Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century by Anne Stiles (review)

With Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century, Anne Stiles establishes herself as both a leading historian of neurology and neuroscience and a prominent scholar of the genre of Victorian gothic romance. Emulating the pattern of such eminent literary scholars as Alan Richardson, Rick Rylance, and Laura Otis, Stiles revises scholarly understanding of the nineteenth-century cultural interaction between artistic vogues and the emergent human, mind, and brain sciences. What is more, she masterfully evaluates the reciprocal intellectual and cultural interactions among authors of gothic fiction and their contemporaries in medicine and the sciences who were enthralled by the unanswered questions raised by discoveries about the evolution of the nervous system. Above all, Stiles’s subject is fin de siècle neurology and the cultural meaning of the horror and spiritual angst the brain and nerves engendered in literature.

By the same token, Stiles’s book enlarges upon, and at times brilliantly elaborates, an historically revisionist account of the emergence of a physiology of the brain and nerves situated in the thick texture of Victorians’ evolutionary debates, their apprehensions about the rise of technological modernity, and their anxieties that biological deterministic discoveries ultimately heralded cultural degeneration and the decline of the West. With a sophistication characteristic of work by the best historians of nineteenth-century brain sciences—e.g., Anne Harrington, Janet Oppenheim, Robert M. Young—Stiles, with admirable clarity and historical rigor, demonstrates that authors of gothic romances not only produced stories rife with their contemporaries’ concerns about the nerves, but also intentionally sought to evoke nervous responses in their readers—ones that lent the doctrine of the nerves a literally spine-tingling corporeality. Even more surprising, Stile makes unequivocally clear that literary and artistic currents routinely informed scientific and medical debates, often lending scientific partisans in those debates a range of metaphors, similes, and culturally meaningful tropes with which they could critique their putative opponents and convince prospective champions.

In short, Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century will charm audiences while invigorating scholarly discussions about the common context of Victorian science and literature. Stiles’s book takes any number of themes popular in the history of neurology and neuroscience—cerebral localization, multiple personality syndrome, automatism, photographic memory, neuron theory, degeneration, and the double brain—and places those topics in their intellectual and artistic ferment. Furthermore, Stiles focuses on literary figures bound to inspire wider enthusiasm and interest, especially with undergraduates. In three parts, Stiles elaborates a genealogy that traces the intellectual history of the brain sciences through a simultaneous chronicle that shows how such reactionaries as Robert Louis Stevenson and Bram Stoker, the technological materialist Grant Allen, and prophetic visionaries H. G. Wells and Marie Corelli incorporated (and sometimes even subverted) brain science to literary, ideological, and commercial ends. By the same measure, the literary imagination appears to have exerted a profound influence upon the luminaries of nerve science—i.e., David Ferrier, John Hughlings Jackson, William Carpenter, T. H. Huxley, and scores of others— who often proselytized and actively constructed their sciences with the aid of the discourses of gothic romance.

Certain criticisms of Stiles’s book can be instantly anticipated. More than a few historians of science and medicine will pause upon encountering the word “pseudoscience,” which appears with a regretful regularity, especially in connection to phrenology. There are also many moments in her account when Stiles introduces narrative frames or makes judgments that would be possible only with the benefit of modern-day knowledge found in the works of such popular authors as, for example, Oliver Sacks, who appears frequently and earnestly throughout the pages of this volume. Thoughtful readers will spot the irony that while Stiles submits late-nineteenth-century scientists and the authors of gothic romance to a deeply new historicist tradition, she grants contemporary authors a perhaps too-charitable clarity of vision. In no way, however...