Abstract
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much modern legislation, notably in France, Austria, and Italy, where the laws affecting these misdemeanours have been repealed, on the ground that they are diseases to be cured by a physician, rather than crimes to be punished by a judge.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’.
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Notes
Rupert Hart-Davis (ed.), Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 142.
Oscar Wilde qtd in Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 517.
In his letter, Wilde exaggerates his own status in Nordau’s study: the connection between an artistic temperament and insanity was well-established, Wilde claimed, with ‘Professor Nordau in his book on “Degenerescence” published in 1894 [sic] having devoted an entire chapter to the petitioner as a specially typical example of this fatal law’ (Hart-Davis (ed.), Selected Letters, p. 142). In fact, on the 560-odd pages of Nordau’s diatribe, Wilde’s style of fashion and his prose essays are dealt with on a mere six pages (see Max Nordau, Degeneration (New York: D. Appleton, 1895), pp. 317–22). However, Wilde was certainly the most exposed of Nordau’s targets, and his highly sensationalised court case provided Nordau with an extra quantum of unsolicited fame.
J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman, the editors of the first book-length study on the subject, considered their collection Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) ‘an experiment in intellectual history’ (p. ix) and allowed their contributors relatively free creative reign in the examination of this — at the time — understudied area of research. The first monograph in the field,
Daniel Pick’s magisterial Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1989) 1993), was intended as a comprehensive examination of ‘the formation and dissemination of a medico-psychiatric and natural-scientific language of degeneration’ (p. 2) in a broad pan-European context.
This was quickly followed by William Greenslade’s Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), which traces the influence of degeneration theory in the works of Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Warwick Deeping and John Buchan. Knowledge of degeneration was further enhanced in 1996 by two important studies:
Stephen Arata’s Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) analyses three varieties of decline in late-Victorian literature — national, biological and aesthetic (p. 2);
Kelly Hurley’s theoretically astute The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1996) 2004) focuses on ‘the ruination of the human subject’ (p. 3) in the pages of British Gothic fiction and the writings of the degenerationists. Arata’s and Hurley’s monographs were followed by a string of important publications from the field of Gothic Studies,
notably Cyndy Kay Hendershot, The Animal Within: Masculinity and the Gothic (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press (1998) 2001);
Susan J. Navarette, The Shape of Fear: Horror and the Fin-de-Siècle Culture of Decadence (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1998);
and Andrew Smith, Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). This list of relevant criticism is indicative rather than comprehensive. For further influential contributions, see the bibliography at the end of this study and their critical inclusion in the subsequent chapters.
I appropriate the phrase ‘Gothic effulgence’ from Robert Miles, who uses it to characterise the first flowering of this mode of writing in the last decade of the eighteenth century (see Robert Miles, ‘The 1790s: The Effulgence of Gothic’, in Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 41–62).
Daniel Pick shows how the Lancet — one of Britain’s most respected medical journals — entertained discussions about degeneration from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Starting with clinical analyses of degenerative organs in the human body and anthropological accounts of ‘primitive’ peoples in the 1850s, degeneration was first addressed as a possible pathological condition of Britain’s urban population in the 1860s (see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1989) 1993), pp. 189–90). Throughout the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s, the potential dangers of degeneration, which were extensively analysed by the era’s scientific community, similarly preoccupied social reformers, journalists and readers.
Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1996) 2004), p. 73.
Charles Kingsley, Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays (London and New York: Macmillan, 1902), p. 26.
James Cantlie, Degeneration Amongst Londoners (London: Field & Tuer et al., 1885), p. 24.
Dunn, for instance, attempted a rare statistical comparison of the ‘Report of the Factory Commissioners’ of 1833 with the ‘Report of the Local Government Board on “Changes in Hours and Ages of Employment of Children and Young Persons in Textile Factories”’ of 1873 to settle the question once and for all (see Dunn, ‘Is Our Race Degenerating?’, p. 313). He argued that his results could not support the theory of a progressive degeneration of Britain’s urban population. Even though Dunn conceded the unhealthy living conditions of the urban poor, he believed that the evolutionary mechanism of an organism’s adaptation to environmental change would ensure the progressive development of the human race (see Dunn, ‘Is Our Race Degenerating?’, p. 301). For other contemporary voices about the degeneracy controversy, see William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 41–6 and pp. 47–53).
Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin (1971) 1976), pp. 11–12.
The classic study of the London ‘residuum’ and its perception as a dangerous underclass by Britain’s bourgeoisie is Stedman Jones, Outcast London. William Greenslade points out how middle-class complacency about the living conditions of London’s underclass was shaken by Andrew Mearns’s The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Enquiry into the Conditions of the Abject Poor (1883), ‘the most talked about pamphlet of the 1880s’ (Greenslade, Degeneration, p. 48). Deborah Epstein Nord analyses the way in which nineteenth-century urban explorers such as William Booth, Margaret Harkness (‘John Law’), Jack London, Henry Mayhew and George Sims consistently compared the inhabitants of Victorian slums to the natives of Africa,
Australia and the South Sea Islands (see Deborah Epstein Nord, ‘The Social Explorer as Anthropologist: Victorian Travellers Among the Urban Poor’, in William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock (eds), Visions of the Modern City: Essays in History, Art, and Literature (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 122–34).
See Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 19–20.
Max Nordau, Degeneration (New York: D. Appleton, 1895), p. 35.
Kelly Hurley notes how this phenomenon of nervous exhaustion was influenced by George Beard’s study of ‘neurasthenia’ (a lack of nervous energy) in American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences (1881) (see Hurley, Gothic Body, p. 74).
J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman, ‘Degeneration: An Introduction’ in J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman (eds), Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. ix–xiv (xiv).
See Janet Oppenheim, ‘Shattered Nerves’: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 275.
See Jonathan Dollimore, ‘Perversion, Degeneration, and the Death Drive’, in James Eli Adams and Andrew H. Miller (eds), Sexualities in Victorian Britain (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 96–117 (99).
See Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness, & Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 119.
See Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 3.
Hurley, Gothic Body, p. 71. See also R. B. Kershner, ‘Degeneration: The Explanatory Nightmare’, The Georgia Review 40 (1986), pp. 416–44 (424).
Ian Dowbiggin, ‘Degeneration and Hereditarianism in French Mental Medicine, 1840–90: Psychiatric Theory as Ideological Adaptation’, in William F. Bynum, Roy Porter and Michael Shepherd (eds), The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, vol. 1: People and Ideas (London and New York: Tavistock, 1985), pp. 188–232 (191).
There is no standard English translation of Morel’s works. Direct quotations from Morel have been translated by the author. ‘[L]’idée la plus claire que nous puissions nous former de la dégénérescence de l’espèce humaine, est de nous la représenter comme une déviation maladive d’un type primitif (Bénédict Augustin Morel, Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espèce humaine et des causes qui produisent ces variétés maladives (Paris: J. B. Baillière, 1857), p. 5). As in the case of its English equivalent, the French adjective primitif denotes both ‘primitive’ (that is, pertaining to an early stage of development) and ‘original’ (that is, primary and not derived). The context of Morel’s treatise makes obvious that his definition employs the word in this latter sense.
See Eric T. Carlson, ‘Medicine and Degeneration: Theory and Practice’, in Chamberlin and Gilman (eds), Degeneration, pp. 121–44 (122); Rafael Huertas, ‘Madness and Degeneration, I. From ‘Fallen Angel’ to Mentally Ill’, History of Psychiatry 3 (1992), pp. 391–411 (393); and Hurley, Gothic Body, p. 68.
See Rafael Huertas, ‘Madness and Degeneration, II. Alcoholism and Degeneration’, History of Psychiatry 4 (1993), pp. 1–21 (7).
See Sara Mills, Discourse (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 6–7.
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London and New York: Routledge (1969) 2002), pp. 120–1.
Jürgen Link develops his theory of normalism in Versuch über den Normalismus: Wie Normalität produziert wird (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (1997) 2006).
A very useful shorter account is provided in Jürgen Link, ‘Normal/Normalität/Normalismus’, in Karlheinz Barck (ed.), Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, vol. 4: Medien — Populär (Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 2002), pp. 538–62. All quotations from Link’s works are translated by the author.
In 1885, Parliament passed the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which was originally designed to protect young women from the fate of prostitution. However, the Labouchère Amendment, which was added to the bill at the last minute, recriminalised homosexuality. For an outline of the events that led to the passing of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, see Joseph Bristow, ‘Wilde, Dorian Gray, and Gross Indecency’, in Bristow (ed.), Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 44–63 (48–51) and, more extensively,
Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 42–73.
Yuri M. Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, trans. Ann Shukman, intro. Umberto Eco (Bloomington, IN, and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press (1990) 2000), p. 128.
See Michael Titzmann, ‘Aspekte der Fremdheitserfahrung: Die logisch-semiotische Konstruktion des “Fremden” und des “Selbst”’, in Bernd Lenz and Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink (eds), Fremdheitserfahrung und Fremdheitsdarstellung in okzidentalen Kulturen: Theorieansätze, Medien/Textsorten, Diskursformen (Passau: Wissenschaftsverlag Richard Rothe, 1999), pp. 89–114 (97).
Fredric Jameson, ‘Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre’, New Literary History 7.1 (1975), pp. 135–63 (140).
Roger Luckhurst, ‘Introduction’, in Roger Luckhurst (ed.), Late Victorian Gothic Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. ix–xxxi (xx).
Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 182.
Glennis Byron, ‘Gothic in the 1890s’, in David Punter (ed.), A Companion to the Gothic (Malden, MA, et al.: Blackwell Publishing (2000) 2001), pp. 132–42 (132).
The article by Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall is roughly structured into two parts, the first of which aims at a general critique of the ‘misguided’ interpretive strategies of modern Gothic criticism, which they see as problematically influenced by psychoanalytical theory (Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall, ‘Gothic Criticism’ in Punter (ed.), A Companion to the Gothic (Malden, MA, et al.: Blackwell Publishing (2000) 2001), pp. 209–28 (209)). Their verdict is nothing short of scathing: ‘Gothic criticism is condemned to repeat what is has failed to understand and so reproduces in its own discourse what we call the trope of “Gothicising” the past, typically casting the nineteenth century bourgeoisie in the melodramatic light reserved for the Italian aristocracy or the Spanish Inquisition by Radcliffe and Lewis. Gothic criticism serves less to illuminate a certain body of fiction than to congratulate itself, on behalf of progressive modem opinion, upon its liberation from the dungeons of Victorian sexual repression or social hierarchy’ (Baldick and Mighall, ‘Gothic Criticism’, p. 210). By de-historicising their subject matter, Baldick and Mighall argue, critics of the Gothic have imposed supposedly universal structures of the mind on a literary genre that is, however, prominently concerned with history (see Baldick and Mighall, ‘Gothic Criticism’, p. 218). The second part goes on to dismiss those critical contributions that do contextualise their object of study, while unduly relying on the ‘anxiety model’ (see Baldick and Mighall, ‘Gothic Criticism’, pp. 221–8). This latter critique was first voiced in Mighall’s groundbreaking study, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press (1999) 2003), pp. 166–8.
Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press (1961) 2001), p. 63.
Robert Miles, Gothic Writing, 1750–1820: A Genealogy (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 2.
See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York and London: Methuen (1980) 1986), pp. 9–10.
Julian Wolfreys, Transgression: Identity, Space, Time (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 98.
Patrick McGrath, ‘Transgression and Decay’, in Christoph Grunenberg (ed.), Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art (Boston, MA, and Cambridge, MA: Institute of Contemporary Art & MIT Press, 1997), pp. 158–2 [sic] (157). See also Botting, Gothic, pp. 8–9.
David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Time, vol. 2: The Modern Gothic (London and New York: Longman (1989) 1996), p. 184.
Chris Baldick, ‘Introduction’, in Baldick (ed.), The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press (1992) 1993), pp. xi–xxiii (xix).
Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, ed. Michael Gamer (London and New York: Penguin (1764) 2001), pp. 6–7.
David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Time, vol. 1: The Gothic Tradition (London and New York: Longman (1980) 1996), p. 46.
See Hurley, Gothic Body, pp. 53–113 and Judith Halberstam, Skin Show: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 16.
Mighall, Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction, p. 30. With this quotation Robert Mighall refers to G. M. W. Reynolds’s serial novel The Mysteries of London (1844–8). However, it also seems a particularly pertinent description of the late-Victorian Gothic. The Gothic’s geographical development ‘from Udolpho to Spitalfields’ — via Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837–8) and Bleak House (1852–3), Reynolds’s Mysteries, and the ‘suburban Gothic’ of sensation fiction — is traced in great detail by Mighall (see Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction, pp. 27–77 and pp. 118–29).
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Karschay, S. (2015). Introduction. In: Degeneration, Normativity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137450333_1
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