Staying Calm and Seizing the Iron: Contagion, Fermentation, and the Management of the Rabies Threat in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley

On being told that the dog, Phoebe, is "raging mad" (426), Shirley runs to the kitchen, grabs an iron, and cauterizes the wound to prevent her own infection with rabies.1 Through this action, Shirley seeks to protect herself from shame and pain, but her mortification of the flesh is also a measure to reassert the integrity of the flesh by blockading it against infection. Newspapers in the 1840s described individuals dying in agony from the disease, detailing their painful convulsions and violent paroxysms in articles whose titles promised lurid details of a "Shocking," "Dreadful," "Lamentable," or "Frightful" death.2 In September 1849, the Blackburn Standard documented a case in which the "deceased died raving, and requiring five or six men to hold him down" ("Dreadful Death"); Lloyd's Weekly told how the same man "requested that if in his ravings he should bite his mother, they would knock his head off the next moment. Emily Brontë's bite from a "strange dog, running past, with hanging head and lolling tongue," after which she applied an iron to her arm to cauterize the wound (Gaskell, Life 214), has traditionally been considered the primary context for the episode in Shirley, one in a list of parallels between Emily and Shirley that Charlotte outlined to Elizabeth Gaskell (215) and that biographies such as Juliet Barker's have both noted and queried (Barker 612; see also Miller 204). Neil Pemberton and Patrick Worboys have indicated the metaphorical associations between rabid dogs and the criminal classes in the 1830s (25); the veterinary surgeon and author of On Canine Madness, William Youatt, argued in 1830 that an increase in rabies in previous years had resulted from "the increasing demoralization of the country" (30), in which members of the "peasantry" were mingling with "the ruffian and the avowed thief" (31), mistreating and neglecting their dogs to the extent that the animals became rabid.