THE CURSE OF CONSUMPTION
MARION FAY
I was six years old when I met Tommy Wallace. He spent a good bit of time with his Aunt Rushie, who lived two doors down from us, while his mother spent a year at the Booneville Sanatorium with tuberculosis. We still see an occasional patient with tuberculosis nowadays, but the sanatoriums are all closed or used for other purposes. However, it still causes 1.5 million deaths worldwide each year, trailing only respiratory diseases, AIDS, and diarrheal diseases as the leading infectious killers.
Tuberculosis, known back then as consumption, was widespread in the nineteenth century, causing one out of four deaths in England in 1815. It only began to subside between 1850 and 1950, when deaths due to tuberculosis decreased tenfold, from 500 per 100,000 population in 1850 to 50 per 100,000 population in 1950. Improvements in public health reduced the incidence of tuberculosis even before the advent of antibiotics in 1946 with the introduction of streptomycin. Poor living conditions and the development of resistance to antibiotics have contributed to its resurgence and worldwide threat.
Before the discovery of the tubercle bacillus in 1882, the common understanding of consumption was that it was a constitutional disorder with a strong hereditary element, giving a pale, even "haunted" look to the sufferer. As such, it played a prominent role in literature and the other arts. John Keats, Frederic Chopin, and Franz Kafka died of consumption, as did Edgar Allen Poe's wife, Virginia. Among the familiar victims in our collective consciousness are Mimi in Puccini's La Boheme, Violetta in Verdi's La Traviata, and Camille, played by Greta Garbo in the MGM film of 1936. Doc Holliday died of tuberculosis in 1887, and his bloody cough figured prominently in the 1993 film Tombstone. Consumption claimed a number of characters in Dickens's novels: Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, Nell's friend Kit, Nicholas Nickleby's faithful companion Smike, and both Richard Carstone and the boy Jo in Bleak House. Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain portrays a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. Other victims include Ralph Touchett in Henry James's A Portrait of a Lady; Edmund Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night; Fantin in Hugo's Les Miserables; Dostoevsky's Katerina Ivanovna in Crime and Punishment and Kirillov in The Possessed; and Jane Eyre's best friend in Charlotte Bronte's novel.
Anthony Trollope's two sisters and two of his three brothers died at a young age with consumption, an "established sorrow" described in his autobiography as the horrid word, Consumption. With this experience, it is no surprise that Trollope should write a novel, Marion Fay, about a young woman with consumption. The wonder is that it took him so long to write it; it was more than thirty years after his first novel that he wrote Marion Fay, which was finished in 1879.
Marion Fay's story is a sad one. A Quaker's daughter and the eldest son of a marquis meet and fall in love with each other. She refuses to marry Lord Hampstead, however, pleading first that it would be an unequal match for him, but finally admitting she has a strong family history of early death and does not expect to have a long life. Hampstead's emotional reactions are described in great detail, and much of their story is told from his point of view. She is determined from the first that she will not marry, and there is little more to think or say about it. She gradually becomes more open with him as her illness progresses, writing frequent letters from her seaside location. Most of the agonies belong to him, while she appears relatively tranquil, though she does indulge in a Trollopian flop onto the sofa to bury her tearful face in a cushion.
The reader is shielded from some of the details. For one thing, the descriptions emphasize the mental processes. There are no bloody scenes. The color would sometimes rise to Marion's cheeks, and those in the room would hear only a preparation for a cough, not the cough itself. This preparatory sound, the author tells us, is the one so familiar to those obliged to follow the downward course of someone dear to them. And that's it. Marion's illness is said to be a description of the course of Trollope's sister Emily, and she is said to have had a quiet and peaceful course and death. Apparently, if she had a hacking cough or brought up bright red blood, Anthony missed it. In any event, the reader is spared.
As Marion becomes more ill, a frustrated Hampstead, who has fallen under the Victorian illusion that a woman is obliged to obey the man she loves, fails to understand how he cannot control the situation. He has difficulty accepting the inevitable fate she has predicted. A woman has no right to accept such a fate. Such things must be left to "Providence, or Chance, or Fate, as you may call it."
On the other hand, Marion's friend Mrs. Roden confirms her understanding and acceptance, and she marvels that Marion can soar above weakness and temptation. This angelic portrayal is surely influenced by Trollope's recollection of his sister Emily.