Short-Storying Neo-Victorian Contagion:

The 1847 Typhus Epidemic in Andrea Barrett’s ‘Ship Fever’

Abstract

Andrea Barrett’s neo-Victorian short story ‘Ship Fever’ (1996) portrays the catastrophic conditions on the Canadian quarantine island Grosse Isle in the St Lawrence River off the coast of Quebec in 1847 when hundreds of starving, typhus-infected Irish people, displaced by British colonial occupation and the Great Famine, arrived there in what came to be known as the coffin ships. By contracting the vast historical and geographical landscape of this episode of epidemic contagion to the small Canadian quarantine island and portraying it as the heterotopic mirror of Famine Ireland, the short story form enables a narrowing of focus on typhus as a little-understood infectious disease at a point of intensifying crisis. My close reading of the story traces the intertextual ‘web of affinities’ activated by the constellation of heterotopic sites, which also uncovers a link with George Eliot’s writing on contagion in Middlemarch (1871-1872).