Degeneration & the Transition Era

ELT 38:3 1995 descries everywhere in Beardsley is arrived at by way of an unconvincing variety of biographical-psychological speculation. Despite the disappointing quality of too many of the essays in this collection, the majority are worth attention, and certainly deserve better than a text set in so miserly a type size, with titles, author's names, notes, and index set in a variety of fonts at war with that chosen for the text, the ugliest font being reserved, fortunately I suppose, for the index. Wendell V. Harris ______________ Pennsylvania State University Degeneration & the Transition Era William Greenslade. Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880-1940. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 355 pp. $59.95 WILLIAM GREENSLADE'S Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880-1940 is a compelling, important book, one which both broadens our understanding of the cultural and literary milieu of the Transition years and opens up a host of promising critical avenues. The book chronicles the rise and fall of a set of related theories and ideologies— "degenerate" offspring of the Darwinian revolution—within their social, historical, and literary contexts in Britain. The keystone to this investigation is the once-prevalent theory that through the determinism of heredity portions of the human race were degenerating, reverting to inferior, precursor types. How this "theory" was born, evolved and, finauy, died off—horrifically, but perhaps inevitably, in the gas chambers at Dachau—forms the framework upon which Greenslade fleshes out the cultural and literary configurations that degenerationism assumed during the sixty or so years of its Ufe span. Through Greenslade's deft teUing, the "whole process," as Hayden White has written of Tocqueville 's histories, "has the inevitability of a Tragic Drama." Among Greenslade's first objectives is to establish the post-Darwinian origins and context of degenerationism: "Founded on the Darwinian revolution in biology, and harnessed to psychological medicine, the idea of degeneration spread to social science, to literature and art." Increasingly , the terms and concepts of Darwinian discourse—fit versus unfit, advanced versus degenerate, etc.—colored how the weU-educated approached a variety of social and moral issues. While most proponents of degenerationist ideas were sincere, if misguided, enthusiasts, many others exploited the all too obvious "great-chain-of-being" implications of the theory for their own ideological purposes: "Degeneration was at 384 BOOK REVIEWS the root of what was, in part, an enabling strategy by which the conventional and respectable classes could justify and articulate their hostility to the deviant, the diseased and the subversive." What made this "strategy" so effective, and so dangerous, was that it bore the imprimatur and prestige of science. Most of the analysis of specific novels foUows Greenslade's discussion on the influence of two pivotal figures: Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau. Both men played significant roles in promulgating specific degenerationist myths, but perhaps were most important as popularizers of the general theory who lent it "scientific" credibility. Lombroso's Criminal Man, which appeared in English translation in 1891, attempted to "establish a distinctive criminal type" and argued that The born criminal was by his nature a reversion to a distant ancestral primitive type." Nordau, who Greenslade refers to as "the high priest of the creed of degeneration," took Lombroso a few steps further in his highly influential work Degeneration, first published in English in 1895. Perhaps Nordau's most important "contribution" to the debate, at least to those most interested in the literature of the period, was his charge that much modern art was degenerate because it was created by degenerates . "Nordau's central thesis," writes Greenslade, "concerns the pathology of artistic production." Not reluctant to name names, Nordau classified Wagner, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Tolstoi, Zola, and (of course) Wilde as atavistic artists. The attractiveness of degenerationism for those with reactionary ideological agendas, or for those who simply have a low tolerance level, should be obvious by now: virtually any group—the poor, the criminal, even "queer" writers—can be dismissed, or worse, once they have been stigmatized as "degenerate." Given an issue with such momentous ramifications, it is not surprising that novelists of the day would explore the truth and implications of this idea for themselves. The writers who responded...