Content area
Full Text
When I consider the revival of the slave trade in the American republic . . . I must confess to this conclusion . . . that it is to the body politic what the yellow fever is to an individual. -Thomas Branagan, 1807
ON JANUARY 1, 1854, A NOVEL TITLED DIE GEHEIMNISSE VON NEWOrleans, or The Mysteries of New Orleans, began to appear in daily installments in a New Orleans German-language periodical, the Louisiana Staatszeitung. Loosely based on a true history, this fivehundred- page gothic tome traces the demise of aristocratic German immigrants during the yellow fever epidemic of 1853. Reizenstein capitalized on the very real epidemic that had ended only two months prior to his novel's first installments, adding scandalous and sensational elements to make sure his contract would continue throughout the year. The novel not only tells the story of the epidemic from an insider's perspective, but also delves into the crime, vice, and mythology of the Crescent City. The aspiring writer's ploy was a success and the novel continued to be published through its conclusion on March 4, 1855. Because it emerged almost coterminously with an unprecedented health crisis, The Mysteries of New Orleans provides unique insight into the social and spatial conditions of New Orleans in the summer of 1853. What materializes from this often convoluted and outlandish text is the tale of a city in crisis as bodies and social categories fall apart under the shade of disease.
Within its historical context, the novel's take on yellow fever reveals how slave revolt became an ever present fear in the minds of white New Orleanians. Yellow fever epidemics in Philadelphia since the late seventeenth century had already brought the rhetorics of revolution and disease together, but when race entered the picture in a Southern, slaveholding context, an entire social and economic system hung in the balance. Due to the additional threat that the proximity between New Orleans and the black republic of Haiti presented, a slave revolution seemed inevitable in 1853. Medical and political discourses attempted to draw out and manage the threats of race, revolution, and disease, but Reizenstein's novel extends these efforts to discursively solve the problems of black/white proximity in the South. To maintain white purity and power,...