed myself to somebody else than you . . . I must behave as I do
behave, and keep that vow.”103 But soon after, she begins to have glimmers
of Osvaldesque clarity, declaring, “I am not bound to [Fitzpiers] by any
divine law after what he has done; but I have promised, and I will pay.”104
She thus simultaneously acknowledges both social mandates and her own
sense of the matter—and in invoking “divine” law even asserts that God
must also see things as she does. Although she remains a “ghost,” as Ibsen
Tainted Love 155
would put it, she is beginning to inch forward from the shadows, ever
braver and more confident in her ability to face the light.
As Grace grows in her sense of a personal morality, she recognizes
that if Giles is suffering in his outdoor abode, “it was she who had caused
it. . . . [S]he was not worth such self-sacrifice; she should not have accepted
it of him.”105 With this insight, she rushes outside to look for Giles and
calls for him to come in. When she receives no answer, she retreats into the
house, “overpowered by her own temerity.” A few minutes later, however,
she rushes out again, calling loudly, “Come to me, dearest! I don’t mind what
they say or what they think of us anymore.”106 In this moment, Grace first
begins to recognize the price she and Giles have paid for their commitment
to conventional ideals. Shortly before his death, Grace abandons convention
and drags Giles into the hut, where she undresses him, exchanges his wet
clothes for dry ones, and kisses him repeatedly—thereby contracting his
illness.107 Finally, regardless of the consequences—and she recognizes that
Edred’s “assistance [i]s fatal to her own concealment”—she summons her
husband to Giles’s bedside in an effort to help revive him.108
While Grace ultimately learns to abandon her ties to decorum and to
engage risk encounters, her initial loyalty to conventional morality has dire
consequences. The “snug place” of refuge to which Giles retreats in an effort
to protect Grace’s reputation “prove[s] to be a wretched little shelter of the
roughest kind, formed of four hurdles thatched with brake-fern”—hardly
the place for an ailing man.109 But Grace’s “wish to keep the proprieties
as well as [she] can” keeps her from noticing the signs of Giles’s suffering.
For example, “She d[oes] not notice how his hand sh[akes],” as he lights a
lantern for her convenience before he leaves, and this early oversight allows
for her later “erroneous conclusion” that his absences are indicative of work
rather than invalidism, as well as her assumption that a “squirrel or a bird”
has made the coughing noises she hears.110 The old-order virtue they espouse
most likely kills Giles and, at best, makes him suffer alone. If women cease
to be signifiers of hearth and home in the system of middle-class marriage
and domesticity when male-vectored disease is introduced, then Giles, in his
overdetermined and insistent chivalry, ceases to signify in the text at all.111
His body becomes a site of disease precisely because of their commitment
to superficial ideals, as Grace, too, recognizes after his death: “How selfishly
correct I am always—too, too correct! Can it be that cruel propriety is killing
the dearest heart that ever woman clasped to her own!”112
Notably, both Giles and Grace act in accordance with conventional
morality, revealing Hardy’s and Ibsen’s shared sense that both men and
women are equally trapped, but also equally complicit, in a problematic

way of defining morality and righteousness—a way of thinking that does
nothing but inject disease (literally and figuratively) into the very homes,
families, and societies it is intended to uphold. This is writ large in the
text as Grace falls ill after Giles’s death, likely from having kissed him
during his illness.
This point is integral to my reading of the novel. Much to the chagrin
of Hardy’s contemporaries, The Woodlanders concludes with the reunion of
Grace and her husband. Further, Edred is not only a reformed man, but he
cures Grace with a “liquid . . . of a brownish hue”—even though he knows
she contracted her illness from contact with Giles, and even though she has
(falsely) told him that he should interpret this contact in “the extremest
sense.”113 Thus, Grace’s happy ending is doubly so, for her husband is willing
to turn a blind eye to a supposed affair and to help cure her of a sexually
transmitted disease. Such an ending poses a sharp contrast to the overtly
bleak ending of Ghosts, and it struck many reviewers as glib and out of
sync with their reality. Many reviewers found it neither likely nor possible
for a man to forgive social transgressions such as Grace’s, but many also
took issue with her willingness to forgive him.114
To understand Hardy’s ostensibly blithe ending to a story that is
otherwise quite similar to Ghosts, it is important to consider the slow and
meticulous process through which Grace and Edred reunite, a process in
which each learns to leave loyalty to social decorum behind. By the time
Edred reemerges on the scene with his medicine, Giles’s death has already
jarred Grace out of her unthinking adherence to social mores. Once she
finally drags Giles back into the hut, it is too late to save him, but her
paradigm shift allows her to flout convention and claim that Edred ought
to make the “extremest inference” from her living situation with Giles.115
As for Edred, it is his willingness to figuratively inoculate himself
with a dose of his own medicine via his unconditional acceptance of
Grace that allows for their reunion. As elaborated in chapter 2, inoculation
entails purposely injecting contaminated matter into the skin in an effort
to catalyze immunity in the host and thus involves willingly accepting
something threatening in the hopes of gaining ultimate resistance to it.
Edred inoculates himself by subjecting himself to his own set of humiliating
experiences—mirroring Grace’s prior experiences—in order to strengthen
their relationship. Conversely, Helene refuses to give up her commitment
to propriety and inoculate herself against the debilitating effects of overde-
termined social codes—for example, she won’t risk appearing impious to
Tainted Love 157
insure the orphanage; never leaves her husband; and almost never tells her
son the truth, even to protect him.
Edred’s inoculation requires the complete abandonment of his allegiance
to social convention and traditional gender norms. Upon his return, Edred
first writes Grace, asking her to pack a suitcase and meet him at a port to
leave with him, as he is unwilling to return to the site of his shame; he does
not want to open himself up to public criticism or face Grace’s father, who
previously humiliated him.116 But this approach only spurs her flight, as she
realizes Edred “ha[s] no intention of showing himself on land at all.”117 Later,
when he finally encounters her at Giles’s hut, he placidly accepts her story
that she has lived with Giles in the “extremest” sense, He bears witness to
the scene “not so much in its intrinsic character . . . but in its character as
the counterpart” of his own extramarital relationships and merely states that
he does not “claim . . . any right” to her and that “it is for [her] to do and
say what [she] chooses.”118 Furthermore, he is eager to help her avoid infec-
tion, even though he believes she has contracted her illness through sexual
intercourse with Giles, and provides her with the medicine she needs. In
doing so, he inoculates himself with his own poison, giving up his patriar-
chal claim to sole sexual interaction with Grace’s body in a way that would
have been considered particularly emasculating by contemporary standards.
As Edred progresses in his transformation, he willingly undergoes
a series of humiliations. He begins by moving back into Grace’s father’s
home, which exacts upon him at least some of the shame and stress that
Grace has suffered at his hands, and he bears “all that cost . . . without
flinching, because [he] . . . [feels] . . . [he] deserve[s] humiliation.”119 He
becomes willing to prostrate himself entirely in the hopes of winning Grace
back: “To lay offerings on her slighted altar was his first aim, and until her
propitiation was complete he would constrain her in no way to return to
him. . . . [H]e . . . found solace in the soft miseries she caused him.”120 In
the last chapters of the novel, while living under his father-in-law’s roof,
Edred simply waits while allowing Grace to do as she pleases. He purposely
positions himself to feel what Grace must have felt—and he revels in expe-
riencing her prior pain by proxy. In fact, it is his very belief in her sexual
affair with Giles that begins to kindle a “smouldering admiration of her”
within him, as he witnesses her concomitant ability to move past propriety.121
In the final phase of his shifting persona, Edred tells Grace that he never
more “want[s] [her] to receive [him] again for duty’s sake, or anything of
that sort,” evincing a newfound conviction that a true marriage can only
exist outside of the constraints of the standing moral order.122
Ultimately, it is Edred’s and Grace’s parallel growth that brings them

back together. Like the medicine with which Edred swoops in to save Grace’s
life, the effect of their mutual growth is “not miraculous . . . [but] remark-
able,” and the two slowly grow close, as they both learn—first separately,
and then together—to ignore the bonds of propriety and act in accordance
with their own sense of morality.123 The cure is both literal and metaphoric,
as it signals the release of both Grace and Edred from their blind adherence
to social mores and allows for the healing of their relationship. Only then
can they step forward together and face the new sun—a sun that no longer
suggests a chilling mockery of conventional morality, but that harkens a
new day, full of possibilities.
Enjoying Death in the Darkness:

Fin-de-Siècle Pessimism in Jude the Obscure
Ibsen’s Ghosts shatters the myth that an individual or family can be immune
to pervasive societal taints lurking in predominant social values. By attempt-
ing to quarantine her family via moral righteousness to set them beyond
the reach of moral and physical degeneracy, Helene only guarantees their
contamination. In The Woodlanders, Hardy presents a unique take on tainted
social propriety by making flagrant subversion of hegemonic social mores the
only social curative. By depicting a couple that could only find happiness
together through complete disregard for social norms and fear of infectious
disease, Hardy showed not only that valorization of purity contaminates,
but also that—paradoxically—meaningful existence can only be found in
the tainted spaces on the margins of moral and physical normativity.
Both Ibsen’s and Hardy’s texts vividly illustrate that the family that
considers itself immune to the universal taint of society is in for a brutal
awakening. The characters in Ghosts remain “abysmally afraid of the light,”
while those in The Woodlanders manage to edge their way into the pleasant
glow of the “bright but heatless sun.” In Jude the Obscure (1896), only
“scintillating” glimmers of hope penetrate the bleakly obscure fin-de-siècle
cosmology of the novel.
In Ghosts, the Alving family’s image of moral superiority is maintained
through Helene’s fastidious efforts to hide her husband’s lifelong habits of
drunkenness and philandering. She is startled, of course, to find that, in spite
of her efforts, her son has contracted syphilis due to his father’s lifestyle.
The family is torn apart, its theoretical golden perfection shown for the base
Tainted Love 159
metal that it is, and Osvald descends into catatonia, repeatedly asking his
mother to give him “the sun.” In The Woodlanders, Hardy depicts a couple
who discover, through trial and error, that abandoning these ideals provides
a means to happiness.
In Jude the Obscure, published about ten years later, Hardy compli-
cates this idea. In the scientific and cultural milieu of the extreme end of
the nineteenth century, when the ideals of the New Woman were gaining
momentum and “germ hunter” bacteriologists feverishly competed to identify
the next important microbe, Jude presents a bleaker but more complex—
often nearly paradoxical—set of views. As I will show in greater detail in
the next chapter, New Woman fiction provided great theoretical liberation,
but practical social changes were often long in coming. The same seemed
to prove true for germ theory. Its powers had been lauded in the 1870s
and ’80s, as it gained cultural clout for its theoretical demystification of
death and disease. Yet, even as scientists gained renown for identifying
microbes and bacteria, diseases such as cholera and tuberculosis remained
as deadly as ever. In many ways society remained at a loss for practical
solutions, in spite of a plethora of new epistemologies offering the prospect
of ever-more-hopeful futures. At the turn of a new century, the one-to-one
relationship between the lofty promises of science and improved realities
seemed frustratingly out of step, and the literature of the period reflects
this, often depicting brave new concepts, but with anticlimactic or tragic
endings (Kate Chopin’s The Awakening is a good example). In Jude the
Obscure, everything seems tainted. Gone are the bushy sheep of Wessex, and
even the acrid beauty of the heath is nowhere to be found. There are only
grimy stones, misguided stonemasons, and a writhing mass of unfulfilled
and unfulfilling sexual relationships.
Sue and Jude, like Grace and Edred before them, reject conventional
morality. Using modern ideals inspired by a variety of progressive (albeit
not always contemporary) philosophical systems, they embark upon a jour-
ney of subversion, living together and having children outside of marriage
in an almost hyperbolic rejection of hegemonic norms. Further, both of
them refuse to lie about their relationship, asserting that to do so would
be untrue to their value system, and they both wear the hardships incurred
as badges of honor even as their choices rip their family apart. Their tragic
end is well known. I argue that by the time of Jude’s publication, Hardy
complicates his original view that mere resistance to conventional ideals is
sufficient to achieve positive social change. Of course, Hardy maintained
in a great many of his works that society brutally punishes nonnormative
behaviors. But more is at stake in Jude the Obscure. First, the novel shows
that Sue and Jude’s unconventional morals, when they espouse them, exhibit
the same separatism of moral righteousness as the status quo. Sue and Jude
often nearly catch glimpses of this reality themselves, as their own incon-
sistent behaviors and shifting values famously indicate. In Jude the Obscure,
Hardy depicts characters who tiptoe at the edge of flouting social norms,
dallying momentarily just past its bounds and then frantically retreating to
the safety of hegemonic norms, again and again. What I want to focus on
in this chapter, however, are the ways in which Jude and Sue’s moments of
nonconformity, when they appear, are cloaked in all the moral superiority
that the status quo itself invokes to enforce more commonly held beliefs
(such as matrimonial sanctity and purity). A few brief examples ought
to suffice to indicate this, as the characters’ very caprices result in their
inhabiting unconventional stances only briefly at any given time. In fact,
Hardy was honing a more insistent discussion on catalyzing broad social
changes via unconventional lifestyles, a subject that I will address further
in the next chapter.
For all her belief in the superiority of her unmarried life with Jude,
Sue’s words mirror conventional moralizing tones when she scolds Jude for
returning to Arabella for a sexual encounter after their separation:
How will the demi-gods in your Pantheon—I mean those legend-

ary persons you call Saints—intercede for you after this? Now if
I had done such a thing it would have been different, and not
remarkable, for at least I don’t regard marriage as a sacrament.124
For Jude’s part, while his lofty educational aims began as a real hunger for
knowledge, they are later depicted as having fossilized into mere habit and
social ambition when he decides early on to abandon university for the lay
ministry:
The old fancy which had led on to the culminating vision of

the bishopric had not been an ethical or theological enthusiasm
at all, but a mundane ambition masquerading in a surplice. He
feared that his whole scheme had degenerated to, even though
it might not have originated in, a social unrest which had no
foundation in the nobler instincts; which was purely an artificial
product of civilization.125
Tainted Love 161
In their lowest moments, Sue and Jude (unlike Grace and Edred) do not
truly accept one another outside of moral norms. Rather, in their vacillations
between value systems, the moments where they embrace subversions seem
to demonstrate only more of the same moralizing that characterizes broader
social norms, only aimed at different ends. In depicting their motives this
way, Hardy suggests that Sue and Jude are no better than Helene; although
they may reject the status quo, their divergent path tends toward the same
ends of self-preservation and the isolated superiority of moral righteousness.
To some extent, Jude’s complexities can be linked to the late-century
attitudes outlined above: like many authors at the century’s close, Hardy
exhibits an increasing lack of faith (typical at the very end of the century)
in the power of progressive ideals to create a new and improved reality. But
I would also like to suggest that Hardy cast Sue and Jude as participants in
an unconventional lifestyle for purely conventional ends. While Grace and
Edred learn to grow together and realize they can do so only outside of
moral orthodoxy, Sue and Jude each use conventionally moralistic pretenses
in their pursuit of subversion as moral righteousness—something Hardy
casts as an equally degenerative tactic. As Jude unwittingly notes, to “do
an immoral thing for moral reasons” is a rather paltry ethical defense.126
Ultimately, it is Little Father Time who ushers in the beginning of the
end for Sue and Jude. And it is through him that Hardy vividly shows that
no one, no matter how advanced or subversive, is immune to the effects of
decades of broad moral contamination. Like Ibsen, Hardy demonstrates in
Jude that those who buy into the delusion of personal salvation in a vacuum
of moral purity, quarantined from their fellow men, will fairly quickly hear
their own figurative—and often literal—death knell. Disillusionment with
progressive ideals in this period contributed in some obvious ways, therefore,
to the development of this fictional outcome. Hardy’s ethical meliorism, a
sort of moral evolution that developed alongside his work, likely also con-
tributed to this fictional-philosophical dénouement. If, as Hardy argued,
attaining the best of the world “exacts a full look at its worst,” his view of
ethical meliorism involved a precursorial, ritualized cleansing in which soci-
ety, at all extremes, was forced to recognize its mutual interdependence by
accepting the byproducts of its own social diseases. Jude the Obscure loudly
proclaims, in its characteristically sermonic style, that no one is immune
or quarantined in a globalized, interpersonal world and that no one can
circumvent the consequences of self-contamination. It is Little Father Time
who visits this truth upon Jude, Sue, and their family.
The child, though only about eight years old, appears shriveled and
aged. He has an “octogenarian face,” and is “Age masquerading as Juvenility,
and doing it so badly that his real self showed through crevices.”127 As he
travels ominously on a train bound for Jude and his family equipped with
only a key and a ticket (highly symbolic possessions), the narrator describes
him as “a ground swell from ancient years of night,” an “aged child,” and
a “singular child” with a “quaint and weird face.”128 Children born with
syphilis contracted in utero were described by contemporary medical accounts
using much the same language. “This look of little old men, so common in
new-born children doomed to syphilis” was acknowledged by most medical
professionals to be one of the most characteristic signs of congenital syph-
ilis.129 Going into greater detail, Fournier describes syphilitic infants thusly
in his 1882 Syphilis and Marriage:
They come into the world small, singularly weak and puny,
poorly developed, wrinkled and shriveled, stunted, with the “old
man look,” as it is usually termed. One would call them old
people in miniature, with a skin too large for them over certain
points. . . . Nothing else . . . of a special character attests a
well-pronounced syphilitic state in . . . these little old people,
as they are called. . . . And, nevertheless, at the first glance, one
judges correctly that they will not live. . . . These children do
not die, properly speaking; they fade out rather than die; they
cease to live, for the sole reason that they are not viable, that
they are unequal to life.130
Another late-century medical text affirms these general assessments of the

syphilitic child:
The child often looks prematurely aged; its hair may have fallen
off, even the eyelashes and from the eyebrows; the corners of the
lips and nose are often ulcerated. . . . Progressive and general
emaciation is a very unfavorable sign, the skin becoming of a
dirty white, and hanging from the muscles, which are soft. In
taking up a fold of the skin it is found to be inelastic, cold,
and harsh.131
Contemporary medical texts were not lacking for detailed illustrations

of such children, either (see Figures 4.1 and 4.2).132 From the description
Figures 4.1. Illustration of Infant with Congenital Syphilis, 1856.
Figure 4.2. Illustration of Infant with Congenital Syphilis, 1898.

of Little Father Time’s “quaint and weird face,” with skin loose and sagging
“like the tragic mask of Melpomene,” to the doctor’s assessment of his death,
which indicates that “such boys are springing up. . . . they . . . see all its
[life’s] terrors before they are old enough to have . . . staying power. . . . [they
are] the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live,” Little Father
Time’s tale evokes syphilitic children in the late part of the century.133 It
is no great leap, given Hardy’s engagement with popular science, to read
Little Father Time as an equally medically accurate rendering of a syphilitic
child as Osvald is as a syphilitic adult. Hardy made it easy for readers to
doubt Arabella’s constancy to Jude, so paired with her flight to Australia—a
place saturated with the symbolic ethos of criminals and criminality in the
Victorian era—and Little Father Time’s physical description, contemporary
readers could infer a microbial subtext in the novel in which Arabella con-
tracts syphilis in Australia while pregnant with Jude’s child.134
In Ghosts, an estranged son born from a conventional marriage returns
to deconstruct the normative family who has attempted in vain to avoid
risk encounters; the dynamic that Jude depicts goes farther, revealing that
even “advanced” moral systems are no protection against the universal taint
of conventional morality. Society must reap what it has sown before the
social fields can lie fallow and nourish new growth. As Jude laments after
the death of his children, “Things are as they are, and will be brought to
their destined issue.”135
Thus, if the characters in Ghosts hide as they “glide . . . between the
lines” of the letter of the social law, while The Woodlanders’ Grace and Edred
manage to find their way into a pleasant, sunny grove, Sue and Jude must
effectively live out the Browning epigraph that introduces the tragically cli-
mactic final book of their story: “There are two who decline, a woman and
I, / And enjoy our death in darkness here.”136 Though it is their arrogant
attempt at moral martyrdom that in many ways brings about their doom,
Hardy effectively martyred them to a different cause—they are the evolu-
tionary products of a society based on worm-eaten ideals. This soil must,
as Hardy shows, putrefy before it can leave room for new growth. In this
way, literal and figurative disease is in fact the only potential regenerative
fertilizer in the moral desert of the 1890s. This injection of literal disease
forces even the self-righteous Jude and Sue to recognize that isolated asepsis
is an impossibility in an interdependent society. Little Father Time is the key
and the ticket to understanding their doom, as it is his congenitally diseased
body that unravels their selfish moral system and forces them to accept
their necessary involvement in the world around them. As Sue says when
Tainted Love 165
Little Father Time comes into their lives, “I feel myself getting intertwined
with my kind.”137 Thus, it is only through their final tentative embrace of
infectious disease, in a brief scene that has been given little critical attention,
that Hardy showed that salvation in a secularized world lies in contaminated
pathways that highlight the inescapable interdependence of humanity.
“A Chaos of Principles—Groping in the Dark”
Little Father Time, with his “octogenarian” face “singularly deficient in all
the usual hopes of childhood,” most obviously represents the conventional
ideals of Jude’s legal (and thereby supposedly ethical and natural) marriage
coming back to wreak havoc on the literally natural and extralegal family
he has constructed.138 He is the return of the repressed, embodied in a
ghostly, waifish, sick child. But he signifies still more. He also highlights
the inescapable universal taint of the time, where so-called advanced ideals
were insufficient to combat the leavings of previous ideologies. Indeed, as
Jude expounds upon his sense of “groping in the dark,” late in the novel,
“I perceive there is something wrong somewhere in our social formulas:
what it is can only be discovered by men or women with greater insight
than mine.”139 Little Father Time is—figuratively and literally—the Reaper,
come to display the (rotten) fruits of Sue and Jude’s moral toils and to insist
that all of society must reap what it has sown. As he eerily whispers to his
parents near the novel’s conclusion, “It do seem like Judgment Day!”140 He
represents, therefore, the “chaos of principles” that Jude describes upon his
return to Christminster. He embodies and enacts the force of the liminal
ethical space in which fin-de-siècle society found itself—shuffling hesitatingly
past older order Victorian values of the hearth and home, but only toward
a hazy precipice where deterministic gravitational laws dwarfed theoretical
moral principles. At times, the narrator overtly plays on Little Father Time’s
embodiment of this liminal conceptual world: “ ‘Where do we go to?’ asked
Time, in suspense.”141 He is time embodied and suspended, hanging between
two worlds, a pendulum paused in the upswing. As such, he is “doubly
awake, like an enslaved and dwarfed Divinity, sitting passive and regarding
his companions as if he saw their whole rounded lives rather than their
immediate figures.”142
It is, of course, because of a misunderstanding—or, one could argue, a
too precise understanding—of Malthusian doctrines that Little Father Time
kills himself and his siblings, or so most traditional readings of Jude would
have it. His perfunctory suicide note, after all, reads simply, “Done because
we are too menny,” suggesting that he has taken Sue’s acknowledgment that
their family is too large very much to heart in his final acts.143 Representing
as he does this liminal space between two epistemologies—a liminal space
that becomes a gaping hole—there is another way of reading his last words.
That is, his seemingly innocuous misspelling of “many” must be seen as also
a reference to the humanity or humanness of the family and their ideals.
As Talia Schaffer and Sally Shuttleworth, among others have noted,
Little Father Time is the “nodal point” of Jude and Sue’s story.144 This
moment is key for my reading. In physics, a “nodal point” is a moment
of complete rest in an otherwise dynamic wave pattern, or a point on a
sphere with the value of zero. Little Father Time is indeed the nodal point
upon which the whole novel unravels. He undoes all the doings of the novel.
All the children are unborn, as it were, and Sue and Jude go back to their
previous lives—Sue to an outwardly orthodox and zealous Christianity, and
Jude to Arabella. As with Ibsen’s Ghosts, in Jude, Hardy seemed to suggest
that society would have been better off had all of this simply never been—
that is, if society had not in fact required such a nodal point to reset the
clock, to purify a contaminated society, to make way for the new generations
that Sue seems so sure will come to “feel as we do” in “fifty, a hundred,
years.”145 “I ought not to be born, ought I?” asks poor Little Father Time
shortly before his death, and Hardy’s Jeremiadic answer is “yes.”146 Jude
himself unwittingly prophesies his son’s death earlier when he quotes Job
as he contemplates him: “ ‘Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the
night in which it was said, there is a manchild conceived!’ That’s what the
boy—my boy, perhaps, will find himself saying before long!”147 As Little
Father Time hangs in the closet alongside his siblings, making one of a
“triplet of corpses,” the narrator notes that:
The boy’s face expressed the whole tale of their situation. On that
little shape had converged all the inauspiciousness and shadow
which had darkened the first union of Jude, and all the accidents,
mistakes, fears, errors of the last. He was their nodal point, their
focus, their expression in a single term. For the rashness of those
parents he had groaned, for their ill-assortment he had quaked,
and for the misfortunes of these he had died.148
Like Ibsen, Hardy created a text that he paradoxically insists would

be better off not existing, but, unlike Ibsen, he nevertheless suspends his
condemnation of the two principal characters in this sequence of unworthy
Tainted Love 167
events. As the nodal point that unravels the novel, Little Father Time’s
pathetic scribble, “we are too menny,” rather insists that we, like Jude and
Sue, are all simply too human—too human to continue our own evolution-
ary success.149 Jude the Obscure incorporates one of Hardy’s famous poetic
sentiments about a thoughtless, watchmaker-God: “At the framing of the
terrestrial conditions there seemed never to have been contemplated such
a development of emotional perceptiveness among the creatures subject to
those conditions as that reached by thinking and educated humanity.”150
Where society fails, we all fail. As Jude says of Little Father Time,
“All the little ones of our time are collectively the children of us adults of
the time, and entitled to” (or, as the narrative suggests, yoked under) “our
general care.”151 No matter the ethical system—normative or subversive—no
one can exist in a state of isolated success where society at large is flounder-
ing. Jude continues, acknowledging this fact even as he remains blind to its
personal relevance: “The excessive regard of parents for their own children,
and their dislike of other people’s, is, like class-feeling, patriotism, and
save-your-own-soul-ism, and other virtues, a mean exclusiveness at bottom.”152
Let That Day Be Darkness
The only chinks of sunlight that pierce the gloomy ending of Jude the Obscure
occur when Jude and Sue briefly accept that their fates are intertwined
with that of society. Hardy, aware that the hermetically sealed sickroom is
an illusion and that no one can effect any progressive change upon society
from the sequestration of self-righteous ethics, sends Jude forth from the
sickroom to confront Sue’s aggressive moralism. By engaging in infectious
intimate contact, they open themselves to deeper subjective experience and
lay aside their attempts at moral or physical quarantine and asepsis.
Near the end of the novel, Jude leaves his sickroom (and eventual
deathbed) and travels to confront the naively zealous Sue with his diseased
and dying body, which is ravaged by tuberculosis. The text makes this fairly
clear by indicating his slow decline over several months, coupled with a
cough. As noted in chapter 4, tuberculosis was one of the most prevalent
diseases of the day, and one of the few severe respiratory illnesses that is fatal
but slow. His “ghastly pale” face marks him as consumptive even further, as
the whiteness of tuberculosis patients was widely recognized at the time.153
Throughout the novel, Sue has marginalized Jude, always claiming
the moral high road, whether through modernized reasoning and gender
views or rigorous adherence to conventional Christian morality. But, far
from allowing Jude to languish in the sickroom because of his marginality,

Hardy explodes the space of the sickroom when Jude leaves it and confronts
Sue with the very marginality she has imposed upon him, marginality that
is now written upon his body in the form of fatal illness. Jude calls her to
task for her superficial modes of morality, which have plagued them from
the beginning:
Is it that you are humbugging yourself, as so many women do

about these things; and don’t actually believe what you pretend
to, and are only indulging in the luxury of the emotion raised
by an affected belief? . . . You dear, sad, soft, most melancholy
wreck of a promising human intellect that it has ever been my
lot to behold. Where is your scorn of convention gone?154
As Jude confronts Sue with the fragile mess that conventional and uncon-
ventional ideologies alike have made, he momentarily changes her heart and
strips her of her superficial conventionality:
“I can’t endure you to say that,” she burst out, and her eye
resting on him a moment, she turned back impulsively. “Don’t,
don’t scorn me! Kiss me, o kiss me lots of times, and say I am
not a coward and a contemptible humbug—I can’t bear it!” She
rushed up to him and, with her mouth on his, continued: “I
must tell you—O I must—my darling Love! It has been—only
a church marriage—an apparent marriage I mean!”155
Confronted with the truth that Jude’s body speaks through its disease, Sue
and Jude are able to move past the overdetermined moral systems that have
unraveled their lives. In the face of his dying body, Sue can admit that her
marriage to another man “on the altar of what she was pleased to call her
principles” has not been consummated (that is, that her newest moral outfit
is threadbare). More importantly, she can own her own true self by sloughing
off her assumed impermeability and kissing the contagious and dying man.156
Published in 1895, Jude is much too late a text for Hardy to have been
unaware of the epidemiological implications of “bruising . . . with kisses”
a man clearly dying of tuberculosis—and this is precisely the point.157 By
physically uniting, Sue and Jude are able to attain true interpersonal human
intimacy for a moment, as they are both finally aware of the inextricably
intertwined nature of all humanity.
Tainted Love 169
Of course, Jude remains a tragedy, and the tragedy of this scene is

that, after their passionate kisses, Sue retreats to the moral systems that seem
to offer her safety in purity, and she returns to her “apparent marriage” to
consummate it. She is “creed-drunk,” much as Jude was “gin-drunk” during
his marriage to Arabella, and, as Jude aptly notes during his last journey into
the world of “creation’s groans,” “either form of intoxication takes away the
nobler vision.”158 Too entrenched in her belief in the potential of isolated
moral righteousness, Sue leaves Jude to return to his sickroom, in spite of
his pleas: “Don’t abandon me, Sue, to save your own soul only!”159 She thus
abjures the only chance they have to be together in truth and unity and
abandons her chance of true self-actualization and unity with humanity. In
the end, Jude returns to his sickroom to die, as Sue listens to the departing
sound of “his coughs mingling with the rain on the windows.”160 The novel
ends with Jude back in the sickroom, sequestered again, as he recites the
lines he believed would apply only to his son, but now realizes apply to the
whole of a diseased society: “ ‘Let the day perish wherein I was born, and
the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived. . . . Let that
day be darkness . . . neither let the light shine upon it.’ ”161 With nothing
left certain but the certainty of a tainted society with impure morals, Jude
the Obscure ends bleakly, its characters having but uncertainly and rather
haphazardly attempted to flout the systems of norms that guided their world.
By using only the tools of the system itself (that is, moral high-horsing),
their efforts falter from the beginning, and are only weakly sustained at
any given moment. In the next chapter, Hardy and another late-century
novelist, Grant Allen, up the ante with depictions of sustained subversion
in two fictional case studies of free love.

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Kept from All Contagion

Published by State University of New York Press

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It would be curious to [learn] . . . how much of the sickening

Ghosts is a medical clinic for the treatment of diseases arranged for

We know [Ibsen’s] defects, his lack of humor, of charm, his bourgeois

A repulsive attraction, a fixation with the lurid, exposed underbelly of

Matos’s point is well taken. Depictions of sexual impropriety and sex-

Risky Business: The Contagious Disease Acts in Context

which, if found, allowed police to incarcerate the woman in a hospital for

I. Should we treat enthetic diseases at all?

It is not unreasonable to suggest that the surveillance which is

that they do so by inserting disease into “pure” homes, thereby revealing

The pamphlet Licencing Prostitution goes so far as to deem the registration

in the past “was as criminal as to violate a chaste woman.”48 Other treatises

If my nextdoor [sic] neighbor chooses to have his drains in such

Moreover, doctors, part of the patriarchy themselves, were burdened

“We Are All Ghosts . . . Abysmally Afraid of the Light”:

as claiming that “what Ghosts is really about is the devitalizing effect of

Oswald, however, can see, against the backdrop of the incineration of

in a catatonic stupor, and Helene can only watch as he repeatedly demands

Out of the Shadows and into the Light:

Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders follows the paths of a star-crossed pair:

women are equally trapped, but also equally complicit, in a problematic

Ultimately, it is Edred’s and Grace’s parallel growth that brings them

Enjoying Death in the Darkness:

How will the demi-gods in your Pantheon—I mean those legend-

The old fancy which had led on to the culminating vision of

Another late-century medical text affirms these general assessments of the

Contemporary medical texts were not lacking for detailed illustrations

Figure 4.2. Illustration of Infant with Congenital Syphilis, 1898.

“A Chaos of Principles—Groping in the Dark”

Like Ibsen, Hardy created a text that he paradoxically insists would

Let That Day Be Darkness

from allowing Jude to languish in the sickroom because of his marginality,

Is it that you are humbugging yourself, as so many women do

Of course, Jude remains a tragedy, and the tragedy of this scene is

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