Edwin L. Shuman Award for Outstanding Senior in Creative Writing and Helen G. Scott Prize for Best Research Paper on Literature
An excerpt from Alice’s research paper:
Prior to Louis Pasteur, nineteenth century medicine was characterized by the “miasma” theory—in which diseases were caused by “chemical poisons arising from rotting [organic waste], which the body might absorb…freely as gases diffused through the air” (Barrett 201). Thus, the epidemic outbreaks of cholera and smallpox in 1831 and 1848 in England were in part attributed to urban conditions of rotting matter, darkness, and close crowding, which generated diseased gases that were blown about in London’s fogs, smokes, and clouds of dust (Scoggin 235). In Dickens’s novels, as much as in his reforming texts, the Victorian urban space is a locus of contamination and pollution, from which springs physical diseases—the smallpox that afflicts Bleak House’s protagonist, Esther—as well as mental ones. These mental illnesses, embodied in the madness surrounding Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in Bleak House and Marshalsea Syndrome of Little Dorrit, are closely linked with images of fog, darkness, and stagnant air. Dickens creates an extended social metaphor, in which mental manias can be transmitted through miasmas, attributing these contagions to the unsanitary modern city and its immoral institutions: the Chancery Court and the debtor’s prison system.