September 15, 2019
The young adult novel Fever, 1793, and the thriller film Contagion use different narrative styles to share similar stories and themes about epidemics in order to attract and inform their audiences.
Fever, 1793, is for teen readers, who, like the protagonist, may not yet be aware of the best and worst in people, and only have their own short-term interests in mind. Contagion, on the other hand, presents a gruesome what-if scenario from the point of view of more than 15 characters. Adult viewers may see themselves in one of the characters, but other characters’ roles and the relations between characters may be new or unfamiliar.
Fever, 1793, is a coming-of-age story set during the yellow fever epidemic that strikes Philadelphia in that year. The narrator is Matilda Cook, a fourteen-year-old girl who lives with her mother and grandfather. They run Cook’s Coffeehouse, a popular establishment in town, with the help of Eliza, a freed former slave.
Every chapter reads like a diary entry, titled with the date. At the beginning, a young reader can easily identify with Matilda: she likes to sleep in, avoid housework, and sneak away to visit her crush Nathanial. Her mother scolds her for laziness and daydreaming. Matilda fantasizes about adding a shop with international goods and artwork to the coffeeshop, and idea that her mother denounces.
During the course of the epidemic, as days and weeks pass, Matilda faces uncertainty and danger. Gossip about the fever spreads through Philadelphia. One of Matilda’s friends dies suddenly. Her mother catches the fever. Philadelphians are quarantined, leave town, or succumb to disease. Businesses close their doors. Farmers refuse to come to town to sell food. Her grandfather dies during a looting episode. Matilda is effectively orphaned, having lost track of her mother.
Matilda, formerly self-centered, learns how the wider world works and how to take responsibility. She sees how the desperate situation caused by the epidemic makes people act in extraordinary ways. For example, a farming family that offered to evacuate Matilda and her grandfather literally dump them on the side of the road and leave with their belongings when the grandfather’s symptoms prevent them from passing through a road block. At this point, Matilda must care for her ailing grandfather by finding food and water. After recovering from the fever herself, Matilda resolves to open the coffeehouse again and prepare it for whenever her mother returns to town. The coffeehouse has been looted in the family’s absence, and now it’s up to Matilda to clean up, find food, and fend off burglars. When her grandfather dies in this episode, Matilda accompanies his body to the mass grave. Here she finally appreciates the devastation caused by the epidemic. Workers unceremoniously dump bodies in pit, but Matilda refuses to allow her loss to turn into callousness: she insists the workers join in prayer when her grandfather’s body is laid to rest.
By the end of the book, Matilda, still a teenager, has reopened the coffeehouse, offered Eliza part ownership in order to get her support, adopted an orphan, and welcomes back her mother, now too weak to work. She has laid out a plan to expand the coffeehouse according to her ambitions and reunites with her sweetheart, who respects and complements her. In short, Matilda is now a young woman.
By contrast, in the movie Contagion, the main character is the fictional highly contagious virus. Via many characters’ perspectives, though, we see many of the same themes explored in Fever, 1793.
Like the book, Contagion follows the epidemic one day at a time. However, each character has a role to play without undergoing any individual evolution. Instead, the evolution is likely to happen in each viewer. We each identify with some of the characters in Contagion, but few of us will have personal experience of all the characters, among them an epidemiologist from the CDC; a blogger with millions of fans, tempted by his own influence; a widower who finds out his wife had been cheating on him. We are like Matilda, and through various characters’ eyes we see the workings of our world today: how the epidemic spreads quickly through a globalized world, how international networks collaborate to fight the disease, and how broadcast and online communications battle to spread reliable and damaging information.
Jory Emhoff, a fourteen-year-old girl in Contagion, serves to show the impact of disease and quarantine on a teenager. Like Matilda, she comes off as somewhat self-centered: assured that her father is immune, and blessed with a cell phone, she is mostly concerned with loneliness and boredom. Although Jory eventually celebrates the prom in her own living room, she never reaches a milestone of adulthood in this story. But that’s not the point; rather, this scene illustrates an evolution in the epidemic: a tentative step to normalcy.
Several episodes in Contagion, like in Fever, 1793, show how a desperate situation brings out the best and worst in humanity. In one example, Dr. Mears from the CDC risks her life to set up make-shift hospitals in Minnesota. She ends up as a victim in her own hospital, but to the end she is a doctor: she shares her coat with another patient as she herself is dying. Soon after, her body, sealed in plastic and duct tape, is left in a mass grave. However, in the midst of the outbreak, her colleague takes time to mourn her death at the grave: he arrives dressed in a HazMat suit and carrying a bouquet.
Though differing in narrative styles, Fever, 1793, and Contagion effectively explore similar themes, and hopefully broaden the perspectives of their respective audiences, regardless of their starting point.