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Writer's pictureMekiya Outini

A Good Olfaction Romance: Noses, Telegraphs, Christian Virtue, and Uncanny Vice in Ella Cheever Thayer’s Wired Love

Updated: Jul 26


A coin depicting Vespasian's magnificent nose | Image from George Janet's Nasology
A coin depicting Vespasian's magnificent nose | Image from George Janet's Nasology

“An absent nose is even more conspicuous than an eccentric one,” writes Maud Ellman in her 1960 survey of nasal symbolism in the West, titled—in an inspired nod to Freud—“Noses and Monotheism.” Ellman makes this observation in the context of rhinoplasty, a surgical art with ancient roots that’s enjoyed a resurgence since the late 19th century, and whose purpose, Ellman notes, is “not to make the nose invisible…” but rather to make it “conform to the shape associated with the dominant class.”

 

Yet during the late 19th century, a period marked not only by the first modern endonasal rhinoplasty (1887), but also by the rise of new technologies, such as the electric telegraph, that facilitated disembodied communication across sprawling distances, Ellman’s paradigm appears to have become inverted: a nose, like the Cheshire Cat’s grin, is more conspicuous when present than absent.

 

So it goes in Wired Love, a novel by the romance author, playwright, and telegraph operator Ella Cheever Thayer. Thayer was, in many ways, a product of her time. Like many young women of similar status, she’d seen, in the telegraph office, an opportunity to gain financial independence and catch glimpses of the wider world. The protagonist of Wired Love, Miss Nathalie Rogers—Nattie, for short—also works as a telegraph operator, and it’s from this work that she’s diverted, as the novel opens, by “a sharp, inquisitive nose, a green veil, a pair of eyeglasses, and a strained smile, sticking through her little window.”

 

This intruder—subsequently “the owner of the nose”—sports the first in a series of prominent proboscises that haunt Wired Love, which was published 10 years before the pioneering otolaryngologist John Orland Roe made history by converting a “pug” nose into an aesthetically “normal one” using innovative surgical techniques that left no scars.

 

There’s Miss Kling, “a spinster—not because she liked it, but on account of circumstances over which she had no control,” who routinely inserts her nose into her tenants’ business while also suffering from a chronic head cold marked by “an incessant sniffle and spasms of violent sneezing.”

 

There’s Celeste, whose countenance is “principally nose and teeth.”

 

There’s Jo, who would gladly let the charismatic actress Cyn lead him “about by the nose.”

 

And then there’s Nattie herself, whose nose is evidently so appealing that Clem falls in love with it, specifically.

 

Apart from this abundance of noses and the fact that its romantic affairs are mostly conducted by telegram—a precursor to contemporary online dating—Wired Love is relatively unremarkable. Fans of Austen, the Brontë sisters, and other Victorian romances will surely appreciate Thayer’s work, but the novel appears, at first glance, to bring little to the table that these better-known authors haven’t already covered. To fully grasp its significance, then—and to make sense of its quirkier motifs—we must take a step back and consider this novel in relation to a broader historical context, marked by Victorian preoccupations with sexuality, repression, and progress, and by the conceptual binaries that recur throughout the literature of the era: antiquity versus modernity; nature versus technology; the spoken word versus telegraphy; body versus mind and spirit; paganism versus Christianity; and, yes, olfaction versus vision.

 

Much of the concern over noses, which appears not only in the pages of Wired Love, but also in the news and scholarly papers of the day, owes to a man named George Jabet. In 1848, Jabet published a book called Nasology: or, Hints toward a Classification of Noses, which inaugurated the formal study of correlations between the structure of the nose and the character of its owner. Having already swallowed phrenology, the pseudoscience that took lumps on the skull for metrics of intelligence and moral fortitude, Victorian readers took Jabet’s premise onboard with relative ease. Whereas a person’s fleeting moods and passions showed in the expressive lips and eyes, Jabet observed, the immobile nose supposedly revealed more stable attributes, which characterized individuals and entire races. Irish, African, Semitic, and Native American noses all came under scrutiny, and none fared well. Prefiguring Pinocchio, Jabet even maintained that “the Mind forms the Nose, and not the Nose the Mind,” introducing an element of victim-blaming into a discourse that had otherwise, for all its faults, mostly declined to hold the so-called “inferior races” accountable for their own inferiority.

 

Twenty years after Nasology’s publication, Jabet could boast of citations by muckraking journalists and earnest physicians on both sides of the Atlantic. His damning portraits of the “lesser races,” in particular Irishmen and Jews, even inspired John Roe to develop his revolutionary surgical technique for reshaping racially coded “pug noses.” In a word, Nasology was a smashing success for an otherwise unknown author, and a noteworthy entry in the pseudoscientific canon of the day, which did so much to legitimize plantation slavery and colonial regimes around the world.  

 

There was only one problem. To this day, it has never been firmly established that Jabet, who published Nasology under the pseudonym Eden Warwick and filled its pages with comically earnest aesthetic and moral polemics, alternating hotly between extreme praise and damnation, and even mocking the phrenologists for failing to support their claims with evidence before showering readers with an endless stream of nasal diagrams, ever intended his readers to take his work seriously. On the contrary, he may have written the book as a satire of phrenology, not an addendum to it—a quixotic search for the secrets of the universe in that largest of lumps on the skull.


An illustration of several distinct nasal types | Image from Jabet's Nasology
An illustration of several distinct nasal types | Image from Jabet's Nasology


Unfortunately, if he did, the joke was lost on everyone, with the exception of a handful of scholars who’ve since attempted to argue—without any real evidence for or against—that Jabet should be read alongside Wilde, Swift, and Twain.

 

Regardless of the spirit in which it was written, Nasology did make an impact on the culture of its day, amplifying phenotypic stereotypes that were already in circulation. Whether Ella Cheever Thayer ever read Nasology remains uncertain. That she could’ve read the book, or at least felt its influence at a distance, much as she read the electrical signals sent from hundreds of miles away through the telegraph line, is historically indisputable.

 

Yet unlike the “inimitable Dickens” and the “inimitable Stern” (all literary authors, in Jabet’s parlance, are “inimitable”), Thayer does not seem concerned with classifying her characters’ noses or establishing correlations with the content of their character, so much as she does with recording their noses’ actions and tracking their localities. This suggests that Wired Love, though published in a moment when formalist prejudice reigned, in fact prioritizes function over form.

 

The nose’s main function, of course, is to smell. Since antiquity, smell has functioned as a sort of moral compass. In Medieval Europe, pleasant smells were thought to indicate the presence of the Lord, whereas unpleasant ones suggested Satan. By the Enlightenment, the nose had evolved from a moral compass into a moral vulnerability. Smell was thought to have an immediate impact on the body, and many feared that unpleasant odors might cause immediate physical illness or even death.

 

At first glance, these ideas have little in common with the 20th century’s Broken Windows Theory of Crime, but both schools of thought assume that one’s environment shapes one’s behaviors and determines one’s well-being. The major difference lies in which sense organ one must consult when assessing the environment’s quality. Ellman describes this sensory gestalt shift as the gradual “triumph of the eye over the nose.” While some scholars, such as Mark Jenner and David Howes, have been wary to posit a linear trajectory from olfactory to visual culture, noting its cryptic revival of the noble savage trope—the “olfactory” rather than the “ecological” Indian—many nonetheless agree that there has been some sort of large-scale cultural shift from scent toward vision, even if it has unfolded arbitrarily, in fits and starts, with neither model proving fundamentally superior, and with either potentially ascending at any time.

 

For Freud, this process was very real indeed, grounded in biology, rooted in deep time, and—of course—entangled with psychosexual repression. When primordial homo sapiens transitioned to bipedalism, he believed, they made a choice as pivotal as that which expelled us from Eden. Upright humans could peer over tall grass, an advantage when it came to predator evasion, and could perhaps even sign to each other over long distances, but this came at the cost of olfaction as the nose got farther from the ground, where scents were concentrated. At the same time, the new posture left the genitalia exposed. As one generation succeeded the next, natural selection favored those who were quickest to shelter and shield their reproductive organs, which had once been tucked away beneath the body, and gradually, this instinct for self-preservation developed into sexual shame.

 

Lending credence to Freud’s just-so story, Ellman observes a longstanding association of noses with shame, and Sue Taylor notes, in “‘A Shine on the Nose’: Sexual Metaphors in Surrealism,” a popular tendency among Western artists and scholars from Ovid to Bellmer to conflate noses with phalluses—two organs whose roles were transformed in the same evolutionary moment, and which have been forever after intertwined.

 

In this context, it’s tempting to read humans’ adoption of bipedalism as but the first in a series of steps that our species has taken to achieve physical elevation in order to transmit and receive electromagnetic signals over ever-greater distances—always at the cost of just a little more olfactory acuity. In The Telegraph Manual (1867), Tal P. Shaffner cites the Divine Telegraph, Agamemnon’s Telegraph, and a variety of military signaling systems employed by the Romans, West Africans, Native Americans, and American revolutionaries, then devotes several more chapters to semaphoric networks employed across Europe and Russia in the 18th century. The electric telegraph, heir to this legacy of signaling towers, is a medium even more abstract than vision, in which neither physical nor olfactory exchanges can occur—a technological revolution whose implications for scent and sexuality are every bit as significant as those of bipedalism.

 

Wired Love, like many Victorian telegraphic romances, capitalizes on this disembodiment—which was immensely appealing to Puritan readers—and posits the telegraph as the ideal catalyst for the ideal Christian romance. Flirtation is enabled without the threat of sexual misadventure. Minds and spirits are brought together unencumbered by bodies. Unwanted pregnancy cannot violate the lovers’ paradise, and neither can unwanted odors. 

 

It seems only fitting, then, that in such a narrative, noses should serve as antagonists, disrupting telegraphic communications and complicating romance. Not only do they carry phallic connotations, but they’re also the appendages most likely to be inserted into others’ private business—anathema to the mystery and unknowability that Thayer and her ilk romanticize.

 

These unsavory qualities converge in the nose of Miss Kling, Thayer’s continuously sniffling landlady. John Roe’s contemporary otolaryngologist, Wilhelm Fliess, who’s been credited with inspiring Freud’s fascination with noses, also graced the discourse of olfaction with his own insistence that nasal swelling and congestion result from pent-up sexual fluids. This would certainly explain Miss Kling’s situation, as her invasive curiosity is matched only by her inability to catch Mr. Fishblate’s eye. Elaborating on this association, Ellman waxes poetic:

 

Reddening, bulging, oozing, snuffling, the nose combines the most embarrassing traits of both male and female genitalia, forever needing to be wiped, blown, picked, and powdered in order to elude the shame of self-exposure.

 

That no other woman in Wired Love suffers similar congestion suggests that Miss Kling is not merely a hopeless romantic, but also potentially—according to Thayer’s Victorian logic—a frustrated nymphomaniac. Without ever getting the chance to transgress, she’s subtly coded as desperate, whorish, and perhaps even hermaphroditic. Her age further reinforces this impression, distancing her from the nubile feminine ideal. The disgust conjured up by her constant sneezing simultaneously masks and amplifies a deeper ambivalence toward female sexuality, particularly where it can’t be easily channeled into marriage and reproduction.

 

If Miss Kling’s nose is notable for its constant activity, then another character’s nasal appendage is indeed distinguished, as Ellman suggests, by its invisibility. The telegraph operator who impersonates Clem in order to flirt with Nattie is distinguished by his “hair that insisted on being red, notwithstanding the bear’s grease that covered it.” These traits code him as Irish, or possibly as a mix of Irish and Native American, but his nose is never mentioned—a conspicuous absence in an era when cartoons mocked Irish, African, Jewish, Italian, and Native American noses so viciously.

 

This omission may be read in a number of ways. It could signify that he is not and never will be a prospective sexual partner for Nattie. It could reflect the unknowability of his soul (for without a nose to judge, how could we ever gauge his character?). Or perhaps, harkening back to the older conception of the nose as moral compass, it could indicate his tastelessness and inability to differentiate appropriate and inappropriate behavior. Nattie, after all, discerns his uncouth nature as soon as she catches a whiff of his bear grease, though she was temporarily fooled when they were communicating by telegraph.

 

This suggests that the disembodied communication enabled by the telegraph may come with downsides that enlightened Victorian Christian romantics, for all their hard-won visual acuity, failed to foresee. True, the telegraph may empower young women and men to meet and flirt with one another without the risks associated with the body, but at the same time, it introduces new risks—which will be familiar to anyone who’s ever been the target of a honey pot, identity theft, or phishing scam. In addition to vulnerabilities, bodies also come with built-in threat-detection mechanisms, and crafty ne’er-do-wells are wont to take advantage of any mediated form of communication that puts those mechanisms out of commission. Thayer’s contemporaries may have believed that their understanding of the nose’s significance trumped all previous models, but in reality, the ancient, medieval, Victorian, and modern conceptions of the nose (as useful, compromising, immoral, and finally irrelevant) do not negate each other, but rather layer one atop the other, producing a conceptual palimpsest. Thayer herself seems to be at least vaguely aware of this.

 

In Chapter 1, Nattie muses on the impossibility of describing oneself “unless one’s nose is broken or one’s eyes are crossed,” deformities that would indeed be worthy of mention. But Nattie’s nose is not broken: on the contrary, it’s both shapely and fully functional. It warns her to steer clear of red-haired men who smell of bear grease, and it earns Clem’s affection and praise. “I adore you…” he cries, “and have since I first saw your nose! I—I beg pardon, but I fell in love with your nose!”

 

After 200 pages spent romanticizing distance and problematizing physicality, the narrative finally unites Clems and Nattie’s bodies with a kiss and a marriage proposal. The marriage plot is thus realized even as sexuality is excised, or at least rendered invisible (and odorless, for that matter, for the smells of their lovemaking do not suffuse the pages of the printed novel, nor do they radiate from one’s screen as one peruses Wired Love on Google Books). Wired Love cannot, as Richard Menke argues that it does in Telegraphic Realism, wholly abandon bodies, for they remain necessary to perpetuate the nation and the species. Rather, Clem must fall in love with Nattie twice—once, via telegraph, with her mind and spirit, and then again with her nose, an embodied yet virtuous appendage that distinguishes her with its comeliness and its capacity for discerning right from wrong, and through which their sexual attraction can be safely sublimated.

 

And yet, despite getting successfully co-opted in service of the marriage plot, the nose, even when not running, remains a slippery signifier, reminding us of all that the Puritans hoped to repress, and that the telegraph promised to replace. At best, its relationship with the telegraph is ambivalent. At worst, the two are incompatible. The telegraph functions as an agent of human progress, distancing its users, not only from the earth, but also from embodied, animalistic states, bringing them closer to the disembodied heavenly ideal where the temptations of the flesh are rendered obsolete. The nose, on the other hand, is an anchor that drags humans back toward a base state of quadrupedalism, olfaction, and unrestrained sexuality. Wired Love achieves an uneasy equilibrium between these two competing forces, but the noses that come and go throughout the novel, charged with all manner of energeies and associations, persist as uncomfortable reminders that the vision of disembodiment and transcendence promised by the telegraph can never fully transcend the “reddening, bulging, oozing, snuffling” trappings of reality.

 

 

NOTE: Anyone dissatisfied with the title of this article should bear in mind that it was very nearly “Sinus and Signifiers.” Also in the running was, “A Snifflin’ Nation and Its Discontents.” So, count your blessings.

 

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