Nineteenth century

The nineteenth century functions as a historical measure of visible hunger in the narrator’s account of Mona Mayfair’s condition. By recalling starving Irish arrivals and emaciated beggars in New Orleans, the narration makes Mona’s near-starvation legible not as an ordinary modern sight but as an exceptional return of suffering associated with an earlier era.

Historical Reference

The comparison begins with the narrator’s recollection of the eighteenth century, when people starved in the streets of Paris and died in public. The account then moves to nineteenth-century New Orleans, where starving Irish arrivals and beggars reduced to skin and bone made severe deprivation visible in the city. These references establish a historical contrast: in the narrator’s view, such scenes no longer belonged to everyday experience in contemporary America, though they could still be encountered in foreign missions or certain hospital wards.

The Comparison with Mona Mayfair

That contrast gives the description of Mona Mayfair particular force. She is under seventy pounds, her profuse red hair heightens the macabre impression of her deterioration, and she is so close to death that the narrator attributes her continued survival to sheer will. The narrator connects her illness to a traumatic birth, while acknowledging that its cause remains unclear. Her emaciated body recalls the publicly visible destitution of earlier centuries, making a private medical crisis resemble a form of suffering the narrator associates with historical poverty.

Narrative Function

The reference does more than date a condition: it changes the scale through which Mona’s illness is perceived. The narrator first places extreme hunger in the past and at the margins of modern experience, then brings that history to bear on a living woman whose survival is precarious. The comparison emphasizes both the severity of Mona’s decline and the distance between the relative security of contemporary life and the bodily extremity represented by starvation.