Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Fall 2025
Abstract
By examining two characters in Zofia Nałkowska’s novel Choucas, this paper explores how two different understandings of illness and germ theory exist simultaneously within the book. Published in 1926, the novel follows moments in the lives of a diverse cast of characters from across Europe who have come to a villa in the Swiss Alps. Many of the characters have come because they are sick, including Mademoiselle Sossé and Monsieur Est, the two youngest and sickest characters. Although Sossé reflects nineteenth-century Romantic ideas of the consumptive and Est represents modern disease theory and fears of contagion through tuberculosis, they are united by moments of Christian redemption in their stories. This paper demonstrates that both Romantic and “scientific” constructions of disease operate as frameworks for social valorization and ostracisation in Choucas and throughout the wider interwar years.
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Recommended Citation
Irwin, Ming, "Diseases and Redemption: Two Forms of the Convalescent in Nałkowska’s Choucas" (2025). Mountains and Modernity. 3.
https://scarab.bates.edu/mountains_modernity/3