Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin De Siècle / Stephan Karschay Pages Cm

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© 2015 Stephan Karschay All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identifi ed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–1–137–45032–6 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Karschay, Stephan, 1980– Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle / Stephan Karschay Pages cm. — (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–1–137–45032–6 (hardback) 1. Gothic fi ction (Literary genre), English—History and criticism. 2. Literature and science—Histroy and criticism. 3. Degeneration in literature. 4. English fi ction—19th century—History and criticism. Title. PR830.T3K36 2015 823'0.872909—dc23 2014038791

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Contents

Acknowledgements viii

1 Introduction 1 2 Degeneration and the Victorian Sciences 30 3 Detecting the Degenerate: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan 85 4 Othering the Degenerate: Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle 124 5 Normalising the Degenerate: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan 168 6 Conclusion 209

Notes 219 Bibliography 274 Index 289

vii

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On 3 July 1896, the Home Secretary, Sir Matthew White Ridley, was for- warded a voluble letter, penned by one of the inmates of Her Majesty’s Prison in Reading. It contained a moving plea written to effect an early release:

The Petition of the above-named prisoner humbly sheweth that he does not desire to attempt to palliate in any way the terrible offences of which he was rightly found guilty, but to point out that such offences are forms of sexual madness and are recognised as such not merely by modern pathological science but by much modern legislation, notably in France, Austria, and Italy, where the laws affecting these misdemeanours have been repealed, on the ground that they are diseases to be cured by a physician, rather than crimes to be punished by a judge. In the works of eminent men of science such as Lombroso and Nordau, to take only two instances out of many, this is specially insisted on with reference to the intimate connection between madness and the literary and artistic temperament […]

The male petitioner, who had been convicted under the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 for ‘acts of gross indecency’ committed with other men, interpreted his past crimes as the symptoms of a sexual insanity – ‘the most horrible form of erotomania’ – which threatened ‘his very humanity itself’. Considering the letter’s abject tone and its overt admission of guilt, it is difficult to conceive that its author was none other than Oscar Wilde.1 The petition to the Home Secretary can be contrasted with a glib comment made by Wilde in the presence of the journalist Chris Healy, which seems more in character with his former bon-vivant self. Some months after his eventual release from Reading Gaol on 19 May 1897, Wilde – in a rather pale version of his celebrated paradoxes – quipped on the subject of Nordau: ‘I quite agree with Dr Nordau’s assertion that all men of genius are insane, but Dr Nordau forgets that all sane people are idiots.’2

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Wilde’s desperate petition and his later, somewhat flippant, remark can serve as valuable introduction points to a study of degeneration and normativity in ﬁ n-de-siècle Gothic fiction, not only because Wilde references two masters of degeneration theory, but also because both cases synthesise central (if seemingly contradictory) positions which informed that very theory in the nineteenth century. Wilde’s letter is interesting in this respect for several reasons: Firstly, it quotes the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso and the German-Jewish critic Max Nordau as figures of intellectual authority to vindicate his ‘deviant’ sexuality. Secondly, Wilde himself had been an object of study in Nordau’s weighty tome Entartung (1892), published in English translation as Degeneration in 1895, the year of Wilde’s public fall from grace.3 Thirdly, as Chapter 5 will show, Wilde’s own novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/1891) offers a complex fictional negotiation of several tenets of degeneration theory as well as a striking reconceptualisation of normality. In his feigned acceptance of Nordau’s view that, as an avant-garde artist, he must be suffering from a psychiatrically recognised pathological condition, Wilde trusted his fate to the Home Secretary’s acceptance of degeneration theory as a diagnostic tool for biological and social deviance. The petition was rejected, and this is hardly surprising, given the implications of Wilde’s staged self-diagnosis as a sufferer from degeneration. Degeneration theory posited that ‘degenerate’ individuals shared a deficient biological makeup, which not only set them apart from society’s ‘normal’ population, but threatened that very population with a potentially contagious disease. Writers on degeneration like Nordau and Lombroso (to which could be added the psychopathologist Henry Maudsley and many others) produced extensive studies on the subject, branding degenerates as a separate race and a potential hazard to society. The writings of these degenerationists betray a fierce taxonomical impulse: degenerate individuals are singled out as clearly marked and thus easily recognisable (at least by the medical expert), making them amenable to measures of control and segregation. With Wilde safely tucked away in a prisoner’s cell, most adherents of degeneration theory would hardly have considered an early release advisable. Wilde must have been aware of the meagre chances of success and the potentially counterproductive trajectory of his reasoning, yet, by the time of the letter’s compo- sition in June 1896, he was a man broken in body and mind by the terrors of solitary confinement and hard labour – a man never to regain his past artistic brilliance and social esteem. Even though Wilde’s later aperçu is diametrically opposed to his earlier desperate endorsement of Lombroso’s and Nordau’s theories and seems to be little more than a wilful pun, it can also be read as revealing a deeper truth about the conflicting nature of degeneration theory. Lombroso and Nordau understood the man of genius as one extreme on a continuum of intellectual degeneracy, with the other end being occupied by the figure of

Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 Introduction 3 the imbecile. According to them, society’s ‘normal’ population was neither ingenious nor idiotic and occupied an intermediate position of unspecified intellectual indifference. By claiming that all sane (that is, ‘normal’) people are idiots, Wilde playfully (if unconsciously) draws attention to what is the general argument of the present study: despite the positivistic orientation of nineteenth-century experts on degeneration – with their relentless accu- mulation of data, their insistence on empirical methods, and their strong taxonomical drive – degeneration theory was to a large degree characterised by arbitrary principles of exclusion and destabilised by a subtle mechanism of self-deconstruction. If such disparate phenomena as men of genius and the insane are lumped together as instances of degeneration (thus eliding the differences between them), and if ‘normality’ is defined only ex negativo by contrasting it with degeneracy, what constitutes the norm of socially acceptable behaviour becomes strangely vacuous. Wilde’s pun suggests that sanity (that is, ‘normality’) is in the eye of the beholder, and what it means to be ‘normal’ is a product of random taxonomical constructions performed by nineteenth-century degenerationists, who attempted to contain their objects of study (criminals, the mentally insane and the sexually perverse – to name but a few) through a process of Othering which set these groups apart from society’s supposedly normative self. ‘Degenerates’ were not only perceived as members of an alien ‘race’ but often as monstrous freaks of nature who belied humanity’s claim to evolutionary perfection. Critics have readily recognised the genre of the Gothic, with its physically and morally deformed monsters, as a particularly fertile site for fictional negotiations of degeneration theory. This book analyses the ﬁ n-de-siècle Gothic alongside non-fictional texts on degeneration from the scientific fields of evolutionary biology, criminology, psychopathology and sexology, and it identifies three strategies that are central to writings about degeneration: detection, Othering and normalisation. Due to the inherent evasiveness of degenerative medical conditions and the invisible pathways of their dissemination, degenerationist writings betray an almost obsessive desire to detect the tell-tale (yet frequently well-hidden) marks of degeneration and inscribe them into rigid taxonomies of deviance. In the process of this excessive taxonomical activity, supposedly degenerate individuals were stigmatised as social Others. Branded as diseased, deformed, deviant and dangerous, they were excluded from society’s normative field and relegated to a sprawling realm of transgression. However, as all of the following chapters will make evident, this process of Othering had the unintended effect of destabilising any previously held notion of normality, as the normative field of society shrank vis-á-vis an ever-growing sphere of degeneracy: degeneration became the condition of the ‘norm’, and deviance was effectively normalised. By identifying the distinct discursive strategies inherent in literary and non-fictional writings on the subject, this study also provides a framework for future research into a genealogy of degeneration

Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 4 Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle and its specific permutations in historical and national contexts exceeding the ones treated here. Degeneration has been a seminal object of critical investigation over the past thirty years, with a number of important monographs on the subject.4 While not intended as a revisionist account, this present study nonetheless aims to fill a noticeable critical lacuna. Despite the many indisputable mer- its of existing contributions, a central aspect implied by Bénédict Augustin Morel’s formative definition of degeneration as a pathological (that is, abnormal) deviation from an original (that is, normal/normative) type has not been analysed in any systematic manner.5 Degeneration always presupposes the existence of a norm from which a deviation has occurred, and how this norm is defined bears important ramifications for the nineteenth century’s understanding of normality. Thus, Morel’s definition raises several interrelated questions investigated in this study with regard to the Victorian sciences and the fi n-de-siècle Gothic: Who/What constitutes the normative standard from which a deviation has occurred? When is a variation of the norm pronounced enough to qualify as a pathological deviation, and which parameters are used to demarcate normality from abnormality? After all, if degeneracy and normality are considered as opposite and mutually exclusive categories, then at least one of these binary terms has to be elaborated and specified in order to give meaning to the oppositional pair. Furthermore, if they do not appear as mutually exclusive categories (and this is frequently implied by the writings of the degenerationists), but rather as graded values on a continuum of (ab)normality, what it means to be ‘normal’ becomes a question of considerable debate. This present book analyses a wide range of (pseudo)scientific and literary sources, and sketches how, at the fi n de siècle, degeneration was posited as the non-normative condition of a variety of Others, while simultaneously being perceived as socially ‘normal’ and, indeed, ubiquitous. By understanding nineteenth-century writings on degeneration as contributions to an overarching ideology of normalism that creates its normative standards through largely arbitrary mechanisms of exclusion and branding, this study also delineates the discursive beginning of modern notions of the ‘normal’. Looking at degeneration with this more general ideological formation in mind can, moreover, enrich our knowledge of fi n-de-siècle literature, particularly the Gothic. It has become a truism to note the conspicuous resurgence of the Gothic at the close of the nineteenth century, yet it is surprisingly difficult to account for this second ‘effulgence’ after the Gothic had seeped into the field of Victorian culture in a multiplicity of guises (in Newgate and sensation novels, ghost stories, melodrama, magic lantern shows, spirit photography, spiritualist séances, and so on).6 Gothic fiction has, of course, had a longstanding fascination with deviance and the transgression of norms, and it is, arguably, this potential to negotiate questions of ‘normality’ through the marked disruption of norms that makes the Gothic such

Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 Introduction 5 a popular and peculiarly modern mode of writing. This study, then, aims to sharpen critical awareness of how Victorian science and the fi n-de-siècle Gothic novel unwittingly participated in the formation of modern notions of normality through the relentless dissection of biological and social deviance. Through the narrative representation of monstrous forms of transgression, the fi n-de-siècle Gothic mirrors scientific debates about what it means to be normal ‘in a glass darkly’, as it were. Before moving on to the fi n-de-siècle Gothic in Chapters 3, 4 and 5, the second chapter traces the origins and the development of theories of degeneration in the Victorian sciences. This organisation should suggest something of the historical dimension of my subject, as the degeneration debate was first entertained in the scientific disciplines of evolutionary biology, criminology and psychopathology before being appropriated and negotiated in fiction towards the turn of the century. Furthermore, while also offering the necessary discursive context for my subsequent analyses, the results gained in Chapter 2 serve as critical focal points for the following readings of Gothic fiction. None of this, however, should suggest the priority of science writing over literature or vice versa. On the contrary, the (Gothic) fiction of the period shows a unique potential to engage in scientific debates about degeneration in creative ways that were simply una- vailable for (and possibly counterproductive to) non-literary engagements with the subject. Conversely, Victorian science established the terms for the Gothic’s re-negotiation of the degeneration debate at the end of the century, and the discursive strategies that can be deduced from scientific writings on degeneration can be fruitfully harnessed to provide original readings of the fi n-de-siècle Gothic. Each of the chapters on the Gothic pairs a recognised late-Victorian classic with a lesser-known specimen of the genre that deserves more scholarly attention. Furthermore, these couplings shall suggest something of the discursive pervasiveness of the degeneration debate at the fi n de siècle, with writers as ideologically and artistically dissimilar as Oscar Wilde and Marie Corelli (to choose but two cases) engaging with central paradoxes inherent in the concept of degeneration in diverse and, I hope, mutually illuminating ways. I use the remainder of this introduction to define, clarify and combine the central terms invoked by the title Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle. The first section gives an impression of the remarkable energy of the debate about ‘degeneration’ in the Victorian popular press and its inconsistent evaluation as either urban reality or urban myth before tracing the term’s tangled history and its first scientific use by the French psychiatrist Bénédict Augustin Morel, whose foundational definition informs my general approach. The second section develops the theoretical parameters that frame the following readings and clarify this study’s use of the terms ‘normativity’ and the ‘norm(al)’. It further relates degeneration theory’s inherent dialectic of norm and deviance to the distinction between

Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 6 Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle self and Other, which is so central to the definition of a culture’s collective identity. The final section will provide an answer to the question of why the Gothic so readily accommodates fictions of degeneration and it will do so by carving out some of its defining parameters. This final part also contains a sustained intervention in a recent critical argument about the cultural function of the Gothic, as that unresolved debate (triggered by Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall) has important bearings on my general historicist approach.

‘The plague of modernity’: defining degeneration

Arguments about the empirical status of degeneration as a social reality dominate the second half of the nineteenth century, with supporters and detractors exchanging their opinions in a deluge of periodical articles, public lectures and pamphlets. By the time of the ﬁ n de siècle, ‘degeneration’ had undoubtedly become the buzzword of popular as well as professional debate.7 A random sample of voices from the last third of the nineteenth century is indicative of degeneration’s status as ‘the particular plague of modernity’, to use Kelly Hurley’s words.8 In a lecture on physical education delivered at the Midland Institute, Birmingham, in 1872 (published in 1880 as ‘The Science of Health’), the Anglican priest, novelist and advocate of ‘Muscular Christianity’ Charles Kingsley warned of the indirect perils of war, that ‘most hideous physical curse which fallen man inflicts upon himself’, ‘[f]or instead of issuing in the survival of the fittest, it issues in the survival of the less fit: and therefore, if protracted, must deteriorate generations yet unborn’.9 Kingsley believed that the nation’s most vital men had been sent off to the bat- tlefields of Continental Europe in the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), to die for their country at exactly the moment when Britain’s urban centres witnessed an unprecedented rise in population as a medium-term consequence of the Industrial Revolution.10 With the cities populated by men too feeble to serve as conscripted soldiers (yet strong enough to propagate their own kind) and those war returnees whose constitutions had become ‘tainted and weakened’ by prolonged fighting, nothing less than the future of the British race seemed to be at stake.11 For Kingsley, at least, degeneration was not a threat looming in the distance, but a powerful fact of life, which did not only hold sway in a period of warfare, but during times of peace as well:

[T]ens of thousands […] lead sedentary and unwholesome lives, stoop- ing, asphyxiated, employing as small a fraction of their bodies as of their minds. […] And that such a life must tell upon their offspring, and if their offspring grow up under similar circumstances, upon their offspring’s offspring, till a whole population may become permanently degraded, who does not know?12

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However, Kingsley thought of men as the ‘arbiters of their own destinies’ and as therefore responsible for a way of life that would lead either upwards or downwards.13 Through various reformatory measures – he suggested the provision of healthier living conditions, improved personal hygiene, pure air and water, unadulterated foods, better clothing and expanded education – a more optimistic future could be heralded.14 Kingsley’s lecture received mixed responses with an anonymous reviewer (in the radical Examiner of 12 October 1872) pronouncing it ‘a coup manque’ [sic] declaimed ‘in very faultless Kingsleyese’, yet ‘based upon a misconcep- tion’.15 Three years later, the editor of Chambers’s Journal saw the general degeneration of humanity as a subject ‘well worth discussing’ and provided a liberal digest of a critical article published earlier in the Spectator.16 The verdict about the dangers of degeneration for mankind was unequivocal: ‘There never was a delusion with less evidence for it […]. There is not the slightest evidence anywhere that man was ever bigger, stronger, swifter, or more enduring under the same conditions of food and climate than he is now.’17 Despite such optimistic voices, however, the argument continued to be fought with increasing vigour on the part of the Jeremiahs during the 1880s and 1890s. On 27 January 1885, the Scottish physician and pioneer of First Aid James Cantlie read a paper in front of a public audience at the Parkes Museum of Hygiene on ‘Degeneration Among Londoners’. Cantlie speculated about an ‘urbomorus’, a ‘city disease’,18 which could produce a degenerate lower class of outcasts, ‘unfit to maintain themselves’.19 His prime example were the Spitalfield weavers, whom he considered especially ill-developed: ‘In them we find a stunted, puny race, who become prematurely old, whose grave and sorrowful countenances betray a body and mind at variance with natural habiliments.’20 According to Cantlie, urban centres lacked the ‘health- giving spark’ of ozone,21 ‘to which unsearchable vital powers are ascribed’22 so that the only way to remedy the situation was for urban dwellers to undertake beneficial exercise in the unpolluted countryside.23 Similarly, Reginald Brabazon – Earl of Meath and political philanthropist – indefati- gably campaigned for social reforms to counteract the baneful influence of urban degeneration throughout the 1880s: ‘For some years, both in the press and on the platform, I have been endeavouring to draw public attention to the degeneration which to my mind is taking place in the physique of our town populations.’24 Even though Brabazon conceded a difficulty in proving his point by means of statistical records, he was convinced of degeneration’s reality, as he stated in the May 1887 edition of the Nineteenth Century:

[I]t is only necessary for an intelligent man or woman to walk through the slums of our great towns in order to assure himself or herself, beyond all question or doubt, that the physical condition of the people in these crowded districts is, to say the least, unsatisfactory, and one of which no Englishman can well be proud.25

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He demanded far-reaching reformatory measures to thwart ‘an evil which would ultimately lead to a degeneration of the race and to national efface- ment’:26 improved housing of the poor, the construction of recreational spaces like parks and playgrounds, the feeding of children in national schools, the enforcement of stricter sanitary laws, and compulsory gymnas- tics as well as callisthenics lessons for school children.27 In 1888, the Lancet printed a letter to its editor by a certain G. W. Hambleton, which appeared under the declamatory heading ‘Are We Degenerating Physically?’. For the Lancet’s reader, at least, there could only be one rejoinder to the query:

To answer this question of physical degeneration in the negative or to have any doubt upon the matter is to ignore the facts with which we have to deal. What are these facts? The progress of civilisation has, with the exception of the brain, been obtained at the expense of the body. […] And […] in addition we note the serious import of the double process that is now taking place[,] of the rapid concentration of our population in towns and the invasion of the country districts by the conditions of civilisation, there can be no doubt of the physical degeneration.28

Nearly a decade later, Walter Shaw Sparrow similarly asked in the Idler in December 1897, ‘Has Our Race Degenerated?’ His answer bears strong resemblances to that given by the Lancet’s reader:

I firmly believe that our race, as a whole, has degenerated; and unless you can revolutionise our present type of society […] the degeneration will increase among the working-classes. If anyone doubt the truth of this, let him visit any one of our industrial centres, and ask himself whether the old stamina of our race can be passed on to the next generation by the young men and women to be seen there. He will say with me, I am sure, that all those young women and men need the slow tonic of that vigorous life in the country, which in the course of three generations turns Colonial Europeans into men like Porthos.29

The question of ‘[w]hether the British race is improving or degenerating’ was asked time and again throughout the second half of the nineteenth century:30 ‘Are We Degenerating Physically?’,31 ‘Is Our Race Degenerating?’,32 ‘Are We Degenerating?’,33 ‘Has Our Race Degenerated?’34 – a seemingly endless volley of voices entertained the subject of a national degeneracy crisis. This is not to say that degeneration was universally perceived as a threat to the future of mankind though. There certainly were commentators who agreed with Hugh Percy Dunn’s verdict in the Nineteenth Century that ‘no racial deterioration is in progress’,35 and the Victorian weekly Fun made satirical sport of James Cantlie’s warnings.36 However, as the given examples

Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 Introduction 9 illustrate, the spectre of degeneration at least loomed large enough to merit one editorial after another, and the alarmists seem to have outnumbered the gainsayers in the public controversy.37 The vigorous debate about the alleged physical degeneration of Britain’s urban population at the ﬁ n de siècle had a long history in fictional and journalistic representations of lower-class poverty, vice and crime. Henry Mayhew’s newspaper articles collected as London Labour and the London Poor (1851) initiated a series of explorations into the poor districts of the British metropolis, thus drawing attention away from working-class life in the industrial centres of the north, so vividly chroni- cled in Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England (Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England, 1844). With this geographical shift came a change of focus from the respectable working population which the middle-class public would naturally encounter on a day-to-day basis (as shop assistants, servants, cabbies, and so on) to the metropolitan ‘residuum’, an ever-increasing mass of town-dwellers, at best employed in casual labour and suspected of leading a dissolute – if not downright criminal – lifestyle.38 This hitherto unknown segment of London’s populace inhabited districts of the city which – to the middle-class readers of novels, newspapers and periodicals – were largely terrae incognitae, spaces as alien and dangerous as the distant reaches of the Empire, ‘outcast’ in both geographical as well as imaginative terms.39 Mayhew ushered in a tradition of representing London as a bifurcated city, divided into East and West,40 a contrast with which the middle-class public became more and more familiar as the century drew to a close, through sensational journalistic exposés (notably those of William T. Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette), philanthropic pamphlets, and the social novels of the 1880s and 1890s, which revealed the squalor and destitution of the urban poor.41 The non-fictional accounts of urban explorers – such as James Greenwood’s Low Life Deeps (1876) and The Wilds of London (1879), Andrew Mearns’s The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Enquiry into the Conditions of the Abject Poor (1883), George R. Sims’s How the Poor Live (1883), Arnold White’s The Problems of a Great City (1886), Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People of London (1889), William Booth’s In Darkest England, and the Way Out (1890) and A. Osborne Jay’s Life in Darkest London (1891) – and the narratives of realist novelists – such as Walter Besant’s All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882) and Children of Gibeon (1886), George Gissing’s The Nether World (1889), Margaret Harkness’s In Darkest London (1891), Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (1896) and Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1903) – shone a light on the murky underside of the imperial metropolis, where the results of the long recession of the 1870s and 1880s were felt most keenly. As Judith R. Walkowitz shows, in the late-Victorian imagination, the East End came to hold a special place as ‘a symbol of the social unrest born of urban degeneracy’, because even if writers focused on other underprivileged parts of London (Gissing’s The Nether World details the conditions of slum

Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 10 Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle life in Clerkenwell, Mearns’s Bitter Cry focuses on South London and Sims’s How the Poor Live investigates a string of locations), images of the violent disintegration of family life, biological degeneration and abject misery were quickly superimposed upon the East End.42 Conversely, however, those texts which were not set in London’s East End (and Charles Booth’s com- prehensive multi-volume study Life and Labour of the People of London in particular)43 drew attention to the fact that degeneration, poverty and crime were by no means confined to Whitechapel, Stepney, Bethnal Green and Shoreditch, but disturbed middle-class complacency elsewhere as well. The popular language of degeneration which was used to describe London’s outcast population drew on a lexicon of biological deterioration and anthropological Otherness which, until the 1880s, had been the stock-in-trade of evolutionary theorists, criminologists, psychopathologists and sexologists. City life – particularly in London – was frequently blamed for both promoting and reproducing degeneracy.44 Thus remarked Charles Booth’s assistant Hubert Llewellyn Smith:

It is the result of the conditions of life in great towns and especially in this the greatest town of all, that muscular strength and energy get gradu- ally used up; the second generation of Londoner [sic] is of lower physique and has less power of persistent work than the first, and the third generation (where it exists) is lower than the second.45

However, the supporters of degeneration theory were not content to restrict the city’s baneful influence to the members of the underpriviledged ‘residuum’ as Booth and his co-workers had done. As one amongst many, Max Nordau ascribed a corruptive influence to the metropolitan atmosphere:

The inhabitant of a large town, even the richest, who is surrounded by the greatest luxury, is continually exposed to unfavourable influences which diminish his vital powers far more than what is inevitable. He breathes an atmosphere charged with organic detritus; he eats stale, contaminated, adulterated food; he feels himself in a state of constant nervous excitement, and one can compare him without exaggeration to the inhabitant of a marshy district.46

In Nordau’s view, modern city life caused organic damages, ‘a wearing of tissue’,47 which would lead to nervous exhaustion.48 In the city, only the most energetic could keep pace with ‘the stormy stride of modern life’, Nordau believed, ‘but the less vigorous soon fell out right and left, and fill to-day the ditches on the road to progress’.49 Even Britain’s rural population was not held to be immune against the blight of urban degeneration. In the last decades of the century, London was more and more perceived as a site of vampiric drainage, a space which gobbled up the

Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 Introduction 11 country’s life force by drawing ever larger numbers of able-bodied work- men into its degenerative environment.50 Not confined to any isolatable district in the city and with the potential to spread uncontrollably, urban degeneration seemed to be everywhere and nowhere – a force perceived as both pervasive and elusive, with commentators squabbling over its empirical status. Even those scientists and journalists who believed in degeneration as an urban reality could never agree on a single, all-encompassing definition of the concept’s reach and its attendant mechanisms of contagion and dissemination. Despite (or because of) its virtual omnipresence, degeneration seemed to resist all attempts at theoretical explanation. J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman in fact venture to claim that ‘[i]t could certainly be said to be a word that nobody in the nineteenth century rightly understood’.51 The inherent fuzziness of the term is not the slightest challenge modern critics of degeneration theory have to face. The Victorians themselves found it virtually impossible to separate degeneration’s physical denotation (as a pathological process) from its moral connotations (of a spiritual fallenness)52 so that the formulation of consistent and effective remedies to save the health of the nation became an almost impossible mission. Thus at least two opposing views of degeneration’s prominence coexisted in the period: one which saw it as ‘manageable’ (through identification, stigmatisation, and segregation of the degenerate) and another which considered it a ‘chronic’ affliction of the entire social body.53 This, of course, implies that degeneration theory could provide a continuum between biological and social thought, and that all diseases – both collective and individual – could be explained with recourse to it.54 In other words, the biological model of degeneration provided a means to theorise patterns of social decay, as Stephen Arata notes.55 To add to the confusion, the origins of degeneration were invariably contested, with congenital and environmental explanations struggling for pre-eminence, sometimes (as in the case of Lombrosian criminology) within the writings of individual authorities. Degeneration was thus a highly overdetermined concept – irreducible to a single cause.56 Last but not least, even the effects of degeneration remained elusive as ‘[s]ymptoms became increasingly confused with causes’.57 As this cursory sketch of degeneration’s conceptual problems shows, degeneracy was one of the nineteenth century’s most indefinite notions, characterised by a ‘tapestry of ambivalences’, in Chamberlin’s and Gilman’s phrase.58 Stephen Arata sees in this lack of theoretical and methodological coherence a possible reason for the impres- sive proliferation of writings on the subject,59 and this may indeed have been the prime intellectual challenge for the Victorians’ ‘fiercely categorical instinct’.60 The conceptual confusion surrounding degeneration in fact pre- dates its scientific elaboration during the nineteenth century, as a glance at the word’s origins proves.

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The noun ‘degeneration’ has at least been current since the seventeenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary traces its earliest appearance to the English clergyman Edward Topsall’s The History of Four-footed Beasts of 1607 and provides a textual sample that indicates the term’s original meaning of spiritual fallenness: ‘That so he might learn the difference betwixt his generation, and his degeneration, and consider how great a loss unto him was his fall in Paradise.’61 Interestingly, the word’s biological denotation was not a direct product of the sciences’ investment in the Victorian age, but can be found in the eighteenth century with regard to the field of botany in Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopedia, or An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences of 1728: ‘Others hold, that degeneration only obtains in vegetables; and define it the change of a plant of one kind, into that of another viler kind.’62 Thus, by the time of its first scientific use in French psychopathology in the nineteenth century, degeneration already featured an inherent ambiguity between a biological process of physical disintegration and an ethical evaluation as spiritual deterioration.63 The true founding moment of degeneration theory came with the publication of Bénédict Augustin Morel’s Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intel- lectuelles et morales de l’espèce humaine (1857), which was quickly recognised as one of the most influential contributions to the field of psychiatry in the nineteenth century,64 and some of the contradictory elements of the concept can be traced to Morel’s work. Yet in the face of the conceptual tangle surrounding the notion of degeneracy at the ﬁ n de siècle, at least Morel’s primary definition of the term was remarkably systematic: ‘[T]he clearest idea we can form of the human race’s degeneration is its representation as a pathological deviation from an original type.’65 Such pathological deviations could be induced by a multitude of factors, as a brief glance at the Traité’s table of contents suggests: different toxins (primarily alcohol, but also hash- ish, opium, tobacco and mineral poisons such as phosphor, arsenic and mercury), famine, social milieu and unhealthy working conditions could all contribute to an individual’s degeneration.66 However, the ultimate precondition for humanity’s potential to degenerate was located by Morel in mankind’s religious rather than its natural history. The devout believer Morel saw his primordial original type represented by the Edenic couple,67 whose fall from grace had made mankind particularly vulnerable to the detrimental effects of degeneration.68 For Morel, the fall of man was the great event (‘le grand événement de sa chute originelle’)69 which facilitated all subsequent degenerative developments. Thus, from its very inception, degeneration theory combined a biological meaning with a moral-spiritual one, a conflation that later degenerationists retained in their interpretation of deviant behaviour as the product of both biological regression and moral deficiency. Morel conceptualised degeneration as a highly complex process, which involved a cyclical interaction of various factors and agents. Once a

Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 Introduction 13 degenerative disease had been triggered by a detrimental influence in the individual’s environment (both physical and moral), it became internalised in the body as a functional damage to the patient’s nervous system, which would in turn find expression in forms of aberrant behaviour.70 Morel believed this diseased condition to be transmissible through the mysterious mechanisms of heredity in an ever-aggravating cycle of progressive degeneration:71 ‘This deviation […] contains […] transmissible elements of such a nature, that those who carry the deviant germ become more and more inca- pable of fulfilling their function within humanity, and that the intellectual development, which is already restricted in themselves, is further menaced in that of their descendants.’72 Moreover, with the hereditary transmission of degeneration through the family came the capacity for a bewildering array of pathological conditions73 so that descendants could inherit a pre- disposition to develop almost any number of diseases.74 And even though Morel believed sterility to be the endpoint of degeneration,75 this terminal stage would only be reached after the condition had relentlessly travelled through the generations.76 The invisible hereditary transmission of degenerative conditions and their potential for multiple transformations across generations made the diagnostic detection of degeneration a particularly vexing matter. This problematic of an accurate identification was to haunt many degenerationists after Morel. If the eighteenth-century sciences of phrenology and physiognomy had been able to rely on the fundamental visibility of human character, degeneration theory – despite its indebtedness to these older systems of thought – emphasised the potentially invisible nature of degenerative conditions and the ambiguity of bodily signs, as Stephen Arata asserts:77 ‘The body was a text inscribed with degeneracy’s runes, a text which, in its separate parts or as a whole, might be deceptive, overdetermined, or even illegible, a text that would give up its truths only under the pressure of a professional scrutiny.’78 Even though Morel conceded that a degenerative condition would normally be perceptible to the trained scientific eye, he made explicit allowance for degeneration’s more elusive characteristics:

Degenerative conditions reveal themselves not only through typical exterior characteristics, which are fairly easy to grasp – such as a small or badly conformed head, a predominantly morbid temperament, special deformities, structural anomalies of the organs, the impossibility to reproduce – but also through the strangest aberrations in the exercise of the intellectual faculties and the moral sentiments.79

This potential to evade the scrutiny of any but the most conscientious observer was arguably one reason for the attempts of post-Darwinian writers on the subject to contain degeneration within a rigid taxonomical system of classification and exclusion.

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In view of the above, the use of the term ‘degeneration theory’ with regard to the body of knowledge produced in the nineteenth-century sciences makes a disclaimer necessary. In the Victorian age, degeneration ‘theory’ was never a scientific theory proper. Despite the many scientific contributions to the subject from the fields of evolutionary biology, criminology, psychopathology and sexology – scientists could neither rely on a coherent body of work, nor did they produce an empirically founded system of knowledge (even when they professed the contrary). Therefore, whenever I speak of degeneration ‘theory’, readers are advised to virtually add their own inverted commas. One of the reasons for degeneration’s resistance to scientific theorisation, in a pre-Mendelian age, were the invisible mechanisms of heredity believed to determine its workings, as William Greenslade notes: ‘If all that was irrational, injurious and disturbing was encoded in the determinism of heredity, it meant that the irrational was preserved as mystery, whose secrets only the high-priests of science could understand.’80 Or, at least, could purport to understand, one might add. The word ‘degeneration’ is thus best apprehended (in both senses of the word), with Daniel Pick, as ‘a shifting term[,] produced, inflected, refined, and re-constituted in the movement between human sciences, fictional narratives and socio-political commentaries’.81 Implicit in Pick’s description of the term as constantly in motion is the understanding of degeneration as a ‘discourse’ (from the Latin discurrere: ‘to run to and fro’).82 This book alternately uses the words ‘degeneration theory’, ‘degeneration discourse’ and ‘degenerationism’ to denote the historically specific body of knowledge about degeneration circulating at the Victorian ﬁ n de siècle. Sara Mills notes how the word ‘discourse’ eludes attempts at a rigorous definition due to its complex history and the varying ways in which it has been employed by critical theorists.83 The French philosopher Michel Foucault – whose ideas about discourse were uniquely influential – is exem- plary in this respect, as he put the term to different uses during the course of his long career and even juggled with various theoretical conceptions of discourse within individual works. Thus, in The Archaeology of Knowledge (L’archéologie du savoir, 1969), he dwells on ‘the equivocal meaning of the term discourse’ and acknowledges that he ‘used’ as well as ‘abused’ it:

[I]n the most general, and vaguest way, it denoted a group of verbal per- formances; and by discourse, then, I meant that which was produced […] by the groups of signs. But I also meant a group of acts of formulation, a series of sentences or propositions. Lastly – and it is this meaning that was finally used […] – discourse is constituted by a group of sequences of signs, in so far as they are statements, that is, in so far as they can be assigned particular modalities of existence.84

It is Foucault’s third definition which informs this study’s understanding of the term ‘discourse’, since it implies a certain systematicity of ideas, concepts

Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 Introduction 15 and opinions about a given subject in a particular historical context85 – Foucault’s ‘modalities of existence’.86 Foucault explicitly conceptualised such a series of discursive statements as governed by a ‘law’ that deter- mines a ‘discursive formation’ through its historically contingent rules and regulations:87

Whenever one can describe, between a number of statements […] a system of dispersion, whenever, between objects, types of statement, concepts, or thematic choices, one can define a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformations), we will say, for the sake of convenience, that we are dealing with a discursive formation […].88

A historicist analysis of discourse can allow the critic to lay bare the intricate relationship between power and the production of knowledge, which is so peculiar to Foucault’s understanding of discourse.89 As William Greenslade notes, ‘[i]n Foucault’s terms, degeneration is discursively activated to produce, for example, typologies of “inclusion” and “exclusion”’.90 The construction of elaborate taxonomies of deviance by powerful figures of intellectual authority from the fields of criminology, psychopathology and sexology is indeed one of the central features of degeneration discourse. Chapter 2 will show how degenerationists like Cesare Lombroso, Henry Maudsley and Richard von Krafft-Ebing obsessively focused on the ‘pathological’ and ‘abnormal’ and alternatively refrained from discussions of the ‘healthy’ and ‘normal’ – categories which were, more often than not, established ex negativo. Nonetheless, it is important to emphasise that this focus on everything ‘abnormal’ within degeneration discourse is not exclusively ‘repressive’ in nature, as the persistent branding of ‘degenerates’ as different from the ordinary run of men ultimately resulted in the production of a new conception of normality.

Degeneration’s Others: normativity and the norm(al)

According to Jürgen Link, what we today deem ‘normal’ is a cultural category that has been discursively produced since the mid-eighteenth century.91 The decisive moment in its conceptual evolution is marked by the emergence of statistical procedures in the nineteenth century, which helped to mathematically settle what was to be considered ‘normal’ (that is, ‘average’ and ‘usual’) or ‘abnormal’ (that is, ‘exceptional’ and ‘unusual’).92 Ideally, this average can be visualised by means of a Gaussian bell curve on which the statistical majority of a population (the ‘norm’) is situated squarely in the broad middle range:93 ‘The trend of the “normal” is the more or less extensive normal range of mass objects or mass behaviours, which stretches around different averages between two polar boundaries of normality.’94

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It is important to note, however, that this ‘normal range’ is not necessar- ily congruent with the ‘normative range’ of socially and legally acceptable behaviour. On the contrary, the concepts of normality (concerning the ‘norm’) and normativity (concerning norms) are essentially disparate phenomena.95 Norms are explicit or implicit rules and regulations that prescribe specific forms of socially acceptable behaviour, while being reinforced by authorities through the threat of predefined sanctions. Norms are thus pre- existent to social action.96 Not so the ‘norm(al)’:

Normality is a historically specific achievement of modern occidental societies, which has never before existed and, to this day, does not exist in various societies, or is still only in its rudimentary stages. In fact, normality presupposes […] mass data and statistical dispositives as its constituent sine qua non, and it is defined through averages and mean values. Normality is, then, essentially and by its very constitution, post- existent (rather than pre-existent) to action. Whether an action will be ‘normative’ (that is, whether it will conform to a norm) is theoretically known in advance; whether the action was ‘normal’ can only be decided in retrospect, as it takes up its statistical position amongst a number of comparable actions.97

Frequently, ‘normality’ and ‘normativity’ are wound up in a tense and intricate relationship, as the statistical procedure that situates the ‘average’ population within a ‘normal field’ only produces a graded scale without qualitative discontinuities.98 This is the stage when ‘normativity’ comes into play. If it cannot be decided at what point ‘normality’ tips over into ‘abnormality’ (the transitions on the bell curve are, after all, continuous), then societies react with the establishment of clear-cut, qualitative (‘normative’) boundaries, which secure the grouping of individuals as either ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’:

The variable positioning of the normalistic boundaries is an essential fac- tor in the dynamics of normalism. This fundamentally new type of social boundaries separates the realm of normality from two ‘extreme zones’ of abnormality (which are usually imagined as symmetrical, either vertical or horizontal). Through the positioning of the normalistic boundaries, normalism governs social and cultural inclusion and exclusion respec- tively […].99

Following the work of Erving Goffman, Jürgen Link calls such discursive borderlines ‘stigma boundaries’ to emphasise their functions of exclusion and branding:100 ‘With this line, the […] continuous normal field is firmly and (if possible) indelibly marked out in a semiotic and semantic (especially symbolic) fashion.’101 Calling such boundaries ‘stigmatic’ seems particularly

Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 Introduction 17 appropriate with regard to degeneration, as their installation presupposes a process of detection, which tries to make visible the physical or behavioural markers of deviance. In the late-Victorian period, the supposed visibility of deviance thus becomes the criterion by which the ‘normal field’ of a society’s population is transformed into a ‘normative field’, with degeneration reigning beyond its bounds. The rigid and repressive definition of a normative social field by means of stigmatic boundaries is a characteristic of ‘proto-normalism’, the discursive strategy Link sees as dominant throughout the nineteenth century. An alternative mechanism, which Link calls ‘flexible normalism’, did not become relevant until the second half of the twentieth century. The dominant feature of the former is the compression of the normative field, that of the latter its expansion.102 An example may help to work out the differences between the two strategies: Nineteenth-century legislation re-criminalised same-sex relationships, branding them as pathological and ‘abnormal’ symptoms of degeneration.103 By contrast, the twentieth century came to acknowledge homosexuality as a common phenomenon and, consequently decriminalised same-sex relationships, thus acknowledging them as healthy and normal. Proto-normalism repressively excluded homosexuals from the normative field of society. Flexible normalism expanded the normative field to re-include homosexuals, recognising that they constituted a large and, by no means, ‘abnormal’ segment of society. Degeneration theorists participated in this proto-normalist project, and an analysis that focuses on the normative standard from which degeneration is claimed to have occurred can reveal the inherent mechanisms of exclusion and branding Link sees as characteristic of normalist discourse in general. The discursive establishment of stigma boundaries is a largely arbitrary endeavour, repressively forcing ‘normality’ on individuals, who would be either included in or excluded from society’s ‘normative’ field. So technically (and this will be confirmed by my subsequent readings), it is imaginable that a rather large part of society’s statistically ‘average’ population finds itself outside of the ‘normative field’, because it may not (be able to) conform to such strict ‘normative’ standards. An analysis of degeneration theory can thus reveal to what extent the notion of a stable norm has in fact become undermined at the ﬁ n de siècle. Degeneration, then, is as much concerned with normativity and the ‘norm’ as it is with pathological deviation – even if this concern is frequently silenced in the writings of the degenerationists. Jonathan Dollimore calls this inherent paradox of degeneration theory the ‘perverse dynamic’:

[T]o deviate from something presupposes an antecedent point of congruence with it […]. Typically this means that perverse deviation discloses a split, a contradiction, a difference within or about (in proximity to) the normal which the latter must disavow in order to remain itself; this is one

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reason why perversion is regarded as dangerous. However, this original proximity (or identity) of the perverse with the normal also enables the latter to displace its own contradictions onto the former; proximity is a condition of displacement which in turn marks the same or the similar as radically other.104

This radical Othering of what could – under a different social, cultural and historical regime – be considered as a constituent part of the ‘norm’ is readily apparent in nineteenth-century writings on degeneration, which attached the stamp of degeneration to a multitude of different groups perceived as dangerous.105 Criminals, the insane, prostitutes, sexual perverts, men of genius, hooligans, anarchists, colonised races, the physically disabled, homosexuals, New Women, the urban poor as well as effete aristocrats – they could all be branded as exhibiting the symptoms of degeneration, that ‘ultimate signifier of pathology’, to use Daniel Pick’s phrase.106 Stigmatised as ‘Other than normal’ by degeneration theorists, ‘[s]ocial groups and deviant types are tactically dispatched to a “safe” zone of abnormality; this ren- ders them innocuous and deprived of the power to challenge the dominant order’.107 In this respect, nineteenth-century writers on degeneration were engaged in a historically specific version of what is arguably the bedrock of all cultural activity – the definition of a coherent and stable cultural identity. The Russian critic Yuri M. Lotman postulates that – in an attempt to con- fine an excess of diversity – cultures respond through an act of self-description that prevents them from threatening disintegration.108 For Lotman this is ‘the stage when grammars are written, customs and laws codified’ – a stage which lays the foundations for the evolution of a stable (normative) identity.109 The result of this self-describing process is an aspect of overall unity, based largely on the structuring principle of the boundary, which constitutes for Lotman ‘[o]ne of the primary mechanisms of semiotic individuation’:

Every culture begins by dividing the world into ‘its own’ internal space and ‘their’ external space. How this binary division is interpreted depends on the typology of the culture. But the actual division is one of the human cultural universals. The boundary may separate the living from the dead, settled peoples from nomadic ones, the town from the plains; it may be a state frontier, or a social, national, confessional, or any other kind of frontier.110

Lotman interprets the boundary as ‘the outer limit of a first-person form’, in other words, the delimiting marker of an individual or collective identity. By means of inclusions and exclusions, the boundary serves the primary function of determining the self’s own (ideological, psychological and cultural) space against some kind of Other, in terms of, for example, race, class, gender or religious belief. It allows the member of a cultural community to say ‘[t]his space is “ours”, “my own”, it is “cultured”, “safe”, “harmoniously

Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 Introduction 19 organized”, and so on. By contrast “their space” is “other”, “hostile”, “dangerous”, “chaotic”.’111 A culture thus constructs it(s)self as ‘normal’, as the ‘normative’ marker of deviance. Conversely, the Other appears as ‘abnormal’, as deviating from the normative self. The quantitative extent of this deviation will inevitably depend on its quality, that is, on whether the self values one identity-defining characteristic more highly than another: the Other appears as most alien when it deviates from what the self considers indispensable identity,112 when its Otherness touches the core of the self’s imagined identity.113 In an article on the literary genre of the romance – later incorporated into his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981) – Fredric Jameson makes some pertinent remarks on how figures of Otherness are frequently represented as evil. According to Jameson, the gradual dis- appearance of national, racial and social differences in the modern world has led to a virtual congruence of the concept of evil and the category of Otherness: ‘[E]vil characterizes whatever is radically different from me, whatever by virtue of precisely that difference seems to constitute a very real and urgent threat to my existence.’114 This threat may find its expression in cultural images of, for example, a marauding underclass, a dissolute aristocracy, political anarchists, man-eating femmes fatales, foreign invaders or supernatural monsters – in fact in the whole roster of degeneration’s and Gothic fiction’s multiple referents. Whatever the dominant culture experi- ences as menacing and disruptive will be branded as consummately ‘Other’ and consequently ‘evil’, in order to legitimate either its regulatory contain- ment or its eventual expulsion. However, Jameson underscores the significance of the logical sequence behind such reasoning: ‘The point […] is not that in such figures the Other is feared because he is evil; rather, he is evil because he is Other, alien, different, strange, unclean, and unfamiliar.’115 However, as Dollimore’s conception of the ‘perverse dynamic’ suggests, such complete Otherness is never ontologically pre-existent to a culture’s self; it is rather constructed by the self in an attempt to circumscribe and define its own cultural identity. Lotman considers this feature of identity construction the requisite consequence of a culture’s semiotic makeup:

Since […] there can be no ‘us’ if there is no ‘them’, culture creates not only its own type of internal organization but also its own type of external ‘disorganization’. In this sense we can say that the ‘barbarian’ is cre- ated by civilization and needs it as much as it needs him. […] No matter whether the given culture sees the ‘barbarian’ as saviour or enemy, as a healthy moral influence or a perverted cannibal, it is dealing with a construct made in its own inverted image. It is entirely to be expected, for instance, that the rational positivistic society of nineteenth-century Europe should create images of the ‘pre-logical savage’, or of the irrational subconscious as anti-spheres lying beyond the rational space of culture.116

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In the writings of the degenerationists, this ‘rational space of culture’, is silently posited as the normative social realm from which all manner of deviants must be excluded. Yet it is a space ever only staked out ex negativo through endless references to the aberrant, a tactic which appears most tangible in the profusion of the degenerationists’ scientific taxonomies. Kelly Hurley points out how this ‘accelerated taxonomical activity’ results in its own paradox: ‘[T]he sum effect of this drive towards organization is disorder: a proliferation of competing paradigms, a multiplication of mental and sexual pathologies behind which the “normal subject” is occluded.’117 In an important way, this occlusion of the normal is the central subject of the present study: the explosive multiplication of pathologies in the writings of the degenerationists occasioned a compression of society’s normative field so that degeneration appeared as a non-normative, yet ubiquitous, phenomenon. Or to put it in even more formulaic terms: through the definition of degeneration as ‘a pathological deviation from the norm’, deviance effectively became normalised.

Transgressing time and space: degeneration and the Gothic

Roger Luckhurst notes how ‘[t]he enduring images of the late-Victorian Gothic are saturated with dramatizations of the process of degeneration’118 and registers how Gothic fiction has become ‘the primary locus’119 for critical investigations of degeneration at the ﬁ n de siècle, an insight corroborated by the survey of critical literature offered above.120 Yet why should that be so? A consensual answer to the question of why the Gothic so readily accommodates fictions of degeneration could run along the lines of the following explanation offered by Glennis Byron:

[T]he discourse of degeneration articulates much of the same fears and anxieties as those traditionally found in the Gothic novel, and as con- cerns about national, social and psychic decay began to multiply in late Victorian Britain, so Gothic monstrosity reemerged with a force that had not been matched since the publication of the original Gothic at the previous ﬁ n de siècle.121

According to such reasoning, the late-Victorian Gothic is inscribed with the anxieties about degeneration, circulating in the larger sphere of cultural discourse, and gives voice to these fears in displaced shape, through horrific images of psychological and (especially) physical decay.122 Jerrold E. Hogle even believes that the Gothic’s inherent potential to speak to a culture’s collective anxieties accounts for the genre’s remarkable durability: ‘[T]he longevity and power of Gothic fiction unquestionably stem from the way it helps us address and disguise some of the most important desires, quan- daries, and sources of anxiety, from the most internal and mental to the

Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 Introduction 21 widely social and cultural, throughout the history of western culture since the eighteenth century.’123 The unequivocal benefit of this understanding of the relationship between cultural context and Gothic literature is that it can account for the Gothic’s cyclical and cumulative re-emergence at various historical moments of heightened cultural stress such as the period of revolutionary turmoil between 1780 and 1820 (the first major wave of Gothic novels) and the final decades of the nineteenth century. However, this popular ‘anxiety model’ has come under severe critical attack, launched by Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall in a confrontational article on ‘Gothic Criticism’ in one of the discipline’s most influential volumes, David Punter’s Companion to the Gothic (2000).124 In Baldick and Mighall’s opinion, the assumption that the Gothic writings of the ﬁ n de siècle provide an index to a widespread cultural anxiety is more than questionable as it supposedly relies on a preconceived conviction on the part of the critic, rather than on judicious hermeneutical deduction.125 The result of this method is, according to Baldick and Mighall, a self-serving tautology: ‘Horror fiction is used to confirm the critic’s own unproven point of departure, that this “oppressive” culture was terrified by its ideological “Others”; and thus if the Gothic features the Other in demonic form, these demonic forms must reflect society’s fears about the Other.’126 By contrast, they argue, the Gothic has a generic duty to create affective states of fear, horror and disgust in its readership, which makes Gothic fiction ‘in principle the least reliable index of supposedly “widespread” anxieties’127 – in the same manner that one would not cite the popularity of Punch magazine and the operas of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan as evidence for the Victorian age’s pervasive gaiety.128 Additionally implicit in Baldick’s and Mighall’s criticism is the recognition that nineteenth-century science and nineteenth- century (Gothic) literature have widely diverging agendas: the former tries to de-emotionalise its object of study to produce rational knowledge for a scientifically-minded audience, the latter attempts to achieve an acute affective reaction in its readership through fictional, irrational representation.129 By ignoring this fundamental difference between science and literature, critics would be in danger of crudely imposing scientific contexts onto literary works, which (according to Andrew Smith) ‘can not [sic] simply be read as fictional reformulations of scientific debates’.130 The greatest merit of Baldick and Mighall’s whistle-blowing critique of the ‘anxiety model’ is arguably the keen self-reflexivity that it intends to prompt by pointing out the many hermeneutic pitfalls critics should attempt to circumnavigate in their endeavours. However, its sheer rigorousness makes it almost impossible to counter – and this is by no means only a beneficial thing. As doubtful as the assumption of a general cultural anxiety (pertain- ing to notions of degeneration and racial decline) at the Victorian ﬁ n de siècle may ultimately be, its opposite claim of the non-existence of such an anxiety is equally impossible to prove.

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This is the problem inherent in Raymond Williams’s understanding of a cultural and historical ‘structure of feeling’. According to Williams, the ‘general organization’ of a cultural period can only be known substantially by the members of the culture in question.131 As soon as the critic looks to times past, Williams argues, he is confronted with a fundamental problem: ‘[C]ertain [cultural] elements […] will always be irrecoverable.’132 Yet these elements are of prime importance for our understanding of a given period in cultural history, as they constitute and shape the ‘felt sense of the quality of life at a particular place and time’.133 Williams emphasises the structure of feeling’s constitutive quality and its concomitant affective value: ‘[I]t is as firm and definite as “structure” suggests, yet it operates in the most delicate and least tangible parts of our activity.’134 That the structure of feeling can never be fully reconstructed nearly condemns the cultural critic to eventual ineffectuality, since, ‘[i]n one sense, this structure of feeling is the culture of a period: it is the particular living result of all the elements in the general organization’.135 Yet Williams is confident that not all hope is lost: ‘The arts of a period’, he argues, ‘are of major importance’, because there, ‘if anywhere, this characteristic is likely to be expressed’.136 Williams’s observa- tions are tentatively formulated and seem to bolster Baldick and Mighall’s argument: if an affective structure (such as anxiety about degeneration) is only ‘likely’ to be expressed in the arts of a period, how can critics be sure that it was ever there in the first place? This critical impasse boils down to nothing less than a question of epistemological faith. And even the harnessing of non-scientific, journalistic sources must be considered as insufficient in ultimately clinching the matter for either side of this argument. The sample of voices quoted in the first half of this chapter is merely indicative of degeneration’s prominence as a subject of cultural debate in late-Victorian England. It cannot pretend to prove that there was a general and pervasive cultural anxiety about degeneration at the fi n de siècle. Individual commentators did not universally agree on degeneration’s empirical reality as an urban phenomenon, and the affective responses of those who acknowledged its existence ranged all the way from apocalyptic pessimism through solicitous concern to optimistic insouci- ance. Yet, as almost any critic of the Victorian period (including Baldick and Mighall) would underline, notions of degeneration dominate intellectual and popular debate at the end of the nineteenth century, and degeneration theory informs much of fi n-de-siècle fiction, particularly the Gothic. How, then, can one account for Gothic fiction’s undeniable aptitude at mediating scientific knowledge about degeneration in fictional form and harnessing that knowledge to develop plots of horror and suspense to such great aes- thetic effect, without relying on the ‘anxiety model’? One possible answer to this question can arguably be found through an examination of the Gothic’s generic properties and an investigation of how these defining features are transformed in the genre’s fi n-de-siècle variety.

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‘What is “Gothic”?’, asks Robert Miles, and playfully notes that ‘[f]ew literary questions appear so easily answered’.137 In a similar vein, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick lists the familiar conventions of Gothic fiction in terms of its setting, characters, plots and narrative structure: a sublime landscape with a ruinous castle in a Catholic country of Southern Europe; a villain- ous aristocrat who terrorises an over-sensitive heroine and her impetuous lover; a fragmented and convoluted narrative with multiple narrators and a Chinese-box-structure; doubles and other ghostly apparitions; family secrets and curses, to name but a few.138 Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) – subtitled A Gothic Story – inaugurated the late-eighteenth-century vogue for Gothic fiction and introduced many of the tropes and stock features that came to be rehashed endlessly in the 1790s. As an anonymous contemporary remarked about the fashion for ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’, the readers of Gothic fiction could be certain to find the staple ingredients of the genre in any newly-published romance, and the critic provided his very own disdainful ‘recipe’:

Take – An old castle, half of it ruinous. A long gallery, with a great many doors, some secret ones. Three murdered bodies, quite fresh. As many skeletons, in chests and presses. An old woman hanging by the neck; with her throat cut. Assassins and desperadoes, quant. suff. Noises, whispers, and groans, threescore at least. […] PROBATUM EST.139

Yet, as Fred Botting observes, it is only for the first wave of Gothic fiction – from Walpole’s Otranto through the romances of Ann Radcliffe to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818/1832) and Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) – that such a catalogue of fixed generic conventions can be formulated.140 Consequently, Botting suggests to think of the Gothic as a hybrid ‘mode’ rather than a clear-cut ‘genre’ to make allowance for the wide diffusion of the Gothic across various literary forms and historical periods.141 This tendency to consider the Gothic a fluid mode of writing as opposed to a monolithic genre has become a staple of much Gothic criticism and is arguably indicative of the difficulties involved in any attempt to define a ‘typically’ Gothic text.142 Julian Wolfreys, for instance, considers it a critical commonplace that Gothic cannot be reduced to a simple definition as it is ‘transgressive through and through’:143 ‘Part of its very definition is that it endlessly transgresses itself, erasing, crossing and rewriting the very boundaries by which its shape, its meaning, and its form are apprehended.’144 Similarly, Fred Botting thinks of the Gothic as a form of writing that signifies transgression and excess,145 and Patrick McGrath calls transgression the

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Gothic’s very ‘raison d’être’: ‘It identifies limits so as then to assault them.’146 These are as much limits of form and structure as they are limits of normative experience. David Punter therefore detects in Gothic fiction a fascination with the concept of paranoia, the notion of barbarism and the nature of taboo: ‘[T]hese are the aspects of the terrifying to which Gothic constantly, and hauntedly, returns.’147 Punter’s phrase of a Gothic ‘return’ is particularly apt, as it signifies a peculiar attitude towards both time and space, two structural determinants which establish the historically specific forms the Gothic can take. In the ‘Introduction’ to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (1992), Chris Baldick put forward a now-classic definition of Gothic writing, which is as precise as it is pertinent: ‘For the Gothic effect to be attained, a tale should combine a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a sense of claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration.’148 The Gothic hinges on ‘returns’ (both temporally and geographically) – haunting its readers through the multitude of its transgressions. Time, space, transgression: these terms provide a conceptual intersection between degeneration and the Gothic and can thus be employed to stake out an answer to the question why degeneration theory proved so portable for Gothic appropriations at the ﬁ n de siècle. From its very inception in the eighteenth century, the Gothic was markedly characterised by its attitude towards the past and its potential to haunt the present.149 In Walpole’s Otranto, the usurping villain Manfred plunges his own wife and children into a protracted ordeal of rape, incest and incarceration, after having broken the laws of rightful family inheritance. The novel’s central moral was provided by the old biblical law that ‘the sins of fathers are visited on their children to the third and fourth generation’,150 a scenario which became central to so many subsequent novels that David Punter considers it ‘perhaps the most prevalent theme of Gothic fiction’.151 In his Traité des dégénérescences, Morel used the same image to illustrate the hereditary mechanism of degeneration’s transmission and distribution through the family’s generations.152 After Morel, and particularly in the wake of Darwin, degeneration was not only cast as a ‘haunting’ of the family by the transgressions of an earlier generation of ancestors, but as the wholesale haunting of the human species by its evolutionary history. Through an understanding of degeneration as a reversal to an earlier, more primitive, stage in the history of mankind, the Gothic’s fascination with ‘inheritance’ was transformed into a fascination with ‘heredity’. In the Gothic and degeneration theory, time is, then, best understood as a non-linear and disjunctive dimension: the past holds the potential to erupt into the present unannounced, and the present may slide back into the past in a dark parody of evolution. In the traditional Gothic, the spaces in which the past’s visitations unfold are the oppressive structures of a time-worn architecture: ruinous castles

Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 Introduction 25 with crumbling subterranean passages, sinister abbeys and monasteries, for- lorn graveyards and burial vaults, gloomy dungeons and torture chambers. The harnessing of these spaces for sensational effect is a stock feature of the original Gothic, yet by the time of the fi n de siècle, they have arguably come to lose their seminal status in Gothic fiction. By contrast, the drama of visitations from the past is here played out on the stage of the human body153 so that ‘the body [becomes] the locus of Gothic horror in the last decades of the century’, as Robert Mighall notes.154 This relocation of the horrific and frightening – from ‘actual’ places to the metaphorical space of the body – was facilitated by the degenerationists’ pervasive somatic inter- ests. As Chapter 2 will make evident, medical authorities always understood degeneration as a disease of the body – even if it affected the workings of the mind. The terrifying delusions of the insane were frequently ascribed to disintegrative processes within the body of the afflicted, and the criminality of the violent offender was considered a product of his regressive physical nature. In degeneration theory and the late-Victorian Gothic, the human body – not the mediaeval castle – is the haunted house of horror.155 The major changes wrought by the industrialisation and urbanisation of nineteenth-century social life affected the Gothic’s conceptualisation of time and space in yet another significant way. Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall note how ‘Gothic novels […] thrive on anachronistic emphases, and their narrative effects derive from the clash between “modernity” and “antiquity”, whether the former finds itself misplaced in the latter, or the latter lives beyond its proper scope and survives into the present’.156 While the first scenario is characteristic of the late-eighteenth-century Gothic (particularly in the vein of Ann Radcliffe),157 the second is central to its late-nineteenth-century variety. The setting of the late-Victorian Gothic is a decidedly contemporary one, and it is no coincidence that all of the novels analysed in this study are set in fi n-de-siècle London, in contradistinction to mediaeval or early-modern Italy and Spain – the favourite locales of the traditional Gothic. While, in Jane Austen’s parody Northanger Abbey (1818), the extravagant plots of Gothic romance (so eagerly devoured by the novel’s heroine Catherine Morland) seem too remote to be imaginable to the clear- headed Henry Tilney, the terrors evoked by the late-Victorian Gothic have moved considerably closer to its readership’s home: ‘This is not just a Gothic in the city, it is a Gothic of the city. Its terrors derive from situations peculiar to, and firmly located within, the urban experience.’158 In the same way that degeneration came to be considered a distinct part of this urban experience by the fi n de siècle, the Gothic had transformed itself into a distinctly urban genre by that time, a parallel which makes the Gothic the perfect site for creative appropriations of degeneration. Since the Gothic mode is not only transgressive in the way it transforms itself throughout its historical development and across genre boundaries but also delights in all manner of transgressions in its depicted worlds, it

Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 26 Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle offers yet another intersection with the notion of degeneration: with the latter defined as a pathological deviation from a given norm, it is no exaggeration to claim that the concept of transgression is also built into the very fabric of degeneration. As Chapter 2 will show, the diagnostic gaze of nineteenth-century degenerationists fastened as much on perceptible physical aberrations as on behavioural irregularities. The textbooks of these writers are populated by a myriad of ‘degenerate’ transgressors of which criminal offenders (comprising swindlers, thieves, arsonists, rapists and murderers) and ‘sexual perverts’ (including sadists, masochists, fetishists and ‘inverts’) are the most prominent types in what is a veritable pandemonium of transgressiveness. This study, then, understands the Gothic as a shifting mode of writing and the body of Gothic texts as a discursive site on which historically specific forms of knowledge are creatively (re)produced, negotiated and reshaped.159 The Gothic fiction of the ﬁ n de siècle is thus a constituent part of the ‘discursive formation’ of degeneration discourse, and a historicist analysis can reveal the conspicuous tripartite mechanism of ‘detection-Othering-normalisation’ as an interconnected web of representational strategies at work in the Gothic’s negotiation of knowledge about degeneration. These strategies can, in turn, also be seen in operation within those scientific writings in which degeneration discourse first came into being. However, they should not merely be understood as thematic congruities or similarities between literary and non-literary texts, but rather as fundamental discursive characteristics which cannot be contained within any genre or category. Detection, Othering, normalisation: the following chapters trace each of these discursive strategies in two Gothic novels at a time. Detection is perceived as the central discursive process at work in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894); the Othering of ‘foreign’ monsters is at the heart of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897); and the normalisation of deviance is of pivotal importance in both Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan (1895). However, this grouping according to one isolatable discursive strategy should not suggest that the other two are insignificant or inoperative in the respective texts. All three mechanisms – detection, Othering, and normalisation – are intricately connected and can certainly be traced in all of the Gothic novels that are analysed here, and this should become evident in the course of this study. Each of the chapters on Gothic fiction is separated into two parts: while the first focuses on the respective novels’ representation of degeneration in its deviant characters, the second half will foreground how degeneration’s inherent dialectic of ‘norm’ and ‘deviance’ is consistently destabilised in Gothic fiction. These readings of the ﬁ n-de-siècle Gothic are preceded by an extensive investigation of degeneration theory in the Victorian sciences in Chapter 2.

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While this part will also help to rationalise the subsequent historicist contextualisations of our Gothic novels, it is primarily an analysis of the complex discursive negotiation of the concept of degeneration within the scientific disciplines of criminology, psychopathology and sexology. Section 1 lays the foundation for this negotiation by analysing Charles Darwin’s seminal works on evolutionary theory On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) and Thomas Henry Huxley’s treatise Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863). It shows how Darwin’s central ideas of the ‘tree of life’ and ‘natural selection’ facilitated an understanding of degeneration as the sinister mirror image of species evolution. Section 2 analyses Cesare Lombroso’s famous study Criminal Man (L’uomo delinquente, 1876), which cast delinquency as a natural characteristic of certain atavistic individuals. Lombroso believed degeneracy to be clearly written on the body of the criminal offender, whose stigmatic markers he assiduously inscribed into complex taxonomies of deviance. Section 3 is concerned with degeneration in the field of medical psychiatry and traces its significance in the oeuvre of two major nineteenth-century ‘alienists’: Henry Maudsley and Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Maudsley’s series of lectures Body and Mind (1870) and Krafft- Ebing’s compendium of sexual ‘perversions’ Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) are centrally concerned with degeneration’s invisible mechanisms of hereditary transmission, and both works cast immoral behaviour as contingent on a diseased physical constitution. Chapter 2 concludes with an analysis of Max Nordau’s bizarre patho-cultural study Degeneration (Entartung, 1892), a book that made degeneration theory accessible to a wider audience than ever before by transposing notions developed in the specialised discourses of criminology and psychopathology to the field of cultural production. However, Nordau’s diatribe is read as the culmination rather than the beginning of such patho-cultural criticism which, by the time of Degeneration’s publication, had already been sensationally applied to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Even though Chapter 2 sketches the evolutionary history of degeneration in the Victorian sciences, I emphasise that it narrates one version of that history: it focuses on authors and texts whose significance no critic would deny, while being aware that it has to exclude other important writers on the subject. Each of the readings provided in Chapter 2 investigates whether – and if so how – these degenerationists conceptualised notions of normality and normativity in their studies of deviance. Chapter 3, ‘Detecting the Degenerate’, brings together Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan in a reading that foregrounds the discursive process of detection so central to degenerationism. I will show how, in these novels, the pre- occupation with the discovery of some truth behind a specific ‘case’ exceeds the generic patterns of the detective plot. Both Stevenson’s Strange Case and Machen’s Great God Pan betray a sustained confidence in the applicability of physiognomic theories of reading ‘character’ on the body. The amateur

Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 28 Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle detectives of both novels show a heightened desire to behold the features of their respective villains, trusting that they can thus unravel the mysteries surrounding them. The spectacle of Edward Hyde and Helen Vaughan frustrates these protracted attempts at apprehending the deviant body, as physiognomic methods ultimately prove unproductive of epistemological certainty in Jekyll and Hyde and The Great God Pan. Instead, the confronta- tion between the detective and his object of study creates the sense of an uncanny rapport between the normative characters and the degenerate transgressor. This subtle connection is further enforced by transgressive desires within the normative protagonists themselves (which are analysed in Section 2), as virtually every single gentleman in these novels has a latent dark side hidden behind a thin veneer of respectability. The depiction of a transgressive potential in the supposedly normative characters of Jekyll and Hyde and The Great God Pan deeply destabilises degeneration’s inherent dialectic of ‘norm’ and ‘deviance’. Additionally, this chapter showcases how a historicist contextualisation can support the detection of transgressive sexu- alities in Machen’s The Great God Pan, while being less confident of such an interpretation in the case of Stevenson’s novel. Chapter 4, ‘Othering the Degenerate’, offers a reading of Bram Stoker’s vampire classic Dracula and Richard Marsh’s supernatural thriller The Beetle, by highlighting the construction of the degenerate Other as a menace to the novels’ supposedly normative characters. Removed in terms of space and evolutionary history, the vampire and the beetle-creature are depicted as belonging to an ‘Other’ race that seems to be entirely alien to the modernity of nineteenth-century London. Section 1 focuses on the production of this sense of Otherness: while Dracula achieves an effect of radical alienation through the appropriation of features derived from the literary genre of the travelogue, The Beetle constructs its eponymous monster as a consummate Other in terms of gender, race and biological species. The chapter’s second part moves away from the Other’s representation as thoroughly different from the self and focuses on their similarities instead. On the one hand, both novels establish a disconcerting bond between the self and the Other (Dracula through vampirism and The Beetle by means of mesmerism) that threatens to undermine the self’s integrity; on the other hand, transgressive desires are shown to lurk within the supposedly normative characters themselves so that – despite the apparent expulsion of the monstrous Other – these narratives can only ever achieve an anxious sense of closure. This reading illustrates how cultures frequently project unwanted and unac- knowledged components from their own identity onto monstrous images of alterity in order to maintain the illusion of a stable, normative self. Chapter 5, ‘Normalising the Degenerate’, carves out the inadvertent result of degeneration discourse’s persistent Otherings. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan portray a society riddled with degeneracy. Section 1 analyses whether the moral depravity of Wilde’s

Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 Copyrighted matrial – 978–1–137–45032–6 Introduction 29 and Corelli’s main characters is the result of unfavourable environmental conditions (that is, nurture) or the consequence of an elusively diseased biological constitution (that is, nature) – a question which was widely debated in the writings of the degenerationists as well. In both novels, the nature- nurture-controversy is grounded in an anti-positivistic scepticism about the unequivocal visibility of degenerative conditions. The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Sorrows of Satan exhibit a narrative fascination with degeneration’s potential invisibility by hiding the rotten souls of their characters behind immaculately faked social masks. Degeneration and depravity, however, are not the exclusive property of Wilde’s and Corelli’s main protagonists. The second half of this chapter shows how moral regression is here configured as a ubiquitous social malaise in a manner similar to Max Nordau’s thumping invective Degeneration, where deviance and transgression are also depicted as the condition of the ‘norm’. It is in their respective negotiation of morality and normativity that The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Sorrows of Satan part ways: while Corelli urges a wholesale return to Christian norms and values, Wilde’s novel suggests that the ubiquity of vice and degeneration in society could initiate a redefinition of normality.

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Index

abnormality, 4, 15–18, 68–9, 144, 146, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin 241 n. 161 of Our Ideas of the Sublime and ambiguity, 12, 13, 178, 181–2, 190, 197, Beautiful, A, 134, 249 n. 58 210, 229 n. 7 ancestry, 24, 37–8, 58–61, 172–5, 183, Cantlie, James, 7–8, 221 n. 36 230–1 n. 26, 267 n. 21 Cézanne, Paul, 218 anthropology, see criminal children, 24, 39, 47–9, 59–61, 65–7, 92, anthropology 115, 120–2, 126, 180–1, 233–4 n. 59 anxiety, 20–2, 44, 57, 198, 226 n. 128 class, 55, 137, 179, 197–8, 214, 221 n. anxiety model, 21, 226 n. 124, 258 n. 21 39, 262 n. 78 appearance, 98–100, 138–40, 143–6, lower, 7–9, 142, 149, 221 n. 39, 248 184–8, 268–9 n. 46 n. 49 aristocracy, 183–4, 197, 204–5, 246 n. 26 middle, 9–10, 79, 118–20, 249 n. 64, artist, degenerate, 2, 73, 75–82, 217–18, 258 n. 25, 263 n. 99 219 n. 3 upper, 109, 189 asphyxiation, 106–10, 121, 251 see also aristocracy n. 92, 251 n. 95, 251 n. 96, city, 7, 9–11, 25, 111, 115–16, 132, 252 n. 100 136–7, 252 n. 105 atavism, 38–40, 44–55, 90–1, 120, 127, see also London 146, 170–88, 230–1 n. 26, 231 n. Conan Doyle, Arthur, 271 n. 80 28, 233 n. 44, 234 n. 60, 235 n. 78, Hound of the Baskervilles, The, 175 267 n. 21 Conrad, Joseph, 51, 228 n. 1 Secret Agent, The, 51 Beccaria, Cesare, 45 contagion, 31, 119, 148–57, 174–5, 260 behaviour, 3, 44–5, 84, 161–3, 198, n. 62, 264 n. 120 210–11, 216, 232–3 n. 44, 234 n. Corelli, Marie, 5, 28–9, 168, 179, 182–3, 60, 246 n. 24, 264 n. 122 188–9, 192–4, 196–8, 265 n. 2, 265 deviant, 15–17, 47–50, 56, 61–9, n. 3, 266 n. 4, 268–9 n. 46, 269 n. 116–18, 120–1, 171–6, 189, 48, 269 n. 50 200–2, 206–8, 213 Life Everlasting, The: A Reality of sexual, 129, 272 n. 97 Romance, 182 Bentham, Jeremy, 45, 234 n. 74 Sorrows of Satan, 26, 28–9, 63, 168–70, blackmail, 122–3, 254 n. 144 177–98, 202, 204–6, 212, 215, 268 Blackmailer’s Charter, see Labouchère n. 45 Amendment criminal, 44–55, 78–9, 122, 126–7, 140, Boer War, Second, 216, 217 200–1, 209–11, 213–15, 232–3 n. boundaries, 15–17, 43, 51, 117, 129–30, 44, 234 n. 60, 234 n. 70, 247 n. 46, 147–8, 154–5, 207–8, 211, 214, 259 252 n. 105, 254 n. 144, 256 n. 13, n. 31, 260 n. 62 257 n. 15, 264 n. 122 see also transgression, of boundaries anthropology, 44, 49–53, 89–91, 235 Brabazon, Reginald, 7 n. 90 British Association for the Advancement stigmata, 50–5, 93, 97, 126, 145–6, 215 of Science, 36–7 Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1, 82, Burke, Edmund, 134 122–3, 225 n. 103, 248–9 n. 52

289

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Darwin, Charles, 30–51, 70, 90, 127, amateur, 95, 109, 147, 211, 253 n. 112 229 n. 7, 229 n. 8, 229 n. 9, 229 gentleman, 86, 88, 111–14 n. 10, 230 n. 12, 230 n. 26, 231 deterioration, 8, 83–4, 99, 216 n. 28 determinism, 14, 173, 182–3 Descent of Man, The, 27, 30, 38–42, 90, deviance, 3–5, 15, 17–20, 26–9, 31, 96, 127–8, 231 n. 28 44–55, 66–71, 83–4, 94, 103–13, entangled bank, 35 120, 158–67, 199–200, 205–6, natural selection, 31–6, 41–3, 211, 228 210–16, 220 n. 5, 234 n. 60, 252 n. 1, 229 n. 9 n. 105 Origin of Species, On the, 27, 30–6, 38, bodily, 27–8, 45, 50–1, 176 40–3, 228 n. 1 normalisation, 20, 51, 63, 169–70, tree of life, 34–5, 40, 43, 211 194, 198 de Navarre, Marguerite, 108 diagnosis, 2, 94, 107, 160, 164, 195–6, de Verville, Beroalde, 108 213, 235 n. 78, 251 n. 95 decadence, 65, 75, 194 discourse, see degeneration, discourse deformity, 3, 88–97, 146, 172, 212, 249 disease, 11, 58, 69, 74–80, 150, 158–61, n. 58 174–5, 189, 193, 213–14, 243 n. 2, degeneration, 125, 158–9, 169–77, 247 n. 40, 264 n. 120 188–98, 202, 206–8, 221 n. 36, 221 mental, 56, 187, 217–18 n. 37 physical, 13, 25, 27, 29, 93, 133, 144, biology, 2, 10–13, 30–1, 44–51, 56–61, 227 n. 155 64–5, 103, 120, 176–8, 180, 183–4 disorder, 131, 159, 169, 235 n. 78, 238 diagnosis, 2, 13, 66, 71, 74–7, 213 n. 124 discourse, 14–15, 20, 26–8, 31, 35, 38, mental, 39, 56, 62, 271 n. 86 40, 44, 49, 51, 52, 65, 68, 72, 77–80, somnambulistic, 58, 66 83–4, 92, 126, 140, 144, 146, 148, Disraeli, Benjamin, 38 157, 169, 191, 208, 209–18, 226 n. double, 90, 93–4, 114, 116–18, 154–5, 124, 226 n. 128, 237 n. 106 170, 176, 206, 244 n. 10, 245 n. 20, environment, 7, 9, 42–3, 45, 115–16 249 n. 53, 253 n. 114, 253 n. 129 origins, 11–12, 30–44, 45, 56, 66–7, 88–97, 98, 172, 209, 218 education, 6–7, 60–1, 64–5, 180–1 process, 30–5, 38–9, 43, 52, 57, 65–6, egotism, 83, 191–4, 196, 201 101, 169, 174, 213 Ellis, Havelock, 104, 234 n. 65, 236 n. society, 7–8, 20, 30–2, 41–2, 51, 90, 250–1 n. 90, 252 n. 100 59–63, 169–70, 177, 209–11, 213 Criminal, The, 92, 140, 145–6, 191 stigmata, see stigmata Impressions and Comments, 206 taxonomy, 2–3, 13, 15, 20, 27, 68, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 107 105, 144, 147, 210–14 environment, 11–13, 29, 32–4, 45, theory, 2–29, 67, 72–4, 83, 192, 200, 115–16, 133, 229 n. 9, 232–3 n. 44, 209–14, 218, 223 n. 81, 235 n. 78, 254 n. 130, 270 n. 72 239 n. 139 see also space desire, 27–8, 45–6, 98, 161, 170–1, 191, erotomania, 1, 76 198, 200, 211, 215 evolution, 24, 28, 30–48, 58–65, 70–3, repressed, 94, 112, 207 90–7, 101–3, 125, 134, 146–7, 177, sexual, 64–71, 87–9, 91, 105, 107, 117, 191, 207, 221 n. 37, 231 n. 37, 237 139–40, 239 n. 134, 242 n. 184, 258 n. 121 n. 25 cultural, 42, 65 detection, 13, 16–17, 26, 88, 113–14, differentiation, 37, 40 210–12, 257 n. 15 progression, 32, 35, 39, 41–3, 61–2, detective, 27–8, 50, 86, 93–5, 111–14, 64–5, 102–3, 127, 140, 229 n. 10 140, 152–4, 252 n. 105 survival of the fittest, 6, 32

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theory, 10, 27, 30, 32–3, 41, 43–4, 46, 177–88, 212, 233 n. 72, 239 n. 137, 48, 71, 73, 90–7, 211, 228 n. 1, 229 267 n. 21 n. 7 determinism, 14, 183 variation, 31–5 stigmata, 56–7, 88–97 see also inheritance; stigmata façade, 88, 104, 117, 119, 154, 185, 204, heritage, 60, 95, 103, 160 208, 212, 253 n. 129 hermaphroditism, 66, 139–40 see also appearance Herrick, Robert, 252 n. 102 family history, see heritage ‘Upon Love’, 108, 252 n. 101 fate, 7, 59–61, 96, 147, 172, 174, 179, Hitler, Adolf, 217–18, 273 n. 20 180–3, 186–7, 200, 204, 213, 266 holocaust, 140, 217 n. 16 homoeroticism, 168–9, 261 n. 67, 270 femme fatale, 19, 97, 105, 111 n. 73 fetishism, 65, 70 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 30–1, 36–8, 48, Foucault, Michel, 14–15, 238 n. 124 230 n. 21, 230 n. 26, 231 n. 26, 250 Archaeology of Knowledge, The, 14 n. 78 free will, 45, 61, 177–88 Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, French school of the milieu social, 45 27, 36, 38, 43 Freud, Sigmund, 95, 100, 211, 240 n. ‘Evolution and Ethics’, 60 145, 249 n. 53 hyperaesthesia sexualis, 65, 83, 105 Interpretation of Dreams, The, 101 hypnosis, 144, 148, 154, 156 projection, 69 hysteria, 74–6, 98, 133, 159, 189, 247 ‘Uncanny, The’, 95-6 n. 40

Gauguin, Paul, 217–18 Ibsen, Henrik, 72, 76, 82, 242 n. 196 gender, 70, 128–9, 135–48, 214, identity, 43, 88, 97, 114–17, 129–30, 234 n. 60, 248 n. 52, 258 147–8, 154, 173–5, 176–7, 180, 182, n. 25, 260 n. 62, 261 n. 66, 193, 201 261 n. 68, 262 n. 80, 263 n. 99, cultural, 17–19, 263 n. 99 266 n. 7 gender, 137–40, 148–9, 260 n. 64, 262 genetics, 57, 160, 172–4, 181–2 n. 80, 270 n. 71 genius, 157, 235 n. 78, 241 n. 161 racial, 135, 143 artistic, 79 imperialism, British, 216, 262 n. 75 male, 1–4, 78–9 industrialisation, 8–9, 25, 131, 216 gentleman, 28, 90, 154, 163, 215, 245 n. inevitability, see fate 22, 245–6 n. 24, 248 n. 49 infection, 58, 158 see also Victorian, gentleman inferiority, 46, 130, 134, 146, 213–14 Gothic, 2–6, 94, 135, 169, 188, 208, 225 inheritance, 13, 24, 57–8, 74, 172, n. 120, 226 n. 124 179, 181–2, 231 n. 26, 235 n. 78, genre/mode, 19–27, 120, 125, 131, 267 n. 19 211–16 biological law, 57–8, 61 late-Victorian, 4–6, 88, 136, 146, see also hereditary 174, 193, 205–6, 227 n. 158, 237 insect, 48, 127, 137, 140, n. 106 151–2, 218 invasion, 8, 135–6, 140, 151–3, 157 Haeckel, Ernst, 46–7, 92, 174–5 invisibility, 13–14, 29, 31, 67, 211–13 hanging, see asphyxiation invitation, 160–1, 251 n. 92 Hardy, Thomas, 267 n. 81 Hellenic ideal, 170, 198, 242 n. 184 Jack the Ripper, 109, 177 hereditary, 13–14, 23–4, 27, 38–9, James, William, 80 55–71, 159–61, 169–70, 172–5, Jenyns, Leonard, 36

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Kingsley, Charles, 6–7, 228 n. 1 Machen, Arthur, 85–8, 108, 243 n. 1, Kipling, Rudyard, 121–2 243 n. 2, 244 n. 11, 250 n. 78, 252 ‘Mark of the Beast, The’, 121 n. 100, 252 n. 101 Kocˇwara, Frantisek, 108 Great God Pan, The, 27–8, 85–8, Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 15, 30, 41, 97–123, 156, 161, 163, 211, 215, 63–73, 91, 104–7, 128–9, 139–40, 243 n. 1, 243 n. 2, 245 n. 11, 250 210, 215–16, 239 n. 134, 239 n. n. 76 137, 239 n. 141, 240 n. 145, 248 n. Hieroglyphics: A Note upon Ecstasy in 46, 265 n. 128 Literature, 85, 243 n. 3 Psychopathia Sexualis, 27, 63–71, 91, Macleay, William Sharp, 36 105, 107, 129, 139, 215, 238 n. 124, madness, 1, 3, 25, 56–8, 62–3, 73, 76–7, 238 n. 126, 238–9 n. 127, 239 n. 87, 95–6, 150, 156–60, 165, 169, 143, 248 n. 46, 252 n. 100 191, 198, 203–4, 219 n. 3, 237 n. 106, 237 n. 121, 247 n. 40 Labouchère Amendment, 122, see also erotomania; mental illness; 123, 198, 225 n. 103, 249 nymphomania; paranoia n. 52, 272 n. 97 mad scientist, 44, 112, 263 n. 104 Lacassagne, Alexander, 45, 233 n. 44, Malthus, Doctrine of, 31–2 235 n. 90 Marsh, Richard, 124 Lankester, Edwin Ray, 42–3 Beetle, The, 28, 124–5, 135–57, 167, Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism, 211, 260 n. 60, 260–1 n. 65, 261 42–3 n. 72 Le Fanu, Sheridan, 85 masochism, 68–70, 239 n. 137 ‘Carmilla’, 132 Matisse, Henri, 218 Lee, Vernon, 83 Maturin, Charles Robert, 23 lesbianism, see sexuality, homosexuality Maudsley, Henry, 27, 55–66, 72–4, 79, Link, Jürgen, 15–17, 72, 117, 224 n. 91 159–60, 180–1, 183, 209–10, 236 n. Lombroso, Cesare, 1–2, 27, 44–57, 100, 236 n. 103, 237 n. 106 59, 73, 78–9, 91–3, 126–7, Body and Mind, 27, 55, 59, 61, 62, 237 145–6, 157, 200–1, 210–15, n. 106 232 n. 38, 232–3 n. 44, 233 n. 45, Body and Will, 192, 237 n. 106 233 n. 46, 233 n. 57, 233 n. 59, 234 ‘Insanity in Relation to Criminal n. 60, 234 n. 65, 235 n. 78, 235 n. Responsibility’, 209 89, 235–6 n. 90, 237 n. 106 Pathology of Mind, 58–64 Criminal Man, 27, 44, 47, 52, 54, 56, Responsibility in Mental Disease, 237 126–7, 145–6, 211, 215, 232 n. 38, n. 106 232 n. 41 Mayhew, Henry, 9 Criminal Woman, 200–1 Memoirs of Jacques Casanova, 108, 252 Man of Genius, 78–9, 126–7 n. 100 London, 9–10, 44, 98–9, 107, 110–11, mental illness, 62–3, 96, 160, 236 123, 130–2, 135–7, 176, 193, 221 n. n. 103 36, 221 n. 39, 263 n. 100 see also erotomania; madness; East End, 10, 109, 252 n. 105 nymphomania; paranoia Piccadilly, 53, 109 Mercier, Charles Arthur, 54 Soho, 115–16, 119 mesmerism, 148–50, 156–7 West End, 98, 137, 252 n. 105 metamorphosis, 43, 102, 130, 212 Whitechapel, 10, 109, 177 monstrosity, 20, 34–5, 129, 137–8, 167, Lotman, Yuri M., 18–19, 152, 262 211, 248 n. 46, 259 n. 37 n. 97 moral, 11–13, 28–9, 40, 45–8, 60–5, lust murder, 65, 71, 119 80–1, 134, 159, 168–70, 176–8,

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183–4, 188–208, 215, 269 n. 48, 271 perverse dynamics, 17–19 n. 80 perversion, 17–19, 27, 63, 65–71, 105, consciousness, 24, 60, 71, 77–8, 92, 105 129, 139, 215, 240 n. 145, 248 n. superiority, 19, 120, 263 n. 103 46, 252 n. 100 see also responsibility, moral phrenology, 88, 211 Morel, Bénédict Augustin, 4–5, 12–13, phylogeny, 39, 46-7, 48, 134, 146-7, 24, 30, 34, 50, 55–7, 61, 75, 79, 173, 192, 213, 231 n. 28, 237 n. 121 209–11, 220 n. 5, 222 n. 65, 223, physiognomy, 27–8, 49–50, 52–3, 87–9, n. 72 98–100, 139, 143, 145, 170–7, 184– Munich exhibition of ‘Degenerate Art’, 218 7, 210–12, 234 n. 74, 268 n. 31, 268 n. 46, 269 n. 46 nature, 15, 32, 35, 37, 55–71, 95, 101, physiology, 55–6, 64, 69–70, 72, 78, 215 114–16, 146, 157, 211, 229 n. 9, 250 Picasso, Pablo, 217 n. 80, 261 n. 66 Polidori, John William, 132, 258 n. 27 law of, 35, 61, 64, 160, 187 Vampyre, The, 132 versus nurture, 29, 55, 60, 169, 170–7, Prichard, James Cowles, 62, 159 177–88, 198 procreation, 67, 69–70, 215, 258 n. 25 Nazism, 217–18, 273 n. 20 prostitution, 107–8, 122, 127, 129, 177, necrophilia, 164, 265 n. 128 209, 234 n. 60 neurosis, 56–7, 65–6 protoplasm, 98 New Hedonism, 199 psychiatry, 12, 27, 73 ‘New Woman’ fiction, 53, 181, 194, 261 psychology, 38, 40, 55, 72, 73, 78, 95, n. 68, 263 n. 99 200 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 72, 76 psychopathology, 12, 55–6, 58, 62–3, Nordau, Max, 1–2, 191 79, 113 Degeneration, 2, 10, 27, 29, 71–84, degenerative, 39–40, 55, 63, 71–3 155–7, 169, 196–7, 219 n. 3 sexual, 39–40, 63, 71–2 normalism, 4, 16–20, 54–5, 120, 168– punishment, 45, 117–18, 169, 199 208, 214–16, 219 n. 3, 240 n. 153, 241 n. 168, 242 n. 184, 224 n. 91 race, 6–8, 12, 37, 41, 49–50, 64–5, flexible, 17, 207, 216 125, 131–2, 135–48, 174–5, 183, proto-, 17, 208 221 n. 37 normativity, 2–3, 16–20, 27–8, 29, 31, Radcliffe, Ann, 23, 25, 226 n. 124 67–72, 77–80, 126, 129–30, Mysteries of Udolpho, The, 131, 135 148–57, 158–67, 198–208, 214–16 Reading Gaol, 1, 216 nymphomania, 105–6 repression, 94–5, 207, 226 n. 124, 246 n. 31 ontogeny, 39, 46–7, 103 responsibility, 45, 171–3, 205 Orientalism, 143–4, 261 n. 75 moral, 59–60, 190, 201 original sin, 96, 112 social, 60–1, 71 Other, the, 18–19, 21, 28, 96, 123, 125, 132, Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 76, 79, 82 135, 138–9, 148–57, 158–67, 213–14 Othering, 3, 26, 50–1, 124–67, 210, sadism, 68–70, 91, 215, 239 n. 137, 240 212–13 n. 145, 248 n. 46, 265 n. 128 Said, Edward W., 143, 261 n. 75 Pan (Greek god), 87, 98, 103, 106, 110, sanity, 3, 77, 81, 96, 150, 159, 164, 203 112 self, 28, 96, 125, 138–9, 147, 148–57, paranoia, 24, 179 160–1, 164, 166, 214, 263 n. 99 pathology, 18, 68, 71–84, 144–5, 148, recognition, 6, 18–19, 106, 200–1 235 n. 78 splitting, 88, 90, 114

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sexology, 104–5, 164, 238 n. 122, 258 supernatural, 131–2, 147, 159–60, 178, n. 21 258 n. 21, 260 n. 64, 266 n. 9 sexuality, 63–71, 87, 94, 96, 103–23, Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 76, 79, 126–9, 139–40, 215, 239 n. 137, 194–5 240 n. 145, 258 n. 21, 261 n. 66, 261 n. 68 tattooing, 55, 232 n. 41 antipathic, 65–6 Tarde, Gabriel, 45, 235 n. 90 bisexuality, 66 taxonomy, 13, 20, 34, 152, 210–14 deviance, 2, 63, 66–71, 87 Thomson, James, 110 female, 70, 260–1 n. 65 Topsall, Edward, 12 heterosexuality, 64, 67–71 transcendental medicine, 89, 111 homosexuality, 17, 65, 67, 94, 122–3, transgression, 3–4, 23–6, 29, 49, 139, 141, 198, 225 n. 103, 242 n. 86–7, 91, 111, 113, 126, 161, 184, 256 n. 13 165, 167, 169, 171, 189, 200, 205–8, see also transgression, of sexuality; 215–16, 258 n. 27 Victorian, sexuality of boundaries, 129–30 Shaw, Bernard, 77, 82–3 of femininity, 99, 103, 109, 122, 152 Shelley, Mary, 23, 46, 111 of sexuality, 198 Frankenstein, 23, 46 transmission, 57–8, 159, 169, somnambulism, see disorder, 173, 183, 201, 212, 223 n. 72, somnambulistic 230 n. 26, 231 n. 26, 239 n. 137, space, 10, 25, 130–8, 152, 154, 264 n. 120 160–1, 166, 170, 204, 214, 262 travelogue, 28, 126, 131, 135 n. 97 Gothic, 24, 227 n. 155 uncanny, 88–103, 113, 211, 249 n. 53 liminal, 90, 133, 135, 137 unspeakable, 88–113, 249 n. 58, 252 n. Stevenson, Robert Louis, 85–6, 244 n. 100 10, 248 n. 52, 249 n. 53, 253 n. 114, 254 n. 130 vampire, 28, 58, 125–48, 158–67, 212, ‘Olalla’, 132, 174–5, 246 n. 26 214, 256 n. 13, 257 n. 15, 258. 21, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 258 n. 27 26–7, 85–97, 113–23, 137, 146, 161, van Gogh, Vincent, 218 194, 204, 211–12, 215, 245 n. 20, Victorian, 4–5, 11–12, 20–2, 154, 167, 246 n. 26, 247 n. 46, 248 n. 46, 254 169, 179, 188, 190–4, 198–9, 216, n. 144 263 n. 99, 267 n. 21 stigmata, 27, 44, 50–4, 56–7, 74–6, 80, decency, 90, 112–13, 130 88–97, 126–7, 144–7, 156, 175–6, gender, 70, 248 n. 52 187, 202, 210–13, 235 n. 90, 257 gentleman, 88, 94, 97, 112, 114, n. 15 119–20, 128, 155, 163, 245–6 n. 24, Stoker, Bram, 124, 129, 131, 256 n. 13, 253 n. 128, 254 n. 129 257 n. 15 home, 107 Dracula, 26, 28, 53, 58, 120–1, 124–35, sexuality, 87, 94, 96, 226 n. 124, 239 136–8, 147–9, 158–67, 211–15, 255 n. 134 n. 2, 256 n. 13, 257 n. 15, 258 n. see also sexuality 21, 258 n. 27 Villella, Italian felon, 45–6 strangulation, see asphyxiation sublime, 23, 134–5 Wagner, Richard, 72, 76, 82, 242 n. 196 suicide, 106–11, 187, 192, 195, 199, 201, Walpole, Horace, 23–4 251 n. 95 Castle of Otranto, The, 23–4, 135

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Wells, H. G., 82 241 n. 168, 242 n. 184, 243 n. 1, Island of Dr Moreau, The, 44, 248 n. 52, 270 n. 71 263 n. 104 ‘Critic as Artist, The’, 173, 207 ‘Zoological Retrogression’, 43 Picture of Dorian Gray, The, 2, 26–9, Whitman, Walt, 76 79–81, 137, 168–88, 189–90, Wilberforce, Samuel, 37, 230 198–208, 212, 215–16, 241 n. 168, n. 21 270 n. 73, 271 n. 73, 271 n. 86 Wilde, Oscar, 1–3, 80–2, 123, 168, 198–200, 213, 216, 219 n. 3, Zola, Emile, 72, 82, 194