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Abjection and degeneration in Thomas Hardy's "Barbara of the House of Grebe"

College Literature, Spring 1999 by Shumaker, Jeanette Roberts

Thomas Hardy's Gothic tale, "Barbara of the House of Grebe" (1891), dramatizes the horrid consequences of belief in the Victorian myth of degeneration. Only months after writing Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Hardy creates another tragedy in the less well-known "Barbara"; this time tragedy stems from dread of the lower class and of sexually assertive women of any class.1 The theory of degeneration situates the hatred of the working class and women seen in "Barbara" within the pseudo-scientific debates of the late-Victorian era. Hardy shows how belief in the myth of degeneration could ruin relationships and lives.

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Recent studies of degenerationism in history and literature do not discuss Hardy's short stories, but their ideas illuminate "Barbara." Degenerationism posited that groups such as the urban poor, the insane, prostitutes, criminals, and homosexuals adapted to immoral, polluted cities by taking on characteristics of their environment; as a result, they became physically stunted and mentally depraved. Degenerates were thought to pass on their flaws to their children through a kind of Lamarckian evolution that increased aberrations with each succeeding generation. Facial and bodily deformities might be warnings of degeneracy. But the most dangerous degenerates carried no marks: these decadent artists and writers might seem free from any "taint," helping them to spread their degenerate thinking to the general population through their works (Spackman 1989, 9).2 Like a disease, degeneracy was thought to be gradually spreading through late-Victorian societies, imperiling their future. Protection of "the race" against decadence was sought through the ostracism of those who weren't respectable, as well as through vigilance about literature and art.

In the 1850s, French psychiatrist Benedict-Augustin Morel developed the theory of degeneration to explain cretinism. An Italian follower of Morel, Cesare Lombroso, applied degenerationism to criminals in a widely read book (Pick 1989, 178-79). Lombroso argued that the "born criminal" is an atavistic throwback to an earlier, more vicious type of human (Hurley 1996, 93); in a later book, Lombroso drew on other studies written from a degeneratist perspective, linking the prostitute to the Hottentot woman as atavistic types (Gilman 1985, 98). Racism, classism, and sexism intertwined in studies such as Lombroso's: "For the colonial mentality that sees 'natives' as needing control easily shifts that concern to the woman, in particular the prostitute caste" (Gilman 1985, 107). While degenerationism rationalized imperialism, scientific theory helped sell degenerationism to the educated classes. Evolutionary theory, physics, and medicine suggested models of entropy that made degenerationism seem plausible to Victorians (Hurley 1996, 65).

Increasingly, degenerationism made sense to the affluent as there was "a growing sense in the last decades of the century of a lack of synchrony between the rhetoric of progress, the confident prediction by the apostles of laissez-faire of ever-increasing prosperity and wealth, and the facts . . . of poverty and degradation at the heart of ever richer empires" (Greenslade 1994, 15).3 In the 1880s, English psychiatrist Henry Maudsley argued that modern Britain was oscillating between progress and decadence; its development might end up being either regenerative or degenerative (Pick 1989, 209; Hurley 1996, 66). If crowding in cities continued to spread moral and physical degeneration throughout the population, British society might decay rather than evolve. Maudsley popularized degenerationism for middle-class readers by associating it with both common sense and typical fears (Arata 1996, 16). Through the myth of degeneration, "the conventional and respectable classes could justify and articulate their hostility against the deviant, the diseased, and the subversive" (Greenslade 1994, 2). No longer would the respectable need to feel guilty about the misery of the urban poor. In other words, degenerationism explained poverty and crime in a supposedly scientific manner rather than as ethical problems needing redress (Pick 1989, 10).

Nevertheless, degenerationism was used to justify a variety of middle-class responses to social problems, including philanthropy (Arata 1996, 17). However, the affluent most often used degenerationism to prove that mass democracy and particularly socialism were dangerous (Pick 1989, 218). Dread of democracy and socialism grew from memories of a century of riots and revolutions in Britain, Europe, and America. It was feared that in the future, widespread degeneracy might lead to mob rule under the guise of democracy or socialism, destroying the middle and upper classes.

Widely translated books about degeneration such as Max Nordau's drew heavily upon nineteenth-century literature for examples of degenerates, including aesthetes (Arata 1996, 28-9). Nordau's ideas about fictional degenerates were then used by London journalists, for example, to explain the accusations of homosexuality against Oscar Wilde (Arata 1996, 3). As for fiction itself, degenerationism influenced novelists such as Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling (Arata 1996, 13), Bram Stoker and Robert Louis Stevenson (Hurley 1996, 30), and Emile Zola (Pick 1989, 4). Degenerative motifs appear most commonly in Gothic novels, as degenerationism "is a 'gothic' discourse, and as such is a crucial imaginative and narrative source for the fm-de-siecle Gothic" (Hurley 1996, 65). In the case of "Barbara," degenerationism is an imaginative source for Hardy's treatment of disfigurement and wife abuse.

Abjection and degeneration in Thomas Hardy's "Barbara of the House of Grebe"

College Literature, Spring 1999 by Shumaker, Jeanette Roberts

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