Victorian Visual Culture

As someone with a weird fascination with disease and illness, reading and discussing “Romance of a Shop” by Amy Levy was a perfect way in to talk about consumption, or as it is now known, tuberculosis. The character Phyllis dies of consumption, and it is an interesting choice by Levy to kill the most beautiful, seemingly perfect character. Not interesting as in unexpected, because as we discussed this is a common trope when there are four women, one must die. The March sisters or the Lorimer sisters, it doesn’t matter. The choice to kill Phyllis with consumption caught my attention because at this time in Victorian London, consumption was actually considered a gift. Women were seen as more beautiful if they had consumption because of how it paled their skin, flushed their cheeks, and thinned out their faces and bodies. In the chapters surrounding Phyllis’ death, she is surrounded by “pale” objects, like flowers (pale violets) and clothing (her white dress), both considered objects of beauty, drawing deeper connections between whiteness, consumption, and beauty. As it was considered a disease of white women, I would argue that consumption actually perpetuated themes of empire.

Once society realized that consumption affected people in the working class and people of color, it stopped being a gift, and started being considered an actual affliction, and medical advancements started to ramp up. Not to help the working class or the non-white, but to cure the white, upper class women who developed this disease, so they would not be afflicted with the same disease as someone working class or non-white. Tuberculosis hospitals were started to shunt off patients and hide them from view, and the problem of consumption in other countries under the British empire like India or Africa was largely ignored by England. With the mentions of Africa and India in the novel, it’s hard for a person like me who is intensely interested in diseases not to have one million bells going off in my brain. In the novel, the sisters are distraught when the British army is reported to have been attacked in Africa and they are unsure of if Frank is alive or not. It is never disclosed what the British army was doing there in the first place. Additionally, the sisters have no problem with racializing their labor using slurs, while never acknowledging the labor of black people. The sisters are aware of the army in Africa, aware of enslavement, and aware of consumption, yet none of these things connect in their minds, when in actuality they are entirely connected.

In a contemporary lens, Big Pharma withholds certain medications that can cure tuberculosis, especially drug resistant tuberculosis from countries such as Sierra Leone in Africa, who’s colonial history with England is largely defined by the British and other foreign mining companies exporting what they mined, which is a large opportunity for revenue for Sierra Leone. The prices for the medications are higher than the government and the hospitals can afford due to this history. These lingering effects of British imperialism and empire show that the grip of colonialism is still killing populations in indirect ways.

Though a small plot point, Phyllis’ consumption is an additional subtle theme of empire that Levy puts into her novel. She killed the beautiful, perfect, sister to draw sympathy and emotion from the readers at this unfair disease, yet kept her beauty even in death by killing her with consumption, the white woman’s disease.