Typhoid Mary

by Judith Walzer Leavitt

  Fig. 7.6. “Typhoid Mary” serving up skulls and bones, drawing, 1979.

  These popular accounts reveal only a small amount of sympathy for Mary Mallon in the decades following her death. With hints that Mallon herself might be innocent or an unwitting perpetrator, authors presented, albeit sometimes reluctantly, a negative picture of Typhoid Mary and her blameworthiness. Mallon’s story sometimes was told to illuminate the progress of science and modern accomplishments of public health, but authors and illustrators did not endow her personally with many redeeming features. Instead, they underscored and reinforced the same kind of negative interpretations of her story and of the meaning of Typhoid Mary that had emerged in the media following her recapture in 1915.

  From 1980 to the present, a stream of productions drawing on Typhoid Mary’s story exemplify that its compelling narrative continues to have meaning in our end-of-the-century world. The newer renditions of Mallon’s story differ from their immediate predecessors in some important ways. First, writers have increasingly shown sensitivity to the personal sadness in Mallon’s story, a response that hearkens back to the sympathy for Mary Mallon expressed in the 1909 newspaper stories. Second, they explicitly connect her story with current worries about new viruses and old diseases reappearing in drug-resistant forms. And finally, they make efforts to understand Mallon’s own position and to find some agency in her actions.

  It was predictable that our experiences at the end of the twentieth century with a new epidemic of HIV infection and AIDS and an upsurge in drug-resistant tuberculosis, in addition to other emerging viruses like Hanta, Ebola, and Sabia, and Lyme disease, Legionnaire’s disease, and toxic shock syndrome, would have inspired writers to use Mary Mallon’s story to develop the human meaning in our new health worries. The first modern dramatic rendition of her story appeared on January 15, 1979, when BBC Radio 4 aired a new play by the award-winning playwright Shirley Gee, called simply Typhoid Mary.16 This play was the BBC entry for the Italia Prize and won the jury’s Special Commendation. It won the Society of Authors/Pye Award for the Best Original Play of 1979, and it has been rebroadcast numerous times, including most recently in 1993.

  Gee invents an Irish childhood for Mary Mallon, as Molly Malone, the poor daughter of a fishmonger immortalized by the song “Cockles and Mussels,” whose days are spent working at the fish stall and bearing up under the taunts of the other children who do not like the lingering smell.17 Molly’s beloved brother dies of the fever (unspecified) while Molly nurses and cuddles him, presumably picking up the typhoid infection. At the age of sixteen, she escapes to America, where immigration officers change her name and provide her with the identity of a cook. She develops this skill to a fine art while working for elite New York families, but all the while she is bothered by a recurrent dream of children’s whispers and scorn. One of their cruel taunts in particular, “misbegotten Mary, misbegotten Mary,” brings back the torments of her youth, sufferings she eventually associates with the treatment she gets at the hands of George Soper. When the sanitary engineer finds her and tries to explain her carrier state, Mary replies, “You’re a quack or a crank or something, be accusing me of witchcraft next.” Soper, who does not realize the distance she places between them, urges, “Trust me. Come with me.” To which Mary replies, “Trust you? Go with you? A man who says I’m dirty? I kill people?” The distance between them is an impassible moat.

  When the health department isolates Mary, the playwright puts her in irons, and while she is in this helpless position Soper visits again, always asking questions. When he asks her where she is from, Mary explodes: “So that’s it. I might have known. You think all immigrants are trash, don’t you. Riffraff. You think we stink—that’s why you call me dirty. . . . Stinking transients. We’re supposed to pee on the stairs, aren’t we, and drink, and kill.” Misbegotten Mary. In America she cannot escape her Irish fishmonger heritage, her birth stigma.

  Mary finds some redemption, but no true peace, in Shirley Gee’s hands. At the end of the play and her life, she ponders the meaning of it all. She becomes resigned to her fate and her isolation. “My window has no bars,” she muses. “The days go by.” But more: “I’ve been a bit of a marvel. I’ve a place in the history books. I’ve had a destiny. That’s more than you can say for some. Isn’t it? It is. Isn’t it?”

  We learn much about the historical place of America’s first identified healthy carrier of typhoid fever from playwrights like Gee, who have put Mallon’s story to present-day use. Gee avoids the stigmatization of the Typhoid Mary label and presents instead a sympathetic portrayal of a woman trapped by circumstances. She is critical of Soper’s lack of understanding of Mallon’s point of view. She considers the problem, still relevant, of what to do with people like Mary Mallon who pose a risk to society, perhaps innocently, but who are still potentially deadly. Her play, by emphasizing sympathy for Mallon’s plight, suggests that compassion should govern public health responses.

  The social and public policy dilemma Mary Mallon’s story posed was addressed repeatedly in the 1980s, as writers tried to help people come to terms with new health dangers and dilemmas. Vermont Royster, for example, in a piece for the Wall Street Journal, told Mallon’s story to illuminate the controversy over compulsory drug tests for airline pilots who might endanger their passengers. He asked the “haunting” question: “Under what circumstances, if any, may society for the protection of all infringe on the rights of its individual members?” He remembered compulsory smallpox vaccination and thought that even though some religious beliefs might have been ignored in that case, “did not the end [the elimination of smallpox] justify the means?” But he acknowledged there were no simple answers to the difficult question of conflicting rights of individuals and society. “As we grapple with [the question],” he suggested, “we might give some thought to the sad story of Mary Mallon.”18

  J. F. Federspiel’s widely read 1982 novel The Ballad of Typhoid Mary was an effort to come to terms with questions of individual responsibility.19 Federspiel, a Swiss author, draws a psychological portrait of an alienated and lonely young woman, who cuts a sexual and culinary path across New York under the sympathetic eye of a physician, drawn as the present-day narrator’s grandfather. Federspiel creates Mary Mallon as a Swiss émigré, Maria Caduff. While sailing to America Maria’s family dies on board ship, and the ship’s cook, Sean Mallon, befriends the twelve-year-old, initiating her sexually while imparting recipes.

  By the time she arrives in New York, Maria has become Mary Mallon. Sean Mallon has died in the interim, and Mary is alone and free to develop her cooking and sexual skills in a series of escapades with unsavory characters, most of whom die after their encounter with this “avenging angel.” Only two characters genuinely appreciate the young ambitious immigrant, and these two are immune to her form of “truly equalizing justice.” One is a four-year-old retarded girl, for whom Mary cares lovingly for four years, despite her family’s wish that Mary’s curse would kill the child. The second is her chaste lover, anarchist intellectual Chris Cramer, who hunkers down in New York after throwing a bomb at the Haymarket riots in Chicago. Chris is loyal to a point: he always provides her refuge when she needs it, but he refuses to have a sexual relationship with her, possibly because he fears her disease.

  The novel recounts Mary’s isolation on North Brother Island and her release and return to her former life. When Chris dies, among his papers she finds a note, which speaks for both his bomb throwing and her cooking: “Either every human being is guilty of what he does; or, on the contrary: everyone is innocent, despite everything he has done. I can’t decide. May I be forgiven.”

  Federspiel leaves his readers to decide for themselves if Mallon should be forgiven. Although he adopts a mode of verisimilitude—a present-day pediatrician writing the story from his grandfather’s notes and his own research (one piece of which is one of Soper’s articles)—the novelist changes Mary Mallon’s roots and ethnicity, he makes people around her c
onscious of the danger she poses long before they could have been, and he portrays her as more lethal than any evidence suggests.20 Perhaps the author altered Mallon’s story in these ways to make a more universal statement about individual responsibility, the culpability of medicine, and the impotence of the state.

  A 1984 story in Current Health, “The Tale of Typhoid Mary,” takes a more positive approach. It begins with strong language: “Mary Mallon was a mass murderer—unknowingly.”21 The article touts modern medical advances to conclude that Mary Mallon’s experiences will not be repeated. The unnamed author makes no direct reference to new infections and implies that typhoid fever itself is a problem only for developing nations. The illustration accompanying the story provides a strong example of how an AIDS-aware America might make use of the story of a healthy carrier from the past. Looking directly at the reader, a prim Mary Mallon carries a tea tray (see fig. 7.7). She is in uniform, her hair neatly pulled back. One might be prepared to sit down to her serving if it were not for the “wings” of pathogenic microbes that frame her, wings that propel the angel of death, bringing her within your home, ready to light on your food. Evil lurks all around, especially in unlikely places. The warning from the past is even more relevant today. A suspicious nation, untrusting and wary, is ready to see danger in every teapot, death in each pretty face.22

  Fig. 7.7. Mary Mallon, drawing, 1984.

  Boston-area playwright Tanya Contos in 1985 offered a stage presentation called Typhoid Mary, which directly confronts the problem of whether Mary Mallon knew about the danger she carried.23 The question of the extent to which people who carry and spread disease are aware of the danger they pose has become an important one in our nation’s response to people who test positive for HIV. Contos took on the challenge and found in Mary Mallon an excellent medium. In the first act of the two-act play, Mallon denies her guilt to three visitors, a priest, her physician, and a young kitchen maid. She is filled with her defenses, bitter and sad. The doctor says to her: “Every time there was an outbreak, you fled the house in the dead of night, only to surface somewhere else with a new alias. Is that the pattern of a victim, or of a criminal?” Mary replies, “I left because I didn’t want to get sick myself.” Refusing to take any responsibility, Mary lashes out at her captors: “Suddenly I’m the one to blame for everything that happens to me. Well, you can’t wash your hands of me like that. I won’t accept responsibility. . . . I’m a prisoner, not a patient, but I can be a patient prisoner.”

  The second act brings ghosts from Mary’s past, ghosts of people who know her better than her earlier visitors: her former employer/lover, a teen-age girl who died in her care, and her own son. These characters urge her to remember and accept, which, by the end of the play, she does. With a roar, she says, “GUILTY. I had that power. I knew I had it, I knew how to use it, and I used it. Again and again and again. I cooked my way from house to house to hotel to hospital to hell.” She is redeemed in her confession, and, surrounded by the ones she loved in the past, shouts (very much to a late-twentieth-century audience), “I’m FREE!” In this modern-day rendition of Mallon’s story, the woman carrier accepts blame, and in the process is forgiven. Mary Mallon on stage emerges from the Typhoid Mary stigma.

  Another experimental rendition of Mary Mallon’s story is Joan Schenkar’s 1986 play, Fulfilling Koch’s Postulate, which the author calls a “comedy of menace.”24 The play is staged within the huge lips of an infected throat. The playwright has devised an inventive cross-Atlantic pairing. On one side of the stage, Mary Mallon holds forth in her kitchen; on the other, Robert Koch works in his laboratory. Koch was the German scientist whose postulates establishing proper bacteriology laboratory procedures helped lead to the realization of healthy carriers. In Schenkar’s play he is also Mallon’s employer and struggles to dictate her actions. More figuratively, he is her creator, but he is himself not immune to her influence. Mallon and Koch work in their separate laboratories on the two sides of the stage, dissecting culinary and scientific treats, both with a purpose. The play examines the power struggle between the laboratory and the kitchen:

  MARY: Sooner or later, in every household I’ve ever worked in comes the same question: Who is to be cook in the kitchen? Is the master of the house to be cook in the kitchen? Or is the cook to be cook in the kitchen? That is always the question.

  MAID: Is there an answer, Miss Mary?

  MARY: To that question? There is an answer. (Pause.) I am the cook. That is the answer I always give.

  Mary’s power diminishes when no one will eat what she prepares, and Koch himself cannot control all that happens in his own house. He understands Mary’s danger but cannot stop her from cooking. “You’re Cooking Poison! You’re Cooking Death!” Koch accuses. Mary responds, “The important thing is to keep cooking.” Koch can only warn his laboratory assistant, “Nothing from the kitchen should ever go into your mouth.” The assistant puts his finger in the pot anyway. “It’s the cook’s postulate,” he laughs, as its potency overwhelms him.

  One critic wrote that the play “mates the kitchen with a doctor’s laboratory . . . [and] contagion, sexuality, and scientific research [go] haywire.” Schenkar’s play, even though she denies it was about AIDS or about contemporary America at all, but rather says she was “waltzing the floor with history,” has enormous significance today. “You can’t blame a bug,” she told her interviewer.25 It seems, though, that Shenkar more emphatically does not want to blame the bug’s carrier. As drama critic Vivian Patraka noted, “Schenkar undermines the traditional responses of revulsion for Mary as contaminated pariah” at the same time as she debunks an “idealization of Koch as hero of medicine.”26 The audience is left to conclude that menace can exist in both camps and that blame, either of the carrier or the science, is not the point. Schenkar subtly disposes of the question that hangs over the 1980s about what to do with people who carry the HIV virus by showing that neither side of her stage—carrier or scientist—can alone solve our problems.27

  Barry J. Drogin, musical creator in 1988 of the theater dance production Typhoid Mary, and choreographer Peg Hill portray a complex Mary Mallon and, like Contos and Schenkar, move well beyond the common view of her as menace and demon. Drogin believed that Mallon’s isolation and silence “forced [her] to become that which the public sees,” as he put it in the production notes.28 He felt haunted to get beyond the public representation and see inside Mallon, but he also worried whether his efforts were right, “primarily because of what I learned about Mary’s fierce fight for privacy.” He wrote, “As we delved further into our project, we found ourselves in a lose-lose position—by pointing out that Mary Mallon was not ‘Typhoid Mary,’ had we turned her into our vision of her instead? I continue to work in biographical forms . . . and to rub up against this problem of depicting people who do not want to be depicted.”29

  Drogin and Hill staged the production with the dancers dressed in “ghoulish” costumes, the brown streaks at the back of their union suits, a reviewer noted, “particularly graphic reminders that typhoid was spread through poor personal hygiene.”30 Here is Dance Magazine’s description of the play’s opening scene: Mary Mallon is “supervising the preparation of a meal that is served to members of the audience by dancers whose faces are made up to resemble hollow-eyed death masks. We ate the pasta, salad, bread, and fruit somewhat warily as dancers were rapidly overcome by disease and dropped dead [in front of us].”31 By having the audience actually eat a meal dramatically prepared, Drogin and Hill force people to confront their fears on the spot, in public.

  The Drogin and Hill narrative dance-pantomime poses the dilemma of why Mary returned to cooking after her release from her original isolation. Either as a form of a “dangerous sense of denial or merely due to financial necessity,” as the program notes put it, they feel the choice and the responsibility for that choice were hers. The misfortune, too, was Mary’s. But it is also ours. Drogin’s anguish becomes society’s anguish. During the dance M
allon is painted with a big red X. At the close of the evening, she stands alone, recaptured, “in a cloud of powder-puff dust.” The problem she poses is solved only by separating her from society. The production stands as a challenge to the audience to find a better way, to move beyond stigma and isolation.

  The premier performance of Drogin and Hill’s Typhoid Mary was a benefit for People with AIDS Coalition. Drogin was “struck by the similarities between the way Mary was treated, her social position, and contemporary editorials and news articles about AIDS and prostitutes.” He and Hill staged the production to speak to the similarities, a conscious contemporary use of history. Reviewers caught the significance for today’s audiences: “The notion of a dance about Typhoid Mary is intriguing because it puts us in mind of threats of quarantine in connection with the AIDS crisis,” wrote the Village Voice critic. Dance Magazine’s reviewer also saw the “bold but nonetheless valid comparisons between the public hysteria of the early twentieth century and contemporary reactions to the spread of AIDS.”32 Such a confrontation between history and the present forces audiences and readers to think about how the past might help us understand our current public health problems and also suggests how our present concerns shape our interpretation of the past.