It's the plaaaaaague!

[damned_colonial]

It's July 1st. Let the "Plagues and Pandemics" discussion begin!

I'll be posting some questions/prompts for discussion over the next month, at least one a week and hopefully a bit more than that. If anyone else has points for discussion, please feel free to post with them. I am responsible for making sure *some* discussion posts happen, but I'm happy to share!

For now I'd like to open up with something very general:

What have you noticed are the main similarities and differences between the various plague stories you've read?

What impressions did you get regarding the author's historical research? How do you think the author's understanding of the period in question affected the way the story was told?

Comments

[al_zorra]

The element that first most stood out for me after having read several plague works is that the books, whether fiction or non-fiction, were almost all presented from an interior, isolated perspective, no matter how detailed the observation of the events and atmosphere external to the narrative voice.

This is an effect of a plague, historically, to divide people, to isolate them from one another, from fear of death and fear of violence and predation.

This is so for both Journal and for Fever Season, but in such very different ways, if only because one is fiction and the other is journalism on the spot.

Knowing New Orleans and its traditions very well, Hambley's Fever Season, which was her second Benjamin January-New Orleans work, her research is always declaring itself loudly. She hadn't lived with the place and the material long enough to have internalized the milieu, so it was flat reading. You saw her period map of the city open next to her keyboard.

However, in terms of Fever Season, that January could make an alliance with a white man in authority made some sense. However, in reality, it was the Americans in that era post the Louisiana Purchase, who instituted the strict and rigid and relentless separation of race, and the declaration that any one with 'one drop,' was a n*gger, no matter what. These matters were seen very differently by the Americans, who were protestants, than by the older, European tradition Catholic 'creole' population, whether white or colored, slave or free.

Love, C.

[damned_colonial]

Just a factual point... JotPY is *not* journalism on the spot, it's historical fiction masquerading as a journalistic account. Defoe was only a child at the time of the plague (b. 1659), but his account is from the POV of an adult. It was written in the 1720s, more than 50 years after the plague, so it's like a 60ish author now writing about WW2 -- perhaps some vague recollections from childhood, but no first-hand knowledge of adult experience of the war itself.

[al_zorra]

I knew that -- but even today we have many journalism works published post the time of occurance.

However, though Defoe didn't live in the period of the Great Plague, London experienced frequent epidemics of greater and lesser degree during his lifetime that carried off significant numbers of Londoners in a short period.

The highest total of deaths of an epidemic in London was in 1681, fatal smallpox. It returned with high fatalities in 1689 and 1691. Defor was 29 in 1689 and 30 in 1691. The Queen died in London of smallpox in 1694.

Here's a history of plagues and epidemics in London.

Love, C.