Sanitizing Narratives: Urban Health in Nineteenth-Century European Fiction

Abstract

This dissertation examines the emergence of a sanitary discourse in the nineteenth-century European novel, one that framed social deviance, moral propriety, and urban poverty in terms of disease and health. Drawing upon realist novels, literary sketches, and administrative and medical texts on urban health from France, Great Britain, and Russia, the dissertation argues for a reconsideration of the sanitizing role that narrative form and practices of description play in the novel. In this respect, formal features of what we might term “realism”—a belief in the value of referential detail to reveal individual interiority, or lengthy, omnipresent descriptions of characters and their domestic interiors—become invested with moral significance when the nineteenth-century European novel represents its downtrodden and criminal members of society in terms of cleanliness and filth. The first two chapters of the dissertation examine how novels and extraliterary genres, such as medical topographies and philanthropic manuals, chart urban space and situate the lower classes within the physical and moral ecosystem of the nineteenth-century city; the sanitary work performed in sketches and novels by Honoré de Balzac, Eugène Sue, Charles Dickens, Nikolai Nekrasov, and Fyodor Dostoevsky exposes the limitations of representing poverty. Having peered into the homes of the urban poor and criminal, the third and fourth chapters of the dissertation analyze how an array of novelists—George Sand, Émile Zola, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and Leo Tolstoy—imagine potential solutions to urban misery through their fictional works, aiming to find a place for the deserving working poor and irredeemable criminals within their story worlds. To this end, socialist thought on the reorganization of labor in an industrializing society and administrative tracts and histories on colonization provide an external counterpoint to the ways that social problems are presented in the novels.