Ill Fated: The Disease of Racism in Julia Collins's The Curse of Caste

In this essay I argue that by pathologizing the violence of racism, Collins creates a contagion that connects the novel's sick characters and establishes an alternative family tree linking the births of black and white members. Because they are sources of information essential to repairing the rifts in the family (and the narrative), these ill figures are vital to the narrative, whereas the convention in nineteenth-century fiction is for invalids to be in-valid or ancillary to the plot. ("Correspondent Sick") It is hard to imagine that an author struggling with tuberculosis would not have infused illness into her text. [...]I suggest that we read this announcement and her obituary as the final installments of The Curse of Caste, because as it occurs in the novel, the sick body is a source of information.