Harriet Stark's THE BACILLUS OF BEAUTY

Man, there are as many crashing disappointments as there are genuinely interesting moments in this strange relic of also-ran science fiction from days gone by. The Bacillus of Beauty, the only known novel penned by Mrs. Harriet Stark of the little town of Payson, UT, first saw print in 1900, and is very much a relic of its time, with more of ordinary literary than science fictional interest on offer, but I'm glad to have found it and am very interested in seeing what its fellow volumes from the Legacy of the Corridor have to offer. 

In an important way, Stark's novel is more than a bit prescient; its plot concerns a young woman who is every bit the ancestress of heroines such as the narrator character in Ling Ling Huang's Natural Beauty; Elisabeth Sparkle/Sue in Coralie Fargeat's body horror sensation, The Substance; Infinite Jest's Joelle Van Dyne, the PGOAT (Prettiest Girl of All Time), whose extreme beauty comes to seem to her a deformity that forces her to go veiled in public; and Jolenta, the artificially created Marilyn Monroe-esque bombshell of a monumental genre fiction series I've mentioned once or twice in this blog, The Book of the New Sun. Which means that yes, The Bacillus of Beauty concerns a young woman, Helen Winship, who has lived the first 20 years of her life as a normal, healthy, fit but ordinary- looking specimen until she chances in the course of her studies (one refreshing element to the novel, considering its age, is its matter-of-factness about the very notion of a young woman pursuing scientific studies, though her aim is not, if course, what we would nowadays consider a career in the field so much as a way to contribute something of greater than usual value to society while she waits to earn that coveted MRS degree) upon an old Dutch scientist who has discovered/invented a very simple biotechnological tool that can give Miss Winship absolute and perfect beauty, make her the absolute apex of her type (in this case, brown-haired, brown- eyed white women), if she will consent to be his test subject. 

The rest of the novel follows her career as she takes the New York City, more or less of Edith Wharton and co., by storm, becoming such a sensation, once the treatment takes effect, that like Joelle Van Dyne she must go about her daily business veiled lest she be mobbed everywhere she goes. She is taken up as a novelty by high society, feasted on by the press, romantically linked with minor British aristocracy, all very Cinderella-coded -- but the dark side to the story gets very dark indeed, though not as dark as it probably should, and...

Look, this is a fascinating little historical document and very competently constructed, at least as well written as a Robert W. Chambers "shop girl" romance, say. And it's neat to have this early example of science fiction written by not only a woman, but a woman from a part of the world not normally associated with women getting to be autonomous creative artists, a newly incorporated U.S. state that only recently gave up polygamy in order to be admitted to the Union, but still very much run as a theocracy by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Sants. It's fascinating that this exists at all, and it's really cool that someone has made the effort to rescue it and several others somewhat like it from oblivion. 

But, that rescue also feels just a little bit icky, for reasons that I really can't discuss without first pointing to that text and the tagline for this blog that so many people ignore: WARE SPOILERS FOR A 126 YEAR OLD BOOK. 

While the world of this book is a little bit more progressive than I'd expected -- see my remarks above about it being somewhat unremarkable that Helen has chosen to pursue post-graduate work in biology -- it's still an artifact of its time in that Helen is still expected to marry, and soon, and indeed before she even sets foot in New York, she has been claimed as fiancee by a hometown guy about eight years older than she is, who was her high school teacher for a while and later was a law student while she was an undergrad at the same unspecified Utah university. This alert young man, John Burke, who Knew Her When she was just a very good student but covered in freckles, with her hair in pigtails, is the novel's other narrator, because of course his feelings about what he finds on his first visit to Helen after she has had a few months in New York are very important: in place of his perfectly presentable but still ordinary-looking bride-to-be, he finds he is somewhat unofficially engaged to the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, whose appearance at the Metropolitan Opera has stopped a performance so that everyone in the audience, orchestra and on stage can get a look at her, who has garnered the admiration of every man and the envy of every woman in the city, whose roommates in the modest little studio apartment she calls home (even in 1900, a girl can't afford to live alone in Manhattan unless she comes from Serious Money) can hardly function for falling all over her in near-worship -- one is an artist and illustrator and the other is a newspaper reporter, so their enthusiasm for Helen does not help matters. And while Burke quickly puts a modest opal ring on it, he knows full well that he might already be too late. So yeah,  we get to hear all about it, of course.

But just as it starts feeling like that's all we're going to get -- how Helen's transformation affects her intended -- we at least get a switch to Helen's own perspective. And she is, at first, utterly delighted. She had concluded at a very young age that Beauty is Power and that she wanted it, even though while not exactly an ugly ducking, she's not the most promising raw material for her project of Getting Beautiful. Fortunately, she was counseled by a pretty aunt that the way to attain beauty is to work on everything else -- improve her mind, maintain a healthy outlook, and exercise to keep her body capable and strong and fit, and you'll at least grow up to be the prettiest version of yourself that you are capable of being. And soon Helen is the best student in her little school, which is how she first attracts the attention of Burke, and the  habit of excellence she has cultivated in pursuing beauty is what allows her to enroll at Barnard College in New York for a post-graduate program under the tutelage of the weird scientist who will change her life forever. Burke will simply follow her there in a bit and take up a post at a good law firm and then they'll marry. HEA! Meanwhile, Helen has an aunt who married very well, to a New York judge, who can keep an eye on her. Or such is the plan.

One thing at which Stark truly excels is tracing Helen's changing attitudes toward herself and others, as the kind of flattering attention that we might think only 21st century media could drown a person in becomes part of her daily life, much richer and handsomer men than her fiance start vying for her attention, and her OG friends, female family members, and the Society Matrons who take her up gradually stop blowing smoke up her skirts and start trying to sabotage her when they realized that nobody else is going to be able to get married until she does, and maybe not even then.

Because of course, even if she comes through all of this with a Master's degree or PhD and a pile of scientific accolades under her belt, she's still expected to chuck it all once she is married, so that she can start giving the world beautiful babies* and be a perfectly beautiful hostess and helpmeet and ornament to her husband's career. She'll be all the better a trophy for being a scientist who could have been great. 

Meanwhile, of course her head is turned by all of the attention, until it starts getting exhausting. More interestingly, her own attitude towards her fellow women, who will someday benefit from the same boon granted to her, evolves in interesting ways. As the story progresses, Helen begins more and more to express disdain for the less-beautiful in everything, to feel affronted when confronted by ugliness, to regard the plain, the infirm, the actually ugly, with real disgust she does not bother to hide. Really, she becomes kind of a bitch.

But really, it could and should be so much worse. Somehow, Helen never encounters the kind of dude that is ubiquitous in pretty much every other sphere or work of art. Nobody hits on her. Nobody grabs at her or makes crude propositions or cat-calls her. Nobody ever disrespects her or in any way tries to do her harm, except socially and later, possibly by accident, economically. For of course her only real obstacle in the story is the fact that she's been thrown into high society and everybody just naturally expects her to keep that society's standards of dress and amusement and environment. And daddy is just a simple farmer back in Utah. And nobody wants to hire her, even to work as a scientist or lab assistant; she is too distracting and, it is implied very subtly, she might not really be as competent as she and we have been led to believe (or at least everybody is assuming she's not really that competent and probably has coasted on her looks -- even though those looks are only weeks or months old). As for any other work, it is obviously beneath her, both by her standards and those of her employers, and she's looking at the classic self-supporting woman's two choices, which are really kind of one: she can earn some money on the stage, but more on her back, though, again, this second option is never even a little bit alluded to except in one brief scene where an acquaintance suggests very, very obliquely that some men might pay a little for her company.

But so, good thing John Burke is such a, sorry, but there it is, a Nice Guy. He's watched with long suffering adoration from afar as the girl he used to know conqued New York and was kind of conquered back, biding his time and waiting until he's her only option again. Though of course the fact that this is what he's done couldn't possibly be further from his mind. He's no Incel waiting for his Stacy to fall into his arms after the Chads are done with her. No sir. Not at all. Well, maybe a little.

So this is really kind of a frustrating book that made me feel pretty awful, but only because I'm encountering it in the context of 2026 -- an utterly unfair basis on which to evaluate a book. It's just, well, I feel weird about its surfacing now the way it has. It was first reissued for the Legacy of the Corridor project in 2022, when all the modern circumstances that made this kind of an icky read for me (including how even more warped beauty standards have gotten, especially in the author's home state) since this book's heyday) were already very much in effect. But so, why now, for this book? I am going to have to think about this for a while. I have some ideas, and yes, they tie into a more common name for the Corridor invoked by the project's title, and how certain organizations are interacting with the greater world nowadays, but they feel really cynical and paranoid and I don't feel ready to broach that subject just yet. Maybe after the Midterms...

Is this an anti-feminist work? Not quite. But it sure isn't a feminist one, either. It's a pretty misanthropic one in general, but not so overtly ugly as to make it a fully unpleasant read. It is what I keep calling it: an artifact, the only one we have from a creator who showed greater than average potential as a novelist and a writer of speculative fiction, but for whatever reason exercised her talents in other directions. She had, for instance, eleven children, most of whom survived to adulthood. I can't help but wonder what else she might have had to offer us in other circumstances, but I also can't help but wonder if she wouldn't have been an early version of Phyllis Schlafly.

I don't know. I'll see what else the Corridor has to show me, I guess.

*Though it is, of course, by no means so that her uberbeauty will be heritable. But by then she should no longer be the only one infected by the Bacillus and it can be administered to her children at a suitable time, is the plan. Because the scientist's stated intention is that someday every woman in the world will be physically perfect, the better to please men, basically. Because of course that's the only thing that's ever going to matter to the women. Of course.