As Chung-jen Chen points out in Victorian Contagion: Risk and Social Control in the Victorian Literary Imagination, contagion is "a physical object, a biological entity, a psychological dimension, a cultural artifact, a social construction, and a political process." Discourse of contagion goes beyond the physical and can be seen as indicative of and consequent to the social, cultural, and political. Victorian society faced many fears about contagion, and these fears are inseparable from threats to established systems such as public wellbeing, social hierarchy, patriarchal order, familial harmony, and political stability—systems still existing today, though evolved through time. Epidemiological studies of Victorian society can expose how the fear of contagion is inseparable from an anxiety about the fragility of such social systems. Under the circumstances of the current pandemic, studies of the nineteenth-century sense of contagion can shed a light on how our society should see and face contagion within its socio-cultural context.
This paper examines two Hardy short stories, "The Fiddler of the Reels" (1893) and "An Imaginative Woman" (1894), in which the vulnerability of the marriage system is highlighted by allegorical contagions. "The Fiddler of the Reels" tells the story of Car'line Aspent/Hipcroft, whose involuntary dance caused by Mop's seduction evokes the legends of "dancing mania." Here the Victorian anxiety surrounding female sexuality, dancing halls, prostitution, and sexually transmitted diseases can be seen. In "An Imaginative Woman" the metaphorical vertical transmission of sexual diseases is illustrated by the son of Ella Marchmill, whose face resembles that of her poetic idol Robert Trewe, whom Ella never meets in person. As this anomaly is caused entirely by Ella's admiration of the poet, the threat that female sexuality creates within the domestic order again emerges. The unhappily married heroines in Hardy's short stories carry maladies that can be transmitted to their children, threatening the family from within. Thus, contagion serves as a metaphor for the anxiety inherent in the inadequacy and vulnerability of the marriage system—defects that Hardy criticizes throughout his texts.
