Bewell: Romanticism and Colonial Disease

Bewell’s essay mainly deals with questions of epistemology: beginning with the personification of disease, leading into the “framing of disease” (2), and then the contextualization of disease as a historical interaction between colonizers and the colonized. The “healthy” write history (5), and much of how the colonizer perceived disease extended from a position of power: the colonial subject ordered the geographic and bodily space of the "other" through his or her social, racial and political ideals. I think comparing this chapter to McKibben’s (in addition to the Last Man, which I will address later) will flush out some of the finer points I wish to address.

McKibben presents anecdotal evidence, statistics, and projections into the future of “eaarth.” “Eaarth” is like Bewell’s rampant “invalidism,” the permanently marked, colonial body, denoting a connection to the “other” in a similar fashion that “eaarth” denotes humanity’s connection to nature; self and other, self and nature, do not exist in isolation; we all come from the same stuff. 

How this comparison relates to how the two authors differ, I am not quite sure yet. 

If we take the common knowledge of modern physics as a parallel to the common knowledge of hygiene, and acknowledge that although the average child is cognizant of the existence of germs (at least as a concept) the average child does not understand what it means to flood the earth with hydrocarbons, McKibben and Bewell differ quite starkly. Although Bewell uses similar rhetorical techniques, he grounds his argument in the objective (the now commonplace knowledge of) spread of microbes: “They would have adapted themselves biologically and culturally to the pathogens around them. . . .” (3). McKibben, for the most part, avoids addressing the migration of hydrocarbons at the atomic level, choosing to beat us over the head with anecdotes, stats and prognostications (I am aware that McKibben is a journalist and not a physicist. He is also a celebrity on the topic, which is partially why I'm picking on him). Bewell, perhaps due to the privilege of temporal distance from the time period at hand, provides the reader with a similar position of privilege: we are not embedded within the matrix of similitude—of humoral physiology that hides the objective, bodily truth from the subject; we are allowed to ponder the “epidemiological reality” (4) of colonialism in ways that we are not allowed to do in medias res of our ecological crisis. I can imagine an article similar to Bewell’s, written centuries from now, through which future readers are provided a similar position of privilege. These readers will comfortably (or not) wonder how humanity could have continued to foolishly flood hydrocarbons into the atmosphere. But then they will solemnly realize that the children, the people who would take over, were not being educated. Just as a child knows to wash his hands to prevent illnesses, that same child should know that all life is nothing more than the redistribution of carbon, and to flood hydrocarbons into the air is to return the earth back to a time when it was uninhabitable.

Attention to the commonplace of objective details: perhaps this is fundamental difference. McKibben assumes the reader knows the details (or not? I’m not sure) and Bewell most certainly knows we know the details. The details are so fundamentally intertwined with the history of colonial disease that he does not have to scare us to get a reaction. Shelly, embedded in Bewell’s history, most certainly did not know the details. Much of her novel is a meditation on humanity's connection to nature; a lack of knowledge allowed her to sublimate her abstract, philosophical ideas about existence. Plague is a metaphor for nothingness, for meaninglessness, and nothing attunes us better to the fundamental questions of existence than the possibility of not existing.  

Is it a fair trade-off, having the capacity to foolishly dwell in the moment, out of ignorance? Or is it better to have the details, to have the knowledge, to dread a future that may not be fixable? 

Knowledge, after all, is what got us into this mess.