Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle

S. Karschay

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137450333
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This exciting new study looks at degeneration and deviance in nineteenth-century science and late-Victorian Gothic fiction. The questions it raises are as relevant today as they were at the nineteenth century's fin de siecle: What constitutes the norm from which a deviation has occurred? What exactly does it mean to be 'normal' or 'abnormal'?

1

Introduction

On 3 July 1896, the Home Secretary, Sir Matthew White Ridley, was forwarded 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much modern legislation, notably in France, Austria, and Italy, where the laws affecting these misdemeanours have been repealed, on the ground that they are diseases to be cured by a physician, rather than crimes to be punished by a judge.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

Wilde’s desperate petition and his later, somewhat flippant, remark can serve as valuable introduction points to a study of degeneration and normativity in fin-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 make-up, 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 composition 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 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 accumulation 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 fin-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 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 merits 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 fin-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 fin 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 fin-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 a popular and peculiarly modern mode of writing. This study, then, aims to sharpen critical awareness of how Victorian science and the fin-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 fin-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 fin-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 unavailable 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 fin-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 fin 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 i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Degeneration and the Victorian Sciences
• 3 Detecting the Degenerate: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan
• 4 Othering the Degenerate: Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle
• 5 Normalising the Degenerate: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan
• 6 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index