Reading Shah’s analysis of the discourse that surrounded Chinatown as a site of disease---“The creation of ‘knowledge’ of Chinatown relied upon three key spatial elements: dens, density, and the labyrinth” (18)---my mind immediately went to Charles Dicken’s Bleak House, the nineteenth-century novel I’m currently reading in my seminar, “On life and the living.” Descriptions of Chinatown employ a vocabulary and imagery similar to Dicken’s in describing the slums of the London poor; in particular, Dicken’s description of the slum “Tom-all-Alone’s” employs similar tropes of infection and dehumanization:
“It is a black, dilapidated street avoided by decent people…these tumbling tenements contain by night, a swarm of human misery. As, on the ruined human wretch, vermin parasites appear, so, these ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence, that crawls in and out of gaps in wall and boards…and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever” (256).
With this passage in mind, I was fascinated that one observor explicitly made a connection to Dickens in his evaluation of Chinatown:
“The immodesty, lethargy, and unabashed narcotic addiction recalled for Logan the figure of the ‘opium-smoking hag’ in Charles Dicken’s novel Edwin Drood…Logan used realist narrative devices and Dickens’s ‘morally-ordered’ universe to effectively communicate the hidden dangers of Chinese habitation” (31).
What I find fascinating about this connection is the tension between environment and “specimen” that it highlights, as well as a tension between considerations of race and class. While nineteenth-century “ethnographers” of Chinatown seem to have employed its “dens and density” to suggest the mysterious and malicious character of the Chinese race, Dicken’s passage emphasizes that it is the environment itself---the social conditions of London---that have “bred” such “human wretches” as the London poor. Bleak House is a novel anxious that the contagious poor will infect the entire social body; the street urchin Jo introduces smallpox into the middle-class household of the heroine. But in this passage, Dickens attributes the development of this infection to rapacious landlords and “all the fine gentlemen in office” who have oppressed the poor (257).
With Logan’s observation, we see a discourse about class transformed into one about race, and the “blame” shifted from “external” social policy to some “intrinsic” racial character. And with later Asian American activists, we can observe a return to Dicken’s use of this rhetoric. Later activists accepted evaluations of Chinatown as a site of decay, but they argued that this decay was created by negligent city officials and racist policies. Like Dickens, they used this strategy to lobby for social reform and government action.
At the same time, Shah’s work challenges me to consider the ways in which Dicken’s discourse on class might also be a racial discourse (particularly in establishing a kind of paradigm of environment / specimen that was common in racist theories of social Darwinism). The passage demonstrates a great deal of ambivalence by blaming “fine gentlemen” yet so vividly describing the poor as dehumanized “vermin parasites.” Particularly in the imperial context of the novel---English ventures in Africa, America, and India feature prominently---I wonder how else I might read Dicken’s invocation of a “crowd of foul existence.”
I came to a similar conclusion when thinking about contemporary examples of this kind of discourse of “dens” and “human vermin.” I believe this discourse remains with us in contemporary American society, but that it is more often expressed in terms of class rather than race. However, a term like “white trash”---while typically used as a class marker---still implies a particular set of racial beliefs and hierarchies; race and class remain intertwined in these discourses of social decay and ruin.
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