Infectious Narratives and Crisis in Liberal Biopolitics AC Ros Phd 2019

‘The Haunting Memory of Contagions’: Infectious Narratives and Crisis in Liberal Biopolitics A C Ros PhD 2019 ‘The Haunting Memory of Contagions’: Infectious Narratives and Crisis in Liberal Biopolitics Andreea Catalina Ros A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Manchester Metropolitan University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English 2019 Abstract Interest in new and re-emerging diseases as well as a developing language of informational contagions has led to a wave of interdisciplinary analyses of contagion narratives and contagion metaphors in the fields of literary studies, cultural theory, philosophy and medical history. This thesis makes a contribution to the growing field of “contagion theory” exploring the ideological implications of narratives of contagion through a historically situated analysis of the relationship between contagion narratives and governmental efforts to manage contagious disease in the 19th and late 20th centuries. I explore contagion narratives in the work of a range of Gothic and science fiction writers writing during times of crisis and change: Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Bram Stocker, Harriet Marryat, Elizabeth Barren Brown, Michael Crichton, Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy. Through a highly interdisciplinary analysis, I put these fictional texts in conversation with contemporary political and medical representations of contagion in order to understand how historical changes in the expansion of biopolitics and, in particular, the rise of liberalism and neoliberalism have shaped contagion narratives. Given Foucault’s description of popular imaginaries of contagion (which he terms, “the haunting memory of contagions”), a side-by- side exploration of the development of biopolitics and evolution of contagion narratives also makes an important intervention in theoretical debates on Foucauldian biopolitics. This thesis argues that contagion narratives help negotiate tensions between the expansion of biopolitics and (neo)liberalism’s hostility to state interventions by conceptualising acquired resistance or immunity to transmissible disease as an result of liberal individualism and rational self- governance and, secondly, of governmental interventions in private health as a necessary, educational corrective to lack of self-government of illiberal subjects, rather than as an extension of quarantine. 3 Dedication & Acknowledgements This thesis is dedicated to the memory of my grandmother, Silvia Roman. This thesis would not have been possible without the generous funding of the Manchester Metropolitan University’s Vice-Chancellor International Scholarship. I am grateful for the guidance and assistance of my supervisor team: Linnie Blake, Emma Liggins and David Wilkinson. I would also like to thank Muzna Rahman and Aidan Arrowsmith for their generous advice. My PhD would not have been the same without the support of my colleagues in the MMU PhD student office. Thank you to Natalie, Chris, Kate, Aly, Yassine, Rachid, Sumaira, Isabel, Polly, Holly, Jon, Halima, Steph, Cat and Zoe for always listening patiently when I needed to rant about vaccination history. A special thank you to my desk pal, Spencer Meeks: I hope you know we are blood brothers now. I would also like to talk PhD and ECR colleagues from other institutions and disciplines who welcomed me at their events and had tolerated my many questions: Linnea, Iain, Jamie, Jaime, Hannah, Jen and the fabulous duo behind the North West Medical Humanities Postgraduate Network: Erin and Natalie. A massive thank you to my family and, in particular, to my mother whose unfailing support for my educational endeavours has kept me going over the last decade. Finally, and most of all, this thesis would never have been completed without Ash. Thank you for the burgers, the footnotes and the many words of encouragement. 4 Table of Contents Abstract.................................................................................................................................................2 Dedication & Acknowledgements..........................................................................................................3 Introduction...........................................................................................................................................6 Dickensian Disease.............................................................................................................................6 Overview & Hypothesis....................................................................................................................11 Contribution & Models for Reading Contagion & Immunity............................................................15 Methodology, Obstacles, Disciplinary Position................................................................................23 Biopolitics as Methodology..........................................................................................................28 History of Liberal Biopolitics in Britain.............................................................................................29 Key Concepts...................................................................................................................................34 Contagion.....................................................................................................................................34 Liberal Biopolitics.........................................................................................................................41 Text Choice......................................................................................................................................43 Chapter 1: Reconsidering the Outbreak Narrative...............................................................................47 Origin of EID.........................................................................................................................54 Neoliberal Biopolitics, Science & Optimism.....................................................................................56 Beginnings....................................................................................................................................56 Before 1981: Neoliberalism, scientific research and global risk...................................................61 Risk factor and neoliberalism.......................................................................................................65 AIDS: An Epidemic of Signification...............................................................................................68 Ebola, AIDS & Outbreak Narrative...............................................................................................72 Patient Zero & Immunity.................................................................................................................76 Chapter 2: The Gothic Dream of the Plague and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826)........................88 Liberal Biopolitics.............................................................................................................................92 The Plague and the Gothic...........................................................................................................94 Charles Maclean...................................................................................................................95 Gothic Epidemiology...........................................................................................................101 Plague and Liberal Selfhood...........................................................................................................104 The Nature of the Plague...........................................................................................................106 The Reader in The Last Man..........................................................................................................117 Gothic, Affect, Biopolitics...........................................................................................................120 Chapter 3: Edwin Chadwick’s Gothic Sanitary Reports and Working-Class Illiberal Subjectivities.....124 Contagion in Sanitary Reports.......................................................................................................135 5 Urban Gothic Architecture.............................................................................................................143 Gothic Geographies...................................................................................................................145 Underground Labyrinths: Chadwick...........................................................................................149 Urban Gothic and Domestic Space................................................................................................151 Smallpox in Bleak House............................................................................................................156 Chapter 4: Vampiric Blood and Reproductive Biopolitics..................................................................163 Contagious Diseases Acts and Liberal Biopolitics...........................................................................167 Prostitution as Public Health Issue.............................................................................................169 Contagious Diseases Acts & Repeal...............................................................................................171 Blood and

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