Journal Article

\In Utter Fearlessness of the Reigning Disease\: Imagined Immunities and the Outbreak Narratives of Charles Brockden Brown

Miller, Nicholas E

2017

Overview

A month later, he began writing Ormond; or, The Secret Witness} A sprawling narrative of conspiracy and contagion, Ormond was the first of Brown's published novels to revisit the Philadelphia he knew in 1793: a community threatened not only by disease, but by the perceived collapse of established social, political, and racial hierarchies. In so doing, I demonstrate how stories of disease resistance-what we now call \"immunity\"-mirror other forms of political resistance in France and Saint Domingue during the so-called \"age of democratic revolutions.\" Just as Silva argues that \"the immunological distinctions that settlers observed between themselves and Native Americans were crucial to how they understood their place in the New World,\" I argue that perceived immunological distinctions between United States citizens, French immigrants, and black persons revised existing definitions of political belonging in the new nation (16). By examining both Ormond and Arthur Mervyn through an immunological lens, I demonstrate how epidemic outbreaks in the 1790s complicated political boundaries between native and foreign, or citizen and non-citizen, in the early republic. [...]an approach to interpreting Brown's novels also owes a debt to Priscilla Wald, who coined the term \"outbreak narrative\" to define a genre of \"contradictory but compelling [stories] of the perils of human interdependence and the triumph of human connection\" in the face of disease outbreaks. In what follows, I borrow Wald's notion of \"imagined immunities\" (a phrase clearly indebted to Benedict Anderson's seminal Imagined Communities) to identify an immunological foundation for the communities depicted in Ormond and,...

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Subject: Allusion / American Indians / American literature / Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810) / Citizenship / Conspiracy / Disease / Epidemiology / Fever / History of medicine / Ideology / Immigrants / Literary characters / Literary devices / Literary translation / Literature / Logic / Metaphor / Narrative structure / Narratives / Novels / Politics / Publishing / Publishing industry / Revolutions / Semiotics