The Bacillus of Beauty: A Romance of To-day

Stark, HarrietProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
472K words
Chapters
48

Tags

English Originals Romance Fiction Consumer SocietyScience FantasyBeauty ExperimentUrban RomanceSocial CritiqueBody PoliticsSelf-ReflectionRomantic NarrativeSatirical StyleFemale Perspective

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Bacillus of Beauty: A Romance of To-day by Harriet StarkAuthor: Stark, Harriet,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Oct 1, 2005

Editor's review

This novel centers on the idea of a "beauty bacillus," weaving beauty treatment, science, and emotional entanglements into a "romance of today." Its strength lies in the forward-looking nature of its subject: at a time when bacteriology was just entering public view, the author boldly imagined using microbial means to alter appearance, raising questions of identity, desire, and ethics. As American popular fiction, it moves at a brisk pace and has the dramatic quality of a romantic tale, while reflecting the period's mixture of curiosity and unease about science. Its value for readers lies not in hard science-fictional premises but in observing how early twentieth-century popular culture imagined technology's control over the body. It suits readers interested in early science fiction, medical history, and the study of gender images. It is best read as a period text rather than a strict scientific prophecy, with attention to its discussion of beauty, health, and self-transformation.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Learn first about early twentieth-century bacteriology and beauty culture to better appreciate the period character of the premise.
  2. Treat the "beauty bacillus" as a thought experiment, noting as you read its implications for the body, identity, and ethics.
  3. Read it alongside science-fiction or medical novels of the same period to observe the social context of technological imagination.
  4. If reading the original English, note the narrative conventions of popular romance and do not scrutinize every sentence for scientific plausibility.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48

FAQ

Is this book hard science fiction? No. It is closer to a romantic tale with a scientific premise, focusing on characters' emotions and social reactions rather than rigorous scientific extrapolation. Readers judging it by hard science-fiction standards may be disappointed; read as a period thought experiment, it is more rewarding.
Does the "beauty bacillus" premise have any basis in reality? The novel draws on the rising public interest in bacteriology of the time, but altering beauty through a bacillus is literary imagination, not a real medical procedure. It should be read as a metaphor for technological modification of the body rather than a workable medical idea.
For readers researching which themes is it useful? It is useful for readers studying early science fiction, medical history, beauty culture, gender images, and body politics. The novel offers a textual sample of how early twentieth-century popular culture imagined the relationship between technology and beauty, and can be used to discuss how scientific discourse enters popular narrative.

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About the author

Stark, Harriet Author

Harriet Stark is an author about whom little public information is available; only one work by her is recorded in the collection, The Bacillus of Beauty: A Romance of To-day. Judging from its title and subtitle, the book belongs to the vein of science-tinged romance, combining a scientific conceit—the “bacillus of beauty”—with a contemporary love story, and reflecting the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular imagination around science, appearance, and gender. Since the author's nationality, dates, and education cannot be confirmed, this note makes no speculation and focuses on the work's orientation: a popular romantic narrative built around a scientific idea, written for a general readership with a clear emphasis on plot. Today such fiction is of interest chiefly as a sample of the intersection between popular literature and scientific imagination of its era, while the author herself remains difficult to describe biographically owing to the scarcity of sources.