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Night is falling in the city. Holiday shoppers bustle down the sidewalk, some pausing to gaze at a colorful billboard publicizing the delights of an upcoming exposition. A few crafty rats scamper along a tall wooden fence, stalked by a sinister ratcatcher of the Dickensian mold. Children frolic, fight, and tease one another in front of the fence, the familiar syncopated strains of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker overture underscoring their exuberant street play. This is not, however, the early 1800s Germany of the upper-class Stahlbaum family. It's 1892 Chicago. In the Joffrey Ballet's 2016 production of The Nutcracker, the story of Clara Stahlbaum's innocent Christmas Eve dalliances with an anthropomorphic nutcracker and their journey to the Land of Sweets becomes the story of Marie, the daughter of a Polish immigrant single mother, whose fantasyland is the future Chicago World's Fair. Marie's mother, we learn, is a hired artist working on the fair's sculptures. Marie, Fritz, and their mother inhabit a wooden shack in the heart of the construction site, surrounded by the skeletal structures that will become the White City's buildings. Drosselmeyer is now “The Great Impresario,” a character of vision and magnetism inspired by the fair's Director of Works Daniel H. Burnham, and Marie's working-class mother transforms in the second act into the embodiment of the fair's golden Statue of the Republic, a less saccharine substitute for the Sugar Plum Fairy. The mutual affection of Mother and The Great Impresario spans both acts, and though the ballet leaves unclear the outcome of their budding romance, in it young Marie sees the promise of her American dream: a contented nuclear family.

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It was impossible to realize that it was death that was approaching. The child felt no pain-only a tranquil, soft weakness, daily and almost insensibly increasing; and she was so beautiful, so loving, so trustful, so happy, that one could not resist the soothing influence of that air of innocence and peace which seemed to breathe around her. St. Clare in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) 2 [T]he Bacillus tuberculosis of Koch must be admitted as perhaps the most powerful member of that dangerous class of microzymes which, in the form of spores, rods, and dots, more than decimate the "lords of the world." Hugo Engel, "The Etiology of Tuberculosis" (1882) 3 The paradoxical construction of consumption within overlapping social, literary, and medical spheres (particularly as manifested in the nineteenth century) has been the subject of numerous works in contemporary scholarship, most notably in Susan Sontag's seminal text Illness as Metaphor (1977). As Sontag and other theorists and historians have convincingly argued, consumption was a seemingly kaleidoscopic phenomenon, a unique and shifting blend of fact and fiction within the collective cultural imaginations of several Western populaces (France, England, and the United States chief among them). 4 The writings of poets, novelists, social commentators, and even physicians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries demonstrate that consumption was at once constructed as the disease of passionate lovers, the rich, the young, the white, the brilliant and poetic, the penitent sinner, and the chaste and innocent. Consumption's conceptualized (and yet inseparable) bond with human sensibility and the self, as well as its mythologized capacity for bestowing painless demises upon its victims, made it an exceptionally popular

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