'Matter out of place': The disorder of Victorian sanitary reform

Although the Victorian sanitary reform movement sometimes enabled the bourgeoisie to regulate its personal, domestic, and social boundaries, the Victorian period's rich body of sanitary reform literature reveals that the movement simultaneously produced and was comprised of ideological messiness and social disorder, generating great quantities of "matter out of place." When the reformers' methods required them to assume the position of boundary invaders, they often sought rationales for their behaviors or located transgressive responsibilities elsewhere. For instance, in hopes of concealing their assaults on personal barriers, bourgeois reformers deployed an incisive gaze to prompt unwashed subjects to implant sanitary values within themselves. In addition, sanitarians worked to mitigate their uneasiness about violations of domestic frontiers by recasting home investigations as friendly visits, incorporating sanitary proteges into bourgeois homes, and displacing bourgeois visitors' transgressive qualities onto working-class surrogates or inanimate objects.; Sanitary reform also produced human subjects who confounded social categories. Middle-class women's participation in the sanitary crusade destabilized nineteenth-century gender classifications and the public/private distinction of social space and labor, spurring Victorian sanitarians' and authors' efforts to reassert separate spheres ideology. Although certain middle-class narratives of working-class cleanliness showcase proletariat women's hygienic prowess, those tales also had to be carefully managed because, by relying upon the separate spheres paradigm, they failed to supply a commensurate sanitary role for working-class men. We discover another group of disruptive subjects in literary works that express dominant social groups' discomfort when, through cleanliness, their socioeconomic Others threatened to resemble them. To explore soap's subversive potential yet stabilize class borders, Victorian authors perpetuated the myth that only hereditary members of the middle or upper classes could embrace and perform cleanliness masterfully, and they consistently refused to narrate successful passing or social ascent through sanitation. In its entirety, this study of reformers' boundary-defying roles and the ambiguous human subjects that their tactics spawned usefully complicates renderings of nineteenth-century sanitary history.