| | |Fin de Siècle Writing and Culture. |

Discuss any two fictional texts studied in the light of fin de siècle theories of degeneration. The era of the Victorian fin de siècle ‘…from the 1880s to the end of the century…generated an enormous amount of scientific and cultural debate concerning the future civilisation and the human race itself.’[1] It was an era of technical progress, Imperial gain, and a nation at the pinnacle of progress. ‘…bolstered by Darwin’s theory of evolution, Victorians regarded themselves and their society as the acme of human development.’[2] However, it was an era that balanced on the age of a new century that seemed to accentuate and highlight numerous anxieties. Ledger and Luckhurst (2000) further state that this was an ambivalent period; with major progress in science and technology but also a time of real decline, in which Britain’s global economic power was rivalled by Germany and America. This ambivalence at the turn of the century created fears and anxieties concerning the decline of the British race. A crucial influence on British anxieties of decline was underpinned by scientific and medical knowledge known as Theories of Degeneration. Ledger and Luckhurst (2000) state, at this time, that ‘…degeneration was one defining structure which can be traced across many disciplines…’[3] These theories of degeneration impacted over many discourses within Victorian culture including race, class, sexuality and morality, and envisaged ‘…a “primitive” lost world or degenerate “after world”.’[4] In other words, the threat of decline and degeneration to the upper middle class white race of Britain that held power both nationally and globally. Edward Tylor’s work, Primitive Culture asserted scientific naturalism and development along evolutionary lines ‘…races could be lined up along a developmental line from most savage (Fuegians…) to most civilised (Northern Europeans).’[5] Scientific anthropological fact supported the creation of the superior white race, spoken of in terms of a pure blooded race, and the creation of an inferior racial ‘other’. This racial ‘other’ was considered a degenerate form, a reversion to the primitive ape. According to Darwin man had descended from the primitive ape and ‘…there was no absolute evolutionary separation from the world of animals, no escape from the stigma of that descent.’[6] Darwin’s theory of evolution provided the basis for the concepts of racial and cultural degeneration. Scientific theories of degeneration imminent at the time gave authority and validation to these fears of atavism, the reversion to the primitive state, and the threat of decline to the British nation. These theories impacted significantly on Victorian life and culture highlighting a preoccupation with degeneration that reflected in major literary works such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Gothic tale Olalla. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Stevenson’s Olalla, the manifestation of the threat of miscegenation, the threat to the pure, white British race is clearly apparent. ‘…the fear that the dark skinned ‘other’ will invade England and compromise its racial purity.[7] Dracula is, without doubt, placed as the degenerate foreign ‘other’ by Stoker. He is a foreigner, monstrous in appearance and deed, pagan and controlled by passion, the antithesis of the Victorian gentlemen and seen as the threat to western civilised society. Dracula originates from Transylvania in the East significant as the complete opposite of civilised western society. Stevenson’s character Olalla is similarly categorised as the ‘other’, and though she displays superior knowledge by reading books of ‘… all sorts devotional, historical and scientific’.[8] Olalla is situated in Spain, placed amongst peasants’ superstition and barbarity. The soldier hero who remains anonymous represents the superiority of the west while Olalla is situated ‘…out of the eastern gate’[9] He is seen to be ‘…leaving the western sunshine behind’[10] a symbol for civilisation, which he leaves behind as he travels towards Olalla’s home. Edward Lankester’s work Degeneration: A chapter in Darwinism (1880) [11] is influential and reflected within the narrative construction of Stoker’s and Stevenson’s novels. Lankester’s work talks about degeneration as a ‘…suppression of form corresponding to the cessation of work…’[12]. Degeneration is seen in terms of the inactive parasite absorbing, feeding off and weakening. Stevenson describes Olalla’s mother in such parasitic terms, ‘…sunk in sloth and pleasure…’[13], who tries to absorb and contaminate the pure blood of the soldier. ‘The pang of the bite, the sudden spurting of the blood, and the monstrous horror of the act, flashed through me.’[14] Bram Stoker’s Dracula is also constructed as a parasite. He is seen as draining the blood of British women assaulting and poisoning both Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker. These women symbolise the future procreators of the pure British race threatened and contaminated with the blood of the foreign degenerate ‘other’. Both Stoker and Stevenson can be seen to place Dracula and Olalla as forms of regression, based on the influence of Lankester’s work Degeneration. His work also highlighted the degenerate as ‘…descended from ancestors possessed of a relatively elaborate civilisation.’[15] Both Stoker’s Dracula and Stevenson’s Olalla stem from once great families. The soldier in Olalla could ‘…judge, by these decaying effigies, in the house of what a great and what a handsome race I was then wandering.’[16] Stoker’s Dracula proudly boasts to Jonathan Harker ‘…of the blood of many brave races…’[17] that runs through his veins. Dracula and Olalla originate from highly civilised backgrounds and both are constructed as having regressed down the evolutionary ladder. As Lankester states ‘…it is well to remember that we are subject to the general laws of evolution, and are as likely to degenerate as progress.’[18] These anxieties are portrayed by Stevenson’s graphic descriptions of Olalla’s brother, Felipe’s foreign and primitive appearance as ‘…dusky hue, and inclined to hairiness…’[19]. Dracula takes the form of several animals such as the bat; he is described as ‘…crawling down the castle wall…his cloak spreading out …like great wings.’[20] His victim’s also become animal like, he contaminates those around him with degenerate blood. Dracula’s follower ‘…Renfield [becomes] a “zoophagous” [life eating] maniac…Lucy’s teeth grow long and sharp as her disease progresses.’[21] The message is clear in both texts; the degenerate foreigner poses an immense threat to racial purity. Ledger and Luckhurst state that although degeneration placed itself as a scientific discourse, it was also very much the product of the social and cultural climate, nearly always described in terms of racial decline.[22] Social commentators of the time such as Henry Mayhew and W.T Stead of the Pall Mall Gazette used the language of race and sensationalised journalism, to talk about the poor. This perpetuated a fear not only of the foreign outsider, but also from within the growing British lower classes. Especially those categorised by Victorians as the ‘…“residuum”-gypsies, beggars, vagrants, petty criminals, madmen [and] slum-dwellers…’[23] Dracula is closely allied with the ‘residuum’, his allies are the Szgany gypsies and the dock workers who help execute his plans, for what is seen as the degeneration of the British race. In Victorian times, dockworkers were considered to be ‘particular vagrants’[24] and associated as criminal types. Cesare Lombroso’s work Criminal Man (2nd ed. translation1895) perpetuated the new science of physiognomy in the field of criminology, where certain facial features revealed degeneracy. In the novel Dracula, Jonathan Harker’s observation of Dracula ‘…found him of a very marked physiognomy…with peculiarly sharp white teeth…his ears were pale and at the top extremely pointed.’[25] Harker describes Dracula’s features as those of the classic criminal’s physical stigmata categorised by Lombroso’s work. Olalla does not have these physical stigmata. Her degenerate blood is masked and deceptive, the soldier tells how ‘…her loveliness struck to my heart… .’[26] Thus, highlighting the ambiguity felt within certain scientific discourses as to their reliability, but this was not applied to the threat of degeneration itself. The social commentators of the fin de siècle concentrated on the poorest because they offered ‘…a most shocking portrait of domesticity, motherhood and female sexual purity gone awry.’[27] However, there were serious fears of degeneration within the upper middle classes. The emergence of the New Woman made possible by the women’s movement brought into question anxieties of women’s roles within Victorian society. The New Woman was seen as ‘…lacking in all the attributes of ideal womanhood…sometimes configured as an oversexed vamp.’[28] In the novel Dracula, ‘Lucy represents the new woman’s sexual daring…’[29] Sagolla states that Lucy’s sexuality and daring resembles prostitution. Lucy is victim to, and vamped by Dracula, becoming sexually promiscuous. She receives blood from three men, besides her husband to be, representing a sexual symbol for intercourse. The former sweet, pure Lucy becomes ‘…voluptuous…unholy …unclean.’[30] She preys on babies ‘…the babe at her breast is not being suckled, but sucked for blood.’[31] representing a form of degenerate, deviant motherhood. Mina Harker addresses the balance restoring ideal Victorian womanhood. She remains sexually pure within the role of dutiful, self-sacrificing wife and mother. Conversely, Lucy is ‘staked’ back into her rightful place, Victorian womanhood is once more asserted, and the threat of female sexual degeneracy is contained. However, there is a sense of ambivalence created within Stoker and Stevenson’s texts. Both the soldier and Jonathan Harker are attracted to as well as repulsed by the representations of degenerate sexuality. Jonathan finds the three vampire women ‘…voluptuous which was both thrilling and repulsive…I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited -…’ [32] In Stevenson’s text the soldier desires ‘the joys of complete intimacy’ with Olalla and yet is ‘…revolted against the thought of such an accost. ’[33] The trial and imprisonment of the aesthete Oscar Wilde for homosexual acts, brought into question a degenerate form of masculinity associated with the aesthetic ideology. Notable German scholar Max Nordau’s work Degeneration (1895) associated the aesthete with ‘moral insanity and emotionalism…’.[34] Both Stoker’s and Stevenson’s texts valorise the ideal of Victorian masculinity as heterosexual. In Dracula’s ‘…Transylvania… sexuality is fluid Dracula desires men as well as women…’[35], he savagely claims Jonathan Harker for his own from the three vampire women, ‘This man belongs to me!’[36] Stoker is associating this sexuality with degeneracy as foreign and morally insane. Alternatively, Stevenson’s soldier hero is constructed as masculine and heterosexual. He is obsessed by his heterosexual love for Olalla, and ashamed by Felipe’s homoerotic suggestions ‘…drawing his hand over my clothes with an affectionate manner of caressing…’.[37] The texts are concerned with the Victorian fear of crossing racial, social and moral boundaries, and the containment of the Victorian status quo. Sagolla points out that Stoker in particular associates crossed boundaries with potential decline. Dracula crosses these boundaries by invading England, he is clearly defeated by the scientific and moral crusaders for Victorian upper middle class normality spearheaded by Van Helsing. Stevenson highlights the temptation of crossing these boundaries and chronicles the soldier’s decline into madness and emotional hysteria, symptoms associated by Lombroso work with mental degeneracy. Stevenson’s soldier represents the pure, superior, western race, at risk. This ‘… most pleasant man that ever came from England ’[38]and his pure blood is at risk of degeneration because of his love for Olalla, who stems from a family tainted by degeneracy. He is saved by the symbolic martyrdom of Olalla who sacrifices her love in order to terminate the procreation of the degenerate blood she carries. ‘…my vow has been given; the race shall cease from off the earth.’[39] This echoes the work of Francis Galton and ‘…the new science of Eugenics’[40], an ideology based on selective racial breeding in order to maintain racial purity. Olalla and the soldier’s procreation, and symbolic crossing of social and racial borders, would only poison the English race, weakening and causing its decline. Olalla states that she cannot ‘…hand down this cursed vessel of humanity charge it with fresh life as with fresh poison and dash it…in the faces of posterity.[41] Scientific theories of degeneration impacted on wider social issues and gave validation to numerous anxieties at the period of the fin-de-siecle. These anxieties of degeneration centred on the decline of the pure, white, North European race and upper- middle class Victorian Society threatened by the ‘foreigner’ and the ‘residuum’. These anxieties are metaphorically epitomised within the narrative structure of Olalla and Dracula, which highlight, defeat and contain the degenerate representative. Edwin Lankester looks to the ‘science of knowledge ‘for the answer to degeneration and the ‘protection of the race’[42] Olalla is placed by Stevenson as a martyr to the cause of eugenics, her acquiescence acknowledging her regressive, degenerate, blood, reinforcing ideologies of white superiority. Dracula is chased across the sea back to Transylvania ‘…purging England of contagion and moral decay’ [43]. He is completely defeated by the superior ‘brain’ and knowledge of Van Helsing. Stoker and Stevenson can be seen to be ‘… constructing a reassuring narrative which depicts containment’. [44] However, there is still an overriding sense of danger to Victorian society, both texts acknowledging the ambivalent allure and dangerous temptations of degeneration. The fear being that degeneracy is inherent and linked within each one by the simple process of evolution. Harker says ’ …I could see him over my shoulder …there was no sign of him [Dracula] in the mirror…except myself ‘[45], raising the ongoing fear that perhaps Jonathan Harker and Dracula are in a sense mirror images of the same self.
Bibliography

Primary Sources
Stevenson, Robert Louis, ‘Olalla’, ed. by Chris Baldick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 183-217.

Stoker, Bram, Dracula, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

Secondary Sources

Ledger, Sally, and Luckhurst, Roger, The Fin de Siècle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

Pick, Daniel, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848 - c. 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

Pick, Daniel, ‘ ‘Terrors of the Night’: Dracula and ‘Degeneration’ in the late Nineteenth Century ’, in Reading Fin De Siècle Fictions, Lyn Pykett, (Harlow, Essex: Longman (1996), pp.149-165.

Sagolla, Laura, ‘the rhetoric of reform in Stoker’s Dracula: Depravity, decline, and the fin de siècle “Residuum”’, Literary criticism (1995): pp.1-20, online, Internet, 19 March 2002.

Showalter, Elaine, Sexual anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Virago Press, 2001).

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[1] Sally Ledger & Roger Luckhurst (eds) The Fin de Siècle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.1.
[2] Ledger & Luckhurst, p1.
[3] Ledger & Luckhurst, p xxii.
[4] Daniel Pick Faces of Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 156.
[5] Ledger & Luckhurst, p316.
[6] Daniel Pick, p171.
[7] Laura Sagolla, ‘the rhetoric of reform in Stoker’s Dracula: Depravity, decline, and the fin-de-siècle “Residuum”,’ Literary criticism vol 37 (1995): p.1-20, online, internet, 19 March 2002.
[8] Robert Louis Stevenson, Olalla, in The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, ed. by Chris Baldick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp.183-217 (p.198).
[9] Stevenson, p.185.
[10] Stevenson, p.186.
[11] Edwin Lankester, ‘Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism’, in The Fin de Siècle, eds. by Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).pp. 3-5.
[12] Lankester, p. 3.
[13] Stevenson, p.193.
[14] Stevenson, p. 208.
[15] Lankester, p. 4.
[16] Stevenson, p. 198.
[17] Bram Stoker, Dracula (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 28.
[18] Lankester, p.4.
[19] Stevenson, p. 186.
[20] Stoker, p. 34.
[21] Sagolla, p. 5.
[22] Ledger & Luckhurst, p 1.
[23] Sagolla, p.3.
[24] Sagolla, p. 8.
[25] Stoker, p.17-18.
[26] Stevenson, p. 201.
[27] Sagolla, p. 9.
[28] Ledger & Luckhurst, p. 75.
[29] Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Virago Press, 2001), p. 180.
[30] Stoker, p. 211.
[31] Sagolla, p. 11.
[32] Stoker, p 38.
[33] Stevenson, p. 204.
[34] Max Nordau, ‘ Degeneration’, The Fin de Siècle, eds. by Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 16.
[35] Showalter, p. 179.
[36] Stoker, p 39.
[37] Stevenson, p. 189.
[38] Stevenson, p.184.
[39] Stevenson, p. 211.
[40] Ledger & Luckhurst, p.316.
[41] Stevenson, p.211.
[42] Lankester, p.5.
[43] Sagolla, p.14.
[44] Pick Daniel, ‘Terrors of the Night: Dracula and Degeneration in the late Nineteenth century’, in Reading Fin De Siecle Fictions, ed. by Lyn Pykett (Essex: Longman, 1996), pp. 149-165 (p. 149).
[45] Stoker, p.21.