Novelists such as Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, and particularly Bram Stoker all shared a fascination with the science of crime and the physiognomy of degeneration.18 In Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), a Victorian gentleman-scientist regresses to an apelike primitive. In Rudyard Kipling’s short story “The Mark of the Beast” (1890), an Englishman in India defiles a Hindu temple and regresses to a wolflike state. Although the story offered a rational, medical explanation for the degenerative transformation, it suggested that Western science was impotent to elucidate the mysteries of the East.19 Decline had become a national concern following the formulation of the second law of thermodynamics in 1851. The discovery of the entropic cosmos occasioned reflections on the loss of human energies and the dissipation of vigor.20 Richard Dugdale’s 1877 bestselling account, “The Jukes”: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity became a synonym for degeneracy on both sides of the Atlantic.21 Scientific and literary texts alike expressed fears about dissipation, degeneration, and decline. The fin-de-siècle British Gothic novel was dedicated to exploring the boundary between the human and what has been called the “abhuman.” A highly innovative genre that reemerges at periods of cultural stress, the Gothic violently enacts the reconstitution of the human body and mind. Scientists and novelists expressed nostalgia for the fully human subject, a project their work had undermined.22 Themes of human devolution occurred repeatedly in the fin-de-siècle Gothic, showing the beast within or as a means of demonstrating how casually cruel a nature driven by random change could be.23 The human body was conceptualized as utterly chaotic, unable to maintain its distinctions from an exuberant menagerie of spectacular possibilities: “slug-men, snake-women, ape-men, beast-people, octopus-seal-men, beetlewomen, dog-men, fungus-people.”24
An array of scientific discourses—including evolutionism, criminal anthropology, degeneration theory, sexology, mesmerism, and pre-Freudian psychology—all articulated new models of the abhuman body’s ambiguities. With this crisis in the epistemology of human identity, science was infected with Gothic themes. Darwin had reconceptualized nature as a motiveless force, indifferent to suffering, that was, nevertheless, full of picturesque superabundance. Excessive and gratuitous, nature no longer evidenced divine benevolence but was a teeming chaos of meaninglessness and superfecundity. Natural selection incorporated the teratological and the fantastic, and gestured toward the grotesque.25 Lamarckian evolution similarly provided fruitful explanatory tropes and expressed deep anxieties concerning the health of the nation.26 The effects of alcohol, tobacco, opium, hashish, a poor diet, syphilis, and tuberculosis, as well as fears about the pathologies of the city were all seen as injurious to biological descent. Heredity was no longer considered the motivator of progress, but an invisible source of contamination and danger. In attempting to normalize the meanings of sexuality by delineating the many “perversions” the human body was capable of, sexology merely succeeded in multiplying sexual variety and enlarging the field of possibilities. It also undermined commonplace logics that posited corporeality as the exclusive property of femininity, a state that only masculinity could transcend. Gender was itself an unstable category that had to be perpetually fashioned anew as part of “the immense cultural labour” required to produce and sustain the liberal humanist subject.27
By critiquing science’s classificatory schemes, the Gothic delighted in the creation of monsters. Literary narratives exposed the social, economic, and political conditions of knowledge production, questioned the ontological status of criminal man, and disputed the possibility of science ever purifying its categories. Profound questioning of truths and assumptions were found in the entertaining narratives of novels that revealed “the unsayable of social discourse.”28 By blurring boundaries, novelists were able to challenge the axioms of determinist science. The figure of the criminal “beast” became, on this reading, an intertextual species that slipped between science, literature, and the mass media. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), a masterpiece of ambiguity and anxiety, was heavily influenced by Lombroso: “The criminal always works at one crime [Van Helsing explained]—that is the true criminal who seems predestinate to crime, and who will of none other. This criminal has not full man-brain… . The Count is a criminal and of criminal type. Nordau and Lombroso would so classify him, and qua criminal he is of imperfectly formed mind.”29 The criminal tainting of aristocratic blood recapitulated the plotlines of several late Victorian novels.30 Descended from “noble blood”, the Count was, nevertheless, inherently corrupt. Animated by themes of hypnosis, hysteria, degeneration, and sexuality—a veritable Foucauldtian nightmare of biopower—the novel expressed the dangers of entering new places and experiencing new forms of consciousness. The poison of degeneration could be passed in blood from person to person, potentially infecting the entire population. Against the fantasies of Lombrosoians degeneration could not be contained. Deploying diaries, reports, and letters, the novel resists an easy synthesis. Yet it is concerned with resistance, frustration, and the failure of insight, “paralysed at a threshold of uncertainty, at the turning point between a psychiatric positivism (which the novel derided), and the glimpsed possibility of a new exploration of the unconscious.”31 Orthodox medicine is sleep walking, Stoker suggests, stumbling along in a half-light.
The modern figure of the detective emerged in the shadowy borderlands between vice and virtue, purity and corruption, and science and superstition. Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887) has been credited with establishing many conventions of the detective novel such as scientific deduction as a means to knowledge. Holmes is nothing less than “the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen.”32 As an admiring Watson tells the great detective, “You have brought detection as near an exact science as it ever will be brought in this world.”33 Viewed simply as a detective story, The Hound of the Baskervilles appears to dispel magic and mystery and to render everything visible to the scientific gaze. Yet it is as much a fin-de-siècle Gothic tale as it is detective story. The novel was influenced by Lombroso, as Watson’s representation of Selden demonstrates: “Over the rocks in the crevice in which the candle burnt, there was thrust out an evil yellow face, a terrible animal face, all seamed and scored with vile passions. Foul with mire, with a bristling beard, and hung with matted hair, it might well have belonged to one of those old savages who dwelt on the burrows in the hillsides. The light beneath him was reflected in his small, cunning eyes, which peered fiercely to right and left through the darkness, like a crafty and savage animal who has heard the steps of the hunters.”34 Relying on the conventions of contemporary Gothic narratives, it challenged the aspirations of science to subject crime and criminality to scientific analysis.35 With its use of multiple narratives that implicitly critique science’s claim to a single unified truth, the Gothic was a counterattack against the excessive faith in positivist science and a subversion of received wisdom about criminality.36 Whereas Holmes— “part social physician, part magician”—can deploy his genius to solve crimes, Watson, a medical doctor, can solve nothing.37 The novel is simultaneously a detective story promoting the exclusive use of reason and deduction and a warning about the failures of modernity and the futility of scientism.38
Embodying the conflicting genres of the novel, Sherlock Holmes is associated with both light and darkness, with the urbanity and culture of modern London and with the elemental peat and granite of the primeval moor. “It is my belief, founded upon my experience,” Holmes tells Watson in The Copper Beeches (1892), “that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”39 The paradox of Holmes is also the paradox of the detective story: the more it aims at a rational explanation of crime, the more its appropriation of the Gothic themes of criminal anthropology subverts that project.40 The figure of the “criminal genius” highlighted the instability of criminal anthropology as i
t combined the normal and the pathological.41 “A criminal strain ran in his blood,” Holmes says of Moriarty, a one-time professor of mathematics, “which, instead of being modified, was increased and rendered infinitely more dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers.”42 Recall that for Lombroso, genius had a “degenerative character.” For Lombroso, as for Galton, genius was a form of abnormality, a species of moral insanity. The hereditary line need not run straight; a “good birth” guaranteed nothing. In The Man of Genius, Lombroso warned, “even habitually sober parents, who at the moment of conception are in a temporary state of drunkenness, beget children who are epileptic or paralytic, idiotic or insane… . Thus a single embrace, given in a moment of drunkenness, may be fatal to an entire generation.”43
Criminal anthropology therefore shored up the integrity of the liberal bourgeois subject just as it was undermining it.44 The question of criminal genius was but one exemplar of this general social crisis of criminal nature and human agency. Articulating the oppositional, the unsaid, and the unsayable, literature challenged received scientific wisdoms. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) disputed criminology’s maxim that there was a qualitative difference between the normal and the criminal: “man is not truly one, but truly two.” The novel suggested that within the healthy were hidden the seeds of the pathological: everyone was potentially suspect, a criminal in waiting. Inside everyman lay a dormant ailment, all too easily animated given the right circumstances. “I hazard the guess,” Jekyll says, “that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens.”45 It has been suggested that Jekyll’s moral and temperamental transformation was absent from the first draft of the story. Even in the final version, Jekyll had been living two lives for many years prior to Hyde’s physical materialization. The scientist’s experiment is less a fatal error than it is the polarization of the antagonistic tendencies of his nature.46 In the end the novel, a thorough deconstruction of the Victorian cult of character, provides no solution to the dilemma as to how to expunge criminality from the self.
Physical decline and biological degeneration were an intoxicating mix, masterfully articulated by H. G. Wells in The Time Machine (1894). The future earth is imagined to be populated by two degenerate humanoid races, one lacking the power of reason, the other dissipated of energy. The Eloi were vapid and effete, their mental powers atrophied; the Morlocks were stunted abominations, deformed and morally depraved. The novel—in which cannibalistic and bestial Morlocks prey upon the vegetarian Eloi aesthetes—has been read as a “blue-print” of degenerationist concerns and a critique of “outcast London.”47 It is also a parable about the loss of energy and devitalization. Wells frequently examined the impermanence, imperfection, and insignificance of human life. A great admirer of Darwin and a one-time student of his “bulldog,” T. H. Huxley, Wells read into Darwin a legitimation of ephemerality, degradation, and teratology. Set on an island near the Galapagos, Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) is inhabited by monstrous humananimal hybrids. The “beast people” include Leopard Man, Dog Man, Puma Woman, Monkey Man, Wolf Woman, and the “Mare-Rhinoceros-Person,” a world “teeming with abominations.”48 Wells, like Lombroso (whose theory on female insensitivity Wells had written about), theorized “a human body both chaotic and entropic, both hybridized and prone to reversion.”49 The novel’s protagonist Prendrick devolves during the narrative, becoming hysterical, nervous, and ineffectual, hairy and agile, and accustomed to sleeping in a den. Moreau—the novel’s criminal genius—was the personification of nature. He represented the apex of human intellectual evolution but was as “inhuman” as his grotesque creations, bereft of any of the civilizing human emotions of compassion.50 Wells explained that the novel was “written just to give the utmost possible vividness to that conception of men as hewn and confused and tormented beasts.”51 In the end, the novel accomplishes the ruination of the human subject, “without apology, without nostalgia, without remorse.”52
Like psychoanalysis, that fin-de-siècle science of the unconscious mind, what characterized the Gothic was a confessional mode, the impulse to unburden oneself of unpalatable truths. Revolving around the insecurities of biomedical knowledge and often featuring young, inexperienced medical doctors, Gothic novels featured an abundance of primary texts: letters, journals, interviews, official reports. It is as though the prolix archive of established medicine has had to be reopened; epistemology had to follow a cadavarous ontology and return itself to an earlier, primitive state of contestation. Once the body of knowledge has been exhumed, its disagreeable corporeality becomes evident. Horrific truths about human nature provide neither sensational thrills nor spectacular forewarnings but rather affect a nauseating collapse of meaning.53 The war against crime was allied to the administration of abnormality, expanding social control as it relaxed moral judgment.54 In this context, Goring’s The English Convict can be read less as criticism of Lombrosoian science than as its rhizomatic outgrowth. For if criminal anthropology had blurred the boundary between the normal and the abnormal, then biometrics simply located these categories on the same normal distribution curve, the one imperceptibly blending into the other.55
In 1892, in a measured article warning of the dangers of over interpreting criminal statistics, the Rev. W. D. Morrison expressed a skeptical note about Lombroso’s theory of the born criminal.56 “Whatever may be the ultimate fate of Lombroso’s theory,” wrote Morrison, “he has unquestionably succeeded in calling attention to the fact that a larger proportion of anomalies is to be found among the criminal population than among ordinary members of the community.” A “debilitated body,” after all, had “a tendency to produce a perverted mind.” But instead of regarding criminal stigmata as signs of degeneration, Morrison proffered a sociological version of events, suggesting that such marks might predispose a person to a life of crime simply as a result of social prejudice, a dearth of employment opportunities, and an embittered sensibility: “In the inevitable and unceasing struggle for existence a considerable proportion of the feeble, the degenerate, the malformed, the anomalous are not fitted for one reason or another to earn a living by normal methods, and society looks upon all who adopt abnormal methods as criminals.” Physical anomalies among offenders were neither evidence of their mental capacities nor did they support for the existence of a criminal type. Physical abnormalities were “proof of a fact apparent everywhere, that the physically anomalous and incapable are less adapted to fight the battle of life, and are accordingly more likely to come into collision with the law.”57 Visible stigmata were the cause of a criminality acquired through the hostile actions of the prejudiced.
Morrison argued that although it was widely believed that crime had fallen over the previous thirty years, this apparent decline could not be taken for granted without taking into account changes in judicial procedure and methods of incarceration. Changes in the law had criminalized some activities, while some criminal offences had been rendered harmless. In 1890, for example, proceedings against over eighty thousand parents had been initiated for not sending their children to school, a statutory requirement since the passing of the 1870 Elementary Education Act. An increase in the number of sexual crimes had occasioned the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, but the police were increasingly turning a blind eye to intemperance. The use of reformatories and juvenile homes challenged the usefulness of the incarceration statistics as a guide to crime rates. Despite living in an age when statistics were collated on a vast number of criminal subjects, those statistics could never be taken at face value. The more crime was studied the more obscure it appeared.
In 1893, Science carried a short review of Arthur MacDonald’s Criminology. In his brief introduction to the book Lombroso had defended his theory of the criminal type, “the organicity of crime, its anatomical nature, and degenerative source.” The anonymous reviewer, however, claimed that the notion had been “distinctly rejected” by the cr
iminal anthropologists assembled at the previous summer’s Brussels congress, and it was “encouraging to note” that MacDonald now considered the criminal type “from the psychological rather than the physical side… . This is virtually giving up the position of Lombroso, which, in fact, is no longer defensible. There is absolutely no fixed correlation between anatomical structure and crime, so far as has yet been shown.”58 Bemoaning the lack of progress in criminal anthropology a few years later, Gabriel Tarde concluded that “Lombroso’s alleged criminal type is a chimera; that the Italian school is engaged in the desperate undertaking of rescuing from perdition an error which it knows to be an error, but which it hopes, in spite of the head of the school, to attach to some theory palpably less visionary. This can not be done.”59 The novelists had critiqued homo criminalis: now it was the turn of the criminologists.
“Prominent among the new ‘sciences’ that have sprung up, mushroomlike, in our generation is ‘criminology.’” Thus began Dr. H. S. Williams’ 1896 North American Review article, “Can the Criminal be Reclaimed?”60 “Its advocates regard the criminal as a distinct type of the genus homo. With the true spirit of our induction-haunted age, they analyze the delinquent out of all association with his fellows, making him stand apart as a separate order of being.” Williams ridiculed the claim that criminologists could pick out the murderer before he had committed a murder or the inebriate who had never been intoxicated, adding: “No doubt the abstract robber, forger, and what not, will follow in due season.” “All this is very delightful if true. It suggests visions of a golden age, when science shall rule society and by its anticipatory action nip all crimes in the bud by restraining their would-be perpetrators. But with the vision comes also a doubt.”61 Williams suggested that crime was not a particularly special phenomenon, “but merely the expression of a relation.” Criminality was a matter of social consensus: “deeds stamped as criminal under some circumstances are justified under others.” Killing in warfare, for example, or accidental homicide, were not considered crimes. Furthermore, since all human actions involved advancement for personal gain, a criminal act could not be singled out as particularly special: “sinfulness is fixed in accordance with an absolute standard of ethics, criminality in accordance with a relative or human standard.”62 Because ethical codes were constantly changing, the boundaries of criminal action were forever fluctuating. It was therefore impossible to define crime accurately. Williams accepted that it was a fact of human psychology that people had criminal desires, but these were repressed by the pressures of social life. “The spirit of practical altruism was born, and the cornerstone of civilization was laid.”63 Persons who had no moral sense were known as habitual criminals. According to criminology, Williams wrote, people became criminals because of “inherently defective” brains. He proposed “that in the great majority of cases they have failed to evolve because they were human and could not rise far above their environment.”64 There was good and bad in everybody, but the two extremes of the social scale were not morally distinguishable: “Wax to receive, marble to retain, that young mind was graven deep with the lines of wrong living. A subtle poison permeated every cell of its body; what wonder if it thenceforth gave out none but poisoned thoughts?”65 Careful training was necessary if the best results were to be obtained because the “flowers of the human mind do not bloom on human weeds.”66 Williams pointed to the forced feeding of a larva in the hive that produces the queen bee, drawing a parallel with the process of socialization early in infancy and early childhood. It was “familiar knowledge that most wild beasts can be tamed only if taken while young,” “The day is past when it was supposed that the human mind is intrinsically different in kind from other animals. It is now known that general biological truths apply to each and every member of the organic scale from highest to lowest… . And in this connection it may not be amiss to note that the human family contains but a single species.”67
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