Symptoms of the Self: Tuberculosis and the Making of the Modern Stage 1609388615, 9781609388614

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Symptoms of the Self

Studies in Theatre History and Culture Heather S. Nathans, series editor

Symptoms of the Self

G

Tuberculosis and the Making of the Modern Stage

Roberta Barker

University of Iowa Press  |  Iowa City

University of Iowa Press Iowa City, IA 52242 Copyright © 2022 by the University of Iowa Press www.uipress.uiowa.edu Printed in the United States of America isbn 978-1-60938-861-4 (pbk) isbn 978-1-60938-862-1 (ebk) Design by April Leidig No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. Printed on acid-­free paper Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the Library of Congress.

For my mother, Diane Murray Barker (1943–2022) With love and gratitude, forever Thy firmness makes my circle just, And makes me end where I begun. —­J ohn Donne,

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduc tion

The Symptom, the Stage, and the Transmission of the Self 1

Part I. Consumptive Poetics Ch ap ter One

“La Poétique du Poitrinaire”: The Making of the Stage Consumptive, 1828–1833 29 Ch ap ter T wo

Death and the Working Woman: Subtexts of the Consumptive Heroine, 1848–1855 53

Part II. Sentimental Transmissions Ch ap ter Thr ee

Camilleology: The Stage Consumptive as Transnational Vector, 1852–1877 77 Ch ap ter Four

The Ills of the Parents: Heredity, Sentiment, and the Stage Consumptive Child, 1852–1900 103

Ch ap ter Fiv e

Ailing Nations: Consumption, the Stage, and the Body Politic, 1857–1900 129

Part III. The Sentimental Survival Ch ap ter Si x

S ­ entimental Resistance: The Stage Consumptive in the Age of the Bacillus, 1879–1906 159 Ch ap ter Sev en

The Con That Tells the Truth: The Consumptive Repertoire and the Autobiographical Impulse in American Theatre, 1912–1977 183 Af terwor d

A Living Repertoire 209 Notes 213 Bibliography 259 Index 285

Acknowledgments

Over the course of a decade’s work on this book, I have learned from many students, colleagues, and friends, who deserve credit for everything good in this volume. Any errors are wholly my own. I am grateful to my many wonderful students at Dalhousie University and the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who transform my understanding of theatre and performance every day. In particular, I thank the members of my two “From Melodrama to Realism” seminars, in 2010 and 2013, for their memorable illumination of the languages of nineteenth-­century performance. The gifted actors who played in Angèle in those two seminars—­Eric Benson, Stewart Legere, Claire Leger, Jennette White, GaRRy Williams, Hugh Cape, Maggie Hammel, Susan Leblanc-­ Crawford, and Ben Stone—­also transformed my vision in ways for which I am deeply grateful. Countless collaborators have contributed invaluable insights to this book. My sincere thanks to Jennifer Bain, Steve Baur, Dawn Tracey Brandes, Barbara Cooper, Carolyn Day, Maria Euchner, Michelle Faubert, Jure Gantar, Hervé Guay, Krista Kesselring, Simon Kow, Laura Levin, Marie Raynard, Kim Solga, Jenn Stephenson, Hélène Stoyanov, Anne C. Vila, Jacqueline Warwick, and Julia Wright. Clark Lawlor, the doyen of literary consumption studies, has been an especially generous supporter of the project; his editorial and scholarly insights on a number of articles that intersect with this book have improved it immeasurably. Heather Davis-­ Fisch, Sasha Kovacs, Stephen Johnson, and Marlis Schweitzer have been an incomparable scholarly support team whose passion for and knowledge of nineteenth-­century performance have transformed my thinking; my very special thanks to Marlis for her many rounds of kind and perceptive feedback on the work. Meanwhile, three dear people—­A lison Betty, Tawnie Olson, and Shannon Brownlee—­contributed to this project long before it assumed its present form; you are everywhere in this book, my friends, and I thank you. — ix —

x Acknowledgments

Symptoms of the Self benefited from the support of a SSHRC Insight Development Grant and of numerous research grants from the University of King’s College, which supported travel to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF), the British Library, the V&A Theatre and Performance Archives, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Many thanks to all the librarians and archivists who offered their expertise and aid, especially to the librarian at the Salle Richelieu who so uncomplainingly cut the pages of the BNF’s long-­unread first edition of Valentine, ou La Chute des Feuilles. Many thanks to the scholarly associations and gatherings who invited me to share my research: the American Society for Eighteenth-­Century Studies, the American Society for Theatre Research, the British Society for Eighteenth-­Century Studies, the Canadian Society for Theatre Research, the Nineteenth-­Century French Studies Association, the University of Manitoba Health Humanities Research Cluster, and the Research Forum of the Fountain School of Performing Arts. I owe special gratitude to Anne-­Marie Callet-­Bianco, Sylvain Ledda, and all the attendees of the colloque “Le théâtre d’Alexandre Dumas père: héritages et renouvellements.” Thanks to the following publications and presses for permission to reprint material: Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (Wiley), NineteenthCentury French Studies (University of Nebraska Press), Theatre Research in Canada (University of Toronto Press), and Palgrave Macmillan. At the University of Iowa Press, Heather S. Nathans has been an exemplary series editor: patient, rigorous, perceptive, and encouraging. I thank her and the other members of the editorial team, including Daniel Ciba, Meredith T. Stabel, Susan Hill Newton, and Daniel Forrest-­Bank, for their wise suggestions as well as for their support, tolerance, and compassion during the many personal vicissitudes that affected this project. Sincere thanks, too, to the two anonymous reviewers who offered such thoughtful, detailed, and generous feedback on an earlier draft. My deepest thanks go to two people without whose love, humor, patience, traveling companionship, listening ears, and insights Symptoms of the Self would never have come to fruition. The first is my husband, David Nicol. The second is my mother, Diane Murray Barker, who died just a few weeks after the final manuscript was submitted, and to whom this book is dedicated.

Symptoms of the Self

Introduction

The Symptom, the Stage, and the Transmission of the Self

G

“Love and a cough cannot be hid.” — ­(Proverbial)

Early in 2012, the British film critic Mark Kermode reviewed Declan Donnellan’s film adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-­Ami on BBC Radio  5. In it, he remarked, the actor Philip Glenister “does that thing that people do in movies: he turns up and goes, ‘Hello’ [cough].” In a tone of amusement, Kermode mimicked both the workaday greeting and the single hacking cough. His copresenter, Simon Mayo, responded promptly: “He’s going to die. Is it consumption? It normally is.”1 For Mayo, the cough immediately signified not just a terminal prognosis but a particular agent of doom: the disease now best known as pulmonary tuberculosis, which in Maupassant’s era was generally called consumption or phthisis.2 The classic symptoms of tuberculosis—­especially its chronic cough and attendant blood-­spitting—­have become synonymous with stage and screen representations of illness. This linkage was already firmly established by 1921, when the Polish playwright Stanisław Witkiewicz spoofed histrionic convention by introducing Plasmonick Blödestaug, the anti-­hero of his drama The Anonymous Work, as a consumptive artist coughing into his handkerchief.3 Today, the popular website TV Tropes devotes a substantial page to the “Incurable Cough of Death,” noting that even a mild coughing fit near the beginning of a play, film, or television program generally guarantees a character’s death by the end of it.4 The TV Tropes compendium includes examples from Japanese anime and video games, South Korean film, Spanish children’s TV, American web comics, and a host of fanfictions. No other illness or its symptoms can boast such currency in the international marketplace of signifiers. —1—

2 Introduction

How did pulmonary tuberculosis become the theatrical and cinematic illness par excellence? One answer lies in the logic of the symptom, in which a complex and otherwise inscrutable inward process is rendered decipherable through its somatic materialization in and upon the body. Unlike those of many other diseases, the symptoms of tuberculosis are highly audible, visible, and imitable. An actor can simulate a cough with ease; a bloodstained handkerchief offers no challenge to a seasoned props-­maker. So snugly do these symptoms fit mimetic media that André Bazin used them as examples in his foundational essay on the differences between theatre and cinema, remarking that The art director would not conceive the bedroom of La Dame aux Camélias in a substantially different way if working for the stage or for the screen. True, in the cinema we might get close-­ups of the bloodstained handkerchief. But a skillful theatrical production would also know how to make play with the cough and the handkerchief.5 In their consummate legibility, the symptoms of tuberculosis are theatre, are cinema. Kermode only has to cough once for Mayo to name the disease in question. Over the period of the disease’s greatest cultural visibility during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, the performance of tuberculosis also responded to deeper needs and tensions in the communities by and to whom it was played. As these communities struggled with an epidemic and generally terminal affliction, they worked collectively to make sense of it by tying it to their most deeply held and fiercely debated constructions of individual and social identity. Because consumption was understood for much of the nineteenth century as a disease whose roots lay in aspects of the sufferer’s personal and social being, its symptoms served as signs not only of pathology but also of other kinds of inwardness. Emotional sensibility, family history, and even racial, national, gender, and class identities could all be materialized by the cough and the bloodstained handkerchief. This study, the first to attempt a wide-­ranging exploration of the theatrical history of tuberculosis, tracks the emergence and implications of what I dub the “consumptive repertoire” (in French, the repertoire poitrinaire) within transatlantic performance cultures during and beyond the long nineteenth century. My work draws on Tracy C. Davis’s definition of nineteenth-­century repertoires as

Introduction 3

multiple circulating recombinative discourses of intelligibility that create a means by which audiences are habituated to understand one or more kinds or combinations of performative tropes and then recognise and interpret others that are unfamiliar, so that the new may be incorporated into repertoire.6 The first stage consumptive protagonists emerged on the boulevard stages of Paris before and during the July Monarchy inaugurated by the revolution of 1830. At the outset, they were so “unfamiliar” as to shock some spectators. Nevertheless, they were embraced by audiences because they fitted effectively into other, well-­established conventions of the contemporary stage. The repertoire of consumptive dramas soon became both familiar and beloved, gaining popularity first in France, then across the English Channel and in North America. Far from obliterated by the simultaneous rise of germ theory and theatrical realism in the late nineteenth century, many aspects of this consumptive repertoire were incorporated directly into the emergent realist canon. The case history of the stage consumptive thus illuminates the etiology and epidemiology of modern western theatrical practice—­and of narratives that still affect the way many humans live and die.

The Storied Disease To follow consumption’s theatrical trail, I start from the premise that narrative plays a role in human experiences of health, illness, and death: a proposition crucial to both the “medical turn” in literary studies and the “narrative turn” in medicine. The discipline of medical humanities often focuses upon the ways in which human subjects “develop stories, patterns of expectation, plots and sequences of images and metaphors, which form our perceptions of disease [and] pain.”7 At the same time, medical theorists and practitioners strive to understand “the centrality of illness experience in the medical treatment of disease.”8 One way to sum up these explorations—­and to link them directly to Theatre and Performance Studies—­is to suggest with Ronald Frankenberg that sickness is lived by patients and those around them as a “cultural performance.”9 Through what Richard Schechner describes as “twice-­behaved behaviors,”10 disease processes and their symptoms become comprehensible social positions, actions, and relationships. While acknowledging that each person experiences health and disease differently and that many aspects of their experience remain untouched (and

4 Introduction

untouchable) by narrativization or performance,11 this book builds upon the hypothesis that social expressions of disease “depend on shared ways of narrating illness.”12 It understands the stage as one medium among many—­ including medical and literary writing, the visual arts, fashion, and music, among others—­that provide “cultural templates” for these shared forms of narration.13 Moreover, it follows Linda C. Garro and Cheryl Mattingly’s insistence that to understand illness narratives, “one must go beyond text to examine the social world in which a story is told, or even tellable.”14 This dialogue between sickness, society, and narrative is constantly visible in the modern world. Many diseases—­such as syphilis, cancer, and AIDS—­ have accreted complex performative meanings over time. Others—­such as COVID-­19—­are in the process of doing so in the contemporary global arena. As TV Tropes’s “Incurable Cough of Death” page suggests, however, if the cultural history of any one illness can be seen as epitomizing humanity’s propensity to perform disease, it is that of tuberculosis. Many scholars have examined the ways in which this leading killer of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries transformed the imaginations of the societies it ravaged.15 In Illness and Self in Society, Claudine Herzlich and Janine Pierret identify the span of “more than a century” covered by this book—­ the years from the early nineteenth to the mid-­t wentieth centuries—­as a period during which pulmonary tuberculosis became the “embodiment of illness” in western cultures.16 Consumption accounted for approximately one in five deaths in England in the century’s opening decades,17 and as many as one in four deaths in France in its closing years.18 The highest levels of mortality from the disease were among patients in their twenties and thirties,19 their dying often drawn out over months or years of chronic suffering. Koch’s identification of the tubercle bacillus in 1882 linked this suffering to infectious bacteria that could create lesions in many human organs, but that most frequently attacked the lungs into which they are inhaled. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, however, Northern European and North American doctors and patients viewed consumption primarily as the product of heredity20 or of environmental or emotional factors.21 Nineteenth-­ century consumptive patients were thus cast in a tale of individual doom to which they were condemned by personal history and temperament. This story was eminently suited to a narrative-­based, character-­focused art form such as nineteenth-­century Euro-­North-­American drama.

Introduction 5

So, too, was the typical trajectory of the illness’s symptoms as seen through the eyes of nineteenth-­century physicians. In his influential Traité de l’Auscultation Médiate (1819), Réné-­Théophile-­Hyacinthe Laënnec described how the manifestations of phthisis often began with a “little dry cough”22 that appeared hardly worthy of notice until more disturbing symptoms followed. The cough turned persistent and productive, accompanied by recurrent “hectic” fevers and copious night sweats.23 Breathlessness, fatigue, weight loss, and pain in the chest or side began to trouble the sufferer, while their face showed the classic consumptive contrast between overall pallor and feverishly flushed cheeks.24 In many cases, the frightening appearance of hemoptysis (blood-­spitting)—­the symptom that John Keats described as his “death warrant”25—­provided confirmation of tubercular disease.26 As painted by Laënnec, the symptomatic trajectory of tuberculosis resembled Aristotle’s description of a tragic dramatic plot. From an apparently innocuous inciting incident, the illness proceeded through various complications to the terrible anagnorisis or recognition of disease. Although further reversals or peripeteia might succeed this moment of discovery, the likely denouement was the catastrophe of death.27 Thus, historians Isabelle Grellet and Caroline Kruse depict the cultural history of tuberculosis in theatrical terms, replete with spectacular “grand scenes” of blood-­spitting and searing deathbed farewells.28 Susan Sontag’s influential Illness as Metaphor (1977) offered the first major scholarly analysis of western literary narratives about tuberculosis. In the nineteenth century, she noted, tuberculosis was seen as “a disease of time” that “speeds up life, highlights it, spiritualizes it.”29 By wasting its victims, it “dissolved the gross body, etherealized the personality, expanded consciousness.”30 It was a disease of passion and of passion’s sublimation, afflicting creatures of extreme sensibility who felt desire too intensely and were forced nobly to renounce it.31 “Above all,” wrote Sontag, tuberculosis was “a way of affirming the value of being more conscious, more complex psychologically.”32 For Sontag, such metaphorization was a preposterous “distortion” of sufferers’ horrendous lived experiences.33 More recent studies have nuanced Sontag’s arguments about the ways in which tuberculosis was aestheticized by communities coping with a terrifying, incurable disease. In particular, Clark Lawlor has demonstrated how consumption’s often horrific symptoms “came to be constructed through various discourses as beneficial to the recipient of the illness.”34 His work

6 Introduction

Figure 1. Henry Peach Robinson, Fading Away. Courtesy of the History Collection / Alamy Stock Photo.

explores the profound links between consumption, the “cult of the sentimental,” and medical notions of nerve-­based sensibility in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.35 If, as the physician George Cheyne asserted in 1731, “Feeling is nothing but the Impulse, Motion, or Action of Bodies, gently or violently impressing the Extremities or Sides of the Nerves,”36 then a person of high nervous sensibility was likely both to feel more and to suffer more violently from their feelings than others. The more refined and intense one’s sentiments, the more likely one was to be threatened by disease; thus, Cheyne declared that “great nervous Symptoms, were the first Stage, or Elements of a Phthisis.”37 Within this medical framework, Lawlor suggests, the notion of consumption as an illness of complex, sensitive subjectivities appeared not risible but convincing—­and perhaps even comforting for patients faced with almost certain death. Other scholars have shown how these conceptions of consumption interacted with the material conditions and social structures of emergent modernity. Roy Porter has drawn out the links between consumption and the rise of consumer society in the eighteenth century.38 Within a colonial context, Alan Bewell has described how a conception of consumption as

Introduction 7

the ennobling disease of the “western middle class” spread from Europe to the Americas.39 In her work on the late eighteenth-­and early nineteenth-­ century rise of “consumptive chic,” Carolyn Day has shown how middle-­ and upper-­class European feminine beauty came to be associated with the disease.40 In the English Victorian novel, Katherine Byrne has argued, consumption worked as “a signifier of gender and class issues . . . and one which was associated with industrial capitalism in complex ways.”41 Alex Tankard has examined the experience of nineteenth-­century male consumptives both real and fictional through the lens of Disability Studies, exposing the ways in which they asserted their identities by rebelling against the sanctifying stereotypes associated with their illness.42 Sharon Hirsh and Elizabeth L. Lee have explored the ways in which nineteenth-­century visual culture shaped a “code of consumption” that, in widely replicated images like Henry Peach Robinson’s 1858 photograph “Fading Away” (Fig. 1), worked to keep the disease’s beautiful and ennobling cultural image firmly in circulation.43 In their varying ways, all of these scholars affirm Lawlor and Suzuki’s conclusion that consumption functioned historically as “the disease of the self ”: the illness most closely linked to the rise of an interiorized, liberal humanist conception of the individual in western thought.44 To date, the stage has played a relatively minor part in this scholarly work. Those who have explored theatre’s role in consumption’s cultural history have generally focused on the massive influence of Alexandre Dumas fils’s drama La Dame aux Camélias (1852), adapted from his 1848 novel of the same name.45 Prominent amongst these scholars is Meredith Conti, whose first published work on theatrical consumptions is a fine 2009 essay that examines Dumas’s Marguerite Gautier alongside Little Eva, the saintly consumptive child who played a starring role in many stage adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Conti argues convincingly that these roles offer examples of consumption’s “tragic potential” onstage, touching in the process upon a number of other English–language consumptive dramas.46 Conti’s subsequent monograph on representations of illness in nineteenth-­century Anglophone theatre, Playing Sick, showcases the ways in which nineteenth-­century performers and playwrights worked to center the patient’s experience onstage. Playing Sick considers the performance of multiple illnesses; a key section surveys the work of actresses who played Dumas’s consumptive Marguerite on American stages and illuminates the socio-­cultural implications of their portrayals.47

8 Introduction

Although it builds upon Conti’s excellent work, Symptoms of the Self strives to do something rather different than Playing Sick, or any of the other existing cultural histories of tuberculosis. It aims to offer the first synoptic, transatlantic stage history of consumption, and to unpack some of the complex and influential theatrical repertoires associated with the disease. Where Conti focuses primarily upon La Dame aux Camélias, my study examines a great plurality of stage consumptives created across a span of 150 years, beginning in Paris in the late 1820s and ending in New York in the early 1970s. Where Conti looks specifically at performers who played La Dame aux Camélias—­or, as it became known to Americans, Camille—­ in the United States, I examine the work of artists across France, Britain, and the United States. I show how these three national theatrical cultures affected one another, foregrounding in the process many plays, playwrights, and performers that contemporary performance scholarship has tended to neglect. Studies like Linda and Michael Hutcheon’s Opera: Desire, Disease, Death have analyzed the importance of opera’s consumptive heroines,48 while cultural historians like Pierre Guillaume have nodded to theatrical consumptives such as the Duc de Reichstadt in Rostand’s 1900 verse drama L’Aiglon.49 When dealing with the “inevitable consumption”50 that featured in so many other, now forgotten nineteenth-­century dramas, however, critics have generally treated it as an embarrassing sin against dramatic good taste, worthy of a swift oblivion.51 To date, no study has looked comparatively at a wide range of stage consumptives, the manner in which they were embodied by actors, or the reception they met from audiences who lived in daily proximity to the disease. By considering a variety of ways in which consumption was represented on French, British, and American stages during the period in which it became “the embodiment of illness,” Symptoms of the Self strives to fill a small part of that gap.

Performing Consumption Two points emerge when one begins to compare consumption’s onstage appearances with its well-­documented representations in novels, poetry, visual culture, and memoirs. First, whereas many other cultural portrayals of consumption depicted the disease not only as beautiful but often as painless and almost symptomless, 52 this reassuring image of a gentle, pleasant ailment was rarely obtained in the theatre. Because actors represented consumption

Introduction 9

through their bodies, the physical symptoms associated with the illness were commonly foregrounded onstage, even if in sanitized or idealized ways. Second, the cultural image of the consumptive patient as sensitive, creatively gifted, and/or spiritually elevated was far slower to emerge in drama than in other literary forms. Lawlor has traced consumption’s metaphorical links to passion and spirituality back to sixteenth-­century English prose; but when the consumptive cough was heard on French and British stages before the nineteenth century, the effect was almost always comic. A quick survey of references to the disease in pre-­Romantic drama suggests some of the reasons for this surprising association between consumption and comedy. One of the earliest examples occurs in Plautus’s Mercator (c. 200 b.c.) when a servant reproaches his master with the pains he has taken for him, complaining, “For your sake, I’ve burst the veins of my lungs; I’m spitting blood already.”53 Similar treatments of consumptive or quasi-­consumptive symptoms appear in neoclassical French comedy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The great playwright Molière, for example, may have suffered from tubercular illness throughout much of his theatrical career.54 Instead of finding pathos in his condition, he translated his chronic cough into a sequence of comically hacking old man’s roles. 55 So successful was he in this endeavour that, according to one of the most famous anecdotes in theatre history, audiences kept laughing until he began coughing blood onstage on the night of his death.56 A later French playwright, Destouches, made a similar joke from the coughing of two aging lovers in his 1741 comedy L’Amour Usé: ISABELLE: I no longer enjoy anything. I have a continual cold; I cough day and night. (She coughs.) LISIDOR: I’m in the same state. (He coughs.) I’m actually afraid I may be consumptive. (They both cough together.) ISABELLE: I see we’re both done for. What a pity! But, come now, despite our infirmities, we must still love one another.57 Building on Aristotle’s assertion that “comedy prefers to represent people who are worse than those who exist, tragedy people who are better,”58 such comic treatments of consumption and its symptoms depended upon a grotesque vision of the body: aging, ailing, straining, and altogether less beautiful than the spectator might prefer to imagine their own body to be. Social and spiritual nobility, the indispensable attributes of neoclassical

10 Introduction

tragedy, were inextricable from physical decorum. A stage body whose inelegant symptoms resisted control lacked the aura of distinction associated with consumption in other, non-­performative discursive contexts. In the English theatre, less insistently classicist than its French counterpart, the fashionable attractions of consumption were more readily acknowledged, but just as quickly satirized. In Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, premiered in 1773 as consumption was gaining cultural capital under the cult of sensibility, the good-­natured but affected Mrs. Hardcastle ludicrously pictures her boorish son Tony Lumpkin as a doomed invalid: MRS. HARDCASTLE: We must not snub the poor boy now, for I believe we shan’t have him long among us. Anybody that looks in his face may see he’s consumptive. HARDCASTLE: Ay, if growing too fat be one of the symptoms. MRS. HARDCASTLE: He coughs sometimes. HARDCASTLE: Yes, when his liquor goes the wrong way.59 Goldsmith spoofs the sentimental fashion for consumption and the pretensions of those who use it to depict themselves or their intimates as more refined and interesting than they really are. Where the neoclassical French theatre staged the grotesquely ailing body as an object of mockery, Goldsmith’s satire contrasts the healthy body of the galumphing Tony with what it constructs as the risible literary ideal of the intriguingly languishing consumptive. Even when dealing with characters who appear actually to be suffering from phthisic symptoms, eighteenth-­century English drama goes out of its way to mock the disease’s sentimental profile. Miles Peter Andrews’s The Reparation (1784) features a sickly aristocrat, Lord Hectic, whose name points to his consumptive ailment as clearly as his constant coughing. He describes himself in hyperbolically sentimental terms: “Harkee, sirrah, don’t you know that I am all feeling—­a mass of combustible sensibility?”60 Yet he is at pains to deny his own ill-­health, which gets in the way of his efforts to style himself as a lover. His first appearance finds him sitting upon a chamber-­horse, a fashionable machine for indoor exercise: LORD HECTIC: (getting off ) There, there—­I have taken a pretty long ride today. (coming forward) What a fine thing it is to be hale and hearty! (coughing) One gets thro’ so much fatigue without minding it; and looks as fresh as a rose after all (coughing).61

Introduction 11

Later in the play, Lord Hectic challenges a man he believes to have ill-­used a lady he desires, declaring himself a “man of nice feelings, and strong powers (coughing).”62 As in She Stoops to Conquer, so here the comedy depends upon the contrast between the words used to describe a character and that character’s physical being as embodied by an actor. In both cases, the joke works to keep class distinctions in place; where Tony Lumpkin’s strapping middle-­class frame undercuts his mother’s claims of consumptive refinement, Lord Hectic’s effete aristocratic body undermines his efforts to appear a manly and heroic lover. In both cases, the effect is ludicrous rather than pathetic. The eighteenth-­century theatrical attitude to consumption’s cultural capital is summed up in the London Morning Chronicle’s praise for She Stoops to Conquer: It is with great pleasure we can inform the public, that the ingenious and engaging Miss Comedy, is in a fair way of recovery. This much admired young lady has lately been in a very declining way, and was thought to be dying of a sentimental consumption. She is now under the care of Dr. Goldsmith, who has already prescribed twice for her. The medicines sat extremely easy upon her stomach, and she appears to be in fine spirits.63 It was the theatre’s role, physician-­like, to strive to cure such social ills as the cult of sensibility, which encouraged unhealthy affectations. Treated thus, consumption and its symptoms served to keep traditional aesthetic canons—­and the established social order—­firmly in place. In the wake of the challenges posed to neoclassicism by political events, such as the American and French revolutions, and aesthetic movements, such as Romanticism, however, sentimental modes gained ever more purchase in the late eighteenth-­century theatre, creating the conditions for the rise of the consumptive stage protagonist. Germany, the seedbed of Romantic drama, played a key role in this process. The sentimental comedies of August von Kotzebue, among the most popular and frequently translated plays of the 1790s and 1800s, featured a number of frail, elderly consumptive characters, including the virtuous bourgeois father in Die Versöhnung (The Reconciliation, 1798) and the faithful servant Rachel in Der Taubstumme (The Deaf-­Mute, 1800).64 Though these characters take minor roles and are far from glamorous, their suffering is played for pathos rather than for laughs. A closer forerunner of the Romantic stage consumptive is

12 Introduction

the doomed Marie de Beaumarchais in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s first published play, the sentimental tragedy Clavigo (1774). A young and sensitive woman jilted by her fiancé, Marie grows breathless and swoons at the thought of her inconstant lover,65 collapsing fatally when he finally betrays her.66 Written at the dawn of the Sturm und Drang movement, Goethe’s tragedy had few imitators in its own time; but the model it offered, in which consumptive symptoms function as moving indices of emotional turmoil rather than laughable signs of personal and social inadequacy, would bear fruit in the century to come.

Sentimental Symptoms The appeal of this model within the sentimental ecologies of performance that underlay many aspects of nineteenth-­century western theatrical practice is elucidated by Lynn Festa’s definition of sentimentality as “a rhetorical practice that monitors and seeks to master the sympathetic movement of emotion between individuals and groups of people.” Festa argues that whereas sympathy alludes to the mobility of emotion between different individuals, and sensibility describes individuals’ susceptibility to particular kinds and degrees of feeling, sentimentality as a crafted literary form moves to locate that emotion, to assign it to particular persons, thereby designating who possesses affect and who elicits it.67 In this affective economy, Elizabeth Barnes writes, “As one subject views another, she must imagine how the other feels; this can only be accomplished by projecting onto another person what would be one’s own feelings in that particular situation. According to this model, personal feeling becomes the basis of both one’s own and the other’s authenticity.”68 As a “crafted literary form,” sentimentality works to foster and manage this affective encounter. Hence, Margaret Cohen argues, sentimental works tend to showcase “a spectacle of suffering that solicits the spectator’s sympathy.”69 In one way or another, every performance of consumption discussed in this book re-­enacts this sentimental exchange. What I describe in the book’s first chapter as “consumptive poetics”—­that is, the superstructure of images, tropes, affective properties, and socio-­cultural implications that accrued around consumption in nineteenth-­century transatlantic theatrical

Introduction 13

culture—­may thus be seen as a subset of sentimental poetics, which hinge upon the moving display of pain that Cohen calls “sentimentality’s primal scene.”70 By defining the theatrical consumptive repertoire as fundamentally sentimental, I diverge somewhat both from the frequent scholarly depiction of consumption as “a melodramatic conceit” and from Conti’s counter-­ argument that consumption gained popularity on the nineteenth-­century stage primarily because of its tragic potential.71 In the chapters to come, I detail how some stage consumptives did indeed conform to the archetypes of melodrama. Others, as Conti shows, met the requirements of classical or later models of tragedy. Still others were rewarded with love, health, and a frankly comic happy ending. All, however, were shaped by sentimentality’s “investment in affective and psychological interiority,” 72 its effort to elicit and manage intense emotion, and its commitment to the social relationship that Mary Louise Kete has called “sentimental collaboration”: an exchange of sympathy that “establish[es] the ground for participation in a common cultural or intellectual project.” 73 To understand the nature of that project, it is helpful to return to Lawlor and Suzuki’s identification of consumption as a “disease of the self,” which over time came to figure “a positive interiority.”74 By the late eighteenth century, they argue, consumption was understood as an ailment that both stemmed from and imparted a vivid, complex, and distinguished interior life. Hence, Lawlor and Suzuki suggest, it became linked with an “intense consciousness of the messages that one’s own body was conveying to others.”75 To have what French commentators dubbed an air de poitrinaire (a consumptive look), or to suffer perceptibly from consumptive symptoms, might serve as tangible proof that one possessed an admirable (if potentially fatal) inwardness. The sentimental stage sought precisely these kinds of signifiers: indices of an interiority so powerful it forced itself to the surface of the body, creating in the process visible and audible invitations to the spectator’s sympathy. At the height of theatrical neoclassicism in the early eighteenth century, actors had been trained to convey emotions partially by studying codified rhetorical gestures and facial expressions, each of them connected to a particular passion.76 Later in the century, Joseph Roach has argued, nerve-­based medicine and the culture of sensibility led to greater emphasis upon spontaneity and emotionality in acting.77 Hence, Julia Fawcett suggests, sentimental

14 Introduction

theatre came to “value earnest performance over mimetic performance and to call for an acting style in which the actor truly feels—­rather than simply representing—­the emotions he displays onstage.” 78 “Like a medical symptom,” Fawcett writes, “the expressions of the sensible body are physical, visible, and unpremeditated; their authenticity is guaranteed by the assumption that the body that exhibits them cannot help doing so.”79 This regime created as many challenges as it resolved, for, as Fawcett notes, the sentimental hero “forfeits subjectivity the moment that this emotion becomes too evident, the moment that the body becomes too transparent.”80 In a context where privacy and inwardness were inseparable from authentic subjectivity, overt expressions of emotion could result paradoxically in an audience’s withdrawal of sympathy. When—­as was often the case—­sentimental dramas, tragedies, and comedies featured settings familiar from the audience’s own world, this challenge became particularly acute. In Alexandre Dumas père’s popular 1831 drama Antony, his alter ego, the young playwright Eugène d’Hervilly, flags the difficulty of expressing passion in plays with modern settings. He complains that because “the resemblance between the hero and the parterre [is] too great, the analogy too close,” audiences accustomed to the polite mores of their own everyday social interactions view the drama’s unrestrained displays of emotion as exaggerated and unconvincing.81 Even as they strove to portray sincere and unmediated feeling, then, sentimental dramas with modern settings—­like the realist dramas of the later nineteenth century—­stood in serious need of “a performance rhetoric that [made their] thematic emphasis on privacy and interiority legible” while still accurately recreating the surface of ordinary bourgeois existence.82 Thanks to the medical and cultural links between sensibility and consumptive pathology, the performance of consumption offered one such rhetoric. By showing a character coughing, fainting, gasping for breath, or spitting blood onstage, the sentimental actor could literally symptomatize that character’s emotion through mimesis of an all-­too-­quotidian material experience, often without needing explicitly to enunciate or enact the emotion itself. Frequently, indeed, sentimental consumptive dramas featured characters who strove to conceal their deepest feelings, which then revealed themselves forcibly through their coughing fits or bloodstained handkerchiefs. Their emotions remained radically private while also being radically legible. The result was what I dub symptomatic dramaturgy and

Introduction 15

acting, which expressed characters’ most private feelings through their somatic expression on the surface of the body. This symptomatic approach to theatrical signification worked symbiotically with what Kirsten  E. Shepherd-­Barr has termed the “diagnostic gaze[,] shaped by the deepening cultural embeddedness of medical discourse,” which nineteenth-­century theatre invited its audience to train upon the stage.83 By inviting medical and emotional diagnosis, the physical signs of consumption also engaged the spectator’s interest and sympathy. In the process, they worked to affirm not only the character’s selfhood, but also the spectator’s own. Within this sentimental economy, the stage consumptive gained and wielded considerable affective capital—­and hence, considerable social power. Building upon Sara Ahmed’s argument that “emotions work as a form of capital”84 and on Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding of capital as “accumulated labor,” which enables agents to “appropriate social energy,”85 I define affective capital as emotional labor that makes others feel—­and (perhaps) do. Such capital was vital to the construction of post-­revolutionary literatures, constitutions, and social orders, which claimed to have their foundations in bonds of sympathy rather than in God-­given and unshakable social hierarchies.86 Because consumption worked so effectively to create sympathy, many of the most beloved sentimental dramas of the long nineteenth century used the individual suffering of consumptives to promote carefully managed forms of social change, often—­though not always—­upon a liberal or progressive model. If consumption could be triggered or exacerbated by emotional pain, then the familial, economic, or political forces that caused such pain were open to critique. By using consumption’s affective capital to show how modern society could destroy its own children, dramas like La Dame aux Camélias and Uncle Tom’s Cabin opened themselves to readings that challenged established social hierarchies and moral truisms. At the same time, the pleasure audiences took in weeping for pathetic victims like Marguerite Gautier and Eva St. Clare often negated any impulse to change. In practice, the effort to use the stage consumptive’s affective capital to foster sentimental collaborations often reflected and resulted in vehement debate. During the emergence of the repertoire, the very act of performing consumptive symptoms onstage was viewed by many as a provocative defiance of established social and aesthetic norms. Later, the now-­familiar symptoms began to be linked to controversies around social identity. Though more than one recent study has argued that “the consumptive in

16 Introduction

nineteenth-­century literature and art was usually represented as a woman,”87 this conclusion is qualified by the stage consumptive repertoire, where male and female sufferers appeared with approximately equal frequency. In the theatre, the tropes associated with the disease offered a language through which to debate the boundaries of appropriate gendered behavior. Similarly, the identification of consumption with bourgeois virtue in early drames poitrinaires, such as Valentine, ou La Chute des Feuilles (1828) and Angèle (1833), was challenged at mid-­century by a spate of plays featuring working-­class consumptives, and then again at the fin-­de-­siècle by the appearance of a number of ailing aristocrats. The racial identification of stage consumptives, by contrast, remained chillingly static. Throughout the long nineteenth century, the theatre’s tubercular patients were overwhelmingly white. In an era when Indigenous peoples and people of color were dying of tuberculosis in huge numbers in the transatlantic world, the fact that this point seems to have occasioned little or no controversy amongst critics of the consumptive repertoire speaks volumes about that repertoire’s foundations within white supremacist, Eurocentric cultures. This observation links the stage consumptive to Joseph Roach’s influential argument that circum-­Atlantic performance cultures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were dominated by the process of surrogation, in which “survivors attempt to fit satisfactory alternatives” into “the cavities created by loss through death or other forms of departure.”88 Stage consumptives were moving, divisive, and durable theatrical archetypes partially because they translated some of the greatest losses, anxieties, and controversies of the era into sentimentally legible forms. They strove to fill the spaces left by the many lives lost to tuberculosis, a disease that carved quite literal “cavities” into the lungs of its victims. But they also stepped into the voids left by other cultural traumas. Some of these—­such as revolutionary upheaval, class conflict, and shifting norms of gender and sexual morality—­were openly acknowledged. Others—­such as the brutalities of the transatlantic slave trade and the violent appropriation of Indigenous lands—­were assiduously occluded or erased by the pale, refined, and troublingly attractive figure of the white stage consumptive. Roach argues that “the very uncanniness of the process of surrogation [. . .] may provoke many unbidden emotions, ranging from mildly incontinent sentimentalism to raging paranoia.”89 If, as Ahmed suggests, such powerful emotional responses create “affective economies” that transform disparate individuals

Introduction 17

into communities “through the very intensity of their attachments,”90 then the durable affective capital of the consumptive repertoire may be chalked up—­at least in part—­to its ability to define and solidify social bonds.

Infectious Performances Conspicuous amongst these bonds were the complex cultural ties between the three nations whose triangulated relationship marks the boundaries of this project: France, Britain, and the United States. Although the stage consumptive was and remains an international phenomenon (as the book’s afterword stresses), this study focuses primarily upon the intense trans­ atlantic dialogue that took place between these three performance cultures.91 In this, it is inspired by Alan Bewell’s argument that consumption was understood throughout much of the nineteenth century as “a disease of the temperate regions of the globe, particularly of the urban centres of Europe and North America.”92 Because “Western peoples seemed to be set apart from others by their susceptibility to consumption,” Bewell suggests, the disease came to lie “at the heart of what nineteenth-­century Europeans saw as their biomedical identity.”93 France, Britain, and the United States all strove to define themselves by, against, and through this western biomedical destiny. Within their commercial theatres, which were generally dominated by white, middle-­class artists and audiences, the consumptive repertoire served as a locus for the articulation of national identity while also emerging as a vector for the transnational flow of theatrical practice.94 If theatrical consumptions were linked in the imagination of the nineteenth century to any one nation, it was France. The earliest successful sentimental consumptive stage protagonists appeared in the French theatre in the late 1820s and early 1830s, where they asserted the values of modern French performance in distinction from its past. The Anglo-­Irish noblewoman Lady Morgan evokes this use of the poitrinaire as an agent of cultural redefinition in her book France in 1829-­30 when she wryly describes a young Frenchman “with open shirt-­collar, black head, and wild and melancholy look”95 who recommends that she go see the latest Parisian hit show: “There is a little piece to be presented shortly, that will delight you: it is called the Poitrinaire. Imagine the most interesting of beings the

18 Introduction

victim of consumption. You will see the progress of that most sentimental disease in all its moral and physical characteristics.” “Your authors, then, study nature in the Hotel de Dieu?” I said, in utter amazement. “Not always,” he replied seriously. “Sometimes they go to Charenton. [. . .] You see we no longer study nature exclusively in courts; nor like Racine, copy, at the dictation of a Boileau, some ignorant despot, or vainglorious king. In short, we have done with the old school, not only in writing, but in acting and declamation[.]”96 Clearly an adherent of Romanticism, Lady Morgan’s interlocutor ties the “sentimental” spectacle of consumption, based upon a study from nature of its “moral and physical characteristics,” to the post-­revolutionary French rejection of neoclassical tragedy. Initially amazed, Lady Morgan soon professes herself “weary of this nonsense or mystification—­I knew not which.”97 Her response would be echoed by many British and American critics, who treated the sentimental stage portrayal of consumption as a bizarre and risible aspect of modern French culture. Despite such dismissals, which often sound strikingly like public health warnings against the moral and physical dangers posed by French symptomatic dramaturgy and acting, the French repertoire poitrinaire soon spread across the Channel and the wider Atlantic. The crucial agent in this process of transmission was Dumas fils’s La Dame aux Camélias, which was enthusiastically embraced in the United States as Camille and, though refused a license by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, reached the British stage via Giuseppe Verdi’s operatic adaptation La Traviata (1853). Other plays from the French repertoire also had strong transatlantic impact, including notably Barrière and Thiboust’s 1853 riposte to La Dame, Les Filles de Marbre (translated into English as The Marble Heart). These French consumptive plays became synonymous with the so-­called “emotional drama” in Britain and the United States, serving as proving-­grounds in which some of the most admired actors of the era gained celebrity. American and British stages also evolved their own consumptive dramas, including most prominently the many popular adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Mrs. Henry Wood’s East Lynne (1861). These works were played in French adaptations in their turn, ensuring that the consumptive repertoire flowed both ways across the Atlantic.

Introduction 19

This mobility relied on the consumptive repertoire’s sentimental foundations, which ensured that its discourses circulated and spread primarily through the movement of emotion. Joyce Davidson, Liz Bondi, and Mick Smith have defined emotions as “relational flows, fluxes, and currents, in-­between people and places,” which “both contribute to and disrupt ‘boundary forming processes.’ ”98 Often viewed in the nineteenth century as a crucial agent in the etiology of consumption, emotion was also the vital agent in the transnational epidemiology of the consumptive repertoire. Throughout the book, I thus draw upon medical conceptions of disease transmission to describe the circulation of emotion—­and the repertoires it carried—­across personal and national boundaries. In this, I am inspired by the work of many other recent scholars who have shown how deeply theatre and performance history have been influenced by—­and influenced—­ notions of infection, outbreak, and contagion.99 Elizabeth Maddock Dillon’s description of eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­ century transatlantic theatre as a “performative commons” in which the political and social being of imperial subjects was embodied “at the intersection of the material and the representational” offers another lens through which to view the transmission of the consumptive repertoire.100 Performances of consumption were sites where the often painfully tangible lived experience of nineteenth-­century theatre artists and audience members met the tropes, metaphors, and archetypes by which the disease was translated into moving mimetic forms. This book seeks not only to describe these performances of consumption, but also to understand the means by which they so successfully traversed emotional, social, and national boundaries. For example, at key points in this study Robin Bernstein’s exploration of the “scriptive things” that shaped human behavior in nineteenth-­century performance cultures encourages me to ask how theatrical objects—­especially the handkerchiefs Bernstein analyzes so well—­helped to enhance the consumptive repertoire’s affective capital.101 Elsewhere, I examine the ways in which the theatrical success of the consumptive was bolstered by consumption’s visibility in other popular media, including the novel, the memoir, poetry, visual culture, and fashion. Like the transmission of the disease itself, however, the transmission of the consumptive repertoire depended, above everything else, upon interactions between human bodies. In Diana Taylor’s influential use of the term, repertoires preserve and are preserved by embodied practice.102 In

20 Introduction

the case of the consumptive repertoire, that practice hinged on actors’ performances of the symptoms of a deadly disease—­often, indeed, on their performances of death itself. As an act of mimesis, this labor confessed the inevitability of human mortality. As a show of skill, it affirmed the performer’s power to move the spectator, and the spectator’s power to take pleasure in being moved. In the highly mobile world of nineteenth-­century transatlantic theatre, performers who achieved this feat were treated as conquering heroes who could successfully “command” the hearts of those in far-­flung cities and continents. New performers of the repertoire learned their skills through imitation, through instruction, and even through conscious competition with their predecessors. Via the process Marvin Carlson has described as “ghosting,”103 actors’ appearances in famous consumptive roles were haunted by memories of others’ performances, of their own previous consumptive parts, and—­for many in the audience—­of lived experiences with tuberculosis. Thanks to such modes of transmission, the performers of the consumptive repertoire became “the embodiment of illness” for generations of transatlantic spectators. This long sentimental collaboration affected not only national performance cultures, but also the development and transmission of theatrical genres that have come to be closely identified with modernity upon the transatlantic stage. In an effort to explore these processes of generic transmission and transformation, my book continues well past the traditionally assigned best-­before date of the Romantic consumptive. Scholars have frequently identified that date with Robert Koch’s 1882 identification of the tubercle bacillus, which exposed the disease as “indiscriminate and indifferent to the personal attributes of individual members of the populace,” thus diminishing “the essential nineteenth-­century identification of individuality through illness.”104 The rise of naturalism and realism in European and North American theatres in the same era is often seen as having replaced the popular theatre of the nineteenth-­century middle classes, “a provider of laughs, glitter, and maudlin sentimentality,” with “images of the world and society as it really was.”105 Elin Diamond’s classic essay “Realism’s Hysteria,” which recognizes many continuities between Romanticism and realism, identifies the essential difference between the two forms in medical terms, distinguishing realism’s “search for an etiology” from the spectacular and episodic dramaturgy of pre-­realist melodrama.106 These

Introduction 21

narratives have, however, been helpfully complicated by alternative ones that stress the non-­linearity of both medical and performance histories. Sander Gilman, for example, has shown that “concepts that should have vanished with Robert Koch’s discovery of the tuberculosis bacillus nonetheless powerfully persist in the medical literature of the age.”107 Thomas Postlewait has traced a similar hybridity in theatrical genres, stressing that “most of the time we can find melodramatic elements in realistic forms and realistic elements in melodramatic plays.”108 By offering one history of the consumptive repertoire’s infectious channels, this book strives to show how—­and why—­sentimental consumptive poetics not only survived onto, but actually helped to shape, the modern stage of realism and naturalism. At the heart of these theatrical forms, as Diamond and others have shown, lay the effort to diagnose and render visible onstage the hidden motions of the modern, interiorized psychological self so influentially theorized by Sigmund Freud and his disciples. Stanton  B. Garner argues that the naturalistic theatre strove to achieve this goal in part by “ground[ing] itself in the ‘real’ of the physiological body and install[ing] a medicalized gaze as its normative optics,”109 encouraging the spectator to analyze the surface of the character’s body in order to spot the psychic life underneath. I suggest that a model for this etiological process had already been established by the sentimental stage, which had successfully invited the audience’s interest in consumptive characters whose physiological symptoms were understood as externalizing their otherwise inaccessible emotional lives. Freud himself acknowledged this point in an essay on “Psychopathic Characters on the Stage,” declaring that [i]f a spectator puts himself in the place of someone who is physically ill he finds himself without any capacity for enjoyment or psychical activity. Consequently a person who is physically ill can only figure on the stage as a piece of stage property and not as a hero, unless, indeed, some peculiar physical aspects of his illness make psychical activity possible—­such, for instance, as the sick man’s forlorn state in the Philoctetes or the hopelessness of the sufferers in the class of plays that centre round consumptives.110 Freud’s assertion that the “physical aspects” of consumption “make psychical activity possible” may help to explain not only why the sentimental image of

22 Introduction

the consumptive maintained such a long hold on the modern stage, but also why key aspects of realist and naturalist practice actually emerged, like new strains of bacteria, out of sentimental modes of performance.

Unfolding Histories To trace this complex process, each chapter that follows explores a vital development or theme within the history of the consumptive repertoire. I begin in 1828, when the first consumptive protagonist appeared on the stage of Paris’s Théâtre des Nouveautés, and end in the 1970s, when theatre artists like Tennessee Williams and Charles Ludlam were repurposing the supposedly long-­dead consumptive repertoire to explore very contemporary constructions of gender, sexuality, and race. Each chapter links an aspect of medical theory and practice relating to the causes, transmission, and treatment of tuberculosis to the ways in which the disease was portrayed onstage. By considering playtexts both familiar and forgotten in relation to the cultural milieux that gave them birth, I strive to understand how the consumptive repertoire’s symptomatic dramaturgy developed from within, and helped to shape, pivotal forms of transatlantic theatre in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To get to know the most visible bodies involved in the transmission of the repertoire, I explore the personae, careers, and cultural mobility of performers who gained celebrity in consumptive roles across this same period. Archival materials—­press reviews, popular parodies, graphic and photographic images, promptbooks, obituaries, letters, and fan tributes—­help me to reconstruct the emotional and material relationships between consumptive characters, their actors, and their audiences. I gauge the affective impact of these relationships both through critical responses to the consumptive repertoire published in newspapers, journals, and books, and (where possible) through ordinary audience members’ descriptions of their own emotional reactions. At points, I also strive to place theatrical representations of consumption into dialogue with the other representations—­in novels, life writing, visual culture, and poetry, for example—­that shaped transatlantic cultural understandings of the disease. In the book’s first part, “Consumptive Poetics,” I examine the emergence of the consumptive protagonist on the French stage in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Chapter One explores St. Hilaire and de Villeneuve’s vaudeville Valentine, ou La Chute des Feuilles (1828) and Dumas

Introduction 23

père’s modern drama Angèle (1833) to show how their representations of consumption responded to medical conceptions of the disease as a product of unhappy emotions. By creating heroic points of identification for the bourgeois white subjects of a society gripped by ongoing waves of revolutionary change, these plays and their performers helped to elaborate a durable poetics of the stage consumptive. Chapter Two turns to two iconic French consumptive heroines, Mimì in La Vie de Bohème (1849) and Marguerite in La Dame aux Camélias (1852). Linking these plays to accounts of the life and death of the great actress Rachel Félix, I argue that they reflect medical constructions of consumption as a disease of the overworked. By foregrounding the working woman’s courageous concealment of her symptoms while inviting the theatrical spectator to diagnose the suffering beneath her smiling façade, these dramas created a touching dialectic between repression and revelation that would prove highly influential upon later dramatic forms. The book’s second part, “Sentimental Transmissions,” delves into the emergence of a transatlantic consumptive repertoire, considering the ways in which that repertoire used consumption’s medical and social profiles to articulate national, racial, and gendered identities. Chapter Three traces the process by which La Dame aux Camélias and the works inspired by it entered British and American theatrical cultures over the course of the 1850s. Although critics railed against the moral diseases carried by these French dramas, the huge affective capital that accrued around them—­ and the star actors who performed them—­ensured their transformative impact upon the dramatic landscape of the later nineteenth century. Chapter Four turns to two other major phenomena of the transatlantic stage, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and East Lynne, both of which featured consumptive children. By drawing on mid-­nineteenth-­century medical theories of consumption as a hereditary disease, these plays strove to critique the ills of slavery and sin, but the popularity of their sentimental death scenes often worked performatively to reinscribe the very social blights that their narratives professed to combat. Chapter Five examines the similarly ambiguous ways in which the consumptive repertoire came to articulate national identities—­and anxieties—­in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Even as medical writers of this period worried about the rising incidence of consumption within populations, viewing it as a sign of national decline, the transatlantic success of the consumptive repertoire ensured that identification with

24 Introduction

the disease could prove a significant source of national capital. In plays like Tom Taylor’s An Unequal Match (1857), Augustin Daly’s Horizon (1871), and Edmond Rostand’s L’Aiglon (1900), consumptive characters and the actors who performed them came to embody highly ambivalent constructions of national greatness. The book’s final part, “The Sentimental Survival,” asks how the tropes that developed over the nineteenth-­century career of the stage consumptive endured into the twentieth century. Despite the ironizing example of Henrik Ibsen, Chapter Six argues French and British realists of the 1890s and 1900s declined to jettison the consumptive repertoire. Instead, plays like François de Curel’s La Nouvelle Idole (1895) and George Bernard Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906) employed the consumptive’s affective capital to critique the materialism and scientific positivism of contemporary society. Meanwhile, the last chapter shows how the old French poétique du poitrinaire was absorbed into the bloodstream of the new American theatre via the work of artists such as Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Charles Ludlam. Grounded in autobiography, these artists’ consumptive dramas exemplify the enduring impact of French sentimental drama not only upon the modern stage, but also upon the modern self. The stage consumptive is alive (if still unwell) in the contemporary theatre. Not only are key works from the repertoire granted frequent global revivals, but new ones continue to emerge. In 2001, for instance, director Baz Luhrmann scored a cinematic success with his film Moulin Rouge!, adapted in large part from La Dame aux Camélias and La Vie de Bohème; in 2019, a successful musical based upon the film opened on Broadway. Moulin Rouge! tells the story of the doomed courtesan Satine, whose fatal consumption is inseparable from her passionate inner life and glamorous public persona. When Ben Brantley praised Broadway’s Satine, Karen Olivo, for portraying “a figure of palpable flesh, who deploys a coquette’s arsenal of wiles and illusions to conceal illness, desperation and a hard-­lived past,”111 his language directly recalled that used by nineteenth-­century critics to praise the great performers of La Dame aux Camélias. Yet Olivo’s interpretation also offered a powerful example of the profoundly political relationship between the consumptive repertoire and its performers. As a “woman of color” and “a woman in her 40s,” she declared, she was interested in the character’s agency as well as her struggles: “My background is one that comes from

Introduction 25

somebody who was never given anything, so it became something that was very easy to inject into my Satine.”112 In March 2020, Moulin Rouge! closed after a number of its actors contracted COVID-­19. One of them, Danny Burstein, was hospitalized when he “couldn’t stop coughing up blood.” In a Hollywood Reporter article about his time in hospital, he describes a day in which he repeatedly struggled to breathe: “It was very isolating and scary. What’s an actor without his breath?”113 The article underlines the continuities between the consumptive repertoire and the repertoires emerging around the coronavirus pandemic. Like the consumptions of Satine and Marguerite Gautier, Burstein’s illness gained widespread visibility thanks to the sufferer’s celebrity, charisma, and whiteness, even as the voices of COVID’s many victims of color often went unheard. Yet Burstein’s account stresses that his experience of disease was also linked to Marguerite’s and Satine’s by the widespread human fear of breathless, choking mortality. The COVID-­19 pandemic has given chilling proof that—­now as in the nineteenth century—­narratives of illness are determined by the politics of race, gender, class, and nationhood. It has also emphasized the pivotal role such narratives play in helping populations cope with the visceral terror of epidemic disease. In the consumptive repertoire, as in the cultural response to COVID-­19, these two formative strands of illness narrative are profoundly intertwined. By representing the symptoms of tuberculosis onstage, a long line of French, British, and American theatre artists transformed a real and horrific disease into a pleasurable set of tropes. In the process, they transmitted complex conceptions of subjectivity across wide distances and along the span of a long nineteenth century that spilled far into the twentieth. Conveying at once clinical fact and subjective feeling, the performed symptom became a vehicle through which—­for better and for worse—­standards of health, beauty, and virtue were imposed; constructions of class, gender, and sexuality were debated; the boundaries of nationhood were transgressed or maintained; and an exceedingly fragile whiteness was held up as a dominant social ideal. By taking seriously the theatrical repertoires of consumption, this book strives to uncover a sentimental poetics that still infects the contemporary world.

G Part I

Consumptive Poetics

1 “La Poétique Du Poitrinaire” The Making of the Stage Consumptive, 1828–1833

G

“Consumption and the national horse guards: since 1830, everyone’s been there.” —­A lexandre Dumas fils (Le Demi-­Monde, 1855)

In January of 1834, the critic Amédée Pichot reviewed Alexandre Dumas père’s popular new drama Angèle in the Revue de Paris. “One must admit,” he wrote, that it takes a certain poetic audacity to put on stage an invalid suffering from pulmonary phthisis. I am not sure that illnesses, in general, form part of art’s domain—­and this one less than any other, though the vaudeville has already made couplets out of it. One can only congratulate M. Dumas on having known how to make his consumptive interesting, and thank the actor, who plays him with a few too many grimaces, for having at least dispensed with the cough and other less dramatic symptoms.1 By 1834, consumption had long reigned as one of the most fashionable ailments of European society. Nevertheless, Pichot viewed the appearance of a consumptive, called in French a poitrinaire, in Dumas’s play as an innovation. His comments underline two of this book’s most vital questions. How could a playwright render a consumptive “interesting,” and how should an actor perform the disease’s symptoms, “dramatic” or otherwise? The answers provided by Dumas and his contemporaries would provide the foundations for the theatrical consumptive repertoire. — 29 —

30

consump tiv e poetics

Seismic changes in medical, artistic, and political cultures in France facilitated the emergence of the Romantic stage consumptive. The poitrinaire figured a quest to use material signs to expose the secrets of the individual body, of the emotions that shook it, and of the shifting body politic of which it formed a part. When the actress Thérèse Albert played the dying heroine of Valentine, ou La Chute des Feuilles in 1828, she proved that a consumptive protagonist could succeed onstage. It then fell to Dumas’s Henri Muller definitively to establish the consumptive as a popular theatrical archetype. Almost fifty years later, a doctor writing in the medical journal L’Union Médicale recalled that Muller’s role had provided posterity with “a pretty complete portrait of the poetics of the consumptive in the Romantic year of grace, 1834.”2 This allusion to “the poetics of the consumptive” (la poétique du poitrinaire) suggests that a very specific set of images, tropes, and connotations came to be associated with theatrical consumptions in the French Romantic imagination. Adopting L’Union Médicale’s term as a methodological cornerstone for this study, I set out to recover these “consumptive poetics” as they signified for audiences in an age whose successive waves of revolution had unsettled constructions of nation, class, and gender. The first successful stage consumptives were protagonists for and of their cultural moment. They embodied the French Romantics’s rejection of neoclassical tradition and the aristocratic culture associated with it, figuring the ascendency of a bourgeois, domestic notion of modern heroism. Their ability to do so was based in what Janis McLarren Caldwell calls early nineteenth-­century medicine’s “Romantic materialism”: “Romantic because [it was] concerned with consciousness and self-­expression, and materialist because [it] placed a particularly high value on what natural philosophy was telling [it] about the material world.”3 At the heart of the French consumptive repertoire lay medical conceptions of phthisis as an illness triggered by—­and expressive of—­painful emotion. Materialized through the daring performance language of the symptom, the deep feelings of these sentimental poitrinaires rendered them both exemplars for and sufferers in the modern world.

Valentine, or Consumptive Capital It was the vaudeville, Pichot wrote, that first “made couplets” about consumption.4 The pioneering work to which he refers is almost certainly Valentine, ou La Chute des Feuilles (Valentine, or The Falling of the Leaves) by

“La Poétique du Poitrinaire”

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Amable de St. Hilaire and Ferdinand de Villeneuve. This “drama mixed with songs” premiered at Paris’s Théâtre des Nouveautés on October 2, 1828, and was still playing there at the end of January 1829.5 The fact that Valentine appears to have been the first French theatrical work seriously to portray a consumptive central character was likely a major source of its success. With her “astonishing” performance as the dying heroine, wrote Le Figaro’s critic, the 23-­year-­old actress Thérèse Albert “commanded the interest” of the audience.6 When Mme. Albert’s biographer, Eugène Woestyn, cited the play as one of her greatest triumphs, he called it simply La Poitrinaire.7 Why, after centuries of appearing onstage primarily in comic contexts, did the poitrinaire emerge as a popular theatrical heroine in a Parisian vaudeville in 1828? Part of the answer lies in the city that greeted her arrival. Paris had undergone four successive decades of political disruption, from the revolution of 1789 through the reign of Napoléon and on to the Bourbon restoration. In 1830, less than two years after Valentine’s première, that restoration would come to an end with the three “glorious days” of the July Revolution, which placed the Duc d’Orléans as a constitutional monarch upon the French throne. These ongoing changes in political order engendered theatrical transformation.8 Before 1789, the Théâtre-­Français had been the bastion of state-­sponsored drama, with prerogatives ensured by Louis XIV’s 1680 decree. Its repertoire was dominated—­at least in theory—­by a neoclassical aesthetic, upholding the Aristotelian unities and a clear distinction between the genres of tragedy and comedy. Thanks to the rise of sentimental and other hybrid dramatic genres, this rigid set of distinctions began to break down during the eighteenth century.9 After the 1789 revolution, new stages and genres proliferated across Paris. Though Napoléon and the restored Bourbon monarchs strove in various ways to regulate them, the first three decades of the nineteenth century saw a diversification of the repertoire founded in ongoing competition between theatres.10 In the battle to attract spectators to the popular stages that sprang up all over Paris, interest would prove a key weapon. The terms “interest” and “interesting” designate forms of affective relationship—­and of affective capital—­that were crucial both to senti­ mental poetics in general and to consumptive poetics in particular. In 1761, Pierre de Beaumarchais defined interest as “the involuntary sentiment whereby we adapt ourselves to [a dramatic] event, putting ourselves in the place of the person who is suffering,” and argued that bourgeois or “serious” drama performed a key moral function in society by encouraging the

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audience’s compassion in this manner.11 The sentimental drame bourgeois strove to achieve this effect by focusing on the domestic lives of people from the middle orders of society, with whom most spectators could identify; by exploring relations of class, gender, and family, which most spectators had experienced; and by employing “natural” verbal and physical language, which bore a close resemblance to their own. A comparable commitment to the moral use of interest shaped the mélodrame or “drama with music,” whose passionate conflicts between good and evil the critic Charles Nodier described as encapsulating “the morality of the revolution.”12 The stars of the boulevard stages upon which melodrama played used “concentrated and totally expressive words and gestures”13 to provoke spectators’ interest in the virtuous, who were the primary sufferers in melodramatic plots, and repulsion against the base, who inflicted suffering. Although melodrama’s situations were more heightened and its moral polarities often more extreme than those of the domestically scaled drame bourgeois, in both forms the dramatist inflicted pain upon admirable characters to demonstrate their noble fortitude, creating a dramaturgy of  “virtue made visible”14 that engaged the spectator’s sympathy. The master of early nineteenth-­century French melodrama, Guilbert de Pixérécourt, asserted that a good melodrama’s effect hinged as much on its appeal to “interest [and] sensibility” as on its reward of virtue and punishment of crime.15 The vaudeville may seem the odd form out here. The term “vaudeville” had originated as a descriptor of comic or satirical songs, and later came to denote popular sketches that featured “new words set to well-­k nown airs.”16 By the early nineteenth century, however, authors like Eugène Scribe were responding to the rise of sentimental drama and melodrama by developing multi-­act vaudevilles that married the tried-­and-­true formula of speech-­ plus-­song to the intensely affecting situations of the drame and mélodrame. The Théâtre des Nouveautés, founded by Cyprien Bérard in 1827 and fated to close only five years later, embraced this trend. Among the “novelties” it offered were sentimental dramas with songs—­later dubbed “vaudevilles naturalistes”17—­featuring its talented young star, Thérèse Albert (née Vernet). In 1828, Bérard cast Albert in Valentine, ou La Chute des Feuilles as the quintessential sentimental heroine: virtuous, interesting, and suffering the torments of the damned. The novelty, in this case, was that Valentine’s enemy was neither a strict parent nor a villainous betrayer, but a mortal disease.

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The drama’s subtitle advertised this fact. Its reference to La Chute des Feuilles would immediately have reminded many French spectators of Charles-­Hubert Millevoye’s 1811 poem of the same name, in which a young invalid wanders slowly through an autumnal wood. Melancholically contemplating the transience of life, Millevoye’s poitrinaire finally reaches a state of noble resignation to death, crying, “Fall, fall, ephemeral leaf!”18 In 1839, more than a quarter century after its first publication, the great critic Sainte-­Beuve described La Chute des Feuilles as a “piece everyone knows.”19 Consumptive chic reigned in French society, too; in his Memoirs, Alexandre Dumas père recalled that when he was young in the Paris of the 1820s “the fashion was for lung disease; everyone was consumptive, especially poets; it was in good taste to spit blood after every somewhat lively emotion, and to die before reaching thirty.”20 In such a context, the creation of a consumptive protagonist must have appeared a good theatrical investment, guaranteed to create economic as well as affective capital. Why, then, had the popular stage taken so long to buy shares in the consumptive market? The reviews of Valentine suggest that the delay may have been caused by concerns that the disease would provoke spectators to horror rather than interest. The critic of La Semaine, for example, remarked that the drama risked being “repulsive, for the appearance of one similar to us, doomed to a slow and certain death [. . .] can hardly provide spectators with those sensations of pleasure or terror they seek at the theatre.”21 According to Aristotelian canons, the suffering of a consumptive young woman who was neither lesser than her spectators (and hence potentially laughable) nor greater than them (and hence potentially tragic), but rather their peer, did not fit the affective parameters of accepted classical genres. The very likelihood that spectators would relate Valentine’s illness to their own experience rendered its performance a risky proposition. Such concerns were not mitigated by the fact—­upon which all reviewers agreed—­that Mme. Albert played Valentine with supreme conviction. Eugène Woestyn remembered reading verses in the actress’s album that had been sent to her “the day after a performance of this drama by a girl of fifteen whom science was helpless to save.” Headed “To My Sister of Last Night,” the verses’ first lines read: Why did I see you? Yesterday, I was leaving life Without regret, and my soul, on the threshold of its prison,

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Took flight joyfully toward a new horizon. Today, I look backward with a longing eye. Yes, it is hard to die[!]22 These lines may or may not reflect the experience of a real tubercular patient who was also a real spectator at the Nouveautés in 1828. Whether genuine or constructed, however, they movingly underline a point too often invisible in the archive: that theatrical performances of illness are likely to play out before real-­life patients whose ability to put themselves in the sufferer’s place may be all too immediate. By offering a sick character for the spectator’s identification, Valentine not only transgressed neoclassical canons of taste but also threatened to inflict fresh suffering. The gamble paid off; Léonard de Géréon remarked that “all of Paris” saw it.23 As well as to shock value, this success may be ascribable to the fact that Valentine’s consumption offered a language through which to express her emotional inwardness. Valentine hinges upon the romantic betrayal of the eponymous heroine by her fiancé, Alfred. She has been sent to the country to recuperate after a dangerous bout of illness, and appears to be better, though the peasants of the quarter remark that “it often seems she suffers in secret.”24 Valentine is about to celebrate her marriage with Alfred, but when her cousin Mathilde arrives for the wedding she realizes that Mathilde and Alfred are in love and that he is only marrying her out of pity. She faints in shock, but later insists that she is happy to see Alfred marry her cousin. Her doctor, Muller, divines that this blow has been too much for Valentine and that she is dying. Maintaining a façade of calm acceptance until Alfred and Mathilde go off to be wed, she resigns herself to death and expires just as the wedding party returns from church. Near the beginning of the play, Doctor Muller attributes the origins of Valentine’s illness to “a violent sorrow, whose secret she guards.”25 “The sorrow has been erased, no doubt,” declares the doctor; but he adds ominously that “any overly strong emotion, any sad and unexpected event could once again put her in danger.”26 Muller is correct; once she realizes that Alfred’s heart belongs to Mathilde, Valentine sinks rapidly toward the grave. She recognizes a causal link between her grief and her doom; when Muller tries to reassure her about her health, she responds, “In the past, your words might perhaps have persuaded me; but, since that fatal day .  .  . ah! the blow was too cruel.”27 Valentine’s feelings not only hasten the progress of

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her malady, but also emerge through its symptoms. When Mathilde sees her for the first time after Valentine’s discovery of Alfred’s apostasy, she exclaims in horror, “How you have changed! And yet even yesterday you promised us . . . oh, that pallor . . . I tremble.”28 At such moments, Valentine places the simultaneous concealment and expression of turbulent emotion at the very heart of consumptive poetics. In so doing, it draws directly upon French literature of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which frequently links consumption to intense feeling. As far back as the 1770s, the saloniste Julie de Lespinasse had depicted her cough and weakness as the results of her overly passionate—­ and unrequited—­love.29 A Romantic-­era memoir by Countess Anna Potocka similarly portrays her would-­be lover as falling ill when she rejects his suit: “Every time I feel strong emotion, I spit blood,” he tells her.30 In Juliane de Krüdener’s novel Valérie (1803), the hero Gustave is driven to a fatal consumption by his impossible passion for the married heroine. When he dines with his beloved, he “feels more ill than usual” and his appearance alarms her: “She found me so pale!”31 Consumption serves as the agent of full emotional disclosure, both reflecting and exposing the body’s affective state. Valentine is the theatrical embodiment of this sentimental conception of consumption. She strives to dissimulate her emotional and physical pain, responding to her cousin Mathilde’s anxious queries by declaring ambiguously, “Oh! Don’t worry—­now that my fate is decided, I am calm.”32 But her symptomatic body betrays her suffering. “You wish in vain to deceive me,” Mathilde replies: “Your burning hand . . . your eyes . . . Valentine, you have wept.”33 Signs of a single psycho-­physiological agony, the visible traces of Valentine’s fever and tears foretell an inescapable doom. Her heroism consists not only in her self-­sacrificial love, but also in her acceptance of the terminal nature of her disease. As far back as antiquity, medical texts had ascribed to consumptives the tendency to hope for recovery even on their deathbeds,34 an effect that came to be known as spes phthisica, or the hope of the consumptive. Once she realizes that Alfred does not love her, Valentine shows no such forlorn hope. In her final moments, she sings what the playtext labels her chant du cygne or swansong. Happy that her brief life has “left a bit of good behind,” she accedes to her doom with the final words of Christ: “All is finished!”35 If Valentine’s love has destroyed her, it has also rendered her a saint. This image of the consumptive as a martyr

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for the modern world, sacrificed to love rather than religious fervor, would shape all subsequent versions of the poétique du poitrinaire.

Medicine, Materialism, Feeling Valentine’s construction of phthisis as both produced by and expressive of intense emotion reflected not only contemporary fashion but also contemporary medical debates about consumption’s etiology and effects. In his social history of tuberculosis in nineteenth-­century France, David Barnes describes this period as the heyday of “essentialist medicine,” which he defines as “the belief that disease in general (and tuberculosis in particular) was part of a person’s essence.”36 His argument contrasts with Michel Foucault’s influential thesis that this was a moment of rupture when the rise of clinical medicine divorced the subjective experience of the patient from the physiological processes of the body as analyzed by the “medical gaze.”37 The celebrated physician René-­ Théophile-­ Hyacinthe Laënnec (1781–1826)—­ whose opinions on phthisis, Barnes remarks, “influenced medical teaching and practice throughout the first two-­thirds of the nineteenth century”38—­ plays a starring role in both analyses. To Foucault, who focuses on his processes of diagnosis, Laënnec appears as the arch-­anatomist, determined to subject the human body to objective analysis.39 To Barnes, more interested in his views on consumption’s etiology, Laënnec is an essentialist for whom disease is a product of subjective sorrows.40 Laënnec’s biographer Jacalyn Duffin offers a salutary third view. She understands his era as one in which numerous medical paradigms not only competed, but also coexisted. One of these paradigms was vitalism, which held that life and health depended upon a vital principle whose diminishment could result in illness or death. An ancient strand of medical thought, vitalism had enjoyed a resurgence in the late eighteenth century, thanks in part to the widespread influence of the Elementa Medicinae of the Edinburgh physician John Brown (1770). Brown argued that an excess or lack of vital energy—­which might be occasioned by emotional extremes, among other causes—­could lead to disease and death. Lawlor notes that “Brown aided the move to a Romantic vitalism in medicine, in which it was popularly thought that the intense and sorrowful passions of the sensitive individual were likely to cause consumption.”41 At the same time, Duffin suggests, transformations in French medical training increasingly promoted

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“practical, rather than theoretical medicine, through anatomical dissection, clinical experience, and a melding of surgical and medical skills.”42 Paris became famous as the home of materialism, which strove “to demarcate [. . .] science from metaphysics through empirical verification.”43 Hence, the physiologist Xavier Bichat famously enjoined his fellow doctors to “open up a few corpses” in order to gain medical enlightenment.44 Vitalism and materialism may seem fundamentally opposed,45 yet Bichat believed in a vital principle, and Brown urged doctors to engage in dissection (“cadavera incidas”).46 In a powerful example of the “Romantic materialism” Caldwell finds in early nineteenth-­century medical thinking, vitalist and materialist approaches often formed uneasy coalitions within the Parisian school. This was certainly true of Laënnec and his friend Gaspard-­Laurent Bayle (1774–1816), whose Recherches Sur la Phthisie Pulmonaire (1810) stood with Laënnec’s Traité de l’Auscultation Médiate (1819) as the most influential medical discussions of consumption in early nineteenth-­century France. Trained in Paris in the age of Napoléon, these men worked at the crossroads of subjective and objective approaches to illness. They came to consider the identification of disease as dependent upon a simultaneous understanding of the anatomical changes it wrought in bodily organs and of the vital causes that triggered these observable effects. Describing autopsies of consumptive lungs, they noted visible lesions characterized by the presence of tubercles and cavitation.47 When it came to the causes of these phenomena, they looked to explanations both material and affective. Bayle and Laënnec believed that consumption’s etiology was inseparable from the personal history of the sufferer. In keeping with dominant French attitudes of their time, neither doctor viewed the disease as caused primarily by contagion.48 For them, consumption’s most likely source lay in a constitutional predisposition to the illness, usually grounded in heredity but open to exacerbation by environmental factors such as unfavorable climate or diet, which had long been dubbed the consumptive diathesis.49 Both doctors also saw emotional suffering as a key causative agent. Bayle posited “vital lesions”—­alterations in the psyche or nervous system that affected the life force—­that could trigger consumptive disease.50 He argued that “[s]trong passions, suffering, profound griefs, in weakening the constitution, contribute to the birth of phthisis in many individuals.”51 Laënnec, too, believed that “unhappy passions” were among the most “certain” causes of phthisis.52 “It is perhaps to this reason alone,” he wrote, “that one must

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attribute the greater frequency of pulmonary phthisis in large cities: men having more relations with one another there, they therefore have more frequent and more profound cause for sorrow.”53 Viewed through this prism, the material symptoms of consumption appear as the products both of emotional suffering and of the social relations that inform it. Having thus explained the inward changes wrought by consumption, Bayle and Laënnec strove to render those changes visible, audible, and comprehensible. Laënnec’s 1816 invention of the stethoscope created a new point of diagnostic access to the living body, allowing him to identify the specific sounds or râles discernable in the breathing of sufferers. By listening to the hitherto inaudible sounds of the anatomical changes wrought by phthisic lesions, he brought the secrets of the body to the surface, opening them to empirical analysis.54 For Foucault, this moment of invention represents the triumph of clinical materialism over the old emphasis on patients, their symptoms, and the vital—­often emotional—­causes ascribed to their suffering.55 The personal histories of Bayle and Laënnec tell a rather different story. Both doctors died of pulmonary phthisis, and both left moving autopathographies of their experience.56 In Recherches Sur la Phthisie Pulmonaire, Bayle offers his own first bout of tubercular symptoms in 1802 as a case history, noting the dates of his first fit of dry coughing, his increasing expectoration, his night sweats, and the appearance of blood in his sputum.57 Based on these symptoms, Bayle and his doctors “regarded his malady as a pulmonary phthisis.”58 He resigned himself to death, but rallied after a period of high fever and concluded that his illness had been catarrh rather than consumption.59 Similar attacks in 1813 and 1814 subsided after travel to Provence, but when Napoléon returned from Elba in 1815 the fiercely royalist Bayle was “plunged into a painful despair which took on all the character of a very serious disease.”60 Percussion identified tubercular lesions in his lungs, and in May 1816 he succumbed to consumption. Social events and the emotions they wrought, it appeared, had finally carried Bayle’s illness to the point of fatality. Laënnec survived his friend by a decade, but by 1826 could no longer ignore his own cough, chest pain, exhaustion, and fever.61 In his letters, Duffin finds indices that he blamed his illness on “the severe psychological pain of homesickness, unhappiness, lack of vigorous exercise, and overwork” he experienced in Paris.62 He returned to his native Brittany; if a “vital lesion”

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were responsible for his suffering, it might be cured by rest, sea air, and the sight of home.63 Laënnec’s notes, as meticulously empirical as Bayle’s, chart his continued deterioration: “Strength diminished by half since Paris, noticeable loss of weight idem. More or less perceptible feelings of fever, particularly during the day. [. . .] Expectoration more abundant rather than less.”64 After his death on August  13, 1826, his biographers claimed that it was his wife’s disclosure of the dire state of their finances that plunged him into his final “great decline.”65 Having lived as a close observer of the body’s materiality, Laënnec—­like his friend Bayle—­had died as a victim of feeling.

“Our Sublime Henri Muller” From 1823 to 1826—­the final years of his life—­Laënnec presided over the clinic of Paris’s Hôpital de Charité. During this same period, the young writer Alexandre Dumas also frequented the Charité. After spoofing his own youthful affectation of a stylish consumption in his Memoirs, he describes his friendship with his doctor, Thibaut, recounting how “I used to accompany Thibaut to the Hôpital de Charité, and learned a bit of physiology and anatomy. From thence come those aspects of medical and surgical science that have more than once been useful to me in my writing.”66 At the Charité, Dumas must have encountered, if not Laënnec himself, then certainly physicians like Thibaut who had been influenced by his work. He also observed Thibaut’s treatment of his cousin Félix Deviolaine for a pulmonary illness more serious than his own. His remark that this allowed him to make “almost a special study of pulmonary phthisis”67 suggests that his understanding of the disease likely reflected the ideas of doctors like Laënnec and Bayle. A decade later, this education would bear fruit in the drama that most fully defined the poétique du poitrinaire, Dumas’s Angèle. Even more than Valentine, Angèle emerged into a theatre for which Bayle’s and Laënnec’s Romantic materialism had intense appeal. Dumas himself would later recall the moment of the play’s creation in 1833 as one of “profound incertitude,” thanks both to the political upheaval that followed the July Revolution and to the cultural impact of “Byron’s last sigh.”68 Although the Romantic movement was fading in much of Europe in the 1830s, it was just hitting its stride in France, where it gave rise to the turbulent dramas of Dumas, Victor Hugo, and their contemporaries.69 French Romantic

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theatre, Susan McCready argues, expressed the anxieties of an age caught between a discredited ancien régime and an unstable future. As it struggled to “arrive at some new way of believing,” 70 one of the problems it faced was that of externalizing subjective experiences of emotion in a manner likely to convince and interest the observer. In one of the first great French Romantic dramas, Dumas’s Antony (1831), the anguished hero complains that while a physically wounded man may provoke his peers’ pity because his pain will “be visible to their vulgar eyes [in] blood and wounds,” one who writhes with emotional agony will be greeted with “fits of laughter.” 71 Antony is a drame moderne: a domestic drama based on sentimental and melodramatic models, set in contemporary society. As such, it treats Antony’s complaint not only as a protagonist’s cri de coeur but also as a dramaturgical problem. In the drame moderne, declares Antony’s friend Eugène d’Hervilly, “naked” shows of emotion lead to “cries of exaggeration, of melodrama”72—­the latter term already identified with risibly overwrought theatricality. Only the symptomatic, tangibly unfeigned nature of physical suffering seems likely to engage the belief and interest of spectators in a materialist, doubt-­laden age. Perhaps it was with this idea in mind that Dumas and his collaborator Auguste Anicet-­Bourgeois chose to draw upon Valentine when they created Angèle.73 Like Saint Hilaire and De Villeneuve, they made consumptive illness a linchpin of their plot. They even reused some of the vaudeville’s names, featuring a faithless lover named Alfred and a doctor named Muller.74 Unlike Saint Hilaire and De Villeneuve (but perhaps remembering Bayle and Laënnec), however, the authors of Angèle fused doctor and patient into one figure: the idealistic young physician Henri Muller, who adores the aristocratic Angèle de Gaston but conceals his passion because he knows he is mortally ill with consumption. Unaware of his love, Angèle is seduced by a nobly born but impecunious Don Juan, Baron Alfred D’Alvimar, who makes his way in the world through liaisons with influential women. In the wake of the July Revolution, D’Alvimar turns to Angèle because her mother, the Comtesse de Gaston, has connections to the new King’s inner circle. Realizing that the Comtesse herself is attracted to him, he jettisons the daughter (now pregnant with his child) for maman. Henri Muller delivers Angèle’s baby and strives to force Alfred to marry her. When that effort fails, he kills the Baron in a duel and weds Angèle himself, claiming the paternity of her son. To her sigh that there is still

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one man on earth before whom she must blush, he responds with the play’s tear-­jerking curtain line: “Oh! . . . That man has so short a time to live!” 75 At the time of its 1833 premiere at the Théâtre de la Porte-­Saint-­Martin and throughout the subsequent decade, Angèle enjoyed considerable acclaim. It played across France and in Germany;76 was parodied onstage and in print;77 was transformed into a novel, The Youthful Imposter (1835), by the Englishman G. W. M. Reynolds;78 and was translated into multiple languages.79 Though later critics have generally found only the cynical Alfred d’Alvimar worthy of analysis as a realist anti-­hero avant la lettre,80 the play’s substantial reception archive shows that in its time the “coldly egotistical” Alfred was viewed as one of Dumas’s failed experiments.81 In 1830s Paris, the play’s success was inseparable from the popularity of Henri Muller and the actor who played him, the handsome jeune premier Lockroy (né Jean-­Philippe Simon). Acting opposite the titanic star Bocage—­the creator of Antony, the “leading man of the drama of 1830”—­as Alfred,82 Lockroy should have been obliterated by the competition, but even years later the play was remembered as having been his triumph.83 Offering him the ultimate sentimental tribute, Le Figaro recalled that “Lockroy wept real tears; and from the stage to the boxes, a current of anguish connected the actor to his spectators.”84 The reviewer of La France Littéraire summed up widespread critical opinion when he praised “Muller the consumptive, a beautiful creation.”85 In the Revue des Deux Mondes, Hippolyte Romand celebrated Henri Muller as “one of the author’s most touching inventions” and the beau rôle of the play.86 Though Reynolds recycled many elements from Angèle in The Young Imposter, the only acknowledgment he offered in the novel’s preface was that “the original idea of the young Surgeon’s character is taken from that of Henri Muller in M. Dumas’s excellent melo-­drama.”87 When the play was revived in Paris in 1838, L’Étudiant’s critic dubbed the character simply “our sublime Henri Muller.”88 As late as 1856, a Parisian fashion magazine ascribed the tendency of elegant young men in the 1830s to affect un air de poitrinaire to the influence of “a drama by Alexandre Dumas.”89 The pathos that made Henri so beloved was inseparable from his dual identity as doctor and patient, with his professional knowledge working to heighten the rejection of spes phthisica that had already lent heroism to Valentine. Like Valentine, Henri strives to conceal his suffering; to his father’s worried observation that he seems feverish, he responds with what

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would become the most oft-­repeated line in the repertoire poitrinaire, “It’s nothing” (ce n’est rien).90 But he himself is not deceived. When D’Alvimar’s friend Jules tells him that he looks “much better,” he replies, “Thanks, but you forget that I am a physician.”91 When Angèle tries to encourage him by remarking that as a doctor he can himself “look after that health [. . .] in which everyone who knows you takes such an interest,” he retorts, “Do you think that man will be happy whom God permits to read into his life, bookmarking in advance for him the hour when he must die? . . . Well! I am that man.”92 The autopathography of Dumas’s consumptive doctor closely mirrors those of his historical counterparts, Bayle and Laënnec. Like them, he ascribes the causes of his disease primarily to heredity. “I can’t move forward in my life,” he tells Angèle, “because I lack the air and the space . . . because my mother died at my age . . . because I lost my elder brother and sister at 24 or 25.”93 Like Bayle and Laënnec, he “reads” his doom through careful analysis of material data, noting that “every evening, devoured by this inward fire that boils my blood, I count a few more palpitations in my veins.”94 Later, fleeing from the Comtesse de Gaston’s ballroom, he identifies the environmental factors that exacerbate his complaint: “This air heated by candles, perfumed by flowers [. . .] suffocates me.”95 Like the consumptions of Bayle and Laënnec, however, Henri Muller’s illness is as much a Romantic as a material one. Reviewing the play, Pichot described him as a young man of “naturally lively sensibility, heightened by melancholy and by the almost continual suffering that devours him.”96 Dumas goes out of his way to stress that he is artistically gifted and would have been a painter rather than a doctor, except that “the smell of the oils was bad for his chest.”97 Henri’s is the classic consumptive personality, rendered vulnerable to disease by sensibility and rendered more sensitive by disease. At the same time, his illness bars him from acting upon his emotions. In Romand’s words, “in love with Angèle, he remains silent, for what can he offer her? The heart of a lover already affianced to the tomb.”98 This inward agony plays out on the surface of his body. When Henri is left alone at the window to watch Angèle flirt with D’Alvimar, the spectacle seems to tear symptoms from him: There she is! How happy she looks! This Alfred who never leaves her: he’s coming back with her; why does he have to follow her around all the time?

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He coughs, and brings his hand to his breast in pain. This passion is killing me.99 Henri’s cough and wincing gesture offer material indices of his disease, while their placement immediately after his glimpse of Angèle confirms that these symptoms are triggered by inner turmoil. Through such symptomatic dramaturgy, Dumas effectively solves the problem voiced by An­ tony in his earlier drame moderne. No one can doubt the sincerity of Henri’s emotions, since they emerge through unmistakable physical signs. This materialization of feeling carried political as well as affective meanings. In the 1827 preface to his play Cromwell, Victor Hugo had famously described modern drama as bringing together elements held firmly separate by neoclassical generic distinctions: the sublime and the grotesque, tragic and comic, body and soul.100 A few years later, he would argue that such innovations were a sign of “liberalism,” which he defined as the liberty to choose one’s position and principles, whether in politics or in aesthetics. Romanticism, for him, was an aesthetic and political movement that resisted the efforts of classicism and monarchism to stifle social and artistic change.101 Henri Muller embodies both forms of transformation. His noble nature is welded to a symptomatic body that would have been acceptable in the neoclassical French theatre only as that of a comic grotesque. But he is also a figure whose physical fragility renders material Romanticism’s challenges to social hierarchies. This political dimension emerges first in his German surname. The Romantics pursued their quarrel with élite French tradition in part by embracing other national models, especially those offered by German authors such as Schiller and Goethe. Valentine’s spurned heroine recalls Marie de Beaumarchais in Goethe’s Clavigo, a debt to which Saint Hilaire and de Villeneuve may have nodded when they chose to set their vaudeville in Weimar. If so, no reviewer in 1828 seems to have noted the tribute; but the critics of 1833 read Henri Muller as an overt avowal of Dumas’s Romantic allegiances. In his essay “Hans Sachs,” Ernest Falconnet applauded Dumas for being “the first to essay, in the Muller of Angèle, the portrayal of a German personality.”102 Romand, meanwhile, praised the character as “one of the author’s most touching creations, [.  .  .] consumptive like Novalis.”103 When Muller opposed D’Alvimar’s ancien régime cynicism with the idealistic passion of the German poet whose illness he shared, he embodied the transnational spirit of French Romanticism.

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The climactic confrontation between Parisian aristocrat and German doctor also challenged class divisions. The only one of Dumas’s drames modernes to comment directly on the French political events of its day, Angèle places the consumptive body of Doctor Muller center stage in its representation of the so-­called “bourgeois revolution” of 1830. Henri admits that he cannot look at a more fortunate man, such as the Baron D’Alvimar, “without saying: ‘My God, what did he do right, and what did I do wrong?’ ”104 He states, too, that he cannot confess his love to the aristocratic young woman he adores “because I cannot be her husband.”105 Though these lines refer explicitly to Muller’s terminal illness, Dumas invites his audience to consider an alternative reading of them when Alfred responds, “My social position, I may say without fear that anyone will accuse me of presumption, permits me to aspire to the hand of Mademoiselle de Gaston.”106 As Alfred implies, not only Muller’s sickness but also his status as an hotelier’s son rob him of the social capital such an operation requires. In this context, Henri’s ascendency in the latter half of the drama, despite the ravages of his disease, figures the process by which the very elements of bourgeois identity viewed as crippling handicaps by the old beau monde become indispensable to society’s survival. In the play’s third act, finding Angèle in premature labor, Alfred must beg for Doctor Muller’s professional skills.107 In its fourth act, the Comtesse calls upon the physician to discover the reason behind Angèle’s pallor and sorrow.108 In its final act, which is titled “Henri Muller,” Henri’s common Germanic surname saves Angèle’s reputation and offers her son an identity by which he will be able to access the future.109 The young man who so signally lacked access to social capital at the play’s beginning becomes the agent of social capital at its end. Some of Angèle’s more conservative reviewers frowned at the implications of this denouement. The aristocratic Englishman Henry Lytton Bulwer complained that Dumas parades before you a parcel of doctors, and adventurers, and fine gentlemen [. . . .] The stage is Burlington Arcade, on an August evening, crowded with those mysterious shopkeepers, who [.  .  .] look at every lady of Covent Garden saloon as if they expected to find a nouvelle Heloise. Such gentlemen are capital characters for a comedy; no author need seek a better; but it is too bad to give them as heroes, and models of heroism, in sober earnest.110

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Henri Muller appears in propria persona a few pages later, when Bulwer criticizes Dumas’s tendency to fill his stage “with sickly-­faced apothecaries in the frontispiece attitude of Lord Byron.”111 By calling him an “apothecary,” Bulwer consigns Muller to the lower reaches of the medical profession, considerably beneath his actual status as a trained physician. This rhetorical demotion is of a piece with his earlier comments, which cast a disdainful eye upon the right of “shopkeepers” to claim heroic (or Byronic) eminence. He clearly fears that the export of sentimental French works like Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse will encourage the British working and middle classes similarly to indulge in notions above their station. Where Dumas embraced the consumptive hero as a vessel for his transnational and liberal sympathies, Bulwer rejected him in order to police national boundaries and class hierarchies. In the Parisian Revue Encyclopédique, by contrast, the youthful French socialist Hippolyte Fortoul read Angèle’s conflict between seductive Baron and consumptive doctor in politically positive terms. Alfred struck him as a symbol of “the rotten part of the French nation, a remnant of the old aristocracy posed tragically upon the stage.” As for Alfred’s young rival, he asked his readers, “don’t you think that Henri Muller represents in this drama the virtuous part of the country?”112 An advocate of popular uprising, Fortoul disputed Dumas’s choice to make Muller a poitrinaire, objecting that “the People are not at all phthisical.”113 Still, he identified his own position with the character’s noble self-­sacrifice, which closed the play on “an image of struggle and morality.”114 If the people were not consumptive, a consumptive’s affective capital could still strengthen their cause. Others had less compunction about harnessing the pathos of Henri’s illness to bolster their political readings of Dumas’s play. Writing in the Saint-­Simoniste feminist journal La Tribune des Femmes, Suzanne Voilquin interpreted Angèle as a dramatic indictment of “the prejudice, as absurd as it is cruel, that the world lays upon woman, and that makes [her] responsible for the sins of the sex that claims the right to regulate society.”115 She saw Henri as a model for the young men of the future who would “work actively, for the happiness of both men and women, to change the relations between the sexes and to base them upon justice, on equality, on love.”116 As for Henri’s disease, Voilquin—­who herself went on to pursue medical training117—­described it in vitalist terms: “Alas! Though his soul is strong, in his weak and ailing body the springs of life appear very nearly exhausted.”118

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Why might Voilquin have chosen rhetorically to foreground Henri Muller’s illness even as she recruited him as a soldier in the struggle against masculinist domination? One answer is that Henri’s consumption is precisely the factor that renders normative forms of male power inaccessible to him. Like many French Romantic heroes, he embodies a suffering and apparently ineffectual masculinity, alienated from dominant social institutions.119 His hereditary illness debars him from the patriarchal roles of husband and father. He refuses, he tells Angèle, “to make my wife a widow before I have made her happy,” or “to leave to children who will die young, as I must and as my mother did, the illness she left to me.”120 Not only does he deny himself the masculine function of siring heirs, but he describes his illness as coming down to him directly from his mother. His consumption is inextricably bound up with his experience of gender, pushing him toward the feminine. Picking up on this point, Amédée Pichot declared that he “would have preferred [Muller’s] weakness to be the product of quite another cause: of the effects of some honorable wound, for example.”121 Even as he complained of its potentially emasculating effects, however, Pichot admitted that it was precisely Henri’s consumptive incapacity that guaranteed his moral triumph at the play’s end. When his opponent suggests trial by sword, Henri is forced to confess that he is too weak to wield one.122 Yet, writes Pichot, his “weakness [becomes] his strength”123 when he challenges Alfred to duel at point blank range with one loaded and one unloaded pistol. Because each man chooses his gun at hazard, the outcome reflects God’s justice, not humanity’s.124 Henri’s admission of his own physical limitations thus proves inseparable from his assumption of the archetypal melodramatic role of the justicier, or avenger of the innocent. He attains heroic status not in spite of his illness, but because of it. Henri enters the play’s last scene from this offstage duel just as the Notary hired to marry Angèle to her seducer calls for the bridegroom’s name. “Henri Muller,” he declares, “And add, Monsieur, that I recognize my child!”125 Not even the most conservative of Angèle’s reviewers complained that this “sublime action”126 allowed a provincial doctor, heir to nothing more impressive than a hotel in the Pyrenees, to marry a noblewoman. Henri’s unimpeachably terminal illness assured them that no long-­term benefit would accrue to him. “There is so much true love, after all,” declared L’Artiste, “in this superhuman sacrifice, this sacrifice which has a fixed term

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and of which the recompense is an inevitable tomb!”127 Unlike the self-­ perpetuating power of the aristocracy, the power claimed by the young bourgeois is premised on its own transience. Looking back on Angèle after the play’s initial success had subsided, Auguste Bourjot thus asserted that its key legacy would be its evocation of “the children of our époque, sickly and incomplete, like the consumptive Henri Muller.”128 By embodying the hidden workings of emotion, the theatrical poitrinaire also embodied the spirit of an age.

“A Wholly Material Drama” Even as he objected to the indecorous and feminizing nature of Muller’s disease, Pichot thanked Lockroy “for having at least dispensed with the cough and other less dramatic symptoms.”129 This evaluation raises the question of how Henri Muller’s consumption was performed on the stage of the Porte-­Saint-­Martin in December 1833. Did the codes used to represent it rely solely on the accepted histrionic language of pained “grimaces,” avoiding altogether the verisimilar performance of symptoms that lay outside of “art’s domain”? If everything about the actors’ choices agreed so strictly with the theatrical status quo, why did the representation of consumption in Angèle—­and Valentine before it—­provoke so much critical debate? At first glance, surviving images of the well-­loved final scenes of both Valentine and Angèle seem to confirm that the acting of their poitrinaire roles was more idealized than verisimilar. A lithograph of Thérèse Albert as Valentine (Fig. 2), clearly intended for commercial sale, shows the actress singing the dying heroine’s “swan song.” Dressed for her wedding in a lace-­trimmed white gown and pearl necklace, she braces herself with one hand against the table upon which she has just written a letter of farewell. With her free arm she makes an expansive upward motion, palm open, as if imploring the grace of the heaven to which she will soon depart. Neither the rhetorical gesture nor her fashionable dress and coiffure suggest a realistic representation of a tubercular patient’s final moments. Indeed, La Semaine’s critic complained that a dying woman ought not to be “gowned and corseted as for a ball.”130 Nevertheless, Valentine’s costume, jewelry, and gesture can be read as material markers of her personal history and situation. She tells us that she has worn her pearl necklace and cross “since childhood”;131 she is about to

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Figure 2. Thérèse Albert as Valentine in Valentine, ou la chute des feuilles, Théâtre des Nouveautés, Paris, 1828. Courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

take them off as a mark of her accession to death. As well as fashionable adornments, they are signs of what Konstantin Stanislavski would later describe as her character’s “given circumstances.”132 Moreover, Valentine’s physical debility is clearly, though subtly, embodied in the heavy pressure of Albert’s hand upon the writing table. The gesture not only indicates

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Figure 3. Louis Boulanger, “The final scene of Angèle.” Musée Baron Martin, Ville de Grey. Courtesy of the Bridgeman Art Library.

the character’s frailty, but also conveys her heroic resistance to her own weakness. Albert’s symptomatic acting thus uses the body simultaneously to represent both affective and physiological states of being. This point emerges even more strongly in a representation of Angèle’s final scene by Louis Boulanger (Fig. 3), which records the moment at which Muller bids the notary name him as Angèle’s future husband. He is clad in a fashionable frock coat, his dark curls tousled in high Romantic style; but Boulanger conveys the physical frailty that shadows the character’s glamour. Like Valentine, Henri makes a strong gesture with one hand, pointing toward the place where his name must appear upon the marriage contract. Like Valentine’s, his other hand tells a different story, gripping a chair back for support. The image accords with Dumas’s stage direction for Henri’s final entrance: “HENRI MULLER slowly mounts the staircase, looking paler and weaker than ever, and comes to lean against the NOTARY’s chair.”133 This is one of numerous points where Dumas’s text describes Henri as supporting himself on furniture; earlier in the play, he leans against both

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a mantelpiece and another chair.134 Lockroy seems to have made theatrical gold from the gesture; when Muller challenged D’Alvimar, Pichot wrote, the actor stood “supporting himself against a table, looking like a ghost.”135 Stage properties such as tables, chairs, and mantelpieces were among the key material means by which the creators of Romantic drames modernes strove to represent a recognizable contemporary world onstage. As Dumas’s stage directions and Boulanger’s image suggest, these props were crucial theatrical things in the sense described by Marlis Schweitzer and Joanne Zerdy, contributing to “the ways in which subjectivity and objectivity on-­and off-­stage are constructed and maintained.”136 Henri’s moments of dependence on furniture not only fix him within his modern, bourgeois setting; they also convey his inward struggle against his own physical debility. Here, as in Valentine, the actor’s body collaborated with realistic, contemporary stage objects to convey the suffering—­and the heroic will—­of the poitrinaire. Makeup, too, played a part in this effect. When he praised Mme. Albert’s faithful representation of consumption, Eugène Woestyn remarked that she successfully portrayed the pallor of real-­life phthisic patients.137 Similarly, when L’Étudiant’s reviewer applauded Lockroy’s reappearance in the 1838 revival of Angèle, he asked, “Who else could give us back that pale face, that sensitive and pure soul with its admirable impulses of virtue, and the dark presentiments of the young consumptive?”138 In a pamphlet parody of the play, a provincial bourgeoise, Mme. Gibou, replays the experience of watching Angèle for her friends’ benefit. She tells her companions that Henri’s stout father resembles his frail son as much “as red sealing wax does white”139 and vividly evokes Henri’s appearance after the final duel, “pale, all disheveled, his hair standing on end.”140 The critic of the Journal des Débats Politiques et Littéraires described Muller at the same moment as “pale as the death he has just given and that will soon be his.”141 Like Henri’s tendency to seek out physical support, this pallor invited both sympathy and clinical analysis. In Dumas’s playtext, Henri himself underlines this point when he uses Angèle’s pallor to read her emotional and physical state: HENRI: Are you suffering? ANGÈLE: No, Monsieur Henri. Why do you ask? HENRI: You’ve changed color two or three times in the last minute.

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ANGÈLE: But . . . you’re very pale yourself just now. HENRI: Ah, well! . . . there you have it . . . I am suffering.142 In a feat of theatrical multi-­tasking, white makeup not only helps the actor to enact consumptive illness, but also conveys the agony of unrequited love. If, amidst all these signs of suffering, Lockroy had completely “dispensed with the cough,” he would likely have followed in the footsteps of Mme. Albert; no surviving evidence suggests that she coughed in Valentine. In Lockroy’s case, however, other witnesses complicate Pichot’s report. Recalling the actor’s performance as Henri Muller, Jules Janin tied his brooding attractions to his performance of the symptom that would become synonymous with theatrical consumptions: “He was what’s called a beau ténébreux, and coughed as gracefully as the Dame aux Camélias would later.”143 Janin’s allusion to “grace” implies that Lockroy offered a restrained, elegant version of the hacking cough of the real-­life consumptive patient. If so, perhaps it was this aestheticizing moderation that Pichot praised in the actor, rather than a complete expurgation of consumption’s best-­k nown symptom. Roberge’s parody, which spoofs Angèle’s performance rather than its text, twice paraphrases Henri as remarking that his sufferings weigh “like molten lead on his breast,”144 suggesting that Lockroy may also have pressed his hand frequently to his chest to indicate both Muller’s aching lungs and his anguished heart.145 Lockroy clearly proved himself a master of symptomatic acting, in which physical signs convey inward truths. Even Desiré Nisard, who loathed the Romantic school, confessed that he “played the final stage of phthisis to perfection.”146 La France Littéraire, more favorably disposed, lauded the actor’s depiction of “the soul struggling against the body.”147 Gasping and coughing in defiance of established theatrical decorum, Lockroy simultaneously portrayed a brooding Romantic hero and an ordinary young bourgeois suffering from an all-­too-­common disease. Hence, L’Indépendent’s critic could describe Muller’s role as “throwing a sweet perfume of the ideal over the play” while still concluding that “Angèle is a wholly material drama, a drama of flesh and blood.”148 This fusion of the ideal with the material would form the core of consumptive poetics as they played out upon the nineteenth-­century stage. Through visible, audible performances of consumptive symptoms, Thérèse Albert’s Valentine and Lockroy’s Henri Muller materialized Romantic

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discourses of interiority and emotion. They translated discourses of martyrdom, self-­sacrifice, and heroism into a recognizably modern, bourgeois context. They represented up-­to-­date medical notions of the body, health, and disease, and intervened actively in debates about aesthetics, nation, class, and gender. Above all, their symptomatic performances epitomized the Romantic materialism of post-­revolutionary social and scientific orders, which sought out tangible evidence of a vivid inner life. Many years later, the critic Hippolite Lucas would remember that in Henri Muller Dumas had invented “an interesting character that has since been much used.”149 He was correct; in the years that followed, the poetics of the popular French stage would build upon the poétique du poitrinaire.

2 Death and the Working Woman Subtexts of the Consumptive Heroine, 1848–1855

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“Yes, all right! I do cough a little,” she said to me, “but I feel fine, and I didn’t come here to rest.” —­Jules Chéry (Mademoiselle Rachel en Amérique)

On December  17, 1855, the great tragedienne Élisabeth Rachel Félix—­ known to audiences across Europe and North America simply as “Mlle. Rachel”—­gave her final performance. The city was Charleston, South Carolina; the play was Ernest Legouvé and Eugène Scribe’s tragedy Adrienne Lecouvreur (1849), the tale of a great French actress who dies in her prime. Rachel’s health had long been frail, but during her tour of the United States it broke down altogether, and it became clear that she was suffering from consumption.1 In his memoir Mlle. Rachel en Amérique, Rachel’s company member Jules Chéry tells how the actress responded “with a sort of superstitious stubbornness, as if her will simply had to surmount or block some great and mysterious power; but she exhausted herself visibly in the process.”2 Describing Rachel’s final performance, Chéry tells how he watched her, barely able to stand, barely able to speak, coughing at every word, holding her breath to stifle the cough, clutching my arm in order not to fall, and, despite her weakness, despite her suffering, finding once more, with indomitable energy, the courage to work through to the very end of her role and, like the taper that is about to be extinguished, to cast one last flash of light upon that terrible scene of Adrienne’s death.3 — 53 —

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By this point, Rachel’s work as a performer was clearly aggravating her illness. Nevertheless, Chéry believed that her struggle fed her emotional effects, writing that “[s]he spoke in accents of such sorrow and truth that the whole theatre shivered with admiration.”4 In Chéry’s construction, the actress’s labor is both her triumph and her destruction—­and the audience delights in the spectacle. Rachel was a real woman, suffering from a real disease that would kill her in 1858. As constructed by her contemporaries, she also resembles—­and, I argue, helps to clarify—­the next key fictional figures in the consumptive repertoire. These are two heroines of Rachel’s own heyday in the 1840s and 50s, Mimì in Barrière and Murger’s La Vie de Bohème (1849) and Mar­ guerite in Dumas fils’s La Dame aux Camélias (1852). In the years since their creation, these characters have become synonymous with the theatrical consumptive. Because they are figures of the Parisian demi-­monde whose complicated sexual histories are sanctified by their consumptive deaths, later critics have often concluded that tuberculosis functions in these plays both as a marker of and a punishment for sensuality, serving in the process as “a key vehicle in the nineteenth century through which womanhood was associated with a kind of suffering that was morally and spiritually redeeming.”5 Reading the fictional Mimì and Marguerite alongside Chéry’s account of the historical Rachel may, however, open an alternative window on their cultural significance. Like Mimì, Marguerite, and the real women on whom they were based, Rachel engaged in public and unapologetic sexual affairs.6 Nevertheless, her colleague Chéry paints her less as a punished or redeemed sinner than as a worker determined to maintain agency over her own physical, emotional, and creative labor, even as the effects of that labor destroy her. In the same way, I argue, consumption emerges in the French playtexts and performance histories of La Vie de Bohème and La Dame aux Camélias as an expression of the challenges that assail the woman who depends upon her body for her livelihood. Building upon the Romantic poétique du poitrinaire, these plays offered audiences the interesting spectacle of a professional woman’s efforts to hide her pain—­and invited them, doctor-­like, to diagnosis her true suffering. The rich material world of the period’s bourgeois drama—­the props these consumptive heroines carried, the sofas and chairs onto which they sank, and the handkerchiefs into which they wept and coughed—­collaborated in this process of simultaneous dissimulation



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and disclosure. By inviting the spectator not only to feel for, but also to see through, the stage consumptive, these pivotal works in the sentimental repertoire helped to develop the quintessentially realist art of subtext.

Martyrs of Labor, Martyrs of Love Like those of the Romantic stage, these developments occurred in dialogue with the medical thinking of their era. The middle decades of the nineteenth century saw no revolutionary changes in the French medical understandings of consumptive etiology established by physicians like Bayle and Laënnec.7 Doctors continued to regard determinants such as heredity, nervous disorder, and unhappy passions as important causes of tubercular illness.8 Over the course of the 1830s, however, French physicians became increasingly interested in the social factors that affected tubercular epidemiology.9 Louis-­François Benoiston de Châteauneuf, Henri Lombard, and Louis-­Réné Villermé, among others, undertook detailed statistical analyses of the populations of major European cities, analyzing phthisic mortalities as they related to questions like profession, environment, and economic status. Lombard argued that laborers whose work took place in enclosed, dusty environments were more likely to contract consumption than those who worked outdoors.10 Benoiston de Châteauneuf believed that those who worked in sedentary, hunched positions—­such as writers, shoemakers, and seamstresses—­were at greater risk of the disease.11 Villermé stressed the prevalence of phthisis amongst textile workers.12 All agreed that those who worked hard were more likely to become ill than those who worked little, and that the poor were more likely to die of consumption than the rich. These conclusions resonate through numerous medical treatises published in France in the 1840s. In his Recherches sur la Phthisie Pulmonaire (1842), J.  J. Alamir-­Carcenac declared that consumptive patients must “avoid difficult exercises and abandon harmful or fatiguing professions.”13 Alexandre Fourcault admitted, however, that this was easier said than done when it came to the poor, who were “[c]ondemned to perpetual work, without respite, fifteen to eighteen hours of the day.”14 Nor were the poor the only ones at risk. In his Traité de l’Auscultation Mediate, Laënnec had blamed “excessive labors” for abridging the life of his friend Bayle,15 and his inheritors followed him in understanding overwork—­whether it be physical, mental, or emotional—­as a dangerous drain on the body’s vital energy.

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Writing in 1841, Philippe Cheneau asserted that “the real causes [of consumption], those that lead most directly to disease, are those that weaken the nervous system most severely, harming the vitality of our organs.”16 The exhausted manual laborer, the artist whose mind was always struggling to create, and the emotionally sensitive lover whose feelings gnawed away at their energies were all overtaxing their organisms. Thus, all were liable to fall victim to phthisis. From within this ill-­starred community, Émile Bernardeau identified one group of particularly endangered workers: “In general, young girls—­ especially those who work with their needles and lead a sedentary life—­ are likely to be victims.”17 Striving to explain his statistical finding of high consumptive mortality amongst female workers such as dressmakers, embroiderers, and glovemakers, Benoiston de Châteauneuf argued that “on the one hand, a weaker constitution, with the lower wages and the poverty that attends upon it; on the other, intense passions, and to satisfy them excesses of all kinds, quickly drive these frail creatures to the tomb.”18 Women’s constitutions were held to be weaker because their vital energies were lower and their nervous systems more sensitive than men’s. Thanks in part to this nervous sensitivity, their emotionality was held to be greater than that of their male counterparts. If one added these two factors to the continual labor in which working-­class women needed to engage if they were to survive, the threat of consumption was clear. Women who earned their living in ways that demanded physical and emotional or creative labor—­such as actresses, dancers, and sex workers—­were seen as particularly likely to become tubercular.19 As Benoiston de Châteauneuf ’s delicate allusion to “excesses of all kinds” implies, the same medical pamphlets that warned of the hazards of overwork and emotional strain also tended to caution that intense desire or sexual activity could place patients—­especially women—­at risk of consumption. Indeed, they tended to construct these dangers as different versions of the same problem. Cheneau, for example, writes that “the abuse of sexual pleasure, prolonged moral suffering, mental over-­exertion, too many nights without sleep, reversals of fortune, etc etc” can all cause consumption.20 Jules Fournet offers a similar list: [T]he influence of excessive labor, of lack of sleep, of unhealthy and insufficient food, of living in a cramped space, of breathing bad air, of an overly sedentary life, of unhappy passions carried to an extreme, of



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sexual or alcoholic excesses taken too far: each can, of itself, develop tubercular cachexia, and then pulmonary phthisis, even in an individual who isn’t at all predisposed to it.21 Bernardeau cites this list approvingly, adding only that Fournet has forgotten to include “excessive intellectual labors.”22 Though these texts often connect “perceived moral failings with physical illness,” Barnes argues, they do not reflect a “campaign aimed at stigmatizing certain groups and practices.”23 For a medical establishment whose theories of consumptive etiology remained largely based in vitalism, excessive engagement in sex, alcohol, unhappy love, or textile labor all had similar implications. All were likely to strain and weaken the nervous system, diminish vital energies, and destroy the patient’s health. More than a disease of the oversexed, consumption was a disease of the overworked. Barrière and Murger’s La Vie de Bohème closely reflects these medical conceptions of consumption. Adapted from a series of stories by Murger collectively known as Scènes de la Vie de Bohème (Scenes from Bohemian Life), Barrière and Murger’s play was an instant hit when it opened at the Théâtre des Variétés in November 1849. It recounts the entangled lives and loves of a set of bourgeois young artists slumming in the Latin Quarter and of the grisettes, or young working women, with whom they fall in love. Marcel, the painter, adores the vivacious but chronically unfaithful Musette, while Rodolphe, the poet, flees his wealthy uncle and the rich widow he is supposed to marry to throw himself into the arms of the young seamstress, Mimì.24 From the moment of her first appearance, Mimì’s illness is unmistakable: MIMÌ enters and leans against the bedframe. BENOIT: Sit down, Mademoiselle, you seem to be suffering . . . MIMÌ: her hand to her chest. Yes, just here . . . it happens when I climb the stairs, but it’s nothing!25 Mimì’s breathlessness, her leaning against furniture, the hand pressed to her chest, and the disclaimer “it’s nothing!” would all have been obvious markers of consumption to any spectator familiar with the repertoire poitrinaire established by Henri Muller and Valentine. La Vie de Bohème incorporates all the key tropes of that repertoire, especially the association between consumptive symptoms and unhappy love. The lovers’ idyll is destroyed when Rodolphe’s uncle, Durandin, browbeats

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Mimì into giving up her lover so that he can marry the wealthy Mme. de Rouves. When he attacks Mimì, treating her as a prostitute and accusing her of mercenary motives, she is seized by a series of coughing fits that exteriorize her pain.26 When Rodolphe’s friend Schaunard breaks the news of Rodolphe’s engagement to Mme. de Rouves to her, she “feels faint.”27 Heartbroken, she tries to throw herself into the Seine, but swoons before she can do so and is carried to the hospital.28 At least one contemporary critic read Mimì’s fatal illness as a direct result of her belief that Rodolphe is unfaithful; after Rodolphe leaves her, he wrote, “her life is broken; she is dying, she will die.”29 The intensity of Mimì’s emotion, such language suggests, has eroded her vital force. Mimì’s tubercular illness cannot be ascribed only to unhappy passions, however. Her frequent coughing fits are not always associated with love, grief, or other strong emotions. Her fever rises and falls, causing her to complain of the heat 30 and shiver with cold.31 She describes the ways in which her chest pains and breathlessness affect her moods: It’s funny . . . when I feel ill like I just did, it makes me sad right away . . . it seems to me that I’ll never laugh again . . . and all my sorrows return. . . . But when the pain goes away, as it has right now, I only think of what can make me happy . . . I only think of [Rodolphe], and the songs come back to my lips.32 This speech suggests that Mimì is not consumptive simply because she is unhappy in love, nor is she unhappy in love because of the feverish drives of her consumption. Instead, her love and laughter appear as pleasures she can enjoy whenever the progress of her disease allows her some respite. But if Mimì’s illness is not caused solely by passion, what else has caused it? One answer to this question emerges during her first appearance in La Vie de Bohème. As she recovers from climbing the stairs, her main concern is whether her new room has enough light to work by: MIMÌ: Can one see clearly here? BENOIT: Ah! Mademoiselle, the sun is my busiest tenant! MIMÌ: Who has been to the window, and now puts her workbox on the side table. It will be stormy tonight; that’s probably why I don’t feel very well. BENOIT: Mademoiselle is a seamstress? MIMÌ: I make flowers, Monsieur.33



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Mimì’s occupation, the creation of silk flowers to adorn the gowns and bonnets of more affluent women, depends upon good light and thus upon good weather. So, too, does her health; clouds and damp impede her breathing as well as her sewing. Moreover, her virtue hangs by the same threads as her livelihood and her life. She defines herself as a breadwinner, not a kept woman. “I’ve always worked,” she tells Rodolphe’s uncle when he accuses her of gold-­digging, “and I ask nothing more than to keep on working.”34 If Mimì’s life depends upon work, it is also threatened by it. The stage picture that begins La Vie de Bohème’s third act underlines this point by foregrounding the difference between earnest, hard-­working Mimì and free-­living, light-­hearted Musette: As the curtain rises, Musette is lying on the sofa stage right, smoking and reading, while Mimì, on the sofa stage left, finishes a flower crown. MUSETTE: My word! Are you going to work your life away, then? MIMÌ: Oh, stop it. When I come to see you, I do nothing at all! I work a lot harder than this when I’m in our own little room. MUSETTE: You’ll kill yourself; you’re not very well as it is, and since I’ve known you I’ve never seen you take a single day off. MIMÌ: My dear! Rodolphe isn’t rich.35 Here again, Mimì’s virtue and devotion to Rodolphe are directly linked to her labor. She works to support her lover, rather than expecting his support. But her livelihood is also her death warrant; as she bends over over her artificial flowers in her little garret room, her labor exacerbates, and perhaps even causes, her illness. Love, the long-­established culprit in sentimental consumptive etiologies, is not absent from this equation. Rodolphe recognizes his own culpability in Mimì’s suffering, reminding her that “for you, so frail, so delicate, our life is full of dangers.”36 Still, Mimì assures him that she loves him “[t]oday more than yesterday, and tomorrow more than today, and so on forever, until the end.” “The end . . .?” asks Rodolphe; “Of the world!” she replies.37 As Rodolphe fears, however, it is Mimì herself who is at risk. As she lies dying in the final act, he looks back guiltily upon her self-­sacrifice. “Poor girl!” he cries; “You loved me, and in my own selfish passion I tied you to my life of poverty . . . every day I watched your patient martyrdom, and while you trembled in the agues of your fever . . . I warmed myself with the heat of your great love.”38 Even Rodolphe’s cynical uncle is finally converted by Mimì’s dignity and suffering, declaring, “You love him and he loves you,

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you are good and he will be rich; be happy . . . get up, now, and embrace me!”39 But it is too late; Mimì is already dead. Her love, her poverty, and her labor have hastened her end.

Theatrical Things and the Post-­Revolutionary Poitrinaire Through the workings of the symptomatic dramaturgy pioneered in plays like Valentine and Angèle, these same factors invite the audience’s sympathy. In the third act, for instance, Mimì “coughs, and sits down on the sofa stage right”: RODOLPHE: (aside.) That cough again! (Aloud.) Listen, my girl, you are good and devoted; but just as I don’t want you to deceive me later, I don’t want to deceive you now; we are about to enter into real poverty, and winter is coming. [. . .] My heart beats like a tocsin that sounds the approach of some disaster. (MIMÌ coughs into her handkerchief.) Are you feeling worse? MIMÌ: No . . . you’re worrying about nothing.40 Given that the type of the poitrinaire had been “much used”41 since 1833, the audience of 1849 had no doubt become habituated to the consumptive cough onstage. But Barrière and Murger’s directions offer a new clue as to the manner in which this symptom achieved its emotional effect. They explicitly note the prop with which Mimì tries to stifle her cough, “her handkerchief.” Similar to the furniture upon which Mimì—­like her forbears Valentine and Henri—­leans and sits, handkerchiefs are important theatrical things that help to construct and maintain her subjectivity. In Robin Bernstein’s terms, indeed, they are “scriptive things”42 that act upon and shape the behavior of, as well as serving, their human counterparts. In the sentimental theatre, pressed to the eyes onstage or in the audience, handkerchiefs both concealed and revealed the presence of tears. In the process, Bernstein argues, they worked to “hide (and thus flag) [. . .] expressions of sympathy.”43 These transactions depended upon the prop’s material properties: its small size (scaled to fit within a hand or cover a face), its pliability, its permeability, and above all its ability to conceal. Intuiting what the handkerchief revealed by imagining what it hid (the tears of the rejected lover or the blood of the consumptive), spectators, like actors, relied upon the prop to help produce the illusion of interiority.



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Mimì’s handkerchief—­a little piece of textile readable as the product of her own work as a seamstress—­works in precisely this productive manner. When she “coughs into her handkerchief ” just before assuring her lover that he is “worrying about nothing,” the gesture simultaneously emphasizes the symptom and stages her attempt to suppress it. It shows the audience that her physical and emotional labor have led to serious illness, but also reminds them that she is striving to protect others from her pain. This effect parallels one later in the play, when Rodolphe’s uncle offers to pay Mimì to break off her relationship with his nephew. She cries, “Oh! You revolt me. I want nothing, Monsieur, do you understand? I don’t want to be paid. I want Rodolphe to owe his happiness to me.” She then “ falls onto the sofa stage right and weeps, covering her face with her hands.”44 Mimì’s concealment of her face from Durandin strives to preserve her dignity and privacy, but her sobs and her “fall” onto the sofa express the vehemence of her grief. Left alone onstage, she shares her true feelings with the audience—­“I was too happy, it couldn’t last”45—­and “weeps,” opening her pain fully to the spectator’s gaze. As soon as she hears Rodolphe, Marcel, and Musette entering, however, she “wipes away her tears” and plays the part of a mercenary coquette in order to push Rodolphe into the arms of Mme. de Rouves. When Rodolphe assures her that he will forgive her if she decides to leave him for a richer parti, Mimì responds with a tearful aside: “My God! My God!” As she sinks down once more upon the sofa, it seems safe to guess that she again resorts to her handkerchief.46 In these scenes of coughing and tears, the handkerchief collaborates with the actress to produce an effect that I dub “sentimental subtext.” Subtext is often understood as an invention of the realist movements in literature and theatre; the Oxford English Dictionary’s first examples of the term in the sense of “the subjective reality drawn on by a performer and underlying his or her interpretation of a role” stem from the early twentieth century.47 In the eyes of many critics, it is inseparable from realism’s diagnostic gaze; as Elin Diamond puts it, “Is this not the relation of the realist actor to his/her audience—­the actor produces symptoms addressed to spectators, who gradually understand their meaning?”48 As suggested in Chapter One, however, sentimental modern dramas like Valentine and Angèle had already engaged the diagnostic gaze, and the sentimental stage arguably pioneered many of the tactics by which a performer could symptomatize the subjective truths and physical pathologies hidden behind the character’s literal words and actions. Sentimental subtext generally worked not only to expose inward

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psychological states, but also to display the nobility and self-­sacrifice of apparently ordinary, and sometimes even compromised, modern characters. In the process, it helped the stage to achieve sentimental poetics’ core goal: that of creating community between the sympathetic spectator and the suffering character through the former’s interest in the latter’s apparently private emotions. Hence, in La Vie de Bohème the spectator is invited to read behind the handkerchief ’s veil, to imagine the full extent of the suffering Mimì strives to hide, and thus to become even more interested in that suffering. When the audience briefly gains full access to Mimì’s tears, just before watching her heroic efforts to convince Rodolphe that she is heartless, the spectator sees what he does not: that far from being interested in money and survival she is willing to sacrifice her own physical and emotional well-­being if it means that he will “owe his happiness” to her. In such moments of sentimental subtext, La Vie de Bohème strives to increase the intimacy between its heroine and her audience. In the play’s final scene, one further theatrical thing serves to interest the spectator in Murger’s grisette. This is the muff she requests from Rodolphe as she lies dying, in a direct citation of Murger’s popular story Le Manchon de Francine (Francine’s Muff). “How funny one is when one is sick! One has all sorts of desires,” Mimì tells her lover.49 But when he assumes that she wants “a pretty silk dress like Musette’s, with a trim of blonde,” she responds, “laughing and coughing”: “Ah! Blonde! . . . How stupid he is! . . . It’s dentelle! . . . No, I don’t want a silk dress. I’d only like . . . a muff, but I want it really badly.”50 Even at her last gasp, Mimì is still the professional seamstress, teasing her bourgeois lover for his inability to distinguish between varieties of lace. Far from coveting these luxury goods, she makes a request that performs her acceptance of her status as a working girl. As Octave Uzanne wrote in his 1892 guide to Les Ornements de la Femme, the muff is “a concealer that hides a great deal of distress,” adorning “the hands of all the laborers and seamstresses who leave their homes on early winter mornings for the far-­off atelier.”51 La Vie de Bohème uses this theatrical thing to foster the sort of sentimental subtext created in earlier scenes by Mimì’s deployment of her handkerchief. Mimì needs the muff to warm her hands; long used to the cold of poverty, they are now growing colder with the chill of death. Still, she asks it of Rodolphe as if it were a frivolous present, never mentioning her physical suffering. The effect is compounded when



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she “laughs and coughs.” To the last, she struggles to downplay her illness in an effort to reassure those around her. But the tools of concealment she employs serve as tools of disclosure for the audience, inviting them to share her hidden pain. This effect was hugely popular with La Vie de Bohème’s critics. Marguerite Thuillier, who created the role of Mimì, was praised for her “naturalness, feeling, [and] passion,”52 which “drew tears from the whole auditorium.”53 Jules Janin wrote that she was so truthful and so touching, she represented with so much conscience, conviction and heart those frail and sickly creatures, the lost children of poverty and God, to whom the world refuses bread, love, and the sun; she wept so bitterly but so inwardly, and abandoned herself to a death so unaffected and so cruel, that her emotion spread from the top to the bottom of a theatre that had just laughed for four whole acts.54 For Janin, the fact that Mlle. Thuillier’s tears were “bitter but inward,” hidden from those around her but not from the audience, helped to explain her infectious emotional effect. Because the audience was invited to read their own feelings into her restrained, “unstudied” acting, they engaged more deeply than they would have done with a showier performance. Janin links this style of acting directly to Mimì’s status as a “lost child of poverty and God,” condemned to death by society’s neglect. The audience’s tears for her hidden pain express their sympathy for the hidden misérables of their world. In the Paris of 1849, this sympathy had complex implications. Less than two years earlier, the roi bourgeois, Louis-­Philippe, had abdicated in the face of the violent popular uprisings of February 1848. A provisional government had proclaimed the Second French Republic, fulfilling the dreams of many French radicals (including the first Henri Muller, Lockroy, who briefly served as director of the Théâtre-­Français during this period).55 A conservative reaction rapidly set in, however, culminating in the military repression of June 1848, the victory of Prince Louis-­Napoléon Bonaparte in the presidential election of December 1848, and the purging of Republicans from governmental bodies. By November 1849, when La Vie de Bohème premiered, France was well on the way toward the coup d’état of December  1851, in which Bonaparte illegally dissolved the National Assembly. Like Henri Muller before her, Mimì was a child of political turmoil.

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Writing in the year of La Vie de Bohème’s premiere, however, Dumas himself remarked that the passions of 1849 were “no longer the same” as those that had shaped Angèle in 1833, when everyone had been “waiting for the storm” of more revolutionary agitation.56 In 1848 the storm had broken, and its aftermath had left many Parisians with little appetite for further violence. Perhaps in response to this changed situation, when Dumas wrote a consumptive hero into his 1849 play Le Comte Hermann he made him a nobleman suffering from the aftereffects of a lung wound sustained in an honorable duel; inverting the sentimental politics of Angèle, he placed the affective capital of consumption firmly in the service of the ancien régime. Nevertheless, Le Constitutionnel complained that Dumas’s drama retained too much of his old Romantic “depth of revolt and materialism,” deprecating the play’s “luxury of sick lungs, poison and suicide” as “a little out of place in a play that professes to calm our hearts, edify our souls, and lead us down the radiant path to God.”57 In the same review, this critic praised Mimì’s death in La Vie de Bohème as a natural consequence of her broken heart and her loving, “simple” nature.58 Janin offered a similar reading of Mimì: “Nini [sic], oh! Poor child! [. . .] Nini belongs to hunger, to the cold, to poverty, and to true love, and when she loses her love she dies.”59 Mimì must die, Janin implies, because her love and her working-­class status alike condemn her to consumption. Her illness is not a symptom of aesthetic revolt, but the reflection of an inevitable truth. Such evaluations may be signs that, as Marvin Carson argues, “the bourgeoisie which now supported the French theatre had had enough of romantic excesses” and were turning toward more realistic social dramas.60 They also offer indices of the deeper impulses that shaped this turn. In plays like Angèle, “romantic excesses” had articulated a rebellion against established political and social hierarchies. La Vie de Bohème, by contrast, employs the pathos of the poitrinaire to construct these hierarchies as fundamentally unchangeable. “She offers a touching picture,” writes Janin, “this grisette whose death interrupts laughter and celebration, and who dies without complaining, simply because she must die.”61 As a working-­class woman, Mimì’s pathos and heroism lie in her acceptance of a naturally ordained status quo. By weeping for the pain she so valiantly conceals behind workaday props, the audience is encouraged to mourn for the victims of the established social order—­but not to strive to change it. Handkerchief or muff in hand, Mimì is the perfect post-­revolutionary poitrinaire.



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“Heartbreaking Grace,” or A Woman at Work When the next major entry in the repertoire poitrinaire appeared at Paris’s Théâtre de Vaudeville in February 1852, the Second Republic was all but dead. Louis-­Napoléon Bonaparte’s position as sole ruler of France would soon be consolidated when, in December 1852, he was crowned as Emperor Napoléon III and inaugurated the Second Empire. The pivotal drame poitrinaire of the new imperial age would depict a much more glamorous world than the bohemian one of Mimì and her lover. The consumptive heroine of 1849 had been a starving seamstress; the consumptive heroine of 1852— ­and of so many years, theatres, and continents to come—­would be Dumas fils’s glittering courtesan, La Dame aux Camélias. As one reviewer wrote, however, “Marguerite Gautier dresse[d] in silk, Mimì in cotton, but the same heart beat in both breasts.”62 Both heroines are working women, killed by labor and by love. The story behind the creation of the most famous of all theatrical poitrinaires is well known. Her model was Marie Duplessis (born Alphonsine Plessis), a working-­class Normande who was sexually abused and likely sold into prostitution by her father while still a child. By the age of 15, she had come to Paris and taken work in a dress shop; but if she began as a seamstress like Murger’s Mimì, she was soon a lorette or good-­time girl like Musette. She rose rapidly through the ranks of the Parisian demi-­monde to become one of the capital’s most celebrated courtesans and the mistress of wealthy and famous men, including (briefly) Alexandre Dumas fils. When she died of consumption in 1847, aged only 23, her gilded possessions formed the basis of one of the most famous estate auctions in Parisian history.63 Few readers failed to recognize the real, dead working woman behind Dumas fils’s sensationally successful 1848 novel and his later adaptation of it for the stage. Even their shared title, La Dame aux Camélias (The Lady of the Camellias), may allude to one of Duplessis’s working practices; according to Dumas, she wore red camellias four days of the month and white ones all the others to indicate to clients her days of professional availability.64 In novel and drama, Dumas transmuted many other stories from Duplessis’s life—­including that of his brief affair with her—­into sentimental legend. Marguerite, Dumas’s consumptive courtesan, falls in love with the adoring young Armand Duval and leaves her luxurious life to live with him in the country. In a scene that directly parallels Durandin’s appeal to Mimì in La

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Vie de Bohème, Armand’s father arrives and begs her to renounce his son, as their scandalous affair is destroying both Armand’s reputation and the marriage prospects of his virginal sister. Marguerite agrees, even going so far as to pretend that she has willingly returned to sex work so that Armand will reject her. Her health deteriorates rapidly, and she dies. In Dumas’s drama, she assuages her lover’s grief by commenting, “Sooner or later, human beings must die of what they have lived by. I have lived by love; now, I am dying of it.”65 The double entendre inherent in these words underlines La Dame aux Camélias’s complicated relationship with earlier works in the French repertoire poitrinaire. On one hand, they identify Marguerite as a classic consumptive protagonist in the sentimental mould that Dumas’s own father had helped to establish in Angèle. (Jules Janin began his review of La Dame by dubbing Dumas fils “his father’s son.”66) As in La Vie de Bohème, the play’s dialogue constantly underlines the relationship between the heroine’s disease and her emotions. After Armand confesses his love to Marguerite, she warns him that “a violent emotion could kill me.”67 Her consumptive symptoms increase as her love grows unhappier; when Armand surprises her as she writes her letter of farewell to him, he remarks upon her pallor,68 and when she meets him again in Paris after their separation, she tells him that she can “feel the disease increasing and consuming me.”69 Following both medical and literary tradition, unhappy passion is portrayed as an active agent of consumption, and the disease’s symptoms as material proof of unhappy passion. In Marguerite’s own words to Duval Senior, “Leave Armand, Monsieur? You’d better kill me right away.” 70 On the other hand, Marguerite is a professional seller of her own affections. Is she dying only of her unhappy passion or also of the effects of high living? In Dumas’s playtext, Armand advocates for the latter view; when he sees Marguerite gasping for breath at a late-­night supper, he tells her, “You are killing yourself.”71 His father goes so far as to suggest that Marguerite is suffering from nothing worse than a few too many parties: “Come, come, my child, calm down and let’s not exaggerate; you’re young, you’re pretty, and you mistake the fatigues of an agitated life for a real illness.”72 Marguerite’s doctor takes the question more seriously; encountering her at a soirée, he bids her “look after yourself, Madame, look after yourself, I beg you.”73 Not only her love, but also her lifestyle, are responsible for her decline. Remembering Marie Duplessis, whom many of them had known or at



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least observed firsthand, most of La Dame’s first critics emphasized this point. The critic of Le Daguerréotype Théâtral recalled that Duplessis “wore her frail life away very rapidly with the continual friction of pleasure; the butterfly burned away its wings.”74 Janin’s review of La Dame began similarly, with a long, tender, ambivalent reminiscence of Duplessis in which her work, her attractions, and her illness intertwined: One recognized her by the elegance of her figure, the brightness of her eyes, the pallor of her face! [. . . and] she let herself be known by a dry, feverish cough, the forerunner of certain death—­especially in the profession of love, which is surely of all professions the poorest and the most painful.75 In a particularly disturbing example of consumptive chic, Janin constructs tubercular symptoms as the macabre fashion accessories of the celebrity courtesan. Her fragile beauty may attract, but the life of gaiety her attractions afford completes the vicious circle by exacerbating her illness. As the critic of L’Annuaire Théâtral put it, “Marguerite is consumptive, and the attacks that are killing her get ever more frequent and more serious thanks to the irregular, wild, and dissipated life she lives.” 76 Thanks in large part to diagnoses such as these, Dumas’s play is today generally understood as the drama of a courtesan who is both punished and redeemed by her consumptive death. She lives by love, selling her favors for money and discovering meaning when she finds true passion; she dies of love, destroyed by her dissipations and the agony of renunciation. She is both the classic stage poitrinaire, more sensitive and loving than those around her, and a rewriting of established convention in which the symptoms of virtue become the signifiers of vice. Her consumption is both the ennobling disease of the Romantic heroine and a “euphemism for syphilis.”77 Hence, Sos Eltis argues, her death “hovers ambiguously between the agonizing consequences of sexual promiscuity and the poetic fading of romantic disappointment.” 78 This ambiguity has caused many feminist critics to attack Dumas’s bad faith in pretending to represent Marguerite as an admirable Romantic heroine while actually constructing her as a dangerous whited sepulchre and subjecting her to torture before purging her from society altogether.79 Without wishing to deny the misogyny and sadism inherent in the myth of La Dame aux Camélias, I would argue that placing Marguerite’s—­and

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Marie Duplessis’s—­consumptions within the context of mid-­nineteenth-­ century French medical discourse makes Dumas’s professed sympathy for his heroine look a little more sincere. To vitalists within the medical establishment, Marguerite’s hectic lifestyle and her intense love were both forms of over-­excitement likely to cause or exacerbate consumption. Meanwhile, for those who looked for the social determinants of disease, Marguerite’s impoverished origins, her years as a seamstress, and her eventual decision to escape penury through sex work would have confirmed their conclusion that consumption was a disease of poor working women who were carried away by their fierce desire for a better life. Within the French medical frameworks of her era, Marguerite was a woman whose inward and outward labors had worn out her body. In La Dame aux Camélias, Marguerite herself offers an explanation of her malady that constructs her emotional and professional lives as its symbiotic causes. Describing the life of a courtesan, she tells Armand that “[i]n the midst of our noisy existence, our heads, our vanities, our senses live . . . but our hearts swell up, having no way to unburden themselves, and they suffocate us.”80 Like Valentine, Henri, and Mimì before her, Marguerite must hide her feelings, which accordingly consume her. Unlike theirs, her fatal problem is caused by the exigencies of her profession. As long as she is a practicing courtesan, she must play the role that her clients expect of her. Even after she tries to leave her profession, Duval Senior’s reproaches lead her once again to conceal her true feelings in order to save Armand. In both cases, her professional situation forces her to stifle her heart’s desires until they “suffocate” her. Both a sentimental ailment and a social one, her consumption is a working woman’s disease. To represent this predicament onstage, Dumas fils and his actresses called upon the established tropes of the repertoire poitrinaire. The 1848 novel upon which Dumas based his play is remarkable for its brutally clinical portrayal of tubercular symptoms: Marguerite spits blood; gasps for breath; burns and sweats with fever; and spends her final days writhing in bed, unable to move or speak.81 The Marguerite of Dumas’s drama, by contrast, is able to move elegantly from bed to sofa and to speak long farewell speeches before she dies. In later years, it was even reported that Dumas exonerated the first actress to rehearse the role of Marguerite, Anaïs Fargueil, from the need to imitate the consumptive cough. To Fargueil’s question, “Tell me, Monsieur Dumas, is this girl really going to spit up her lungs [cracher ses poumons] all



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the way to the final act?” he supposedly responded, “it’s not obligatory.”82 Hence, modern critics often accuse Dumas of romanticizing and sanitizing Marguerite’s illness for the stage.83 La Dame aux Camélias arguably offers its own, highly self-­reflexive critique of the notion that feminine sickness and suffering must be prettified or concealed if the business of pleasure is to go on. Janin, speaking from within the play’s own era, devoted much of his review to expatiating on this point. The essence of the courtesan’s job, he proposed, was dissimulation in the face of pain: Dying, to drag oneself to the ball to eclipse one’s rivals,—and, full of fever, to attend those long parties at which you must be the pleasure and the joy,—to smile at this one, and at that one, and to lie to both, and to deceive them all in a block; with neither rest nor truce, without a moment to oneself, and without a second of calm. Actress in a feverish play who can only leave the theatre in order to die[!]84 The courtesan, in this vision, is a working woman in the same sense as the actress. No matter what she herself suffers, she must practice the art of giving pleasure. Dumas uses the symptoms of consumption to make this point early in La Dame aux Camélias, when Marguerite is seized by a fit of suffocation while dancing the fashionable polka. Her party guests are concerned, but she brushes it off, telling them that she is “a little breathless” but that “it’s nothing.” Like Mimì, Marguerite calls upon the stage consumptive’s time-­ honoured downplaying of her ailment. But where Mimì hid her symptoms in order to assuage Rodolphe’s anxieties, Marguerite lies to avoid spoiling her clients’ enjoyment. When Armand begs her to look after herself, she retorts that this would be professional suicide: Taking care of oneself is all very well for respectable women, who have families and friends; but as for us, as soon as we can no longer serve anyone’s pleasure or vanity, we are abandoned, and long nights follow long days. Come, I know what I’m talking about! I just spent two months in bed, and after three weeks no one came to see me any more.85 The façade of beauty, health, and gaiety is crucial to the courtesan’s survival. To live, she must kill herself—­and she must hide the fact that she is doing so.

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These skills pay terrible dividends for Marguerite later in the play when, after her brief idyll with Armand, his father demands that she renounce him. From the first, she has viewed her lover rather as he views her, as a fragile creature in need of protection: “You are too young and too sensitive to live in our world,” she tells him when he first professes his affection.86 Now, to “cure” Armand of his passion as a doctor might cure a patient,87 she tells him that she has left him for a life of luxury with the tedious and possessive Baron de Varville. In the first scenes of the play, the audience learns that Marguerite “never lies”88 and that she despises Varville.89 At the play’s climax, she denies both of these principles in order to fulfil her vow to M. Duval, giving one last, consummate proof of her professional skill for dissimulating her own feelings so as to serve the needs of others. In this context, it is possible to read Marguerite’s theatrical deathbed scene as something more than an act of sanitization for the stage. It finds her still performing, and in performing she retains something of her working woman’s identity. The Marguerite of the novel dies in unmitigated agony, with only one maid to support her; the Marguerite of the stage dies surrounded by old friends and clients, all of whom need some kind of comfort. So, in her accustomed style, she pretends that “it is nothing.” She tells her friend Gaston, who has stayed up all night nursing her, that she feels “well.”90 She says the same thing to Prudence, her cadging milliner, who comes to borrow money.91 When Armand arrives, she reassures him: “Look, I am smiling, I am strong, see? It’s just the astonishment of being alive again that makes me breathless.”92 At the last, in a final (and uncharacteristic) flash of spes phthisica, she is pulled into her own fiction: Ah! How strange. (She rises.) [.  .  .] I am not suffering any more. It feels as though life is returning to me . . . I feel better than I ever have before . . . I am going to live! . . . Ah! How well I feel! (She sits down and seems to fall asleep.)93 The theatrical Marguerite dies as she has lived, still disavowing her own pain. Thanks to Marguerite’s moments of soliloquy, however, the play’s dramaturgy ensures that the audience is privy to that pain. It sees her cry, “Ah! How pale I am!” when she finds herself alone after her fit of breathlessness.94 It listens to her moan, “I will never have the courage” when she realizes she must part with Armand.95 Her spectators understand that



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Marguerite is truly ill, truly suffering, and truly loves Armand. Her untroubled façade works to create sentimental subtext; the more she claims that “it is nothing,” the more the audience is encouraged to take pleasure in its ability to glimpse the agony behind the mask. Over the course of the drama, the spectator is invited to assume the role of Marguerite’s greatest intimate—­or of the doctor who takes her pulse and sees her physical and emotional secrets exposed. In this context, sentimental subtext encourages a particularly troubling version of Shepherd-­Barr’s “diagnostic gaze.” Though Marguerite maintains her privacy in relation to the other characters onstage, she is profoundly exposed to the searching sympathy of the theatrical audience. Reminiscences of Eugénie Doche’s celebrated performance as Mar­ guerite in the original production of La Dame aux Camélias underline this point. No reviewer failed to praise the qualities that linked the actress to the courtesan she played: beauty, charm, delicacy, and chic. She was “ravishing in her grace and good taste,” declared Le Daguerréotype Théâtral.96 Like her character, Doche created a façade that mitigated the unpleasant associations of illness. Théophile Gautier, who had known and eulogized Marie Duplessis, wrote that Even if for those of us who, alas! can judge of its truthfulness, the spectacle was very painful, we can still recommend the death scene. Ary Scheffer himself never placed upon a lace pillow a head more ideally pale, or one that let the soul shine through more clearly. She has a heartbreaking grace, a sorrowful charm that both ravishes you and hurts you.97 An etching published with the play shows the moment to which Gautier alludes, with Doche, clad in white, sinking back upon the pillows of her canapé (Fig. 4). In old age, Doche herself demonstrated the effect to a journalist, enacting how she “died, holding Armand’s hand in hers [. . .], the way consumptives do die, without pain, without agony, so that Armand could only tell she was dead because he could no longer remove his hand from Marguerite’s.”98 Doche’s description of her onstage death as mimicking “the way consumptives do die” seems to offer up her performance as a surrogate for her spectators’ lived experiences of tubercular passings, healing their memories by constructing their loved ones’ final moments as painless and beautiful.

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Figure 4. Charles-Albert Fechter (kneeling) and Eugénie Doche (on couch) in the final scene of La Dame aux Camélias, 1852. Courtesy of Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Even so, Gautier acknowledges that the “charm” of Marguerite’s suffering was bound up with something “painful.” Another critic linked this effect to a contradiction within Doche’s own physical instrument. So delightful to look at, he remarked, she had “the rusty voice of a demon”: a voice whose “broken notes harmonized strangely with her physiognomy to portray this poor young girl who was about to descend into the tomb.”99 While her face and figure conveyed Marguerite’s professional attractions, her “broken” voice created sentimental subtext by hinting at the agony underneath. The audience was “hurt” as well as “ravished” by this quintessential example of symptomatic acting. Upon such contradictions the sentimental actress’s labor—­and the sentimental audience’s pleasure—­rested. In her 1853 novel Villette, Charlotte Brontë hauntingly evoked the complex dialectic of pain and pleasure involved in watching a great performer of this era work. Having seen Mlle. Rachel act in 1851, she transmuted the experience into a scene in which her heroine Lucy Snowe watches the fictional actress Vashti onstage. As she tries to explain her intense emotional response to Vashti, Lucy returns again and again to the actress’s strange combination of power and vulnerability, fierceness and fragility: “She could shine yet with pale grandeur and steady might; but that star verged already on its judgment-­day. Seen near, it was a chaos—­hollow, half-­consumed: an



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orb perished or perishing—­half lava, half glow.”100 For Lucy, the sublime effect of Vashti’s acting depends upon the fierce, unrelenting labor by which she both battles and signifies physical and emotional pain. Brontë writes, Suffering had struck that stage empress, and she stood before her audience neither yielding to, nor enduring, nor, in finite measure, resenting it: she stood locked in struggle, rigid in resistance. [. . .] To her, what hurts becomes immediately embodied; she looks on it as a thing that can be attacked, worried down, torn in shreds. Scarcely a substance herself, she grapples to conflict with abstractions.101 Consumed by disease until she is hardly substantial, Vashti refuses to submit to her own weakness. In Lucy’s vision of the actress’s physical and affective labor, as Sally Shuttleworth writes, “abstractions, the experiential details of mental life which physiology cannot describe, are given material form.”102 The “hurts” of both mind and body are transformed into art, in large part because the artist refuses to accede to them. Pain becomes pleasurably manifest precisely through the working woman’s efforts to resist it. A similar dialectic is at work in La Vie de Bohème and La Dame aux Camélias, both of which premièred during Rachel’s (and Brontë’s) lifetime. Mimì, pressing her handkerchief to her lips to stifle her cough, and Marguerite, gasping “it’s nothing” as she fights for breath, are “locked in struggle” like Vashti. Their images support Elisabeth Bronfen’s argument that signification in nineteenth-­century European culture occurred obsessively over the woman’s dead body;103 premised upon the spectacularization and commodification of a woman’s physical and emotional agony, they clearly cannot be seen as purely positive in feminist terms. Nevertheless, cultural and medical constructions of tuberculosis as a disease of the overworked also allowed its symptoms to function as signifiers of these women’s labor and of their intense—­though cruelly limited—­assertions of agency. The artist who created a popular etching of Rachel on her deathbed in 1858 drew her pale and emaciated with illness, but also crowned with the deathless laurel of the great artist (Fig. 5). The enduring popularity of La Vie de Bohème and La Dame aux Camélias amongst female performers and audience members may be linked to their similar representations of the dignity, as well as the pathos, of working women. At the same time as they foregrounded women’s labor, French representations of consumptive women created after the failed revolutions of 1848 also affected the theatrical audience’s understanding of its own role in the

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Figure 5. Mlle. Rachel (Élisabeth Rachel Félix) on her deathbed, 1858. Courtesy of Lebrecht Music & Arts / Alamy Stock Photo.

production of theatrical meaning. In performances like Thuillier’s as Mimì and Doche’s as Marguerite, the actress’s task was not simply to perform an emotion that the audience was then invited to feel. Instead, she strove to reveal that emotion by half-­concealing it, using the discreet handkerchief to hint at blood, sweat, and tears. In response to such instances of sentimental subtext, the modern audience played the physician, searching out the inward secrets behind material signs. With the rules of actor’s and audience’s labor thus established, it only remained for their shared work to spread around the world.

G Part II

Sentimental Transmissions

3 Camilleology The Stage Consumptive as Tr ansnational Vector, 1852–1877

G

“We warn the ladies of England to take heed in this matter; their own interests are most deeply involved in the decision of the question, whether their husbands and sons shall be inoculated with the worst types of Parisian vice.” —­Review of Verdi’s La Traviata (The Times, August 7, 1856)

In 1853, one year after La Dame aux Camélias’s triumph on the Parisian stage, George Henry Lewes praised Britain’s Lord Chamberlain for “refus[ing] a license to this unhealthy idealization of one of the worst evils of our social life.”1 Lamenting the fact that Dumas fils’s “utterly wrong, unwholesome, and immoral” play had proved “the success of the last ten years,” the British critic set out to refute its apologists: Even those who think the evil a sad necessity, must own that it is an evil, and a very sad necessity,—too sad to be treated lightly, too hideous to be poeticised and made ‘interesting.’ The banale excuse that ‘such things are,’ is no justification; every hospital has its horrible realities, which must be kept from the public eye, and which Art refuses to acknowledge as materials. [. . .] The very skill with which young Dumas has treated [his subject], makes his crime the greater, because it tends to confuse the moral sense, by exciting the sympathy of an audience.2 Lewes never names the “evil” to which he alludes, but by directly equating it with the “horrible reality” of the hospital, he tacitly conflates Marguerite — 77 —

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Gautier’s consumption with her profession as a sex worker. For him, as for many subsequent Anglophone critics, her illness stands as a metaphor for her sexual immorality. Both are inappropriate subjects for “Art” and the playwright’s sentimental treatment of them is particularly problematic. By “exciting” sympathy as an unhealthy stimulant might excite the nerves, Dumas provokes an interest in Marguerite’s fate that leaves the audience morally confused. The play is “unwholesome” because its emotional power works to spread the courtesan’s fatal moral turpitude. In this and many other reviews of the 1850s, La Dame aux Camélias looked less like a play than like a disease vector. Its process of transmission worked—­as many French, British, and North American physicians in these decades believed consumption itself did—­through the sharing of strong emotions. In France, the play’s critics saw Dumas fils’s drama as deliberately using the poétique du poitrinaire to infect the audience with interest in the socially outcast demi-­mondaine. Those who wished to combat this effect responded by staging counterblasts in which phthisis and its attendant connotations of interiority and nobility were shifted from the courtesan to her male lover. Because the sentimental—­and social—­power of consumption was taken for granted, the question of who would be allowed to wield it became paramount. Many British and American critics took these anxieties further, arguing that audiences who succumbed to the sentimental appeal of consumptive dramas risked infection by pernicious French dramaturgical, moral, and political values. Even as such critiques thundered forth, however, Anglo-­ American audiences embraced these dramas and the French-­influenced Anglophone actors who used the performance of consumptive symptoms to convey and provoke profound inward emotions. First in their own nation, then as they crossed the English Channel and the Atlantic, French consumptive dramas and the performers associated with them assumed the role of sentimental—­and stylistic—­ superspreaders.

Infectious Feelings, or La Dame as Social Disease To speak of superspreaders in relation to the consumptive drama of the 1850s is, in one sense, anachronistic, given that a defining characteristic of medical thought about consumption in mid-­nineteenth-­century France, Britain, and North America was the conviction that it was not contagious.

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In his Traité de l’Auscultation Médiate, Laënnec had noted that “tuberculous phthisis has long passed for contagious,” but argued that “[i]n France, at least, this doesn’t seem to be correct,” adducing a body of evidence that included his own supposedly non-­fatal “inoculation” with tuberculous matter during a dissection many years before.3 Though they admitted that many ancient physicians believed phthisis to be infectious and that modern southern Europeans still held this opinion, most French, British, and American medical writers dismissed the belief as “obsolete.”4 The American physician William Sweetser hedged his bets, writing that “though phthisis is probably not contagious, still we cannot regard the question as determined.”5 The French doctor Léon Brachet was more categorical. “The fear of contagion has left too many victims to die in isolation and misery,” he wrote in 1867; “Science must today come to the aid of philanthropy to destroy the last vestiges of contagionist ideas.”6 The American doctor Samuel Sheldon Fitch acknowledged that “consumption will often sweep through a whole family,” 7 and some doctors, like Émile Bernardeau, went so far as to argue that this effect proved the disease’s potentially contagious nature.8 Most treatises on consumption published in France, Britain, or North America between the 1840s and 1860s, however, dismissed this hypothesis, reiterating instead Laënnec’s conclusion that “unhappy passions” were to blame.9 These “unhappy passions,” physicians believed, not only fostered consumption in individuals, but also spread it amongst them. The Englishman George Thomas Congreve, for instance, declared in 1857 that grief “destroys the nervous energy, promotes the development of tubercles, debilitates the whole body, and hastens the progress of the disease.”10 This point, many physicians agreed, offered the best explanation for consumption’s fatal effect on families. Sweetser included “loss of sleep and mental anxiety, in attendance on the sick; and often grief, too deep to be comforted, for the loss of near and dear kindred” among the influences that attacked such “unfortunate families, when the disease is once introduced among them.”11 Brachet used this effect to explain the frequent appearance of tubercular symptoms in the widows of consumptive husbands: Having passed long months, often even long years, in struggling against that terrible disease that deprives them of all hope [. . .], hiding their tears behind feigned smiles, slowly wasting away; what is more

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natural than to see them perish thus, victims of this illness that needs as its seedbed only the slightest deviation of the organic lifeforce, only the lightest prolapsus of the vital forces.12 In Brachet’s vitalist discourse, it is not some organic agent passing between sufferers, but rather the shared pain and grief of terminal illness that ensures that one family member’s death follows rapidly upon another’s. Fitch tells how Two beautiful young ladies recently called upon me, one with a bad cough, the other said to me, “Our mother died of consumption last spring; and since her death, sister has given up, that she must die, and will take no courage or do anything for herself.” This is often the case, frequently at the very grave of one dead of consumption; another will take a cough, go back, give up all hope or effort, and in a few months die of the same disease.13 Not simply “unhappy passions,” but a particular method of their transmission, are to blame for the “beautiful young lady’s” disease. Her illness may be caused in part by a hereditary predisposition, but Fitch implies that her identification with her dead mother is more directly to blame for her cough. Her interest in her mother’s suffering is the agent of her own. In mid-­nineteenth-­century Paris, this same process of emotional contagion was adduced to explain the growing popularity of the repertoire poitrinaire, and especially of the play that had become its most conspicuous exemplar. By 1855, Le Journal Pour Rire could note that “there isn’t a town in Europe where they haven’t talked of performing La Dame aux Camélias, that interesting poitrinaire who coughs so well.”14 Marguerite’s sentimentally engaging symptoms became synonymous with the play’s hold on the public imagination. In 1858, a critic complained that because “Marguerite Gauthier [sic] is phthisic like the courtesan whose history M. Dumas has brought to the stage, the audience’s interest is split between the heroine’s cough and her passion, and their tears are given much more to the consumptive than to the woman in love.”15 The intense emotional “interest” provoked by consumption, such reviews suggest, could spread not only illness, but also theatrical success. While patients obsessed by their sympathy for consumptives fell into the disease themselves, audiences obsessed by the same sympathy shelled out their money, over and over again, in order

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to weep over the poitrinaire’s pain. Unsurprisingly, then, the arguments around gender, sexuality, class, and morality provoked by La Dame aux Camélias were frequently articulated through efforts to harness consumption’s contagious emotional interest. Dumas’s play had smuggled a noble, self-­sacrificial courtesan into the repertoire by exploiting the audience’s interest in her cough. When the play’s critics produced dramatic ripostes, they strove to block this chain of infection. Most notably, a group of anti–La Dame dramas chose to wield consumption’s infectious interest against, rather than in favor of, the courtesan. These plays depicted promiscuous women as heartless vultures and the virtuous young men who fell in love with them as consumptive victims. The first and most famous of them was Barrière and Thiboust’s 1853 drama Les Filles de Marbre, of which Le Figaro remarked that it “played the same tune as La Dame aux Camélias, but played it with a difference, protesting against its elder sibling.”16 Les Filles tells the cautionary tale of the idealistic young sculptor Raphael, who falls for the professional beauty, Mlle. Marco. In thrall to his obsession, he abandons his adoring mother and the virtuous orphan girl, Marie, who loves him. Though Marco entertains his love for a while, she soon abandons him for a richer parti. Raphael, whose health has been undermined by his passion, staggers home in a state of consumption and madness, begs forgiveness from his family and friends, and expires. In 1857, Octave Feuillet reproduced the same pattern in his drama Dalila, whose resemblance to Les Filles was so “fraternal” as to give rise to charges of plagiarism.17 Here, the young composer André Roswein falls in obsessive love with the serial adulteress Princess Leonora, abandoning his virtuous sweetheart (again named Marie). When Leonora tires of him and rejects him, he becomes terminally consumptive. As the Englishman Henry Greville put it, whereas in La Dame aux Camélias “the lady dies for love of the man,” in these plays “the man [dies] for the lady.”18 In both Les Filles de Marbre and Dalila, consumptive symptoms are used to contrast the emotional inwardness and sincerity of the bourgeois male with the shallowness and falsity of the sexually active woman. As Marco’s affection for him wanes, Raphael becomes sicker and sicker; he tells his friend Desgenais that “[f]or a month, this fever has not left me, it consumes my brain, it breaks my heart.”19 When Marco finally abandons him altogether, telling him that he must “try” to come and see her in Paris, Raphael’s agony expresses itself even more symptomatically:

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RAPHAEL: gasping for breath. Yes . . . yes . . . I will try! . . . (He brings his hand rapidly to his chest, with an expression of pain.) MARCO: going to him. What’s wrong? RAPHAEL: with a violent effort at self-­control. Nothing! . . . nothing! . . .20 Although Raphael’s illness is never explicitly identified as phthisis by the characters onstage, his gestures and words offer unmistakable citations from the repertoire poitrinaire. They use sentimental subtext—­and consumption’s infectious affective capital—­not only to rebut La Dame aux Camélias’s claims for the courtesan’s nobility, but also to restore the notion that emotional interiority is a bourgeois male prerogative. Dalila calls upon the starring prop of the consumptive repertoire to make the same point. When the contemptuous Leonora demands that he prove he is dying of love for her, Roswein throws down his bloodstained handkerchief as evidence. Externalizing the inner violence of the disease far more directly than Raphael’s gasps for breath and grimaces of pain, Roswein’s handkerchief serves as a scriptive thing for both Leonora and her audience; its bloodstains invite them to flinch in recognition of consumption’s most dreaded symptom, and in doing so to acknowledge the unimpeachable reality of the young composer’s fatal passion. Leonora remains unmoved. “What does that prove?” she scoffs; “all artists spit blood!”21 For the loving man, the handkerchief contains his heart’s blood. For the promiscuous woman, who lacks interiority, such emotions are artistic affectations, and the bloodstained handkerchief merely a sentimental cliché. Well trained in the diagnostic gaze by the consumptive dramas that preceded and influenced Dalila, the theatrical audience is unequivocally invited to take Roswein’s part. The epidemiological line from La Dame aux Camélias to Les Filles de Marbre to Dalila is a straight one, with the emotions provoked by each drama helping to spawn the next. Not only the plays, but the actors who appeared in them, served as vectors in this process of theatrical contagion. In 1850s Paris, the spreader-­in-­chief amongst such actors was Charles-­A lbert Fechter, whose career epitomizes the French triumph of the consumptive archetype. Born in London of a Franco-­German father and a Franco-­Italian mother, Fechter was a transnational subject from birth, but he began his acting career on the Parisian stage. According to the American journalist

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Kate Field, his appearance as “a very thin, very long, and sentimentally delicate youth” almost barred him from entry into the Paris conservatoire. One “grim professor,” she claims, responded to his ambitions by declaring, An actor, indeed! Permit me to assure you that acting is out of the question. You’ve no lungs, sir; you are consumptive, sir; and my advice to you is to take a great deal of exercise. When you walk, throw your coat open and your shoulders back, put your thumbs in the armholes of your vest, and take long respirations. If you follow my advice you may live, but you can never be an actor.22 Fechter persisted in his goal, Field reports, for he was “by no means persuaded that the gods loved him sufficiently to mark him for an early death.”23 Subsequent events proved him right. On the sentimental French stage, his air de poitrinaire would prove an asset. As early as 1848, the 24-­year-­old Fechter was already associated with the consumptive repertoire, playing Henri Muller in a revival of Angèle at Dumas père’s Théâtre-­Historique.24 His place in theatre history was assured by his creation of the role of Armand opposite Eugénie Doche’s Marguerite in the first production of La Dame aux Camélias. Fechter then sealed his association with the repertoire poitrinaire with his appearance as Raphael in Les Filles de Marbre. It was later reported that Raphael’s death had been Fechter’s own idea.25 London’s Athanaeum informed its readers that, having “made a great success in the Filles de Marbres [sic],—­dying of a deep decline during one hundred nights—­[he] afterwards refused the principle part in a new comedy because the hero was not consumptive.”26 Not only Fechter’s appearance, but also his acting style suited him for the roles of poitrinaires and their lovers. The de Goncourt brothers praised him for eschewing overacting (or as they put it, “la télégraphie”) in favor of a concentrated, “gloves-­on” performance style that they described in quasi-­ medical language. “With him,” they recalled, “acting became contained, delicately nervous; he had almost reduced it to the affective gesture alone.”27 The American Grace Greenwood, too, remembered his “utter lack of the melodramatic style”; generally “simple” and “singularly quiet,” at climactic moments he was able to unleash “an amount of reserved power, of intense, concentrated passion, absolutely electrifying.”28 This restraint extended to his famous death scenes, which, the de Goncourts noted, he played “with an economy of effect very rare in a moment where boulevard agonies tend

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to detail every death rattle: a step forward, a strangulated voice, a brief grimace, a handkerchief brought hurriedly up to reddened lips, a final collapse.”29 This tribute underlines Fechter’s mastery of the skills required by the consumptive repertoire: the visible and audible dialectic between suggestions of a character’s vulnerability and assertions of his will to conceal it, the use of the handkerchief both to conceal and to flag troubling symptoms, the subtlety that left space for the spectator to diagnose the character’s hidden pain and thus to insert their own active sympathy. Because Fechter’s “delicately nervous” acting suggested an actorly organism directly infected by his characters’ emotions, it wielded a contagious power over the audience’s emotions in their turn. Telling the story of the premiere of La Dame aux Camélias, Dumas fils describes how, during the confrontation between Armand and Marguerite in Act 4, Fechter suddenly “improvised” a gesture in which he “seize[d Mme. Doche] by the shoulders and threw her to the ground by force, without her knowing what it was all about. The effect was immense.” Though Mme. Doche was frightened and furious at this unexpected assault, the “emotion and enthusiasm of a public totally carried away by the two artists” knew no bounds.30 At this moment, wrote Dumas fils, Fechter’s “heart beat through the whole auditorium.”31 Not just the audience’s feelings, but their very bodies, became one with his. It was on this very question of embodiment, however, that Fechter seems to have met his Waterloo as the reigning prince of poitrinaires. In an “indiscretion biographique” that spoofs the theatrical culture of 1850s Paris, Jules Lecomte describes Fechter as an actor of great talent, very engaging to the public; one always imagined him as thin, because it is widely agreed that sentiment does not lodge comfortably in abundant flesh, and that the first condition of creating interest—­when it comes to theatrical passion—­is to be consumptive, languishing, and at the last gasp.32 The playwright Auguste Maquet had bet the success of his 1859 drama Dettes de Coeur (Debts of the Heart) upon Fechter’s air de poitrinaire and its infectious sentimental power. Fechter was to play the drama’s pale and ailing hero Henri, torn between two loves and given to such asides as “my blood is burning.”33 But as the premiere of this consumptive drama approached, Lecomte reports, disaster struck. Fechter had visited the land of his birth and, after six months of Old England’s “bière et roastbeef,” had

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put on weight. His ruddy, portly appearance struck terror into the heart of Maquet and his impresario Louis Lurine, who, writes Lecomte, “had been counting on an elegiac, interesting, and pale young lover, but found himself with a noble patriarch! What could he do? Break Fechter’s engagement on the grounds of overly good health?”34 Though impossible, such recourse would have been appropriate, for “no one felt any of the necessary interest in a man who seemed to have more restaurant debts than debts of the heart to pay.”35 The critical archive left behind by Dettes de Coeur confirms Lecomte’s account. The reviewer for La Mode Nouvelle remarked, “Fechter may still be a passionate lover; but he’s already put on a great deal of embonpoint, and a lover who enjoys such flourishing health doesn’t at all lend himself to the necessary illusion.”36 Le Figaro continued the fat-­shaming, sighing that Fechter’s “face looks puffy, he’s grown a paunch; he’s no longer the elegant jeune premier that the ladies used to admire.”37 The French public was unwilling to accept that “a man so well-­nourished could really be madly in love.”38 In the age of La Dame aux Camélias and its dramatic progeny, the sentimental leading actor was expected not only to live the emotions of his roles, but to sport a physique du rôle that materialized their powerful inward force. If the performer put on pounds, their feelings ceased to convince—­and thence to infect—­the audience. In Paris, consumptive chic had become synonymous not only with inwardness, but also with sentimental transmission.

“False and Sickly Sentiment”: The Poitrinaire on the London Stage At first glance, England appeared immune to such emotional contagion. By coding Fechter’s weight gain as the inevitable result of an English sojourn, Lecomte depicted the fashion for pale, ailing heroes and heroines as a signifier of French sensibility, defined in opposition to the “bière et roastbeef ” of Old England. To be English or anglicized, Lecomte implied, was to be healthy, but also stolid, self-­satisfied, and dull—­entirely lacking in the deep emotionality and capacity for self-­immolation required by a consumptive hero. As far back as 1834, when Henry Lytton Bulwer mocked Dumas père’s “sickly-­faced apothecaries,”39 the British had reciprocated such criticisms by dismissing the fashion for stage poitrinaires as a pernicious French

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affectation with which Britain declined to be infected. Albion’s rejection of the French repertoire poitrinaire gained particular visibility in 1852 when the Lord Chamberlain’s office refused to license La Dame aux Camélias for performance on the British stage. The Literary Gazette reported that this fate befell only three plays in that year, of which “two were notorious French works—­La Dame aux Camélias and [Dumas père’s] La Tour de Nesle.”40 Not only the “gross immorality” of La Dame, but also its Frenchness, clearly counted against it. British reviews of the first Parisian production of La Dame aux Camélias offer further evidence of the perceived gulf between British and French attitudes to the repertoire poitrinaire. “What is to be thought of a society,” asked The Globe’s French correspondent, when we see persons of all classes, and females in immense numbers, rushing to a theatre to see a piece, all the characters in which are women of the town and their entreteneurs, and which brings forth tears of sympathy from the audience for the contrariétés experienced by the heroine?41 For this critic, the fact that women and members of the lower classes—­ already prone to moral weakness—­were being seduced into “sympathy” by Marguerite’s sufferings was particularly threatening to the fabric of society. As for Marguerite’s illness, it piled one indecorous spectacle upon another. The critic of The Atlas complained that The last entire act is occupied by the slow death of the heroine in consumption, with all the symptoms and the accidents, studied from the life. The hospital could furnish nothing more disgusting and more true. And the Parisians looked on with delight. They whose nerves and whose views of propriety could not bear to see Caesar stabbed upon the stage, witness the last half-­hour of a consumptive patient’s life! To be sure the consumptive patient is played by Madame Doche.42 Unacclimatized to the French theatre’s by-­now habitual representation of consumption’s “symptoms and accidents,” the British writer finds them “disgusting.” He reads the Parisians’ “delight” in them as a marker not only of prurience but also of hypocrisy, given the famed French objections to the vulgarity of Shakespearean tragedy. The supposedly mitigating fact that

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“the consumptive patient is played by Madame Doche” is treated ironically; to watch an attractive woman enact phthisic death is, the critic implies, to participate in an almost pornographic amusement. As late as 1883, well after La Dame had become a standard work on the British stage, Dutton Cook continued to argue that “[i]n English eyes ‘La Dame aux Camélias’ can never seem an agreeable or artistic work,” but must always appear “morbid, hectic, oppressed with false and sickly sentiment.”43 In his description, the play itself appears as a kind of consumptive patient. Flushed with a “hectic” gaiety, it is also “oppressed” by—­and oppressive in—­its sentimental approach to prostitution, disease, and death. On the one hand, the play deals too frankly with “morbid” subjects that ought to remain taboo. On the other, the play approaches these subjects with “false and sickly sentiment,” wallowing in the tear-­jerking death of its fallen heroine. Like Lewes before him, Cook constructs La Dame’s French symptomatic dramaturgy as a source of moral and social disease. By exciting spectators’ emotions through its sentimental materialism, it infects them with prurient interest in a woman—­and an illness—­that would be much better left in the realms of the marginal, the unspeakable, and the abject. Les Filles de Marbre, which was licensed for British performance in the 1850s in an adaptation by Charles Selby, was greeted with similar rhetoric. British reviewers lauded the play’s relative morality; rather than idolizing a courtesan, the play depicted Raphael’s attraction to Mlle. Marco as fatal to his career, his reputation, and his life. Nevertheless, Lewes argued that The Marble Heart, as Selby dubbed his version, would never succeed in Britain, especially in the absence of La Dame aux Camélias: Raphael buys love, and then rants about want of heart in the woman who sells it; and we are expected to be interested in his infatuation, and to sympathise in his disenchantment! Unless we, too, had our hectic passion for the poetic courtesan, we could feel no sort of interest in seeing that mockery exposed.44 Spectators charmed by the “poetic courtesan” Marguerite Gautier, implies Lewes, were themselves threatened by an aesthetic version of the “hectic” fever that destroys Raphael. Only those (implicitly French) audiences who had been infected by this sickly passion could identify with Raphael’s fatal

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corruption, and thus applaud—­and benefit from—­the curative lessons of The Marble Heart. The British spectator, by contrast, would find it “a pleasure to turn from such scenes of unhealthy sentiment.”45 In practice, these ostentatious rejections of “unhealthy” French drama belied the realities of the London stage, which had been infected by French-­style consumptive poetics before the arrival of The Marble Heart. In 1852, Dion Boucicault had tapped into the tropes of the French repertoire poitrinaire with The Prima Donna, a comedy in which Stella, a famous singer, discovers that her adopted sister Margaret is dying of love for the same man that she herself hopes to marry. As one London reviewer noted, Margaret’s symptoms are “very consumptive.”46 She totters and leans upon tables47; there is “fever on [her] cheek”;48 she faints repeatedly49 and languishes in exhaustion.50 Expecting her sister to die at any moment, Stella encourages her lover to pledge himself to Margaret; upon gaining a fiancé, however, Margaret recovers with miraculous speed, and Stella eventually chooses to give up the man she loves to ensure her sister’s life and happiness. The Prima Donna thus offers a comic British reframing of sentimental French dramas like Valentine. In his Prefatory Note to the play, Boucicault represents his appropriation of French poetics as a deliberate gamble, almost stymied by British Francophobia. “I had been often told by my literary friends,” he writes, “that the sentimental Comedies, so popular at the Gymnase Theatre in Paris, were unsuited to the taste of a London Public.”51 After numerous rejections, he finally convinced Charles Kean to produce the play at the Royal Princess’s Theatre, where it ran for thirty-­four consecutive nights.52 One reviewer, who described it somewhat sneeringly as “dovetailed with such French nicety, and polished with such French polish,” nevertheless confessed that it “played with good success.”53 Boucicault credited this success in part to the performance of his future wife, Agnes Robertson, as the ailing Margaret; he wrote that “the character was dangerous and difficult,” but was “realized by MISS ROBERTSON, with so deep a sense of its tenderness, with so much elegance and poetry, that I congratulated myself that every manager in London had refused the Comedy, since to that fact I owe the admiration bestowed on her performance.”54 The Evening Mail agreed, highlighting Robertson’s successful execution of the requisite consumptive dialectic between revelation and concealment: “The scene in which she was the invalid, apparently on the limit of the grave, yet striving to sustain her spirits in

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the presence of her father, was given with a truth and delicacy which left nothing to desire.”55 The French consumptive archetype came further to the fore in Tom Taylor’s Helping Hands, which premiered at the Adelphi Theatre in 1855. The heroine of this “domestic drama,” again named Margaret, is the daughter of a genteel but impoverished German musician living in London. Margaret has lost her mother to consumption and is herself at risk of a similar fate; as the young doctor who loves her, Merton, tells her, “[t]he seeds of that disorder are already planted in your constitution.”56 Like Mimì and Marguerite, she is a working woman, staying up all night copying music to pay the rent. Soon after she is introduced, she coughs and murmurs, “Oh, what a pain I have here! (pressing her hand to her side.) Come, come, Gretchen, you can’t afford to be ill. I suppose it’s sitting up at work all last night.”57 The cough and pained gesture, placed to ensure that Margaret’s symptoms convey the physical and emotional cost of her self-­sacrifice, offer textbook examples of symptomatic dramaturgy. Clearly, the tropes of the French consumptive repertoire had already infected England in the age of La Dame aux Camélias—­all, that is, except a few crucial ones. Whereas French stage poitrinaires were always doomed tragically to die, these two Margarets live to be comically married. Boucicault’s Margaret is saved by her sister’s ruse, while Taylor’s benefits from “helping hands” who raise a collection to send her and her father for a curative winter in Italy. Unlike Mimì and Marguerite, moreover, both British Margarets are sexually chaste. After meeting her beloved when he saves her life by carrying her from a burning room, Boucicault’s heroine declares that “my first sensation was one of shame—­so burning, so bitter, that I almost hated him.”58 Taylor’s Margaret, meanwhile, initially denies her admirable suitor’s offer of marriage because her care of her blind father “admits no divided duty.”59 The “dangerous and difficult” character of the consumptive heroine, it seems, could be deployed acceptably by British playwrights in the 1850s only if her affective capital worked to affirm the triumph of feminine virtue. As for the consumptive hero, his affective power over the British public—­ and the socio-­cultural threats associated with that power—­during this same period may be gauged in part by the success of The Marble Heart. Contrary to Lewes’s belief that the British would reject the “unhealthy sentiment” of Les Filles de Marbre, Selby’s adaptation of Barrière and Thiboust’s play

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was well received in London and became a fixture on British stages. Critics were at pains to stress the distance between the play’s lovelorn French hero and the tastes of the British public. Reviewing an 1856 revival at the Sadler’s Wells, The Illustrated London News described the “character of the sculptor who [is] seduced by a lorette from an honest profession, and dies of the infatuation” as a foreign one to British spectators. “It was evident,” he noted, “that the audience were strangers to the particular style of acting, and did not always sympathise with the too domestic sorrows of the hero.”60 The gendered term “domestic sorrows” suggests that Raphael’s “infatuation” was depicted with an open intensity that struck the critic as unmanly or effeminate, as well as un-­English. When The Marble Heart played in the British colonial city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in March 1858, the Acadian Recorder suggested similarly that its plot appeared “somewhat unnatural to our Anglo-­Saxon notions.” Nevertheless, he confessed that “one quite forgets this in seeing Mr. Sothern in the leading character. In his rendition of it, the commencement, the growth, the intensity, and the fatal results of the infatuated sculptor’s passion for Marco, appear quite natural.”61 In the British colonies as in France, consumption’s ability to convey emotional subjectivity appears to have proved irresistible. London’s first Raphael was Leigh Murray, without whose powers, wrote the critic of the satirical Tomahawk, “the play would certainly have been damned.”62 Far from resisting the “domestic” qualities of the consumptive sculptor’s role, Murray seems to have affirmed them; the memoirist Westland Marston later recalled that “[t]here was a feminine touch in his sensibility that was quite in place here.”63 Murray played Raphael, wrote Marston, “with an infatuated abandonment to his passion, an utter collapse at the worthlessness of his idol, and a desperation when [. . .] he stood at bay, that made the conception thoroughly intellectual and tragic.”64 He had, declared the Tomahawk, “the power of making the heart of his audience vibrate to his emotions.”65 Even when they dismissed the French model of emotionally and physically fragile masculinity offered by Raphael, British reviewers could not deny the infectious affective power of a sensitive actor in the role. The repertoire poitrinaire’s burgeoning presence within the British performance culture of the 1850s may help to explain why, despite concerted efforts to protect them against “the worst types of Parisian vice,”66 British audiences cheerfully embraced one especially prominent adaptation of

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La Dame aux Camélias. This was Giuseppe Verdi’s opera La Traviata (The Woman Led Astray, 1853), in which Dumas’s Marguerite Gautier appears as Violetta Valéry.67 Unlike its model, La Traviata was licensed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office and premièred at Her Majesty’s Theatre in May 1856. Sos Eltis notes that the opera’s Italian libretto may have led the censor to assume that “Violetta’s profession could remain euphemistically vague for the majority of the opera’s audience.”68 In practice, impresario Benjamin Lumley wrote, the “dangerous and equivocal subject” of Verdi’s opera was “denounced from the pulpit, denounced by mighty authority in the press, denounced even, at one time, by popular sentiment itself.”69 Despite (or perhaps because of) such denunciations, Verdi’s opera “pleased—­it was run after—­it became one of the most popular compositions of the time.”70 Many critics ascribed the source of this success not only to Verdi’s “catching” melodies,71 but also to the performance of the young Italian soprano Maria (“Marietta”) Piccolomini, who had triumphed as Violetta in Turin before being invited to sing the role in London. Lumley represents the emotion Piccolomini inspired as infectious, writing that it “spread like wildfire” until “a mania possessed the public [and] Marietta Piccolomini became ‘the rage’.”72 The emergence of a sentimental community around Piccolomini was due in part to her charm; she clearly had the elusive quality that Joseph Roach has described as “It,”73 and which Lumley dubbed “an “indescribable ‘something’ that bewitched all hearts.” 74 But Piccolomini’s employment of French-­style symptomatic acting contributed to the effect as well. In the first edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Alexis Chitty noted that Piccolomini’s Violetta “became the fashion, partly on account of her charming little figure, and clever, realistic acting—­especially in the last act, where she introduced a consumptive cough.”75 An etching of Piccolomini in the role (Fig. 6) shows her with a champagne glass in one hand and a handkerchief in the other, as though charm and cough were inseparable. Working solely from the opera’s score and libretto, Linda and Michael Hutcheon have argued that La Traviata reflected a pre-­contagionist understanding of consumption by depicting the heroine’s disease only through idealizing, symbolic gestures.76 The performance archive left behind by Piccolomini complicates this argument, emphasizing that she embodied Violetta’s consumptive symptoms in a manner that struck critics as “most distressingly natural.”77 She “coughed away her existence throughout the

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Figure 6. Maria Piccolomini as Violetta in Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata, 1856. Courtesy of De Agostini Editore / Age Fotostock.

whole of the last act,” remarked the critic of The Musical World, “and thereby gave additional colour to a scene painful enough in itself.” 78 The London Times was offended, complaining that to the “apotheosis of prostitution” in Dumas’s novel, the stage had “added a clinical lecture upon consumption in its direst form.”79 For many others, however, the effect was thrilling. Describing Piccolomini’s Dublin appearance as Violetta in October 1856, The Musical World ’s reviewer wrote that hers was “a piece of acting the most intensely and painfully natural that we have ever witnessed,” complete with “sobs of agony and hectic cough breaking in on her plaintive song.”80 Many audience members, he notes, “were moved even to tears by the deep feeling and pathos, and not less by the splendid semblance of reality [. . .] which characterized every movement and gesture.”81 So great was the spectators’

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emotion that some began to exhibit the symptoms of emotional and physical distress themselves. The Musical World recalled with approbation that “one lady swooned in the upper boxes.”82 By infecting her British spectators with the intense emotions she portrayed, La Traviata’s critics feared, Piccolomini’s symptomatic acting would also infect them with foreign immorality. The opera “surround[ed] an abandoned woman with a halo of false sympathy,” objected one.83 Another complained that Violetta “coughed herself to death before their eyes, and nothing was so fascinating as the last agony.”84 A satirical column in Punch noted the “curious fact that [one of] the two great attractions of the present season ha[s] been a case of Consumption at Her Majesty’s Theatre” thanks to “the interesting PICCOLOMINI” and her “musical coughing.” Mocking “the prevailing taste of the public in favour of dramatic disease,” the author imagines “the minor theatres of the Metropolis” hastily preparing plays about whooping cough and nettle rash. Clearly, Britain had not proved so resistant to foreign infection as its moralists liked to pretend. In England as in France, Punch affirmed, the drama was “in a bad way.”85

“That Cough Must Be Stopped”: The Making of an American Epidemic On the other side of the Atlantic ocean, the contagious popularity of La Dame aux Camélias and its theatrical progeny provoked similarly dire health warnings. As the first adaptations of the play arrived in the United States in 1853, the Boston Daily Atlas noted that La Dame, “as anyone having the slightest acquaintance with the French language may imagine, is altogether unsuited to the English or American stage.”86 A widely reproduced article linked the immorality of the play to the vices of the French nation: The younger Dumas, under the despotism of a tyrant, taking a hint from the drunken orgies of the wild anarchy of the French Revolution, sets a crown upon the impudent brow of the courtesan, and enveloping her with the incense of his perverted genius, calls upon the world to worship her as the goddess of the age. With the usual obsequiousness of our theatrical flunkeyism, which, like a servile varlet, dresses itself up in the cast-­off finery of the French stage, the profligate Dame aux Camelias [.  .  .] and other gilded idols of Parisian vice are brought

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over, losing much of the brightness of their gilt in the transportation, but none of their foulness, and set up in our midst, that we, too, like France, may bow down before a wanton.87 Here, La Dame appears as a vector not only of French sexual immorality but also of French political and social evils. Its success in the United States demonstrates the young republic’s failure to free itself from servitude to the old, corrupted world. In America, as in Britain, many critics linked the reprehensibility of La Dame aux Camélias to the heroine’s illness, treating the play’s depictions of disease and sexual vice as near-­synonymous sins against dramatic propriety. The United States Magazine, for instance, argued that the catastrophe is fit for the words [sic] of a hospital, but totally unfit for the arena of art. No talent can render consumption, with its concomitant cough, endurable to an audience of high taste and culture; no talent should render the career of a courtezan and the interior of a brothel acceptable to a virtuous community.88 The Boston correspondent of the Detroit Advertiser agreed that “the disease, dreadful as it is, is not idealized at all—­it is simply frightful and disgusting.” This writer offered a satirical solution to the problem, declaring that “[in] the fifth act Armand Duval should arrive opportunely from America with a general assortment of Codliver oil, Bourbon whisky, and Ayer’s cherry pectoral, and the entire denouement should be changed. That cough must be stopped.”89 American health was offered as a cure for French disease. In the earliest American adaptations of La Dame aux Camélias, actors made practical efforts to effect this cure. The British actress Jean Margaret Davenport, author and leading lady of the first version of La Dame to appear on American shores, strove to adapt the play in a manner that rendered both its morals and its representation of disease more acceptable to Anglo-­ American critics. Renaming the heroine for the American audience, she called her version Camille, or The Fate of a Coquette. Davenport’s Camille is not a courtesan but a young woman born in poverty and adopted by a Duke. Educated as a lady, she is rejected by high society due to her lowly background and responds by embracing a life of incessant partying and coquetry. Although she remains sexually chaste, her reputation is ruined, as is her health.

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Davenport’s adaptation moralizes Camille’s ailment in a much more explicit manner than Dumas had moralized Marguerite’s. In Dumas’s text, Armand tells Marguerite simply, “You are killing yourself.”90 In Davenport’s, he elaborates: You are slowly killing yourself by this wild life of restless fiery excitement. You may deceive the world, your friends, yourself—­and the mind is too ready to take stamp and colour from the Hope—­but me you cannot deceive. That tell tale death-­like cough is more fatal than a pest wind. CAMILLE: Pooh! That’s a mere constitutional weakness.91 Davenport disconnects the play from its French medical and social background, rendering Camille the victim, not of emotional and sexual labor, but of a frenetic search for “excitement.” Unlike Marguerite and so many other sentimental French poitrinaires, Davenport’s Camille deceives herself about her illness, describing it as a mere “constitutional weakness” rather than heroically accepting her impending doom. Armand, by contrast, sees her consumptive symptoms as the signs of a dreadful plague, “more fatal than a pest wind.” In France, the disease had been the symbol of Mar­ guerite’s passion, goodness, and overwork, which outweighed her sins in the moral balance. In America, it became a metaphor for her sins and their punishment—­“the fate of a coquette.” Davenport had grown up as a British child actress on the transatlantic circuit,92 and her interpretation of Camille was shaped by the British stage tradition. Meredith Conti describes her performance as “an exercise in restraint” designed to circumvent complaints about the representation of the “frightful and disgusting” disease just as her adaptation sought to dodge complaints about the morality of Dumas’s play.93 For some critics, Davenport’s reticence succeeded in evoking the pathos of the invalid’s effort to hide her symptoms. The Charleston Mercury wrote that her portrayal of “the hacking cough, which is the premonitory sign of an early death from consumption, was so natural, and the effort to conceal it so complete, that at times the audience were much distressed.”94 For others, however, Davenport’s restraint went too far. Looking back on her performance in the 1870s, L. H. Hooper described her as “too stately, too cold, too much au grand tragique, for the character.”95 When Camille was “represented as a virtuous young lady, whose only fault was that she was a coquette”—­one whose

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moral failings, like her cough, were carefully concealed behind a veil of propriety—­her situation appeared to Hooper more absurd than moving.96 Nevertheless, numerous American actresses of the 1850s—­including most prominently Laura Keene, who adapted the play so that Camille’s sins, sacrifices, and death were depicted as a dream from which she awoke to embrace virtue97—­followed Davenport’s tasteful lead. Even as this genteel approach to La Dame aux Camélias strove to manage the play’s infectious impact, however, American actors’ successes in The Marble Heart foregrounded the contagious affective power of the French repertoire poitrinaire. Karl M. Kippola has argued that the mid-­nineteenth century saw the rise of refined, feminized male heroes, designed to suit increasingly middle-­class and female-­dominated audiences, on the American stage.98 The figure most associated with this shift, Edwin Booth, had the ideal physical instrument—­slight build, dark hair, pale face, and melancholy eyes—­to play the French-­style consumptive hero (Fig. 7). He took up the part of Raphael as a young actor during a tour of California in 1855, after a string of failures in other venues and roles. “I wish you could have seen him play that part!” James McCloskey later recalled: There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. [. . .] The girl who took the part of his mother came off the stage with the tears running down her cheeks. ‘I don’t want to play that part again,’ she said. ‘He makes me cry all the time.’ And that was the beginning of Booth’s success. [. . .] We ran ‘The Marble Heart’ for 100 nights.99 By modeling and provoking sensibility, actors like Booth helped to spread the French consumptive repertoire to new shores. At the same time, their focus on inwardness transformed well-­k nown roles from other repertoires. In Booth’s hugely influential performance as Hamlet, wrote William Winter, Shakespeare’s prince was a “gentleman, exquisitely sensitive in temperament and delicate in manner; [. . .] whose nervous organization, strung to the highest pitch, [wa]s tremulous as a lily-­leaf to every breath of feeling and circumstance.”100 He might almost be describing the French héros poitrinaire. In 1856, The Marble Heart had a triumphant run in New York at Laura Keene’s Theatre, with the young actor George Jordan as Raphael. “As the unhappy, infatuated hero,” wrote the critic of the New York Daily Times,

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Figure 7. Daguerreotype portrait of Edwin Booth, c. 1850. Courtesy of Historical Views / Age Fotostock.

he “was all that the authors could have desired. We have not seen, on a New-­York stage, a more truthful delineation of wild, hopeless, degrading, self-­consuming passion.”101 Far from denigrating the French tradition, this critic was keen to affirm the American actor’s ability to achieve its standard. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper asserted that Jordan’s character is most arduous; its demands upon the physique are great and constant, but Mr Jordan does not shirk the responsibility. [. . .] Mr. Jordan by his intense abandn [sic] to the impulse of the situations, literally controls and sways his audience who sympathize with him and are moved by his emotions.102 Just as Raphael risks his health by responding to impulse and passion, so too does Jordan in order to play the part. By committing himself physically and emotionally to his “arduous” role, Jordan is able quite “literally” to force

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his audience to feel what he feels. Through such identifications of an actor’s inward self with that of a character, consumptive poetics infected America. Although male actors played a key role in this process, it was soon associated above all with an actress, Matilda Heron, who became the most successful Camille of mid-­nineteenth-­century America by embracing—­and identifying herself with—­the role’s emotional and physical extremes. As an Irish immigrant to America born into poverty and struggle, Heron could claim shared experience with Camille in a way that the refined Davenport could not. She offered, wrote one critic, “a literal adaptation of the original piece, in place of the altered versions made to suit preconceived ideas of public morality in America,” and played Camille as “a Parisian lorette, with all the failings of her class.”103 The New York Times constructed her as a fearless iconoclast who offered her audience “a picture so real, so uncompromising, so straight-­forward, that it may be safely said that no other actress ever dared so much.”104 After Heron’s death, William Winter described her greatness in the role as a direct expression of her own intense emotional inwardness, for “[i]t afforded the agonized and agonizing situations which alone could serve for the utterance of her tempestuous nature.”105 From her first appearance, where she “had nothing to do at first but enter, superfinely and well dressed, cough and eat a lozenge,” to the final “phthisical scene of measureless desolations and short-­lived ecstasies,” Heron’s was a relentlessly materialist performance.106 Some praised her death scene as a “noble” piece of acting.107 Others were less impressed. “If anybody takes delight in tracing the cruel and insidious advances of a deadly and inexorable malady,” remarked the Ohio Daily Statesman, “they can do it in this play, but who wants to go to see consumption?”108 Heron offered, wrote the New York Times, a kind of pathological demonstration, upon which “the initiated” looked with a diagnostic gaze, just “as the student in a hospital looks upon the rapid and unerring dissections of the anatomist.”109 With such evaluations in mind, Conti identifies Heron’s as a “clinical” portrayal of Dumas’s heroine, reflecting an emergent view of consumption as a public health issue rather than an individual, romanticized disease.110 Arguing that such “medicalizing” approaches to Camille “grew more prominent in the years surrounding tuberculosis’s medical reclassification [as an infectious disease] and the rise of theatrical realism,”111 Conti nevertheless acknowledges that Heron’s clinically frank Camille coexisted with Davenport’s “idealizing” one in the 1850s.

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To clarify why this was so, it may prove helpful to place Heron’s performance within the wider context of Anglo-­American responses to the French repertoire poitrinaire. Heron herself replied to critics of her acting by asserting her familiarity with that repertoire. To a San Francisco interviewer, she remarked, It is said that I expunged the most beautiful parts of Dumas’s play, and introduced my own diseased fancies. This is not so. After having witnessed in America different representations of the character I went to Paris, where, for the first time I saw the true Camille, the reckless, erring, loving, hoping, sacrificing, repentant, purified woman. I saw the moral of the play in its truth—­its terrible reality.112 Heron constructs the frankness with which she represents Dumas’s heroine, not as a marker of something “diseased” in herself, but rather as a sign of her adherence to the modern, “truthful” French school. Critics in her own time perceived her work in the same way. During her time in Paris, one article noted, she “made herself acquainted with the minutiae of stage costumes and business as carried by the French to the greatest degree of perfection.”113 Admiring critics dubbed her “the American Rachel,” praising the “quiet intensity” she shared with French tragedienne.114 Others dismissed such praise as mere puffery,115 with one British critic sneering that Enthusiasm and earnestness are rare qualities, but they do not so readily obtain recognition in old countries as in new. [.  .  .] We should imagine that [Heron] is a self-­taught artist, adopting by preference Continental models, and has not been subjected to the discipline which a course of provincial experience forces on the actress who has to make her way on the British stage.116 Such remarks suggest that the clinical directness of Heron’s acting was viewed in her own time as neither an aberration nor a forerunner of emergent medical models of the disease, but rather as evidence of the American artist’s imitation of—­or infection by—­French symptomatic acting. Notations in an acting copy of Heron’s adaptation of Camille give some sense of the shocking directness of her French-­style performance of consumptive symptoms. In Camille’s death scene, they note that after she says, “Closer, closer, Armand, and listen while I speak,” the actress should “Gurgle, choke, and get husky,” evoking the suffocating buildup of mucus in

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end-­stage tuberculosis.117 The closing passage of the same speech, meanwhile, suggests the rapid-­fire sequence of physical and vocal gestures by which Heron conveyed Camille’s slide into death: (Look around, dazed) O, how strange! All pain is gone. (Run the hands rapidly down the sides—­press the temples, stare at the others, and attempt to rise) Is this life? Now everything appears to change. (Stand up) O, how beautiful! (Gently push his hands away) Do not wake me. I am so sleepy. (Fall, and die)118 Through a choreography of symptomatic gestures—­the fluttering movements of the hands, the effort to rise, the final fall—­Heron pulls the audience into the character’s physical and affective experience, materializing her interiority even at the moment of death. By thus appropriating the French poétique du poitrinaire for the American context, Heron not only used the symptomatic body to portray emotional intensity but also strove directly to infect the audience with the character’s—­ and her own—­inner life. In the New York Times, Grace Greenwood remembered her Camille as a “merciless draft upon your sympathies,” noting that “there was something peculiarly exasperating in her pathos always—­it did not touch, it tore, the heart.”119 Another critic—­apparently without irony—­ paid Heron the ultimate compliment within the context of the consumptive repertoire, writing that “[h]er Camille was rendered with such magical effect that the audience, spell bound by her magnetic will, not only mingled their tears with hers, but joined in the hectic cough of the consumption she represented.”120 If a “current of anguish” had joined Lockroy’s interiority to that of his spectators in Angèle, Heron’s symptomatic acting was understood as linking the very bodies of her audience to that of her suffering character. Thanks in large part to such powerful affective capital, Dumas fils’s drama spread rapidly on American stages. “Under all forms,” remarked the New York Herald in 1856, “the play has been a favorite one—­chiefly because it gives a fine opportunity for effective acting.” The Herald ’s critic concluded wryly that Camille’s emotional wallop trumped moral reservations, for “audiences, however shocking it may seem, do not regard the theatre as ‘the shop for morals,’ and so long as they are excited and amused without positive infraction of the proprieties, they do not pay much attention to the lesson, moral or immoral, that is sought to be conveyed.”121 This

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principle—­and the attendant box office receipts—­helped to ensure that Dumas fils’s drama was played across the nation. In the words of one St. Louis critic, America was in the throes of a “Camille epidemic.”122 After Matilda Heron died in 1877, responses to her passing showed how deeply her Camille had infected the American imagination—­and her own personality. Esther C. Quinn described her death scene as a direct echo of Camille’s, writing that [w]hen from her pallid, trembling lips as she was about to pass to the great beyond issued the pathetic expression: ‘Poor Tillie! You have never done wrong to anyone,’ she fervently embraced her darling daughter, and then exclaimed, ‘Oh! I am so happy.’ And she who had simulated painful death a thousand times expired peacefully[.]123 Through Camille’s last words, Quinn suggests, the dying Heron articulated her own final inner truth. Quinn went on to report that “Mme. Heron’s broadcloth-­draped rosewood casket bore two silver plates, the one bearing an inscription of name and dates of birth and death, the other, the foot-­ plate, simply ‘Camille.’ ”124 In an early example of the lamination of character onto actor that would later characterize American “Method” acting, Heron had become so radically identified with the fictional French courtesan that at the last they appeared inseparable. The poétique du poitrinaire had always striven to materialize the modern subject’s inwardness onstage. Now, it had become a mode through which the actor’s inner reality, as well as the character’s, could be exposed. Heron’s death and funeral emblematize the theatrical and social impact of the French-­style poitrinaire in the pivotal years of the 1850s. Recognizing the contagious power of French symptomatic dramaturgy, British and American critics treated it as a direct threat to the moral and emotional health of English-­speaking nations. As the celebrity of artists such as Charles-­A lbert Fechter, Maria Piccolomini, and Matilda Heron shows, however, such resistance proved futile in the face of the poitrinaire’s affecting ability to evoke—­and provoke—­ emotional inwardness. Having striven to reject the consumptive heroine in the early 1850s, by the end of the decade the English were buying up her image en masse. Henry Peach Robinson’s 1858 “Fading Away” (Fig. 1), with its beautifully ailing central figure, became one of the most discussed English photographs of the era;

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in a demonstration of the two-­way flow of consumptive poetics across the English Channel, it was reproduced in a French journal under the title “La Jeune Poitrinaire.”125 As for Charles-­A lbert Fechter, the prince of French poitrinaires, he eventually died in Pennsylvania, having moved to America in 1870. The French theatrical consumptive was now living—­and dying—­as a citizen of the transatlantic world.

4 The Ills of the Parents Heredit y, Sentiment, and the Stage Consumptive Child, 1852–1900

G

“Heredity is that biological law by which all beings endowed with life tend to repeat themselves in their descendents.” —Théodule Ribot (Heredity, 1875)

When the lady of the camellias made her first foray across the Atlantic in 1853, she already had well-­established competition from another theatrical consumptive. In November of that year, audiences in New York City could choose between seeing Jean Margaret Davenport’s Camille at the Broadway Theatre or George C. Aiken’s hit adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the National Theatre, with many spectators making the latter choice. The success of Aiken’s Uncle Tom was inseparable from the success of six-­year-­old Cor­ delia Howard in the role of the consumptive Eva St. Clare. “We pity any one who can witness unmoved the truthful personation of Eva by that talented child,” wrote a New York correspondent of the abolitionist newspaper the National Era. The writer went on to praise a “new and beautiful tableau” that had been added to the denouement of the drama, “representing Eva in heaven, amid clouds and a halo of glory, welcomed by angelic choirs.”1 Eva’s celestial apotheosis proved so popular that in 1856 Laura Keene reproduced the effect in her production of Camille by interpolating a sequence in which the heroine dreamt of her own ascent to heaven.2 The French and American strands of the consumptive repertoire had quickly intertwined. At first sight, the American consumptive, as personified by Eva, represents a radically different archetype than Marguerite Gautier. A passage — 103 —

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from Stowe’s novel, placed in the mouth of Eva’s father in Aiken’s stage adaptation, declares that the little girl is one of an especial band of angels, whose office it is to sojourn for a season here, and endear to them the wayward human heart, that they might bear it upward with them in their homeward flight. When you see that deep, spiritual light in the eye, when the little soul reveals itself in words sweeter and wiser than the ordinary words of children, hope not to retain that child; for the seal of heaven is on it, and the light of immortality looks out from its eyes!3 Here, Eva’s illness appears as a symptom not of the French theatrical consumptive’s intense and often conflicted interiority, but of a purity so absolute as to be terminal. An alternative perspective emerges, however, when one places her alongside another consumptive child, William Carlyle, who played a crucial role in the many theatrical adaptations of Ellen Wood’s novel East Lynne (1861). Like Eva, “Little Willie” is too good for the sinful world of his parents. In the version of East Lynne published in America by the Dramatic Publishing Company, his mother, Lady Isabel, declares that her child will be “better off” in death, for it “would be well for all of us if we could go [to heaven] as pure as he is.”4 An adulterous and divorced wife, she herself is anything but pure in society’s eyes. Although Willie is innocent of both sin and emotional interiority, his consumption is a direct legacy from Lady Isabel, whose own consumptive tendencies are inseparable from her tormented inwardness. As the daughter of morally and physically enfeebled southern slave owners, Eva St. Clare comes from similarly dubious stock. In the context of medical theory that stressed consumption’s hereditary roots, her disease can be understood as emblematizing the destructive nature of her parents’ self-­indulgence. Rather than materializing her own complexity, her symptoms—­like Willie Carlyle’s—­render visible the emotional and socio-­political conflicts of nineteenth-­century transatlantic society. On the nineteenth-­century stage, this effect was both amplified and complicated by the sentimental theatre’s investments in emotional excess and familial transmission, which rendered its critiques of hereditary emotional intemperance equivocal at best. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin and East Lynne, the bodies of beautiful, sick, and very white children are both the inheritors and the carriers of society’s diseases—­and if they are emblems of redemption, they cannot be agents of cure.



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The Saint and the Taint An understanding of heredity as a key means by which consumption—­or a predisposition to the disease—­was transmitted was well-­established in transatlantic medicine by the 1850s and 1860s, when Uncle Tom’s Cabin and East Lynne were created. An 1844 article in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal asserted that the “reality of hereditary influence on the production of phthisis is so universally admitted, that it would seem a sort of scientific heresy to doubt it.”5 Writing a few years later, the phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler concurred that “to detail cases in proof that the descendants of consumptive parents are more liable to be carried to premature graves by its ravages than others, is almost a work of supererogation.”6 Many doctors were equally definite in gendering the primary pathway of hereditary transmission. A. P. Dutcher declared, “I have known several families where the disease was confined to the female portion—­the mother and daughter perishing with the disease, while the father and sons are entirely exempt.”7 In his 1861 Practical Treatise on Phthisis Pulmonalis, L. M. Lawson agreed with these conclusions, offering statistics to confirm that about “one-­half ” of the consumptive cases in his own practice could be ascribed to “hereditary predisposition,” and that these showed a “very great preponderance in favour of transmission by the mother.”8 The established belief that environmental and emotional factors were likely to cause or exacerbate consumption led many medical writers of the 1850s and 1860s to see parents who passed on their phthisic tendencies to their children as actively culpable. In his 1852 self-­help treatise The Consumptive’s Guide to Health, the New York physician J. Hamilton Potter declared that “if several generations of one family have pursued that course of living which would engender the consumptive constitution, and while in this condition have become parents, the offspring of such succession [. . .] would be liable to the same disease which destroyed their ancestors.”9 James Copland identified several forms of physical and emotional intemperance as sources of hereditary predisposition to phthisis, including “excessive sexual indulgence, and more especially masturbation”; “premature sexual congress, in respect of either or both parents”; “anxiety of mind, and all the distressing and perturbing emotions”; and over-­indulgence in tobacco, food, and alcohol.10 Other physicians constructed alcoholism not only as a source of hereditary corruption, but even of active contagion. “What sort of a man, think you, would rum, brandy, beer, and tobacco-­juice make?”

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asked Potter in The Consumptive’s Guide: “Bah! open the windows when the specimen enters, lest he spread a pestilence around him.”11 In such texts, the tendency toward consumption appears as a “hereditary taint”12 that blights the lives of children, condemning them to sickly lives and early deaths. Although doctors, such as Copland, recognized that poverty could play a part in this process by trapping families in “crowded and ill-­ventilated houses and apartments,”13 they often placed equal or greater emphasis on the role played by wealth and ease in fostering hereditary disease. Potter went so far as to argue that consumption was never hereditary “among the poor and hard-­working, where both male and female labor together in the open air.” He suggested that families, having cause to fear such taint, have but to reverse the table, retrace their steps, and get back to a more primitive, simple, and laborious way of living; entirely avoiding luxury, and that fearful despondency—­so much indulged in—­which the anticipation of getting consumption is so liable to cause.14 Even as he recognized the affective transmission of consumption via “despondency,” Potter chalked this process up to the “indulgence” of those who embraced “luxury” in place of a simple, working lifestyle. The Virginia– born Samuel Cartwright stressed the same point in an 1857 essay in which he asserted that “an unprofitable life of indolence and ease, with the mind caged from the real world, and fed on vain abstractions mistaken for true science, and novel reading for literature, will as certainly cause consumption and give it the character of an epidemic.”15 Such statements implicitly constructed consumption as a disease of the white upper and middle classes,16 unlikely to touch those subjected to hard manual labor—­such as the enslaved African Americans who made up 13.8 percent of the population recorded in the United States Census of 1850.17 Cartwright made this point explicit in an essay on “the diseases and physical peculiarities of the Negro race,” in which he denied that people of African descent could suffer from pulmonary consumption at all. This essay described a “Negro consumption” that Cartwright stressed “has no form or resemblance of the phthisis of the white race, except in the emaciation.”18 Cartwright maintained that “the seat of negro consumption is not in the lungs, stomach, liver, or any other organ in the body, but in the mind, and its cause is generally mismanagement or bad government on the part of



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the master, and superstition on the part of the negro.”19 Another southern doctor, J.  R. Hicks, responded to Cartwright’s article by protesting that “African consumption” was “strictly hereditary” and was not caused by mental distress or mistreatment.20 Nevertheless, he agreed with Cartwright that “African consumption” rarely affected the lungs, and that patients from the African diaspora were unlikely to suffer from consumptions induced by despondency, since “melancholia is a far greater characteristic of the white race” while the “mirthful glee and joyous spirits of the negro are proverbial.”21 Such racist conclusions bore little relationship to the actual vulnerability of enslaved African Americans to tubercular infection, which was likely exacerbated by factors such as lowered immunity, malnourishment, or pre-­existing illness.22 Medical theory that constructed consumption as primarily an illness of leisured white people similarly ignored the high incidence of the disease that French statisticians had noted amongst the poor and working classes. Instead, theories of consumption’s heredity often reflected a proto-­eugenicist commitment to managing the behaviors of affluent white individuals and populations. By linking the predisposition to consumption to physical and emotional fitness, morality, race, and wealth, they strove to warn the ruling classes of the Anglo-­American world of the threats posed to them by indolence and self-­indulgence. In sentimental terms, they coded non-­white and/or working-­class subjects as uninteresting Others who lacked the interiority requisite for consumptive suffering. Even as they critiqued the modern status quo, they worked to keep that status quo in place. In such a context, the symptoms of consumption—­especially as evinced in white children—­became the material signifiers not only of individual interiority, but also of the complex inheritances of an entire race. This body of medical theory interacts with other key influences on the representation of Evangeline St. Clare in both Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and George L. Aiken’s relatively direct theatrical adaptation of it. Molly Farrell has linked Little Eva’s story to a long line of texts that became mainstays of nineteenth-­century English and North American Sunday schools, in which a child “exhibits special qualities and ministers to his or her peers and elders” before he or she “fortells his or her own death and accepts it with grace.”23 For Stowe, writing from within this tradition, Farrell argues, “a child’s death always carries with it the capacity for the education and conversion of others.”24 Unsurprisingly,

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then, the outward signs of Eva’s physical fragility are often portrayed in Stowe’s novel as material indices of her transcendent spiritual goodness. “Her form,” writes Stowe, “was the perfection of childish beauty, without its usual chubbiness and squareness of outline. There was about it an undulating and aerial grace, such as one might dream of for some mythic and allegorical being.”25 Purchased by Eva’s father, Tom “love[s] her as something frail and earthly, yet almost worship[s] her as something heavenly and divine.”26 “It’s jest no use tryin’ to keep Miss Eva here,” he declares; “[s]he’s got the Lord’s mark in her forehead.”27 Ailing as it is, Eva’s physical being is perfectly designed for its mission of converting others to God. Eva herself calls upon the evangelizing power of her illness in order to achieve her moral aims. Like so many sentimental consumptives, she abjures spes phthisica: “I am not any better—­I know it perfectly well,” she tells her father, “and I am going before long.”28 She looks forward to death, linking her unhappiness on earth—­and, by extension, the “despondency” that doctors believed could exacerbate consumption—­to the cruelties of slavery. “I had rather be in heaven,” she declares; “There are a great many things here that make me sad, that seem dreadful to me.”29 When her father begs her to tell him what will make her happy, she immediately responds by asking, “Papa, isn’t there any way to have all slaves made free?” adding, “When I am dead, papa, then you will think of me, and do it for my sake.”30 As if aware of her affective capital as a dying consumptive within sentimental imaginative economies, Eva believes that her passing will transform her father’s moral feelings. Aiken’s adaptation heightens this sentimental effect. When Eva pleads with her father for Tom’s freedom, Aiken emphasizes her dramatic pause before the mention of her own demise: “And promise me, dear father, that Tom shall have his freedom as soon as—­[Hesitating.]—­I am gone!”31 A year into the run of Aiken’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, George C. Howard added a song at this point in which Eva expands upon her request: When your daughter’s taken away And your heart is fill’d with care; When with Angels I shall pray For your peace and comfort here. Shall poor Uncle Tom be free? Papa promise this to me.32



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Both the rhetorical music of the “hesitation” Aiken writes into Eva’s lines and the literal music of Howard’s tune strive to foreground the pathos of her resignation and to infect the audience with her fervent desire to see Tom freed. Eva’s subsequent death scene, Tracy C. Davis and Stefka Mihaylova argue, works similarly to create a sentimental “community of spectators whose differences of race and rank dissolve in their shared sympathy” for her.33 As Uncle Tom’s Cabin unfolds, however, the workings of the sentimental community around Eva reveal themselves as problematic. Sympathy for Eva’s touching illness and death preoccupies those around her far more than do her abolitionist goals. To Eva’s impassioned plea for Tom’s freedom, St. Clare responds “soothingly”: “There, there, darling, [.  .  .] don’t distress yourself, don’t talk of dying, and I will do anything you wish.”34 His aim seems more to manage Eva’s emotions and prevent her (and his own) suffering than seriously to consider her proposal. This impression is confirmed after Eva’s death, when St. Clare sinks into religious doubt, asking Tom, “Was all that beautiful love and faith only one of the ever-­shifting phases of human feeling, having nothing real to rest on, passing away with the little breath? And is there no more Eva,—­no heaven,—­no Christ,—­ nothing?”35 Aiken’s adaptation replicates this lament directly, underlining it with another song added during the run of the show, in which St. Clare mourns that Childless, desolate this heart Naught on earth is left to cherish All is lost since we must part, Every hope and joy will perish.36 Only after considerable delay does St. Clare recall that “dear little Eva” had “set her little simple soul on a good work for me,” declaring an intention to do “my duty [. . .] to the poor and lowly, as fast as I find it out.”37 On this very day, he is stabbed accidentally in a tavern brawl and dies before he can free his slaves. Even in death, he is more interested in his feelings for Eva than in her mission. In Aiken’s adaptation, he dies with her name on his lips: “at last! at last! Eva, I come!”38 As he goes to meet his daughter in heaven, his slaves are sold to new and cruel masters. Why does Eva’s abolitionist mission fail? Within the narrative of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the answer clearly lies in the failings of her parents, which on

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the surface appear as the diametric opposites of their daughter’s virtues. St. Clare procrastinates fulfilling Eva’s wishes while he wallows in grief for her. Eva’s mother, Marie, is even more culpable. Selfishly wrapped up in her own concerns after her husband’s death, she dismisses his desire to free his slaves. When St. Clare’s cousin Ophelia tries to remonstrate with her by recalling that Tom’s freedom was “one of the promises that [St. Clare] made to dear little Eva on her death-­bed,”39 Marie responds with an immediate performance of her own ill-­health: “Marie sobbed, and gasped for breath, and called Mammy to open the window.”40 If Eva’s consumption is linked to her saintly spirit of self-­sacrifice, Marie’s hypochondria seems a mere symptom of self-­indulgence. Significantly, however, Marie herself perceives the matter quite differently, constructing her daughter’s illness as an inherited shadow of her own. Before Eva’s death, she responds to Ophelia’s anxieties about the child’s cough by exclaiming, “Cough! you don’t need to tell me about a cough. I’ve always been subject to a cough, all my days. When I was of Eva’s age, they thought I was in a consumption.”41 In Aiken’s stage adaptation of the novel, Marie links Eva’s physical frailty even more directly to her own, bidding her daughter, “Do not exert yourself too much!” just before she responds to her husband’s suggestion of a promenade in the garden by sighing, “I wonder how you can ask such a question, when you know how fragile I am. I shall retire to my chamber, and repose till dinner time.”42 Such lines, Conti notes, clearly tie Eva’s illness to her mother’s, linking both to the leisured, hyper-­refined lifestyle of the southern plantation owner’s family.43 Stowe associates toxicity, as well as refinement, with this legacy. The conviction of her own fragility that causes Marie to pass her days lying indolently upon a sofa and going into hysterics whenever she is crossed also ensures that she will pass the resulting physical weakness on to her child. Moreover, these constitutional and moral frailties are represented as inseparable from Marie’s social position as an unquestioning daughter of the slave-­owning South. She constructs her slaves themselves as a disease, calling them “the plague of my life” and asserting that “more of my ill health is caused by them than by any one thing.”44 Her fit of quasi-­ consumptive symptoms when confronted with her late husband’s desire to free his slaves confirms this continuity between sickness, self-­absorption, and slave-­owning. Augustine St. Clare, too, engages in habits that threaten the ruin of his



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morals and his health. At an early point in Stowe’s novel, he is “invited out to a convivial party of choice spirits” and is “helped home, between one and two o’clock at night, in a condition when the physical had decidedly attained the upper hand of the intellectual.”45 In response, Uncle Tom laments that “mas’r isn’t good to himself,” and warns St. Clare, “I’m ’fraid it will be loss of all—­all—­body and soul. The good Book says, ‘it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder!’ my dear Mas’r!”46 In Aiken’s adaptation, St. Clare responds with an explicit admission of intemperance: “Well, to tell the truth, I was slightly elevated—­a little more champagne on board than I could comfortably carry.”47 Aiken follows St. Clare’s and Tom’s discussion of the perils of drink almost immediately with a conversation between St. Clare and Ophelia that introduces Eva’s consumptive symptoms: OPHELIA: Why, the dew is falling, she mustn’t be out there. She is unwell, I know. ST. CLARE: Don’t be croaking, cousin—­I hate it. OPHELIA: But she has that cough. ST. CLARE: Oh, nonsense, of that cough—­it is not anything.48 In this exchange, as in the one with Tom that precedes it, St. Clare dismisses as trivial the symptoms of an affliction that his interlocutor correctly identifies as a dire threat to his family’s well-­being. When read in relation to physicians’ warnings about intemperance as a potential cause of hereditary consumptions, this parallel seems particularly marked. By downplaying both Tom’s concerns and Ophelia’s, St. Clare compounds the sins of negligence and self-­indulgence that began his family’s destruction in the first place. Just as the selfishness and idleness that shape Marie’s fatal legacy to Eva are linked to her position as a slave owner, so too are St. Clare’s flights from reality and responsibility. He procrastinates freeing his slaves until it is too late, just as he procrastinates correcting his own drinking until it is too late to save either himself or his daughter. He is fatally wounded in an “affray” between two gentlemen “who were both partially intoxicated,”49 confirming the justice of Tom’s warnings against drink.50 In Aiken’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, St. Clare dies in Tom’s arms, confessing that he was “very wrong” to forget to sign Tom’s freedom papers. “I may be the cause of much suffering to you hereafter,” he moans; “Marie, my wife—­she—­oh!—­”51 Marie’s and St. Clare’s moral and physical failings have already contributed to their

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daughter’s death. Now, as St. Clare’s dying words stress, they will also occasion “much suffering” for their slaves. Knit deeply into the medico-­moral framework of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, these implicit ties between slave ownership and hereditary disease help to explain the failure of Eva’s abolitionist project. The very illness she strives to use, in self-­consciously sentimental style, to change her parents’ behavior is the product of her parents’ sins. As she lies pale and dying in her luxurious bed (Fig. 8)—­an image reproduced across nineteenth-­century visual culture in countless book illustrations, song sheets, and theatrical posters52—­ the saintly child emblematizes an innocence that adult corruption cannot besmirch.53 At the same time, her pallid little body is also tainted by that corruption. An emblem of white supremacist fetishization of a socially and spiritually refined white upper-­class society, she is also the personification of the emotional and physical self-­indulgence that is rotting white society from within. By striving to use her illness to reform her parents’ behavior, Eva is trying—­in Audre Lorde’s indelible phrase—­to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.54 Unsurprisingly, her efforts prove futile.

Upstaging Uncle Tom Eva’s genealogies only became more complex as Uncle Tom’s Cabin gained the status of a “runaway hit in the United States and Great Britain” and “gained circulation beyond the British–American vector, achieving near global exposure.”55 This process, argues Robin Bernstein, rendered Uncle Tom’s Cabin a vast repertoire unto itself: “relational,”56 in constant flux, and dependent (in Davis’s terms) upon acts of “recombination.”57 As the Uncle Tom repertoire evolved, each new Eva inherited tropes not only from Stowe’s novel, but also from other cultural repertoires. These repertoires, as much as Stowe’s novel, were the parents of the theatrical Eva. Like Eva’s parents in Stowe’s novel, they shaped a character whose illness and death initially appeared to further, but finally sidelined, her abolitionist vision. American theatrical adaptations of Uncle Tom began to emerge before Stowe had finished publishing her novel, but many of these early “Tom shows”—­like that of C.W. “Charley” Taylor in 1852—­eliminated Eva’s role. Perhaps thanks to the established British discomfort with consumptive characters, this early avoidance of Eva appears to have been decidedly the norm in Britain.58 As befitted the homeland of the theatrical poitrinaire,

Figure 8. “I am Going There, or, The Death of Little Eva,” from a song sheet, 1852. Courtesy of Historic New England.

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France had from the first a closer relationship to Stowe’s “little Evangelist”; in Les Filles de Marbre, a character describes seeing Raphael and Marco watching “some Uncle Tom—­I’m not sure which” at a Parisian theatre.59 In fact, Emily Sahakian notes, “three competing melodramas” appeared on the Parisian stage in 1853, the year of Les Filles’ premiere.60 Of these, only the first, Edmond Auguste Texier and Léon de Wailly’s Oncle Tom, which premiered at the Théâtre du Gaîté in January 1853, featured a prominent character based upon Eva, Évangeline. An adolescent in the style of French ingénues poitrinaires like Valentine, Évangeline is aware of her impending death but actively strives to hide her illness from her father even as she utters such classic poitrinaire lines as “ j’étouffe” (I am suffocating).61 Her physical symptoms respond directly to her affective state; already breathless from her illness, she faints after seeing an elderly slave beaten.62 In the end, however, she is saved by the faith of Tom, who convinces her atheist father to believe in God and pray. Filled with joy at his daughter’s immediate and miraculous recovery, St. Clare frees his slaves.63 On the surface, this Eva à la française succeeds where her American counterpart had failed, both surviving her illness and achieving her abolitionist goals. Perhaps because she survived where so many French theatrical consumptives—­and Stowe’s child-­saint—­had offered their spectators spectacularly sentimental deathbed scenes, however, Évangeline does not appear to have been particularly popular with French audiences. The other two adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to appear on the French stage in 1853—­Philippe Dumanoir and Adolphe Denner’s La Case de l’Oncle Tom (Théâtre de l’Ambigu-­Comique) and Arthur de Beauplan’s Élisa, ou un Chapitre de l’Oncle Tom—downplayed or eliminated Eva’s role. Dumanoir and Denner’s drama, in particular, was far more popular than Texier and de Wailly’s adaptation, running for more than twice as many performances.64 Little Eva’s theatrical fortunes finally blossomed in America, thanks to an intersection with another strand of the consumptive repertoire. Henry Pitt Phelps recounts how, just as Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was gaining popularity in 1852, the illness of a young actor in George  C. Howard’s company forced him to place his four-­year-­old daughter, Cordelia, on stage. The actress Caroline Fox Howard, the child’s mother, helped to coach Cordelia in the small role of the consumptive “Little Dick” in an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist. The result was unexpectedly electrifying:



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During the day, in her mother’s lap, little Cordelia was taught the speeches of Little Dick. Night came; the fat baby face was skillfully painted to represent consumption, and duly clad in her brother’s suit, and with a little spade in her hand, Cordelia Howard made her first appearance on any stage. [. . .] “I’ll come back and see you some day, Dick,” said Mrs. Howard, as Oliver. “It yont be no use, Olly, dear,” sobbed the little actress. “When oo tum back, I yont be digging ’ittle graves, I’ll be all dead an’ in a ’ittle grave by myself.” This in a voice, trembling with feigned emotion, yet clear as a bell, and distinctly heard by every person in the building. Such a shower of tears as swept over that theatre! [. . .] Cordelia’s hit and her parent’s fortunes were made from that very night.65 Inspired by his daughter’s success in the role of the Dickensian consumptive child, Phelps reports, Howard was determined that “such infantile emotional talent as this, must not be wasted.” Remembering the success of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the “thousands of eyes” that had already been “moistened by Eva’s saint-­like sayings,” he concluded that Eva was “the very part for Cordelia!”66 Cordelia Howard clearly shared the ability to provoke contagious emotional reactions for which her older American contemporaries, Edwin Booth and Matilda Heron, became renowned in the same era. A popular image of Howard as Eva in Aiken’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin shows her youthful mastery of the visual language of consumptive pathos (Fig. 9). Like Valentine before her, she appears dressed in angelic white and leaning upon a table; a bible rests beside her, as if to accentuate the relationship between her physical frailty and her spiritual strength. The print dubs her “the child of nature,”67 stressing her mastery of the apparently simple, spontaneous acting so valued by the sentimental tradition. One spectator of the time recalled watching gentlemen mop their eyes with the white pocket handkerchiefs that had become synonymous with the cultures of both sentimentality and consumption while “little Cordelia Howard was suffering perhaps her hundredth martyrdom on the boards of the New York National Theatre.”68 In some ways, Tom’s own prominence in the drama named for him benefitted from Howard’s popularity. Bernstein and Morgan have shown

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Figure 9. Little Cordelia Howard in the character of Eva, 1852. Courtesy of the British Museum.

how inseparable the appeal of Aiken’s adaptation was from the spectacle—­ inspired by Hammatt Billings’s illustrations for Stowe’s novel—­of Howard’s tiny, innocent, white Eva cuddling with a blacked-­up adult male white actor as Tom.69 Yet the final movement of the play, in which Tom suffers death at the hands of the cruel slaveowner Legree, seems to have been greeted with considerably less enthusiasm. When the New York correspondent of The National Era praised the “new and beautiful tableau” of



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Eva’s heavenly apotheosis that was added into the Aiken / Howard Uncle Tom’s Cabin during its first year, he underlined the fact that it had “been introduced after the death of Uncle Tom,” which had previously ended the show. He praised the new denouement as “very effective, not only as a scenic display, but also as preventing the abrupt and disorderly departure of a portion of the audience amid the death-­scene, which characterized the finale heretofore.”70 Only the “soul-­moving” Cordelia Howard, this report suggests, could so master her audiences with her impersonation of suffering, death, and beatitude as to keep them from stampeding crassly out of the theatre. Taken alone, Uncle Tom’s “death-­scene” clearly proved unequal to the task. In this revised version of Aiken’s play, the climactic image of Eva welcoming Tom into glory literally upstaged Tom’s own passing. In the wake of Howard’s tremendous success, Eva’s fragile, beatific presence became a central feature not only of stage Tom shows but of many paratheatrical events in transatlantic popular culture. In England, for example, an evangelical writer named James Tipton created Eva, a “musically illustrated service compiled and arranged from Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”71 Intended for performance in Sunday schools, this service featured readings of the Eva-­centric portions of Stowe’s novel alongside the choral performance of a number of popular hymns. Eva’s death formed as climactic a scene in this Sunday school adaptation as it had in Aiken’s theatrical one, with Tipton specifying that the three hymns accompanying it “should be sung by the choir sitting, as the sustained interest of the audience will be checked if there is the slightest disturbance at these points.”72 One of the hymns, “We Watched Her Breathing,” interspersed such sentimental images of the consumptive deathbed as “We watch’d her breathing thro’ the night, / Her breathing soft and low, / As in her breast the wave of life / Kept heaving to and fro” with the chorus, “We watch’d till Jesus came, / And took our lov’d one home.” 73 Wielding interest as a tool of evangelization, this performance places Eva’s saintly, consumptive, very white little body at the apex of the audience’s consciousness, pushing the Black, enslaved body of the novel’s eponymous hero firmly into the background. Where Aiken’s adaptation had upstaged Tom’s violent death by following it with Eva’s heavenly apotheosis, Tipton’s Sunday school performance erased Tom’s agony altogether. Just as so-­called “Negro consumptions” are dismissed in nineteenth-­ century American medical literature as separate from and lesser than

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hereditary white consumptions, so too Uncle Tom’s suffering is marginalized by these representations, which depict the affecting consumptive death as the purview of the white child. Its sentimental power, clearly intended to engage the audience’s sympathies in Eva’s vision of a world without slavery, ends by sidelining that project because all interest is siphoned into the figure of Eva herself. If her illness and death suggest the decline of the white southern ruling class, her apotheosis visibly asserts the superiority of the white race. In performance as on the page, Eva’s ailing body undermines her own stated mission, exalting the mistress at the expense of the enslaved man.

“To Enlist Sympathy for the Erring” In comparison with the controversial Dame aux Camélias and the “internally contentious” Uncle Tom’s Cabin,74 East Lynne, the third great behemoth of the nineteenth-­century transatlantic consumptive repertoire, seems to offer an unequivocally moralistic use of both phthisis’s affective capital and its supposedly hereditary transmission. “Like ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ ‘East Lynne’ is always a safe dramatic card to play at any time,” averred the Bristol Western Daily Press in 1895, explicitly linking the huge number of theatrical adaptations that accrued around Ellen Wood’s novel to the similarly vast and successful Uncle Tom repertoire. East Lynne, added the Press’s critic, “makes a very good play for those who like pieces of the emotional drama type.”75 In Britain and North America, the term “emotional drama” was increasingly used in the latter part of the nineteenth century to describe sentimental plays that both showcased and provoked intense affect.76 Like Camille and Uncle Tom’s Cabin before it, East Lynne drew upon the affective capital of the consumptive repertoire to achieve this goal. In the first chapter of Wood’s novel, the impecunious Earl of Mount Severn tells the upstanding middle-­class lawyer Archibald Carlyle about his elopement with a general’s daughter. After her grief-­stricken father died of a heart attack, he recounts, she blamed herself for her father’s death; and I believe it led to her own. She was ill for years; the doctors called it consumption; but it was more like a wasting insensibly away, and consumption had never been in her family.77



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The Earl’s daughter, Lady Isabel Vane, marries Archibald Carlyle and bears him two children. Physically frail and emotionally intense like her mother, she becomes obsessed by the conviction that her husband is in love with another woman, Barbara Hare. Her Iago–like suitor, Sir Francis Levison, convinces her to take revenge upon Carlyle by eloping with him. Carlyle divorces her and then, convinced that she has died in a railway accident, marries Barbara. In a review, the London Illustrated Times described how Lady Isabel, hearing that her eldest child is dying of consumption, assumes the name of Mdme. Vine, and, having disguised her person and voice, succeeds in obtaining the situation of governess in the family of her husband, and thus obtains the charge of her own children. [. . .] At length, unable to bear the death-­scene of her darling child, she tears off her disguise and declares herself the guilty but repentant wife of the proprietor of East Lynne. Her feeble frame sinking under the fearful struggles of her position at length gives way altogether, and she dies in her injured husband’s arms at the moment of his forgiveness.78 The consumptive illness of William Carlyle plays a pivotal role in East Lynne’s plot, not only drawing the disguised Lady Isabel back to her husband and children, but eventually adding the final straw to the load of grief that leads to her own death. As much as the emotional connotations of consumption, the hereditary transmission of the disease haunts East Lynne. When the family doctor diagnoses William with the fatal illness, declaring that “the seeds of consumption must have been inherent in him,” he reminds Carlyle that the “child’s grandmother died of consumption—­the Countess of Mount Severn.”79 His insistence on the disease’s hereditary transmission is echoed by Lady Isabel herself when, still disguised as Mme. Vine, she is taken ill after her son’s death. As yet unaware of her true identity, Carlyle fears that she may be suffering from a rare case of contagious consumption: “You cannot—­you never can have caught William’s complaint in your close attendance on him?” he exclaimed, speaking in the impulse of the moment, as the idea flashed across him. “I have heard of such things.” “Caught it from him?” she rejoined, carried away also by impulse. “It is more likely that he—­”

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She stopped herself just in time. “Inherited it from me,” had been the destined conclusion.80 Lady Isabel treats hereditary transmission as so self-­evident that her instinctive resort to it almost blows her cover. Moreover, she lays the responsibility for the innocent child’s deadly inheritance squarely upon herself and her aristocratic family. The staunchly bourgeois Carlyles remain free of taint, and the blame for the child’s illness falls squarely upon the mother. At this point, affective and hereditary etiologies of consumption intersect in East Lynne. The Countess of Mount Severn’s consumption stems from her guilt and grief after her rash elopement brings about her father’s death; Lady Isabel’s health declines due to similar emotions after her adultery with Sir Francis Levison destroys her reputation, her family, and her life. In a departure from the standard tropology of the consumptive repertoire, neither consumptive illness nor the emotional intensity it bespeaks redounds to the women’s credit. Lady Isabel and her mother are consumed not by noble love, but by uncontrollable passion that leads them inexorably into error. In Lady Isabel’s case, the punishment for her sin fits the crime. It is meted out through the death of her son, whose young life is blighted by the hereditary disease that her emotional intemperance has helped to confirm. As he lies on his deathbed, Lady Isabel—­still disguised as Mme. Vine—­ tells him that his mother’s “repentance, her sorrow, was greater than she could bear, and [.  .  .] her heart broke in it, yearning after you and your father.”81 In his dying moments, William repeats this assertion to his father: “Papa, did you know that mamma’s heart broke?” “William, I think it likely that your mamma’s heart did break ere death came. But let us talk of you; not of her. Are you in pain?” “I can’t breathe; I can’t swallow.”82 Although Carlyle tries to draw an absolute distinction between William and his mother, the juxtaposition of Lady Isabel’s heartbreak with William’s mortal agony underlines the close ties between their fates. Even as she watches him suffer a death for which she believes herself to be guilty, Lady Isabel cannot acknowledge her true role in his life. Through the process of theatrical adaptation, this terrible form of poetic justice gave birth



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to the line now most indelibly associated with East Lynne (though it never occurs in Wood’s novel): Lady Isabel’s anguished cry over her son’s corpse, “Dead! And never called me mother!”83 As if in direct response to British critiques of the French poitrinaire repertoire that had caused such controversy in the 1850s, East Lynne deployed consumption to support a set of firm moral statements. Unlike La Dame aux Camélias and La Traviata, it condemned women’s emotionalism, not sanctifying it with consumptive martyrdom but punishing it with intergenerational consumptive pain. Unlike The Marble Heart, it celebrated the manly and healthy attitude of its hero, Archibald Carlyle, who “had his emotions under his own control.”84 When the disgraced Lady Isabel holds her dying son in her arms, she does so in the disguise of a French governess, and her story plays out as a cautionary tale of the risks for a respectable Englishwoman of taking on the role of the French héroïne poitrinaire. Deep sensibility and an intense inner life do not save children in East Lynne, as they did in Angèle when Henri Muller’s love rescued the heroine’s illegitimate son. Instead, they rot children from within. In the performance repertoire inspired by East Lynne, however, matters were rather more ambiguous. Between 1863 and 1899, James Eli Adams estimates, at least 20 theatrical adaptations of East Lynne appeared in England alone.85 Though few survive in print, many are preserved amongst the Lord Chamberlain’s papers in the British Library. Some of these theatrical versions of East Lynne make the causal relationship between William Carlyle’s suffering and his mother’s sin even more explicit than it is in Wood’s novel. In a version licensed in 1893 for performance at the Royal Theatre, Woolwich, for example, Barbara Hare remarks baldly that William “has inherited his mother’s complaint, consumption,” immediately underlining the relationship between the “complaint” and the mother’s sins by adding, “Poor erring Lady Isabel.”86 Nevertheless, many of these adaptations invite the audience’s sympathy for—­and even identification with—­the “erring” heroine by interpolating soliloquies in which she pours out the anguish that Wood’s novel describes in third-­person narrative. Alfred Kempe’s Lady Isabel, licenced in 1875, for example, features a scene in which William falls asleep in “Mme Vine’s” arms, leaving her to give vent to her feelings: “My precious child again in his mother’s arms—­the outcast mother that he must never know!—­

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Who for him—­for all—­is in the grave!”87 Even more explicitly, an adaptation published in Chicago in 1894 allows Lady Isabel, alone on stage and looking “very pale and very ill,” directly to address the women in the audience: Alas! what is to be the end of my sufferings? How much longer can I bear this torture of mind, this never-­dying anguish of soul? From what a dream have I awakened! O lady, wife, mother! Whatever trials may be the lot of your married life, though they may magnify themselves to your crushed spirit as beyond the nature, the endurance of woman to bear, yet resolve to bear them.88 Though this speech has been justly read as a “virtual manifesto for wifely subservience,”89 it also tacitly assumes that female spectators will identify with Lady Isabel’s “trials.” As the critic of the Shields Daily News observed in 1888, such scenes work “to enlist sympathy for the erring, and [. . .] convey the feeling that the misguided one has been more sinned against than sinning.”90 Down to the term “the misguided one”—­in Italian, La Traviata—­ such phrases echo those applied to that other great consumptive erring woman, La Dame aux Camélias. In the theatre, it seems, Lady Isabel’s effect was not so different from that of the scandalous French poitrinaire. Just as Marguerite Gautier  / Camille had been in France and North America, the role of Lady Isabel  / Mme. Vine was rapidly accepted in England as the ideal showcase for an “emotional” actress, and those who triumphed in the role were hailed as conquerors of their audience’s feelings. Of Avonica Jones, one of the earliest Lady Isabels, the London Sun’s critic wrote that “in the last act she held the tears of her audience entirely at command.”91 Of Jane Vezin, for whom Kempe wrote Lady Isabel, The Era declared similarly that the “command which Mrs. Vezin exercised over the feelings of the audience [. . .] was best illustrated by the fact that no eye was dry.”92 Margaret Soulby, a frequent Lady Isabel in the Midlands and Northern England in the 1880s, was commended for “emotional powers,” which were “such as to affect the feelings of the vast majority of her audience[,] those of the gentler sex making free use of their pocket handkerchiefs.”93 As if to stress the affective capital of that quintessential consumptive prop, an 1866 issue of the Illustrated Times offered an engraving of the dying Lady Isabel reaching out to Carlyle with one hand while clutching her handkerchief in the other (Fig. 10). Placing this image directly beneath one

Figure 10. The final scene of East Lynne illustrated beneath an image of homeless boys, Illustrated Times, London, 1866. Newspaper image copyright © The British Library Board. All rights reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive, www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk. .

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of supper being given to homeless boys, the paper linked the pathos of the consumptive heroine’s death to the pathos of suffering children. The role of “Little Willy,” often given to girl actors in the theatre, worked similarly to accentuate the affective labor of the leading actress. The critic of the Shields Daily News asserted that “Miss Soulby was touchingly aided in her task by the little girl who took the part of the sick child,”94 while a London critic in the same year praised “ ‘Little Dolly,’ whose simple prattle as Willie Carlyle touched all hearts, and [. . .] helped to moisten many eyes.”95 A child actor’s ability to achieve this feat was seen as vital to the success of any company—­so much so that an 1883 advertisement in The Stage asked explicitly for “an experienced Co. (including clever child) for East Lynne.”96 Many adaptations of East Lynne use the affective capital of the dying child’s symptoms to engage the audience’s sympathy with Lady Isabel’s hidden emotions. Kempe’s version, for example, features the following exchange between the disguised Isabel and her ailing son: (The child coughs) ISABEL: Does that cough trouble you, at night, my pet? WILLY: Sometimes it does, very much.—­But I dont [sic] think they know it. ISABEL: Do you sleep alone, then? WILLY: Yes. ISABEL: Ah. Would you like to sleep in my room—­sleep with me, Willy?—­I would take care of you.— ­Would you like that? WILLY: Yes—­I think I should.—­A long, long time ago—­oh! Ever so long—­when my papa went to London, once, I slept with my mamma for two nights.—­My very own mamma, I mean. ISABEL: (With transport) You remember that!—­Darling!97 This dialogue replaces one in Wood’s East Lynne in which William responds to the question about his cough with a dismissive British schoolboy’s “Not much.”98 Kempe’s Willy, admitting to his suffering but hoping those around him don’t see it, instead follows the lead of the French poitrinaire.99 Where Wood’s William answers Lady Isabel’s query about whether he would like to sleep in her room with a dubious, “I don’t know. Why should I sleep in your room?”,100 Kempe’s Willy embraces Lady Isabel’s offer. His frailty is used not to embody his mother’s culpability, but to affirm her fundamental goodness. The Era’s reviewer praised the “motherly



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love which irresistibly burst forth” from Mrs. Vezin in this scene “as she looked—­but only as a stranger—­upon the little one she dared not call her own.” The curtain descended, the reviewer tells us, on “the sad picture of a dead mother clasping the hand of her dead child.”101 As the East Lynne repertoire grew, it seems to have focused increasingly on such sentimental spectacles. In 1883, a playbill for the new Sadler’s Wells Theatre proclaimed that East Lynne would be performed for the “492nd Consecutive Night,” adding, “N.B., All the principal incidents are strictly adhered to, and tears and laughter alternately hold sway.” An appended synopsis describes the “principle incidents” as follows (in ascending font sizes): ACT I. FLIGHT OF LADY ISABEL

ACT II. THE R AILWAY ACCIDENT

ACT III. DEATH OF WILLIE CARLYLE

ACT IV. DEATH OF LADY ISABEL ! ! ! 102 A similar emphasis on pathos characterizes an 1893 adaptation by Hal Collier, ‘East Lynne’ in Five Scenes, which ends in a walloping climax that conflates Willie’s death scene with Isabel’s. Scarcely has Willie died than Carlyle enters: ISA: I am dying fast and before all I will claim my child for I am his mother still—­Oh my heart, my heart! Sinks over bed. Enter Carlyle Door R. [. . .] CARL: How is your little patient Madame Vine. Pause. He goes to her places hand on shoulder. Madame Vine? Isabel looks up and he recognizes [her] Good heavens Isabel here.103 Having merged East Lynne’s death scenes for maximum sentimental effect, this adaptation ends by citing the Uncle Tom’s Cabin repertoire: ISA: Farewell my once dear husband, until eternity. See the bright light is shining and my little Willie holds out his hands to me. Willie, Willie! Husband, I—­Falls in his arms dead. Curtain open at the back & show picture of Willie with Angel standing over with extended arms[.]104 As Eva’s apotheosis had done for Tom, the vision of Willie enlists the audience’s sympathy for the erring Lady Isabel by welcoming her into glory. But where in Uncle Tom’s Cabin the effect had been to upstage the drama’s

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critique of slavery, in this case it works to upstage any critique of Lady Isabel’s moral failings, assuring the viewer of her salvation. In the case of East Lynne as of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the meanings of the dying child became ever more complex as the performance repertoire grew and engaged with the wider consumptive one. The logic of symptomatic dramaturgy, in which the ailing body materialized the interesting torments of the heart, seems to have trumped the eugenicist moral logic that deprecated Lady Isabel’s emotionalism as physically and socially dangerous. Far from being warned against the aristocratic Lady Isabel’s passion, middle-­ class spectators were infected by it. Throughout East Lynne’s long stage history, their major source of pleasure lay in taking out their handkerchiefs and crying along with her.

Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage Reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin and East Lynne through the medical discourses of their time suggests that the emphasis on heredity so profoundly identified with naturalism in the late nineteenth-­century theatre may be understood as a legacy from, rather than a reaction against, the sentimental stage. Indeed, Eva’s and Willie’s hereditary consumptions arguably work to express not only the complexities of their parents’ identities, but also the deep contradictions of sentimental dramaturgy itself. Because it offered up the ills of modern society as sources of pleasure, sentimental theatre depended upon those ills for the continued success of its business model. Sickness, suffering, abuse of power, social conflict, and sexual betrayal were the sentimental theatre’s bread and butter. To inherit and recombine sentimental repertoires inevitably involved not just the critique of these evils, but also their replication. For the young performers who played Eva and Willie, this process of inheritance and reproduction was often a literal matter of heredity. Many of these actors were the children of theatre artists who, introduced onto the stage when very young, entered the family profession by playing Eva’s or Willie’s death scenes. Dorothy and Lillian Gish, for example, began their theatrical careers at the behest of their actress mother, Mary Gish, and her friend Dolores Lorne; Little Willie Carlyle was four-­year old Dorothy’s first stage role, with “Aunt” Dolores playing alongside her.105 Others, such as Mae West and Mary Pickford, were placed on the stage by non-­theatrical parents who sought to support their impoverished families.



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West appeared as both Eva and Willie; Pickford played Ned, the equivalent figure to Willie, in The Silver King, a popular gender-­flipped response to East Lynne.106 For generations of performers, these frail little figures were gateways to the professional stage. The complexities inherent in such acts of theatrical transmission were embodied by the “original Little Eva,” Cordelia Howard. As Nan Mullenneaux notes, Howard performed her role as Eva in her cousin George L. Aiken’s adaptation, “surrounded by parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles.”107 Her status as “the youngest member of a ‘respectable’ theater family” helped to bolster Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s reputation as an edifying work, which both the Howards and their audiences tied directly to “the image of the middle-­class family as the nation’s moral center.”108 By assuming this role, Howard took up her mother’s mantle. As a girl, Caroline Fox Howard—­ who famously portrayed Topsy in the Aiken Uncle Tom’s Cabin—­had played the variety circuit alongside her brothers in a familial troupe called the “Little Foxes,” which has been credited with rendering theatre respectable in “towns that had hitherto condemned all playacting as damnable.”109 Seen through the prism of this history, Cordelia Howard’s onstage success directly counters the tale of the character she played. Where Little Eva is doomed by her parents’ legacy of sin and self-­indulgence, Little Cordelia is blessed by her family’s legacy of moral probity and industry. Strikingly, however, this narrative fails to square completely with Howard’s own account of her experience as America’s most beloved theatrical daughter. Written in 1928, when the onetime child actress was “in her eightieth year,”110 Cordelia Howard MacDonald’s “Memoirs of the Original Little Eva” convey deep ambivalence about show business. Howard is at pains to assign her family’s involvement in the theatre to her parents’ interest in it. Far from emphasizing that interest’s respectability, she underlines its controversial nature. “My father was the first of his family to adopt the stage, much to their discomfort,” she notes; “I think he must have been born stagestruck,” she adds, depicting his passion for the stage almost as a congenital affliction.111 By contrast, she portrays her mother as a child infected with love of the theatre by contact with actors, recounting how Fanny and Charles Kemble “used to toss my mother back and forth between them like a ball,” while Edwin Forrest “taught her to spout Lady Macbeth’s speech, ‘Out damned spot!’ ”112 Such anecdotes construct Caroline Fox Howard as the plaything of older performers, enchanted onto the stage without much volition of her own.

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Howard represents her own experience as a child star in ambivalent terms, deprecating not only the objectification involved but also the conflation of actor and character so typical of the sentimental theatre. “The stage never had any glamour for me,” she declares; “I did not like the publicity of it; the being stared at, and pointed out in crowds, ‘There goes Little Eva!’ ”113 Asked whether she approves of children on the stage, she responds, I think I should vote ‘no’ on that question. Not that I was ever injured by it, but every child would not have the care and attention that was bestowed on me. For instance, I was never allowed to wait for the allegory of ‘Eva in Heaven’ which comes at the end of the play. I always had a double,—and when the audience thought they were gazing at me, in the midst of canvas clouds, I was safe at home beneath the sheets, sleeping soundly. My parents were always with me; my studies were never neglected; my physical health was cared for; and, altogether, I am sure that my theatrical childhood never did me any harm. But it could not be so in every case, nor in many cases, and so I think children are much better off the stage than on.114 Here, Howard constructs the theatrical life as an inheritance similar to the predisposition to consumption, capable of harming the child’s physical and psychological health. Like Cordelia Howard, the child actors who played roles like Eva and Willie were trained young in the sentimental art of using physical suffering to represent—­and induce—­emotion. What, in the end, distinguished theatre from disease for these children? For Howard, the answer came down to parental morality. She depicts George and Caroline Howard as good parents whose probity, ironically, ensured their daughter’s well-­being by duping their audiences with an emotionally manipulative spectacle. The final image, so much praised by critics, of Cordelia Howard as Eva “in a halo of glory” was actually a piece of trumpery contrived to get Cordelia to bed on time. Had her parents insisted on indulging their audiences’ desires by staging this “beautiful tableau” more truthfully, Howard suggests, it might have damaged Cordelia’s future just as Eva’s parents’ self-­indulgence damages hers. The only thing that keeps the stage from being as dangerous an inheritance as consumption is that the sufferings—­and the glories—­it depicts are fake.

5 Ailing Nations Consumption, the Stage, and the Body Politic, 1857–1900

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“Individuals are sick, communities are sick, nations are sick. [. . .] All must be cured together; but the work must begin with the individual.” —­T. L. Nichols (Esoteric Anthropology, 1853)

While visiting London in 1887, the French actress Sarah Bernhardt posed for a photograph with the English actress Lillie Langtry (Fig. 11). Her statuesque figure showcased by the high fashions of the day, Langtry stares admiringly at “the divine Sarah,” who is swathed in a fur coat. Rimmed with makeup that mimics the dark shadows around the eyes of a consumptive patient, Bernhardt’s eyes gaze into the distance, contemplating mysteries beyond the viewer’s ken. Her elusive glamor can be linked to the French elegance for which she was celebrated by English and American journalists,1 as well as to the “Oriental exoticism” such writers, like their French peers, associated with her Jewish heritage.2 But Bernhardt’s style is also inextricable from her consumptive chic, which many perceived as an outward manifestation of her Frenchness, her Jewishness, and/or her artistic greatness. In this, as in so much else, Bernhardt was emblematic of her age. The second half of the nineteenth century was marked by a burgeoning discourse about “sick” and “healthy” nations that used the prevalence of consumption as an indicator of national fitness or degeneracy. Because medical theory encouraged invalids to regain health by returning to a more “natural” way of life, the drive for a healthier national future often became entangled with nostalgia for a healthier national past. Similar discourses — 129 —

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Figure 11. Lillie Langtry and Sarah Bernhardt, 1887. Courtesy of Niday Picture Library / Alamy Stock Photo.

affected the transatlantic consumptive repertoire in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Tom Taylor’s 1857 comedy An Unequal Match constructed the disease as a hereditary affliction of the over-­refined upper classes, who needed to embrace lower-­class British vigor in order to regain their health. Augustin Daly’s melodrama Horizon (1871) ambiguously



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figured the desirability of white American femininity through its sickly heroine Med. In these plays, as in the careers of performers like Bernhardt, the consumptive embodied the glories and failings of nations. This trend culminated, at century’s end, in the transatlantic success of Edmond Rostand’s portrait of Napoléon Bonaparte’s consumptive son, L’Aiglon (The Eaglet, 1900). Even as it deployed the Romantic poétique du poitrinaire to express nostalgia for France’s past glories, L’Aiglon celebrated the theatrical supremacy of Bernhardt, who triumphed as the young male protagonist. In December 1900, Bernhardt performed the play in French in New York while the American actress Maude Adams played it in English a few blocks away. This histrionic duel saw the theatrical reputations of France and America tested via their actresses’ ability to assume the role of the dying poitrinaire. Even as these two nations strove to affirm themselves as healthy, they fought for cultural and affective capital through the performance of disease.

A Disease in Place Throughout the nineteenth century, nations quarreled over the question of whether consumption was more to be associated with one of them than with another. In an 1889 essay in The Sanitary Record, the British doctor Paget Thurstan confessed that his own country had borne the brunt of such imputations, remarking that “[m]any people imagine that consumption is mainly, or even essentially, an English disease, engendered by the fogs and damp of our insular climate.”3 France’s southern regions, by contrast, were often recommended as the healthy alternative to sickly England. In an 1876 treatise, for example, the Nice-­based Dr. Barriera praised his own city for offering the “temperate heat” that consumptive invalids required.4 To such claims, English physicians retorted that “there are more natives (not strangers, but inhabitants born and bred in the place) who die of consumption in Nice than in any town in England of the same population.”5 The United States was not exempt from such medical bickering. In 1803, the French Comte de Volney described consumptions as common American afflictions, declaring “one may justly regard these maladies as a particular effect of the climate.”6 A few decades later, the Washington physician Henry Huntt retorted that “the United States afford advantages more favourable in this complaint than any other country yet known.” 7

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Admitting that consumption was on the rise in the United States, Samuel Cartwright ascribed its incidence to the decline of the hardy enterprise of its first colonists: We have no woods now, as the early pioneers had, filled with hostile Indians to keep the mind awake, and in a constant state of tension to guard against their wiles; no wars, as that of the Revolution, to bring into play all the mental powers, and thereby to effect cures of consumption.8 Given that mortality from tuberculosis amongst Indigenous North Americans was to rise to genocidal proportions by the late nineteenth century,9 Cartwright’s nostalgia for the healthful days of early settler–Indigenous conflict strikes a cruelly ironic note. His logic is, however, consistent with his understanding of phthisis as a disease of privileged white Euro-­ Americans. The most brilliant members of white American society, Cartwright believed, were designed by Providence to “lead the way in human progress”; but when they lived pampered or overworked lives in cities and fell away from their roles as pioneers, they had “imposed upon them the penalty of pulmonary consumption for not fulfilling their high destiny.”10 As the nineteenth century waned, arguments linking the scourge of consumption to the perceived failings of civilized nations became increasingly common. Edward Greenhow’s 1858 report on “the sanitary state of the people of England,” presented to the General Board of Health, described the high incidence of consumption as “a matter of national concern.” “Whatever tends to increase tubercular disease among the adult members of a population,” stressed Greenhow, italicizing the point for emphasis, “must be regarded as assuredly tending to produce a progressive degeneration of race.”11 Like Cartwright, Greenhow linked the risk of “progressive degeneration” to industrialization and urbanization, which subjected modern city dwellers not only to “deficient ventilation, sedentary occupations, and want of active bodily exercise,” but also to “a listless or dejected state of mind.”12 Katherine Byrne observes strong parallels between these mid-­century British anxieties about consumption and those that prevailed in France at the fin-­de-­siècle.13 At an 1890 meeting of the French Académie de Médecine, Gustave Lagneau warned that In consequence of the mortality from epidemics and tuberculosis—­so much higher in the cities than in the countryside, which more and



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more of our compatriots are abandoning to become city-­dwellers; [. . .] our general mortality is almost the same as our remarkably low birth rate. Thus, [. . .] the growth of our population remains very weak, to the great detriment of our nation’s political future.14 In many treatises, this threat to France’s future was linked to those posed by alcoholism and syphilis. Through this malign trinity of diseases, tied in the medical imagination both to the miseries of the urban poor and to the decadence of the urban rich, doctors feared that “a kind of subspecies was being propagated in France, a lower race of ‘candidates’ for tuberculosis and other afflictions, morally and physically degenerate.”15 Because French, British, and American doctors agreed that phthisis was “a disease of civilization,”16 its symptoms in individuals served as warnings of a potentially deadly malaise at the heart of the modern body politic. In America, these anxieties resulted in increasing calls to restrict the entry of certain communities seen as more prone to consumption, including among others Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants.17 Cartwright suggested that those threatened with the disease should embrace “physical education” in order to approximate the beneficial effects of the pioneer experience, which “[cast] out of the body the seeds of disease, and convert[ed] the pallid, soft, and feeble emigrant into the hale, hearty, healthy backwoodsman.”18 The Englishman Greenhow asserted that “employers who take an interest in promoting the recreation of their workpeople, especially by out-­door exercise or the pursuit of natural history, are great sanitary benefactors.”19 Asked how he would treat a city-­dwelling boy who appeared doomed to a hereditary consumption, the French physician Michel Peter affirmed that the solution was to “to change the urban life for a country life, life in rooms for life in the fields.”20 To move forward into a healthy modernity, nations needed to return to the past. Jules Arnould reassured readers of an 1879 encyclopedia entry on France’s pathology that no one wished to “condemn the civilized life, which offers so many blessings to compensate for the wounds it inflicts.”21 Consumption had long been recognized as a marker of such “blessings,” including emotional sensitivity, artistic talent, and intellectual distinction. If these blessings led to an increased incidence of consumptive illness, however, then they might blight the nation. “Civilization,” wrote Arnould, could thus be seen as “an admirable machine in which we have forgotten to include the levers that would keep the workers from hurting themselves.”22 To perceive

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a nation as inclined toward consumption was to construct it as emotionally, artistically, intellectually, and industrially advanced—­and to warn that it risked crumbling under the weight of its own progress.

Nationalizing the Poitrinaire Britain was quick to assimilate this warning into its cultural productions. By the late 1850s, British opposition to the French-­led vogue for the Romantic poitrinaire had begun to fade. In addition to the consumptive heroines of plays such as Boucicault’s Prima Donna and Taylor’s Helping Hands, Victorian literature of the 1850s saw a rush of male consumptives. Attractive male invalids appear in Charlotte Yonge’s novels Heartsease (1854) and The Castle Builders (1855), with the frail clergyman Lord Herbert Somerville in the latter novel bearing a particularly strong resemblance to the self-­ sacrificial French male poitrinaire. In Janet’s Repentance (1857), George Eliot created a similarly Christlike hero in the consumptive evangelical minister Edgar Tryan. Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! (1855) also featured a glamorous and saintly consumptive, the courtier-­poet Frank Leigh. One review of Tennyson’s Maud (1855) condemned the “consumptive heroes of Mr. Tennyson and the present race of poets.”23 English literature, it seemed, had been thoroughly infected by the poétique du poitrinaire. As if in response to such fashions, Tom Taylor featured a male poitrinaire in his popular 1857 comedy, An Unequal Match. Critics immediately recognized the French influence upon the play; the Tory journal John Bull and Britannia complained that too many of its elements were “borrowed from the French stage.”24 Nevertheless, John Bull admitted that “the play is exceedingly well adapted to the requirements of the British public; the dialogue is throughout lively, likely, and natural [.  .  .] and the morality unexceptionable.”25 Along with dialogue and morality, An Unequal Match adapted the French-­style consumptive hero for English tastes, offering in the process a prescription for England’s health. Taylor’s play centres on Hester Grazebrook, a Yorkshire blacksmith’s daughter who falls in love with a young aristocrat, Harry Arncliffe, while he is sojourning in her village after a disastrous love affair with the widowed Mrs. Montresor. Arncliffe proposes marriage to Hester, holding to his promise even after he learns that he has been raised to a baronetcy by the sudden death of his uncle. In the play’s second act, Arncliffe and Hester are married, but she chagrins him by clinging to her simple countrywoman’s



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lifestyle. Mrs. Montresor, now their house guest, mounts a covert campaign against her low-­born rival. In the midst of this conflict, Arncliffe’s doctor diagnoses him with incipient consumption and instructs him to go at once to the continent for treatment. The final act, set some months later, finds a much-­recovered Arncliffe, along with Mrs. Montresor and many of their English society acquaintances, at a “German watering place.”26 Hester appears in the guise of a fashionable English society lady pursued by foreign princes and dignitaries, having decided to beat Mrs. Montresor at her own game. Arncliffe quickly realizes that he preferred the simple country girl to the urban sophisticate, and Hester closes the play by reminding the audience that the war between “the genuine woman” and “the sly coquette” will always be an “unequal match.”27 Harry Arncliffe’s ill-­health is inseparable from the class—­and national—­ politics of An Unequal Match. When the audience meets him, he is a sensitive, artistically gifted young man whose valet describes him as a “heart-­ broken recluse”28 in the style of Raphael Didier after his unhappy love affair with Mrs. Montresor. Unlike the unfortunate Frenchman, however, English Arncliffe ensures the “unexceptionable” morality of An Unequal Match by turning away from the temptress and toward a pure-­hearted maiden. On their joint first appearance in the play, Hester’s robustness is contrasted with Arncliffe’s delicacy as she begs him to let go of her milk pail: HESTER: No, no; it’s far too heavy for you,—you’re not half as strong as I am, you know. ARNCLIFFE: Nonsense, Hester! [. . .] I tell you I never enjoyed a walk so much in my life! HESTER: Then you don’t look like it.29 This inversion of normative Victorian gender tropes of fragile maidenhood and strong manliness continues in the next act. Transplanted to Arncliffe Manor, Hester longs for “half-­an-­hour in the harvest field, with all those happy hard-­working lads and lasses out yonder,” and rises early while her husband lies abed.30 “I wish she would cure herself of that inveterate habit of early rising,” sighs Arncliffe, adding that “she’s asleep as soon as she lays her head upon the pillow—­even this vile cough of mine doesn’t disturb her.”31 The consumptive cough, so long the sentimental signifier of emotional inwardness, here becomes the symbol of the aristocratic man’s weakness as compared to the lower-­class woman’s strength. When his doctor writes to him that his symptoms are “certain indications

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of a phthisical diathesis,” Arncliffe accepts his verdict: “I feared as much; my increasing weakness, my cough, and this mingled languor and irritability, which make existence at times a burden, all warned me that our old family foe had found me out.”32 Because Arncliffe’s “phthisical diathesis” is hereditary, the “languor and irritability” of which he complains can be seen as symptomatic not only of the consumptive’s low fever, but also of the idleness and entitlement attendant upon his noble status. Taylor brings this point to the fore when Arncliffe responds “testily” to his wife’s pre-­breakfast flight into the fields: “If you choose to breakfast at eccentric hours, you should at least consider those who prefer more civilised habits.”33 Like his insistence upon aristocratic manners, his illness is a product of the nobleman’s unhealthy “civilisation.” To cure Arncliffe’s physical ailments, his physician counsels immediate removal to Germany, constructing England as an ailing nation and the continent as a source of health. When we find Sir Harry ensconced at his German spa in Act 3, he is clearly much recovered; but any ascription of his improvement to the baths is quickly discouraged by the appearance of the English quack doctor Botcherby, who describes how he promoted the most “odiferous” of all German springs until “[t]he English flocked to the place; [and] the foreigners followed to live upon the English.”34 Taylor’s mockery is leveled not just at the trumped-­up claims of continental spas, but also at the credulity of English patients. His satire is given material form in Arncliffe’s ridiculous assumption of a German–style long beard and “holiday blouse,” which implicitly parody the Germanic origins of the French-­style male poitrinaire—­and come in for considerable ribbing from his spouse.35 What really improves Arncliffe’s health is not his departure from England but his embrace of the “natural” life that his lower-­class wife has long since followed. He himself advises a valetudinarian countryman to “rise with the lark, [and] take a stretch up the hills for an hour before breakfast,”36 just as Hester has always done. His learning of this lesson foreshadows his realization of “how odious the artificial Hester” is and how much he prefers “the natural Hester.”37 The cure for ailing England is not continental affectation, but affirmation of healthy English ways. The British performance history of An Unequal Match reflected this message. The young actress Amy Sedgwick scored the greatest triumph of her career with her “exquisitely natural” performance as the “loving, dutiful” Hester.38 Well into the 1880s, the role was one in which British



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actresses—­including Lillie Langtry—­strove to make their mark,39 while the actors who assumed Arncliffe’s part played second fiddle. William Farren, the original Arncliffe, was known primarily for comic parts,40 and unlike his sentimentally interesting French progenitors Taylor’s hero was treated by English reviewers as a fundamentally comic character. Considerably more column space was given to satirical comments upon his Act 3 beard—­dubbed, as if in parody of French symptomatic dramaturgy, “a concession to consumptive tendencies”41—­than to any pathos connected with his illness. Emphasizing the facetious British take on the consumptive hero, the Sun concluded that Arncliffe, having been “taught at last that a good heart is better than good manners, may now be happy for as long a life as his phthisicky constitution will allow him.”42 This satirical approach may have helped to stymie the success of An Unequal Match in the United States. In 1859, George Jordan—­who three years earlier had scored a triumph as Raphael in The Marble Heart—­brought an action against Laura Keene for failing to pay his wages after he refused to play Arncliffe in her production of An Unequal Match. He declined the role, he told a New York City judge, because “he was engaged to play the leading parts,” and Sir Harry “was not a leading character.”43 Though Keene protested that Arncliffe was the “hero” of the play, a string of professional actors called as witnesses disagreed. Harry Pierson, for instance, assured the judge that his personal friend William Farren was an “eccentric comedian and best walking gentleman,” and that the “leading man should not be cast in this play.”44 The judge ruled in favour of Jordan. The English might applaud a comic consumptive, but he had no place in American repertoires. Augustin Daly’s Horizon (1871), a frontier melodrama that drew upon the consumptive repertoire to articulate America’s own national and regional identities, offered a very different version of the poitrinaire.45 Adapted in part from the stories of Bret Harte, Horizon tells the tale of a party of East Coast Americans who make their way westward led by Alleyn van Dorp, who is heading to the frontier to take up his first commission. Alleyn’s adoptive mother, Mrs. Van Dorp, begs him to find her daughter Margaret, who was stolen from her as a child by her wayward husband when he fled west to evade domestic responsibility. In Rogue’s Rest, a rough town on the banks of the Missouri, the party meets Wolf van Dorp and his frail daughter Med, who proves to be the long-­lost Margaret. Alleyn falls in love with this “backwoods Venus, young, lovely, delicate,”46 as do many

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others, including the morally ambiguous gambler Loder and the “civilized Indian”47 Wannemucka. After Med’s father is killed through Wannemucka’s machinations, she joins the eastern party, only to be kidnapped along with the Washington lobbyist Sundown Rowse and his daughter Columbia by Wannemucka and his band. In the play’s dramatic denouement, Med is brought close to death by Indigenous medicines before Alleyn and Loder arrive with a party of soldiers to save her, and Loder nobly gives her into Alleyn’s arms. Med, the “chaste but passionate bourgeois maiden susceptible to capture by the Indians,”48 is clearly coded as consumptive. On her first appearance, she artlessly explains her state of health to Alleyn, all but citing Marguerite Gautier’s final lines: AL: Wouldn’t you like to leave such life as this, and go to the splendid city? MED: Yes, and I will too, if I live. AL: If you live? MED: Yes! Didn’t I tell you? No, I told her. They say I’m very sick. AL: You look delicate and pale—­but a little rest, a little care—­ why don’t you see the doctor? MED: We never have doctors come out here. But there are agents always travelling about with patent medicines [. . .] and making me try them all. I think they made me worse, don’t you? AL: (Sits beside MED.) But, now—­surely you are not ill now? MED: No, I do not suffer now; but the feeling is like—­as if the struggle were over.49 Astonished at Alleyn’s attraction to Med, Columbia dismisses her as “a puny, sickly little backwoods girl.”50 When the drugged and ailing Med appears close to death in the play’s climactic scene, the “friendly Indian” Wahcotah cites the trope of la chute des feuilles, remarking that the “white maiden is as the leaf upon the ground—­as the fallen rosebud.”51 Rescued by the army in the play’s final moment, Med is still in a dead faint. Given that the dry climate and active lifestyle of the West were frequently recommended to tubercular patients as among the healthiest in the United States, 52 Daly’s choice to make his frontier heroine a poitrinaire may appear surprising. By doing so, however, he was replicating his own past successes with quasi-­consumptive heroines. In 1862, he had achieved his first major theatrical hit with Leah, the Forsaken (1862), his adaptation of



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Salomon Hermann Mosenthal’s German-­language drama Deborah. Leah’s heroine is a beautiful Jewess who abandons her people and religion for the Christian Rudolph, only to be deserted. In the play’s dramatic final act, a weak and feverish Leah reconciles with and forgives her old lover. Though she has few explicitly consumptive symptoms, her “hand is burning hot”53 like those of classic French Romantic poitrinaires, and she is clearly dying as the curtain falls upon her exit toward “the far-­off—­the promised land!”54 In 1870, Daly scored another success with his adaptation of Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy’s drama Frou-­Frou, which had been the toast of the previous Parisian season.55 Frou-­Frou’s heroine, Gilberte, is an apparently frivolous child-­bride who abandons her husband for a former suitor, then repents and returns home to die. Gilberte’s final illness is described as a fever caught from “a poor old woman whose life she saved”; 56 but given that her doctors prescribe a trip to the South, one can see why John Stokes diagnoses “the inevitable consumption.”57 The New York audience’s enthusiasm for Frou-­Frou, which ran for 103 consecutive performances, was credited with ensuring the viability of Daly’s management at the Fifth Avenue Theatre.58 Daly’s Gilberte in 1870 was the same actress for whom he created Med in 1871, Agnes Ethel. Described by contemporaries as “a pupil of Matilda Heron,” Ethel had made her New York debut in 1869 in Heron’s celebrated role of Camille.59 She excelled both in Heron’s “emotional” school of acting and in the display of attractive frailty; Edward Dithmar remembered her as a “mere girl, scarcely more than [a] child, with a pale, rather plain face,” whose “youth, fragility, delicacy, and [. . .] elusive charm” were the sources of her success in Frou-­Frou.60 With Ethel as his leading lady, it seems small wonder that Daly chose to cite consumptive tropes in Horizon. Unlike Camille, Leah the Forsaken, and Frou-­Frou, however, Horizon strove to “represent Nature in those forms in which she is familiar to American eyes.”61 Eschewing the “fallen woman” tropology that surrounded characters such as Camille, Leah, and Gilberte, it painted Med as a pure and virtuous girl of the golden West. This aspect of the play appears to have been partly inspired by the persona of Lotta Crabtree, one of the most beloved American actresses of the period, who had begun her career playing in mining camps before gaining stardom as a child performer in San Francisco.62 Among Crabtree’s popular parts was that of the eponymous heroine in Little Nell and the Marchioness, an adaptation of scenes from Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, which featured an ascent to heaven for Little Nell to

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match that of Little Eva in the Aiken Uncle Tom.63 With Med, Daly created an ingénue who evoked the pathos of these consumptive child heroines while also radiating the sexual allure of the French poitrinaire. Daly’s “white flower of the plains”64 embodies a version of desirable American womanhood that appeals to the disparate masculinities of the expanding nation. To Alleyn, the scion of New York society sent west to impose order on the frontier, she is a “backwoods Venus”: a symbol of unspoiled nature ready to be brought into the fold of Euro-­American civilization. To Loder, she is “the star he sees so far above him”:65 an embodiment of refined beauty to which he, a poor and compromised gambler, cannot aspire. For these two men, Med becomes an image of the frontier itself, wavering between two visions of its possible identity within the American Union. Wannemucka’s passion for Med links her even more explicitly to the prairie territory over which he is at war with the white settlers. “Wannemucka chief of tribes,” he declares, in an assertion of his own sovereignty; “Take white maiden there. Be a princess.” Med’s father responds by striking him, crying, “You copper-­coloured scoundrel! You dare to think of my daughter—­a lady!”66 Wolf ’s violent insistence on racial and class difference ensures his demise at the hand of Wannemucka, who crows, “Now injun have white princess!”67 At such moments, Agnes Ethel’s stylish pallor worked to reify racist categories by affirming the supreme attractions of white, high-­status American femininity. Med’s illness complicates the rules of this settler romance. If the “white flower” is rapidly fading, what is the point of her lovers’ pursuit? For Wannemucka, the answer seems clear: a dying or dead white woman can help him to re-­assert his mastery of the plains as well as—­or better than—­a living one can. When the young women of his band reproach him with bringing Med into their midst, he responds, “She is the prize of Wannemucka, and marks his triumph. Go, look upon her. She is weak and frightened. She is ill.”68 Like any sentimental audience, the women are provoked to sympathy for the sickly girl and begin chanting a mourning dirge for her: She was white as the white snow, And her spirit went away Under the breath of Manitou, As snow flees before the sun.69



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In this racially inflected lament, Med’s pallor and frailty are linked to the weakness and transience of white power in the West, which the Indigenous characters dream will flee before them like snow in the sun. Daly hastens to assure white spectators that this fantasy will not come true; the dirge is interrupted by “the distant sound of a drum,” 70 and the combined power of Alleyn, the eastern gentleman, and Loder, the western adventurer, succeeds in saving the helpless white maiden. Although the play ends on the tableau of Med’s rescue, it offers no assurance that she will recover from her illness. As she faints under the influence of Wannemucka’s drugs, her last words are farewells to this world and visions of the next. Mistaking Columbia for Alleyn in her delirium, she sighs, “I told you, you remember, that I was doomed to die. I did not think so soon! Look! My father! [. . .] No, father, I will come to you. She is not my mother and I will not go to her. Dear father, don’t turn from me! I am with you!” 71 In the popular vein of Little Eva, Med rejects the worldly pleasures of her mother’s high society lifestyle and embraces the joys of heaven. Because her death scene is a phony one, designed by Wannemucka to deceive his community, it can be read as a parody of the sentimental farewells familiar to American audiences from Camille, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Frou-­ Frou. Even so, Daly gives Med no later words or gestures to supersede these doleful goodbyes. Unlike Harry Arncliffe, she gets no miraculous cure. By fusing the attractions of the French consumptive heroine with his vision of ideal white American womanhood, Daly was playing with dangerous discursive matter. This point may help to explain Horizon’s relatively lacklustre reception in its time,72 as well as the fact that Med’s illness has been ignored by all later critics while the single scene in which she shoots an Indigenous character has been cited by many.73 A gun-­toting prairie heroine fits mythologies of the pioneer spirit more snugly than a sickly one. Even as Med’s ailment renders her whiter and more desirable, it also implies some degree of sickness at the heart of the American enterprise. Her disease reflects her parents’ eastern refinement, but the western life seems only to hasten her decline. Although she symbolizes the desires that drive the expanding white American empire, no place in the Union seems capable of healing her. Where An Unequal Match had assured its audiences that the English nation could regain its health by returning to its roots, Horizon is haunted by the fear that the “white flower” of American civilization may be doomed.

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The Poitrinaire as International Star As Horizon underlines, the affective capital of the stage consumptive persisted into the final decades of the nineteenth century despite the disease’s increasing medical associations with contagion, corruption, and degeneracy. Although it retained its Anglo-­American reputation as a “sickly, mawkish, and infirm” 74 drama, La Dame aux Camélias, in particular, continued to attract star actresses. Conti shows that one way in which these Marguerites strove to distinguish themselves—­and to articulate their national identities—­was by choosing between “romanticized or medicalized” representations of the heroine’s illness.75 The well-­born Polish actress Helena Modjeska, for example, was one of the most popular Camilles of the American theatre in the 1870s and 1880s76 (and one of the first actresses to sneak the character onto the English stage via her adaptation of La Dame aux Camélias, Heartsease).77 Modjeska expressed her continental refinement by refusing to venture too far into the materialist side of French symptomatic acting; “I do not walk the wards of hospitals to study death in its terrors,” she scoffed.78 Her comment stood in implicit rebuke to the approach of the American Clara Morris, who boasted of having consulted her physician about the precise nature of Camille’s consumptive cough. She learned that there are two coughs peculiar to lingering consumption. One of them is a little hacking cough that interferes with the speech, and injures the throat; the other is a paroxysm brought on by extra exertion. I chose the paroxysm, and introduced it in the first scene, after I have been dancing.79 Morris’s exceedingly materialist symptomatic acting evinced her allegiance to the “emotional” Franco-­American school that Heron had established, in which the actress’s absolute identification with the suffering character is an index of her success. At the pinnacle of transatlantic reputation amongst performers of La Dame aux Camélias stood the greatest international star of the age, Sarah Bernhardt.80 Along with her celebrity, her careful balancing of “the pathos and pathology of the role”81 helped her become the first actress to perform Dumas fils’s play unadapted on the British stage. When she appeared as Marguerite in London in 1881, the English critic Frederick Wedmore noted that, despite her French nationality and popular American tours, she



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fled from the shocking materialism typical of many French and American performers: Mdlle. Bernhardt does not lend herself to even that measure of sensational practice which has been allowed to legitimate comedians who probably have rarely left Paris, and certainly have never crossed the States in special railway-­cars. The death scene in the Dame aux Camélias might easily be made the vehicle of an exhibition of horrors, but with Mdlle. Bernhardt it is gentle, poetical, and reserved.82 Nevertheless, Bernhardt embraced the strengths of symptomatic acting. Reviewing her appearance in La Dame at the Théâtre de la Porte-­Saint-­ Martin in 1883–1884, Camille Le Senne lauded the actress’s collaboration with a handkerchief during Marguerite’s last act encounter with the sponging milliner, Prudence. “The invalid,” he wrote, makes a superb gesture of bitterness and disgust when Prudence comes to borrow her ten louis for New Year’s presents. She spits this disgust into the lace handkerchief that she presses to her trembling lips. One moment, one gesture, and the house was profoundly moved.83 An actress who expectorated onstage—­or even hinted that she was doing so—­was not practicing pure sublimation; but an actress who used the malleable, elegantly scriptive surface of a lace handkerchief so delicately to evince inward disgust was not studying the hospital wards, either. Mastering the symptomatic dramaturgy of revelation through concealment, Bern­ hardt was both the inheritor and the renovator of the Romantic poétique du poitrinaire. Not just a supreme player of consumption, the “divine Sarah” was widely rumored to suffer from it as well. As she herself admitted, “my first claim to fame was my extraordinary slimness and my fragile health.”84 That these characteristics were viewed as “claims to fame” at all can be ascribed both to the enduring power of consumptive chic in the French market and to the equally enduring reputation of Bernhardt’s great predecessor Rachel, whose memory ghosted many of Bernhardt’s early performances. When Bernhardt appeared as Phèdre, Scribner’s Monthly praised her for “dominating her weak body by sheer force of will,” adding admiringly that “although she may spit blood and faint after each act, as she has done again and again, she never gives in.”85 The young Bernhardt faced constant comparison with

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Rachel, especially in parts like Phèdre that had become synonymous with the dead divinity.86 By embracing another role closely associated with Rachel in the cultural imagination—­that of the frail but strong-­willed consumptive actress whose emotional intensity fueled both her illness and her genius—­Bernhardt was able to claim common ground with her great predecessor. Where Rachel had striven to deny her ill-­health, Bernhardt actively promoted herself as a sickly creature half in love with easeful death. She posed for commercial photos that showed her sleeping in her own coffin, and reported that while nursing her sister Régina, who died of tuberculosis in her teens, she “found it quite natural to sleep every night in this little bed of white satin which was to be my last couch.”87 At the same time, she strenuously rejected any notion that she exploited her consumptive aura for profit.88 Instead, she constructed her labor as an act of noble self-­immolation, describing the actor’s task of identifying emotionally and physically with her parts as “a weariness likely to break the strongest,”89 but affirming that when “the audience crowns the play with its approval, we experience the infinite enjoyment of the martyr at the extremity of his suffering.”90 Throughout her career, Bernhardt was keen to link this sentimental aspect of her persona to her identification with the French nation. In 1873, in the aftermath of the Franco-­Prussian War, she wrote to the journalist Benoît Jouvin to refute his description of her as a “German Jewess,” citing her self-­denying service to the nation during the peak of that war as witness: “A Jewess, certainly! But German, no. [. . .] I am French, absolutely French. I proved it during the siege of Paris.”91 When Bernhardt reaffirmed her Frenchness by playing the national heroine Jeanne d’Arc, she constructed Jeanne as a delicate creature in her own image. “We do not like Jeanne d’Arc to be the rough and ready peasant girl,” she remarked; “In the legend she remains a frail being, guided by a divine soul.”92 Bernhardt’s friend and rival, the English actress Ellen Terry, echoed this rhetoric when she described Bernhardt’s own fragile appearance as an index of her spiritual greatness: “She was hollow–eyed, thin, almost consumptive–looking. Her body was not the prison of her soul, but its shadow.”93 Filled with a passion beyond the ken of Englishwomen like Terry and Langtry, Bernhardt in such descriptions was as much the suffering French saint as Jeanne d’Arc. Bernhardt’s opponents drew more sinister connections between her identity and her air de poitrinaire. In 1838, Théophile Gautier had connected



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Rachel’s fascinating persona, “at once frail and nervous, elegant and wild, sickly and full of breeding,” with her “ancient oriental blood transmitted by Jewish veins.”94 Bernhardt’s critics took up this association of sickliness with Jewishness, reading her much-­publicized frailty as a material signifier of Judaism’s blighting effect on otherwise healthy nations. Sander Gilman has shown how the Viennese playwright Ottokar Franz Ebersberg stressed Bernhardt’s “diseased, corrupt nature as a Jew” in his satirical work Sarah’s Travel Letters from Three Continents.95 In his anti-­Semitic treatise La France Juive (1886), Édouard Drumont linked the “macabre imaginings” of the “obviously sick” Bernhardt to the neuroses with which he believed Jews were poisoning France.96 If this queen of poitrinaires was a patron saint to some, to others she was the living image of the body politic’s degeneration.

The Bodies of the Eaglet These two sides of Bernhardt’s persona—­the saintly, redemptive poitrinaire and the tainted embodiment of national corruption—­came together in Edmond Rostand’s L’Aiglon. Premièred in March 1900 at Paris’s Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, Rostand’s verse drama tells the story of the last years of Napoléon François Charles Joseph Bonaparte, Napoléon I’s only son by the Austrian Archduchess Marie Louise. Known after his father’s defeat as Franz, Duc of Reichstadt, this ill-­starred young man was only four at the time of his father’s defeat at Waterloo, and spent most of his short life in gilded semi-­captivity in Austria. Although ambitious of taking up the Napoleonic mantle, he was held back from his goals both by the opposition of the Austrian hierarchy and by his own ill-­health. In July in 1832, he died of tuberculosis at Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, aged only twenty-­one.97 Even before his death, the Duc de Reichstadt had appeared onstage as a symbol of lost Napoleonic dreams in Paul de Lussan’s 1830 Le Fils de l’Homme.98 In 1850, Paris’s Théâtre de l’Ambigu-­Comique offered Charles Desnoyer and Léon Beauvallet’s Le Roi de Rome, which made sentimental use of Reichstadt’s consumptive cough.99 In both of these dramas, Reichstadt was played by an actress whose performance en travesti served to emphasize his youth and vulnerability. This travesti tradition allowed Rostand to revisit the Romantic male poitrinaire in L’Aiglon while still creating a starring role for the reigning mistress of the consumptive repertoire. Rostand’s representation of the Duc explores the forces—­literary, medical, and political—­that shaped the consumptive heroes of the 1830s. One

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courtier describes Reichstadt as having the air of “a Chérubin who reads Werther in secret,”100 overtly constructing him as an emblem of the transition in French literary culture from the pre-­revolutionary comedy of Beaumarchais’s Mariage de Figaro to the German–influenced Romantic drama of writers like Dumas père. Though the ladies of the Viennese court swoon over his stylish pallor,101 the Duc himself distrusts this fashion, complaining that his generation is too proud of “parad[ing] the palest of all brows.”102 In keeping with Romantic materialist medicine, he understands his consumptive symptoms not as stylish accessories, but as the products of a deep emotional pain that ties his soul to that of the suffering French nation. When a young French Bonapartist asks him, “Pale prince, so pale in your black cravat, / What is it, then, that makes you so pale?” the Duc answers simply, “That I am his son!”103 His interlocutor responds, “Weak, feverish, tormented by the past, / Murmuring, like you: What is left for us to do? . . . / We are all of us—­a bit—­your father’s sons.”104 By employing the Duc’s disease as a signifier of socio-­political malaise, Rostand spoke not only to the uncertainties of the 1830s, but also to those of his own time. The France of 1900 was a divided and weakened republic that had seen the fall of Napoléon III’s Second Empire; suffered an ignominious defeat at the hands of the Prussians in 1870; and experienced the polarizing impact of l’Affaire Dreyfus, a crisis that was still underway at the time of the play’s premiere. Rostand—­who had recently scored a massive success with another verse play about a lost hero of France’s past, Cyrano de Bergerac—­claimed that his play was simply the “story of an unfortunate child,” with “no cause [. . .] to attack or defend.”105 Nevertheless, he used his héros poitrinaire both to represent France’s disintegration and to re-­unify the nation’s hearts under the banner of Napoleonic nostalgia.106 Well-­established aspects of the Romantic poétique du poitrinaire played a role in this process. In L’Aiglon’s most celebrated scene, the Austrian chancellor Metternich forces Reichstadt to look in the mirror, constructing his pallor and weariness as outward signs of his Austrian mother’s tainted blood. “A fatal fog accompanies you everywhere you go!” he declares, “Unbeknownst to you, it’s Germany itself!”107 Rostand’s revival of the Romantic-­era trope of the Germanic consumptive has been read as emblematizing France’s suffering at the hands of the Austrians, who humiliated their old enemy at the Congress of Vienna, and the Prussians, who dishonored the French in the Franco-­Prussian War.108 If so, it works



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to reassure French audiences that their nation’s failures can be blamed not on their own degeneracy, but on the evils of others. As Metternich reminds Reichstadt, however, Napoléon himself created the catastrophe in his bloodline by marrying into the Austrian nobility: Jealous of our ancient blood, he wanted To steal it from us in order to make his own more ancient. But all he stole was the melancholy, The weakness[.]109 The Duc is sickly not just because his Austrian mother’s family is feeble, but also because his conquering French father could not control his desire for European power and prestige. Reichstadt learns this terrible lesson firsthand when he flees from the Austrian court to the battlefield of Wagram, hoping that the site of his father’s triumph will give him the strength he needs to claim his imperial inheritance. Instead, he encounters the ghostly voices of the soldiers who died in his father’s wars: THE DUC: Stands still, frozen, two trickles of blood issuing from his lips. . . . Ah! GROAN FROM THE ROAD: For pity’s sake! Put a bullet through my head! THE DUC: Ah! Now I understand my sleepless nights! GROAN FROM THE GRASS: The Light Cavalry are base assassins! THE DUC: Why horrible coughing puts me in a sweat! CRY FROM THE BUSHES: My leg’s too heavy! You must cut it off! THE DUC: I understand what blood it is I spit!110 In this chilling passage, the Duc’s consumptive symptoms become material signs of his father’s impact upon the fallen bodies of Europe. His disease is the product not only of his mother’s poisonous weakness, but of his father’s poisonous strength. As he faces death, Rostand’s Duc strives to snatch a national victory for France from his personal defeat. “I understand now,” he murmurs: “I am the atonement! / All debts had not been paid. I complete the price.”111 By suffering martyrdom for his parents’ sins, he will purge them, leaving only his father’s triumphant legacy behind. However, consumption’s profile

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as a hereditary disease tied to familial and national degeneration complicates his vision. Reichstadt’s status as a late avatar of the French Romantic poétique du poitrinaire reminds the French audience that the consumptive repertoire emerged in response to the failures of multiple reigns and revolutions. If the Duc’s consumptive death is to be a redemptive one, the French must embrace a different future. But how can they do this, when the Duc’s fatal inheritance is also their own? At the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt in March  1900, one answer to this question was personified by Bernhardt herself. In his biography of her, the critic Maurice Baring reminisced about L’Aiglon’s opening night, when the nationalists in the audience, who believed that the ancient strengths of France had to be protected against malign influences like the Jewish “traitor” Dreyfus, squared off against the Dreyfusards, who believed that France was corrupting its own values by its tyrannical treatment of an innocent citizen. They were ready to divide into two camps over L’Aiglon’s depiction of French history, but “Sarah conquered them both in the first act.”112 She was “so beautiful, so touching, so tragic, so delicious, so truly sublime,” agreed Edouard Stoullig, that France united in worship of her.113 Where the body politic was diseased, the divine Sarah healed it—­at least for one night. Bernhardt’s close association with the repertoire poitrinaire played a crucial role in this effect. The presence of her body in the role tied the Duc to a long line of French female poitrinaires, paralleling the Duc’s expiatory death in his white-­draped bedroom with Marguerite’s atoning death in her white-­draped boudoir.114 Some critics were uncomfortable with the Duc’s feminized quality; Ernest Prévost lamented that the “figure of the Duc de Reichstadt—­melancholy, indecisive, and spineless, the almost resigned victim of Metternich’s tyranny—­could never seem to the populace as seductive and French as the manly, noble figure of the Sire du Bergerac.”115 Bernhardt—­who had already triumphed in numerous leading male roles, including Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Alfred de Musset’s Lorenzaccio—­ responded to this challenge by proving her mastery of the tropes of the male as well as the female poitrinaire. Her Duc belonged to the French tradition of leading male consumptives like Henri Muller, who strive desperately to maintain their masculine-­coded courage in the face of potentially emasculating frailty. As Willa Cather, who saw Bernhardt play L’Aiglon in Washington, observed, “[t]his French Duke of Mme. Bernhardt’s tries very hard to die like a king and Napoleon’s son. It is this dignity, supported



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so long by the boy, under intense physical pain and with every evidence of his imminent dissolution on his ghastly face, that arouses such poignant pity.”116 Reviewing Bernhardt’s appearance in L’Aiglon, Stoullig paused to note that London audiences had recently greeted her farewell performances of La Dame aux Camélias with a whopping twenty-­six curtain calls. The art that had occasioned such transnational acclaim was, he affirmed, equally visible in this new creation, where the 56-­year-­old Bernhardt’s technique was so great that she “did not even give the impression of cross-­dressing” as the 21-­year-­old boy (Fig. 12).117 When the French audience wept for Bern­ hardt’s Duc de Reichstadt, they mourned France’s loss of military and political power. At the same time, they celebrated its theatrical dominance, as embodied by the actress whose artistry in performing illness and death had “conquered” the world. Given the American popularity of both Bernhardt and the French repertoire poitrinaire, Bernhardt’s triumph in L’Aiglon all but guaranteed that an enterprising American actress would assume the role. Twenty-­eight-­year-­ old Salt Lake City native Maude Adams took up the challenge. Adams was beloved for her lightness, her wistful charm, and the apparently natural quality of her acting; the only point at which her persona met Bernhardt’s was in their shared association with physical frailty. One of Adams’s first successful performances had been as Nell, the disabled and lovelorn factory worker in Henry C. DeMille’s 1891 adaptation of German playwright Ludwig Fulda’s The Lost Paradise.118 Though Nell is not tubercular (she suffers from a limp due to an industrial accident), Adams’s later costar John Drew remembered Adams’s first “hit” role as that of a “consumptive factory girl.” On the same page of his memoirs, he recalls that “Maude Adams in her girlish slightness seemed to me too fragile for a leading woman,” though “as a matter of fact she was never ill.”119 When, in 1901, it was announced that Adams would serve as the model for a 600-­pound, 14-­karat gold statue entitled, “The Type of American Woman,” one journalist praised her as “a delicate little slip of femininity who, aside from her redoubtable genius as an actress, appeals strongly to the sentimental side of all of us.”120 Like Med and Little Eva—­a role she had played as a child121—­Adams looked frail, fair-­haired, and innocent—­perfect casting for an American–style consumptive. A French poitrinaire was another matter. Critics immediately diagnosed

Figure 12. Sarah Bernhardt as the Duc de Reichstadt in Act 1 of L’Aiglon, 1900. Courtesy of Billy Rose Theatre Division, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.



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Adams’s decision to play the Duc de Reichstadt, made in consultation with her redoubtable manager Charles Frohman,122 as one designed to demonstrate her histrionic capabilities. Many predicted that Adams would be stymied by both persona and technique. She was “essentially a womanly actress,” wrote one, and had “few of the artifices of her sister players.”123 Her shortcomings were likely to be emphasized by the fact that Bernhardt herself would be touring to New York in December and offering L’Aiglon as part of her repertoire. The resulting competition was framed in the New York papers as a transatlantic theatrical version of David and Goliath.124 As one New York writer put it, if Adams should make a “success in the play in which Bernhardt has made one of the hits of her eventful life, we will certainly be able to point to her as a player of versatility as well as sweetness, and of high degree.”125 Adams’s supporters framed her duel with Bernhardt as a battle of national styles. Although she greatly admired Bernhardt’s Aiglon, Adams told the press, she would not copy it in New York, as “[t]here is much in her production that would not ‘go’ in the United States.”126 Interviewed by the New York Times about Adams’s intentions, the American actress Elsie De Wolfe asserted that her idea of the Prince differs entirely from that of Bernhardt. Miss Adams sees in the Prince a weakling, which he was, a man without force or will; a dreamer. In her performance, I think we will get the poetical side. And she is correct in her views. Hers will be the historical character. With Bernhardt you get a suggestion of power that did not belong to the man.127 De Wolfe admitted that Bernhardt’s performance was a “great” one “for a woman of—­here the actress paused with a suggestive gesture—­well . . . her friends say fifty.”128 But where Bernhardt’s power was founded in artifice, Adams’s performance would be natural, with the actress’s youthful, frail body approximating that of her character in all particulars save its birth-­ assigned sex—­and its nationality. The Duc’s consumption played a key role in this perceived opposition. Claiming that “Bernhardt does not at first suggest the consumption to which the little duke finally succumbs,” the Deseret News avowed that Adams would

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never lose sight of it. At her first appearance she is fragile and pale. Great delicacy is apparent in every movement. [. . .] Under the red wig that she will wear Maude Adams’ eyes will be surrounded with dark circles. Her comedy will be pathetic, for it will be the comedy of a youth fighting against disease.129 Publicity photographs of Bernhardt and Adams support such descriptions. Bernhardt stands upright and determined in the Duc’s Act 1 black frock coat (Fig. 12). Adams’s Duc—­pale and wan, with thin shoulders hunched inward—­cleaves much more closely to the iconography of the Romantic male poitrinaire (Fig. 13). Acton Davis complained that Adams “overworked her cough so much that it reminded one of a second-­rate Camille,”130 but in so doing she again differentiated herself from Bernhardt, who reportedly “cough[ed] only once” in the role for fear of duplicating her well-­k nown effects in La Dame aux Camélias.131 Noting this difference, Stephen Fiske concluded that Bernhardt was “too clever, too experienced, too practical,” while the “natural” Adams more effectively portrayed “the gradual ravages of consumption.”132 Almost without exception, American critics agreed that Bernhardt’s mastery of her art was far superior to that of Adams. The New York Times praised Bernhardt’s Duc de Reichstadt as “such a piece of acting in its dominating spirit, its artistic dignity and grace, its moving force, its blazing passion, its exquisite pathos as cannot be matched on the contemporary stage,”133 while remarking that Adams’s performance, though “meritorious” showed “a lack of virtuosity.”134 Cather contrasted Bernhardt’s range of “delicate,” “subtile,” and “forceful” effects with Adams’s “cheap pathos.”135 William Winter damned Adams as a mere “kitten” alongside Bernhardt’s “leopard.”136 Nevertheless, Kim Marra notes, “many American observers preferred Adams, whose lack of passional force and appeal to pathos better suited the frail hero.”137 Life magazine’s critic framed the contest in explicitly sentimental terms, declaring that “the fragile young American secures a stronger hold on the sympathies than the mature French artist can do with any amount of art.”138 Fiske declared that in this role, Adams’s “weakness is her strength.”139 Niedlinger agreed that “Bernhardt’s L’Aiglon lacks the celestial fire that glows in Rostand’s creation, and which an American actress, with not a tithe of the Frenchwoman’s force or finesse, has been able to impart to her own representation of the character.”140 Adams’s sentimental



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Figure 13. Maude Adams as the Duc de Reichstadt in Act 1 of L’Aiglon, 1900. Courtesy of Billy Rose Theatre Division, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

appeal was even credited with having transformed the Duc, that equivocal icon of Frenchness, into a boyish American hero. One critic wrote that she not only interested her audiences in the pathetic little figure but so played upon their hearts with her irresistibly sympathetic and beautifully natural way of portraying him that New York theatre-­goers were soon as fond of him as if he had been one of Bret Harte’s or Mark Twain’s creations.141

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In such evaluations, the affective capital of Rostand’s Eaglet became American capital, and Maude Adams’s success in the role was offered as a sign of American cultural ascendency. Ironically, however, these assertions of triumph depended upon a construction of the “Type of American woman,” Maude Adams, as a sickly “child of nature” in the mould of Med and Eva, rather than as a masterful artist like Bernhardt. As Camille’s suffering had been laminated onto Matilda Heron’s body, so the Duc’s was onto Adams’s; when she came down with appendicitis in 1901, gossip pages claimed (against her own protestations) that “both her lungs were gone” and she would not live through the winter.142 A handwritten note by Nellie Barker, preserved in a scrapbook in the Harvard Theatre Collection, archives an audience member’s emotional response to the same impression: Her apparent frailty was not all “make-­up” I am sure, at all events we each recall she either was pretty well used up [at the curtain call] or she did not drop her role for she never once looked at the audience and her strength seemed almost spent. [. . .] I could not overcome the feeling that she was really suffering & had become a victim of the disease she was portraying.143 Even as one enjoyed the play, wrote Barker, “one felt as if one wanted to shield [Adams] from all that trouble.”144 Where the French audience had experienced Bernhardt’s powerful performance of the Duc as an affirmation of their theatrical vibrancy, American spectators tacitly constructed Adams’s labor in the role as hazardous to the “American woman’s” health. When Adams and Bernhardt played the Duc de Reichstadt on New York stages in December  1900, they performed for a city in which consumption’s sentimental profile was under siege. Robert Koch’s 1882 identification of the tubercle bacillus, whose impact the next two chapters of this book will explore, had intensified anxieties about the disease’s potentially catastrophic effect on populations. In the wake of this discovery, public health campaigns to “change the deviant germ-­spreading behaviour of the masses” proliferated.145 “By 1900,” writes Katherine Ott, “the ‘contagious consumptive’ was a highly politicized entity, most often pictured as a menial labourer or a domestic servant, usually a recent immigrant or African American migrant newly arrived in the city.”146 The nostalgic stylings of L’Aiglon, in which the consumptive hero is aristocratic, Austro–French,



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and very white, were in many ways profoundly disconnected from the lived realities of the modern nation. Even so, Maude Adams’s performance in L’Aiglon earned over $135,000 in box office during its ten-­week run at the Knickerbocker Theatre. “Never before has so much money been taken in at this house in any 10 consecutive weeks of anybody’s engagement,” enthused one newspaper column.147 The vehemence with which audiences in America and France embraced the Duc’s pathos proved that the consumptive repertoire retained its ability to attract star actors and engage audience sympathies. Moreover, it suggested that the repertoire’s symptomatic language was still a means through which transatlantic nations—­or rather, the politically and socially dominant groups within those nations—­could express and debate their own identities. The manner in which they did so emphasized whiteness and elite status as focal points of sentimental interest, erasing the suffering of the communities—­such as African Americans, Indigenous peoples, non-­ western European immigrants, and the working poor—­who were most frequently stigmatized as carriers of consumption in public health discourse. As it had been in the 1850s, the pathos of the sentimental consumptive remained at the fin-­de-­siècle a tool through which to reinscribe white supremacy. Nevertheless, deep at the repertoire’s heart lurked the threat of national and racial, as well as personal, dissolution. If the consumptive repertoire endured into the age of the bacillus, it might well be because it continued to articulate not just the fantasies of white audiences, but also their deepest fears.

G Part III

The Sentimental Survival

6 Sentimental Resistance The Stage Consumptive in the Age of the Bacillus, 1879–1906

G

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” —­James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962)

François de Curel’s 1895 drama La Nouvelle Idole features an unexpected event within the consumptive repertoire: a dying poitrinaire who is cured of her illness. Antoinette, a religious novice, is so near death that Dr. Albert Donnat decides to experiment on her, injecting her with cancer in hopes of better understanding the disease by watching its progress within a (temporarily) living human body. When Antoinette suddenly recovers from her consumption, Dr. Donnat is haunted by the realization that he has effectively murdered a young woman in the name of science. To his astonishment, he finds that Antoinette embraces the opportunity for self-­ sacrifice. “If you had asked my permission to do what you did,” she tells Donnat, “I would have consented right away.”1 The “new idol” of La Nouvelle Idole’s title is the modern, empiricist science that attacked the sentimental mythology of the consumptive on a number of fronts in the late nineteenth century. At the same time as Robert Koch’s 1882 identification of the tubercle bacillus challenged emotionally based constructions of the disease, theatrical realism and naturalism staked their claims to modernity by embracing scientific method and rejecting sentimental clichés. A resolutely modern “problem play” that premièred at André Antoine’s famously naturalistic Théâtre-­Libre, La Nouvelle Idole strove to portray the methods and dilemmas of contemporary medicine. — 159 —

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Nevertheless, Curel’s Antoinette—­her brief period of recovery aside—­is a textbook sentimental consumptive. She stands as one sign among many that the consumptive repertoire proved “surprisingly resilient” in the age of germ theory.2 This chapter strives to offer one explanation for this resilience by placing a cluster of problem plays from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in dialogue with the same period’s medical debates about the etiology of tuberculosis. Though Koch’s identification of the tubercle bacillus had a revolutionary effect on social and medical perceptions of the disease, many doctors continued to believe that emotional, environmental, and hereditary factors created all-­important contexts for infection. Similarly, while some dramas of the period proved their realist bona fides by mocking sentimental clichés, many others retained the poétique du poitrinaire as a tool of socially engaged dramaturgy. Some, such as La Nouvelle Idole and George Bernard Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906), even deployed sentimental consumptive tropes expressly to question the authority of modern science. As the consumptive repertoire was adapted to fit the demands of emergent medical and theatrical discourses, realism and naturalism worked to perpetuate, rather than destroy, key dramaturgical and performance traditions of the sentimental stage.

The Poitrinaire in a Scientific Age Koch’s identification of the tubercle bacillus was arguably the greatest watershed in the medical history of tuberculosis. As his 1882 presentation to the Berlin physiological society (later published as “The Etiology of Tuberculosis”) stresses, his discovery was based upon meticulously empirical testing of potentially infected material, such as sputum and tissue. He used staining agents to highlight the presence of rod-­shaped bacteria (bacilli) and to show that in “all locations where the tuberculosis process has recently developed and is progressing most rapidly, these bacilli can be found in large numbers.”3 He then isolated and cultured the bacillus from the tissues of various diseased animals (including humans) before re-­introducing it into healthy guinea pigs to gauge their reaction. The results, he argued, showed conclusively that “the bacilli which are present in the tuberculous substances not only accompany the tuberculosis process, but are the cause of it.”4 Consumption had “become tuberculosis”:5 a communicable bacterial



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infection no different than “those most feared infectious diseases, plague, cholera, and the like,”6 which were passed along indiscriminately through sputum and feces. As many scholars have observed, this paradigm shift seemed guaranteed to obliterate consumption’s sentimental profile as the affliction of the beautiful, the brilliant, and the good.7 By constructing tuberculosis as the result of a tangible “virus”8 that could be isolated, analyzed, and eventually controlled by modern science, Koch set out to deprive the disease of both mystery and mystique. Nevertheless, notes Sander Gilman, medicine was slow to abandon “the assumption that there is a predisposition for the disease, whether inherited as an acquired trait or as a racial trait, and the assumption that the tubercular has a particular physical constitution, indicated by certain physical and psychological signs.”9 In fact, Koch’s own insights created a context for the survival of these older paradigms. If, as Koch argued, the disease was widely and indiscriminately contagious, then many more must come into contact with tubercle bacilli than actually suffered from tuberculosis. Many transatlantic physicians believed that the “seed” of Koch’s bacillus could not flourish without personal or social factors that provided the “soil” for its growth.10 In 1884, American doctor Austin Flint asserted that the bacillus and the consumptive diathesis worked together “like the blades of a pair of scissors; [. . .] separated, each is powerless.”11 In 1900, French doctor Albert Manaud echoed the same point, declaring that “we all absorb some of Koch’s bacillus without being inconvenienced by it, while only those who are predisposed succumb to tuberculosis.”12 Aspects of the self—­heredity, socioeconomic situation, weakness of constitution, emotional stress—­must still explain the destiny that consigned some to tubercular suffering while others surmounted the infection. In this context, long-­established conceptions of the tubercular patient as one doomed by extreme sensibility, excessive work, or tainted heredity still made sense. Perhaps for this reason, medical and cultural understandings of the relationship between the physical symptoms and the emotional lives of tubercular patients remained fairly constant before and after the rise of germ theory. Particularly in France, the modern languages of bacterial and psychiatric pathology often worked to confirm rather than question the notion that tubercular symptoms both expressed and produced intense emotional experience. In 1884, Joseph Grasset argued that hysteria was a manifestation of the tubercular diathesis, and cited one of Jean-­Martin

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Charcot’s hysterical patients—­the subject of one of the much-­reproduced photographic case studies from the Salpêtrière—­as a classic example of tuberculosis symptomatized through hysteria.13 In his 1902 treatise on the psychology of the tubercular patient, Marius Beraud described the “loving and sentimental” consumptive, who, “careless of the few days that remain to him, is capable of all sacrifices and all heroisms just as he is capable of all follies.”14 “There is no ‘tubercular patient,’ ” affirmed Beraud; “there are tubercular patients, plural: . . . each one is sick, suffers and reacts in his own way.”15 Even as it incorporated the contagious tubercle bacillus into the practice of clinical observation that had been a part of its modus operandi since the days of Bayle and Laënnec, medical thinking in the era of Koch still conceived of the disease as an individuated affliction of the emotionally intense self. In the theatre, similar patterns of persistence amidst change obtained. Written just a year before Koch’s “Etiology of Tuberculosis,” Émile Zola’s manifesto Le Naturalisme au Théâtre demanded the “substitution of physiological for metaphysical man”16 through the construction of characters understood in terms of factors such as heredity, environment, and socio-­ economic class and surrounded by the settings, language, and objects of modern life.17 Just as post-­Kochian medical conceptions of tuberculosis preserved many of the old emotionally based conceptions of consumption, however, Zola’s understanding of naturalism harkened back to many aspects of sentimental practice. The French repertoire poitrinaire and its international offshoots had unfolded directly from the idea that the symptomatic physiological body could convince spectators of the truth of a character’s emotions. The quintessentially realist “hysterical” mode of acting described by Elin Diamond, in which “the actor produces symptoms addressed to spectators, who gradually understand their meaning,”18 was arguably the child of sentimental symptomatic performance. Even realist acting’s lamination of the actor’s experience onto the character’s began to develop under the sentimental regime of “earnest performance.”19 For three-quarters of a century, consumptive characters had worn bourgeois modern clothes; had leant against and lain upon bourgeois modern furniture; had employed ordinary modern objects such as the handkerchief and the muff; had been used to express and critique the workings of heredity; and had embodied dominant medical theories of health, illness, etiology, and transmission.



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When it comes to the consumptive repertoire, the lines between Romanticism and realism, sentimentalism and science, are not always simple ones to draw. Toril Moi’s study of Henrik Ibsen’s modernism offers one way of approaching these problematic distinctions. Moi argues that the keynote of modernity in late nineteenth-­century European art was not so much a new embrace of outward realism as a determined effort to critique idealism.20 A foundational essay on German Idealism, written sometime around 1796– 1797, asserts that “truth and goodness are united as sisters only in beauty.”21 Hence, an idealist artist may depict reality—­including modern reality—­as truthfully as possible, but they will strive to render the representation beautiful through its affirmation of moral goodness, and morally good through its aesthetic beauty. Opponents of idealism, by contrast, often associate “truth” with a rejection of moral absolutes and rhetorics of beauty. For Moi, this point explains the fact that formal tactics such as verisimilar mimesis of modern setting, dress, and speech, as well as thematic interests in physiology, heredity, environment, gender, and class can be found in Romantic as well as realist and naturalist works.22 The difference between them, she suggests, lies in the varying degrees of idealism with which Romanticism and realism approach these shared materials. To consider this proposition as it relates to the consumptive repertoire, it may prove helpful briefly to turn from the triangulated relationship between France, Britain, and America that occupies the heart of this book and toward the subject of Moi’s argument, Henrik Ibsen. This master builder of theatrical realism, who influenced so many transatlantic playwrights, was himself clearly influenced by the French repertoire poitrinaire. However, his approach to its tropes was decidedly anti-­idealizing. In A Doll’s House (1879), Ibsen created Dr. Rank, a character who in almost every way fits the classic French male poitrinaire profile. He is selfless, unrequitedly in love with Nora Helmer, and—­thanks to his medical training—­painfully aware of his impending death from a hereditary disease. However, that disease is not pulmonary phthisis. Rather, Rank’s illness is described as “spinal consumption,” a term that has generally been read as a euphemism for hereditary syphilis.23 By making his doctor the victim of a sexually transmitted disease whose repellant cultural reputation contrasts with consumption’s idealized one, Ibsen undermines the sentimental cliché of the dying amoureux transi.

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He would take this anti-­idealizing approach further in Ghosts (1881), in which the hereditary disease afflicting the tormented and amorous young artist, Oswald, is even more overtly identified with syphilis. The Lady from the Sea (1888) offers Ibsen’s most explicit debunking of sentimental consumptive tropologies. One of the play’s subplots concerns a young sculptor, Lyngstrand, who is summering in its fjord-­town setting. Lyngstrand looks “delicate” and admits to “a tightness on the chest,”24 but insists that his illness will soon pass. Conversations between Bolette and Hilde Wangel, the daughters of the town doctor, reveal that the young man is suffering from “a thickening of the lungs” and “won’t live to be old.”25 Lyngstrand not only appears utterly ignorant of this fact, but is also totally insensitive to others. When he broaches the idea of marriage with Bolette, telling her that an artist’s wife should find happiness in the idea that she can make her husband’s life “thoroughly pleasant,” she responds, “Ah! You don’t yourself know how selfish you are!”26 Bolette’s younger sister Hilde, meanwhile, is actively interested in Lyngstrand. When Bolette asks her why she is “always going on about” him, Hilde responds: HILDE: Oh, I only do that because of the weakness [in his chest]. BOLETTE: I’ve never noticed that you in the least pity him for it! HILDE: No, I don’t. But I think it so interesting. BOLETTE: What is? HILDE: To look at him and make him tell you it isn’t dangerous; and that he’s going abroad, and is to be an artist. He really believes it all, and is so thoroughly happy about it. And yet nothing will ever come of it; nothing whatever. For he won’t live long enough. I feel that’s so fascinating to think of.27 Later, Hilde fantasizes to an oblivious Lyngstrand’s face about how good she would look as a “young, sorrowing, betrothed girl” dressed in black.28 Clearly, it’s not the conventional, self-­involved sculptor that Hilde finds attractive. Rather, she is interested in his impending doom—­and how that doom might help her create an interesting persona for herself. The Lady from the Sea offers a systematic critique of the sentimental consumptive repertoire and its traditional sources of affective capital. Where sentimental poitrinaires heroically eschew spes phthisica, Lyngstrand is staunchly self-­deluding about his illness. Where they are unselfish and ready to sacrifice themselves for love, Lyngstrand is self-­absorbed and keen



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to treat his potential wife as his servant. Through Hilde, Ibsen also deconstructs the position of the sentimental audience, whose sympathy for the poitrinaire had historically been coded as an index of emotional depth and moral commitment. Hilde enjoys the power attendant upon her knowledge of Lyngstrand’s state, which is superior to his own, and treats his illness as a prop in her personal self-­fashioning. The theatrical audience that cries over the death of Marguerite Gautier or applauds itself for its sympathy with the virtuous Little Eva, Ibsen implies, may operate from just such sadistic and narcissistic motivations. Even as Ibsen advances this critique, however, he makes a powerful statement about the consumptive repertoire’s longevity. As Hilde’s attraction to Lyngstrand shows, even in a cynical and anti-­idealizing age consumptives retain their “fascination.” The late nineteenth-­century fortunes of the theatrical poitrinaire in France, the birthplace of the archetype, underline this point. The period from 1880 to 1910 saw the creation of numerous French realist plays featuring consumptive characters; but while French playwrights of the era were profoundly influenced by Ibsen,29 few of these dramas followed him in debunking the Romantic poitrinaire. At the Théâtre-­Français in 1895, Paul Hervieu’s thesis play about marriage and divorce, Les Tenailles, featured a consumptive archeologist, Michel Davernier, whose hopeless devotion to the married Irène throws her husband’s materialism and selfishness into painful relief. In 1900 at the same theatre, Jules Lemaître’s Mariage Blanc portrayed a tubercular young girl who, briefly revived by the love of an aging roué, collapses and dies when she sees him kissing her healthier half-­ sister. In Gustave Guiches’s Au Mois de Mai (Théâtre-­Libre, 1887) and Pierre Wolff’s Ceux Qu’on Aime (Comédie Parisienne, 1895), the consumptive hero is engaged to a heartless woman who is only interested in his money. In Gabriel Trarieux’s Sur la Foi des Étoiles (Théâtre-­Libre, 1900), the ailing Olivier deliberately embraces death so that his wife can marry his more robust best friend. The impact of naturalism upon these dramas is clear. Their consumptive characters are often flawed. Simone, the sickly ingénue of Mariage Blanc, is thoughtlessly self-­centered, blithely stealing the man she knows her half-­ sister loves. Olivier, the protagonist of Sur la Foi des Étoiles, is an irritable and sometimes querulous invalid. Moreover, these plays are generally more explicit about the physical symptoms of tuberculosis than sentimental dramas, with their graceful coughs and discreet handkerchiefs, had been. One

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reviewer complained that the main character of Au Mois de Mai “coughed his lungs up” so overtly that all the play’s dialogue took place “between two expectorations.”30 To the roué Jacques’s sentimental description of Simone as a “charming little shadow,” the doctor in Mariage Blanc responds, “What about the suffocated nights, the horrible coughing fits of that charming little shadow? And the spells of shivering, followed by terrible sweats?”31 In such naturalistic pronouncements, disease appears anything but beautiful. Nevertheless, many of the old idealist rules still apply in this realist drama. Koch’s arguments about the infectious nature of tuberculosis are never mentioned in these post-­1882 French plays, but notions of the disease as hereditary—­and as linked to intense emotion—­play a role in many of them. In Mariage Blanc, Simone is adored but consumptive because her mother married her consumptive father for love and unwisely had children with him; her half-­sister, Marthe, is healthy but unloved because her robust “brute” of a father never won their mother’s affection.32 In Les Tenailles, the secret that Michel (of whom one character remarks dismissively, “Pfff!! un poitrinaire! . . . fils de poitrinaire!”33) is the father of Irène’s child is revealed when it becomes clear that the boy is predisposed to the same disease.34 The same “law of death”35 motivates Olivier’s sacrifice in Sur la Foi des Étoiles, convincing him that he should remove himself eugenically from the population in order to avoid passing his disease on to his children.36 Though framed in naturalistic terms, these consumptive characters are generally just as devoted and frustrated in love as their sentimental predecessors, usually experience physical pain that is inextricable from emotional suffering, and generally end up dying of the results.

“The Contagion of Devotion”: Curel’s Consumptives This realist recombination of sentimental consumptive tropes plays an especially prominent role in the plays of François de Curel. Viewed in his time as a dramatist of ideas whose philosophical problem plays were “far removed from the commercial stage,” Curel was much admired by contemporary critics, who praised him for “widening, in the most promising direction, the horizon of the modern theatre.”37 Because they consistently affirm the possibility of virtue, love, and sacrifice in the midst of corruption, selfishness, and cruelty, his dramas were read by his contemporaries as



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idealist tragedies, rather than as anti-­idealizing naturalistic dramas.38 Nevertheless, their realist settings and exploration of contemporary psychology made them favourites of André Antoine at his Théâtre-­Libre, which saw the creation of Curel’s first consumptive protagonist, Robert de Chantemelle in Les Fossiles (1892). Foreshadowing the Duc de Reichstadt in the nearly contemporary L’Aiglon, Robert is an aristocratic poitrinaire whose disease is grounded in heredity, lineage, and nostalgia for the past. During the play’s first scenes, set in his family’s chateau in the Ardennes, he learns that the doctors have pronounced his case a hopeless one. Tormented by the notion that he will be the last of his line, Robert confesses to his mother that he has had an affair with her onetime companion, Hélène Vatrin, who has borne his child. In a reversal of the class politics of Angèle, the aristocratic Robert marries the bourgeoise Hélène and legitimizes her baby. This action disgusts his father, the Duc de Chantemelle, who has himself been Hélène’s lover, and horrifies his idealistic sister Claire, who knows of the latter affair. Despite their revulsion, Claire and the Duc choose to conceal this liaison from Robert in order to ensure that the Chantemelle line will have a legitimate heir after his death. After the family travels to Nice in an effort to improve Robert’s health, the truth emerges.39 Rather than condemning his wife or his father, Robert chooses to return to his ancestral home, where he knows the cold will rapidly kill him. “[F]rightfully pale, scarcely able to stand,” he shows “a great deal of self-­control,” declaring that he wishes to die “surrounded by memories—­not only of my youth, but of a past so ancient and so great that I feel as though I had already lived for centuries.”40 His death convinces his family to embrace a new vision for their future through the careful education of their new heir, Hélène’s son. Though Robert is destroyed by his passionate dedication to his lineage, he may also prove to be its saviour. Following in the tradition of previous French male poitrinaires, Robert de Chantemelle replaces martial heroism with a heroically clear-­eyed view of his own prognosis. When his mother tries to deceive him about his health in the play’s first act, he rejects her ministrations: No, no, treat me like a man . . . I would be the first of the Chantemelles to pale before my own death! . . . It’s true, I dreamed of another end, but that only makes this a more perfect occasion to show courage—­moral courage, rather than the courage that wins battles.41

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Like his Romantic forbears, Robert experiences intense emotions that feed his disease. His mother believes that his tuberculosis is caused by nostalgia for the chivalric past,42 while his sister chalks it up to despair at his “sterile” modern existence.43 Though he hides his distress under a mask of black humor, Robert’s symptoms repeatedly expose his inner turmoil. After he begs the Duchess to accept his mistress and her son—­“Think, Maman, where your son will be very soon!”—­he immediately “lies back panting, breathless, one hand to his chest.”44 In 1892 as in 1833, symptomatic dramaturgy prevails. The difference lies in the nature of Robert’s passion, which is not romantic but social. His tuberculosis is the product not of unrequited love like Henri Muller’s, but rather of his frustration as an idealistic, liberal aristocrat in modern, materialist, republican France. Just as earlier sentimental consumptives had been suffocated by hopeless passion, so Robert’s disease appears inextricable from his unfulfilled sense of noblesse oblige. When he maintains that the “aristocracy is still, inevitably, the academy of generous feelings,” his sister responds bitterly that it is “an academy as isolated as a hospital.” “Which spreads the contagion of devotion!” retorts Robert.45 In this vision of the nobleman as an ailing Don Quixote fighting against a heartlessly healthy modern world, even germ theory is turned to sentimental use. In strict conformity to the long-­established poétique du poitrinaire, Robert dies willingly for the objects of his love. His final testament begs his family to devote themselves to making little Henri “a modern man in the deepest sense of the word”46—­neither a soulless materialist nor an ultramontane conservative such as Robert’s father, but a liberal who embraces service to those less privileged than himself. “Let us be faithful,” writes Robert, “to the great tradition of paying with our lives for generous errors; affirming in this manner that the nobility must be a school of selflessness, showing its century the way.”47 He dies, he declares, “to give an example of devotion to ideas.”48 By evoking in a modern drama the heady emotions that had shaped the Romantic poitrinaire, Curel thus quietly contradicted the anti-­idealizing spirit of naturalism. Even so, both Curel’s play and Antoine’s production called upon a degree of naturalistic “brutality” in order to serve the playwright’s themes. Curel chose to set the play’s final act in the room where Robert’s corpse was lying in state,49 and to include a sequence in which one of the nuns keeping vigil



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around the bier informs the family that the body is “beginning to decompose.”50 Antoine’s production for the Théâtre-­Libre placed the corpse in full view of the theatrical audience. Henry Fouquier remarked that “the scene of the funereal chamber, very realist, raised objections.”51 More forcefully, Francisque Sarcey objected to “this display of the vulgar realities of death in a purely idealist play.”52 Arguably, however, these naturalistic choices served idealist—­and sentimental—­goals. Crude empiricists who denied the existence of honor, virtue, and immortality might believe that the dead Robert de Chantemelle and his noble values were nothing more than this decaying corpse. But for those touched by the “contagion of devotion,” Robert’s spirit—­like the tropes of the consumptive repertoire—­would live on, infecting the audience with emotion even as they flinched from the spectacle of his physical dissolution. Within the poétique du poitrinaire, sentimentalism and materialism remained closely intertwined, with the former working quietly to rebuke the latter’s increasing cultural hegemony. In Curel’s later drama La Nouvelle Idole, which received its first major theatrical production at the Théâtre Antoine (successor to the Théâtre-­ Libre) in March  1899, this implicit rebuke blossomed into a full-­scale gesture of resistance. Albert Donnat, the play’s protagonist, is not only a physician but also an atheist and materialist who has rejected all ideals save those of scientific progress. Determined to discover cures for the most devastating ailments, he has taken to injecting his dying patients with cancer cells (isolated through a method like Koch’s) in order to study the disease’s effects. When Antoinette, the orphaned religious novice whom he believed near death, recovers from tuberculosis and then promptly develops a malignant tumor, her plight forces Donnat to grapple with the ethical and spiritual conundrums that shadow experimental science. At the play’s climax, he injects himself with cancer in order to expiate his sin against her. When Antoinette forgives him, gladly accepting her own death if it will allow her to aid in the cures of others, Donnat realizes that they share the same faith in the power of self-­sacrifice to bring about good. Unlike flawed realist ingénues poitrinaires, such as Simone in Mariage Blanc, Antoinette fits perfectly into the saintly mould of young female consumptives established by characters like Valentine and Eva. Curel describes her as “a young girl of eighteen, very frail, [who] would be pretty if it were not for her pallor and her sickly air.”53 Her physical suffering mirrors her emotional privation as a foundling; she tells Donnat that “since the day

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I was born, you are the first person who ever thought of giving me pleasure.”54 She loves the doctor and the suffering world around her with equal selflessness; as Donnat puts it, “she worships me like a god, but without a hint of vulgar passion.”55 The very model of a modern sentimental heroine, she invites pity and admiration in equal measure. As La Nouvelle Idole unfolds, Curel uses Antoinette’s afflicted body to combat those who would identify modernity and progress with unalloyed scientific positivism. Their perspective is represented in the play by the psychologist Maurice Cormier, Donnat’s disciple, who complains that “for thousands of years, good people have been tricked with hollow words. The soul! What is this ‘soul’? Has anyone ever seen it or touched it?”56 Donnat himself risks a similarly reductive attitude when he treats Antoinette as little more than a diseased object upon which he can act. “She is tubercular to the marrow of her bones, and will never see the spring again,” he tells his wife; “suppose I did inoculate her with a terrible illness that’s always fatal—­ suppose that, thanks to that act, I could save the mothers of families, robust and useful people!”57 A minute later, he begins to doubt himself; not only Antoinette’s apparent recovery, but also her sweetness and sincerity, fill him with guilt. “If I have killed that child!” he cries: “the most exquisite little being! . . . in whom all is goodness, piety, tenderness!”58 By ignoring all ends save that of prolonging life, he has become a destroyer of it. Meanwhile, his fragile victim shows a strength he can scarcely comprehend. “Do you think I am too ignorant to understand that my pain could cure many others?” she asks: “I wanted to be a Sister of Charity, and to consecrate my life to the sick . . . Well then! I will sell my life wholesale, rather than retail.” In response, Donnat whispers, “Only the Sisters of Charity know how to die.”59 He marvels that Antoinette arrives with such magnificent simplicity at the point that my science could only achieve by superhuman effort: that of generously giving her life. [. . .] Then there really is a kind of act whose beauty attracts us all! . . . Here it is: the impulse of all humanity toward a single sun! . . . I sought it where I shouldn’t have, in the mind—­but I find it in human hearts!60 In an age of science, the great sentimental tools of suffering, faith, and sacrifice prove triumphant. For many critics, this meeting of science and sentiment lay at the heart of La Nouvelle Idole’s appeal. Hippolyte Lemaire described Curel’s drama



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as the “inaugural play of a new form of theatre.’ ” “Whether one likes it or not,” he elaborated, “dramatic art, more and more oriented towards the truth, is also assimilating more and more scientific methods of observation.” He praised Curel’s microcosmic use of a particular human story to explore large social and moral concepts. At the same time, he commended Curel for advancing a beautiful and consoling truth, which is that the indestructible instinct of solidarity and devotion that lies in the depths of men’s hearts, often most lively in the hearts of the most humble, will always remain, across all civilizations and all religions, the sure and eternal guide of humanity’s progress.61 Adolphe Brisson agreed that La Nouvelle Idole was “a drama that has profoundly moved the public, touching them in every way, both through the heart and through the head.”62 So emotional was the audience after watching Curel’s play, Edmond Stoullig affirmed, that they needed the marital comedy offered by the Théâtre-­Antoine as an afterpiece, Que Suzanne n’en sache rien (Don’t Tell Suzanne), for health reasons, in order to “relax the nerves that up until then had been so deliciously moved.”63 Reviewers showered Mlle. Bellanger, who played Antoinette in Antoine’s Nouvelle Idole, with the classic terms of adulation for the actress of a consumptive heroine. Stoullig, for example, enthused that she “showed herself at once touching, pitiable, certain [of her faith], and so tender, and—­ like that Mary whom she adores on her knees—­full of grace.”64 Curel himself ascribed Bellanger’s power over the audience’s emotions to the almost off-­hand naturalism of her line-­deliveries: She understood that little Antoinette would be that much more touching if she “gave her life wholesale instead of retail” as if she were talking about a coin she had thrown to a beggar. The expressions “wholesale and retail,” more commercial than tragic, she spoke with a naïve thoughtlessness. I once had the experience, in a provincial theatre, of seeing a young Antoinette recite all her lines from the third act with her arms crossed over her breast, in the resigned attitude of Joan of Arc at the stake. She was quite simply ridiculous.65 The provincial Antoinette’s attitudes sound like imitations of those with which that great neo-­Romantic, Sarah Bernhardt, had depicted her frail and girlish Joan of Arc. Curel praises Mlle. Bellanger for eschewing such

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effects and delivering his dialogue, laced with quotidian slang terms just as Zola had recommended, as if her noble self-­sacrifice were an everyday transaction. Here, naturalism and sentimentalism appear not as opposites, but as linked tools within the artist’s arsenal, working together toward the same idealist goal. In 1902, an English translation of La Nouvelle Idole was performed as part of the Stage Society’s third repertory season in London. Like the Théâtre-­ Libre, the Stage Society was an independent company that strove to produce socially relevant plays and to foster new theatrical talent. Many of its key members, including George Bernard Shaw and his protégé Harley Granville Barker, were leading lights of the English “new drama” movement. The Society’s 1902 season featured The New Idol alongside Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Barker’s The Marrying of Ann Leete, and Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea. In other words, fully half of the 1902 repertory of this very modern company was taken up by consumptive dramas. As they had done with plays from the French repertoire poitrinaire since the 1830s, English reviewers described The New Idol as quintessentially French—­that is, as simultaneously too materialist and too sentimental for English taste. These failings were now ascribed to the scientific bent of naturalism. In a review titled “All the ’Ologies,” the St. James Gazette declared that “French dramatic art is at present running in the direction of the laboratory and the operating room, we know. Various unsavoury ‘problems’ are the common places [sic] of the unlicensed stage.” The reviewer went on to dismiss this particular problem play as “wonderfully sentimental,” “wonderfully French,” and “wonderfully, supremely, transcendently dull.”66 In a column poised above an advertisement for cough drops, the critic of the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News complained that the Stage Society “seems to have persuaded itself that it is only the sickly that is new and that is at the same time nice,” adding that most of the play’s topics “would be better placed in the lecture-­room of the hospital than on the stage.”67 The Westminster Gazette was more sympathetic, asserting that From France—­and from the Stage Society—­we are in the habit of expecting something “strong”: and we usually get it. [. . .] “The New Idol,” by François de Curel, is a study of the merely horrible. But when you have become acclimatised to the atmosphere of the operating theatre, and “the shrieks from the dissecting room” have ceased to engross



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your attention to the exclusion of everything else, [. . .] you begin to realise that what at first threatened to be an anti-­vivisection pamphlet is really a tragedy of considerable power and of very great interest.68 Such reviews tie the “new” dramatic approach of the Stage Society to the “sickly” nature of modern French theatre, poising Britain’s realist “new drama” to tap into both the science and the sentiment of the French repertoire poitrinaire.

The Dying Actor and His Audience This conjunction did indeed contribute to the making of Shaw’s “medical tragedy” The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906), one of the “new dramas” to emerge from the seasons of repertory playing managed by Harley Granville Barker and J. E. Vedrenne at London’s Court Theatre in 1904–1907. The immediate catalyst for the play was a tussle between Shaw and his fellow Ibsenite, the critic William Archer, which arose in the wake of Ibsen’s death in May 1906. In a memorial essay, Shaw criticized the master’s inability to abandon old-­school sentimentalism, likening Ibsen to Dickens as a murderer of innocents. “Little Nell and Paul Dombey, the Brand infant and Little Eyolf are each as tremendously effective as a blow below the belt,” he conceded; “but they are dishonorable as artistic devices because they depend on a morbid horror of death and a morbid enjoyment of horror.”69 In response, Archer declared that he did not believe Shaw’s “re-­evaluation of dramatic values” would “commend itself to the mass of mankind” since Shaw feared to grapple with “that affirmation and consummation of destiny that only death can bring.”70 Shaw shot back that his next drama would prove his willingness to face the “King of Terrors” onstage.71 That play, which premiered at the Court in November 1906, shied away from neither death nor sentimentality. In The Doctor’s Dilemma, the respected physician Colenso Ridgeon, recently knighted for his discovery of a cure for tuberculosis founded upon the science of germ theory, is forced to choose between two potential candidates for his treatment: the pedestrian but good-­hearted doctor Blenkinsop, or the extravagantly gifted but morally bankrupt young artist Louis Dubedat. Disgusted by Dubedat’s behavior and sexually attracted to his beautiful wife Jennifer, Ridgeon chooses to cure Blenkinsop and to

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abandon Dubedat to the ignorant ministrations of the society doctor Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonnington, which promptly ensure the artist’s demise. When Jennifer, who views her dead husband as a “king among men,” 72 angrily rejects Ridgeon’s advances, he is forced to admit that he has “committed a purely disinterested murder.” 73 A much lighter-­hearted play than La Nouvelle Idole, The Doctor’s Dilemma arguably offers a far darker view of both modern medical science and the consumptive repertoire. Like Albert Donnat, Shaw’s Colenso Ridgeon is a scientist who plays God with the lives of consumptive patients; but his “murder” of Dubedat differs from Donnat’s fatal injection of Antoinette with cancer in that it provides no benefit to humankind and is driven more by Ridgeon’s desire for Jennifer than by his desire to cure humanity’s ills. Unlike Antoinette, moreover, neither of the tubercular patients in The Doctor’s Dilemma fully fits the sentimental image of the beautiful, noble, and self-­sacrificial consumptive. Blenkinsop is overworked, earnest, and morally upright, but also “flabby and shabby” 74 —­and more than a little dull. The gallically named Louis Dubedat, meanwhile, is glamorous, passionate, and artistically gifted, very much in the mold of French male consumptive artists such as Raphael in Les Filles de Marbre. But where Raphael was betrayed by a mercenary woman, Louis blithely commits adultery and bigamy, borrows money he has no intention of paying back, and even considers pimping out his wife. “Shaw has cleverly split the traits of the stage tubercular between the two characters,” Alexis Soloski observes; Dubedat has the consumptive chic, Blenkinsop the self-­sacrificing nobility.75 While this means that “[n]either man completely deserves”76 death by consumption, it also guarantees that neither embodies the simultaneous charm and virtue offered by a classic poitrinaire such as Curel’s Antoinette. Ruthlessly anti-­idealizing, The Doctor’s Dilemma exposes the constructed nature of many of the consumptive repertoire’s most cherished tenets. When Shaw introduces Dubedat, he notes that the “artist’s power of appealing to the imagination gains him credit for all sorts of qualities and powers, whether he possesses them or not.”77 His adoring wife sees in him the emotional sincerity, sensitivity, and intensity that had traditionally been materialized through consumptive symptoms on the sentimental stage. However, Louis’s own first manifestation of those symptoms gives the lie to her perception. When Ridgeon’s colleague Walpole compliments his talent for pastels, Shaw’s stage directions note that “Louis coughs, first out



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of modesty, then from tuberculosis.” 78 The first cough is a sign that Louis—­ who is far from modest—­is playing up to his interlocutor; the second, “from tuberculosis,” is a physiological reaction set off by the first. Here—­perhaps for the first time in the consumptive repertoire—­the symptom does not disclose inwardness; it only discloses disease. As for the disease itself, from the point of view of Shaw’s doctors it is simply a matter of “these germs—­ these bacilli”: 79 an infection caused by an enemy they hope to rout. When Ridgeon reminds Jennifer Dubedat that “tuberculosis is catching,” she responds, “I am not likely to forget it. They treat us like lepers at the hotels.”80 In such passages, the poétique du poitrinaire appears, like Bunbury, to be quite exploded. Nevertheless, the old tropes of the repertoire poitrinaire keep sneaking back into The Doctor’s Dilemma. “Rotten blackguard” though he is, Louis Dubedat lives up with more insouciance than any of his theatrical predecessors to the requirement that a consumptive hero should bravely acknowledge his own doom. When the doctors strive to reform Louis by reminding him of his mortality, he waves away their warnings: LOUIS: We’re all going to die, arnt we? WALPOLE: We’re not all going to die in six months. LOUIS: How do you know? [. . .] I never knew a parson who didnt threaten me with damnation. And now you threaten me with death. With all your talk youve only one real trump in your hand, and thats Intimidation. Well, I’m not a coward; so it’s no use with me.81 When the next act finds him desperately sick, Louis is “not scared.”82 In response to a request from a newspaperman for “a few words on your illness, and your plans for the season,” he remarks simply, “My plans for the season are very simple. Im going to die.”83 These coolly courageous remarks, prominently cited in the London Bystander’s review of the play (Fig. 14),84 launch The Doctor’s Dilemma into an extended riff upon the most famous death scene of the repertoire poitrinaire, that of Marguerite Gautier. Shaw’s stage directions set up deliberate visual parallels, flagged by the critic A. B. Walkley, to a famous contemporary production of Dumas fils’s play. As the Bystander’s photograph of the original production shows, “Louis dies, or fades away, before our eyes, with his head on Jennifer’s breast [just] as Duse dies on Armand’s in the last act

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Figure 14. “No more dull death scenes!” Harley Granville Barker (center) in the death scene of Louis Dubedat, The Doctor’s Dilemma, from The Bystander (London), 1906. Courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Library.

of La Dame.”85 The Italian actress Eleanora Duse, Bernhardt’s great rival on the fin-­de-­siècle stage, was so dedicated to stripping away the clichés of the repertoire poitrinaire that her Marguerite did not even cough;86 Shaw vehemently preferred the simplicity of her dame aux camélias to Bernhardt’s “sorrows and paroxysms of phthisis.”87 If his portrayal of Dubedat’s death scene paid tribute to the modernist austerity of Duse’s performance, however, it also embraced the sentimentalism of the older poitrinaire tradition. Just as Dumas’s dying Marguerite tells Armand that she “loves” death because “once I am dead, everything you will keep of me will be pure,”88 Louis bids those around him not to grieve: “I don’t want to live. Ive escaped from myself. I’m in heaven, immortal in the heart of my beautiful Jennifer.”89



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Marguerite encourages Armand to marry “a beautiful young girl who loves you.”90 Louis, too, declares, “You will marry again, Jennifer [. . .] because people who have found marriage happy always marry again. Ah, I shant be jealous.”91 At this point, however, Shaw reframes his sentimental source through the anti-­idealizing lens of naturalism. Where Marguerite bids Armand sacrifice her memory if his wife demands it, Louis goes on “slyly”: “But don’t talk to the other fellow too much about me: he wont like it. (Almost chuckling) I shall be your lover all the time; but it will be a secret from him, poor devil!”92 Even as he pictures himself cuckolding his wife’s second husband from beyond the grave, Louis blithely affirms that “[w]ith all my faults I don’t think Ive ever been really selfish.”93 His final actions suggest otherwise. His penultimate words are a direct echo of Marguerite Gautier’s: “I think I shall recover after all. [. . .] Because I suddenly want to sleep. Just an ordinary sleep.” Then, with his final breath, he asks whether the newspaperman is still there.94 His death has been a consummately self-­ regarding performance. Harley Granville Barker, for whom Shaw wrote the role of Louis Du­ bedat, clearly made the most of this half-­sincere, half-­parodic version of the French-­style poitrinaire. Barker had personal connections to consumption; his father and sister had died of the disease, and recent scholarship has suggested that he may himself have suffered from it.95 Dark-­haired and slender, he had the kind of physical instrument that actors such as Lockroy, Fechter, and Booth had established as requisite for the type. Shaw’s description of Louis as “a slim young man of 23, physically still a stripling, and pretty, though not effeminate” pays tribute not only to the delicate charms of the traditional consumptive hero,96 but also to Barker’s own appearance in 1906 (Fig. 14).97 Shaw wrote that the actor, who was a veteran of many of his quasi-­Romantic roles,98 was “always useful when a touch of poetry and refinement is needed.”99 Some reviewers took his emotional effects in The Doctor’s Dilemma seriously, as when the Referee asserted that “the long death-­scene is played with a feeling, deep yet undemonstrative—­which would be deeply affecting, but for the discordant humorous sallies with which the author disturbs the impression.”100 Another reviewer declared Barker’s death “as fine a piece of acting in its way as Sarah Bernhardt’s in ‘La Dame aux Camélias.’ ”101 But if Barker cut a sentimental figure, he was

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also a realist—­and, Shaw joked, “a cold-­hearted” one at that.102 The Manchester Courier declared him “inimitable as the artist-­scoundrel” whose apparently Romantic qualities were undercut by his amorality.103 While some reviewers wept for him, others condemned “this impudent young adventurer, whom we refuse to consider a hero or an unfortunate to be sympathized with.”104 Dubedat’s death scene, with its “extraordinary mixture of macabre irony and poetically pathetic fancy,”105 provoked similarly varied responses. Some saw it as inappropriately naturalistic; the Sphere complained that it had “shocked a great many [. . .] who are not naturally squeamish” because Shaw had chosen “to be realistic, forgetting that realism is often indecent.”106 The Daily News objected that there was “not a spark of pathos, of mystery, of poetry, or of humanity in it.”107 On the other hand, the Daily Telegraph found the scene “pathetic and almost tragic,” and objected only to the fact that “coming, as it did, towards the conclusion of a play which had been to a large extent farcical in character, its sheer unconventionality produced a decided shock.”108 This debate continues among contemporary scholars. Conti, for example, reads the play as “Shaw’s sardonic inversion of the consumptive myth,”109 while Soloski argues that by “providing Dubedat with a pathetic death scene that brings both characters and audience members to tears” it “ultimately supports, seemingly in spite of itself, the conventional, sentimental narrative of the typical fictional tubercular.”110 Placing Conti’s and Soloksi’s arguments in dialogue with one another, I would suggest that, rather than rejecting sentimental models altogether or acceding to them in spite of himself, Shaw consciously exploited them in The Doctor’s Dilemma. As his tussle with Archer over Ibsen’s legacy demonstrates, Shaw was wryly aware of the tenacity of sentimental tropes. He was also powerfully conscious of the growing hegemony of germ theory, of which he was a staunch (if inconsistent) opponent.111 Rather than a battle between science and sentiment in which one side must be true and the other false, The Doctor’s Dilemma is a tale of two paradigms—­the scientific and the sentimental—­that Shaw understands as equally fictive. The question is not which narrative the play supports, but rather which narrative it recognizes as spinning the more effective yarn. From the first scenes of The Doctor’s Dilemma, Shaw brings the constructed and assailable nature of scientific narratives in general—­and of germ theory in particular—­to the fore. The venerable old doctor, Sir Patrick Cullen, expresses little faith in Ridgeon’s great discovery:



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Ive known over thirty men that found out how to cure consumption. Why do people go on dying of it, Colly? Devilment, I suppose. There was my father’s old friend George Boddington of Sutton Coldfield. He discovered the open-­air cure in eighteen-­forty. He was ruined and driven out of his practice for only opening the windows; and now we won’t let a consumptive patient have as much as a roof over his head. Oh, it’s very VERY interesting to an old man.112 From Sir Patrick’s vantage point, the ever-­shifting cures for consumption are simply tales told and retold across generations, falling in and out of fashion while the disease continues to thrive. Sir Ralph Bloomfield Bonnington (aka “B.B.”) combats this cyclical view of medical history by constructing germ theory as the end point of a grand progress narrative. He proclaims his pride in his “own generation: the men who were trained on the germ theory, the veterans of the great struggle over Evolution in the seventies. We may have our faults; but at least we are men of science. That is why I am taking up your treatment, Ridgeon, and pushing it. It’s scientific.”113 Of course, it is this very treatment that—­in B.B.’s incompetent hands—­k ills Dubedat. While B.B. trumpets the claims of a science he lethally fails to understand, his artistic patient remains a staunch idealist. As he dies, he instructs Jennifer in the role she will play in the construction of his myth: Men must get such dreams from seeing you as they never could get from any daubing with paints and brushes. Painters must paint you as they never painted any mortal woman before. There must be a great tradition of beauty, a great atmosphere of wonder and romance. That is what men must always think of when they think of me. That is the sort of immortality I want.114 Like any gifted sentimentalist, Louis uses the pathos of his early death to create “beauty” and “romance,” jettisoning his own inconvenient upsurges of naturalistic skepticism as he goes. “I used to think that our marriage was all an affectation,” he tells Jennifer, “and that I’d break loose and run away some day. But now that I’m going to be broken loose whether I like it or not, I’m perfectly fond of you, and perfectly satisfied because I’m going to live as part of you and not as my troublesome self.”115 Dubedat’s sentimental tale of self-­transcendence hits the mark. Most of the doctors are deeply moved, with only Ridgeon remaining “implacable.”116

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When Sir Patrick bids him leave the room to avoid getting on the patient’s nerves, Ridgeon sneers: RIDGEON: (apart to Sir Patrick) Would you deprive the dying actor of his audience? LOUIS: (his face lighting up faintly with mischievous glee) I heard that, Ridgeon. That was good. Jennifer dear: be kind to Ridgeon always; because he was the last man who amused me. RIDGEON: (relentless) Was I? LOUIS: But it’s not true. It’s you who are still on the stage. I’m half way home already.117 The man of science uses anti-­theatrical rhetoric to discredit the artist’s “deliberate and consummate re-­enactment of the mythic tragic demise à la Marguerite Gautier,”118 exposing it as a piece of passé melodrama. Louis makes no apologies for his death’s performative nature. But even as he rounds it off with a quintessentially sentimental reference to his impending arrival in his heavenly “home,” he also reminds Ridgeon that the doctor, too, is “on the stage.” Like the artist, the scientist is merely a player. The crucial difference between their performances lies in their reception. Like Ibsen, Shaw plants a surrogate sentimental spectator in the midst of his ironical consumptive drama. As in The Lady from the Sea, that spectator is a young woman who is attracted to the dying artist. But Dubedat, unlike Lyngstrand, respects this spectator’s power. As he dies, he reminds Jennifer of a vision they once shared of a burning bush: LOUIS: Whenever you see the flame, Jennifer, that will be me. Promise me that I shall be burnt. MRS DUBEDAT: Oh, if I might be with you, Louis! LOUIS: No: you must always be in the garden when the bush flames.119 If his sentimental performance is to triumph, Louis needs Jennifer’s ongoing allegiance to his myth. She obliges, maintaining her exalted vision of him even when Ridgeon tries to disillusion her by offering his realist alternative. To his assertion of the “buried truth” that Dubedat was “the most callously selfish blackguard that ever made a wife miserable,” she replies, “you don’t understand: that is all. You never could have believed in him. It is just like your not believing in my religion: it is a sort of sixth sense that you



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have not got.”120 Where Hilde Wangel had played cynically at sentimental spectatorship, Jennifer embraces the same role with ardent idealism. The poétique du poitrinaire, Shaw suggests, will survive germ theory not because it is true, but because spectators want it to be true—­and because the “truths” offered by modern science are not powerful enough to supplant it. Just two years before Louis Dubedat died so histrionically on the stage of the Court Theatre, a real-­life tubercular death took place at the German spa town of Badenweiler. Described by Janet Malcolm as “one of the great set pieces of literary history,”121 the passing of the 44-­year-­old doctor and playwright Anton Pavlovich Chekhov comes down to us as reported by his wife, the actress Olga Knipper, who tells how Anton sat up unusually straight and said loudly and clearly (although he knew almost no German): Ich sterbe [‘I’m dying’]. The doctor calmed him, took a syringe, gave him an injection of camphor, and ordered champagne. Anton took a full glass, examined it, smiled at me and said: “It’s a long time since I drank champagne.” He drained it and lay quietly on his left side, and I just had time to run to him and lean across the bed and call to him, but he had stopped breathing and was sleeping peacefully as a child.122 Knipper’s narrative gives all the details that one might expect from a realist play: the syringe, the injection of camphor, the glass of champagne. At the same time, Chekhov’s frank acknowledgment of his own impending demise; his courageous, playful last words; and his peaceful, childlike passing fit neatly into the sentimental image of the consumptive death scene. Himself a practicing physician, Chekhov embraced Koch’s research and declared that “if I were offered a choice between the ‘ideals’ of the celebrated sixties and today’s poorest [. . .] hospital, I’d take the latter without the least hesitation.”123 In his 1887 play Ivanov, nevertheless, he created the character of Anna Petrovna, née Sara, a consumptive Jewess who sacrifices her faith and family for love of her husband, only to die in misery when he abandons her for a younger and healthier woman.124 Chekhov treats Sara with much greater sympathy than he does the self-­righteous young doctor, Lvov, who wants to save her but cannot understand her love for Ivanov. A scientist and a realist, Chekhov displayed the same willingness to engage the tropes of the sentimental repertoire poitrinaire—­and to use those tropes to critique the medical profession—­as had Curel and Shaw. Like that of his

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contemporaries, Chekhov’s work shows the sentimental stage consumptive not only surviving but actually thriving in the age of the bacillus. Clark Lawlor ascribes such survivals to the fact that “narratives of consumption were still performing certain important discursive functions in society.”125 One of those functions was that of countering—­or, at least, complicating—­the rising hegemony of scientific positivism in modern western societies. But the death scenes of Dubedat and Chekhov also underline a deeper role played by the consumptive repertoire. Olga Knipper, like Jennifer Dubedat, turned to sentimental consumptive tropes to articulate her husband’s identity as well as his passing, suggesting that these tropes had been incorporated into her modes of understanding her world. By shaping the ways in which subjects perceived their own realities, the consumptive repertoire had become a part of the real.

7 The Con that Tells the Truth The Consumptive Repertoire and the Autobiogr aphical Impulse in American Theatre, 1912–1977

G

“Belief is the secret to reality.” —­Charles Ludlam

In his memoir of 1920s Paris, A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway offers an unforgiving portrait of the Irish American poet Ernest Walsh, who died of tuberculosis in 1926 aged 31. Walsh, he writes, was “dark, intense, faultlessly Irish, poetic and clearly marked for death as a character is marked for death in a motion picture.”1 Hemingway depicts Walsh as using his air de poitrinaire to cadge money from “lady admirers of poetry and of young poets who were marked for death.” When Walsh tries a similar gambit on Hemingway, the latter responds with contempt: I looked at him and his marked-­for-­death look and I thought, you con man conning me with your con. I’ve seen a battalion in the dust on the road, a third of them marked for death or worse and no special marks on them, the dust and all, and you and your marked for death look, you con man, making a living out of your death.2 By contrasting Walsh’s consumptive appearance unfavorably with a remembered image of soldiers bound for slaughter on the western front, Hemingway constructs combat as an appropriate form of suffering and heroism for the modern American male. He ties the suffering of the sentimental consumptive to theatricality and inauthenticity, as well as by implication to effeminacy. To set up as “marked for death” in the modern world, Hemingway suggests, is to con others—­and oneself. — 183 —

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Despite such dismissals, the consumptive repertoire—­and the French-­ style consumptive hero—­ were far from defunct in twentieth-­ century America. Many physicians and the sanatoria they ran for tubercular patients continued to approach tuberculosis as a product of sufferers’ emotional and psychological histories, as well as of bacterial infection. This medical context helped sentimental consumptive tropes to survive as tools of self-­ fashioning in the modern American theatre, especially for male-­presenting artists who disidentified with the aggressive masculinity celebrated by Hemingway. A tubercular patient who, as the son of a nineteenth-­century matinee idol, was to the sentimental manor born, Eugene O’Neill worked his self-­mythologization as a Romantic poitrinaire directly into the naturalistic dramaturgy of autobiographical plays like The Straw and Long Day’s Journey into Night. Tennessee Williams, too, called upon lived experiences with tuberculosis in his late dramas Kingdom of Earth (The Seven Descents of Myrtle) and Vieux Carré, which used the disease’s established cultural profile tacitly to associate his own queer, white, “sissy” identity with sickness and death. In Charles Ludlam’s 1973 Camille, by contrast, Dumas fils’s beloved drama served as the vehicle for a joyfully defiant expression of queer subjectivity. “Con” though it might be, the sentimental poétique du poitrinaire functioned for these artists, rather like the camp aesthetic that both Williams and Ludlam employed, as a lie that told the truth about inward subjectivity.3 On the twentieth-­century American stage, the symptoms of tuberculosis remained symptoms of the self.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Poitrinaire In 1896, American physician A. L. Benedict declared that once consumption was understood as a contagious disease, the “veil should be drawn from the loathsomeness of the ‘great white scourge,’ that false sentiment which poetry and prose have thrown over infection.”4 As Koch’s arguments about tuberculosis’s infectious nature gained increasing credence not only in the medical profession but in society more broadly, this anti-­Romantic understanding of the illness also gained traction. Tuberculosis was constructed as a loathsome foe to be combatted by rigorous public health measures. In the United States, the 1890s and 1900s saw the creation of multiple societies for the prevention of the disease, including the National Tuberculosis Association.5 These societies “preached to Americans from all walks of life the



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same hygienic message: tuberculosis was a deadly communicable disease that could be prevented by careful hygiene.”6 The “all-­too-­frequent custom of promiscuous spitting in public”7 came in for particular censure from public health campaigns, which stressed that the infected sputum of “the careless or ignorant expectorating consumptive can eliminate and distribute seven billions of bacilli in twenty-­four hours.”8 While advocating for improved living conditions, education, and hygiene standards to diminish this threat, crusaders also promoted the construction of sanatoria where consumptives could be treated at a safe distance from the healthy population. The sanatorium cure based on “a simple, frugal life spent in sparsely furnished cottages and in harmony with the outdoors”9 had been pioneered in America by the physician Edward  L. Trudeau, who had brought his own tubercular infection under control in the 1870s by open-­air living, moderate exercise, and healthy eating. By the early twentieth century, sanatoria across the country were emulating Trudeau’s model.10 Deeply conscious of tuberculosis’s contagious nature, these twentieth-­century sanatoria required patients to “cover their mouths, dispose hygienically of sputum, and cleanse soiled utensils and linens.”11 The good tubercular patient was one who learned to manage infectious bodily effluvia, gaining readmission to civil society only when likely to be non-­infectious. At first sight, the gap between such constructions of tubercular patients as contagious menaces to the body politic and the old Romantic tropes of the disease appears absolute. Nevertheless, the emotionally based understandings of consumption that had shaped its sentimental profile still century worked alongside contagionist approaches at early twentieth-­ American sanatoria. Medical professionals continued to believe that tuberculosis both provoked sadness and was exacerbated by it, encouraging patients “to maintain vigilance over their thoughts so as not to dwell upon sad or melancholic sentiments.”12 In his 1922 Hygiene and Efficiency for the Tuberculous, John Wakeman Turner described the sanatorium as a “health school” where the patient was “taught to relax, to put away worry, to get over his homesickness, and to suppress other depressing emotions.”13 Artistic creativity was encouraged as a means of dispelling the sadness and anxiety that assailed tubercular patients. In particular, “writing, as a means of alleviating fear and boosting morale, was served along with diet, bed rest, and sunlight as a means of detoxifying the tubercular body.”14 Albeit

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by a different medical logic, the characteristics that had been associated with consumption in the Romantic era—­intense emotion, melancholia, and heightened creativity—­retained their ties to the disease in the age of the sanatorium. Eugene O’Neill’s experience of tuberculosis highlights this point. O’Neill was a twenty-­four-­year-­old newspaper reporter working in New London, Connecticut, in October 1912 when he developed a persistent cough and began to lose weight. His earliest explanations of his infection focused on the contagion, poverty, and dirt with which tuberculosis was associated in contemporary public health campaigns; he told a doctor that he had likely contracted tuberculosis while “visiting dives and tenement houses as a reporter,” and later remarked to a friend that he had probably gotten “a dose of those germs” from the “lungers” with whom he had dossed down the previous spring at a notorious New York saloon.15 On Christmas Eve 1912, O’Neill was admitted to Gaylord Farm, a privately funded sanatorium that offered a strict rest cure. Within five months he was discharged, with his doctor, David R. Lyman, affirming that “in his present condition he would not be a menace to any one.”16 Alongside anti-­contagionist strategies, emotionally and morally focused approaches to tuberculosis formed a key part of Eugene O’Neill’s experience at Gaylord Farm. In a move Laënnec would have understood, Dr. Lyman discouraged romances between the patients, finding that the ‘healthy heart’ interferes with ‘the cure of the sick lung.’ Eventually he would stress his view in a printed card, handed to all patients on their arrival, that bore the legend: Scatter your Attention: Do Not Concentrate.17 O’Neill seems to have followed Lyman’s injunctions against all forms of emotional intensity. Though he engaged in a number of flirtations while at Gaylord, including one with fellow patient Catherine (Kitty) MacKay, he did not commit himself to any serious passions. Instead, he penned a satirical romantic ballad in which he begged his female addressee to “scour and cleanse my soul of the mire,  / (A regular Christian thing to do).”18 Though this verse treated the moral and emotional conversion the sanatorium sought to achieve as something of a joke, O’Neill did view Gaylord Farm—­and his experience of tuberculosis—­as salutary and even redemptive. In a 1946 interview, he declared that “the inactivity forced upon me



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by life at a san [. . .] forced me to mental activity, especially as I had always been high-­strung and nervous temperamentally.”19 Constructing the sanatorium as a school of interiority, O’Neill ascribed to it not only his victory over his classically consumptive “nervous” temperament, but also his decision to become a playwright. In a letter to Dr. Lyman, O’Neill described Gaylord Farm as “the place I was reborn in,” adding that “my second birth was the only one which had my full approval.”20 Having passed through the crucible of consumption, he was resurrected as a writer who could translate his suffering into art. The strongly affective dimension of O’Neill’s treatment for tuberculosis may help to explain the sentimental survivals that mark his contributions to the consumptive repertoire. O’Neill’s earliest successful full-­length drama, Beyond the Horizon (1918), features a tubercular hero, Robert Mayo, who chooses to stay on his father’s farm instead of pursuing his dreams of adventure and dies in penury after years of pain. Beyond the Horizon ran for 111 performances at Broadway’s Morosco Theatre and won O’Neill the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes. Celebrated in its time as a modern American tragedy, its reputation as a pivotal rejection of nineteenth-­century dramatic values has endured.21 For the protagonist of a supposedly “naturalistic play with no melodramatic overtones,”22 however, Robert Mayo cuts an exceedingly sentimental figure. A refined, poetry-­loving young man whose physical fragility externalizes his deep emotional sensibility, Robert cannot escape the catastrophe inscribed in and through his body. His farm fails because he is too frail to run it, his wife comes to hate his impractical and dreamy nature, and his beloved daughter dies of hereditary illness. Through great physical and emotional suffering, he finally gains the anagnorisis articulated in his last words, which declare that life’s meaning is to be found “only through sacrifice.”23 The reviewers of Beyond the Horizon lauded the matinee idol Richard Bennett, who played Robert Mayo, in highly sentimental terms, praising his “remarkably beautiful and imaginative portrayal of the unhappy wild bird with clipped wings, dying in captivity, bearing his burdens cheerfully, hopefully, uncomplainingly.”24 At the heart of O’Neill’s emergent American naturalism, the stage consumptive’s affective capital—­ and the constructions of interiorized, tormented selfhood upon which it depended—­lived on. The consumptive repertoire and its emotional accoutrements were arguably a part of O’Neill’s own familial inheritance. His father, James O’Neill,

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had made his reputation in the 1870s and 80s as a handsome jeune premier in the sentimental French repertoire. In 1877, he played Armand Duval to Clara Morris’s Camille in New York, 25 and in 1881 he prepared the role of Raphael in The Marble Heart in Chicago.26 His most famous role was that of Edmond Dantès in Monte-­Cristo, an adaptation of Dumas père’s novel The Count of Monte Cristo that had been introduced to America by Charles-­A lbert Fechter. In this role, the St. Joseph Herald declared, “He has the picturesqueness of Fechter, whose successor he may well be called, and he possesses even in a greater degree Fechter’s poetic charm and enkindling power.”27 In Monte-­Cristo, O’Neill was praised for sharing many of the characteristics that had rendered Fechter the prince of poitrinaires in his youth; the Herald’s critic rhapsodized about his mouth: “sensitive, yet firm, a shade of sadness blending with its smile, giving a strange interest to the whole countenance.”28 As a young man, O’Neill also acted opposite the most Romantically melancholic of Fechter’s American contemporaries, Edwin Booth.29 James O’Neill thus spent his career in close proximity to the repertoire poitrinaire, and Eugene O’Neill grew up at very few degrees of separation from it. In his two explicitly autobiographical—­and putatively naturalistic—­dramas of tuberculosis, The Straw (1919) and Long Day’s Journey into Night (completed in 1942; first published in 1956), he drew upon the repertoire’s sentimental poetics to mythologize his own youthful experience of the disease. Based directly on O’Neill’s experiences at Gaylord Farm and his friendship with Kitty MacKay, The Straw depicts the romance between O’Neill’s surrogate, Stephen Murray, and Kitty’s stand-­in, Eileen Carmody. At first sight, The Straw’s representation of the terror and disgust surrounding tubercular infection in an era of public health campaigns appears unimpeachably naturalistic. In the play’s first act, when a recently diagnosed Eileen tries to embrace her fiancé, he “shudders and fights against an impulse to push her away.”30 Upon her arrival at Hill Farm Sanatorium, she herself is repulsed by a nurse’s instructions about sputum management: EILEEN: (falteringly) She said they’d give me—­a—­cup to carry around—­ (She stops, shuddering.) MURRAY: (easily) It’s not as bad as it sounds. They’re only little paste-­board things you carry in your pocket. EILEEN: (as if speaking to herself ) It’s so horrible.31



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In another scene, O’Neill depicts the weekly weighing of sanatorium patients as a kind of high-­stakes spectator sport, in which the denizens of Hill Farm “stare [. . .] with pitying looks and murmur consoling phrases”32 at those whose weight loss indicates active infection. By replacing the graceful coughs and glamorous pallor of the poitrinaire with the sanatorium’s rigid policing of ailing bodies, such scenes consciously mark their distance from the sentimental stage. Far from being ironized or challenged by O’Neill’s depiction of bacterial infection and its treatment, however, interiority and self-­sacrifice—­the sine qua nons of the consumptive repertoire—­play out in and through the sick bodies of The Straw’s protagonists. When the rapidly recovering Murray and the rapidly failing Eileen compare the results of their weighing, she greets the news that he has gained three pounds by exclaiming tearfully, “Oh—­I’m so glad—­you gained—­the ones I lost, Stephen—­so glad!”33 After Eileen confesses her love for Murray, their shared awareness of TB’s infectious nature works to externalize their emotions and emphasize their selflessness: EILEEN: (pulling down his head with fierce strength and kissing him passionately on the lips). I love you! I will say it! There! (With sudden horror.) Oh, I know I shouldn’t kiss you! I mustn’t! You’re all well—­and I—­ MURRAY: (protesting frenziedly). Eileen! Damn it! Don’t say that! What do you think I am! (He kisses her fiercely two or three times until she forces a hand over her mouth.) EILEEN: (with a hysterically happy laugh). No! Just hold me in your arms—­just a little while—­before—­34 By “ forc[ing] a hand over her mouth” to avoid re-­infecting Murray, Eileen renders literal the logic of La Vie de Bohème and La Dame aux Camélias, in which the suffering and death of the working-­class woman pays for the survival of the middle-­class man. By putting his own precarious health at risk by “fiercely” returning her kiss, meanwhile, Murray claims the heroic courage of the Romantic male poitrinaire. The final act of The Straw offers a first in the history of the consumptive repertoire: a love scene between two consumptive heroes. When Murray returns to visit Hill Farm, he finds Eileen dying. Though she tries to keep

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up a brave front for him, she responds to his exit with a gesture worthy of Bernhardt, “struggl[ing] up in bed and stretch[ing] her arms after him with an agonized sob.”35 Lest the audience entertain any doubt about the sentimental nature of Eileen’s ailment, Nurse Gilpin tells Murray that she will die “because lately she’s given up hope, she hasn’t wanted to live any more. [. . .] I suppose you know that Eileen loves you, don’t you?”36 Realizing that his departure has hastened Eileen’s decline, Murray decides to lie to her, telling her that he is returning to the sanatorium as a patient and that he wishes to marry her. Aglow, she is convinced that she will recover, until Stephen “remembers [her] doom”: EILEEN: (with a cry) Stephen! What is the matter? (Her face suddenly betrays an awareness, an intuitive sense of the truth.) Oh—­ Stephen—­(then with a childish whimper of terror) Oh, Stephen, I’m going to die! I’m going to die! MURRAY: (lifting his tortured face—­wildly) No! EILEEN: (her voice sinking to a dead whisper) I’m going to die.37 In an era when Camille still retained a firm hold on the American imagination,38 few theatre-­or filmgoers could have failed to recognize this citation of its celebrated final scene, in which Marguerite realizes that if Armand’s return has not saved her, nothing will.39 In O’Neill’s riff on this sequence, the tubercular Murray is able to reassure Eileen: “I didn’t mean you—­but me—­yes, me! [. . .] I don’t know how to live without you, don’t you see?”40 The medical fact of Murray’s previous infection helps him to convince her of his claims, and as the play ends she is telling him in “a tone of motherly, self-­forgetting solicitude” that she will now “have to look out for” him.41 Murray’s self-­abnegation in re-­committing himself to tuberculosis allows Eileen to take on her own self-­sacrificial role as a caregiver, and thus to grasp onto a thin straw of hope. O’Neill described his drama as “a play of the significance of human hope,” asserting that “the T.B. background of the action is as important as the action itself in bringing out my meaning.”42 When it closed after only twenty performances at New York’s Greenwich Village Theatre, he worried that “the fault must lie in the subject matter” and the “shudder” it provoked.43 Some critics did indeed disparage The Straw as a “repellant study in tuberculosis,”44 with the acerbic Alan Dale declaring that it was “likely to kill the audience.”45 Others, however, disagreed. “Pulmonary



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drama, except for the sentimental case of ‘Camille,’ might be thought forbidding and gloomy,” reflected Charles Darnton, “[but] O’Neill does not make it so, giving it the saving quality of youth and strengthening it with hope.”46 James Whittaker, too, praised the play by linking it to sentimental tradition. In the theatre, he wrote, the effects of tuberculosis were tabulated by the younger Dumas, not by the doctors. In medical lore it is a disease which mines lungs and clamps a slow break on life until it stops. In romantic lore it is a stimulant which excites hearts and accelerates passions to a racing pace.47 Though O’Neill had chosen to foreground the disease’s “purely physical symptoms”—­naturalistic “matters of fact with which Dumas did not concern himself ”—­W hittaker believed that his real aim was the same as that of Dumas fils: to offer a “compact history of a heart.”48 As these critics’ citations of Camille recognize, The Straw deploys its clinical representation of tuberculosis not to destroy, but to amplify the disease’s sentimental profile as an outward expression of individual sensibility. By translating his own experience at Gaylord Farm into sentimental drama, O’Neill rewrote that experience in crucial ways. After Kitty MacKay’s death in 1915, Dr. Lyman declared that “the girl on whom the heroine of The Straw was modeled” was “one of the unfortunate cases” that inspired him to warn his patients against sanatorium romances, presumably because he believed that her affection for O’Neill had harmed her health.49 Unlike Stephen Murray, however, O’Neill did not return to Gaylord Farm to embrace the dying MacKay. Travis Bogard suggests that “he felt a guilt about his ultimate neglect of her that conceivably led him to hide his own features under a mask” in The Straw.50 If so, the mask was that of the selfless stage consumptive. By a process of surrogation, O’Neill substituted his own theatrical alter ego for Kitty MacKay’s tubercular corpse, deferring onstage the death to which he had left her in life. A similar process of mythologization marks O’Neill’s representation of his youthful diagnosis with tuberculosis in his final consumptive drama, Long Day’s Journey into Night.51 O’Neill was twenty-­four when he was diagnosed; his fictional alter ego, Edmund Tyrone, is twenty-­three, the age that Dumas père gave to Henri Muller, Shaw to Louis Dubedat, and O’Neill himself to Robert Mayo at the beginning of Beyond the Horizon. Although the stage direction with which O’Neill introduces Edmund fits

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the author’s own appearance circa 1912, it also conforms to the norms of the French male consumptive repertoire, in which the “big, dark eyes,” “extreme nervous sensibility,” dark hair, and pallor that O’Neill ascribes to his theatrical surrogate had long been de rigueur.52 In keeping with sentimental tradition, moreover, the consumptive poetics of Long Day’s Journey into Night consistently depict Edmund’s tubercular symptoms as the direct results of intense emotion. In Act One, he reacts to his father’s criticism of his brother Jamie “with sudden nervous exasperation,” snapping, “If you’re starting that stuff again, I’ll beat it,” and is then “heard coughing as he goes upstairs.”53 In Act Two, as Edmund and Jamie wait “with a hopeful, fearful expectancy” to see whether their mother Mary has returned to her morphine habit, Edmund “coughs nervously and this brings on a real fit of coughing.”54 In Act Four, “bursting with rage” at his father’s plan to send him to a state-­run sanatorium, he “chokes huskily, his voice trembling with rage, and then is shaken by a fit of coughing.”55 Whenever Edmund’s emotions hit boiling point, so does his tuberculosis. Like that of his consumptive male predecessors from Henri Muller to the Duc de Reichstadt, moreover, Edmund’s frailty is associated with heredity on the maternal side. He looks like his mother Mary, who has been addicted to morphine since she was treated with the drug after Edmund’s birth. After Edmund is diagnosed with tuberculosis, his father sighs, “It doesn’t come from my side of the family. There wasn’t one of us that didn’t have lungs as strong as an ox.”56 Complaining that his son has “deliberately ruined his health by the mad life he’s led,” Tyrone adds that “he’s always been a bundle of nerves like his mother.”57 Though Edmund’s “dissipations” supply a partial explanation for his tubercular infection (as O’Neill’s did at the time of his own diagnosis), Tyrone maintains that the seed of the tubercle bacillus has grown in his younger son only because it is planted in the soil of a congenitally weak constitution. This tale of tainted heredity has had a direct impact on scholarly and popular understandings of Eugene O’Neill’s own family history. In Act Four of Long Day’s Journey into Night, Tyrone gives the following account of Mary’s father’s death: It’s true he never touched a drop [of alcohol] till he was forty, but after that he made up for lost time. He became a steady champagne drinker, the worst kind. That was his grand pose, to drink



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only champagne. Well, it finished him quick—­that and the consumption[.]58 The notion that O’Neill’s own grandfather Thomas Quinlan, long a teetotaler, similarly “developed a great thirst, especially for champagne [. . .], drank himself into poor health, and finally fell victim to tuberculosis”59 has been reproduced by numerous critics and biographers.60 Their assumptions have been challenged by Doris Alexander, who points out that the notice of Thomas Quinlan’s death in the Cleveland Plain Dealer of May 26, 1874, remarks only that he died “after a short illness” and observes that even “a galloping consumption that was galloping very fast would never have been described” in such a fashion.61 Arguably, however, O’Neill’s portrayal of Edmund’s maternal inheritance has less to do with accurate family history than with the close dramaturgical relationship between heredity and tuberculosis within the sentimental consumptive repertoire. By adapting his own autopathology to fit the sentimental mould, O’Neill heightens the affective capital of his alter ego’s illness. At the same time, the playwright draws upon sentimental tools to soften some of the darker aspects of his own experience of tuberculosis. Olive Evans, the nurse hired in autumn 1912 to tend O’Neill before he entered a sanatorium, reported that his mother Ella, “afraid of being infected, rarely visited his room.”62 In Long Day’s Journey into Night, fear of contagion is mentioned only once, when Tyrone responds to Jamie’s remark that Edmund will “have to go to a sanatorium” by agreeing, “Yes, and the sooner the better, Hardy said, for him and everyone around him.”63 If a memory of Ella O’Neill’s terror of infection survives into Long Day’s Journey into Night at all, it is in a highly modified form. When Mary enters the play’s final scene, lost in morphine, Edmund makes a final effort to reach her: EDMUND: (Turns impulsively and grabs her arm. As he pleads he has the quality of a bewilderedly hurt little boy.) Mama! It isn’t just a summer cold! I’ve got consumption! MARY: (For a second he seems to have broken through to her. She trembles and her expression becomes terrified. She calls distractedly, as if giving a command to herself.) No! (And instantly she is far away again. She murmurs gently but impersonally.) You must not try to touch me. You must not try to hold me. It isn’t right, when I am hoping to be a nun.64

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In this moment of cruel pathos, Mary does not flee contagion; rather, she recoils from an unbearably painful present into the refuge of the past. Meanwhile, Edmund’s naming of his disease exposes the childlike well of feeling beneath his veneer of cynicism. Reaching out in pain and love to Mary, he is not far removed from Little Willie in East Lynne, who dies longing for a ruined mother who cannot comfort him. Like that of so many male stage consumptives, his suffering is linked directly to the perceived emotional and moral failures of women. Thomas Postlewait has argued that O’Neill’s realism depends upon, much more than it rejects, the conventions of his father’s theatre.65 Nowhere is this dependence more clear than in the artist’s self-­portrait as a young poitrinaire. Edmund repeatedly asserts his creative kinship with the great consumptives of the past, including notably the poets John Keats and Ernest Dowson. Paraphrasing the former, he declares that “I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!”66 Consumed by the pain of selfhood in a world that cannot meet their ideals, sentimental male consumptives from Henri Muller to the Duc de Reichstadt had resigned themselves to their doom. In the “play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood”67 that American critic Harold Clurman described as “the testament of the most serious playwright our country has produced,”68 O’Neill premises his subjectivity—­and his writerly persona—­ upon the same Romantic stance. By canonizing Long Day’s Journey into Night as an icon of American autobiographical realism, O’Neill’s critics have worked, as he did before them, to ensure the ongoing transmission of the consumptive repertoire on the modern stage and screen. Over the course of the play’s performance history, reviewers and audience members have generally celebrated those actors who brought the consumptive chic and emotional interiority of the sentimental male poitrinaire to Edmund’s role. Dean Stockwell, who played Edmund in Sidney Lumet’s 1962 film version of the play, embodied the dark-­haired pallor and emotional sensitivity of the Romantic male consumptive (Fig. 15); in a personal blog entry on the film, screenwriter Sheila O’Malley offers an audience member’s perspective on his success, praising “the beautiful intense listening face of Dean Stockwell” whose Edmund does nothing but “absorb, absorb everybody else’s pain.”69 When, in 1986, the medically trained director Jonathan Miller “boldly went against the stereotype by



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Figure 15. Dean Stockwell as Edmund Tyrone on the set of the 1962 film of Long Day’s Journey into Night. Courtesy of Private Collection, J. T. Vintage / Bridgeman Art Library.

casting the physically strapping, but emotionally fevered, young American actor Peter Gallagher in the role,” 70 critics objected that Gallagher looked “too healthy and pragmatic as the consumptive, poetic Edmund.” 71 In 2017, by contrast, Charles McNulty waxed rhapsodic about Colin Woodell’s depiction of Edmund in Jeanie Hackett’s production: Woodell’s performance has a natural ease. Edmund’s cough is one you can imagine echoing down a sanitarium corridor. (The sound might have you reaching for hand sanitizer.) [. . .] The frail, almost sacrificial beauty of Woodell’s Edmund elicits a delicacy of feeling from his scene partners.72 Both the “sacrificial beauty” and the “natural” symptomatic acting of the nineteenth-­century stage, such reviews suggest, retain their ability to evoke

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“delicacy of feeling” in our hand-­sanitizing era. In O’Neill’s autobiographical theatre, the sentimental past is not dead. It is not even past.

Blood and Bleached Hair Some of the deeper implications of this sentimental survival emerge from the late dramas in which Tennessee Williams, an inheritor of O’Neill’s mantle as America’s leading playwright, staged consumptive characters. Like O’Neill, Williams had lived experience of tuberculosis and its impact upon families. In his Memoirs, he explains the “rough and tough character” of his alcoholic and sometimes abusive father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, by the fact that he “grew up mostly without the emollient influence of a mother, as the beautiful Isabel Coffin Williams died of TB at the age of 28.”73 He recalls an episode in his childhood when his family was shunned by their onetime friends after moving into a down-­market neighbourhood in St. Louis, theorizing that they may have made this move because the new apartment “admitted more sunlight (my mother was recuperating from ‘a spot on her lungs’).”74 Following a bout of diphtheria at the age of five, Williams himself was physically frail as a child and came to depend upon his imagination—­and a mother he describes as “overly solicitous”—­for solace.75 While they helped to shape his creativity, Williams suggests that these experiences also gave him “the makings of a sissy.” 76 This pejorative term, which Williams recalls being hurled at him as a child by “gangs of kids,”77 was one he would later link directly to feminine masculinity and/or homosexuality in his plays.78 In reporting these snatches of his family history, Williams constructs himself as a consumptive hero manqué, condemned to paternal cruelty, social ostracism, and a stigmatized gender and sexual identity—­but also invited into the embrace of the poetic imagination—­by tainted maternal bloodlines. As Williams’s dramatic career unfolded, the figure of the poitrinaire came increasingly to embody similar aspects of his own artistic and social persona. His first major citation of the consumptive repertoire appears in Camino Real (1953), a densely symbolic drama that traces the fortunes of Romanticism’s walking dead. All of the denizens of the Camino Real, the drama’s purgatorial setting, “suffer from extreme fatigue” and “have a degree or two of fever.”79 Fittingly, the queen of this quasi-­consumptive crew is the greatest of all theatrical poitrinaires, Marguerite Gautier. Aging and



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lost, “the sentimental whore”80 is “not as she was when she burned with a fever that cast a thin light over Paris, but changed, yes, faded as lanterns and legends fade when they burn into day!”81 “What is it, this feeling between us?” she asks her lover, Casanova: Something, yes, something—­delicate, unreal, bloodless! The sorts of violets that could grow on the moon, or in the crevices of those far away mountains, fertilized by the droppings of carrion birds. [. . .] But tenderness, the violets in the mountains—­can’t break the rocks!82 Marguerite constructs her own once-­fabled capacity for love as a spent force in the modern world: a “delicate, unreal, bloodless” consumptive patient in an inhospitable environment. Yet the play ends with Marguerite and Casanova clasped in one another’s arms as Don Quixote pronounces the play’s “curtain line”: “The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks!”83 Sentiment and emotional interiority are, it seems, not easy to kill. Williams described Camino Real as a profoundly autobiographical work that embodied “nothing more nor less than my conception of the time and world that I live in.”84 He explicitly linked this worldview to that of an earlier consumptive hero, Shaw’s Louis Dubedat, writing that My own creed as a playwright is fairly close to that expressed by the painter in Shaw’s play The Doctor’s Dilemma: “I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by beauty everlasting and the message of art that has made these hands blessed. Amen.”85 In these lines, as in Williams’s depiction of Marguerite, the stage consumptive is invoked as an exemplar of the beauty and emotion that Williams desired to restore to disenchanted modernity. Though passé, the sentimental poitrinaire still embodies the “magic” that Blanche Dubois, that other doomed Williams heroine, wishes to offer in place of “realism.”86 This identification of the consumptive with the struggle to bring beauty to a prosaic world recurs in Williams’s late plays, where it is repeatedly linked to the figure of the homosexual or gender non-­normative “sissy” to whom Williams had tied tuberculosis in his Memoirs. This link first emerges in Kingdom of Earth (The Seven Descents of Myrtle), which flopped spectacularly on Broadway in 1968. In this “funny melodrama,”87 as

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Williams dubbed it, the tubercular character Lot, a “frail, delicately—­you might say exotically—­pretty youth of about twenty,”88 returns to his father’s Mississippi Delta farmhouse with a Memphis sex worker, Myrtle, whom he has recently married. As the pair clash with Lot’s mixed-­race half-­brother, Chicken, it becomes clear that Lot has married Myrtle largely in order to keep the farm out of Chicken’s hands. Lot declines more rapidly than expected, Myrtle has sex with Chicken on the kitchen table, and Lot finally dies dressed in his dead mother’s clothes just before a huge flood arrives to subsume the farmhouse. Scrupulously refined and ambiguously gendered, Lot is a direct descendent of the elegant nineteenth-­century poitrinaire. In a near-­direct (if satirical) citation of Théophile Gautier’s 1853 encomium to Eugénie Doche’s Marguerite—­“Ary Scheffer never placed upon a lace pillow a head more ideally pale”89—­Williams even describes “Lot’s fair head, delicately pretty as a girl’s, lean[ing] against a souvenir pillow from Biloxi.”90 Myrtle’s enraptured response to her young husband winks to the gender ambiguity of late Romantic stage consumptives like the Duc de Reichstadt: MYRTLE: A man is twice as nervous as a woman and you are twice as nervous as a man. LOT: Do you mean I’m not a man? MYRTLE: I mean you’re a man but superior to a man. [. . .] Do you know, do you realize what a beautiful thing you are? LOT: I realize that I resemble my mother.91 In strict compliance with the Romantic repertoire poitrinaire, Williams identifies Lot with femininity, nervous sensibility, and maternal attachment. As per the norms of the American consumptive repertoire, however, he also ties these traits to over-­civilization. Explaining his lack of erotic enthusiasm for his new wife, Lot tells her that she has “married someone to whom no kind of sex relation was ever as important as fighting sickness and trying with his mother to make, to create, a little elegance in a corner of the earth we lived in that wasn’t favorable to it.”92 Far more than O’Neill’s, Williams’s citations of the consumptive repertoire acknowledge its historical entanglement with questions of racial, gender, and sexual difference. Lot, the tubercular child of a “little blond haided woman that worked in a beauty shop,” and Chicken, the healthy son of a “dark-­complected woman [their father] lived with in Alabama,”93 offer a disturbing revision of Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s pairing of the frail, fair, patrician



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Eva and the robust, dark, enslaved Topsy. Lot owns the farm and strives to create beauty, but is incapable of work. “One lung gone and one going,” scoffs Chicken, “but trying to run this place. Didn’t take long for him to find out he couldn’t, so I begun to hear from him.”94 Chicken eventually does Lot’s marital work for him, too; Myrtle confesses after having sex with Chicken that she has never before felt such a “terrific attraction”95 as she does for her husband’s half-­brother. Chicken chooses the moment immediately after this confession to tell Myrtle that “I got coloured blood in me,”96 as if explicitly to link his sexual prowess with his racial heritage. Just as Lot’s fragility, beauty, and refinement are synonymous with his whiteness, Chicken’s strength, coarseness, and hyper-­masculinity are inseparable from his African ancestry. Philip  C. Kolin interprets this contrast as a sign of Kingdom of Earth’s anti-­racist and postcolonial sensibilities.97 When read through the lens of the American consumptive repertoire, however, it can also be interpreted as resurrecting the racist belief that members of the African diaspora lack the mental and emotional sensitivity that fosters consumption in their European counterparts. Lot’s susceptibility to consumption hardly redounds to his credit within the discourses of gender and sexuality that govern Williams’s play. Given his passionate commitments to beauty, the past, and performative enactments of femininity, both Lot’s “inscrutable sexuality”98 and his position on the gender spectrum might best be described as queer, in J. Jack Halberstam’s sense of the word as referring to “nonnormative logics and organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in time and space.”99 Lot himself constructs this queerness in largely negative terms. He tells Myrtle not to imagine that she has “married a fairy,”100 but describes himself as “an impotent one-­lung sissy who’s got one foot in the grave and’s about to step in with the other.”101 Like Williams’s association of the term “sissy” with his own tubercular heritage in his Memoirs, Lot’s use of it identifies gender and sexual non-­conformity with sickness. He compounds this association when, minutes after admitting to Myrtle that he is dying, he further horrifies his new wife by telling her, “My hair is bleached. [. . .] As bleached as yours.”102 “Aghast”103 at the news, Myrtle cries out to Chicken: That poor boy bleaches his hair, not only has TB but bleaches his hair. Look, now, seriously! Do you imagine that I’d give up a career in show business to marry a, a, to marry a, to, to, to marry a—­104

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Myrtle identifies the infectious disease with which she reproaches her husband—­“Here I’m standing, here, full of TB germs because of you!”105—­ with another evil that strikes her as far more unspeakable. By tying her husband’s moribund state to his dyed hair, she associates his fatal illness—­an ailment that, according to Chicken, causes Lot to bleed “like a chicken with its head chopped off”106—­with an artifice that she finds perverse in a putatively masculine subject. In Kingdom of Earth’s climactic sequence, Williams himself confirms this dark association. Doubling down on his earlier references to the feminized Romantic male poitrinaire, the playwright describes how Lot appears “like an apparition” at the head of the stairs: He has put on the gauzy white dress to conjure an image of his mother in summer. As he stands above the stairs he puts on a translucent, wide ‘picture hat,’ the crown is trimmed with faded flowers. [. . .] With each step his gasping for breath is louder, but his agony is transfigured by the sexless passion of the transvestite.107 Living and dying, Lot embodies a beauty and theatricality that Williams ties to femininity. “Smiling as if on a social occasion,” he “seems to bow to an applauding audience” just before crumpling dead to the floor,108 rather as a great nineteenth-­century actress such as Heron or Bernhardt might have done. By allowing his consumptive hero/ine this one last defiant enactment of selfhood, Williams can be read as striking a blow for queer self-­ fashioning on the modern stage. By actively exteriorizing Lot’s “sexless” and “transvestite” passion through disease and death, however, Williams’s engagement of consumptive tropes arguably works to reify heteronormative and transphobic constructions of queer identity, just as his contrast between Lot’s white fragility and Chicken’s mixed-­race virility perpetuates racist ones. A glance at Kingdom of Earth’s reception confirms this impression. Reviewing the doomed 1968 Broadway production, Clive Barnes compared the “fine naturalistic performance” of Harry Guardino as an “effectively sullen and impassioned” Chicken to Brian Bedford’s “nicely languid portrayal of the effete mother’s boy,”109 while John Chapman described the “part Negro” Chicken, who “likes booze and women,” as “much less complicated” than his half-­brother, “a tubercular fairy with one foot in the grave.”110 Reviews of the play’s rare later outings consistently echo such language. In the 2015



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production by the Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans, writes Theodore P. Mahne, Sean Richmond’s “strutting, prowling performance” as Chicken, a “creature ruled by his physical nature [who] might better be named Rooster,” contrasted with David Williams’s depiction of Lot as “an aloof and effete scion of the Southern family, with ‘mother issues’ (to say the least).”111 In a blog reflection on the 2016 production at Los Angeles’s Odyssey Theatre, Paul Myrvold similarly juxtaposed the “effeminate” and “weak” Lot, who shows “sure sign[s] of consumption,” with the “darker-­skinned” Chicken, who “has the manners and language of a brute.”112 By pitting consumptive white southern over-­refinement against an animal vitality implicitly identified with Blackness, both professional critics and blogging spectators revive nineteenth-­century binaries of white frailty and Black strength. At the same time, they confirm cultural associations between queer masculinity and disease. These associations are frequently read as autobiographical reflections of Williams’s own self-­image. Meditating on the Odyssey Theatre production, blogger Earnest Kearney asserts that thanks to the “character’s homosexuality and pronounced mother fixation[,] some have seen in Lot, a vicious self-­caricature of Williams himself.”113 In another blog entry, this time about a 1999 production at Ontario’s Touchmark Theatre, Christopher Hoile similarly declares that as Lot, “Eric Woolfe expertly embodies what is surely Williams’ own negative self-­portrait—­a man who is, weak, self-­ absorbed and obsessed with his dead mother.”114 In a more positive reading of Lot’s gender-­queer aestheticism, scholar Michael R. Shiavi suggests that “Williams’s own discomfort with effeminacy notwithstanding, he manages to channel the demon of his youthful self-­presentation into worthy art by suggesting the presentational value of an affect almost always reduced to spoof or pat interpretation.”115 To all of these spectators, Williams’s engagement with tubercular tropes in Kingdom of Earth is a fiction that tells the truth about his own gender and sexuality. Even stronger associations between tuberculosis and an ambivalently regarded queer male identity characterize Williams’s 1943 short story “The Angel in the Alcove” and the 1977 play he adapted from it, Vieux Carré. Inspired by Williams’s time in New Orleans in 1938–1939,116 these works have “become known as Williams’ (quasi) autobiographical coming-­out narratives.”117 Both feature a tubercular artist to whom they link the sexual awakening of Williams’s alter ego, the Writer. In the short story, the Writer

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describes a scene redolent of sexual assault when, one night in a down-­at-­ heel boarding house, he is unexpectedly awoken by “a warmth that was not my own”: I jumped up and nearly cried out, but the arms of the visitor passionately restrained me. He whispered his name which was that of a tubercular young artist who slept in the room adjoining. ‘I want to, I want to,’ he whispered. So I lay back and let him do what he wanted until he was finished.118 Williams depicts the Artist as a tragic, isolated figure both struggling against and driven by his tuberculosis: His disease was entering the final stage, he coughed all the time but managed to go on working. [. . .] He lived in a world completely hostile to him, unrelentingly hostile, and no other being could enter the walls about him for more than the frantic moments desire drove him to. He would not give in to the mortal fever which licked all the time at his nerves.119 The Artist is eventually ejected from the boarding house by its landlady, who explicitly associates his infectious disease with his homosexuality. “You hawk and you spit and you spread contamination,” she charges; “And that ain’t all that you do by a long shot neither!”120 Declaring that she “know[s] all about you degenerates in the Quarter,” she tells the Artist that a “case like you is a public nuisance and danger. You’ve got no right to expose healthy people to you.”121 In Vieux Carré, his late-­career theatrical reworking of this material, Williams gives the Artist a name, Nightingale; makes him a decade or two older than his prototype; and further emphasizes the revolting, anti-­Romantic qualities of his disease. Echoing Chicken’s sneers about Lot in Kingdom of Earth, the landlady, Mrs. Wire, complains that Nightingale “leaves a track of blood behind him like a chicken that’s had its head chopped off.”122 She screams at him that the restaurant where he works “had to scrub the pavement around your easel with a bucket of lye each night, that customers had left without payin’ because you’d hawked an’ spit by their tables!”123 Nightingale furiously denies the reality of his tubercular condition, claiming that the blood on his pillow is “the remains of a squashed bedbug.”124 Stripped of the glamour of doomed youth, he is a consumptive in the naturalistic tradition.



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As much as O’Neill’s, however, Williams’s naturalism preserves many aspects of the sentimental consumptive repertoire. Like his nineteenth-­ century predecessor, Raphael in The Marble Heart, Nightingale is a beauty-­ loving artist whose gifts are eroded by desire and disease. A frustrated idealist, he is rejected by a world that cannot share his fierce desire for love and abandoned by those to whom he reaches out for solace. Chief amongst these is the Writer, whom Nightingale sadly describes—­in a direct echo of The Marble Heart—­as a “Boy with soft skin and stone heart.”125 When the Writer rejects him, Nightingale assumes a kind of tragic grandeur, his “ face slowly turn[ing] to a mask of sorrow past expression.”126 In Vieux Carré, these markers of sentimental consumptive masculinity correlate directly with homosexuality. “Faggots, they all do something artistic, all of ’em,”127 the macho heterosexual gigolo Tye declares. When the Writer tries to distance himself from Nightingale’s pleas by remarking, “You talk like you have a fever,” the artist responds by crying out, “I have a fever you’d be lucky to catch, a fever to hold and be held!”128 Using the threads of the nineteenth-­century consumptive repertoire, Williams spins an imaginative web of disease, creativity, and queerness. In the process, he feeds one of the most dominant—­and destructive—­tropes connected with queer identity in twentieth-­century representation: the imperative to “bury your gays.”129 The autobiographical implications of this process come to the fore in the relationship between Nightingale and Williams’s surrogate, the Writer. Nightingale offers himself to the Writer as a queer mentor who will initiate the younger man into “gay life.”130 “Ain’t come out completely, as we put it?” he asks, “placing a shaky hand on the writer’s crumpled, sheet-­covered body.”131 The Writer articulates his resistance to these uninvited sexual advances in terms of his fear of infection, demurring, “I don’t want to catch your cold.”132 Given the Writer’s dramaturgical role as a “signaling device to underscore the autobiographical nature of the play,”133 his terror of Nightingale’s tuberculosis may be read as a sign of the “internalized homophobia” that many of Williams’s critics have seen as marking his life and work.134 To embrace an out queer identity like Nightingale’s, Williams hints, may be to embrace precisely the “decadence, corruption, and [. . .] illness” with which his own critics often associated his work as a homosexual playwright.135 To flee it, however, is to sacrifice artistic and emotional potential. Thus, Nightingale describes the Writer’s “cold in the heart” as “a hell of a lot more fatal to a boy with literary pretensions” than tuberculosis.136 In the press surrounding Vieux Carré’s Broadway opening, the play was

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repeatedly framed as one in which Williams had finally “discuss[ed] his homosexuality honestly and fully,” just as Nightingale does in the play.137 When Vieux Carré flopped, reviewers frequently ascribed its failure to the sickening nature of this self-­portrait. Emory Lewis regretted that Williams was so “intent on baring his soul to the public,” branding the result a “dreadful, out-­of-­focus, and funereal parody” of Williams’s earlier work.138 Ernest Albrecht declared that Vieux Carré reworked Williams’s established “characters, themes, language, and imagery to the point of perversion,” adding that it was “filled with bellowing harangues, [. . .] the blood and spit of a consumptive and perhaps other similarly revolting activity which I could not decipher.”139 While some critics praised Tom Aldredge’s “impressive” and “poignant” acting as “the tubercular artist looking for the kindness of strangers and bedbugs,”140 William Glover saw his “jittering” performance as “a consumptive but determined old queen” as exemplifying the “harrowing botch” that was Williams’s latest play.141 Such dismissals of Vieux Carré used the connection between disease, homosexuality, and self-­revelation as a stick with which to beat its aging playwright. In the process, they arguably echoed Williams’s own deployment of the consumptive repertoire. In Vieux Carré as in Kingdom of Earth, tubercular symptoms can be interpreted as externalizing aspects of the playwright’s own inwardness, foregrounding his vexed relationships with artifice, emotion, and desire as well as with race, gender, and sexuality. This process of revelation through consumption amplifies Williams’s habitual “self-­portrait of the artist as martyr”142 in ways that suggest self-­critique and even self-­disgust, marking queer subjectivity for death. Like O’Neill’s tubercular alter egos, Williams’s stage consumptives are cons that can be read as telling a personal truth. This time, however, the truth is a deeply discomfiting one.

“I Began to Think I Looked Like Garbo” As this chapter—­and this book’s main argument—­draw to a close, I want to give the final word to a more direct and joyful queer appropriation of the consumptive repertoire: Charles Ludlam’s Camille, which premiered at the Ridiculous Theatrical Company in 1973. Ludlam’s Theatre of the Ridiculous deployed a camp aesthetic in the sense advanced by Fabio Cleto, for whom camp involves “an encoding and decoding of the self and the world as stage.”143 Profoundly resistant to the material and psychological realism,



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born from the sentimental tradition, that had had such a shaping influence on the theatres of O’Neill and Williams, ridiculous theatre applied practices of drag, pastiche, parody, and travesty to canonical works of western high culture. In the process, it underlined the socially constructed nature of inwardness, as well as of dominant and residual theatrical—­and gender—­ repertoires. Kelly  I. Aliano links these camp practices to the “queer art of failure”144 described by Halberstam; by gleefully flagging the limits of representation and of interiority, she argues, the Theatre of the Ridiculous offered its performers freedom “to play at (and with) their roles.”145 In the same period when critics were using the “harrowing botch[es]” of plays such as Vieux Carré to attack Tennessee Williams’s artistic and sexual identities, Ludlam and his company embraced failure as a way of asserting theirs. La Dame aux Camélias was a prime target for this approach. Ludlam considered it “the most successful play ever written,”146 but admitted that “[p]layed seriously, ‘Camille’ would be laughed off the stage today.”147 His adaptation, and his performance as the heroine, mocked the ludicrousness of the play’s sentimentality and moralism. At the same time, they used these “cons” of the past to express personal, contemporary truths. In Camille, Ludlam’s citations of the consumptive repertoire worked relentlessly to spoof it. He undercut the fragile, elegant femininity of the consumptive heroine by appearing in the role in full nineteenth-­century female drag while also exposing his pectoral muscles (Fig. 16). He burlesqued the bourgeois morality that consigned the erring Marguerite to consumptive suffering and then wept over her grave by turning the tears provoked by her symptoms into slyly lascivious laughter. As Ludlam’s Marguerite lies dying, she complains of the cold à la Mimì in La Vie de Bohème, begging her maid Nanine to “throw another faggot on the fire.” When Nanine responds, “There are no more faggots in the house,” Marguerite looks “plaintively” out at the audience: “No faggots in the house? Open the window, Nanine. See if there are any in the street.”148 British actor-­director Neil Bartlett offers an entranced audience member’s perspective on the show, recalling how Ethyl Eichelberger, one of the actors to take up the role of Marguerite after Ludlam’s death, literalized the consumptive repertoire’s tacit linkage of sex and death: [I]t’s the final act of Camille and she’s in bed and Armand is there. [.  .  .] And she starts coughing, and [Eichelberger] reproduces precisely Maria Callas’s cough [in La Traviata], and Armand is sitting

Figure 16. Unidentified actor as Armand and Charles Ludlam as Marguerite in Charles Ludlam’s Camille, Theatre of the Ridiculous, New York, 1973. Courtesy of Billy Rose Theatre Division, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.



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by the side of the bed, and she starts coughing and coughs more and more, and eventually collapses into Armand’s lap, and everyone thinks that she’s coughing, and then the maid comes in and goes, “Oh! I’m sorry!”149 For Bartlett, Eichelberger’s “blow-­job gag” is “the funniest thing ever performed.”150 In this version of the poétique du poitrinaire, consumptive symptoms still signify the devices and desires of the human heart, but the old tropes are treated as costumes to be put on and off with a wink and a smile. Ludlam’s Camille can thus be seen as the first entry in the consumptive repertoire to deconstruct, rather than confirm, the inwardness of the modern subject. Nevertheless, sentimental consumptive poetics retained their affective capital—­and their connection to interiority—­in Ludlam’s theatre. When he first saw the 1936 film version of Camille, Ludlam told a New Yorker interviewer, “It moved me to tears . . . . I developed such an identity with the role I began to think I looked like Garbo.” This identification had, he said, “a lot do with my feelings about love and the nature of love in one of its highest expressions.”151 He adapted Dumas fils’s play in a manner that evoked the ostracism and stigmatization experienced by members of the LGBTQ+ community, as when Armand’s father tells Ludlam’s Marguerite that she is “killing [Armand’s] right to a normal life.”152 Rick Roemer suggests that the artist “felt an identification with and a compassion for Marguerite, who found herself marginalized because of who she was” because “[t]his kind of discrimination was something that Ludlam understood very well” as a gay man.153 In such readings, Ludlam’s ridiculous Camille, as much as O’Neill’s and Williams’s realist dramas, appears fundamentally autobiographical. Perhaps most importantly, Ludlam drew upon the artifices of the sentimental repertoire in order to challenge binary constructions of gender and emphasize performance’s ability to open up the gender spectrum. “If a man plays Camille,” he told one interviewer, “you begin by thinking it’s horrible, but in the end you are either moved or won over. You believe in the character beyond the gender of the actor, and no one who has experienced that can go back. In such cases, the theater is political in the highest sense of influence.”154 Attesting to the success of these tactics, queer comedian Charles Busch offers a personal reflection on Ludlam’s Camille as the “performance that had the most influence on me in my life”:

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he was a rather homely man and made no effort to physically be a beautiful woman. But the power of his performance made you believe that he was a desirable, glamorous lady. He even exposed his hairy chest by wearing an off-­the-­shoulder gown, and it didn’t matter. You just believed.155 In Kingdom of Earth, Williams had tied Lot’s quasi-­feminine artifice to disease, depicting his bleached hair—­like his bleeding—­as a symptom of mortal sickness. Ludlam, by contrast, drew upon hoary consumptive tropes in order to celebrate the queer performer’s triumph over constructed gender norms and the deathly stasis they imposed. In the Theatre of the Ridiculous, Ludlam declared, “we take the abandoned refuse, the used images, the shoes from abandoned shoe factories, the clichés, and we search for their true meaning.”156 Even as his Camille mocked the washed-­up imagery of the nineteenth-­century transatlantic stage, it also returned the consumptive repertoire to the socially oppositional meanings with which it had begun in 1830s Paris. Like O’Neill and Williams before him, Ludlam deployed the sentimental consumptive poetics born in that distant era as a tool of twentieth-­century self-­expression. But where O’Neill had used the consumptive’s affective capital to mythologize his lived experience and Williams had deployed it painfully to unpack his own identity, Ludlam did something else again. Gleefully exposing the “cons” of sentimental culture, he repurposed them to express his subjective vision, constructing the performer’s art as a source of vibrant—­and potentially transformative—­life.

G

Afterword

A Living Repertoire I completed the first draft of this book in April  2020, while the city in which I live—­like so many others around the world—­was experiencing lockdown in response to the COVID-­19 pandemic. On the day I finished the final chapter, the New York Times’s front page warned that Black Americans were bearing the brunt of COVID-­19 infections and deaths in the United States.1 Still, much world coverage of the pandemic was dominated by the health of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, then hospitalized in intensive care with the virus. Despite the fact that patients of color were dying at “disproportionately high rates”2 not only in the United States but in other countries around the world, the affective capital of the disease seemed tied to the affective capital of whiteness and high social status. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. When I began this project a decade ago, I was fascinated by the consumptive repertoire because it seemed so distant—­a dead repertoire about death. Delving into the sentimental relish with which generations of transatlantic theatremakers and audiences approached a painful, deadly disease struck me as a way into the irreducible pastness of the past. I wanted to understand how the horror of tubercular suffering, which had once seemed too shocking for theatrical representation, had become first a popular spectacle and then a risible cliché—­the very antithesis of modernity. The story I discovered turned out to be quite different. Consumption played a prominent role in many of the most popular and durable performance works of the transatlantic long nineteenth century because the disease offered a language through which some of the dominant voices of that century spoke to themselves about the modernity in which they perceived themselves as living. The consumptive repertoire spoke of emotion, and of the complex, often contradictory ways in which feelings bound human beings together. It expressed the radical interiority of the modern self, as — 209 —

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well as the inevitable and often painful ways in which that self ’s inner privacy was shaped, affected, and ruptured by social relations. It examined family inheritances, class conflict, gender and its discontents, national identity and xenophobia, a consuming demand for change, and an agonizing nostalgia for the past. It spoke about whiteness, and about constructions of Euro-­North-American identity that bolstered white supremacy even as they strove to critique it. It articulated the relations of desire, fear, knowledge, and power that informed transatlantic societies—­and that threatened their very existence. The language of the symptom, through which the consumptive repertoire conveyed these fundamental aspects of transatlantic modernity, emerged from within the sentimental tradition. It helped to shape the dramaturgies of realism and naturalism, as well as the personal identities of some of the leading artists of the modern stage. The consumptive repertoire, then, was not just an embarrassing and mawkish “Other” rejected by emergent theatrical modernity, but a vital part of that theatre’s genealogy. Its reliance on the performed symptoms of a terminal disease helped to ground performances of the modern self as much in pain and transience as in notions of progress or stable identity. Elaine Scarry has described physical pain as “bring[ing] with it all the solitude of absolute privacy with none of its safety, all the self-­exposure of the utterly public with none of its possibility for camaraderie.”3 By embodying modern selfhood as pain, transatlantic stage consumptives not only looked back to eighteenth-­century cultures of sensibility and typified the individualism of the nineteenth century, they also looked forward to the high modernist theatres of Artaud and Beckett, with their condemned protagonists signaling desperately through the flames. In Endgame, Beckett’s moribund, self-­ dramatizing Hamm—­a figure who, like Ludlam’s Camille, embodies the theatricality of interiority and suffering—­first appears with a bloodstained handkerchief covering his face. Replacing the handkerchief as the curtain falls, Hamm cries, “Old stancher! You . . . remain.”4 Tuberculosis does indeed remain a vital part of the performance cultures of modernity; its story does not end with the stories I have told here. By adding my research to that of the disease’s previous historians, I have striven only to illuminate a small and self-­consciously Eurocentric part of a much broader global narrative. A great deal of work remains to be done on the ways in which the white transatlantic consumptive repertoire compares to and intersects with those of the many other literary and performance



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cultures in which consumptive characters play iconic roles. The elegant, ailing Lin Daiyu is an archetypal tragic heroine in multiple theatrical and cinematic adaptations of the great eighteenth-­century Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber (红楼梦). The alcoholic, consumptive Devdas Mukherjee is a quintessentially tormented lover in numerous performance versions of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s beloved Bengali novel, Devdas. The Takarazuka Revue’s perennially popular musical adaptation of the Japanese shōjo manga series Rose of Versailles (Berusaiyu no Bara) hinges upon the star performance of an otokoyaku (a female-­identified actor trained to play male-­identified roles) as Oscar, a girl raised as a man in pre-­revolutionary France. When Oscar falls prey to consumption near the story’s tragic climax and a gender-­crossing twenty-­first-­century Japanese actor, playing a gender-­crossing eighteenth-­century French character, coughs blood into a white handkerchief before launching into an elegiac love duet, multiple sentimental repertoires coalesce.5 The complex cultural politics of these and many other performances of tuberculosis—­including those, such as James Baldwin’s depiction of the dying jazz trombonist Luke in his 1954 play The Amen Corner, that powerfully resist white Euro-­North-American sentimentalism—­deserve further exploration and interrogation. So, too, does the manner in which the consumptive repertoire has shaped other theatrical repertoires of disease. In such iconic dramas of the AIDS epidemic as Jonathan Larson’s Rent (an adaptation of La Vie de Bohème), for example, the legacy of the sentimental stage consumptive is still powerfully visible. Perhaps most crucially, the consumptive repertoire remains a disturbingly living repertoire because the disease it represents continues to affect so many lives. The World Health Organization reports that 10,000,000 people fell ill with tuberculosis in 2018, with eight countries—­India, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and South Africa—­ accounting for two-­thirds of the global total of tuberculosis cases.6 In that same year, Cape Town social anthropologists Pieter du Plessis and Siv Tshefu published a photo essay and interview with Flavia Nazier, a transgender woman from Burundi living in South Africa who had experienced tuberculosis. Although they began with an “immensely medicalized” view of tuberculosis, du Plessis and Tshefu write that their collaboration with Nazier ended by underlining that “people who have or had TB live more nuanced lives far beyond just the disease.”7 This understanding, they write, “brings to the fore not just the embodied experience of TB but points to the

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socially ill society Flavia finds herself in—­one that operates on notions of cis-­and heteronormative standards, and one that is racist, afrophobic, and patriarchal.”8 Nazier herself describes her ongoing experience as the object of an interrogating gaze that gives her both pleasure and pain: “People stare at me and I love it because they always wonder who is this, where did this person come from?”9 Through her performance of self in the photos and interviews of the essay, she tells the researchers, she wants to be “made human just the way she is.”10 Flavia Nazier’s lived experience of tuberculosis in a “socially ill society” links her across time and space to the characters and performers of the consumptive repertoire this book has explored. It also underlines the ongoing, toxic effects of the white, bourgeois, Eurocentric culture that the consumptive repertoire helped to spread. That repertoire’s spectacularization of the tubercular patient who, though marginalized by her society, comes to embody its fascination with selfhood lives on—­uncomfortably, but perhaps also productively—­in Nazier’s articulation of her position. To ensure that she is “made human just the way she is,” Flavia Nazier insists on assuming control of her own self-­representation. If such acts of agency are to occur more widely—­and if the global inequities that continue to enable tubercular infection are to diminish—­then the sentimental consumptive repertoire may need finally to die, and a new, more healing repertoire to be born.

Notes

Unless otherwise noted, I have supplied my own translations of French texts throughout this study. For the reader’s reference, I have included the original versions of passages longer than fifty words in the notes.

Introduction 1. Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo, “Review of Bel-­Ami,” Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review, BBC Radio 5, London, UK, March 9, 2012. 2. The terms “consumption” and “phthisis” in English (and “la phthisie” in French) may refer to a range of wasting illnesses. In this book, which analyzes characters and figures who were often described as “consumptive” or “phthisique” and whose symptoms clearly approximated those of pulmonary tuberculosis, I generally treat “consumption,” “phthisis/phthisie” and “tuberculosis,” as well as their derivative adjectives, as synonyms. 3. Stanisław Witkiewicz, The Anonymous Work, in Seven Plays (New York: Martin E. Segal Theatre Centre, 2004), 177. 4. “The Incurable Cough of Death,” TV Tropes, April 19, 2020, https:// tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IncurableCoughOfDeath. 5. André Bazin, “Théâtre et Cinema (Suite),” in Esprit 180/181, no. 7/8 (Juillet–Août 1951), 238: “Le décorateur ne concevra pas de façon sensiblement différente la chambre de La Dame aux Camélias pour la scène ou pour l’écran. Il est vrai qu’au cinema nous aurons peut-­être des gros-­plans du mouchoir taché de sang. Mais une mise en scène théâtrale habile saura bien, elle aussi, jouer de la toux et du mouchoir.” 6. Tracy C. Davis, “Nineteenth-­Century Repertoire,” Nineteenth-­Century Theatre and Film 36, no. 2 (2009): 7–8. 7. Clark Lawlor, Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 3. 8. Angela Woods, “The Limits of Narrative: Provocations for the Medical Humanities,” Medical Humanities 37 (2011): 73. 9. Ronald Frankenberg, “Sickness as Cultural Performance: Drama, Trajectory, and Pilgrimage Root Metaphors and the Making Social of Disease,” International Journal of Health Services 16, no. 4 (November 1986): 622.

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Notes to Pages 3–4

10. Richard Schechner, Between Theatre and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 36. 11. See Woods, 73–78. 12. Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, second ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), xiv. 13. Lawlor, Consumption 7. 14. Linda C. Garro and Cheryl Mattingly, “Narrative Turns,” in Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing, Linda C. Garro and Cheryl Mattingly, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 263. 15. The classic social history of tuberculosis is René and Jean Dubos, The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man, and Society (1952; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987). More recent, wide-­ranging accounts are offered by Thomas Dormandy, The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Flurin Condrau and Michael Worboys (eds.), Tuberculosis Then and Now: Perspectives on the History of an Infectious Disease (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2010), and Helen Bynum, Spitting Blood: The History of Tuberculosis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Among the more specific social histories that shaped this study are David S. Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-­Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Barbara Bates, Bargaining for Life: A Social History of Tuberculosis, 1876–1938 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); Georgina D. Feldberg, Disease and Class: Tuberculosis and the Shaping of Modern North American Society (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995); Katherine Ott, Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture Since 1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Randall Packard, White Plague, Black Labor: Tuberculosis and the Political Economy of Health and Disease in South Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); and Sheila M. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1994). 16. Claudine Herzlich and Janine Pierret, Illness and Self in Society, trans. Elborg Forster (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 24. 17. Katherine Byrne, Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 12. 18. Barnes, 4. 19. Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 186. 20. Dubos and Dubos, 33–43. 21. Bynum, 75–6.



Notes to Pages 5–7

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22. Réné-­Théophile-­Hyacinthe Laënnec, Traité de l’Auscultation Médiate et des Maladies des Poumons et du Coeur (Bruxelles, 1828), 298. 23. Laënnec, 298–9. 24. Laënnec, 299–300. 25. Charles Armitage Brown, The Life of John Keats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937), 64. 26. Laënnec, 299. 27. For the links between the trajectory of tuberculosis and the Aristotelian tragic plot, see Meredith Conti, “ ‘I am not suffering any more . . .’: Tragic Potential in the Nineteenth-­Century Consumptive Myth,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 42, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 59–82. 28. Isabelle Grellet and Caroline Kruse, Histoires de la Tuberculose: Les Fièvres de l’Âme, 1800–1940 (Paris: Éditions Ramsay, 1983), 66. 29. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (London: Allen Lane, 1978), 14. 30. Sontag, 19–20. 31. Sontag, 26. 32. Ibid. 33. Sontag, 35. 34. Lawlor, Consumption 4; see also Clark Lawlor, “ ‘It Is a Path I Have Prayed to Follow’: The Paradoxical Pleasures of Romantic Disease,” in Romanticism and Pleasure, eds. Thomas H. Schmid and Michelle Faubert (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 109–132. 35. Lawlor, 44. 36. George Cheyne, The English Malady: Or, A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of All Kinds (London: George Strahan, 1733), 71. 37. George Cheyne, The Natural Method of Cureing the Diseases of the Body, and the Disorders of the Mind Depending on the Body (London: George Strahan, 1742), 186. 38. Roy Porter, “Consumption: Disease of the Consumer Society?” in Consumption and the World of Goods, eds. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1994), 58–81. 39. Bewell, 186. 40. Carolyn A. Day, Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 41. Byrne, 171. 42. Alex Tankard, Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth-­Century Literature: Invalid Lives (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 43. Sharon L. Hirsh, Symbolism and Modern Urban Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 120–7, and Elizabeth L. Lee, The Medicine of Art: Disease and the Aesthetic Object in Gilded Age America (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 57–8.

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44. Clark Lawlor and Akihito Suzuki, “The Disease of the Self: Representing Consumption, 1700–1830,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74 (2000): 458–94. 45. See, for example, Grellet and Kruse, 66–9; Barnes, 52–4; Lawlor, Consumption 167; Byrne 113. 46. Conti, “I am not,” passim. 47. Meredith Conti, Playing Sick: Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine (New York: Routledge, 2018). 48. Linda and Michael Hutcheon, Opera: Desire, Disease, Death (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 29–59. 49. Pierre Guillaume, Du Désespoir au Salut: Les Tuberculeux au 19e et 20e Siècles (Paris: Aubier, 1986), 97–8. 50. John Stokes, The French Actress and Her English Audience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 106. 51. See, for instance, Maurice Descotes, Le Drame Romantique et Ses Grands Créateurs (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1955), 258. 52. Lawlor, Consumption, 6 and 35. 53. Plautus, Mercator, in The Comedies of Plautus, ed. and trans. Henry Thomas Riley (London: George Bell and Sons, 1890), 140. 54. Virginia Scott, Molière: A Theatrical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 160. 55. Jure Gantar, The Pleasure of Fools: Essays in the Ethics of Laughter (Québec: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2005), 136. 56. For Molière’s death, see Mechele Leon, “Corpsing Molière: History as Fiasco,” Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions, eds. Henry Bial and Scott Magelssen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 177–8. 57. Néricault Destouches, L’Amour Usé, in Oeuvres Dramatiques de N. Destouches, 6 vols. (Paris: Lefèvre, 1811), 5, 324. 58. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Richard Janko (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 3. 59. Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer: or, The Mistakes of a Night (London: F. Newbery, 1773), 3–4. 60. Miles Peter Andrews, The Reparation: A Comedy (London: T. and W. Lowndes, 1784), 8. 61. Andrews, The Reparation, 7. 62. Andrews, The Reparation, 46. 63. Qtd. in James Prior, The Life of Oliver Goldsmith, M. B., vol. 2 (London: J. Murray, 1837), 393. 64. August von Kotzebue, Die Versöhnung (Leipzig, 1798); Der Taubstumme, oder: Der Abbé de l’Épée (Leipzig, 1800). 65. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Clavigo, in Goethe’s Works, vol. 3 (Philadelphia, 1884), 158 and 168.



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66. Goethe, 178. 67. Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-­Century Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 3. 68. Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 5. 69. Margaret Cohen, “Sentimental Communities,” in The Literary Channel: The Inter-­National Invention of the Novel, eds. Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 108. 70. Cohen, “Sentimental Communities,” 108. 71. Conti, “I am not,” 60. 72. Festa, 3. 73. Mary Louise Kete, Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-­Class Identity in Nineteenth-­Century America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), xiv. 74. Lawlor and Suzuki, 460. 75. Lawlor and Suzuki, 468. 76. Joseph Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 67–71. 77. Roach, Player’s, 98–9. 78. Julia H. Fawcett, Spectacular Disappearances: Celebrity and Privacy, 1696–1801 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 140. 79. Fawcett, 140–41. 80. Fawcett, 142. 81. Alexandre Dumas père, Antony, ed. Pierre-­Louis Rey (2002; Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 127–8: “Mais, que nous essayons, nous, au milieu de notre société moderne, sous notre frac gauche et écourté, de montrer à nu le coeur de l’homme, on ne le reconnaîtra pas. . . . La ressemblance entre le héros et le parterre sera trop grande, l’analogie trop intime [. . .] Puis les cris à l’exagération, au mélodrame, couvrant les applaudissements[.]” 82. W. B. Worthen, Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 55. 83. Kirsten E. Shepherd-­Barr, “The Diagnostic Gaze: Nineteenth-­Century Contexts for Medicine and Performance,” in Performance and the Medical Body, eds. Alex Mermikides and Gianna Bouchard (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 38. 84. Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 120. 85. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” trans. Richard Nice, in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Philosophy of Education, ed. J. E. Richardson (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1986), 241. 86. For the links between sentimental literature and post-­revolutionary

218

Notes to Pages 16–19

societies, see Margaret Cohen, The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Cecilia Feilla, The Sentimental Theater of the French Revolution (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013); Barnes, States of Sympathy; and Heather S. Nathans, Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787–1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 87. Byrne, 150; see also Day, 53, on “the cultural notion of infirmity as a distinctly feminine quality.” 88. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-­Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 2. 89. Roach, 2. 90. Ahmed, 119. 91. By using the term “transatlantic” to denote the relations between French, British, and American theatres, I do not wish to erase other theatrical cultures within the transatlantic world—­for example, those of multiple African nations and of the Caribbean. Though the Eurocentrism of the particular consumptive repertoire I analyze here compels a degree of focus upon this particular triangle, I aim in this study to offer only one of many possible transatlantic histories of the theatrical consumptive. 92. Bewell, 186. 93. Ibid. 94. For literary consumption as a transatlantic phenomenon, see Clark Lawlor, “Transatlantic Consumptions: Disease, Fame and Literary Nationalisms in the Davidson Sisters, Southey and Poe.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 36, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 109–126. 95. Sydney, Lady Morgan, France in 1829–30, vol. 1 (New York: J and J Harper, 1830), 73–4. 96. Morgan, 1:79–80. 97. Morgan, 1:80. 98. Joyce Davidson, Liz Bondi, and Mick Smith, Emotional Geographies (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 3. 99. For important explorations of notions of contagion, infection, and transmission in theatre and performance history, see Adam Alston, “On Sick Performance and Theatre’s Chronic Maladies,” Staging Decadence, February 11, 2021, https://www.stagingdecadence.com/blog/on-­sick-­performance -­and-­theatres-­chronic-­maladies; Miriam Felton-­Dansky, Viral Performance: Contagious Theaters from Modernism to the Digital Age (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008); Stanton B. Garner, “Artaud, Germ Theory, and the Theatre of Contagion,” Theatre Journal 58.1 (March 2006): 1–14; Katherine E. Kelly, “Pandemic and Performance: Ibsen and the Outbreak of Modernism,” South Central Review 25.1 (Spring 2008): 12–35; Marlis Schweitzer, ‘The Salome Epidemic: Degeneracy, Disease, and



Notes to Pages 19–25

219

Race Suicide,” in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater, ed. Nadine George-­Graves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 890–921; and Fintan Walsh, ed., Theatres of Contagion: Transmitting Early Modern to Contemporary Performance (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). 100. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1648–1849 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 3. 101. Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 8. 102. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (London, UK: Duke University Press, 2003), 19. 103. Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 7. 104. Conti, “I am not,” 75. 105. Martin Esslin, “Modern Theatre: 1890–1920,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre, ed. John Russell Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 341. 106. Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 18. 107. Sander Gilman, Franz Kafka, The Jewish Patient (New York: Routledge, 1995), 171. 108. Thomas Postlewait, “From Melodrama to Realism: The Suspect History of American Drama,” in Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 54–5. 109. Stanton B. Garner Jr., “Physiologies of the Modern: Zola, Experimental Medicine, and the Naturalist Stage,” in Ric Knowles, Joanne Tompkins, and W. B. Worthen, eds., Modern Drama: Defining the Field (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 74. 110. Sigmund Freud, “Psychopathic Characters on the Stage,” in Writings on Art and Literature, ed. James Strachey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 89–90. 111. Ben Brantley, “Moulin Rouge!: The Musical Offers a Party, and a Playlist, for the Ages,” New York Times, June 25, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com /2019/07/25/theater/moulin-­rouge-­review.html. 112. Alicia Ramirez, “Karen Olivo on Being the First Woman of Color to Play Satine,” Remezcla.com, April 21, 2020, https://remezcla.com/features /culture/moulin-­rouge-­karen-­olivo-­satine-­historic-­role-­interview/. 113. Danny Burstein and David Rooney, “Broadway Star Danny Brustein on Harrowing Coronavirus Experience,” Hollywood Reporter, April 13, 2020, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/broadway-­star-­danny-­burstein -­his-­harrowing-­coronavirus-­experience-­strength-­stillness-­g uest-­column -­1289839.

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Notes to Pages 29–32

Chapter One 1. Amédée Pichot, “Angèle, Drame en Cinq Actes,” Revue de Paris (January 1834): 49: “un drame où l’on chercherait en vain [. . .] un caractère précisément nouveau, à moins qu’il y ait une hardiesse poétique à mettre en scène un malade atteint de phthisie pulmonaire. Je ne sache pas que les maladies, en général, soient du domaine de l’art, et celle-­ci moins qu’une autre, quoique le Vaudeville l’ait déjà mise en couplets. On ne peut que féliciter M. Alexandre Dumas d’avoir su rendre son phthisique intéressant, and remercier l’acteur, qui le représente avec quelques grimaces de trop, de s’être du moins dispensé de la toux et d’autres symptômes moins dramatiques.” 2. ‘De Savay,’ “La Médecine au Théâtre: Angèle,” L’Union Médicale 73 (1880), 933. 3. Janis McLarren Caldwell, Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-­Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1. 4. Pichot, 49. 5. “Th. des Nouveautés,” Diogène, January 28, 1829, 1. 6. “Théâtre des Nouveautés,” Le Figaro, October 3, 1828, 3. 7. Eugène Woestyn, “Madame Albert,” La France Théâtrale 4, no. 17 (26 February–1 March 1846), 2. 8. For an overview of developments in French theatre in this period, see John McCormick, Popular Theatres of Nineteenth-­Century France (London: Routledge, 1993). 9. For the rise of sentimental drama in France before and during the 1789 revolution, see Feilla. 10. McCormick, 5–6. 11. Pierre-­Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, “Essai sur le Drame Sérieux,” in Eugénie, Drame en Cinq Actes en Prose, Avec un Essai sur le Drame Sérieux (Paris: Clousier, 1782), xv. 12. Charles Nodier, “Introduction,” in Théâtre Choisi de Guilbert de Pixérécourt, vol. 1 (Paris: Tresse, 1841), viii. 13. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 4. 14. Brooks, 27. 15. Guilbert de Pixérécourt, “Dernières Réflexions de l’Auteur sur le Mélodrame,” in Théâtre Choisi de G. de Pixérécourt, vol. 4 (Paris: Tresse, 1843), 493. 16. McCormick, 114. 17. Henry Lyonnet, Dictionnaire des Comédiens Français, Ceux d’Hier (Geneva: Bibliothèque de la Revue Universelle, 1912), 14.



Notes to Pages 33–37

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18. Charles Hubert Millevoye, “La Chute des Feuilles,” in Oeuvres Completes de Millevoye, vol. 1 (Paris: Furne, 1833), 45–6. 19. Charles-­Augustin Sainte-­Beuve, “Poètes et romanciers modernes de la France XXIII: Millevoye,” Revue des Deux Mondes 10, no. 4 (1839): 649–50. 20. Alexandre Dumas père, Mes Mémoires, 10 vols. (Paris: M. Lévy frères, 1863–84), 9:179. 21. “Th. des Nouveautés: Première Représentation de Valentine, ou la chute des feuilles,” La Semaine (October 5, 1828), 3. 22. Woestyn, 2. 23. Léonard de Géréon, La Rampe et les Coulisses (Paris, 1832), 176. Woestyn, 2, notes that their next such venture, 1829’s Isaure, starred Mme. Albert as a woman stricken with rabies. 24. Amable de Saint Hilaire and Ferdinand de Villeneuve, Valentine, ou La Chute des Feuilles, Drame en Deux Actes, Mêlé de Chants (Paris: J. N. Barba, 1828), 8. 25. Saint Hilaire and Villeneuve, 17. 26. Saint Hilaire and Villeneuve, 17–18. 27. Saint Hilaire and Villeneuve, 40–1. 28. Saint Hilaire and Villeneuve, 40. 29. Julie de Lespinasse, Lettres de Mlle. de Lespinasse, 2 vols. (Paris: Long­ champs, 1811), 2.244. 30. Anna Potocka, Mémoires de la Comtesse Potocka, 1794–1820, ed. Casimir Stryienski (Paris: Plon, Nourrit et Co., 1897), 236. 31. Barbara Juliane von Krüdener, Valérie, vol. 2 (Paris: Ollivier, 1837), 27–8. 32. Saint Hilaire and Villeneuve, 41. 33. Saint Hilaire and Villeneuve, 35. 34. See Aretaeus of Capodoccia, Of the Causes and Signs of Acute and Chronic Disease, trans. T. F. Reynolds (London: William Pickering, 1837), 31. 35. Saint Hilaire and Villeneuve, 48. 36. Barnes, 26–7. 37. Michel Foucault, Naissance de la Clinique: Une Archéologie du Regard Médical (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), 14. 38. Barnes, 27. 39. Foucault, 160–3. 40. Barnes, 29. 41. Lawlor, Consumption, 114. 42. Jacalyn Duffin, To See With a Better Eye: A Life of R. T. H. Laennec (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 25. 43. Duffin, 302; see also, Caldwell, 26. 44. Xavier Bichat, Anatomie Générale, Appliquée à la Physiologie et à la Médecine, vol. 1 (Paris: Brosson et Chaudé, 1821), 70.

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Notes to Pages 37–40

45. See Georges Canguilhem, Idéologie et Rationalité dans l’Histoire des Sciences de la Vie (Paris: Librairie Philosophique, 2000), 52. 46. John Brown, Elementa Medicinae (Edinburgh, 1784), 41. 47. Gaspard Laurent Bayle, Recherches sur la Phthisie Pulmonaire (Paris: Gabon, 1855), 362; Laënnec, 236. 48. Bayle, 645; Laënnec, 285. 49. Bayle, 645; Laënnec, 285–6. 50. Bayle, 642. 51. Bayle, 645. 52. Laënnec, 284. 53. Laënnec, 284. 54. Duffin, 138. 55. Foucault, 169. 56. For “autopathography,” see G. Thomas Couser, “Autopathography: Women, Illness, and Lifewriting,” a/b: Auto/biography Studies 6 (1991): 65–75. For Bayle’s and Laënnec’s autopathographies, see Jacalyn Duffin, “Sick Doctors: Bayle and Laennec on Their Own Phthisis,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 43, no. 2 (1998): 165–82. For Bayle and Laënnec as “romantic doctors” whose autopathographies reflect their era’s understandings of emotion’s role in tubercular etiology, see Thomas Dodman, What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 133–5. 57. Bayle, 478. Bayle refers to himself as “G. L. B., docteur en médecine.” Duffin, 356, notes that Laënnec identified this case as that of “Bayle lui-­même” (“Bayle himself ”). 58. Bayle, 478. 59. Bayle, 479. 60. Duffin, 99. 61. Roger Kervran, Laennec: His Life and Times, trans. D. C. Abrahams-­ Curiel (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1960), 197. 62. Duffin, 250. 63. Duffin, 280. 64. Qtd. in Kervran, 201. 65. Kervran, 208. 66. Dumas, Mes Mémoires, 4:78. 67. Dumas, Mes Mémoires, 4:270. 68. Alexandre Dumas père, Le Comte Hermann, in Théâtre Complet, vol. 10 (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1861), 367. 69. For theatre’s relationship to the 1830 revolution, see Sylvie Vielledent, 1830 aux Théâtres (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2009). 70. Susan McCready, The Limits of Performance in the French Romantic Theatre (Durham: Durham Modern Language Series, 2007), 13.



Notes to Pages 40–41

223

71. Dumas, Antony, 63. 72. Dumas, Antony, 127–8. 73. In an 1861 note, Anicet-­Bourgeois declared that he helped to sketch the plot of Angèle and “came up with the sympathetic and touching character of young Henri Muller” (“Correspondance,” Le Figaro, May 12, 1861: 5). In Dumas, Mes Mémoires, 10:46, Dumas also credits Anicet-­Bourgeois with this inspiration, remarking, “I gave him the idea of Angèle; yet it was he who discovered, not Muller the doctor, but Muller the consumptive: that is to say, the profoundly melancholy side of the work” (emphases Dumas’s). Although I follow tradition and the original title page of the work by describing Angèle as Dumas’s play, Anicet-­Bourgeois’s contribution should not be erased. 74. Dumas also replicated Valentine’s love triangle between a consumptive girl, her healthy cousin, and her conflicted lover in his novel Amaury (Paris: H. Souverain, 1844). 75. Alexandre Dumas père [and Auguste Anicet-­Bourgeois], Angèle (Paris: Charpentier, 1834), 254. 76. For example, Jules Édouard Bouteiller, Histoire Complète et Méthodique des Théâtres de Rouen, vol. 4 (Rouen: C. Métérie, 1880), 17, notes Angèle’s premiere in Rouen on March 24 1834. It played in Lyon in the same year, with more than one actor playing the role of Henri Muller over the course of the run; the controversy this occasioned is described in “Grand Théâtre: Angèle—­Henri-­Muller-­Monval,” Le Papillon: Journal des Théâtres, June 8, 1834: 1. See E. C, “Théâtres,” Le Journal des Artistes 12, no. 2 (1838): 86, for a note that Angèle would soon be played in Berlin. 77. The print parody is Roberge, Angèle, Drame en Cinq Actes, Narré et Commenté par Mme. Gibou à ses Commères Mme Pochet, La Lyonnaise, etc. (Paris: Marchant, 1834). For the onstage parody, see M. Dumersan, Les Immoralités: Pièce Morale en un Acte, Mélée de Couplets (Paris: Marchant, 1834). 78. G. W. M. Reynolds, The Youthful Imposter (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1836). 79. See, for instance, Angelika: Drama in Fünf Acten von Alexander Dumas (Leipzig, 1837); G. A. Garberoglio, Angela: Drama in Cinque Atti di Alessandro Dumas: Libera Traduzione (Milano, 1853); and Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch, Ernesto: Drama en Cinco Actos (Madrid, 1837). 80. See Hippolyte Parigot, Le Drame d’Alexandre Dumas: Étude Dramatique, Sociale, et Littéraire (Paris: Hachette, 1898); Anne Ubersfeld, “A. Dumas père et le Drame Bourgeois,” Cahiers de l’Association Internationale des Études Françaises 35 (1983): 121–39; Anne Ubersfeld, Le Drame Romantique (Paris: Belin, 1993); Florence Naugrette, Le Théâtre Romantique: Histoire, Écriture, Mise en Scène (Paris: Seuil, 2001).

224

Notes to Pages 41–45

81. Hippolyte Romand, “Poètes et Romanciers Modernes de la France: IX. M. Alexandre Dumas,” La Revue des Deux Mondes 3, vol. 1 (Janvier 1834): 152. 82. “Chronique,” L’Étudiant, January 18, 1838: 32. 83. “Chronique,” 32. 84. “Porte-­Saint-­Martin: Angèle,” Le Figaro, December 30, 1833: 2. 85. P.S***, “Théâtres,” La France Littéraire 11 (1834): 217. 86. Romand, 151, 152. 87. Reynolds, ii. 88. “Chronique,” 32. 89. “Le Premier Lorgnon,” Le Moniteur de la Mode: Journal du Grand Monde 451 (January 1856): 409. 90. Dumas, Angèle, 85. 91. Dumas, Angèle, 43. 92. Dumas, Angèle, 106–7. 93. Dumas, Angèle, 106. 94. Dumas, Angèle, 107. 95. Dumas, Angèle, 182. 96. Pichot, 51. 97. Dumas, Angèle, 86. 98. Romand, 151. 99. Dumas, Angèle, 48. 100. Victor Hugo, Cromwell (Paris: Ambroise Dupont et Co., 1828), xx. 101. Victor Hugo, Hernani (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1866), 1–2. 102. Ernest Falconnet, “Hans Sachs,” La France Littéraire 15 (1834): 32. 103. Romand, 151. 104. Dumas, Angèle, 108. 105. Dumas, Angèle, 98. 106. Dumas, Angèle, 98. 107. Dumas, Angèle, 184–5. 108. Dumas, Angèle, 202. 109. Dumas, Angèle, 253. 110. Henry Lytton Bulwer, France, Social, Literary, Political, vol. 2 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1834), 206. 111. Bulwer, 212. 112. Hippolyte Fortoul, “Bulletin Dramatique: Angèle,” Revue Encyclopédique 59 (July–September 1834): 528. 113. Fortoul, 528. 114. Fortoul, 530. 115. Suzanne Voilquin, “Angèle,” La Tribune des Femmes 2 (1833): 99. 116. Voilquin, 101 (emphases Voilquin’s).



Notes to Pages 45–51

225

117. Pamela Pilbeam, Saint-­Simonians in Nineteenth-­Century France: From Free Love to Algeria (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 119. 118. Voilquin, 100. 119. On this recurring trope in French Romanticism, see Allan H. Pasco, Sick Heroes: French Society and Literature in the Romantic Age, 1750–1850 (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 1997). 120. Dumas, Angèle, 107. 121. Pichot, 49. 122. Dumas, Angèle, 239. 123. Pichot, 54. 124. Dumas, Angèle, 240. 125. Dumas, Angèle, 253. 126. “Revue Dramatique,” L’Artiste 1, no. 6 (1833): 290. 127. “Revue Dramatique,” 290. 128. Auguste Bourjot, “Du Drame Moderne: Mm. Victor Hugo et Alexandre Dumas,” Journal des Artistes 12, vol. 8 (1838): 90. 129. Pichot, 49. 130. “Th. des Nouveautés: Première,” 3. 131. Saint Hilaire and Villeneuve, 49. 132. Konstantin Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work, ed. and trans. Jean Benedetti (London: Routledge, 2008), 52. 133. Dumas, Angèle, 252. 134. Dumas, Angèle, 81 and 103. 135. Pichot, 54. 136. Marlis Schweitzer and Joanne Zerdy, “Introduction: Object Lessons,” in Performing Objects and Theatrical Things (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 3. 137. Woestyn, 2. 138. “Chronique,” 32. 139. Roberge, 30. 140. Roberge, 54. 141. ‘R,’ “Théâtre de la Porte-­Saint-­Martin: Première Représentation d’Angèle,” Journal des Débats Politiques et Littéraires, December 30, 1833: 3. 142. Dumas, Angèle, 103–4. 143. Jules Janin, “La Semaine Dramatique,” Journal des Débats Politiques et Littéraires, May 27, 1861: 2. 144. Roberge, 32 and 47. 145. The word Dumas uses, poitrine, can indicate either object. 146. Désiré Nisard, “D’un Amendement à la Définition de la Littérature Facile,” Revue de Paris 2 (1834): 10. 147. P.S***, 217.

226

Notes to Pages 51–55

148. “Théâtre de l’Odéon: Reprise d’ Angèle,” L’Indépendent, January 21, 1838: 1. 149. Hippolyte Lucas, Histoire Philosophique et Littéraire du Théâtre Français Depuis Son Origine, vol. 2 (Paris, 1863), 285. Among Angèle’s many imitators was 1858’s Le Fils Naturel, by Alexandre Dumas fils, in which the wealthy young consumptive Lucien offers his name and fortune to save the reputation of a young unwed mother.

Chapter Two 1. Jules Chéry, Mademoiselle Rachel en Amérique (1855–1856), ed. Anne Martin-­Fugier (Paris: Mercure de France, 2008), 77–8. 2. Chéry, 85. 3. Chéry, 102: “Je l’ai vue pouvant à peine se soutenir, pouvant à peine parler, tousser à chaque mot, retenant son souffle pour étouffer cette toux, se crispant à mon bras pour ne pas tomber, et, malgré sa faiblesse, malgré sa souffrance, trouvant encore, par une indomptable énergie, le courage d’aller jusqu’au bout de son rôle et, comme l’étincelle qui va s’éteindre, de jeter un dernier éclat fulgurant sur cette terrible scène de la mort d’Adrienne aux cinquième acte.” 4. Chéry, 103. 5. Barnes, 49; see also Isabelle Percebois, “Blighted Destinies: Arts, Artists, and the Romantic Disease in 19th-­Century France,” Mediogaphia 37, vol. 1 (2015): 108. 6. Rachel Brownstein, Tragic Muse: Rachel of the Comédie Française (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1993), 151. 7. Barnes, 25–7. 8. See, for example, J.-­J. Alamir-­Carcenac, Recherches sur la Phthisie Pulmonaire (Paris: Lacombe, 1842, 1842), 22–7; Armand Rondard, Recherches sur la Phthisie Pulmonaire et Sur le Traitement qui Lui Convient (Montpellier: La Veuve Ricard, 1844), 79–83; Émile Bernardeau, Histoire de la Phthisie Pulmonaire, Nouvelles Recherches sur l’Étiologie et sur le Traitement de Cette Maladie (Paris: Fortin, Masson, and Co., 1845), 27. 9. William Coleman, Death Is a Social Disease: Public Health and Political Economy in Early Industrial France (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 10; Barnes, 31. 10. H. C. Lombard, De l’Influence des Professions sur la Durée de la Vie: Recherches Statistiques (Geneva, 1835), 19–25. 11. Louis-­François Benoiston de Châteauneuf, “De l’Influence de Certaines Professions sur le Développement de la Phthisie Pulmonaire,” Annales de l’Hygiène Publique 6 (1831): 36. 12. Louis-­René Villermé, “De la Santé des Ouvriers Employés dans les



Notes to Pages 55–59

227

Fabriques de Soie, de Coton, de Laine,” Annales de l’Hygiène Publique 21 (1839): 339–420. 13. Alamir-­Carcenac, 77. 14. Alexandre Fourcault, Hygiène des Personnes Prédisposées aux Maladies Chroniques et Spécialement à la Phthisie Pulmonaire (Paris: B. Dusillon, 1844), 199. 15. Laënnec, 114. 16. Philippe Cheneau, Un Mot sur Cette Question: “Peut-­on déterminer, au moins jusqu’à un certain point, la cause de prédilection de l’affection tuberculeuse pour le poumon, depuis l’époque de la puberté jusqu’à l’âge de trente-­cinq ou quarante ans, et par suite expliquer la fréquence progressive de la phthisie dans le siècle où nous sommes?” (Paris: Imprimerie des Ducessois, 1841), 4. 17. Bernardeau, 30. 18. Benoiston de Châteauneuf, 34–5. 19. See Julie de Faramond, “Être Actrice et Mourir Phthisique: Une Malédiction de l’Époque Romantique,” Épistémocritique.org, May 13, 2016, http:// epistemocritique.org/wp-­content/uploads/2016/05/Faramond.pdf. 20. Cheneau, 4. 21. Jules Fournet, Recherches Cliniques sur l’Auscultation des Organes Respiratoires (Paris: J. S. Chaudé, 1839), 481–2. 22. Bernardeau, 28. 23. Barnes, 30. 24. The play’s Mimì is a composite of two consumptive characters from Murger’s stories; one of them, Mimì, is a recurring character across a number of the scènes, while another, Francine, appears in one of the most popular scènes, Le Manchon de Francine (Francine’s Muff ). See Henry Murger, Scènes de la Vie de Bohème (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1851). 25. Théodore Barrière and Henry Murger, La Vie de Bohème, Pièce en Cinq Actes, Mêlée de Chants (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1860), 34. 26. Barrière and Murger, 59. 27. Barrière and Murger, 67. 28. Barrière and Murger, 95. 29. “Théâtres,” Le Constitutionnel, November 26, 1849: 2. 30. Barrière and Murger, 35. 31. Barrière and Murger, 100. 32. Barrière and Murger, 35. 33. Barrière and Murger, 34. 34. Barrière and Murger, 59. 35. Barrière and Murger, 44. 36. Barrière and Murger, 56. 37. Barrière and Murger, 56.

228

Notes to Pages 59–65

38. Barrière and Murger, 100–1. 39. Barrière and Murger, 104. 40. Barrière and Murger, 57. 41. Lucas, 285. 42. Bernstein, 8. 43. Bernstein, 11. 44. Barrière and Murger, 61. 45. Barrière and Murger, 61. 46. Barrière and Murger, 63. 47. “Subtext, n.2,” OED Online, December 2021, Oxford University Press, https://www-­oed-­com.ezproxy.library.dal.ca/view/Entry/193161 ?redirectedFrom=subtext (accessed January 29, 2022). 48. Diamond, 30. 49. Barrière and Murger, 96. 50. Barrière and Murger, 97. 51. Octave Uzanne, Les Ornements de la Femme: l’Éventail, l’Ombrelle, le Gant, le Manchon (Paris: Quantin, 1892), 261–2. 52. Théophile Gautier, “Théâtres,” La Presse, November 26, 1849: 1–2. 53. “Théâtre des Variétés,” Le Menestral, November 25, 1849: n.p. 54. Jules Janin, “Théâtres,” Journal des Débats Politiques et Littéraires, November 26, 1849: 2: “Elle a été si vraie et si touchante, elle a représenté avec tant de conscience, de conviction et de coeur ces frêles et maladives creatures, enfans [sic] perdues de la misère et du bon Dieu, à qui le monde a refusé le pain, l’amour et le soleil, elle a si cruellement pleuré en dedans, elle s’est abandonée à une agonie si peu étudiée et si cruelle, que l’émotion s’est emparée de haut en bas, de cette salle qui venait de rire pendant quatre actes.” 55. G. C., “M. Lockroy,” Le Figaro, January 20, 1891: 1. 56. Dumas père, Le Comte Hermann, 366. 57. “Théâtres,” Le Constitutionnel, November 26, 1849: 2. 58. Ibid. 59. Janin, “Théâtres,” Journal des Débats, November 26, 1849: 2. 60. Marvin Carlson, The French Stage in the Nineteenth Century (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1972), 57. 61. Janin, “Théâtres,” Journal des Débats, November 26, 1849: 2. 62. Qtd. in Félix Duquesnel, “Les Oubliés: Henri Murger,” Le Temps, November 18, 1913: 3. 63. For recent biographies of Marie Duplessis, see René Weis, The Real Traviata: The Song of Marie Duplessis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), and Julie Kavanagh, The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis (New York: Knopf, 2013).



Notes to Pages 65–69

229

64. Alexandre Dumas fils, La Dame aux Camélias: Roman, third ed. (Paris, 1852), 16. 65. Alexandre Dumas fils, La Dame aux Camélias, in Théâtre Complet d’Aléxandre Dumas fils, vol. 1 (Paris, 1863), 180. 66. Jules Janin, “Théâtre du Vaudeville: La Dame aux Camélias,” Journal des Débats Politiques et Littéraires, February 9, 1852: 1. 67. Dumas, La Dame, 1863, 112. 68. Dumas, La Dame, 1863, 136. 69. Dumas, La Dame, 1863, 162. 70. Dumas, La Dame, 1863, 130. 71. Dumas, La Dame, 1863, 75. 72. Dumas, La Dame, 1863, 130. 73. Dumas, La Dame, 1863, 155. 74. “Théâtre du Vaudeville: La Dame aux Camélias,” Le Daguerréotype Théâtral 3, no. 49 (February 18 1852): 2. 75. Janin, “Théâtre du Vaudeville,” 1: “On la reconnaissait à l’élégance de sa taille, à l’éclat de ses yeux, à la pâleur de son visage [. . . et] elle se laisait [sic] remarquer par une toux sèche et febrile, avant-­courrière d’une mort certaine, et surtout dans cette profession de la galanterie, qui est bien de toutes les professions la plus misérable et la plus pénible.” 76. “Vaudeville: La Dame aux Camélias,” Annuaire du Théâtre, February 1852: 78. 77. Jann Matlock, Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria, and Reading Difference in Nineteenth-­Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 110; see also, Sos Eltis, Acts of Desire: Women and Sex on Stage, 1800–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 101, and Bernadette C. Lintz, “Concocting La Dame aux Camélias: Blood, Tears, and Other Fluids,” Nineteenth-­Century French Studies 33, nos. 3–4 (2005): 300. 78. Eltis, 103. 79. See, for example, Susan Painter, “La Dame aux Camélias: The Myth Revised,” in Melodrama, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 121–43; M. A. Loera de la Llave, “La Traviata and La Dame aux Camélias: Verdi, Dumas Fils, the Bourgeoisie, and Bad Faith,” Romance Languages Annual 5 (1993): 223–33. 80. Dumas, La Dame, 1863, 111. 81. Dumas, La Dame, 1852, 358–63. 82. Frédéric Febvre, “La Marguerite des Marguerite,” Le Gaulois, July 26, 1900: 1. 83. Hutcheon and Hutcheon, 46; Eltis, 103. 84. Janin, “Théâtre du Vaudeville,” 1: “mourante—­se traîner au bal afin d’éclipser ses rivales,—­et, pleine de fièvre, assister à ces longs festins dont

230

Notes to Pages 69–73

il faut être la joie et le plaisir, et sourire à celui-­ci, et sourire à celui-­là, et mentir à tous les deux, et les tromper tous en bloc; et ni repos ni trêve, et pas un moment de solitude avec soi-­même, et pas un instant de calme! Comédienne au jeu febrile qui ne va plus quitter son théâtre que pour mourir[.]” 85. Dumas, La Dame, 1863, 76: “se soigner, c’est bon pour les femmes du monde qui ont une famille et des amis; mais, nous, dès que nous ne pouvons plus servir au plaisir ou à la vanité de personne, on nous abandonne, et les longues soirées succèdent aux longs jours; je le sais bien, allez; j’ai été deux mois dans mon lit: au bout de trois semaines, personne ne venait plus me voir.” 86. Dumas, La Dame, 1863, 79. 87. Dumas, La Dame, 1863, 134. 88. Dumas, La Dame, 1863, 53. 89. Dumas, La Dame, 1863, 55. 90. Dumas, La Dame, 1863, 168. 91. Dumas, La Dame, 1863, 173. 92. Dumas, La Dame, 1863, 180. 93. Dumas, La Dame, 1863, 182. 94. Dumas, La Dame, 1863, 74. 95. Dumas, La Dame, 1863, 136. 96. “Théâtre du Vaudeville,” Le Daguerreotype Théâtral, 2. 97. Théophile Gautier, “Théâtres,” La Presse, February 10, 1852: 2: “Quoique pour nous, qui, hélas! pouvons juger de sa vérité, ce spectacle ait été extrêmement pénible, nous vous recommandons la scène de l’agonie. Jamais Ary Scheffer n’a posé sur un oreiller de dentelles une tête plus idéalement pâle et laissant plus transparaître l’ame: c’est une grace navrante, un charme douloureux qui vous ravit et vous fait mal.” 98. Georges Nanteuil, “Les Costumes de Marguerite Gautier,” Le Journal, September 30, 1896: 2. 99. “Le Diable Boiteux,” “Les Contemporains en Pantoufles: CCXXXII: Eugénie Doche,” Le Passe-­Temps, February 16, 1861: n.p. 100. Charlotte Brontë, Villette, vol. 2 (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1853), 188. 101. Brontë, 189–90. 102. Sally Shuttleworth, “ ‘The Surveillance of a Sleepless Eye’: The Constitution of Neurosis in Villette,” in One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature, ed. George Levine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 330. 103. Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 13.



Notes to Pages 77–83

231

Chapter Three

1. George Henry Lewes, Dramatic Essays (London: Walter Scott, 1896), 241. 2. Lewes, 242. 3. Laënnec, 284–5. 4. James Clark, Medical Notes on Climate, Diseases, Hospitals, and Medical Schools in France, Italy, and Switzerland (London: T. and G. Underwood, 1820), 94. 5. William Sweetser, A Treatise on Consumption (Boston: T. H. Carter 1836), 139. 6. Léon Brachet, De la Contagion de la Phthisie Tuberculeuse (Nice: V.-­Eugène Gauthier et Co., 1867), 8. 7. Samuel Sheldon Fitch, Six Lectures on the Uses of the Lungs; and Cause, Prevention, and Cure of Pulmonary Consumption, Asthma, and Diseases of the Heart (New York: H. Carlisle, 1847), 46. 8. Bernardeau, 39. 9. Laënnec, 284. 10. George Thomas Congreve, On Consumption of the Lungs, or Decline, and the Only Successful Treatment (London: James Gilbert, 1857), 12. 11. Sweetser, 139. 12. Brachet, 12: “Après avoir passé de longs mois, souvent même de longues années, à lutter contre ce mal terrible qui leur ravit tout espoir [. . .], cachant leurs larmes sous des sourires factices, s’étiolant lentement; quoi de plus naturel que de les voir périr ainsi, victims de ce mal qui ne demande pour germer que la plus légère déviation de la vie organique, que le plus léger prolapsus des forces vitals.” 13. Fitch, 46. 14. Albert Monnier, “Théâtres,” Le Journal pour Rire, September 8, 1855: 7. 15. Émile Montégut, “Le Théâtre Réaliste,” La Revue des Deux Mondes 28, no. 13 (1858): 708. 16. “Théâtres: Le Mariage d’Olympe,” Le Figaro, March 15, 1863: 1. 17. “Correspondance,” Le Figaro, July 23, 1857: 7. 18. Henry Greville, Leaves from the Diary of Henry Greville, ed. Alice Byng Strafford, vol. 2 (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1884), 243. 19. Barrière and Thiboust, 55. 20. Barrière and Thiboust, 63. 21. Octave Feuillet, Dalila: Drame en Trois Actes et Six Tableaux (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1857), 62. 22. Kate Field, Charles Albert Fechter (Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1882), 16.

232

Notes to Pages 83–89

23. Field, 16. 24. L. Xavier Eyma, “Premières Représentations: Théâtre Historique: Reprise d’Angèle,” Messager des Théâtres et des Arts, September 12, 1848: n.p. 25. Édouard Noël and Edmond Stoullig, Les Annales du Théâtre et de la Musique, Quinzième Année: 1889 (Paris: G. Charpentier et Co., 1890), 305. 26. “Paris in Little,” Athenaeum 1403 (16 September 1854): 1110. 27. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Pages Retrouvées (Paris: Charpentier, 1886), 207, emphasis in original. 28. Grace Greenwood, “Five Camilles,” New York Times, February 21, 1875: 7. 29. De Goncourt, 207. 30. Dumas, La Dame, 1863, 17. 31. Dumas, La Dame, 1863, 29. 32. Jules Lecomte, Le Perron de Tortoni: Indiscrétions Biographiques (Paris: E. Dentu, 1863), 163. 33. Auguste Maquet, Dettes de Coeur (Paris: Librairie Théâtrale, 1859), 164. 34. Lecomte, 163. 35. Lecomte, 164. 36. La Mode Nouvelle, November 1, 1859: n.p., Recueil Factice “Dettes de Coeur,” Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Collection Arts du Spectacle. 37. Georges Davidson, “A Travers les Théâtres,” Le Figaro, March 11, 1860: 5. 38. Lecomte, 164. 39. Bulwer, 2:212. 40. “Topics of the Week,” Literary Gazette 1924 (December 3, 1853): 1172. 41. “Latest News: France,” Globe, April 17, 1852: 3. 42. “Theatrical and Musical Gossip,” Atlas, June 2, 1852: 12. 43. Dutton Cook, Nights at the Play: A View of the English Stage (London: Chatto and Windus, 1883), 250. 44. Lewes, 276–77. 45. Lewes, 277. 46. “Princess’s Theatre,” Evening Mail, September 20, 1852: 7. 47. Dion Boucicault, The Prima Donna (London: Lacy’s Acting Edition, 1852), 10. 48. Boucicault, 11. 49. Boucicault, 10–11. 50. Boucicault, 13. 51. Boucicault, 2. 52. John William Cole, The Life and Theatrical Times of Charles Kean, FSA, vol. 2 (London: Richard Bentley, 1859), 40. 53. “The Theatres,” Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, October 3, 1852: n.p. 54. Boucicault, 2. 55. “Princess’s Theatre,” Evening Mail, September 20, 1852: 7.



Notes to Pages 89–93

233

56. Tom Taylor, Helping Hands (London: Thomas Hailes Lacy, n.d.), 9. 57. Taylor, 5. 58. Boucicault, 9. 59. Taylor, 9. 60. “The Theatres,” Illustrated London News, March 29, 1856: 10. 61. “Sothern’s Lyceum,” Acadian Recorder, March 18, 1858: 3. 62. “A Leap Before a Fall,” Tomahawk 57 (June 6, 1868): 234. 63. Westland Marston, Our Recent Actors, vol. 2 (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1888), 308. 64. Marston, 307–8. 65. “A Leap,” 234. 66. Rev. of La Traviata, Times [London], August 7, 1856: 8. 67. For the British reception of La Traviata, see Roberta Montemorra Marvin, “The Victorian Violetta: The Social Messages of Verdi’s La Traviata,” in Art and Ideology in European Opera: Essays in Honour of Julian Rushton, eds. Rachel Cowgill, David Cooper, and Clive Brown (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2010), 222–40. 68. Eltis, 104. 69. Benjamin Lumley, Reminiscences of the Opera (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1864), 378–9. 70. Lumley, 378. 71. Lumley, 378. 72. Lumley, 376. 73. Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007). 74. Lumley, 376. 75. Alexis Chitty, “Piccolomini, Maria,” A Dictionary of Music and Musicians (A. D. 1450–1880), ed. George Grove, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1880), 751. 76. Hutcheon and Hutcheon, 46. 77. R. M. Levey and J. O’Rorke, Annals of the Theatre Royal, Dublin: From Its Opening in 1821 to Its Destruction by Fire, February, 1880 (Dublin: Joseph Dollard, 1880), 171. 78. “Music in Paris,” Musical World, February 14, 1857: 101. 79. Rev. of La Traviata, Times, August 7, 1856: 8. 80. “Mdlle. Piccolomini in Dublin,” Musical World, October 18, 1856: 665. 81. “Mdlle. Piccolomini,” 665. 82. “Mdlle. Piccolomini,” 666. 83. “Mlle. Piccolomini in ‘La Traviata,’ ” Dwight’s Journal of Music, August 23, 1856: 166. 84. “Her Majesty’s Theatre,” Times, August 4, 1856: 5. 85. “The Drama in a Bad Way,” Punch, or the London Charivari, July 5, 1857: 7.

234

Notes to Pages 94–99

86. “Theatrical,” Daily Atlas, November 14, 1853: 1. 87. “The Theatre and its Friends,” Harper’s Weekly 1, no. 5 (January 31, 1857): 1. 88. “Theatricals,” United States Magazine 4 (1857): 356–7. 89. “Unique View of Camille,” New Orleans Daily Crescent, May 30, 1857: 1. 90. Dumas, La Dame, 1863, 75. 91. Jean Margaret Davenport, “Camille, or the Fate of a Coquette” (unpublished MS prompt book), 1853, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library, n.p. 92. For Davenport’s career as a girl actor, see Marlis Schweitzer, “An ‘Unmanly and Insidious Attack’: Child Actress Jean Davenport and the Performance of Masculinity in 1840s Jamaica and Newfoundland,” Theatre Research in Canada 35, no. 1 (2014): 49–68. 93. Conti, Playing Sick, 37. 94. “The Theatre,” Charleston Mercury, February 24, 1857: 2. 95. L. H. Hooper, “The Adventures of a Drama,” Appletons’ Journal 9 (January–June 1873): 403. 96. Hooper, 403. 97. Conti, Playing Sick, 40. 98. See Karl M. Kippola, Acts of Manhood: The Performance of Masculinity on the American Stage, 1828–1865 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 117–46. 99. “Early Days with Booth,” Washington Post, March 11, 1906: 37. 100. Qtd. in Charles Shattuck, The Hamlet of Edwin Booth (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1969), 94. 101. “The Varieties,” New York Daily Times, April 26, 1856: 4. 102. “The Drama: Laura Keene’s Varieties,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 10, 1856: 343. 103. “Wallack’s Theatre—­Debut of Matilda Heron,” Unidentified Newspaper, 1857, Matilda Heron Clippings File, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library. 104. “The Hermit of Fifth-­Avenue,” “The Audit of the Week,” New York Times, March 3, 1857: 1. 105. William Winter, “The Famous Matilda Heron,” New York Tribune, March 17, 1877. 106. “Miss Matilda Heron,” Frank Leslie’s New York Journal 5 (January 1857): 167. 107. “Miss Matilda Heron,” 167. 108. “Theater,” Daily Ohio Statesman, February 26, 1858. 109. “The Hermit,” 1. 110. Conti, Playing Sick, 47. 111. Conti, Playing Sick, 55. 112. “Matilda Heron’s Opinion of Camille,” Daily Evening Bulletin, May 28, 1857.



Notes to Pages 99–105

235

113. “Miss Matilda Heron,” Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-­Room Companion, April 4, 1857: 209. 114. George Wilkes, “Genius—­The Drama: The American Rachel,” Porter’s Spirit of the Times, Matilda Heron Clippings File, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library. 115. “A Portrait Etched,” Buffalo Courier, October 14, 1864: 2. 116. “The Theatres,” Illustrated London News, April 27, 1861: 389. 117. Qtd. in Merle L. Perkins, “Matilda Heron’s Camille,” Comparative Literature 7, no. 4 (Autumn 1955), 342. 118. Qtd. in Perkins, 342. 119. Greenwood, 7. 120. “St. Louis Theatre,” Western Journal and Civilian 15, no. 3 (February 1856): 222. 121. “Academy of Music–‘La Traviata,’ ” New York Herald, December 4, 1856: 5. 122. “St. Louis Theatre—­Camille Epidemic,” Alexandria Gazette, February 7, 1856: 2. 123. Esther Cleophes Quinn, “The Sleeping Camille,” San Francisco Call, August 18, 1895: 13. 124. Ibid. 125. “Scène d’Octobre: La Jeune Poitrinaire, d’après Robinson,” Le Journal Illustrée 34 (October 2–9, 1864): 299.

Chapter Four 1. “Indicator,” “New York Correspondence,” National Era, November 3, 1853. 2. Conti, Playing Sick, 40. 3. George L. Aiken, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly: A Domestic Drama in Six Acts (New York: Samuel French, 1858), 33. 4. East Lynne, A Drama in Five Acts, Adapted from the Famous Novel of That Name by Mrs. Henry Wood (Chicago: Dramatic Publishing Co., 1894), 46. 5. “M. Louis on Consumption,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 29 (1844): 470. 6. Orson Squire Fowler, Hereditary Descent: Its Laws and Facts Applied to Human Improvement (New York: Fowlers and Wells, 1847), 72. 7. A. P. Dutcher, “Hereditary Predisposition a Cause of Pulmonary Consumption,” Cincinnati Lancet and Observer 3.21 (1860): 150. 8. Leonidas M. Lawson, A Practical Treatise on Phthisis Pulmonalis (Cincinnati: Rickey, Mallory, and Co., 1861), 192. 9. J. Hamilton Potter, The Consumptive’s Guide to Health; or, The Invalid’s Five Questions, and the Doctor’s Five Answers, second ed. (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1852), 64.

236

Notes to Pages 105–109

10. James Copland, A Dictionary of Practical Medicine (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1856), 1226–7. 11. Potter, 45. 12. Fitch, 57. 13. Copland, 1228. 14. Potter, 64–5. 15. Samuel A. Cartwright, “The Treatment of Pulmonary Consumption,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 14 (1857): 295. 16. For earlier histories of this understanding of consumption, see Porter and Bewell. 17. J. D. B. DeBow, Statistical View of the United States . . . Being a Compendium of the Seventh Census (Washington, DC: United States Census Office, 1854), 39, lists the population of the United States in 1850 as 23,191,876. DeBow, 82, lists 3,204,313 slaves of African and mixed-­race descent as forming part of this population. 18. Samuel A. Cartwright, “Cartwright on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” The Stethoscope 4, no. 11 (November 1854): 652. 19. Cartwright, “Cartwright on the Diseases,” 653. 20. John R. Hicks, “African Consumption,” The Stethoscope 4, no. 11 (November 1854): 628. 21. Hicks, 628. 22. Todd L. Savitt, Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Healthcare of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 42. 23. Molly Farrell, “Dying Instruction: Puritan Pedagogy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” American Literature 82, no. 2 (June 2010): 249. 24. Farrell, 264. 25. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, 2 vols. (Boston: John P. Jewett and Co., 1852), 1.212. 26. Stowe, 2.61. 27. Stowe, 2.85. 28. Stowe, 2.86. 29. Stowe, 2.86. 30. Stowe, 2.87. 31. Aiken, 33. 32. George C. Howard, “Eva to Her Papa” (New York: Horace Waters, 1854). 33. Tracy Davis and Stefka Mihaylova, “Introduction,” in Uncle Tom’s Cabins: The Transnational Histories of America’s Most Mutable Book, eds. Tracy Davis and Stefka Mihaylova (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 12. 34. Stowe, 2.87. 35. Stowe, 2.121.



Notes to Pages 109–114

237

36. George C. Howard, “St. Clare to Little Eva in Heaven” (New York: Horace Waters, 1854). 37. Stowe, 2.137. 38. Aiken, 41. 39. Stowe, 2.152. 40. Stowe, 2.153. 41. Stowe, 2.81. 42. Aiken, 14–15. 43. Conti, “I am not,” 66. 44. Stowe, 1.243. 45. Stowe, 1.293. 46. Stowe, 1.294. 47. Aiken, 29. See Nathans, Slavery 234 for the relationship between this scene and other sentimental works that link the temperance movement (especially as represented by Black Christians) to abolitionism. 48. Aiken, 31. 49. Stowe, 2.141. 50. Nathans, Slavery, 234. 51. Aiken, 41. 52. For Little Eva’s impact on nineteenth-­century visual culture, see Jo-­Ann Morgan, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” as Visual Culture (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007). 53. Bernstein, 4–5. 54. Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984; Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007), 110–14. 55. Davis and Mihaylova, 4. For further analysis of the American and transatlantic transmission of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, see Sarah Meer, Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), and John W. Frick, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” on the American Stage and Screen (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 56. Bernstein, 14. 57. Davis, “Nineteenth-­Century Repertoire,” 7. 58. Amongst the five manuscript adaptations from 1852–3 preserved amongst the Lord Chamberlain’s Papers (LCP) in the British Library (BL), four do not feature Eva at all. See Uncle Tom’s Cabin, LCP, BL Add MS 52934. See also Meer, 138, for the frequent absence of Eva from British adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 59. Barrière and Thiboust, 56. 60. Emily Sahakian, “Eliza’s French Fathers: Race, Gender, and Transatlantic

238

Notes to Pages 114–121

Paternalism in French Stage Adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1853,” in Uncle Tom’s Cabins: The Transnational History of America’s Most Mutable Book, eds. Tracy C. Davis and Stefka Mihaylova (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 82. 61. Edmond Texier and Léon de Wailly, L’Oncle Tom, Drame en Cinq Actes et Neuf Tableaux (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1853), 12. 62. Texier and de Wailly, 18. 63. Texier and de Wailly, 19. 64. Sahakian, 82–3. 65. H. P. Phelps, Players of a Century: A Record of the Albany Stage (Albany: Joseph McDonough, 1880), 287. 66. Phelps, 287–8. 67. For a theatrical genealogy of the “child of nature,” see Marlis Schweitzer, Bloody Tyrants and Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-­American Girls in the Nineteenth Century (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020), 75–7. 68. Adolphus M. Hart, Uncle Tom in Paris (Baltimore: William Taylor and Co., 1854), 10. 69. Bernstein, 119; Morgan, 51. 70. “Indicator,” “New York Correspondence,” National Era, November 3, 1853. 71. James Tipton, Eva: A Musically Illustrated Service, Compiled and Arranged from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (London: Weekes and Co., 1875). 72. Tipton, i. 73. Tipton, 18. 74. Bernstein, 14. 75. “ ‘East Lynne’ at the Theatre Royal,” Western Daily Press, July 9, 1895: 8. 76. In The Story of America (Chicago: R. S. King, 1889), 619, for example, Elia W. Peattie named two famous performers of Camille when he declared that “Matilda Heron and Clara Morris are the leaders in what is known as the emotional drama.” 77. Ellen (Mrs. Henry) Wood, East Lynne (London: T. Nelson and Sons, n.d.), 5. 78. “Scene from ‘East Lynne’ at the Surrey Theatre,” Illustrated Times, February 14, 1866: 115. 79. Wood, 412. 80. Wood, 476. 81. Wood, 459. 82. Wood, 465. 83. This line, or a variant of it, occurs in many adaptations of East Lynne preserved in the Lord Chamberlain’s Papers; for example, see the version licensed for performance at the Royal Albert Theatre in November 1870, LCP, BL Add MS 53090 k.



Notes to Pages 121–127

239

84. Wood, 221. 85. James Eli Adams, A History of Victorian Literature (Malden: Wiley-­ Blackwell, 2012), 203. 86. Hal Collier, “East Lynne” in Five Scenes, 1893, LCP, BL Add MS 53539 k, 24. 87. Alfred Kempe, Lady Isabel (East Lynne), 1875, LCP, BL Add MS 53153 C, 59. 88. East Lynne, 1894, 32. 89. Jennifer Jones, Medea’s Daughters: Forming and Performing the Woman Who Kills (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003), 22. 90. “East Lynne,” Shields Daily News, July 17, 1888: 3. 91. “Surrey Theatre,” Sun, February 6, 1866: 3. 92. “Lady Isabel,” Era, January 19, 1873: 4. 93. “East Lynne,” Shields Daily News, 3. 94. “East Lynne,” Shields Daily News, 3. 95. “ ‘East Lynne’ at the Olympic,” Era, December 29, 1888: 12. 96. Stage, March 6, 1883: 23. 97. Kempe, 58. 98. Wood, 333. 99. For Kempe’s familiarity with French drama, see Barbara T. Cooper, “Translating French Drama for English Audiences: Adolphe Belot’s L’Article 47,” Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens 86 (Fall 2017), https:// journals.openedition.org/cve/3323. 100. Wood, 333. 101. “Lady Isabel,” Era, 4. 102. East Lynne Cuttings File, Theatre and Performance Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK. 103. Collier, 28. 104. Collier, 29. 105. Lillian Gish and Ann Pinchot, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me (New York: Prentice-­Hall, 1969), 10. 106. Jill Watts, Mae West: An Icon in Black and White (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 21; Katherine A. Feeley, Mary Pickford: Hollywood and the New Woman (New York: Routledge, 2018), 19–20. 107. Nan Mullenneaux, Staging Family: Domestic Deceptions of Mid-­Ninteenth-­ Century American Actresses (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 127. 108. Mullenneaux, 129. 109. Laurence Senelick, “Howard Family,” in The Cambridge Guide to American Theatre, eds. Don B. Wilmeth with Tice L. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 198. 110. Cordelia Howard MacDonald, “Memoirs of the Original Little Eva,” Educational Theatre Journal 8, no. 4 (Dec. 1956): 267.

240

Notes to Pages 127–133

111. Howard MacDonald, 268. 112. Howard MacDonald, 269. 113. Howard MacDonald, 281. 114. Howard MacDonald, 275.

Chapter Five 1. Sharon Marcus, The Drama of Celebrity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 154. 2. “Sarah: The Idol-­Woman and the Other,” London Times, March 28, 1923: 10. For the link between this “exoticism” and Bernhardt’s Jewish identity, see Ann Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (New York: Routledge, 1997), 39–47. 3. Paget Thurstan, “The Canaries for Consumptives,” The Sanitary Record, January 15, 1889: 319. 4. E. Barriera, La Phthisie Pulmonaire, Son Traitement (Nice: V. Eugène Gauthier, 1876), 19. 5. Thomas Burgess, “Inutility of Resorting to the Italian Climate for the Care of Pulmonary Consumption,” Lancet 56, no. 1401 (July 6, 1850): 11. 6. Constantin-­François de Chasseboeuf, Comte de Volney, Tableau du Climat et du Sol des États-­Unis d’Amérique (Paris: Courcier et Dentu, 1803), 303–5. 7. Henry Huntt, “Observations on a Change of Climate in Pulmonary Consumption,” North American Surgical and Medical Journal 1 (1826): 289. 8. Cartwright, “Treatment,” 291. 9. James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life (Regina, Canada: University of Regina Press, 2013), 163. 10. Cartwright, “Treatment,” 293. 11. Edward Headlam Greenhow, Papers Relating to the Sanitary State of the People of England (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1858), xxii. 12. Greenhow, xxiii. 13. Byrne, 15. 14. Gustave Lagneau, Des Mesures Propres à Rendre Moins Faible l’Accroissement de la Population de la France (Paris: Masson, 1890), 36. 15. Barnes, 170. 16. This phrase appears, for example, in Étienne Lancereaux, La Distribution Géographique de la Phthisie Pulmonaire (Paris: Martinet, 1877); Ohio State Board of Health, “The Prevention of Consumption,” Ninth Annual Report of the State Board of Health of the State of Ohio (Columbus, 1895), 99; and “Origin of Consumption,” Swiss Cross 1 (January–June 1887): 217. 17. Feldberg, 105; see also Ott, 101, and Emily K. Abel, Tuberculosis and the



Notes to Pages 133–138

241

Politics of Exclusion: A History of Public Health and Migration to Los Angeles (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 36–8. 18. Cartwright, “Treatment,” 295. 19. Greenhow, xxiv. 20. Michel Peter, Leçons de Clinique Médicale, vol. 2 (Paris: Asselin, 1870), 469. 21. Jules Arnould, “France (Pathologie),” Dictionnaire Encyclopédique des Sciences Médicales, Series 4, vol. 5 (Paris: Masson / Asselin, 1879), 861. 22. Arnould, 861. 23. “Maud and Other Poems,” Evening Mail, August 27, 1855: 3. 24. “Theatres and Music,” John Bull and Britannia, November 14, 1857: 732. 25. “Theatres and Music,” 732. 26. Tom Taylor, An Unequal Match: A Comedy in Three Acts (Manchester: T. Chambers, 1874), 44. 27. Taylor, Unequal, 65. 28. Taylor, Unequal, 9. 29. Taylor, Unequal, 11–12. 30. Taylor, Unequal, 22. 31. Taylor, Unequal, 27. 32. Taylor, Unequal, 27. 33. Taylor, Unequal, 30–1. 34. Taylor, Unequal, 49. 35. Taylor, Unequal, 59. 36. Taylor, Unequal, 44. 37. Taylor, Unequal, 65. 38. “Haymarket Theatre,” Sun, November 9, 1857: 2. 39. “The Tatler,” Bell’s Life in London, September 23, 1882: 11. 40. “Mr. William Ferren,” The Dramatic Yearbook for the Year Ending December 31, 1891 (London, 1892), 52–3. 41. “The Tatler,” 11. 42. “Haymarket Theatre,” 2. 43. “Leading Actor,” Weekly Law Gazette, October 29, 1859: 349. 44. “Leading Actor,” 350. 45. For Horizon as frontier drama, see Roger A. Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 1870–1901 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 38–43, and Matthew Rebhorn, Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 121–47. 46. Augustin Daly, Horizon, in Plays by Augustin Daly, eds. Don B. Wilmeth and Rosemary Cullen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 118. 47. Daly, Horizon, 103. 48. Kim Marra, Strange Duets: Impresarios and Actresses in the American Theatre, 1865–1914 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), 40.

242

Notes to Pages 138–142

49. Daly, Horizon, 121. 50. Daly, Horizon, 123. 51. Daly, Horizon, 149. 52. Ott, 40–2. 53. Augustin Daly, Leah, the Forsaken (New York, 1874), 40. 54. Daly, Leah, 44. 55. For the social and clinical implications of French actress Aimée Desclée’s celebrated performance as Gilberte, see Stokes, 105–111. 56. Augustin Daly, Frou Frou: A Comedy of Powerful Human Interest (New York: Samuel French, 1870), 55. 57. Stokes, 106. 58. Joseph Francis Daly, The Life of Augustin Daly (New York: Macmillan, 1917), 99. 59. John Bouvé Clapp and Edwin Francis Edgett, Players of the Present: Part One (New York: Dunlap Society, 1899), 361. 60. Edward Augustus Dithmar, Recollections of Daly’s Theatres, with Passing Recollections of Others (New York, 1897), 36–7. 61. “Amusements,” New York Herald, March 29, 1871: 7. 62. Constance Rourke, Troupers of the Gold Coast: The Rise of Lotta Crabtree (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2016), 214. 63. Rourke, 199. 64. Daly, Horizon, 104. 65. Daly, Horizon, 141. 66. Daly, Horizon, 124. 67. Daly, Horizon, 126. 68. Daly, Horizon, 146. 69. Daly, Horizon, 149. 70. Daly, Horizon, 149. 71. Daly, Horizon, 148–9. 72. For the play’s box-­office and critical fortunes, see Hall, 41–2, and Rebhorn, 141. 73. See Dithmar, 64. Dithmar’s memory of Med and her gun seems to have led to the description of Med as “a wild flower of the plains, able to shoot a gun,” in George Odell, Annals of the New York Stage: 1870–1875 (New York: AMS Press, 1970), 21, and thence to the reference to the “gun-­toting ‘Wild Flower of the Plains’ ” in Gerald Bordman and Thomas S. Hischak, The Oxford Companion to American Theatre, third ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 210. 74. Frederick Wedmore, “The Stage: Sarah Bernhardt,” Academy 19 (January– June 1881): 462. 75. Conti, Playing Sick, 28.



Notes to Pages 142–145

243

76. Beth Holmgren, Starring Madame Modjeska: On Tour in Poland and America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 162–3. 77. Eltis, 108. 78. Qtd. in Marion Moore Coleman, Fair Rosalind: The American Career of Helena Modjeska (Cheshire: Cherry Hill Books, 1969), 715. 79. Alan Dale, Familiar Chats with the Queens of the Stage (New York, 1890), 365. For Morris’s Camille, see Barbara Wallace Grossman, A Spectacle of Suffering: Clara Morris on the American Stage (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), 115–25. 80. For Bernhardt as “the godmother of modern celebrity culture,” see Marcus, 14 passim. 81. Conti, Playing Sick, 65. 82. Wedmore, 463. 83. Camille Le Senne, Le Théâtre à Paris, Première Série, 1883–1884 (Paris: H. Le Soudier, 1888), 80. 84. Sarah Bernhardt, Ma Double Vie: Mémoires de Sarah Bernhardt (Paris: Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1907), 424. 85. “A Company of Actors,” Scribner’s Monthly 16 (1878): 841–2. 86. Gerda Taranow, Sarah Bernhardt: The Art Within the Legend (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 35. 87. Bernhardt, Double Vie, 338. 88. Bernhardt, Double Vie, 424–5. 89. Sarah Bernhardt, The Art of the Theatre, trans. H. J. Stenning (New York: Dial Press, 1925), 96. 90. Bernhardt, Art, 197–8. 91. Qtd. in Jules Huret, Sarah Bernhardt (Paris: F. Juven, 1899), 30. 92. Bernhardt, Double Vie, 113–14. For further analysis of Bernhardt’s Jeanne d’Arc, see Venita Datta, Heroes and Legends of Fin-­de-­siècle France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 142–78. 93. Ellen Terry, The Story of My Life (London, Hutchinson and Co., 1908), 217. 94. Théophile Gautier, Histoire de l’Art Dramatique en France Depuis Vingt-­ Cinq Ans, vol. 5 (Brussels: Hetzel, 1859), 236. 95. Sander Gilman, “Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt, and the ‘Modern Jewess,’ ” German Quarterly 66, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 205. 96. Édouard Drumont, La France Juive: Essai d’Histoire Contemporaine, vol. 1 (Paris: Marpon et Flammarion, 1886), 107. 97. See Jean Tulard, Napoléon II (Paris: Fayard, 1992). 98. Paul de Lussan, Le Fils de l’Homme, Souvenirs de 1824 (Paris: R. Riga, 1831). 99. Charles Desnoyer and Léon Beauvallet, Le Roi de Rome, Drame en Cinq Actes (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1857), 19.

244

Notes to Pages 146–151

100. Edmond Rostand, L’Aiglon: Drame en Six Actes, En Vers (Paris: Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1922), 26. 101. Rostand, 25. 102. Rostand, 42. 103. Rostand, 43. 104. Rostand, 43. 105. Rostand, ii. 106. See Kenneth E. Silver, “Celebrity, Patriotism, and Sarah Bernhardt,” in Constructing Charisma: Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteenth-­Century Europe, eds. Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 151–2. 107. Rostand, 146–7. 108. Silver, 152. 109. Rostand, 148. 110. Rostand, 239: “LE DUC: immobile, glacé—­deux filets de sang lui coulant   des lèvres. Ah! UN GÉMISSEMENT SUR LA ROUTE: Par pitié ! le   coup de grâce, dans l’oreille ! LE DUC: Ah ! je comprends pourquoi la nuit je me réveille ! . . . UN RÂLE DANS L’HERBE: Mais ces chevau-­légers sont d’ignobles   tueurs ! LE DUC: Pourquoi d’horribles toux me mettent en sueurs ! . . . UN CRI DANS UN BUISSON: Oh ! ma jambe est trop lourde ! il faut   qu’on me l’arrache ! LE DUC: Et je sais ce que c’est que le sang que je crache !” 111. Rostand, 240. 112. Maurice Baring, Sarah Bernhardt (New York: D. Appleton-­Century Company, 1934), 139. 113. Edmond Stoullig, “Premières Représentations,” Les Annales du Théâtre, July 14, 1901: n.p. 114. Barnes, 62. 115. Ernest Prévost, “Chronique: Après ‘L’Aiglon,’ ” Revue des Poètes, April 1900: 180. 116. Willa Cather, “Winter Sketches in the Capital,” The Index of Pittsburgh Life 6, no. 278 (1901): 11. 117. Stoullig, “Premières Représentations,” n.p. 118. Henry C. DeMille, The Lost Paradise: Drama in Three Acts (New York: Samuel French, 1897). 119. John Drew, My Years on the Stage (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1922), 170. 120. Untitled newspaper cutting, c. 1901, Phyllis Robbins Scrapbooks, vol. 2, 19, Maude Adams Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 121. Phyllis Robbins, The Young Maude Adams (New York: Marshall Jones Co., 1959), 51.



Notes to Pages 151–154

245

122. For Adams’s and Frohman’s collaboration on L’Aiglon, see Marra, 106–22. 123. Untitled newspaper cutting, September 1900, Phyllis Robbins Scrapbooks, vol. 1, 103, Maude Adams Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 124. For this theatrical competition’s role in histories of celebrity and of queer theatre, see Marcus, 206–8, and Marra, 108, respectively. 125. Untitled newspaper cutting, September 1900, Phyllis Robbins Scrapbooks, vol. 1, 103, Maude Adams Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 126. Untitled newspaper cutting, May 27, 1900, Phyllis Robbins Scrapbooks, vol. 1, 101, Maude Adams Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 127. “Elsie de Wolfe Returns,” New York Times, September 17, 1900: 7. 128. “Elsie de Wolfe,” 7. 129. “Maude Adams Preparing for the Greatest Effort of Her Life,” Deseret News, October 20, 1900: 11. 130. Acton Davies, Maude Adams (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1901), 98. 131. Stephen Fiske, “Art in the Theatres,” Art Amateur 43–44 (June 1900–May 1901): 38. 132. Fiske, 429. 133. “Sarah Bernhardt as the Eaglet,” New York Times, November 27, 1900: 5. 134. “Maude Adams as the Stricken Eaglet,” New York Times, October 23, 1900: 6. 135. Cather, 10–11. 136. William Winter, “The Drama: French Acting at the Garden,” New York Tribune, November 27, 1900: 8. 137. Marra, 109. 138. Untitled cutting, Life magazine, December 1900, Phyllis Robbins Scrapbooks, vol. 1, 117, Maude Adams Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 139. Fiske, 429. 140. Qtd. in “Bernhardt and Maude Adams,” Courier-­Journal, December 9, 1900: 17. 141. Untitled newspaper cutting, January 1901, Phyllis Robbins Scrapbooks, vol. 2, 8, Maude Adams Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 142. “Maude Adams Not Ill,” Unidentified Boston newspaper cutting, n.d., Scrapbook (anonymous compiler), Box 31, Maude Adams Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 143. “Comments in program of Nellie Barker,” Scrapbook 4 (compiled or collected by Laura B. Kennedy), 2, Box 28, Maude Adams Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

246

Notes to Pages 154–163

144. “Comments in program of Nellie Barker,” 2. 145. Bynum, 114. 146. Ott, 101. 147. Untitled cutting, Phyllis Robbins Scrapbooks, vol. 1, 121, Maude Adams Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Chapter Six 1. François de Curel, La Nouvelle Idole (Paris: P-­V. Stock, 1899), 247. 2. Conti, “I am not,” 78; see also Lawlor, Consumption, 187. 3. Robert Koch, “The Etiology of Tuberculosis,” Reviews of Infectious Diseases 4–6 (November–December 1982): 1271. 4. Koch, 1274. 5. Bynum, 95. 6. Koch, 1270. 7. Conti, “I am not,” 74; Hutcheon and Hutcheon, 39; Lawlor, Consumption, 186–7; Sontag, 38. 8. Koch, 1274. 9. Gilman, Franz Kafka, 171. 10. Barnes, 75–6; Feldberg, 43–4. 11. Austin Flint, “On the Pathological and Practical Relations of the Doctrine of the Bacillus Tuberculosis,” Medical News 44 (1884): 63. 12. Albert Manaud, La Névrose d’Angoisse (Lyon: A. Storck, 1900), 43. 13. J. Grasset, “The Relations of Hysteria with the Scrofulous and the Tubercular Diathesis,” Brain (January 1884), 435, 543–4. 14. Marius Beraud, Essai sur la Psychologie du Tuberculeux (Lyon: A. Rey, 1902), 65–6. 15. Beraud, 8. 16. Émile Zola, Le Naturalisme au Théâtre (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1881), 108. 17. For the intersections between medicine and theatrical naturalism, see Stanton B. Garner, Jr., “Is There a Doctor in the House? Medicine and the Making of Modern Drama,” Modern Drama 51, no. 3 (2008): 318. 18. Diamond, 30. Stokes, 110, argues that the “neurotic” embodiments of Second Empire French acting, where symptoms “signalled not so much revelation as compulsion,” were “transitional” to a “modern kind of theatre that is concerned with self-­k nowledge and motivation.” 19. Fawcett, 140. 20. Toril Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 4. 21. “The Oldest System-­Program of German Idealism,” in Friedrich Hölderlin: Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. and ed. Thomas Pfau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 155.



Notes to Pages 163–169

247

22. Moi, 82. 23. See, for example, Thomas Dormandy, The Worst of Evils: The Fight Against Pain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 316, and Kirsten Shepherd-­Barr, Science on Stage: From “Doctor Faustus” to “Copenhagen” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 158. 24. Henrik Ibsen, The Lady from the Sea, trans. Eleanor Marx-­Aveling (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1890), 25. 25. Ibsen, Lady, 62. 26. Ibsen, Lady, 121. 27. Ibsen, Lady, 66. 28. Ibsen, Lady, 173. 29. See René Doumic, De Scribe à Ibsen: Causeries sur le Théâtre Contemporain (Paris: Paul Delaplane, 1893). 30. Camille Le Senne, Le Théâtre à Paris, Sept. 1887–Oct. 1888 (Paris: H. Le Soudier, 1889), 495. 31. Jules Lemaître, Mariage Blanc (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1891), 6–7. 32. Lemaître, 7. 33. Paul Hervieu, Les Tenailles, in Revue de Paris 19 (October 1, 1895): 549. 34. Hervieu, 552–3. 35. Hervieu, 550. 36. Gabriel Trarieux, Sur la Foi des Étoiles (Paris: P-­V. Stock, 1901). 37. Hugh Allison Smith, Main Currents of Modern French Drama (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1925), 229. 38. Francisque Sarcey, “Chronique Théatrale,” Le Temps, December 12, 1892: 1. 39. Curel extensively rewrote the scène à faire in which this secret is revealed for the play’s revival at the Théâtre-­Français in 1900. All quotations in this chapter are from the 1893 edition, which more closely reflects the text used in Antoine’s production for the Théâtre-­Libre. 40. François de Curel, Les Fossiles: Pièce en Quatre Actes (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1893), 95. 41. Curel, Fossiles, 9. 42. Curel, Fossiles, 35. 43. Curel, Fossiles, 42. 44. Curel, Fossiles, 17. 45. Curel, Fossiles, 44. 46. Curel, Fossiles, 109. 47. Ibid. 48. Curel, Fossiles, 96. 49. Curel, Fossiles, 97. 50. Curel, Fossiles, 101. 51. Henry Fouquier, “Les Théâtres,” Le Figaro, November 30, 1892: 6. 52. Francisque Sarcey, “Chronique Théatrale,” Le Temps, December 5, 1892: 2.

248

Notes to Pages 170–175

53. Curel, Nouvelle Idole, 15. 54. Curel, Nouvelle Idole, 91. 55. Curel, Nouvelle Idole, 21. 56. Curel, Nouvelle Idole, 48. 57. Curel, Nouvelle Idole, 20. 58. Curel, Nouvelle Idole, 21. 59. Curel, Nouvelle Idole, 93. 60. Curel, Nouvelle Idole, 95. 61. Hippolyte Lemaire, “Théâtres,” Le Monde Illustré, March 18, 1899: 223. 62. Adolphe Brisson, “Causerie Théatrale,” Les Annales Politiques et Littéraires, March 19, 1899: 183. 63. Edmond Stoullig, “Chronique Théatrale,” Le Monde Artiste, March 18, 1899: 181. 64. Ibid. 65. François de Curel, “Historique de ‘La Nouvelle Idole,’ ” Théâtre Complet de François de Curel, vol. 3 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1931), 142. 66. G. F., “All the ’Ologies,” St. James Gazette, March 18, 1902: 6. 67. “The New Idol,” Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, March 22, 1902: 135. 68. J. W., “The Stage Society,” Westminster Gazette, March 18, 1902: 3. 69. George Bernard Shaw, “Ibsen,” Clarion, June 1, 1906: 5. 70. William Archer, “About the Theatre: Death and Mr. Bernard Shaw,” The Tribune, July 14, 1906; rpr. in Martin Quinn, “William Archer and The Doctor’s Dilemma,” Shaw 4 (1984): 89–94. 71. Quinn, 89. 72. George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor’s Dilemma, in The Doctor’s Dilemma, Getting Married, and The Shewing-­Up of Blanco Posnet (New York: Brentano, 1911), 114. This edition follows Shaw’s idiosyncratic spellings and his common practice of omitting the apostrophes from many contractions, which I have reproduced here. 73. Shaw, Doctor’s, 116. 74. Shaw, Doctor’s, 24. 75. Alexis Soloski, “The Playwright’s Perplexity: Constitution, Contagion, and Consumption in The Doctor’s Dilemma,” Shaw 34 (2014): 53. 76. Soloski, 53. 77. Shaw, Doctor’s, 45. 78. Shaw, Doctor’s, 45. 79. Shaw, Doctor’s, 23. 80. Shaw, Doctor’s, 40. 81. Shaw, Doctor’s, 73. 82. Shaw, Doctor’s, 94. 83. Shaw, Doctor’s, 95.



Notes to Pages 175–179

249

84. “No More Dull Death Scenes,” Bystander, December 12, 1906: 557. 85. A. B. Walkley, “The Doctor’s Dilemma,” rpr. in George Rowell (ed.), Victorian Dramatic Criticism (London: Routledge, 1971), 318. 86. Conti, Playing Sick, 79. 87. George Bernard Shaw, “Duse and Bernhardt,” in Plays and Players: Essays on the Theatre (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 37. 88. Dumas, La Dame, 1863, 181. 89. Shaw, Doctor’s, 99. 90. Dumas, La Dame, 1863, 181. 91. Shaw, Doctor’s, 98. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid. 94. Shaw, Doctor’s, 100. 95. Richard Nelson and Colin Chambers, “Editors’ Postscript,” in Granville Barker on Theatre: Selected Essays (London: Methuen, 2017), 236. 96. Soloski, 52. 97. Charles Benjamin Purdom, Harley Granville Barker (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1955), 60. 98. Dennis Kennedy, Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 66–8. 99. Qtd. in Hesketh Pearson, Bernard Shaw: His Life and Personality (Looe, UK: House of Stratus, 2001), 204. 100. “Mordred,” “Tragedy for Fun,” Referee, November 25, 1906: 2. 101. “Rambler,” “The Genius Without Morals,” Unidentified Newspaper, 1906, Doctor’s Dilemma Cuttings file, Theatre Collection, Victoria and Alberta Museum. 102. Qtd. in Pearson, Bernard Shaw, 204. 103. “The Latest Play of Mr. Bernard Shaw,” Manchester Courier, November 21, 1906: 7. 104. “The Court,” Stage, November 22, 1906: 16. 105. Alex. M. Thompson, “Stageland,” Clarion, November 23, 1907: 3. 106. J. M. B., “Mr. Shaw’s Strange Play About Doctors,” Sphere, December 1, 1906: 176. 107. E. A. Baughan, “The Doctor’s Dilemma,” Daily News, November 21, 1906: 6. 108. “Court Theatre,” Daily Telegraph, January 1, 1907: 9. 109. Conti, “I am not,” 75. 110. Soloski, 57. 111. Sally Peters, “Bernard Shaw’s Dilemma: Marked by Mortality,” Inter­ national Journal of Epidemiology 32 (2003): 918. 112. Shaw, Doctor’s, 12.

250

Notes to Pages 179–185

113. Shaw, Doctor’s, 24. 114. Shaw, Doctor’s, 96. 115. Shaw, Doctor’s, 98. 116. Shaw, Doctor’s, 94. 117. Shaw, Doctor’s, 99. 118. Conti, “I am not,” 78. 119. Shaw, Doctor’s, 97. 120. Shaw, Doctor’s, 115. 121. Janet Malcolm, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (New York: Random House, 2001), 62. 122. Olga Knipper, in Dear Writer, Dear Actress: The Love Letters of Olga Knipper and Anton Chekhov, trans. Jean Benedetti (London: Methuen, 1996), 284. 123. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Selected Letters, ed. Simon Karlinsky and trans. Michael Henry Heim (1973; Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 176. 124. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Ivanov, trans. David Hare (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 125. Lawlor, Consumption, 187.

Chapter Seven 1. Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2009), 95. 2. Hemingway, Moveable, 99. 3. See Philip Core, Camp: The Lie That Tells the Truth (London: Plexus Publishing, 1984). 4. A. L. Benedict, “Consumption Considered as a Contagious Disease,” Popular Science Monthly 48 (1895–6): 35. 5. Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 114. 6. Tomes, 115. 7. “Tuberculosis,” in Transactions of the Sixth Annual Conference of State Sanitary Engineers: Public Health Bulletin No. 160 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1926), 159–202, 163. 8. S. A. Knopf, “Our Duties Toward the Consumptive Poor,” Charities 6 (February 1901), 76. 9. Feldberg, 34. 10. Anne L. Davis, “A Historical Perspective on Tuberculosis and its Control,” in Tuberculosis: A Comprehensive International Approach, eds. Lee B. Reichman and Earl S. Hershfield (New York: Marcel Decker, 2000), 23–4.



Notes to Pages 185–190

251

11. Feldberg, 91. 12. Ott, 150. 13. James Wakeman Turner, Hygiene and Efficiency for the Tuberculous (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1922), 93. 14. Ernest B. Gilman, Yiddish Poetry and the Tuberculosis Sanatorium: 1900– 1970 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015), 7. 15. Qtd. in Louis Sheaffer, O’Neill: Son and Playwright (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1968), 246. 16. Qtd. in Sheaffer, 257. 17. Sheaffer, 254. 18. Eugene O’Neill, “Ye Disconsolate Poet to his ‘Kitten’ Anent Ye Better Farm Where Love Reigneth: Ballade,” Poems, 1912–1944 (New Haven, CT: Ticknor and Fields, 1980), 42. 19. Croswell Bowen, “The Black Irishman,” in Conversations with Eugene O’Neill, ed. Mark W. Estrin (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), 210. 20. Eugene O’Neill, Selected Letters, eds. Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 25. 21. See, for example, Warren French, Twentieth-­Century American Literature (London: Macmillan Press, 1980), 440. 22. Ken Bloom, The Routledge Guide to Broadway (New York: Routledge, 2007), 199. 23. Eugene O’Neill, Beyond the Horizon, in Complete Plays, 1913–1920 (New York: Library of America, 1988), 652. 24. Ralph W. Carey, “At the New York Theatres,” Hartford Courant, February 22, 1920, n.p. Clippings of Reviews for Beyond the Horizon, Eugene O’Neill Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 25. “Amusements,” New York Herald, November 11, 1877: 4. 26. “Katy Did and Katy Didn’t,” Daily Inter Ocean, July 16, 1881: 12. 27. “The Stage,” St. Joseph Herald, March 21, 1897: 9. 28. Ibid. 29. Robert Dowling, Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 30. 30. Eugene O’Neill, The Straw, in Complete Plays, 1913–1920 (New York: Library of America, 1988), 731. 31. O’Neill, Straw, 745. 32. O’Neill, Straw, 757. 33. O’Neill, Straw, 763–4. 34. O’Neill, Straw, 770. 35. O’Neill, Straw, 785. 36. O’Neill, Straw, 787.

252

Notes to Pages 190–193

37. O’Neill, Straw, 791. 38. Frank Northen MacGill, Cinema: The Novel into Film (Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 1980), 58, notes that “from 1915 to 1927 there were at least four silent-­fi lm productions of Camille.” 39. Dumas, La Dame, 1863, 180. 40. O’Neill, Straw, 792. 41. O’Neill, Straw, 794. 42. Ibid. 43. O’Neill, Selected Letters, 157. 44. “Playgoer,” “Eugene O’Neill’s The Straw is Gruesome Clinical Tale” (1921), in John H. Houchin, The Critical Response to Eugene O’Neill (New York: Greenwood, 1993), 38. 45. Alan Dale, “Tuberculosis Dramatized in the Latest Play by Eugene O’Neill,” New York American, November 11, 1921: n.p. 46. Charles Darnton, “ ‘The Straw’ Human and Moving,” Evening World, November 11, 1921: 36. 47. James Whittaker, “O’Neill’s ‘Straw’ Compact History of Girl’s Heart,” Sunday News, November 27, 1921: 20. 48. Ibid. 49. Shaeffer, 254. 50. Travis Bogard, Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 112. 51. For Edmund as Romantic consumptive, see Conti, “I am not,” 77, and Gerardine Meaney, “Long Day’s Journey into Night: Modernism, Post-­ Modernism, and Maternal Loss,” Irish University Review 21, no. 2 (Autumn/Winter 1991): 63. 52. Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 20. 53. O’Neill, Long, 26. 54. O’Neill, Long, 58. 55. O’Neill, Long, 145. 56. O’Neill, Long, 79. 57. O’Neill, Long, 33. 58. O’Neill, Long, 137. 59. Shaeffer, 14–15. 60. See Stephen A. Black, Eugene O’Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 11, and Robert M. Dowling, Critical Companion to Eugene O’Neill (New York: Facts on File, 2009), 720. 61. Doris Alexander, Eugene O’Neill’s Last Plays: Separating Art from Autobiography (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 79–80. 62. Shaeffer, 241.



Notes to Pages 193–197

253

63. O’Neill, Long, 79. 64. O’Neill, Long, 174. 65. Postlewait, 56. For O’Neill as a transitional writer who bridges melodramatic and realist forms, see Zander Brietzke, The Aesthetics of Failure: Dynamic Structure in the Plays of Eugene O’Neill (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2001), and Kurt Eisen, The Inner Strength of Opposites: O’Neill’s Novelistic Drama and the Melodramatic Imagination (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994). 66. O’Neill, Long, 154. 67. O’Neill, Long, 7. 68. Harold Clurman, Lies Like Truth: Theatre Reviews and Essays (New York, Grove Press, 1960), 28. 69. Sheila O’Malley, “Dean Stockwell Listening, Part 2,” The Sheila Variations, June 25, 2007, https://www.sheilaomalley.com/?p=6738. 70. Michael Romain, A Profile of Jonathan Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 5. 71. Blake Morrison, “A Whale of an Evening,” Observer, August 10, 1986: 17. 72. Charles McNulty, “Alfred Molina, Jane Kaczmarek and the Slow Burn of a Long Day’s Journey into Night,” Los Angeles Times, February 10, 2017, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-­et-­cm-­long-­days-­journey -­review-­20170209-­story.html. 73. Tennessee Williams, Memoirs (1972; New York: New Directions, 2006), 12. 74. Williams, Memoirs, 13. 75. Williams, Memoirs, 11–12. 76. Williams, Memoirs, 12. 77. Tennessee Williams, New Selected Essays: Where I Live (New York: New Directions, 2009), 65. 78. See, for instance, Tennessee Williams, Spring Storm (New York: New Directions, 1999), 18; The Rose Tattoo (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1979), 55; A Period of Adjustment, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, vol. 4 (New York: New Directions, 1972), 178. 79. Tennessee Williams, Camino Real (New York: New Directions, 1953), 15. 80. Williams, Camino, 58. 81. Williams, Camino, 58–9. 82. Williams, Camino, 97. 83. Williams, Camino, 161. 84. Williams, Camino, viii. 85. Williams, Camino, xii–xiii. 86. Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1981), 84. 87. Williams, Memoirs, 40.

254

Notes to Pages 198–201

88. Tennessee Williams, Kingdom of Earth (The Seven Descents of Myrtle) (New York: New Directions, 1968), 4. 89. Théophile Gautier, “Théâtres,” La Presse, February 10, 1852: 2. 90. Williams, Kingdom, 37. 91. Williams, Kingdom, 14. 92. Williams, Kingdom, 43. 93. Williams, Kingdom, 73–4. 94. Williams, Kingdom, 77. 95. Williams, Kingdom, 97. 96. Williams, Kingdom, 98. 97. Philip C. Kolin, “Sleeping with Caliban: The Politics of Race in Tennessee Williams’s Kingdom of Earth,” Studies in American Drama, 1945–Present 8 (1993): 140–62. 98. Michael R. Shiavi, “Effeminacy in the Kingdom: Tennessee Williams and Stunted Spectatorship,” Tennessee Williams Annual Review 2 (1999), 103. 99. J. Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Sub­ cultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 6. 100. Williams, Kingdom, 43. 101. Williams, Kingdom, 39. 102. Williams, Kingdom, 43. 103. Ibid. 104. Williams, Kingdom, 85. 105. Williams, Kingdom, 88. 106. Williams, Kingdom, 35. 107. Williams, Kingdom, 107–8. 108. Williams, Kingdom, 108. 109. Clive Barnes, “Theater: Williams Drama,” New York Times, March 28, 1968: 54. 110. John Chapman, “Tennessee Williams, Durable Mystic,” New York Daily News, April 7, 1968: S3. 111. Theodore P. Mahne, “Kingdom of Earth Provides Funny, Sultry Debut,” Times-­Picayune, August 3, 2015, https://www.nola.com/entertainment _life/arts/article_87d23ed6-­f021-­590d-­864c-­f05be013ce22.html. 112. Paul Myrvold, “Tennessee William’s [sic] ‘Kingdom of Earth’ at Odyssey Theatre,” Paul Myrvold’s Theatre Notes, July 16, 2016, https://paulmyrvolds theatrenotes.wordpress.com/2016/07/16/tennessee-­w illiams-­k ingdom -­of-­earth-­at-­odyssey-­theatre/. 113. Ernest Kearney, “Tennessee Williams’s Kingdom of Earth Calls Out,” TVolution, August 6, 2016, https://thetvolution.com/2016/08/tennessee -­w illiams-­k ingdom-­of-­earth-­calls-­out/. 114. Christopher Hoile, “Kingdom of Earth,” Stage Door, November 13, 1999,



Notes to Pages 201–204

255

http://www.stage-­door.com/Theatre/2000/Entries/1999/11/13_Kingdom _of_Earth.html. 115. Shiavi, 109. 116. Rodney Simard, “The Uses of Experience: Tennessee Williams in ‘Vieux Carré,’ ” Southern Literary Journal 17, no. 2 (1985), 68. 117. Linda Dorff, “All Very [Not!] Pirandello: Radical Theatrics in the Evolution of Vieux Carré,” Tennessee Williams Annual Review 3 (2000), 5. 118. Tennessee Williams, “The Angel in the Alcove,” in Collected Stories (New York: New Directions, 1985), 123. 119. Williams, “Angel,” 124. 120. Williams, “Angel,” 125. 121. Ibid. 122. Tennessee Williams, Vieux Carré (New York: New Directions, 1979), 72. 123. Williams, Vieux, 73. 124. Williams, Vieux, 48. 125. Williams, Vieux, 93. 126. Williams, Vieux, 46. 127. Williams, Vieux, 31. 128. Williams, Vieux, 50. 129. “Bury Your Gays,” TV Tropes, https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php /Main/BuryYourGays, accessed March 13, 2021. 130. Williams, Vieux, 23. 131. Williams, Vieux, 21. 132. Williams, Vieux, 50. 133. Simard, 69. 134. See, for example, John M. Clum, “ ‘Something Cloudy, Something Clear’: Homophobic Discourse in Tennessee Williams,” South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989): 164–5. 135. Stanley Kauffmann, “Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises,” New York Times, January 23, 1966: 93. 136. Ibid. 137. Bernard Carragher, “Born-­again Playwright: Tennessee Williams,” Daily News, May 8, 1977: 187. 138. Emory Lewis, “Williams’ Vieux Carré: A Jumbled Parody,” Record, May 12, 1977: 17. 139. Ernest Albrecht, “Williams’ New Play a Complete Disaster,” Central New Jersey Home News, May 12, 1977: 18. 140. Clive Barnes, “Vieux Carré by Williams Is Haunting,” New York Times, May 12, 1977: 70. 141. William Glover, “Tennessee Williams’ Vieux Carré Drivel,” Democrat and Chronicle, May 13, 1977: 18.

256

Notes to Pages 204–211

142. Henry I. Schvey, “The Tragic Poetics of Tennessee Williams,” Études Anglaises 64, no. 1 (2011): 84. 143. Fabio Cleto, Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 26. 144. J. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 145. Kelly Aliano, Theatre of the Ridiculous: A Critical History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2019), 8. 146. David Kaufman, “The Man Born to Play the Heroine Camille,” New York Times, November 3, 2002: 2.11. 147. Elenore Lester, “The Holy Foolery of Charles Ludlam,” New York Times, July 14, 1974: 1.16. 148. Charles Ludlam, Camille, in The Complete Plays of Charles Ludlam (New York: Perennial Library, 1989), 246. 149. Adrian Kiernander, “ ‘Theatre Without the Stink of Art’: An Interview with Neil Bartlett,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1, no. 2 (1994): 234. 150. Ibid. 151. Kaufman, “The Man,” 2.11. 152. Ludlam, Camille, 238. 153. Rick Roemer, Charles Ludlam and the Ridiculous Theatre Company (New York: McFarland and Co., 1999), 99. 154. Charles Ludlam, Ridiculous Theatre: Scourge of Human Folly, ed. Steven Samuels (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1993), 241. 155. Charles Busch, “Charles Ludlam in ‘Camille,’ ” Back Stage 53, no. 12 (March 22–23, 2012): 10. 156. Qtd. in Kaufman, “The Man,” 2.11.

Afterword 1. John Eligon, Audra D. S. Burch, Dianne Searcey, and Richard A. Oppel, Jr., “Black Americans Bear the Brunt as Deaths Climb,” New York Times, April 8, 2020: 1. 2. Ibid. 3. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 53. 4. Samuel Beckett, Endgame (London: Faber & Faber, 1976), 52. 5. See “Rose of Versailles 1991 Oscar – Ai Areba Koso,” YouTube video, 6:57, posted by DavidPix92, August 9, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=AjujQOheQPI.



Notes to Pages 211–212

257

6. World Health Organization, Global Tuberculosis Report 2019 (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2019): 1–2. 7. Pieter du Plessis, Siv Tshefu, and Flavia Nazier, “Tuberculosis, Staring, Love and Loneliness: Flavia’s story,” Anthropology Southern Africa 41, no. 4 (2018): 330, 333. 8. Du Plessis, Tshefu, and Nazier, 333. 9. Du Plessis, Tshefu, and Nazier, 330. 10. Du Plessis, Tshefu, and Nazier, 327.

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Index

abolitionism. See slavery acting, approaches to: cross-gender, 145, 148–49, 204–08, 211; earnest (Julia Fawcett), 14, 99, 162–63; emotional, 139, 142; hysterical, 162; idealized, 47, 91, 98; materialist, 98, 142–43; Method, 101; realist, 91, 162–63; restrained, 63, 83–84, 95–96; rhetorical, 13; spontaneous, 13–14, 84, 115; symptomatic, 14–15, 18, 49, 51–52, 72, 91, 93, 99–100, 142–43, 162, 195–96 Adams, Maude, 131, 149–55 Adrienne Lecouvreur (Legouvé and Scribe), 53 affective capital, 15, 17, 19, 23, 24, 31, 33, 45, 64, 82, 89, 100, 108, 118, 122, 124, 131, 142, 154, 164, 187, 193, 207, 208, 209; definition of, 15 Ahmed, Sara, 15, 16–17 AIDS, 4, 211 Aiglon, L’ (Rostand), 8, 24, 131, 145–55, 167, 194, 198 Aiken, George C. See under Uncle Tom’s Cabin, stage adaptations of air de poitrinaire (consumptive look), 13, 41, 83, 84–85, 144–45, 183 Alamir-Carcenac, J. J., 55 Albert, Thérèse (née Vernet), 30, 31, 32, 33–34, 47–49, 50–52 Aldredge, Tom, 204 Amen Corner, The (Baldwin), 211 Amour Usé, L’ (Destouches), 9 Andrews, Miles Peter. See Reparation, The

“Angel in the Alcove, The” (Williams), 201–02 Angèle (Dumas père with Anicet-Bourgeois), 39, 40–47, 48–52; adaptations of, 41; early responses to, 29, 41, 43, 44–47; influence and legacy of, 23, 39, 47, 57, 60, 61, 64, 66, 68, 148, 191, 194; influences upon, 39–40; inversions of, 64, 121, 167; parodies of, 41; as passé, 16, 64; performances of, 41, 47, 49–52, 83, 100 Anicet-Bourgeois, Auguste, 40, 223n73. See also Angèle Anonymous Work, The (Witkiewicz), 1 Antoine, André, 159, 167, 168–69 Antony (Dumas père), 14, 40, 41, 43 Archer, William, 173, 178 Aristotle, 5, 9, 31, 33 Arnould, Jules, 133–34 Artaud, Antonin, 210 Au Mois de Mai (Guiches), 165–66 Baldwin, James. See Amen Corner, The Barker, Harley Granville, 172, 173, 176, 177–78. See also Marrying of Ann Leete, The Barker, Nellie, 154 Barriera, E., 131 Barrière, Théodore, and Henry Murger. See Vie de Bohème, La Barrière, Théodore, and Lambert Thiboust. See Filles de Marbre, Les Bartlett, Neil, 205–07

— 285 —

286 Index Bayle, Gaspard-Laurent, 37–39, 40, 42, 55, 162 Beaumarchais, Pierre de, 31–32 Beauplan, Arthur de. See Uncle Tom’s Cabin, stage adaptations of Beckett, Samuel, 210. See also Endgame Bedford, Brian, 200 Bel-Ami (Maupassant), 1 Bellanger, Mlle., 171–72 Benedict, A. L., 184 Bennett, Richard, 187 Bérard, Cyprien, 32 Beraud, Marius, 162 Bernardeau, Émile, 56–57, 79 Bernhardt, Sarah, 129–31, 142–45, 148–54, 176, 177, 190, 200 Bernstein, Robin, 19, 60, 112, 115–16 Bewell, Alan, 6–7, 17 Beyond the Horizon (O’Neill), 187, 191 Bichat, Xavier, 37 Billings, Hammatt, 116 blood-spitting (hemoptysis). See under symptoms of consumption Bocage (né Pierre-Martinien Tousez), 41 Booth, Edwin, 96, 97, 115, 177, 188 Boucicault, Dion, 88. See also Prima Donna, The Boulanger, Louis, 49–50 Bourdieu, Pierre, 15 Brachet, Léon, 79–80 breathlessness. See under symptoms of consumption Brontë, Charlotte, 72–73. See also Villette Brown, John, 36–37 Bulwer, Henry Lytton, 44–45, 85 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 39, 45 Callas, Maria, 205 Camille (common title of American

adaptations of La Dame aux Ca­ mélias), 8, 18, 118, 139, 141, 152, 190– 91; Davenport version, 94–96, 103; Heron version, 98, 99–101, 103; Keene version, 96, 103; 1936 film adaptation of (starring Greta Garbo), 207 Camille (Ludlam), 184, 204–08, 210 Camino Real (Williams), 196–97 camp, 204–05 cancer, 4, 159, 169, 174 Cartwright, Samuel, 106–07, 132, 133 Castle Builders, The (Yonge), 134 Cather, Willa, 148–49, 152 causes of consumption, 4; contagion, 37, 78–80, 142; emotion and sensibility, 4, 5, 9, 10–11, 34–38, 42, 55, 56, 58–60, 64, 66, 79–80, 106–07, 118–20, 160, 161–62, 166, 168, 185–86, 189, 191, 196; environment, 4, 17, 37, 42, 55–56, 68, 106, 107, 132–34, 160, 161; excess and self-indulgence, 56–57, 66–68, 95, 107, 111–12; heredity, 4, 23, 37, 42, 46, 55, 80, 103–07, 110–12, 118–20, 121, 126, 130, 133, 136, 148, 160, 161, 162–64, 166, 167, 192–93, 196; indolence, 106–07, 110, 189, 194, 197, 207; interiority, 13–14, 21, 107, 110; labor, 55–60, 64, 68; melancholia, 107, 147, 185, 186; tubercle bacillus, 4, 20–21, 98, 154, 160–62, 166, 175, 181–82, 184–86, 189, 200, 211–12 Ceux Qu’on Aime (Wolff), 165 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 161–62 Châteauneuf, Louis-François Benoiston de, 55, 56 Chattopadhyay, Sarat Chandra. See Devdas Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich, 181–82. See also Ivanov Cheneau, Philippe, 56

Index 287 Chéry, Jules, 53–54 Cheyne, George, 6 child consumptives, 7, 15, 23, 103–28, 139, 140–41, 149, 166 Chitty, Alexis, 91 “Chute des Feuilles, La” (Millevoye), 33 chute des feuilles, la (trope of “the falling of the leaves”), 33, 138 class and consumption, 16, 17, 23, 24– 25, 31–32, 44–47, 55–56, 64, 81–82, 86, 106–12, 126–27, 130, 135–36, 140, 154–55, 162–63, 167–68, 189, 212 Clavigo (Goethe), 12, 43 Collier, Hal. See under East Lynne, stage adaptations of comedy, 9–11 Comte Hermann, Le (Dumas père), 64 Congreve, George Thomas, 79 consumption (pulmonary tuberculosis, phthisis), names and terminology of, 1, 213n2. See also causes of consumption; cures for consumption; symptoms of consumption consumptive chic, 7, 33, 67, 85, 129, 143, 174, 194 consumptive poetics. See poétique du poitrinaire, la consumptive repertoire (repertoire poitrinaire), passim: definition of, 2–3; overview of, 22–25 Conti, Meredith, 7–8, 13, 95, 98, 110, 142, 178 Copland, James, 105 cough. See under symptoms of consumption COVID-19, 4, 25, 209 Crabtree, Lotta, 139–40 Cromwell (Hugo), 43 Curel, François de, 166–67, 171–72. See also Fossiles, Les; Nouvelle Idole, La

cures for consumption: sanatoria, 184, 185–87, 188–89, 191, 193, 195; satire on, 178–79 Cyrano de Bergerac (Rostand), 146, 148 Dalila (Feuillet), 81–82 Daly, Augustin, 138–39. See also Frou-Frou; Horizon; Leah, the Forsaken Dame aux Camélias, La (novel by Dumas fils), 7, 65–66, 68–69, 70 Dame aux Camélias, La (play by Dumas fils), 15, 23, 65–74, 80–88, 93–102, 103, 165; adaptations of, 24–25, 90–91, 142, 184; American responses to, 93–94, 98–102, 142; British responses to, 77–78, 86–87, 121, 122, 142–43; censorship of, 86; French responses to, 66–67, 69, 71–73, 80–81, 143; influence and legacy of, 7, 18, 24–25, 54, 65, 80, 82, 85, 89, 122, 148, 152, 154, 165, 175–77, 189, 190–91, 196–97, 198; influences on, 51, 65–66, 68; parodies of, 175–77, 205–08; as passé, 180, 205; performances of, 2, 68–69, 71–74, 83–84, 86–88, 98–102, 142–45, 148, 149, 175–76, 188. See also Camille Davenport, Jean Margaret, 94–96, 98, 103. See also Camille Davis, Tracy C., 2–3, 109, 112 Day, Carolyn, 7 De Wolfe, Elsie, 151 death, consumption as leading cause of, 4 deathbed scenes, 5, 23, 35–36, 69–71, 73–74, 83–84, 98, 99–100, 101, 109, 111–14, 116–18, 119, 120–21, 122–26, 141, 143, 175–82 Deborah (Mosenthal), 139 DeMille, Henry C. See Lost Paradise, The

288 Index Desnoyer, Charles, and Léon Beauvallet. See Roi de Rome, Le Destouches (né Philippe Néricault). See Amour Usé, L’ Dettes de Cœur (Maquet), 84–85 Devdas (Chattopadhyay), 211 diagnostic gaze (Kirsten Shepherd-Barr), 15, 61–62, 71, 82, 98 Diamond, Elin, 20–21, 61, 162 Dickens, Charles, 173; stage adaptations of works by, 114–15, 139–40 Doche, Eugénie, 71–74, 83–84, 86–87, 198 Doctor’s Dilemma, The (Shaw), 24, 160, 173–81, 182, 191, 197 Doll’s House, A (Ibsen), 163 Dowson, Ernest, 194 drame bourgeois, 32 drame moderne, 40, 43, 44 Dream of the Red Chamber (Cao), 211 Drew, John, 149 Dreyfus affair, 146, 148 Dumanoir, Philippe and Adolphe Denner. See under Uncle Tom’s Cabin, stage adaptations of Dumas, Alexandre, fils, 65–66, 68–69, 84, 191. See also Dame aux Camélias, La (novel); Dame aux Camélias, La (play) Dumas, Alexandre, père, 33, 39–40, 43, 64, 66, 83, 146, 223n73. See also Angèle; Antony; Comte Hermann, Le; Tour de Nesle, La Duplessis, Marie, 65–68, 71 Duse, Eleanora, 175–76 Dutcher, A. P., 105 East Lynne (novel by Mrs. Henry Wood), 18, 105, 118–21, 124 East Lynne, stage adaptations of, 18, 23, 104–05, 118, 120–27; in Chicago, 122; by Collier, 125–26;

influence and legacy of, 194; by Kempe, 121–22, 124–25; at the Royal Theatre, Woolwich, 121; at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, 125 Ebersberg, Ottokar Franz, 145 Eliot, George. See Janet’s Repentance emotional drama, 18, 118 empiricist medicine, 159, 160–61, 169 en travesti. See acting, approaches to: cross-gender performance Endgame (Beckett), 210 essentialist medicine, 36 Ethel, Agnes, 139, 140 “Fading Away” (photograph by Robinson), 6, 7, 101–02 fainting. See under symptoms of consumption Falconnet, Ernest, 43 Fargueil, Anaïs, 68–69 Farren, William, 137 fatigue. See under symptoms of consumption Fawcett, Julia, 13–14 Fechter, Charles-Albert, 72, 82–85, 102–03, 177, 188 Félix, Élisabeth-Rachel (Mlle. Rachel). See Rachel Feuillet, Octave. See Dalila fever. See under symptoms of consumption Field, Kate, 82–83 Filles de Marbre, Les (Barrière and Thiboust), 18, 81–82, 83, 87, 89, 114, 174. See also Marble Heart, The Fils de l’Homme, Le (de Lussan), 145 Fitch, Samuel Sheldon, 79, 80 Forrest, Edwin, 127 Fortoul, Hippolyte, 45 Fossiles, Les (Curel), 167–69 Foucault, Michel, 36, 38 Fouquier, Henry, 169

Index 289 Fourcault, Alexandre, 55 Fournet, Jules, 56–57 Fowler, Orson Squire, 105 Freud, Sigmund, 21–22 Frohman, Charles, 151 Frou-Frou (Meilhac and Halévy), 139, 141 Fulda, Ludwig. See Lost Paradise, The furniture. See under objects in the theatre Gallagher, Peter, 195 Garbo, Greta, 207 Gautier, Théophile, 71–72, 144–45, 198 gender, sexuality, and consumption, 2, 7, 16, 22–25, 30, 32, 52, 81; cross-gender performance, 145, 148–49, 151, 207, 211; emasculation, 46, 148; equality of genders, 45–46; gendering of consumption, 15–16, 46, 81–82, 89–90, 105, 135, 148–49, 183–84, 194, 196, 198–99; misogyny, 67–68; punishment for sensuality, 54, 67, 89; queer sexuality, 184, 196–208; sex work, 24, 56, 65–72, 77–78, 95; transgender identity, 211–12; working women, 23, 53–73. See also class and consumption germ theory, 3, 160–62, 168, 173, 178–79, 181 Ghosts (Ibsen), 164 Gish family, 126 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. See Clavigo Goldsmith, Oliver. See She Stoops to Conquer Goncourt, Edmond and Jules, de, 83–84 Granville Barker, Harley. See Barker, Harley Granville Grasset, Joseph, 161–62 Greenhow, Edward, 132, 133

Greenwood, Grace, 83–84, 100 Greville, Henry, 81 Guardino, Harry, 200 Guiches, Gustave. See Au Mois de Mai Hackett, Jeanie, 195 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 96, 148 hand on chest. See under symptoms of consumption handkerchief. See under objects in the theatre Harte, Bret, 137 Heartsease (novel by Yonge), 134 Heartsease (play by Mortimer), 142 Helping Hands (Taylor), 89, 134 Hemingway, Ernest. See Moveable Feast, A hemoptysis. See symptoms of consumption: blood-spitting Heron, Matilda, 98–101, 115, 139, 142, 154, 200; see also Camille Hervieu, Paul. See Tenailles, Les Hicks, J. R., 107 Horizon (Daly), 24, 130–31, 137–42, 149, 154 Howard, Caroline Fox, 114–15, 127– 28 Howard, Cordelia, 103, 114–17, 127– 28 Howard, George C., 108–09, 114–15, 127–28 Hugo, Victor, 39, 43. See also Cromwell, 43 Huntt, Henry, 131 hysteria. See under symptoms of consumption Ibsen, Henrik, 24, 163–65, 173, 178, 180. See also Doll’s House, A; Ghosts; Lady from the Sea, The idealism, 163

290 Index interest and the “interesting”, 29, 32– 33, 40, 52, 54–55, 62, 77–78, 80–81, 84–85, 87, 93, 107, 117–18, 126, 137, 153, 155, 164, 173, 188; definition of, 31–32 interiority. See under causes of consumption Ivanov (Chekhov), 181–82 Janet’s Repentance (Eliot), 134 Janin, Jules, 51, 63, 64, 66, 67, 69 Johnson, Boris, 209 Jones, Avonica, 122 Jordan, George, 96–98, 137 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 86 July Monarchy, 3 July Revolution, 3, 31, 39, 40 Kean, Charles, 88 Keats, John, 5, 194 Keene, Laura, 96, 103, 137. See also under Camille Kemble, Charles, 127 Kemble, Fanny, 127 Kempe, Alfred. See under East Lynne, stage adaptations of Kermode, Mark, 1–2 Kingdom of Earth (Williams), 184, 197–201, 202, 204, 208 Kingsley, Charles. See Westward Ho! Knipper, Olga, 181–82 Koch, Robert, 4, 20–21, 154, 159–62, 166, 169, 180, 182, 184 Kotzebue, August von. See Taubstumme, Der; Versöhnung, Die Krüdener, Juliane de. See Valérie Lady from the Sea, The (Ibsen), 164–65, 172, 180 Lady Isabel. See East Lynne, stage adaptations of

Lady of the Camellias, The. See Dame aux Camélias, La Laënnec, Réné-Théophile-Hyacinthe, 5, 36–39, 40, 42, 55, 79, 162, 186 Lagneau, Gustave, 132–33 Langtry, Lilly, 129, 130, 137 Larson, Jonathan. See Rent Lawlor, Clark, 5–6, 7, 9, 13, 36–37, 182 Lawson, L. M., 105 Le Senne, Camille, 143 Leah, the Forsaken (Daly), 138–39 Lecomte, Jules, 84–85 Legouvé, Ernest, and Eugène Scribe. See Adrienne Lecouvreur Lemaître, Jules. See Mariage Blanc lesions in lungs. See under symptoms of consumption Lespinasse, Julie de, 35 Lewes, George Henry, 77–78, 87–88, 89–90 Little Nell and the Marchioness, 139– 40 Lockroy (né Jean-Philippe Simon), 41, 47, 50–52, 63, 100, 177 Lombard, Henri (H. C. Lombard), 55 Long Day’s Journey into Night (O’Neill), 184, 188, 191–96; 1962 film adaptation of, 194, 195 Lord Chamberlain’s Office (Britain), 18, 77, 86, 91, 121 Lorde, Audre, 112 Lorne, Dolores, 126 Lost Paradise, The (Fulda/DeMille), 149 Ludlam, Charles, 22, 24, 183, 204–08. See also Camille (Ludlam) Luhrmann, Baz. See Moulin Rouge! Lumet, Sidney. See Long Day’s Journey into Night: 1962 film adaptation of

Index 291 Lumley, Benjamin, 91 Lussan, Paul de. See Fils de l’Homme, Le Lyman, David R., 186–87, 191 MacKay, Kitty, 186, 188, 191 makeup, 50–51 Manchon de Francine, Le (story by Murger), 62 Maquet, Auguste, 84–85. See also Dettes de Coeur Marble Heart, The (English adaptation of Les Filles de Marbre by Selby), 18, 87–88, 89–90, 96–98, 121, 136, 188, 203. See also Filles de Marbre, Les Mariage Blanc (Lemaître), 165–66, 169 Marrying of Ann Leete, The (Barker), 172 materialism. See acting, approaches to: materialist; Romantic materialism Maud (Tennyson), 134 Maupassant, Guy de. See Bel-Ami medical gaze (Michel Foucault), 36 melancholia. See under causes of consumption melodrama (mélodrame), 13, 20–21, 114, 130, 137; archetypes of, 46; characteristics of, 32, 40; comic, 197–98; and interest, 32; as passé, 180; persistence of, 20–21, 187; rejection of, 83–84 Mercator (Plautus), 9 Miller, Jonathan, 194–95 Millevoye, Charles-Hubert. See “Chute des Feuilles, La” Modjeska, Helena, 142; see also Heartsease (play by Mortimer) Moi, Toril, 163 Molière, 9

Monte-Cristo (Dumas père, adapted by Fechter), 188 Morgan, Sydney, Lady, 17–18 Morris, Clara, 142, 188 Mosenthal, Salomon Hermann. See Deborah Moulin Rouge! (film), 24; theatrical adaptation, 24 Moveable Feast, A (Hemingway), 183 Mrs. Warren’s Profession (Shaw), 172 mucus. See under symptoms of consumption Murger, Henry. See Manchon de Francine, Le; Scènes de la Vie de Bohème; Vie de Bohème, La Murray, Leigh, 90 national identity and consumption, 2, 17, 23–25, 129–55; American, 78, 93–102, 131–33, 137–42, 149–55; British, 45, 78, 85–93, 101–2, 131, 132, 134–37, 172–73; French, 17–18, 43–45, 85–86, 93–94, 131–33, 136–37, 144–49, 155, 172–73; German, 43– 44, 136, 146–47 naturalism, 20–22, 126, 159–60, 162– 63, 165–69, 171–72, 177, 178, 179, 184, 187, 188–89, 191, 200, 202–03, 210 Nazier, Flavia, 211–12 neoclassicism, 11, 13, 31; rejection of, 11, 18, 30, 34, 43 new drama, 172–73 night-sweats. See symptoms of consumption: fevers and night-sweats Nodier, Charles, 32 Nouvelle Idole, La (Curel), 24, 159–60, 169–73, 174 Novalis, 43 objects in the theatre, 19, 162; furniture, 49–50, 54–55, 57, 60–61, 115, 162;

292 Index objects in the theatre (continued) handkerchiefs, 1–2, 5, 14, 19, 54–55, 60–62, 64, 73, 74, 82, 84, 91, 115, 122–23, 126, 143, 162, 165, 210, 211; muffs, 62, 64, 162; as scriptive things (Robin Bernstein), 19, 60, 82, 143 Old Curiosity Shop, The (Dickens). See Little Nell and the Marchioness Oliver Twist (Dickens), stage adaptation of, 114–15 Olivo, Karen, 24 O’Neill, Eugene, 24, 184, 186–96, 198, 203, 204, 205, 207, 208. See also Beyond the Horizon; Long Day’s Journey into Night; Straw, The O’Neill, James, 187–88 pain. See under symptoms of consumption pallor. See under symptoms of consumption Peter, Michel, 133 phthisis. See consumption Piccolomini, Marietta, 91–93 Pichot, Amédée, 29, 30, 42, 46, 47, 50, 51 Pickford, Mary, 126–27 Pixérécourt, Guilbert de, 32 Plautus. See Mercator Plessis, Pieter du, and Siv Tshefu, 211–12 poétique du poitrinaire, la (consumptive poetics), definition of, 30 Porter, Roy, 6 Postlewait, Thomas, 21, 194 Potocka, Anna, 35 Potter, J. Hamilton, 105–06 Prima Donna, The (Boucicault), 88–89, 134 props. See objects in the theatre

Que Suzanne n’en sache rien (Veber), 171 Quinlan, Thomas, 193 race and consumption, 16–17, 24–25, 103–18, 211–12; African Americans, 106–18, 154–55, 198–201, 209, 211; Indigenous North Americans, 16, 132, 138, 140–41, 155; Jewishness, 129, 133, 145; whiteness, 16–17, 23, 25, 104, 106–18, 131, 132, 138, 140–41, 154–55, 184, 197–201, 209–12 Rachel (Élisabeth-Rachel Félix), 23, 53–54, 72–74, 99, 143–45 realism, 3, 4, 20–22, 24, 41, 55, 61, 64, 98, 159–60, 162–63, 165–67, 169, 173, 178–82, 194, 207, 210 Rent (Larson), 211 Reparation, The (Andrews), 10–11 repertoire, definitions of, 3, 19 repertoire poitrinaire. See consumptive repertoire Reynolds, G. W. M. See Youthful Imposter, The Roach, Joseph, 13, 16, 91 Roberge, 51. See also Angèle: parodies of Robertson, Agnes, 88–89 Robinson, Henry Peach. See “Fading Away” Roi du Rome, Le (Desnoyer and Beauvallet), 145 Romand, Hippolyte, 41, 42, 43 Romantic materialism (Janis McLarren Caldwell), 30, 37–38, 39, 52, 146 Romanticism, 11–12, 18, 20–21, 30, 39–40, 43; allusions to, 196–97; and realism, 20–21, 163 Rose of Versailles (Takarazuka Revue musical version), 211 Rostand, Edmond, 146. See also Aiglon, L’; Cyrano de Bergerac

Index 293 Saint Hilaire, Amable de, and Ferdinand de Villeneuve. See Valentine, ou La Chute des Feuilles Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin, 33 sanatoria. See under cures for consumption Scènes de la Vie de Bohème (collection of stories by Murger), 57 Scribe, Eugène, 33. See also Adrienne Lecouvrer sentimental subtext, 61–63, 71–74, 82; definition of, 61–62 sentimentality and sentimentalism, passim: definition of and relationship to consumptive repertoire, 12–13 Sedgwick, Amy, 136 Selby, Charles. See Marble Heart, The sexuality. See gender, sexuality, and consumption Shakespeare, William. See Hamlet; Julius Caesar Shaw, George Bernard, 172, 173–81. See also Doctor’s Dilemma, The; Mrs. Warren’s Profession She Stoops to Conquer (Goldsmith), 10–11 Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten, 15, 71 shivering. See under symptoms of consumption Silver King, The, 127 slavery, 16, 23, 103–18 Sontag, Susan, 5 Soulby, Margaret, 122 spes phthisica (“hope of the consump­ tive”), 35, 41–42, 70, 108, 164; defini­ tion of, 35 Stanislavski, Konstantin, 48 Stockwell, Dean, 194, 195 Stoullig, Edouard, 148, 149, 171 Stowe, Harriet Beecher. See Uncle Tom’s Cabin (novel)

Straw, The (O’Neill), 184, 188–91 Streetcar Named Desire, A (Williams), 197 subtext. See sentimental subtext Sur la Foi des Étoiles (Trarieux), 165– 66 surrogation (Joseph Roach), 16–17 Sweetser, William, 79 symptomatic acting. See under acting, approaches to symptomatic dramaturgy, 18, 22, 40, 42–43, 60, 81–82, 89, 101–02, 126, 137, 143, 155, 168; definition of, 14– 15 symptoms of consumption, 1–2, 4–5, 13; blood-spitting (hemoptysis), 1, 5, 9, 14, 33, 35, 38, 68–69, 82, 143, 147, 204; breathlessness, 5, 12, 14, 25, 51, 57, 58, 59, 66, 68, 69, 70, 73, 82, 110, 114, 120, 168, 200; cough, 1–2, 4, 5, 9, 10–11, 14, 25, 35, 38, 43, 47, 51, 53, 54, 58, 60–63, 67, 68–69, 70, 73, 80–81, 89, 91–96, 98, 100, 110–11, 124, 135–36, 142, 145, 147, 152, 165– 66, 174–75, 176, 186, 189, 192, 195, 202, 205–07, 211; fainting, 14, 34, 58, 88, 114, 138, 142; fatigue and weakness, 5, 10, 35, 39, 53, 66, 135–36, 146, 196; fevers and nightsweats, 5, 35, 38–39, 41, 58, 59, 67, 68–69, 81, 87, 88, 139, 146, 166, 196– 97, 202, 203; hand on chest (indication of pain), 43, 51, 57, 82, 168; hysteria, 161–62; lesions in lungs, 4, 16, 37–39; mucus buildup (congestion), 99–100; pain, 5, 38, 43, 58, 61, 63–64, 69–70, 73, 82, 84, 89, 149, 166, 210; pallor, 5, 35, 44, 50–51, 66, 67, 140–41, 146, 169, 189, 192, 194; shivering, 58, 166; weight loss, 5, 39, 84, 186, 189 syphilis, 14, 67, 133, 163–64

294 Index Takarazuka Revue, 211. See also Rose of Versailles Taubstumme, Der (Kotzebue), 11 Taylor, C. W. See under Uncle Tom’s Cabin, stage adaptations of Taylor, Tom. See Helping Hands; Unequal Match, An Tenailles, Les (Hervieu), 165, 166 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord. See Maud Texier, Edmond Auguste and Léon de Wailly. See under Uncle Tom’s Cabin, stage adaptations of theatrical things. See objects in the theatre Thuillier, Marguerite, 63, 74 Thurstan, Paget, 131 Tipton, James. See under Uncle Tom’s Cabin, stage adaptations of Tour de Nesle, La (Dumas père), 86 tragedy, 9–10, 12, 13, 18, 31 Trarieux, Gabriel. See Sur la Foi des Étoiles Traviata, La (Verdi), 18; British re­ sponses to, 77–78, 91–93, 121; influence of, 122; licensing in Britain, 91; parody of, 205; performances of by Maria Piccolomini, 91–93 Trudeau, Edward L., 185 tuberculosis, pulmonary. See consumption TV Tropes (website), 1, 4 Unequal Match, An (Taylor), 24, 130, 134–37, 141 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (novel), 7, 103–104, 105, 107–12, 114, 117; influences on, 107–08 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, stage adaptations of, 7, 15, 18, 23, 104–18; by Aiken, 103, 107–12, 115–18, 127, 140; by de Beauplan, 114; in Britain, 112, 117;

by Dumanoir and Denner, 114; in France, 112–14; influence and legacy of, 125–26, 141, 149, 154, 165, 169, 198–99; by Taylor, 112; by Texier and de Wailly, 114; by Tipton, 117 Valentine, ou La Chute des Feuilles (Saint Hilaire and de Villeneuve), 30–36; early responses to, 33–34; influence and legacy of, 22–23, 40, 41, 57, 60, 61, 68, 88, 114, 115, 169; influences on, 33, 35, 43; as passé, 16; performances of, 31, 32, 33–34, 47–52 Valérie (Krüdener), 35 vaudeville, 30–31, 32 Verdi, Giuseppe. See Traviata, La Versöhnung, Die (Kotzebue), 11 Vezin, Jane, 122, 125 Vie de Bohème, La (Barrière and Murger), 23, 57–64, 65–66; adaptations of, 24, 211; early responses to, 63–64; influence and legacy of, 54, 65–66, 68, 189; parody of in Ludlam’s Camille, 205; performances of, 63–64 Vieux Carré (Williams), 184, 201–04, 205 Villermé, Louis-Réné, 55 Villette (Brontë), 72–73 vitalism, 36–37, 57, 68 Voilquin, Suzanne, 45–46 Volney, Constantin-François de Chasseboeuf, Comte de, 131 Walsh, Ernest, 183 weakness. See symptoms of consumption: fatigue and weakness weight loss. See under symptoms of consumption West, Mae, 126–27

Index 295 Westward Ho! (Kingsley), 134 white supremacy, 16, 112, 155, 210. See also race and consumption Williams, Tennessee, 22, 24, 184, 196– 204, 205, 207, 208. See also “Angel in the Alcove, The”; Camino Real; Kingdom of Earth; Streetcar Named Desire, A; Vieux Carré Winter, William, 96, 98, 152 Witkiewicz, Stanisław. See Anonymous Work, The Woestyn, Eugène, 31, 33–34, 50

Wolff, Pierre. See Ceux Qu’on Aime Wood, Ellen (Mrs. Henry Wood). See East Lynne (novel by Mrs. Henry Wood) Woodell, Colin, 195 Yonge, Charlotte. See Castle Builders, The; Heartsease (novel by Yonge) Youthful Imposter, The (Reynolds), 41 Zola, Émile, 162

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