It took me a long time to revise the article “‘Paine’s Yellow Fever’: Opposition Politics and Pandemic Disease in the Early Republic” that appears in the current issue of the JER. I blame Puccini, and Verdi, and Camus, Woolf, García Márquez, and Brown. But I was carrying out the first round of revisions from late 2020 to 2021. During those years, the Metropolitan Opera streamed its past productions for free. Many people then were also reading pandemic literature to understand the COVID-19 pandemic. So I confess— I listened to too much opera and read too many novels while revising.[1]

Historians cite their evidence and historiographical influences, but we don’t acknowledge the music we listen to or the non-history books we read while working on projects. Perhaps there’s rarely any connection between our work and what we read/listen to for pleasure, but sometimes the connection might be indirect. This post highlights examples from two imaginative works, La Traviata and Love in the Time of Cholera, that shaped my understanding of disease, death, and loss, subjects I often pondered as I wrote about yellow fever during COVID-times.

Title page of La Traviata score (1855), with engraved image of Violetta and Alfredo. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.         https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Giuseppe_Verdi,_La_traviata_title_page.jpg.

First, thinking about the structure of La Traviata helped me focus and organize my article. During the R&R process, JER editor Andy Shankman suggested that I sharpen my description of the contrast between Philadelphia before the outbreak and during the outbreak to strengthen my argument about the fever’s disruption to politics—essentially a contrast between life and disease/death. Susan Sontag conceptualized this contrast as a fundamental divide between the “kingdom of the well” and the “kingdom of the sick.” La Traviata portrayed the movement from the first kingdom to the latter one. Based on a novel by Alexandre Dumas fils and composed by Guiseppe Verdi, and first performed in Venice in 1853, La Traviata is about a Parisian courtesan, Violetta, who falls in love with a young man from a wealthy family and dies of tuberculosis, an example of the “consumptive chic” genre of art and literature popular in the nineteenth century. Though La Traviata dealt with a different disease, storyline, and historical era than my article, the opera’s structure conveyed this contrast between life and death: Act I depicts a party where Alfredo and Violetta fall into a feverish love; Act II romantic complications; Act III Violetta’s death.^[2]

The first section of my article discussed some of the French Revolutionary celebrations that took place in the national capital in early 1793: parades, festive dinners, drinking, singing, and toasting. In revising this section, it didn’t take long for me to think of the Brindisi from La Traviata. I’ve often played that famous toasting song in class for inspiration when my students have written political toasts. Though about love not politics, the Brindisi duet and chorus depicts a vibrant atmosphere of celebration—not completely unlike the festive culture of pre-outbreak Philadelphia. “Let us drink from these cups adorned with flowers!” the operatic toast begins. Violetta tells the partygoers: “I spend my time happily amongst you.” Then the popular chorus: “Let’s enjoy drinking and singing which enhance the night with laughter.” This portrayal of collective joy, even if fleeting, made me read my eighteenth-century newspaper sources not as flat descriptions but as three-dimensional social scenes. I began to visualize Philadelphia’s Democratic-Republicans organizing themselves in a convivial atmosphere, fast-paced and busy, gaining momentum in building opposition to the Washington administration through association.^[3]

Although not from the opera, pieces of art like this frequently illustrated the grief depicted in death bed scenes.
A young man weeps in grief by the death bed of a young woman. Line engraving by J. Brown, 1846, after J. Barker. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/vqrsf5an/images?id=zcr2dxsx.

The yellow-fever outbreak abruptly ended this socializing and politicking. The contrast between Act I and III of La Traviata is likewise stark. By Act III, Violetta is alone. She is dying. Her friends have largely abandoned her, though the estranged Alfredo does arrive on the scene just in time for her death. In particular, Violetta’s aria “Addio, del Passato” dramatizes her interior strife as she nears death. “Farewell, bright memories of the past,” the soprano sings.  The music conveys her exhaustion; her voice despair. What a contrast to the energy present in Act I. Her repeated invocation: “tutto fini” (“all is over”) is heartbreaking. She knows her fate will soon be the grave. An extended sickbed/deathbed scene punctuated by a few bursts of delirious energy, a symptom of tuberculosis, Act III highlights the shift from social life to the isolation of the sick room/deathbed. Virginia Woolf, in her essay “On Illness,” remarked how for the sick person isolated in a room the “whole landscape of life lies remote and fair, like the shore seen from a ship far out at sea,” Woolf added. This perspective of distance between the well and the sick, depicted in the opera, helped me describe Philadelphia’s encounter with pandemic illness in the second section of my article—the solitude, the deaths, the disruption to people’s lives. It helped me convey how time slowed down, even stopped for people during those months, and how circumstances had reversed from the previous spring and summer.^[4]

Second, while La Traviata underscored the significance of the deathbed scene for me, a passage from Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera offered a fictional parallel to a Democratic Society leader I’d been studying. Set in a South American port city on the Caribbean, Love in the Time of Cholera tells the story of Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza whose youthful, feverish romance is cut short when Fermina chooses to marry a wealthy man, Juvenal Urbino, instead of Florentino. But it was Juvenal’s father, Dr. Marco Aurelio Urbino, a minor character in the novel, who was the most compelling character to me.  “A civic hero during that dreadful time,” Urbino sacrificed his life to treat others during a cholera outbreak. When infected, Dr. Urbino locked himself into a hospital utility room “so as not to infect anyone else.” His final act was to write “a letter of feverish love to his wife and children . . . in which he revealed how much and with how much fervor he had loved life.” The letter went on for twenty “heartrending” pages, “the progress of the disease . . . observed in the deteriorating script,” with the doctor signing “his name with his last breath.” Perhaps it takes the same imagination to picture a cholera victim writing a twenty-page letter as it does to believe that a woman dying of tuberculosis could sing a glorious aria, but this magic realist description of Urbino’s death moved me at a time when health care workers were similarly sacrificing themselves to treat COVID-19 patients.[5]

James Hutchinson. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-2cdc-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.

Furthermore, Urbino reminded me of James Hutchinson. A founding member of the Democratic Society of Pennsylvania and a doctor, Hutchinson stayed behind to help the sick during the yellow-fever outbreak. He got sick and died. Like Urbino, Hutchinson loved life. He loved healing others. He reveled in political organizing. He cajoled others into participating in festive politics, toasting and singing with enthusiasm. A convivial fellow, he retreated to his home after he had caught the fever. A clinical description of Hutchinson’s infection exists, but it entails a litany of horrible symptoms and treatments that increased his misery. The description does not convey his emotional state. Opera and literature can help us expand our understanding of these experiences that often escape the clinical and/or historical record. Reflecting on how Hutchinson died, in relation to the fictional Violetta and Urbino, gave me a sense of the despair and exhaustion he must have felt in dying. It also made me understand the joy present in Hutchinson’s life and the origins of the Democratic Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia’s festive culture.[6]

As I was revising my article on yellow fever during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the operas I listened to and novels that I read shaped my writing experience and my historical understanding. Like social histories, many operas and novels present everyday experiences, often of ordinary or marginalized people. These works did not directly influence my article as evidence or argument, but they led me to reflect on the contrast between wellness and sickness, which helped me organize my argument more effectively. These imaginative works also enabled me to visualize the social scenes I discussed as living, embodied historical moments. They finally pushed me to think about how the people I studied, especially those like James Hutchinson who had suffered during the outbreak, faced not only disease and death, but also life. Sometimes a little opera and literature can help a historian bring out the humanity of her subject.

Endnotes

[1] Met operas are still available for viewing by subscription: https://ondemand.metopera.org/.

^[2] Susan Sontag, “Illness as Metaphor,” in Illness as Metaphor and Aids and Its Metaphors (1978; repr. New York, 2021), 3.  Alexandre Dumas Fils, The Lady of the Camellias, trans. Liesl Schillinger (1848, repr. New York, 2013). Carolyn A. Day, Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease (London, 2020). During the pandemic, I viewed the Met production from 2012 with French soprano Natalie Dessay in the title role. Designed by Willy Decker and originating at the Salzburg Festival, this production, with its minimalist and symbolic staging, featured an actor representing the archetype death and a clock ticking forward on stage reminding the audience that time was running out. This stripped-down staging brought out the contrast between life and death.

^[3] Even in Act I, disease is present. Recently recovered from a bout of tuberculosis, Violetta still has occasional fainting and coughing spells in the first act, suggesting that the relationship between illness and recovery is non-linear. Michelle Orihel, “Just Add Sparkling Grape Juice: Toasting and the Historical Imagination in the Early Republic Classroom,” Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life, https://commonplace.online/article/just-add-sparkling-grape-juice. Guiseppe Verdi, La Traviata (The Fallen Woman): Opera Study Guide and Libretto (Opera Journeys Publishing, 2018), 49–50.

^[4] Verdi, 56, 85. Virginia Woolf, “On Being Ill,” The Essays of Virginia Woolf, wd. Andrew McNeillie (1926; repr. London, 1994), 319.   

[5] Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, trans. Edith Grossman (New York, 1988), 112–13.

[6] William Samuel Waithman Ruschenberger, An Account of the Institution and Progress of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1887), 62–65.