Brown’s Use of Miasma to Portray Seduction and Sexual Violence as Disease Anonymous College

Miasma is an outdated medical notion that contagion could move through the air, permeating the atmosphere to find its next victims. Often portrayed as a sinister cloud, people believed that the air could be filled with disease, creeping around like an unseen bogeyman waiting to pounce on the unsuspecting. Though medicine has since evolved past these ideas, Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond, or the Secret Witness, was written in a time that still subscribed to these notions, and as such, the story reflects this doctrine in it’s inclusion of the Yellow Fever. During the Dudleys’ time in Philadelphia, the city was ravaged by an epidemic that was taking lives constantly. In one passage, Brown writes of a family that fell victim to the virus, “They probably imbibed their disease from the tainted atmosphere around them” (Brown 37). This reference to “tainted atmosphere” directly alludes to the concept of miasma. In turn, Brown’s subscription to this concept of contagion informs how he portrays seduction and sexual violence as working like a physical disease, such as the Yellow Fever. Some might be wary at the act of drawing metaphors regarding illness. Susan Sontag, in her essay, Illness as Metaphor, writes, “Illness is not a metaphor,...