Le Monstre, le singe et le foetus: tératogonie et décadence dans l'Europe fin-de-siècle (review)

Stead's compendious volume sets out to address the historical lacuna she identifies and describes in the opening pages: 'l'absence de discours théorique de la fin du XIX^e siècle sur elle-même' (p. 1). Drawing on a vast selection of fin-de-siècle iconography and texts from various Western European cultures, she attempts to show that rather than articulating a discourse about its own ideology, Decadent language and art proliferated instead a series of symptomatic images and fantasies. Three of these, the monster, the monkey and the foetus, are the focus of her investigation. The thesis persuasively propounded by Stead is that the preponderance of these figures in texts and images of the epoch betray the extent to which Decadence was influenced by contemporary philosophical and medical currents that pulled between the poles of progress and decline; namely, embryology and Darwin's evolutionism, on the one hand, and the pathologizing discourses of degeneration theory on the other. Representations of monstrousness, simian life and embryonic forms embody different points on the scale between nature and culture, fecundity and decay, creativity and destruction —binarisms that obsessed the fin-de-siècle imaginary, and that it constantly sought to transgress, to merge or to overcome. The book's methodology is one of thoroughgoing comparatism and it achieves this successfully in each of the various configurations it essays. It is genuinely even-handed and comprehensive in its coverage of sources from various European cultures; the lines of interpenetration between scientific discourse and literary or artistic texts are skilfully highlighted; and its readings of, and between, text and image are deftly handled. In this, the book espouses an interdisciplinarity that is close to the Anglo-American approach of cultural studies, often eschewed in French academia. Also, the author is explicit about her intention to construct a literary history that is not constrained by the traditional focus on canonical names or on schools — what she terms '-Ismes' (p. 511), but which orbits instead around clusters of images and ideas that serve as indices of the spirit of the time. Stead's scholarship is consistently impressive throughout this sizeable tome. One is not surprised to read that the doctoral thesis on which it is based was the result of ten years of research; nor that it was awarded the prestigious Prix Marie-Louise Arconati-Visconti in 1994. That the book started life as a thesis comes as no surprise either, however, and herein lies, perhaps, its only weakness. At moments, the writing is dry and overly verbose, suggesting that the adaptation from examination piece to monograph has not been achieved as successfully as it might have. This minor reservation notwithstanding, I would not hesitate to recommend Stead's work as an invaluable document, exemplary both in its implementation of method and in the breadth and depth of its research, to any student of the Decadent imagination or the history of mentalities in the nineteenth century.