Abstract
When Bénédict Augustin Morel advanced his formative definition of degeneration as ‘a pathological deviation from an original type’ in his Traité des dégénérescences in 1857, Charles Darwin was getting his own grand treatise into shape. On the Origin of Species (1859), however, seems to work in the very opposite direction of Morel’s thoughts. Instead of degeneration, it traced the vagaries involved in the generative process of evolution by means of natural selection. At the same time, Darwin’s theory can be read as accommodating the spectre of its own inversion. Not only could degeneration be pictured as a species’ evolutionary development reeled off in reverse — evolutionary theory in itself contains the very notion of biological regression.
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Notes
Two classic studies that analyse the narrative patterns of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and trace its influence on Victorian fiction are Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1983) 2000) and
George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Both of these groundbreaking books show how, ‘[c]oming from a mode of discourse self-confidently representational and non-fictional’, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection ‘enters into the dubiously representational realms of narrative and fiction’ (Levine, Darwin and the Novelists, p. 2), where it ‘has been assimilated and resisted by novelists who, within the subtle enregisterment of narrative, have assayed its powers’ (Beer, Darwin’s Plots, p. 2). While Beer traces such an ‘enregisterment’ in the works of Charles Kingsley, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, Levine is concerned with writers less obviously shaped by Darwin’s ideas, such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope and Joseph Conrad. For an analysis of The Origin as ‘one long argument’
(Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin (1859) 1968), p. 435) in the tradition of John Herschel’s philosophy of reasoning,
see Kenneth C. Waters, ‘The Arguments in The Origin of Species’, in Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Darwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 120–43.
For book-length studies of the history of evolutionary theory, see Peter J. Bowler Life’s Splendid Drama: Evolutionary Biology and the Reconstruction of Life’s Ancestry, 1860–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996);
Ernst Mayr, One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991);
Michael Ruse, The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw (Chicago, IL, et al.: University of Chicago Press (1979) 1999). Shorter informed accounts are, for example, provided by
Robin Gilmour, The Victorian Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1830–1890 (Harlow: Longman, 1993), pp. 118–33;
Josephine M. Guy, ‘Science and Religion: Introduction’, in Guy (ed.), The Victorian Age: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (London: Routledge (1998) 2002), pp. 199–211;
Virginia Richter, Literature After Darwin: Human Beasts in Western Fiction, 1859–1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 17–39.
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin (1859) 1968), p. 67. All further references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.
See Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, intro. T. H. Hollingsworth (London: J. M. Dent, (1803) 1973), pp. 5–11.
Beer, Darwin’s Plots, p. 109. William Greenslade points out how the term ‘fitness’ was used by Darwin and other biologists in a largely value-free manner. Only with the development of Social Darwinism in the last two decades of the nineteenth century did the notion of ‘fitness’ become imbued with ideological ambiguity: ‘Value was being effectively and widely smuggled into Darwinism’ (William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 36). John Glendening accounts for this development with evolutionary theory’s inherently ambiguous appeal: on the one hand, it sanctions a self-congratulatory sense of greatness in mankind for having risen to the top of the natural world; yet, on the other, it also decentres humanity’s sense of self by effectively reducing Man to the status of a mere animal
(see John Glendening, The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels: An Entangled Bank (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), p. 14).
Daniel Pick argues that Darwin was very well inclined to extend his evolutionary theory to the history of mankind at the time of The Origin, as a number of entries in Darwin’s notebooks show (see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1989) 1993), p. 193, n. 52).
However, the largely averse critical reception of Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) was partly responsible for Darwin’s sparse treatment of the subject in The Origin (see Pick, Faces of Degeneration, pp. 192–3). Chambers was an amateur geologist whose anonymously published Vestiges at least implied the animal origins of man. However, he posited a transformationalist view of human evolution, which ascribed the variability amongst creatures to past acts of divine intervention (see Guy, ‘Science and Religion’, p. 207). A further cautioning voice was that of Charles Lyell — author of Principles of Geology (1830–3) and dedicatee of The Origin — whose scientific blessing Darwin craved
(see Adrian Desmond and James Moore, ‘Introduction’, in Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. xi–lviii (xxx–xxxi).
In this respect, Darwin appropriated Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, yet the notion of natural selection, which would randomly support only those that were most fit to survive, was unacceptable for the advocates of Lamarckism, who believed that a changed environment would induce all the members of a species to adapt (see Peter J. Bowler, ‘Holding Your Head Up High: Degeneration and Orthogenesis in Theories of Human Evolution’, in James R. Moore (ed.), History, Humanity, and Evolution: Essays for John C. Greene (Cambridge et al: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 329–53 (333)). Furthermore, Lamarck’s understanding of evolution was decidedly progressive and cast Nature as a purposive force at variance with Darwinian evolutionism’s inherent callousness (see Robin Gilmour, The Victorian Period, p. 121).
This notion of an increasing structural complexity in evolving organisms was most famously put forward by Darwin’s contemporary Herbert Spencer (who suggested to Darwin the term ‘survival of the fittest’ rather than ‘struggle for existence’). Two years before The Origin, Spencer had defined progress as ‘an advance from homogeneity of structure to heterogeneity of structure’ (Herbert Spencer, ‘Art. V. — Progress: Its Law and Cause’, The Westminster Review 67 (1857), p. 446). That this development was one that ultimately tended towards perfection was unequivocally stated by Spencer as the universal ‘law of all progress’: ‘This is the course of evolution followed by all organisms whatever. It is settled beyond dispute that organic progress consists in a change from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous’ (Spencer, ‘Progress’, p. 446).
Margot Norris, Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, & Lawrence (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 37.
See Peter Morton, The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination, 1860–1900 (London et al.: Allen & Unwin, 1984), p. 91.
Leonard Jenyns, ‘From Leonard Jenyns: 4 January 1860’, in Charles Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 8, ed. Frederick Burkhardt et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 14.
William Sharp Macleay, ‘W. S. Macleay to Robert Lowe’ (1860), in A. Patchett Martin, Life and Letters of the Right Honourable Robert Lowe Viscount Sherbrooke, G. C. B., D. C. L. etc. With a Memoir of Sir John Coape Sherbrooke, G. C. B. Sometime Governor-General of Canada, vol. 2 (London and New York: Longmans, Green & Co, 1893), p. 205.
The story of the Huxley-Wilberforce debate has been told so many times, it is easy to forget that there are very few sources to suggest it is anything other than a Darwinian myth. Stephen Jay Gould rehearses the few existing facts and measures the evidence for and against the popular heroic version of the encounter (Stephen Jay Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (New York: Norton, 1991), pp. 385–401).
Thomas Henry Huxley, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (New York: D. Appleton, 1863), p. 71. All further references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.
Benjamin Disraeli qtd in Ian St. John, Disraeli and the Art of Victorian Politics (London: Anthem (2005) 2010), p. 54.
See Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, intro. Adrian Desmond and James Moore (London: Penguin (1871) 2004), p. 22. All further references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.
See Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press (1999) 2003), p. 144, n. 23. In a looser sense, atavism could also signify the transmission of negative character traits from a parental generation to their offspring, even though — strictly speaking — this is incorrect. However, even Huxley sometimes used the term laxly to denote any form of reversal to an earlier, and not necessarily remote, ancestor. Darwin was not pleased with Huxley’s carelessness and wrote to him on 25 February 1863: ‘You here & there use Atavism=Inheritance. — Duchesne, who, I believe invented word in his Strawberry Book, confined it, as everyone else has since done, to resemblance to grandfather or more remote ancestor, in contradistinction, to resemblance to parents[.]’ Huxley complied with his elder’s wish and meekly wrote an apologetic note in return: ‘I picked up “Atavism” in Pritchard [an unclear reference, probably to James Cowles Prichard] years ago — and as it is a much more convenient word than “Hereditary transmission of variations” it slipped into equivalence in my mind — and I forgot all about the original limitation’
(Charles Darwin, ‘To T. H. Huxley’ (before 25 February 1863), in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 16, ed. Frederick Burckhardt et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 176–7).
See Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press (1989) 1991), p. 66.
See Diane B. Paul, ‘Darwin, Social Darwinism and Eugenics’, in Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Darwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 219–45 (224–5).
Edwin Ray Lankester, Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (London: Macmillan, 1880), p. 10. All further references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.
H. G. Wells, ‘Zoological Retrogression’, The Gentleman’s Magazine 271 (1891), p. 247.
Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1996) 2004), p. 56.
H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, ed. Patrick Parrinder, intro. Margaret Atwood, annot. Steven McLean (London: Penguin (1896) 2005), p. 130. For detailed readings of evolution, degeneracy and animalism in Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, see Hurley, Gothic Body, pp. 102–13 and Glendening, Evolutionary Imagination, pp. 39–68.
Analyses of Lombroso’s L’uomo delinquente studiato in rapporto alla antropologia, alla medicina legale ed alle discipline carcerie were until recently hampered by the absence of a reliable English translation. Furthermore, Lombroso kept revising and enlarging his study over a period of 21 years, until the slim volume of the first edition (1876) had swelled to four thick volumes in its final form (1896–7). Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter have authoritatively re-translated Criminal Man (Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man, ed. and trans. Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press (1876) 2006)), and their edition collates the most important material from all five editions (1876, 1878, 1884, 1889 and 1896–7) with an invaluable critical corpus. For the publication history of Criminal Man and a detailed account of Lombroso’s changing theory,
Mary S. Gibson, ‘Cesare Lombroso and Italian Criminology: Theory and Politics’, in Peter Becker and Richard F. Wetzell (eds), Criminals and Their Scientists: The History of Criminology in International Perspective (Washington, DC, and Cambridge: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 138–51;
Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter, ‘Editors’ Introduction’, in Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero, Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman, ed. Gibson and Rafter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press (1893) 2004), pp. 3–33, as well as the editorial introductions to Lombroso’s individual editions in Criminal Man (pp. 39–41; pp. 97–8; pp. 161–2; pp. 227–8; pp. 299–300).
See David G. Horn, The Criminal Body: Lombroso and the Anatomy of Deviance (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 38.
General historical accounts of Lombroso’s criminal anthropology are provided in Neil Davie, Tracing the Criminal: The Rise of Scientific Criminology in Britain, 1860–1918 (Oxford: Bardwell Press, 2005);
Mary Gibson, Born to Crime: Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of Biological Criminology (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002) and Horn, Criminal Body. Daniel Pick reads Lombroso’s life and works in the context of nineteenth-century Italian politics (see Pick, Faces of Degeneration, pp. 109–52).
Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man, ed. and trans. Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press (1876) 2006), p. 236. All further references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text. Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter point out that Lombroso here exaggerates his intellectual independence, since he did reference Darwin’s work as early as the first edition of Criminal Man, when writing about the criminal habit of excessive tattooing (Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter, ‘Notes’, in Lombroso, Criminal Man, pp. 371–400 (p. 392, n. 9)).
See Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981), pp. 141–2; Pick, Faces of Degeneration, pp. 136–8.
It is important to stress, however, that the differences between the two schools should not be overrated (see Marie-Christine Leps, Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Discourse (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1992), p. 36). David G. Horn points to the ‘considerable porosity of both disciplinary and national boundaries’ (Horn, Criminal Body, p. 4) between Italy’s and France’s criminologists. Lombroso indeed oscillated between biological and sociological causes in explaining criminal behaviour. Daniel Pick observes that Lombroso’s early writings are remarkable for their emphasis on the determining influence of the environment (see Pick, Faces of Degeneration, p. 113), and in Criminal Man Lombroso outlined an aetiology of crime, including the weather, urbanisation and moral education (see Criminal Man, pp. 114–34). On the other hand, Lombroso’s French opponents did not deny the significance of atavism for criminal behaviour. They rather understood crime as the combined product of environment and biology, most memorably captured in Lacassagne’s famous metaphor: ‘The social milieu is the cultural broth of criminality; the microbe is the criminal, an element that gains significance only at the moment it finds the broth that makes it ferment.’ (‘Le milieu social est le bouillon de culture de la criminalité; le microbe c’est le criminel, un élément qui n’a d’importance que le jour où il trouve le bouillon qui le fait fermenter’ (Alexandre Lacassagne qtd in Pick, Faces of Degeneration, p. 140)). Scathing comments from either faction should also be seen in the context of disciplinary struggles for authority between the Italian and the French camps (see Davie, Tracing the Criminal, p. 162).
In 1911, Lombroso’s daughter Gina Lombroso-Ferrero published a compiled summary of her father’s L’uomo delinquente to which Lombroso had contributed an original introduction. For a classic but still reliable biographical account of Lombroso’s career, see Marvin E. Wolfgang, ‘Cesare Lombroso’, in Hermann Mannheim (ed.), Pioneers in Criminology (London: Stevens & Sons, 1960), pp. 168–227.
Cesare Lombroso, ‘Introduction’, in Gina Lombroso-Ferrero, Criminal Man: According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso, intro. Leonard D. Savitz (Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith (1911) 1972), pp. xi–xx (xii).
For a history of the notion of recapitulation from classical antiquity to the early twentieth century, see Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977). A shorter account is provided in Gould, Mismeasure of Man, pp. 113–22.
See Laura Otis, Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth & Early Twentieth Centuries (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), p. 7.
It is important to note that Lombroso’s implicit norm against which he measures atavistic deviance, is not only defined through the categories of race and age but also through that of gender. Late in his career, Lombroso wrote The Female Offender (La donna delinquente, la prostitute e la donna normale, 1893), an extensive treatise on criminality amongst women. However, his conviction that women are evolutionarily less evolved than men (and thus closer to children) is already evident in Criminal Man, even though statistical data on criminal behaviour in women suggested that born criminals were generally male. Lombroso solved this empirical problem with characteristic nonchalance by counting prostitutes as a variety of female offenders: ‘If we include prostitutes in our statistics, the crime rates of the two sexes become nearly equal, with the weaker sex possibly predominating’ (Lombroso, Criminal Man, pp. 127–8, emphases added). For accounts of Lombroso’s study on criminal women, see Horn, Criminal Body, pp. 52–7, and the editorial introduction to Mary Gibson’s and Nicole Hahn Rafter’s new translation of La donna delinquente (Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero, Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman, ed. Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press (1893) 2004).
Many careers could be cited as examples for the cross-disciplinarity of the sciences in the nineteenth century. Lombroso was a physician-turned-criminologist who, arguably, also contributed to sexological research (see Criminal Man, p. 7). Havelock Ellis is primarily known today as an important early sexologist, yet it was the polymath Ellis who was primarily responsible for the popularisation of criminology (a term he introduced) in England with the publication of his own study on the subject, The Criminal, in 1890 (see David Garland, ‘British Criminology Before 1935’, The British Journal of Criminology 28 (1988), pp. 1–17 (5–6) and Greenslade, Degeneration, pp. 97–9).
Nancy Leys Stepan, ‘Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science’, Isis 77.2 (1986), pp. 261–77 (264).
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale, ed. Michael Newton (London: Penguin (1907) 2007), p. 38.
See Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Maud Ellmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press (1897) 1998), p. 188.
See Bridget M. Marshall, ‘The Face of Evil: Phrenology, Physiognomy, and the Gothic Villain’, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 6 (2000), pp. 161–72 (165).
See Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 3.
Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (London: Virago (1985) 1987), p. 118.
For useful accounts of Maudsley’s life and work, see Trevor Turner, ‘Henry Maudsley: Psychiatrist, Philosopher, and Entrepreneur’, in William F. Bynum, Roy Porter, and Michael Shepherd (eds), The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry, vol. 3: The Asylum and Its Psychiatry (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 151–89;
Nicholas Hervey, Charlotte MacKenzie, and Andrew T. Scull, Masters of Bedlam: The Transformation of the Mad-Doctoring Trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996) and Davie, Tracing the Criminal, pp. 67–123.
Henry Maudsley, Body and Mind: An Inquiry into Their Connection and Mutual Influence, Specially in Reference to Mental Disorders: An Enlarged and Revised Edition: To Which Are Added Psychological Essays (London: Macmillan (1870) 1873), p. 2. All further references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.
Janet Oppenheim, ‘Shattered Nerves’: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 270.
Henry Maudsley, The Pathology of Mind: Being the Third Edition of the Second Part of the ‘Physiology and Pathology of Mind’, Recast, Enlarged, and Rewritten (New York: D. Appleton (1879) 1880), p. 84. All further references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.
Henry Maudsley, Organic to Human: Psychological and Sociological (London: Macmillan, 1916), p. 267.
Thomas Henry Huxley, Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays (New York: AMS Press, 1896), p. 61.
Henry Maudsley, Responsibility in Mental Disease (London: Kegan Paul and Trench & Co. (1874) 1885), p. 58.
Alienists of Maudsley’s ilk believed that madness (like criminality) constituted a reversal to an earlier phylogenetic stage in humanity’s evolution. The English physician Daniel Hack Tuke regarded morally insane patients as evolutionary throwbacks and compared them to the indigenous and supposedly less civilised races of Africa: ‘Such a man as this is a reversion to an old savage type, and is born by accident in the wrong century. He would have had sufficient scope for his bloodthirsty propensities, and been in harmony with his environment, in a barbaric age, or at the present day in certain parts of Africa, but he cannot be tolerated now as a member of civilized society. But what is to be done with this man who, from no fault of his own, is born in the 19th instead of a long-past century? Are we to punish him for his involuntary anachronism?’ (Daniel Hack Tuke, ‘Case of Moral Insanity or Congenital Moral Defect, with Commentary’, Journal of Mental Science 31 (1885), pp. 360–6 (365)).
For an account of the history of sexual ‘science’ since the eighteenth century, see Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 25–36 and the contributions to
Julie Peakman (ed.), A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Enlightenment (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2012).
For studies of the emergence of sexology proper in the nineteenth century, see the contributions to Chiara Beccalossi and Ivan Crozier (eds), A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Age of Empire (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2011),
Joseph Bristow, Sexuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1997) pp. 12–61, Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature,
and Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths & Modern Sexualities (London et al.: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985).
Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature, p. 43. Krafft-Ebing seems to have taken the title from the Russian psychiatrist Heinrich Kaan’s earlier and far less influential classification of sexual disorders. Kaan’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1844) was popularised in the twentieth century through Michel Foucault’s lectures on sexuality, in which he honoured it as a foundational text in the history of sexual science: ‘With Heinrich Kaan’s book we have then what could be called the date of birth, or in any case the date of the emergence, of sexuality and sexual aberrations in the psychiatric field’ (Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975, ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 282). Post-Foucauldian critics, however, tend to give pride of place to Krafft-Ebing’s study as the formational text for the discipline of sexology.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: With Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Forensic Study, trans. Franklin S. Klaf (New York: Arcade Publishing (1886) 1998), p. xxii. All further references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.
‘Die folgenden Blätter wenden sich an die Adresse von Männern ernster Forschung auf dem Gebiete der Naturwissenschaft und der Jurisprudenz. Damit jene nicht Unberufenen als Lektüre dienen, sah sich der Verfasser veranlasst, einen nur dem Gelehrten verständlichen Titel zu wählen, sowie, wo immer möglich, in Terminis technicis sich zu bewegen. Ausserdem schien es geboten, einzelne besonders anstössige Stellen statt in deutscher, in lateinischer Sprache zu geben’ (Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis: Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der konträren Sexualempfindung: Eine medizinischgerichtliche Studie für Ärzte und Juristen (Munich: Matthes & Seitz (1886) 1997), p. v). The translation of Psychopathia Sexualis by Franklin S. Klaf, which is used in this study, renders all of Krafft-Ebing’s Latin excursuses in modern English. Inexplicably, the important above passage from the preface to the first edition is here cut out.
Psychopathia Sexualis was quickly translated into several foreign languages, amongst them English, French, Dutch, Hungarian, Russian and Japanese (see Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature, p. 275). One reviewer of the British Medical Journal, writing in 1893, deemed the book so risqué that he wished ‘it had been written entirely in Latin, and thus veiled in the decent obscurity of a dead language’ (qtd in Daniel Blain, ‘Foreword’, in Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: With Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Forensic Study, trans. Franklin S. Klaf (New York: Arcade Publishing (1886) 1998), pp. xvi–xx (xix)). Indeed, Psychopathia Sexualis’s long stretches of Latin did not seem to deter the many non-academic readers from perusing its pages, as the Munich physician Albert von Schrenk-Notzing (a contemporary of Krafft-Ebing) noted: ‘To be sure the appearance of seven editions of that work could not be accounted for were its circulation confined to psychiatric readers’ (Albert von Schrenk-Notzing qtd in Blain, ‘Foreword’, p. xix). There is an apocryphal rumour that German and Austrian booksellers registered a marked increase in sales of Latin dictionaries after the publication of Psychopathia Sexualis (see Joseph LoPiccolo, ‘Introduction to the Arcade Edition’, in Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, pp. xiii–xv (ix)).
See Lisa Downing, ‘Sexual Variations’, in Chiara Beccalossi and Ivan Crozier (eds), A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Age of Empire (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2011), pp. 63–81 (66–7).
See Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature, p. 47. Renate Hauser reads Krafft-Ebing’s preoccupation with subjective states of mind as indicative of a new psychological understanding of sexuality, rather than ‘an exercise in pathology’ (Renate Hauser, ‘Krafft-Ebing’s Psychological Understanding of Sexual Behaviour’, in Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (eds), Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science: The History of Attitudes to Sexuality (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 210–27p (211)). This is an important revisionist understanding of Krafft-Ebing’s work, which was frequently branded as ‘materialist’ when contrasted with Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic approach to understanding human behaviour (see Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature, pp. 59–61). However, Hauser’s contention that the terms ‘masochism’ and ‘sadism’ did not function as ‘disease labels but rather described extremist expressions of normal attitudes’ (Hauser, ‘Sexual Behaviour’, p. 211) is only correct with critical hindsight and was not really a conscious part of Krafft-Ebing’s sexological project. Krafft-Ebing certainly shows an unusual understanding of perversion as the pathological intensification of normal drives. By the same token, however, he attempted to uphold a qualitative difference between deviant acts as part of a ‘normal’ sexuality and ‘true’ sexual perversions.
Max Nordau, Degeneration (New York: D. Appleton, 1895), pp. 538–9. All further references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.
See Jürgen Link, Versuch über den Normalismus: Wie Normalität produziert wird (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (1997) 2006), p. 19 and pp. 42–3.
Ironically, this passage is not a far cry from William Butler Yeats’s famous poem ‘The Second Coming’ (1921), in which the speaker conjures a similar apocalyptic scenario: ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity’
(William Butler Yeats, The Major Works, ed. Edward Larrissy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 91). Even though Yeats is not included in Nordau’s diatribe, it does not seem far-fetched to claim that the young Irish poet would have found his place in the ranks of Nordau’s degenerates, had the critic been aware of Yeats’s life and his early creative output.
Allon White, The Uses of Obscurity: The Fiction of Early Modernism (London et al.: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 6.
Andrew Smith similarly notes this instability with regard to the construction of a normative masculinity in Nordau’s discourse: ‘[Degeneration’s] language of Type and Symptom, while suggesting that one can easily discern the perverse and culturally anomalous rests on an assumption that the masculine “norm” is itself stable and coherent’ (Andrew Smith, Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 3).
See Bernard Shaw, Major Critical Essays: The Quintessence of Ibsenism, The Perfect Wagnerite, The Sanity of Art (Harmondsworth et al.: Penguin, 1986), p. 353.
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 (102–3).
See Rafael Huertas, ‘Madness and Degeneration, IV. The Man of Genius’, History of Psychiatry, 4 (1993), pp. 301–19 (301).
The French psychiatrist Jacques-Joseph Moreau was the first to write about genius as one form of extreme abnormality (the other being idiocy) and developed his theory of the génie-névrose in La psychologie morbide dans ses rapports avec la philosophie de l’histoire, ou l’influence des névropathies sur le dynamisme intellectuel in 1859, in which the genius was described as an individual with an overexcited nervous system (see Huertas, ‘Madness and Degeneration’, p. 305). Valentin Magnan’s studies about the ‘superior degenerate’ became particularly influential throughout the second half of the nineteenth century (see Huertas, ‘Madness and Degeneration’, pp. 306–7). Lombroso’s intervention in the subject, in Genio e folia (1864) and L’uomo di genio, was followed in England by J. F. Nisbet’s The Insanity of Genius (1891)
and Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius (1892) (see Arata, Fictions of Loss, p. 18).
Cesare Lombroso, The Man of Genius (London: Walter Scott, 1891), p. v.
See Gowan Dawson, Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 190–221.
Regenia Gagnier makes a similar point: ‘But more important than the novel itself is the controversy it generated, for it recapitulated the novel’s themes’ (Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), p. 51).
See William James, Essays, Comments, and Reviews (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 507.
Rupert Hart-Davis (ed.), Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 85.
See Richard Eilmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 412.
Edward Clarke qtd in Merlin Holland, Irish Peacock & Scarlet Marquess: The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde (London and New York: Fourth Estate, 2004), p. 42.
John Stokes, In the Nineties (New York et al.: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), p. 11. The synchronicity of Wilde’s fall and the publication of Nordau’s Degeneration was not lost on their contemporaries. William Greenslade points to a famous review by Hugh E. M. Stutfield under the title ‘Tommyrotics’, which established a subtle link between Wilde’s conviction and Nordau’s success (see Greenslade, Degeneration, p. 123). In his contribution to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Stutfield commented cryptically: ‘Recent events, which shall be nameless, must surely have opened the eyes even of those who have hitherto been blind to the true inwardness of modern aesthetic Hellenism, and perhaps the less said on this subject now the better’ (Hugh E. M. Stutfield, ‘Tommyrotics’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (June 1895), pp. 833–45 (835)). The reference to ‘nameless’ events is an underhand jab at Wilde’s sexuality. Homosexual desire was frequently described as ‘the love that dare not speak its name’, a phrase famously inscribed in the poem ‘Two Loves’ (1894) by Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde’s protégé and lover.
Shaw was probably provoked to review Degeneration by its vicious treatment of Ibsen and Wagner, on both of whom he had written admiringly (see Greenslade, Degeneration, p. 125). Two other lengthy studies that made a hatchet job of Nordau’s book were William Hirsch’s Genie und Entartung: Eine psychologische Studie (1895), translated into English as Genius and Degeneration: A Psychological Study in 1897,
and Alfred Egmont Hake’s Regeneration: A Reply to Max Nordau (1896) (see Greenslade, Degeneration, p. 126).
Vernon Lee, ‘Deterioration of Soul’, The Fortnightly Review 59 (1896), pp. 928–43 (928).
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Karschay, S. (2015). Degeneration and the Victorian Sciences. 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_2
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