“This contrived Quarantine”:

Local Lockdown as Heterotopia in Sheri Holman’s The Dress Lodger (2000)

Abstract

This article considers the heterotopic implications of what we might now term ‘local lockdown’ in Sheri Holman’s neo-Victorian novel The Dress Lodger (2000). Now newly relevant in the context of the social and cultural impact of the recent pandemic, Holman’s narrative, set in 1831 Sunderland, quarantined due to high incidence of cholera, provides a key point of comparison with COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, exploring the violent potential of this isolated locality. By tracing key aspects of Michel Foucault’s definition of the ‘heterotopia’ (spatiality, temporality, and identity), I evaluate the ways in which Holman’s Sunderland speaks to twenty-first-century anxieties about the limitations and permissions of local lockdowns.