Canine Contaminations: Douglass, Hurston, Cujo

• In Event: Enticing Infestations: Animal Encounters and Contested Belonging in American Literature and Visual Media

Abstract

“Canine Contaminations: Douglass, Hurston, Cujo” pieces together a long durée of rabies narratives in progressive print media and popular culture, demonstrating how canine rabidity has long been used metaphorically to frame analyses of partisan American conflict. I begin by providing a brief history of how the disease was understood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During these decades, the common name for rabies was hydrophobia. Transliterated from the Greek, the term was used to designate a dread of fluids, stemming from difficulties in swallowing—a symptom doctors considered the most familiar form the disease took. I go on to show how political uses of the -phobia suffix (familiar to us today in terms such as, homophobia, transphobia, and Islamophobia) originated first in antislavery newspapers edited by Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. For Douglass and Garrison concepts such as colorphobia and Negrophobia gained traction, at first, almost as puns on hydrophobia. Following this abolitionist moment, I go on to explore how canine rabidity has since continued to inflect progressive print media, in works such as Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, even as the terminology of “hydrophobia” has largely dropped out of vernacular familiarity.

Author

• Don James McLaughlin, Swarthmore College