Monstrous Anatomies: Literary and Scientific Imagination in Britain and Germany during the Long Nineteenth Century 9783737004695, 9783847104698, 9783847004691

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Interfacing Science, Literature, and the Humanities / ACUME 2 Volume 10 Edited by Vita Fortunati, Università di Bologna Elena Agazzi, Università di Bergamo

Scientific Board Susan Bassnett (Warwick University), Andrea Battistini (Università di Bologna), Andreas Blödorn (Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster), Wolfgang Braungart (Universität Bielefeld), Michele Cometa (Università di Palermo), Susan Fairweather-Tait (University of East Anglia), Vincenzo Ferrone (Università di Torino), Claudio Franceschi (Università di Bologna), Susan Friedman (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Brian Hurwitz (King’s College), Giovanni Levi (Muséum National D’Histoire Naturelle), Ansgar Nünning (Justus Liebig Universität Giessen), Vera Nünning (Universität Heidelberg), Giuliano Pancaldi (Università di Bologna), Stefano Poggi (Università di Firenze), Stanley Ulyaszeck (Oxford University) Editorial Board Raul Calzoni (Università di Bergamo), Valeria Cammarata (Università di Palermo), Zelda Franceschi (Università di Bologna), Guglielmo Gabbiadini (Università di Bergamo), Gilberta Golinelli (Università di Bologna), Andrea Grignolio Università di Roma La Sapienza), Federica La Manna (Università della Calabria), Micaela Latini (Università di Cassino), Alessandro Nannini (Università di Bologna), Greta Perletti (Università di Bergamo), Massimo Salgaro (Università di Verona), Aurelia Santoro (Università di Bologna)

Raul Calzoni / Greta Perletti (eds.)

Monstrous Anatomies Literary and Scientific Imagination in Britain and Germany during the Long Nineteenth Century With 17 figures

This book is published with the support of the University of Bergamo, “Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature Straniere e Comunicazione”, Italy.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. ISSN 2197-1390 ISBN 978-3-8471-0469-8 ISBN 978-3-8470-0469-1 (E-Book) ISBN 978-3-7370-0469-5 (V&R eLibrary) You can find alternative editions of this book and additional material on our website: www.v-r.de © 2015, V&R unipress GmbH, Robert-Bosch-Breite 6, 37079 Göttingen, Germany / www.v-r.de All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher. Printed in Germany. Cover image: Francisco Goya, El sueño de la razón produce monstruos, 1797 Printed and bound by CPI buchbuecher.de GmbH, Zum Alten Berg 24, 96158 Birkach, Germany. Printed on aging-resistant paper.

Contents

The Body of the Monster between Science and Literature: An Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Elisa Leonzio Deformity and Monstrosity : Jean Paul between Embryogenesis and the Concept of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Raul Calzoni Liminal Figurations of the Vampire in the German Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang and Romanticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Lorella Bosco A ‘Mosaic Work’: The Poison Mixer’s Body between Monstrosity and Deception . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Micaela Latini Angels and Monsters: On Stifter’s Turmalin

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Anna Cappellotto Creating Life Artificially : Robert Hamerling’s Homunculus . . . . . . . .

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Francesca Di Blasio The Monstrous Gaze: Exotic/Subaltern/Female. Omai in Eighteenth-Century Fin de Si{cle London . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 Sharon Ruston Has Man “Paid Too Dear a Price for His Empire”? Monsters in Romantic-Era Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

6 Flora de Giovanni Displaying the Anomalous Body. Wilkie Collins’s Freak Show

Contents

. . . . . . 149

Alessandra Violi Dead pro tem.: Suspended Animation and the Monstrosity of Death-Counterfeits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Laura Di Michele Nineteenth-Century London as Monstrous Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 Maria Teresa Chialant ‘The Thing’. Unidentified Monstrous Objects in Victorian Fiction

. . . . 217

Francesca Guidotti The Dis-Appearance of the Body in an Age of Science: H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 Sara Damiani Unthinkable Hybrids: The Somatic Unconscious of the Transplanted Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255 Daniela Crocetti Taming Gender : How Hermaphroditism Became Pseudo and Gender Fled the Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273 Michele Cometa The Survival of Ancient Monsters: Freud and Baubo . . . . . . . . . . . . 297 The Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311

The Body of the Monster between Science and Literature: An Introduction

This book explores the significance and dissemination of ‘monstrous anatomies’ in British and German culture by investigating how and why scientific and literary representations and descriptions of abnormal bodies were proposed in the late Enlightenment, during the Romantic and the Victorian Age. Since the late Enlightenment, the emphasis on reason and the desire to prevail over nature have paradoxically brought to light the aspects of life that elude categorization, thus paving the way for a new interest in the abnormal and the monstrous.1 This is especially true in the light of the investigations of late eighteenth-century natural sciences, when the interest in monstrous anatomies becomes functional to scientifically understand the physiology and anatomy of the human being, although this scientific approach to the abnormal body is often mingled with the survival of alchemical, mystical and supernatural aspects.2 This is part of the cultural movement that Terry Castle has famously described as the ‘turning inwards’ of the supernatural, when the mysteries of the human mind

1 On the monster as a natural and philosophical ‘error’ that had a decisive influence in revolutionary debates on political identity and national history during the Enlightenment, see David William Bates, Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and Revolution in France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002). On the Enlightenment, its historical development and its legacy in the following centuries, see Vincenzo Ferrone, The Enlightenment: History of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). 2 As it is demonstrated, with reference to the influence of alchemical sources on literature, in Eva Horn, ‘Abwege der Forschung. Zur literarischen Archäologie der wissenschaftlichen Neugierde (Frankenstein, Faust, Moreau)’, in Literatur als Philosophie – Philosophie als Literatur, hrsg. von Eva Horn, Bettine Menke und Christoph Menke (München: Fink, 2006), pp. 153–171. On Paracelsus’ influence on European culture and science, see Die Alchemie in der europäischen Kultur- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, hrsg. von Christoph Meinel (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1986), and on the two sides of his thought, i. e. speculative and theological as well as medical and scientific, see Andrew Weeks, Paracelsus. Speculative Theory and the Crisis of the Early Reformation (Albany : State University of New York Press, 1997) and Charles Webster, Paracelsus. Medicine, Magic and Mission at the End of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

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become increasingly more fascinating than the magical and the mystical intended as aspects coming from some kind of ‘other world’.3

Monstrous Anatomies in German Culture The fascination with the monstrous demonstrated by the investigations of natural philosophers found in the German culture of the 1770s a peculiar approach in Johann Caspar Lavater’s pathognomical and physiognomical studies on physical ‘diversity’, published in his well-known Von der Physiognomik (‘Physiognomy’, 1772) and Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe (‘Physiognomic Fragments for the Purpose of Promoting the Knowledge and Love of Mankind’, 1775–1778) rapidly translated into the major European languages.4 Literary descriptions of monstrous bodies in the last decades of the eighteenth century were mostly influenced by Lavater’s analysis, whose final goal was to trace and describe the physiognomy of the genius and of the criminal as well as the physiognomy of Jesus. While it was scientifically impossible to delineate the latter, the former were sketched out by Lavater, who would become influential for later theories of degeneration, and in particular for Lombroso’s criminological studies.5 This was also the time when the rays of light of the Enlightenment began to be obscured in Germany by the rising irrationality of Sturm und Drang that – to refer to Tzvetan Todorov’s analysis of the ‘fantastic’ in literature – eventually turned into the poetics of the ‘marvelous’ developed by the Frühromantiker in Jena, of the ‘fantastic-marvelous’ in the Romantic circle of Heidelberg and, finally, of the ‘fantastic-uncanny’ during the late Romanticism of Berlin.6 Such authors as Georg Christoph Lichtenberg – an adversary of Lavater’s “physiognomical frenzy” –7 and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe were actually funda3 See Terry Castle, ‘Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie’, Critical Inquiry, 15 (1988), pp. 26–61; Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer : Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 4 On the influence of Lavater’s works on European culture, see Physiognomy in Profile: Lavater’s Impact on European Culture, ed. by Melissa Percival and Graeme Tytler (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005). 5 See Carsten Zelle, ‘Physiognomie des Schreckens im achtzehnten Jahrhundert. Zu Johann Caspar Lavater und Charles Lebru’, in Lessing Yearbook, XXI (1989), pp. 89–102 and Carsten Zelle, ‘Soul-Semiology : On Lavater’s Physiognomic Principles’, in The Faces of Physiognomy, ed. by Ellis Shookman (Columbia: Camden House 1993), pp. 40–63. 6 See Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. by Richard Howard (London: Case Western Reserve University, 1973). 7 When the first book of Lavater’s Fragments appeared, Lichtenberg actually spoke of a “Raserei für Physiognomik”, i. e. a “physiognomical frenzy […] which lasted until well into the following century”, see Melissa Percival, The Appearance of Character : Physiognomy and Facial

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mental during the late Enlightenment (Spätaufkläung) for the sedimentation of a scientific and epistemological method that influenced the perception of the monstrous in both Romantic literature and aesthetics.8 Yet, the Romantic interest for the monstrous, the abnormal and the paranormal began under the aegis of Lichtenberg’s epistemological theory (Wissenslehre),9 mainly contained in his Südelbücher (‘Scrapbooks’), that is to say the author’s notebooks written between 1765 and 1799. While it emphasises the importance of experimental evidence in physics, Lichtenberg’s method reveals to be critical and analytical at the same time, as the most famous Aphorism 1602 of the collection reveals: Je mehr sich bei Erforschung der Natur die Erfahrungen und Versuche häufen, desto schwankender werden die Theorien. Es ist aber immer gut sie nicht gleich deswegen aufzugeben. Denn jede Hypothese die gut war, dient wenigstens die Erscheinungen bis auf ihre Zeit gehörig zusammen zu denken und zu behalten. Man sollte die widersprechenden Erfahrungen besonders niederlegen, bis sie sich hinlänglich angehäuft haben um es der Mühe wert zu machen ein neues Gebäude aufzuführen.10

The fundamental role played by Lichtenberg in the interfacing between science and literature at the end of the eighteenth century is not by chance underlined by Jean Paul Richter at the beginning of his Unsichtbare Loge (‘Invisible Lodge’, 1793). Published only three years after Lichtenberg wrote his theoretical Aphorism 1602, this work represents in a sense the application of the physicist’s Expression in Eighteenth-Century France (Leeds: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1999), p. 13. See further, on the debate on physiognomy, August Ohage, ‘Über “Raserei für Physiognomik in Niedersachsen” im Jahre 1777. Zur frühen Rezeption von Lavaters Physiognomischen Fragmenten’, in Das Antlitz Gottes im Antlitz des Menschen: Zugänge zu Johann Caspar Lavater, hrsg. von Karl Pestalozzi und Horst Weigelt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), pp. 233–242 and Federica La Manna, Sineddoche dell’anima. Il volto nel dibattito tedesco del Settecento (Milan: Mimesis, 2012). 8 On Goethe’s experimental method and on its influence on Romanticism, see Raul Calzoni, Greta Perletti, ‘Experiment and its Travelling in German and British Romanticism’, in Travelling Concepts, Metaphors, and Narratives: Literary and Cultural Studies in an Age of Interdisciplinary Research, ed. by Sybille Baumbach, Beatrice Michaelis and Ansgar Nünning (Trier : Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2011), pp. 69–94. 9 Elena Agazzi, ‘Die Blitzartigkeit der kleinen Form. Gedanken über die Metapher im Bezug auf die Wissenslehre bei Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’, in Tropen und Metaphern im Gelehrtendiskurs des 18. Jahrhunderts, hrgs. von Elena Agazzi in Zusammenarbeit mit Ulrike Zeuch unter Mitwirkung von Guglielmo Gabbiadini (= Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, Sonderheft 10, Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2011), pp. 69–80. 10 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aph. 1602 (1790/91), in Sudelbücher II, in Schriften und Briefe, hrsg. von Wolfgang Promies (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1971), vol. 2, Heft J, pp. 294–295: “The more experience and experiments are accumulated during the exploration of nature, the more faltering its theories become. It is always good though not to abandon them instantly. For every hypothesis which used to be good at least serves the purpose of duly summarizing and keeping all phenomena until its own time. One should lay down the conflicting experience separately, until it has accumulated sufficiently to justify the efforts necessary to edifice a new theory”.

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experimental theory to literature and, at the same time, the impossibility to apply it to the writing process without degenerating into the monstrous. Thus, while Lichtenberg is explicitly named at the beginning of the Unsichtbare Loge as a tutelary deity of Jean Paul’s novel, the author himself reveals with his words the failure of his literary experiment. The transfer of Lichtenberg’s scientific method from physics to literature and Jean Paul’s confrontation with it represent in this instance a turning point for the author, i. e. the moment when he became a ‘Romantic’: Der Verfasser der unsichtbaren Loge hatte von Lichtenberg so starke Bußpredigten gegen die Menschenunkunde der deutschen Romanschreiber und Dichter gelesen und gegen ihre so große Unwissenheit in Realien ebensowohl als in Personalien, daß er zum Glück den Mut nicht hatte, wenigstens früher als im 28ten Jahre das romantische Wagstück zu übernehmen. Er fürchtete immer, ein Dichter müsse so gut wie ein Maler und Baumeister etwas wissen, wenn auch wenig; ja er müsse (die Sache noch höher getrieben) sogar von Grenzwissenschaften (und freilich umgrenzen alle Wissenschaften die Poesie) manches verstehen, so wie der Maler von Anatomie, von Chemie, Götterlehre und sonst.11

Significantly, it is five years before the outbreak of the Frühromantik in 1798 that Jean Paul confessed his Romantic turn and insisted in a syncretic method of knowlegde, stimulated by Lichtenberg, that eventually turned into the Symphilosophieren, the ‘philosophizing-together’ typical of the self-reflexive discourse of the Jena Romantics. Thus, the confrontation with Lichtenberg was essential for the sedimentaion of the early Romantic epistemology in Germany and for its conception of poetry as ‘universal progressive’, according to the famous ‘Fragment 116’ from Athenaeum: Die romantische Poesie ist eine progressive Universalpoesie. Ihre Bestimmung ist nicht bloß, alle getrennte Gattungen der Poesie wieder zu vereinigen, und die Poesie mit der Philosophie und Rhetorik in Berührung zu setzen. Sie will, und soll auch Poesie und Prosa, Genialität und Kritik, Kunstpoesie und Naturpoesie bald mischen, bald verschmelzen, die Poesie lebendig und gesellig, und das Leben und die Gesellschaft poetisch machen, den Witz poetisieren, und die Formen der Kunst mit gediegnem Bildungsstoff jeder Art anfüllen und sättigen, und durch die Schwingungen des Humors beseelen. Sie umfaßt alles, was nur poetisch ist, vom größten wieder mehre 11 Jean Paul, Die unsichtbare Loge, in Jean Paul: Sämtliche Werke, 6 vols., hrsg. von Norbert Miller and Gustav Lohmann (München: Hanser, 1959ff), vol. 1, Appendix I, p. 16: “The author of the Invisible Lodge had read so many of Lichtenberg’s strong penitential sermons against the lack of anthropological knowledge of most German novelists and poets and against their ignorance in natural sciences and personal characters that luckily he didn’t dare before his 28th birthday to undertake this Romantic feat. He always feared that a poet should know something so well as a painter or a carpenter, although maybe not so many things like them; yes, he even should (to go to the extreme) understand something of fringe-sciences (and all sciences fringe poetry) like the painter of anatomy, chemistry, theology and so on”.

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Systeme in sich enthaltenden Systeme der Kunst, bis zu dem Seufzer, dem Kuß, den das dichtende Kind aushaucht in kunstlosen Gesang. Sie kann sich so in das Dargestellte verlieren, daß man glauben möchte, poetische Individuen jeder Art zu charakterisieren, sei ihr eins und alles.12

The place where Romantic poetry loses itself is exactly the place where the monstrous is generated in its different meanings and manifestations, as Jean Paul demonstrates before the Romantic circle of Jena settled. In this sense, Elisa Leonzio’s contribution to this book is telling, since it retraces the scientific influences on Jean Paul’s literary works by focusing on his Philosophische Untersuchungen (‘Philosophical Inquires’), written between 1790 and 1821, and on the Unsichtbare Loge in order to show how deformity and monstrosity in these oeuvres can be read at both a philosopohical, i. e. aesthetical, and scientific level. Leonzio actually traces back the philosophical and scientific background of the novel, revealing how Paracelsus’ medicine, Frany Anton Mesmer’s magnetism, Johann Christian Reil’s and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s physiology as well as Lavater’s physiognomy converge with Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft (‘Critique of Judgement’, 1790) in the author’s handling of the monstrous. Thanks to an embriogenetic perspective, the author reads Jean Paul’s works in the wake of these influences and succeeds in legitimating the monster and its manifestations with respect to Reil’s studies, since it was thanks to them that the abnormal began to be no longer regarded as a disturbing element contradicting an epistemological model, founded on the assumed perfection of God’s creation. Thus the monster was considered by Jean Paul as the manifestation of the many possible directions that nature can follow in its development. The presence of the monster in nature and its legitimation would encourage the growth of ‘monstrous’ figures and styles in Romantic literature, perceived as uncanny, perverted and even fatal. Nevertheless, if the form of early Romantic literature tended from an aesthetical point of view to become itself ‘monstrous’, because of its universal and progressive inclination, it should not be forgotten 12 Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Fragment 116’, in Athenaeum, in Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, hrsg. von Ernst Behler (Mu¨ nchen/Paderborn/Wien: Scho¨ ningh, 1967), vol. 2, Friedrich Schlegel. Charakteristiken und Kritiken I (1796–1801), pp. 182–183: “Romantic poetry is a progressive universal poetry. Its destiny is not merely to reunite all of the different genres and to put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric. Romantic poetry wants to and should combine and fuse poetry and prose, genius and criticism, art poetry and nature poetry. It should make poetry lively and sociable, and make life and society poetic. It should poeticize wit and fill all of art’s forms with sound material of every kind to form the human soul, to animate it with flights of humor. Romantic poetry embraces everything that is purely poetic, from the greatest art systems, which contain within them still more systems, all the way down to the sigh, the kiss that a poeticizing child breathes out in an artless song. Romantic poetry can lose itself in what is represented to the extent that one might believe that it exists solely to characterize poetic individuals of all types”.

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that the appearance of monsters in German literature is not so common in the works of the authors belonging to the circle of Jena: Novalis, the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, but even Friedrich Schleiermacher and August Ludwig Hülsen did not actually offer literary representation of the monstrous.13 The inclination to magic and to the ‘marvelous’ – i. e. “the supernatural accepted” –14 of their poetry actually prevented them from representing monsters and this differentiates the poetry of Fruhromantik from that one of the so-called Spätromantik. In both Heidelberg and Berlin, the centres of German late Romanticism, the marvelous got respectively the traits of the ‘fantastic-marvelous’ and the ‘fantastic-uncanny’.15 In the first case, it is already the title of Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano’s collection of Volkslieder (‘popular songs’) published between 1805 and 1808 to vehiculate the importance of the ‘fantasticmarvelous’ for the Heidelberg Romantic circle: Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte deutsche Lieder (‘The Boy’s Magic Horn: Old German Songs’). As far as the monster is concerned, it is well known that it also was in Heidelberg that the brothers Grimm profited from their philological and ethnographical researches to write the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (‘Children’s and Household Tales’, 1812–1815). In this collection of fairy tales, directly influenced by Arnim and Brentano’s Magic Horn, the brothers Grimm wanted to preserve from oblivion an entire German oral tradition within the programme of the Romantic nationalism. Nevertheless, in the first edition of their anthology, the Grimms included Charles Perrault’s tales, published in Paris in 1697 and written for the literary salons of an aristocratic French audience. It is incidentally in the different ‘use’ of the monster in the Grimms’ and Perrault’s tales that the Romantic turning point from ‘fantastic-marvelous’ to ‘fantastic-uncanny’ took place, since Perrault and his contemporary women writers keep a light touch throughout, even when they delight in producing shivers and thrills. But in the Grimm Brothers’ later, seminal anthology, the tally of blood-drinking, child-stealing, omophagous assailants cannot be made, and the mood turns sinister. Besides the familiar stories ‘The Juniper Tree’ and ‘Hansel and Gretel’, many more introduce ravening ogres and flesh-eating witches; only occasionally will a Mother Holle perform an act of kindness.16

13 With respect to this point we can speak of a ‘physiology of poetry’, mainly developed by Novalis in the Circle of Jena and based on John Brown’s Elementa medicinae (1780), as Ethel Matala de Mazza does in Der verfaßte Körper : Zum Projekt einer organischen Gemeinschaft in der Politischen Romantik (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1999), p. 144. 14 Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 42. 15 Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 42. 16 Marina Warner, Monsters of Our Own Making: The Peculiar Pleasures of Fear (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007), p. 310.

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This sinister imaginary was fundamental for the “development of the so-called black Romanticism”17 and the disposition for the ‘fantastic-uncanny’ that characterised it. It is not by chance that Tzvetan Todorov explicitly referred to the ‘uncanny’ in order to understand the ‘fantastic’ as an aesthetic category, since it was over the literary works of German late Romanticism that Sigmund Freud elaborated psychoanalysis. It is in particular with regard to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (‘The Sandman’, 1812) that Freud elaborated the theory of the uncanny, because it is in the works of this German Romantic writer that the monster manifests its liminal condition as an abnormal body able to interrogate man on human nature and mind. It this book Raul Calzoni’s contribution focuses therefore on the figure of the vampire, its birth and its religious, social and literary meanings between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Suspended between life and death and therefore able to embody the innest fears of the human soul, the vampire proves to be an abnormal body and, like many of the monsters that feature in this book, it is essentially a mixture […] of two realms, the animal and the human: the man with the head of an ox, the man with a bird’s feet – monsters. It is the blending, the mixture of two species: the pig with a sheep’s head is a monster. It is the mixture of two individuals: the person who has two heads and one body or two bodies and one head is a monster. It is the mixture of two sexes: the person who is both male and female is a monster. It is a mixture of life and death: the fetus born with a morphology that means it will not be able to live but that nonetheless survives for some minutes or days is a monster. Finally, it is a mixture of forms: the person who has neither arms nor legs, like a snake, is a monster.18

But the monster is also a metaphor for the writing process itself, which like a vampire takes nourishment from other corpora; thus Hoffmann has reenacted with his tale Vampirismus (1821) an uncanny literary tradition, which began with Bürger’s Lenore (‘Ellenore’, 1773) during the Sturm und Drang and then with the contribution of Goethe’s Braut von Korinth (‘The Bride of Corinth’, 1798), the Brothers Grimm and Ludwig Tieck, ended up in the late Romanticism with Tieck’s own works and Heinrich von Kleist’s theatre, novellas and journalism.19 Another suitable methaphor for the writer is therefore the monstrous 17 Monika Schmitz-Emans, ‘Theories of Romanticism: The First Two Hundred Years’, in Nonfictional Romantic Prose: Expanding Borders, ed. by Steven P. Sondrup and Virgil Nemoianu (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004), p. 24. 18 Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collwge de France, 1974–1975, ed. by Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, trans. by Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 63. 19 On Ludwig Tieck’s importance for the Romantic ‘fantastic’ and its relapses on Hoffmann, Freud and Todorov, see Marc Falkenberg, Rethinking the Uncanny in Hoffmann and Tieck (Frankfurt am Main-Berlin: Peter Lang, 2005).

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‘poison mixer’ as it is portrayed in Kleist’s play Kätchen von Heilbronn oder Die Feuerprobe (‘Katie of Heilbronn or The Trial by Fire’, 1807–1808) to which Lorella Bosco devotes her contribution to this book. Kunegunde’s sexual desire and the monster as a tempting and erotic body are the main topic of this play – and all of these are incidentally features belonging to Hoffmann’s and Goethe’s vampiric bodies as well. Allowedly based on the commixture between fact and fiction typical of Kleist’s literary oeuvres, this play shows the body of the monster as a manifestation of the moral decline, i. e. as a death process, in which life becomes a mask, a mere simulacrum. Kunigunde is therefore a monstrous conglomerate of body parts of different origins and she owes her beauty to well applied concealment make-up and to costuming. She simulates life even though her body is made out of anorganic, dead materials like metals. She is indeed a combination of metal, flesh and humanoid prostheses, a sort of ‘female Golem’. The reference to the Golem made by Bosco in her essay opens up a perspective on the monster that leads to a literary handling of the monster as a tool to prove the limits of human creative power and at the same time to overcome melancholia and eventually death. In her essay on Adalbert Stifter’s Turmalin (‘Tourmaline’, 1853), Micaela Latini actually shows how the central theme of the story is an obscure pain that infects mind and soul with melancholia and manifests itself in the primitiveness of the protagonist of the tale. Tourmaline’s enormous head represents the demonic power of imagination that cannot be totally translated into form, and this confirms that poetry does not reproduce the world, but produces it. During Realism, Stifter used the abnormal to criticize the Romantic tendency to take distance from the real world that eventually turned into insanity. Stifter’s criticism of the Romantic ‘fantastic’, which he believed to be a degeneration of reason, is typical of the time when he produced his works, i. e. a period when Positivism and empirical evidence prevailed over Romanticism and imagination. And yet, in another Austrian author of the second half of the nineteenth century, the monster re-emerges as an aestethical, ethical and even psychological device able to criticize the unilateral exercise of empirical methods in science and to assert the human need for creative power and imagination. As in the case of Mary Shelley’s modern Prometheus, Frankenstein (1818), Anna Cappellotto deals in her essay with the attempt to produce human beings in a laboratory, which in German tradition dates at least back to Paracelsus, who theorized in his treatise De generatione rerum naturalium (1537) the receipt of his man-made man: a little creature having the appearance of a newborn, the so-called Homunculus. Starting from Rudolf Steiner’s reading of this figure, according to whom modern science intended the Humanities as “fantasy and dreaming”,20 Cappellotto demonstrates that in such works as 20 Rudolf Steiner, Homunkulus, public lecture, Berlin, March 26, 1914, in Geisteswissenschaft

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Goethe’s Faust (1831) and Robert Hamerling’s Homunculus. Moderne Epos in zehn Gesängen (‘Homunculus. A Modern Epic in 10 Cantos’, 1888), this little creature is “a symbol, presumably containing within himself multiple, if not inexhaustible semantic ambiguities”.21 Rather than belonging to the ‘fantastic’, this creature actually becomes in Goethe’s and Hamerling’s works an instrument of criticism of the Positivistic attitude of the natural sciences, which purported to have a complete comprehension of the human being. The Homunculus thus confirms the belief that monstrosity has to do less with diversity in kind than with the profusion of forms which qualifies nature itself.

Monstrous Anatomies in British Culture Also in British culture, the years between the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century are widely recognized as pivotal for the emergence of new epistemologies of monstrosity. This is the moment when the monster’s body most fully foregrounds the importance of its anatomy, turning the monster into an interesting specimen that invites the gaze of natural philosophers, anatomists and practitioners of medicine. It is in this way that the body of the monster seems a privileged site to observe the entrance of what Rosemarie Garland Thomson calls the ‘extraordinary body’ into the domain of science: By the eighteenth century the monster’s power to inspire terror, awe, wonder, and divination was being eroded by science, which sought to classify and master rather than revere the extraordinary body. The scientist’s and philosopher’s cabinets of curiosities were transformed into the medical man’s dissection table. The once marvelous body that was taken as a map of human fate now began to be seen as an aberrant body that marked the borders between the normal and the pathological.22

Garland traces here a familiar line of argument for the scholarly investigation of monstrosity, one that turns monsters from prodigies – indicating or showing (as in the etymology of the term ‘monstrum’, from ‘monstrare’, ‘to show’) the divine will or prefiguring divine punishment – to wonders to be collected and shown in the Wunderkammern of many European countries between the fifteenth and sixteenth century, and then to the naturalized objects used for scientific inquiry. While this linear narrative dominated Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park’s als Lebensgut (Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1959), p. 12. 21 Latimer Dan, ‘Homunculus as Symbol: Semantic and Dramatic Functions of the Figure in Goethe’s Faust’, MLN, 89, German Issue (1974), p. 812. 22 Rosemarie Garland Thompson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 57.

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seminal work on monsters,23 which first sparked the interest of historians of science, authors tend today to demystify what Daston and Park themselves call, in their later masterpiece Wonders and the Order of Nature, a “teleological model, organized as a progress toward rationalization and naturalization”.24 This is especially true for the period of time that is the focus of this volume; a time which it has become established practice in Anglophone criticism to label ‘the long nineteenth century’, and which spans between the late eighteenth century and the late nineteenth century, between the works of the first Romantic generation and the Victorian age. As Stephen Pender notes, throughout the eighteenth century, rather than being kept separated, “the marvelous and the scientific coexisted in the reception and study of monsters and continued to do so long after the monster’s absorption by legitimate science”.25 This is not surprising, if we keep in mind that ‘the marvelous’ was by no means perceived to be an antagonist of ‘the scientist’: as the title of Richard Holmes’s fine book reminds us, the years that witnessed the encounter between the Romantics and the new developments of what (from 1833 onwards) would be termed ‘science’ might be defined “the age of wonder”,26 thereby foregrounding the very aspect connected to the monster’s body which, according to the linear and telic narrative describing the trajectory of monsters in the history of science, would be supplanted by the desire for classification and naturalization. While the effort to systematize knowledge about monsters and to debunk their supposedly supernatural value can be traced as early as in Sir Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), the taste for the ‘fantastic’ continued to thrive (as was the case with German culture), albeit under different guises. If the supernatural as such was dismissed as a vestige of superstition, British culture displayed a fascination with the exotic, the grotesque, and the aberrant throughout the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment years. As Francesca Di Blasio’s contribution to this volume shows, the arrival of Omai on the British soil in the 1770s is an example of this fascination with what deviates from the norm: as the ‘noble savage’ is soon turned into an object of display, Omai becomes the monstrous other, a freakish subaltern self that can be subjected to the dominant white gaze. While novelist Fanny Burney provides a counter-narrative to the 23 Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, ‘Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France and England’, Past and Present, 92 (1981), pp. 20–54. 24 Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998). 25 Stephen Pender, ‘“No Monsters at the Resurrection”: Inside Some Conjoined Twins’, in Monster Theory : Reading Culture, ed. by Jeoffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996), p. 150. 26 See Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder : How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (New York: Harper Collins, 2008).

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objectifying attitude shown by many commentators who described the encounter with the Polynesian man, Di Blasio shows the extent to which also contemporary exhibitions can replicate the colonial paradigm when dealing with the display of the living ‘other’, coming from the most remote and exotic places of the empire. In its refusal to acknowledge the reciprocity involved in the process of viewing the other, the dominant white gaze assimilates the monstrosity of Omai’s body to the monstrosity of women’s bodies in patriarchal society : like the exotic, freak ‘other’, also women are subjected to a similar reifying process and are thus doomed to inhabit a similar marginality. The closing decades of the eighteenth century display a markedly materialistic attitude towards the body of the monster. Paul Youngquist opens his book on monstrosity and British Romanticism with the famous anatomist John Hunter’s quest for the body of the man known as “the Irish giant”27 – whose impressive bones can still be seen (or gazed at) at the Hunterian Museum in London – while Stephen Asma in his historical and cultural exploration of monsters focuses on the work by Hunter and William Lawrence in the UK and by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in France to trace the new epistemological significance of monsters: aberrant bodies were now not only observed but also compared, measured and in some cases manipulated, because monstrosity was now recognized to have the potential for improving knowledge in embryology and developmental morphology.28 Sharon Ruston’s essay places in this context her discussion of the changing definitions of the monstrous body, whose importance is both physical and moral. Thus, in the work of conservative thinkers like Edmund Burke and Hannah More, the monstrous body functions as an instrument which, by foregrounding the dangers of political and moral aberrations, establishes the need for the ‘natural’ system of British monarchy and for the ‘natural’ hierarchies of British society. At the same time, Ruston also illustrates one of the most important tenets of nineteenth-century conceptions of monstrosity : namely, the fact that the monstrous body is increasingly conceived of as contiguous to rather than radically different from the normal body. If the medical and philosophical debates of the Romantic age increasingly authorize the belief that between the normal and the monstrous organism there is no ontological difference, Lawrence goes as far as to propose that monsters in nature have actually been created by man. While this anticipates Darwin’s later view (to be found especially in The Descent of Man, 1871) that in nature the most evidently monstrous species are 27 Paul Youngquist, Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 3–7. 28 See Stephen T. Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 154–161.

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the result of human artificial selection, Lawrence’s ideas about the role of humans in creating monstrosity takes up the issue of responsibility, which will continue to resonate throughout the century, most famously in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein but also in fin-de-siwcle works such as H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). The question of the similarities between the healthy and the monstrous body exerts a pervasive fascination also in Victorian culture, encouraging theorists and writers alike to explore to the full the implications of the exchange between the aberrant and the normal. This aspect is what qualifies, for Juliet Halberstam in her influential book Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), the new ‘monsters of modernity’ that emerge in Anglophone culture in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century. The epistemological novelty springing from the contiguity between monstrous and normal anatomies is re-read by Halberstam as the peculiarity of Gothic writing, the literary genre that most typically hosts the ‘monsters of modernity’ in British and American fiction: Gothic, I argue, marks a peculiarly modern preoccupation with boundaries, and their collapse. Gothic monsters, furthermore, differ from the monsters that came before the nineteenth century in that the monsters of modernity are characterized by their proximity to humans.29

This proximity encourages in Victorian imagination a continuous process of probing the limits and the potentialities of boundaries, thereby questioning – if not demystifying – accepted values and codes of behavior. This is especially evident in sensation fiction, a literary sub-genre of Gothic fiction that receives its name from a questioning of the boundaries that separate physiology and pathology : receiving sensory impressions from reading this kind of fiction was regarded (most famously by John Ruskin in his ‘Fiction Foul and Fair’, 1860) as a process that could easily lead to nervous impairment.30 Moreover, as Flora De Giovanni shows in her essay, sensation fiction engages a dialogue with current medical theories and discourses by insistently staging impaired bodies and 29 Halberstam, Skin Shows, p. 23. 30 For a discussion of the medical and cultural discourses supporting the pathological effects of sensation fiction from the 1850s to the 1890s see Angelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century : Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 85–91. More generally on the relations between sensation fiction and the medical context see D. A. Miller, ‘Cage aux folles: Sensation and Gender in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White’, Representations, 14 (1986), pp. 107–136; Sally Shuttleworth, ‘“Preaching to the Nerves”: Psychological Discourse in Sensation Fiction’, in A Question of Identity : Women, Science, and Literature, ed. by Marina Benjamin (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993), pp. 192–222; Pamela K. Gilbert, ‘Sensation Fiction and the Medical Context’, in The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed. by Andrew Mangham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 182–196.

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mental illnesses. Adopting the critical perspective of disability studies, De Giovanni focuses on Wilkie Collins’s writing in order to expose his complex attitude towards the Victorian representations of the ‘otherness’ embodied by the disabled or the deformed. If, on the one hand, Collins rejects a simplistic acceptance of the binary oppositions that sustain the stereotypical depiction of the freak, on the other hand his disabled characters are exhibited as spectacle, and fail to elude the marginality to which abnormal bodies are confined within Victorian culture. Despite the fascination with the possibility of exploring the potential inherent in unsettling boundaries and problematizing the status of monster-like characters, Collins’s narratives ultimately revert to the necessary subjection of the abnormal body. This is something akin to what Erin O’Connor argues in her exploration of Victorian freak shows, when she shows that while the deformity of the freak is recognized as the badge of unique individuality, “celebrating pathological formation as the ultimate mark of personal distinction”,31 yet this potentially empowering aspect is demystified by the endless repeatability of deformity. The centrality of monsters and freak shows in Victorian imagination is thus more apparent than real, as the deformed body is actually denied the possibility to actively shape or modify the definition of the Victorian unique self: With the exception of celebrities such as Tom Thumb, these figures were infinitely renewable – the names and faces changed over time, but the basic configuration of the show remained the same. The result was a sort of assembly-line individualism, an endless procession of human oddities whose cumulative impact was to standardize abnormality itself, to reduce the scene of nature’s bounty to a series of predictable, replaceable originals.32

Alessandra Violi’s contribution further explores the process of crossing boundaries, focusing on the body that is suspended between death and life, one of the most uncanny examples of the monstrous anatomies that inhabit Victorian imagination. The uncertain separation of death from life, an idea deriving from the scientific and medical studies in the physiology of dying and in the experiments with altered mental states,33 generates the irresistible fantasy of bodies that remain stuck in suspended animation. Hibernated bodies, trance-like states, vampires and mummies are all examples of a cultural obsession with boundaries that fail to hold, blurring the distinction between consciousness and 31 Erin O’Connor, Raw Material: Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 189. 32 O’Connor, Raw Material, p. 195. 33 On the proliferation of the so-called Victorian mental sciences see the anthology edited by Sally Shuttleworth and Jenny Bourne Taylor, Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830–1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). See also Martin Willis, Mesmerists, Monsters and Machines (Kent: The Kent State University Press, 2006).

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unconsciousness, life and death. If this uncertainty results in the proliferation of cultural fears (most notably, the fear of premature burial), by analyzing the discourses and fantasies circulating around these fears Violi shows that the undead can be recognized as a monster whose body becomes the symbol of not just the inevitable extinction of life, but also its indefinite extension. Thus, by eliciting a deeply ambivalent feeling, this monstrous anatomy encourages the experience of the uncanny, in which we feel both fascination with and horror at what appears to be ‘strangely familiar’: as in Freud’s conception of ‘the double’, who is regarded as both a harbinger of death and a guarantee of immortality,34 also nineteenth century monsters prove, to use the words of one of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s ‘Seven Theses’ on monstrosity, that “Fear of the Monster is Really a Kind of Desire”.35 This ambivalence affects also the representation of the monstrous body of nineteenth-century London, as Laura Di Michele’s essay illustrates, with examples from, among others, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker. A polymorphic and sickly organism, darkening and poisoning not just the East End but also the respectable West End and the Crystal Palace – which at mid–century had been the symbol of the technological and commercial power of the British empire and had established London as the thriving capital city of the European world – London is imagined as a place where the rich and the poor, cleanliness and mud, white and black incessantly meet and mix, enveloped in the all-pervading fog and moving on and around the filthy waters of the Thames. Once again, what the monstrous anatomy foregrounds is the impossibility of resorting to secure boundaries, protecting categories; uncertainty and proximity result in a process of relentless contamination. Because of its non-ontological difference from the normal, as the century progresses the monster becomes an instrument for unsettling and questioning the definition of the human itself. As Kelly Hurley argues, after Darwinian ideas spread the belief that change (and adaptation or resistance to change) is the dominant process in the evolution of species, the boundaries of the human body itself are put into question: “Matter is no longer subordinate to form […], bodies are without integrity or stability ; they are instead composite and changeful”.36 This is particularly evident in fin-de-siwcle fantasies of humans and animals disturbingly shading into one another – a fascinating subject that has

34 See Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, in Writings on Art and Literature, ed. by Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 193–233. 35 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’, in Monster Theory : Reading Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 16. 36 Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the ‘Fin de Siwcle’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 9.

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recently been explored by Virginia Richter’s study on Literature after Darwin.37 However, as illustrated by the contributions in this volume by Maria Teresa Chialant and Francesca Guidotti, what Hurley calls “new models of the human as abhuman, as bodily ambiguated or otherwise discontinuous in identity”38 emerge also through more unsettling associations, such as the association to the world of formless things or to the realm of the invisible unseen. Chialant’s essay addresses the relations between the monster and the formless or the indefinite; through an analysis of works by Mary Shelley, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Rudyard Kipling and H.G. Wells, Chialant explores the extent to which nineteenth-century writers imagine the monstrous by evoking undifferentiated beings or objects. Suspended between scientific and supernatural explanations, between the genre of Gothic and science fiction, these works engage with the strange physicality of bodies that, lacking or refusing a definite shape, resist classification and defy the usual categories of definition for identity and agency. Chialant’s essay points to the importance of the relation human-thing that has recently been at the core of Bill Brown’s ‘thing theory’.39 Within this theoretical framework, the importance of things goes beyond their role as objects of consumption and fetish; rather, things interact with the definition of identity, acting as mediators between subjects and objects. Initially focused especially on eighteenth-century culture,40 thing theory has recently spurred some interesting works also in Victorian studies.41 Guidotti’s essay explores the unsettling effects of invisibility and the unseen in the Victorian world, which is usually associated to a special interest in vision and which seems to be obsessed with the fantasy of incessant display and with the power of the scopic regime. Focusing on H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man, Guidotti shows how the unseen breaks into the everyday, generating a monstrous anatomy that is all the more disturbing because of its paradoxical corporeality, 37 Virginia Richter, Literature After Darwin: Human Beasts in Western Fiction, 1859–1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 38 Hurley, The Gothic Body, p. 5. 39 See Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 28 (2001), pp. 1–16; Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003). 40 To mention but few examples: Cynthia Wall, The Prose of Things: Transformation of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006); The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. by Mark Blackwell (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007); Julie Park, The Self & It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 41 Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006); Katharina Boehm, Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); John Plotz, ‘Materiality in Theory : What to Make of Victorian Things, Objects, and Commodities’, in The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture, ed. by Juliet John (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015 [forthcoming]).

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problematically mixing together absence and presence, emptiness and materiality. The body that matters in spite of (and because of) its invisibility calls for different interpretative systems, just as the concluding chapter of the novel foregrounds the invisibility of Griffin’s notes to Marvel: by defying interpretation, also the text becomes a monstrous anatomy that calls for a different paradigm of visibility and a different gaze. The last three contributions of this volume, by Sara Damiani, Daniela Crocetti and Michele Cometa, shed light on one particular figuration of monstrous anatomy : the transplanted body and the hermaphrodite that fascinate nineteenth-century imagination, and, on the other hand, Baubo, a mythical figure that surfaces in a number of writings by Sigmund Freud, in the early twentieth century. By introducing Bruno Latour’s concept of the seamless modern body that is constructed through the elision or repression of unthinkable processes of mixture and hybridization, Damiani’s essay explores the extent to which the modern body is haunted by its unconscious, characterized by fantasies that continuously threaten to disrupt the body’s integrity. This is especially true in the context of nineteenth-century medical practices, which create new possibilities for the manipulation, fragmentation and recombination of bodies. The transplanted body gives flesh to the blurring of boundaries which, as we have seen, dominates the imagination of the monstrous anatomy in the nineteenth century : the literary and cinematic explorations of organ transplants show that when the parts of different bodies are grafted together personal identity is disrupted by the confusion between the human and the animal or by the juxtaposition of fragments that belong to social categories (most typically, the criminal and the respectable person, or the black and the white) that should be kept separated. Crocetti’s essay traces the metamorphoses that have affected the cultural representations of the hermaphrodite, one of the most pervasive figurations of monstrous anatomies in the Western imagination. The story of the hermaphrodite across centuries illustrates the monster’s transformation from a beautiful marvel (as in the famous Borghese Hermaphroditus, the seventeenth-century copy of a Hellenistic statue) into an object of medical study, aimed at policing normative codes of gender politics and behaviors and then, in Virginia Woolf ’s writing, into a trope that allows her to explore and overcome gender restrictions. By illustrating a number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medical theories and case studies – including the story of Herculine Barbin, who features in Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality42 and was made public by Foucault 42 See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. by Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1998), vol. 1, The Will to Knowledge.

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himself, who published her memoirs and wrote a famous introduction for the English edition –43 Crocetti reveals the full extent of the medically driven social project that strived to prevent gender deviant and homosexual activity. Concluding our journey through monstrous anatomies with an incursion into the early twentieth century, Cometa’s essay uses the figure of Baubo in Freud’s writings as an illustration of the extent to which the monster, together with literature itself, properly becomes ‘the place of the other’, seeking to compensate for the fear of what technology and professionalization – as well as the teleologically-oriented Positivistic philosophy that aimed to understand them – attempted to exorcise and remove. At that time, the monster was used not only to foreground ancestral fears but also to tame the different other, so that it could be named and represented. Thus Freud evoked in his fin-de-siwcle psychoanalysis a complex mythological figure: the almost forgotten mythical wife of Disaule but also the maid who welcomes Demeter in Eleusis when she is desperately seeking for her daughter Persephone. Freud’s essay ‘Mythologische Parallel zu einer plastischen Zwangsvorstellungen’ (‘A Mythological Parallel to a Visual Obsession’, 1916) is a perfect integration of psychoanalytic reasoning, teratological and mythological evocation – the figure of Baubo herself – as well as a reflection on the survival of this image in modernity, after Goethe’s evocation of the wife of Disaule in his Faust. In order to integrate heterogeneous discourses, Freud’s text deals with the phenomenological history of monsters across the centuries, summoned up by Cometa as follows: In the Middle Ages, monsters had found a place in the great theological theories; as a result, they seem to have been fed less by literature than by theology. In later centuries, monsters featured in the scientific domains of geographical explorations, zoology and alchemy. While in the nineteenth century monsters became the domain of physiology as well as of comparative anatomy and of the bizarre science of teratology, in the twentieth century they come under the jurisdiction of the sciences of the psyche. These sciences retain a double function: on the one hand, they come to account for the workings of the soul; on the other, in the wake of the aesthetical quality that is typical of early psychology, they explore the fantastic world that can be found in literature, which taps into the depths of the psyche itself.44

By referring to Baubo’s phenomenology, Cometa demonstrates in his essay that psychoanalysis and the literature inspired by it have hosted those monsters which had been exiled by the unconscious in the scientific and pseudoscientific literature of the past. And it is not by chance that to debate this thesis the author 43 See Michel Foucault, ‘Preface’, in Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth Century French Hermaphrodite, trans. by Richard McDougall (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. vii–xvii. 44 See Michele Cometa’s essay in this book, p. 299.

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quotes a very telling passage taken from Todorov’s study on the ‘fantastic’, where it is said that psychoanalysis has replaced (and thereby made useless) the literature of the fantastic. There is no need to resort to the devil in order to speak of an excessive sexual desire, and none to resort to vampires in order to designate the attraction exerted by corpses: psychoanalysis, and the literature which is directly or indirectly inspired by it, deal with these matters in undisguised terms.45

Be this true or not, there is no doubt that the ‘fantastic’ in its different manifestations has been representing the very reason for the fascination and disgust with monsters throughout the centuries. According to Michel Foucault, from the Medieval period, throughout Renaissance till the nineteenth century, variations or types of monsters share the property of being strange ‘mixtures’. Monsters thus defy our categories of understanding, be they civil, scientific, religious, ethical or aesthetical. Therefore monsters are “Antiphysis”, as Foucault defined them in one of his lectures of the 1974–1975 year, that is to say “the kind of natural irregularity that calls law into question and disables it”.46 Is this not also true for the ‘fantastic’ in literature and science, which thanks to the liminal figure of the monster has been able to put into question established categories, religions, laws, methods and eventually disable them?

Acknowledgments The translation of Michele Cometa’s contribution is by Greta Perletti. We are very grateful to the contributors of this book for their patience and for the quality of their texts. We would also like to thanks Elena Agazzi and Vita Fortunati for the possibility of publishing this book in the series “ACUME 2 – Interfacing Science, Literature, and the Humanities”. Raul Calzoni Greta Perletti

45 Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 160. 46 Foucault, Abnormal, p. 64.

Elisa Leonzio

Deformity and Monstrosity: Jean Paul between Embryogenesis and the Concept of Life

Many monographs and articles explore the presence and relevance of the scientific discourse in Jean Paul’s literary and philosophical work.1 Many of these studies offer large space to medicine, both as a practice (i. e. doctors and their patients, descriptions of pathologies and treatments) and as a theoretical discipline (in its branches, in particular physiology and anatomy). Until now, however, no scholar has considered the numerous ‘grotesque’, deformed and monstrous bodies, which populate Jean Paul’s narrative, under the scope of embryogenesis and eighteenth-century physiology and, in particular, with respect to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s and Johann Christian Reil’s theories of Bildungstrieb (‘formative drive’) and Lebenskraft (‘vital force’). Still, without minimizing the influence which was wielded on Jean Paul by the medicine of Paracelsus and, in his wake, the magnetism of Mesmer, as well as Stahl’s physiology, on the one hand, and Lavater’s physiognomy, on the other hand, only the reflection on the ‘living organism’ offered by Blumenbach and Reil in their works can cast light on Jean Paul’s literary representation of science and its poetological significance. The first part of this paper is therefore devoted to a brief reconstruction of the debate on monstrosity in eighteenth-century German physiology, paying particular attention to the works of Kant, Blumenbach and Reil. In the second part, thanks to the analysis of some of Jean Paul’s narrative and philosophical works – including the Philosophische Untersuchungen (‘Philo1 The most significant among these are: Maximilian Rankl, Jean Paul und die Naturwissenschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1987); Werner Gerabek, Naturphilosophie und Dichtung bei Jean Paul: das Problem des commercium mentis et corporis (Stuttgart: Heinz Akad. Verl., 1988); Hans Esselborn, Das Universum der Bilder : die Naturwissenschaft in den Schriften Jean Pauls (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1989); Alexander Kosˇenina, Ernst Platners Anthropologie und Philosophie (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1989); Maximilian Bergengruen, Schöne Seelen, groteske Körper. Jean Pauls ästhetische Dynamisierung der Anthropologie (Hamburg: Meiner, 2003); Sabine Eickenrodt, Augen-Spiel. Jean Pauls optische Metaphorik der Unsterblichkeit (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006).

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sophical Inquires’, 1790–1821) and other texts from his literary remains (Nachlass) –, this essay will demonstrate that both the figures described in Jean Paul’s novels and his poetics of the ‘unfinished’ and the ‘deformed’ have their basis in Blumenbach’s writings and in Reil’s Archiv für die Physiologie; being ‘monstrosity’ in both of them no longer regarded, on the hand, as a disturbing element that contradicts an epistemological model founded on the assumed perfection of the universe as God’s creation and, on the other hand, as an offense against natural and the divine order. Rather, ‘monstrosity’ is considered by the two scholars as one of the possible directions which natural evolution can follow and, accordingly, a legitimate part of nature itself. This legitimation eventually encouraged the growth of ‘monstrous’ figures and styles in German Romantic literature, perceived as uncanny, but no longer as perverted.

I.

Life vs. Mechanism: the Legitimation of the Monsters

After the scientific revolution of Galileo and Newton the mechanistic interpretation of nature establishes itself as the dominant tendency in the Enlightenment all around Europe. Since the first decades of the following century it becomes, with the atomistic theory, nearly the only accepted model of scientific explanation of the natural world. This preponderance remains constant until the twentieth century because it offers the possibility – or maybe the illusion – of controlling nature: if the natural world is rationally explicable in accordance with calculable and therefore foreseeable laws, it becomes possible to dominate and modify it. In the twentieth century, however, a widespread fear of a possible ‘revolt’ of nature, whose effects would be environmental disasters, starts off a debate on anti-causalistic and anti-physicalistic models and philosophical approaches.2 The origin of such an alternative position is to be found in the eighteenth century, though with different reasons if compared with the present ones: it is not the fear of mankind destroying the natural world or the fright of nature rebelling against this violence with equal violence. The reasons are merely epistemological: living organisms escape any causal explanation and seem to follow inner laws of evolution, as if they have an internal impulse, an unaware drive to reach a particular form. Furthermore, creatures do exist, whose physical development contradicts not only causal explanations, but also the finalistic ones, which have also been used to illuminate the inclination of each body toward a specific form: that is, abnormal creatures, or monsters, which should 2 Maike Arz, Literatur und Lebenskraft. Vitalistische Naturforschung und bürgerliche Literatur um 1800 (Stuttgart: M& P. Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung, 1996), p. 10.

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not exist if an unalterable connection between a cause and its effect exists in natural generation. Acknowledging this fact means to recognize that the phenomenon of ‘life’ cannot be explained by physics, but by such different discipline that, after Lamarck, is called biology. One of the most interesting and long-unexplored chapters in the history of German biology is the role played by Immanuel Kant in helping the affirmation – and their influence in the Romantic Age – of new physiology and life science at the end of the Enlightenment.3 In his Kritik der Urteilskraft (‘Critique of Judgment’, 1770) – particularly in the second part, Kritik der teleologischen Urteilskraft (‘Critique of teleological Judgment’), and in the appendix, Methodenlehre der teleologischen Urteilskraft (‘Methodology of the Teleological Judgement’), of this book – Kant offers a clear and authoritative statement on the difference between mechanism and organism: In einer Uhr ist ein Teil das Werkzeug der Bewegung der andern, aber nicht ein Rad die wirkende Ursache der Hervorbringung des andern; ein Teil ist zwar um des andern Willen, aber nicht durch denselben da. Daher ist auch die hervorbringende Ursache derselben und ihrer Form nicht in der Natur (dieser Materie), sondern außer ihr in einem Wesen, welches nach Ideen eines durch seine Kausalität möglichen Ganzen wirken kann, enthalten. Daher bringt auch, so wenig wie ein Rad in der Uhr das andere, noch weniger eine Uhr andere Uhren hervor, so daß sie andere Materie dazu benutzte (sie organisierte); daher ersetzt sie auch nicht von selbst die ihr entwandten Teile, oder vergütet ihren Mangel in der ersten Bildung durch den Beitritt der übrigen, oder bessert sich etwa selbst aus, wenn sie in Unordnung geraten ist: welches alles wir dagegen von der organisierten Natur erwarten können. – Ein organisiertes Wesen ist also nicht bloß Maschine: denn die hat lediglich bewegende Kraft; sondern sie besitzt in sich bildende Kraft, und zwar eine solche, die sie den Materien mitteilt, welche sie nicht haben (sie organisiert): also eine sich fortpflanzende bildende Kraft, welche durch das Bewegungsvermögen allein (den Mechanism) nicht erklärt werden kann.4 3 Timothy Lenoir, ‘Kant, Blumenbach and the Vital Materialism in German Biology’, Isis, LXXI, 1 (1980) pp. 77–108. 4 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Werke in zwölf Bänden, hrsg. von Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), vol. 10, p. 322; engl. trans. Critique of Judgement, translated with introduction and notes by John Henry Bernard (London: Macmillan, 1914, 2nd ed. revised), p. 164: “In a watch one part is the instrument for moving the other parts, but the wheel is not the effective cause of the production of the others; no doubt one part is for the sake of the others, but it does not exist by their means. In this case the producing cause of the parts and of their form is not contained in the nature (of the material), but is external to it in a being which can produce effects according to Ideas of a whole possible by means of its causality. Hence a watch wheel does not produce other wheels, still less does one watch produce other watches, utilising (organising) foreign material for that purpose; hence it does not replace of itself parts of which it has been deprived, nor does it make good what is lacking in a first formation by the addition of the missing parts, nor if it has gone out of order does it repair itself – all of which, on the contrary, we may expect from organised nature. – An

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What definitely distinguishes a living creature from an artificial, mechanical object is the presence of a ‘formative force’, which, from inside the living body, organizes it as its product. Of course, the act of the natural organisation has a deep affinity with the idea of a link between causes and their effects. The relation, however, between these two poles goes beyond human understanding, when man tries to explain the ‘activity’ of living nature. In the same passage Kant further emphasizes this aspect: “Genau zu reden hat also die Organisation der Natur nichts Analogisches mit irgendeiner Kausalität, die wir kennen”.5 With this affirmation, Kant does not exclude that the natural organisation is ruled by an innermost connection of causes and effects, but in accordance with his analysis of the limits of human understanding he underlines that nature cannot be explained, either directly or indirectly through analogy : if there is a causality, it must be different from the mechanical causality we know and are able to manage. Still more interesting for our analysis is the fact that the concept of causality developed here by Kant is so extensive that it can imply deviations and anomalies: Sie [die Natur] organisiert sich vielmehr selbst, und in jeder Spezies ihrer organisierten Produkte, zwar nach einerlei Exemplar im Ganzen, aber doch auch mit schicklichen Abweichungen, die die Selbsterhaltung nach den Umständen erfordert.6

Outlined here is the dialectic of ‘whole and parts’, which dominates the Enlightenment’s reflection on natural philosophy, psychology and aesthetics dealing with: a) the concept of the cosmos as a composite being, whose parts all cooperate to form a perfectly completed whole; b) the idea of individual life as a succession of episodes, teleologically ordered to promote the birth of an adult rational human being, i. e. a ganzer Mensch (‘whole person’); c) after Christian Friedrich von Blanckenburg’s Versuch über den Roman (‘Essay on the Novel’, 1774), the theory of novel meant as a description as a ‘whole’ and thus complete as the life it describes.7 organised being is then not a mere machine, for that has merely moving power, but it possesses in itself formative power of a self-propagating kind which it communicates to its materials though they have it not of themselves; it organises them, in fact, and this cannot be explained by the mere mechanical faculty of motion”. 5 Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, p. 323; engl. trans. Critique of Judgement, p. 164: “To speak strictly, then, the organisation of nature has in it nothing analogous to any causality we know”. 6 Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, p. 322; engl. trans. Critique of Judgement, p. 164: “Much rather does it [the Nature] organise itself and its organised products in every species, no doubt after one general pattern but yet with suitable deviations, which self-preservation demands according to circumstances”. 7 Elisa Leonzio, ‘Teoria del romanzo e dell’arte del giardino nel tardo Settecento tedesco’, in Metamorfosi dei Lumi. Il paesaggio, ed. by Simone Carpentari Messina (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2010), pp. 79–98.

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However, in the passage quoted above, Kant recognizes that nature, for its overall balance, can eventually choose to make ‘appropriate deviations’ and generate organisms, which are not perfect and completed, i. e. beings which are in some way interrupted. It has to be underlined that, in relation to this topic, Kant, both in the Kritik der Urteilskraft and in his letters, pays his tribute to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the supporter of epigenesis and theorist of the Bildungstrieb, who had disclosed this theory in his Über den Bildungstrieb (‘On the Formative Drive’), firstly published in 1781 and reprinted with great success after Kant’s public praise. In a letter to Blumenbach (5 august 1790), Kant expresses his gratitude as follows: Für Ihre mir im vorigen Jahre gewordene Zusendung des trefflichen Werks über den Bildungstrieb abzustatten. Ihre Schriften haben mich vielfältig belehrt; doch hat das Neue in der Vereinigung zweier Prinzipien, dem der physisch-mechanischen und der bloss teleologischen Erklärungsart der organisierten Natur, welche man sonst geglaubt hat unvereinbar zu sein, eine nähere Beziehung auf die Ideen, mit denen ich mich vorzüglich beschäftige, die eben einer solchen Bestätgung durch Fakta bedürfen.8

But it is in the § 81 of the Kritik der Urteilskraft that Kant publicly admits his indebtedness to Blumenbach: Daß rohe Materie sich nach mechanischen Gesetzen ursprünglich selbst gebildet habe, daß aus der Natur des Leblosen Leben habe entspringen, und Materie in die Form einer sich selbst erhaltenden Zweckmäßigkeit sich von selbst habe fügen können, erklärt er [Blumenbach] mit Recht für vernunftwidrig; läßt aber zugleich dem Naturmechanism unter diesem uns unerforschlichen Prinzip einer ursprünglichen Organisation einen unbestimmbaren, zugleich doch auch unverkennbaren Anteil, wozu das Vermögen der Materie (zum Unterschiede von der, ihr allgemein beiwohnenden, bloß mechanischen Bildungskraft) von ihm in einem organisierten Körper ein (gleichsam unter der höheren Leitung und Anweisung der ersteren stehender) Bildungstrieb genannt wird.9 8 Immanuel Kant, Briefwechsel, Briefwechsel, hrsg. von Otto Schöndörffer (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1972), p. 466: “I wish to extend my thanks for sending me last year your excellent work on the formative drive [Bildungstrieb]. I have learned a great deal from your writings. Indeed, in your new work, you unite two principles – the physical-mechanical and the sheerly teleological mode of explanation of organized nature. These are modes which one would not have thought capable of being united. In this you have quite closely approached the idea with which I have been chiefly occupied – but an idea that required such confirmation [as you provide] through facts” (my translation). I choose to use here the term ‘drive’, which is more adherent to the original word Trieb and which better reproduces the distinction between Kraft and Trieb, affirmed both by Kant and his precursor Blumenbach. 9 Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, p. 381; engl. trans. Critique of Judgement, p. 204: “In all physical explanations of these formations he starts from organised matter. That crude matter should have originally formed itself according to mechanical laws, that life should have sprung from the nature of what is lifeless, that matter should have been able to dispose itself into the form of

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Kant credits Blumenbach with the merit of having discovered and developed the idea of a ‘nisus formativus’ or Bildungstrieb, which is able to put together mechanical and teleological perspectives, i. e. two apparently incompatible types of causality : a cause subject to mechanical laws (‘gesetzmäßig’) and an intentional cause (‘absichtlich wirkende Ursache’), the latter being more powerful than the former and even conditioning it. The nisus formativus, according to Kant, is the supersensible substrate of nature, the unknowable an sich that opposes the phenomenal reality and its mechanical power of the ‘formation force’ (Bildungskraft). Both Bildungstrieb and Bildungskraft are present in the organism and it is the greatest merit of Blumenbach to have recognized their existence and respective functions. Kant, in his praise, sets up the epigenetic approach of Blumenbach against the theory of preformationism by underlining that epigenesis is more adherent to reality, i. e. to what it can be observed. In this context Kant lingers on the way Mißgeburten (literally a ‘misbirths’, or children born monstrously deformed) and Bastarde (‘bastards’) are treated in both tendencies.10 Preformationism had established itself in the middle of the seventeenth century, at a time when Aristotelian postulates began to be repudiated. The classical idea was that an unformed substance could take up a form, which was potentially in it.11 According to preformationism, instead, the embryo takes immediately a completed, though miniaturized human form and this excludes an embryonic development stricto sensu. In this perspective no space remains for deformations caused by inner alterations: preformationism therefore cannot account for monstrous or deformed creatures. At least, deformities are explained, as in Nicolas Andry’s Orthop{die (‘Orthopaedia’, 1741), as the results of mechanical effects suffered by the mother during pregnancy and having repercussions on the foetus.12 Blumenbach’s epigenetic approach, instead, offers some interesting explanations for the existence of monstrosity, considering its two main variants, i. e. abnormal outgrowths on the body and misshapen foeti. Part of the former group includes anomalous excrescences in the joints of animals and human beings, as well as warts in plants. For the latter, Blumenbach offers a rich survey, a self-maintaining purposiveness–this he rightly declares to be contradictory to Reason. But at the same time he leaves to natural mechanism under this to us indispensable principle of an original organisation, an undeterminable but yet unmistakeable element, in reference to which the faculty of matter in an organised body is called by him a formative impulse (in contrast to, and yet standing under the higher guidance and direction of, that merely mechanical formative power universally resident in matter)”. 10 See Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, p. 380. 11 Clara Pinto-Correia, The Ovary of Eve: Egg and Sperm and Preformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 5. 12 Pinto-Correia, The Ovary of Eve, p. 137.

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where particular relevance is paid to malformations of the reproductive organs and to bodies with two heads or, mirroring these, ‘heads’ with too many limbs.13 Bildungstrieb acts, according to Blumenbach, in both Reproduktion (‘reproduction’) and Zeugung (‘generation’).14 As proof of this, Blumenbach mentions the astonishing way polyps15 or other similar organisms are able to reproduce amputated limbs, i. e. recreating them like mammals generate their offsprings: hence reproduction and generation are interconnected. Therefore Blumenbach also considers alterations in both reproduction and generation as a consequence of identical malfunctions of the Bildungstrieb that can be more or less stark and effective, depending for example on the age of the organism. Moreover, it can deviate “wenn er bey Bildung der einen Art organischer Körper die für eine andere Art derselben bestimmte Richtung annimmt” (“when, generating a kind of organisms, it takes the direction that would be proper to another kind of organisms”).16 Or it can deviate when it provides sexual characteristics which belong to the opposite sex or, finally, when it produces creatures that are not only strange like the formers, but they are so-called ‘unnatural’ beings, i. e. monsters. On this idea of ‘unnatural’ (widernatürlich), however, Blumenbach has much to oppose: indeed, Blumenbach writes that the Mißgeburten cannot be considered ‘unnatural’, because even in their deformities we could recognize some regularities, which prove that natural laws are acting here, though in an inscrutable way.17 The great relevance awarded to the phenomenon of monstrosity is also functional to Blumenbach’s (and vicariously Kant’s) controversy against preformationism: indeed, Blumenbach says ironically that if followers of preformationism would be coherent in their theories, they should admit that also monstrosity is preformed, since the embryo is monstrous from the very first moment of his creation and God has predestined it to be like that.18 Johann Christian Reil, who revises the concept of Bildungstrieb in his Von der Lebenskraft (‘On Vital Force’), published in the first volume of the Archiv für Physiologie (1795), does not expound on the debate between preformationists and epigeneticists, although probably tending towards preformationism, but he paradoxically offers some interesting ideas even about the concept of irregularity and deviation. Reil has quite a mechanistic conception of organic processes and reduces all operations to chemical-physical interactions. As a symbol 13 Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Über den Bildungstrieb, 3rd ed. (Göttingen: Johann Christian Dieterich, 1791), pp. 110–111. 14 Blumenbach, Über den Bildungstrieb, p. 91. 15 Blumenbach, Über den Bildungstrieb, p. 96. 16 Blumenbach, Über den Bildungstrieb, p. 108. 17 Blumenbach, Über den Bildungstrieb, pp. 112–113. 18 Blumenbach, Über den Bildungstrieb, p. 113.

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to illustrate his theory, he uses the image of a crystal and the phenomenon of crystallization: “a clear example of inanimate assimilation and growth”.19 Even Lebenskraft, which he polemically introduces in the title of his essays, is nothing more than a chemical-physical force. According to the aim of its author, Von der Lebenskraft should also be a manifesto against vitalism: Reil rejects, therefore, the term Trieb, because “im eigentlichen Verstande nicht ohne Gefühle oder Vorstellungen gedacht wird”20. In addition Trieb implies the presence of a conscious being, i. e. a god. Yet Reil is compelled to indicate one element to differentiate living and dead bodies and he finds it in the idea of ‘life’ itself: vitality would be the effect of a particular Form (‘form’) and Mischung (‘constitution’) of matter and life as the actuation of this potential principle; nevertheless, he admits, life finally eludes human comprehension, and the same happens with the irregularities we notice in organic matter : “Warum die thierische Materie nicht in symmetrische, sondern in irreguläre aber zweckmäßige Formen anschießt, ist uns eben so unbegreiflich, als warum die Salze in symmetrische Formen anschießen”.21 We find in Reil, as previously in Blumenbach, the attempt to bring irregularities, i. e. anomalies, back to a teleological dimension. But teleology is intrinsic to parts (not to the whole, as it was in Kant) and therefore an organism can grow with irregularities that would not be possible in the inorganic matter without destroying the whole. Also deviations find a kind of scientific legitimation in Reil’s approach toward life. Obviously Reil does not ignore the fact that each organism is ruled by a specific order and that an unbalance in it can cause specific illnesses and maybe destruction. Nevertheless he insists on the fact that there is not one, but several possible combinations of Form and Mischung and that Mißbildungen (‘deformed organs or limbs’) are simply organs or limbs whose development was interrupted in a stage still ruled by a different form and constitution of matter.22

19 Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 258. 20 Johann Christian Reil, Von der Lebenskraft, in Archiv für die Physiologie, hrsg. von Johann Christian Reil (Halle: in der Curtschen Buchhandlung 1795), vol. 1/I, p. 66: “to speak strictly, cannot be taught without feelings and representations”. 21 Reil, Von der Lebenskraft, p. 68: “Why the animal matter develops in irregular although appropriate forms is to our so incomprehensible as the reasons why the salt develops in symmetrical ones”. 22 Johann Friedrich Meckel, Über die Divertikel am Darmkanal, in Johann Christian Reil, Archiv für die Physiologie (Halle: in der Curtschen Buchhandlung 1809), vol. 9/III, p. 422.

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Jean Paul’s Monstrosities

Jean Paul is well known for his omnivorous reading and excerpting from all branches of knowledge from ancient to his times. The immense amount of excerpts (Exzerpten), which the author collected throughout his life, is only partially published and represents with its approximately 15.000 pages23 a great challenge for Jean Paul’s interpreters. However, the importance of such an impressive material for the understanding of Jean Paul’s work has been often underlined because of the intimate connection existing between reading and writing in his poetical praxis and poetological discourse. Jean Paul’s technique has been compared to a “Werkstatt” (“workshop”),24 where elements taken from the most varied disciplines are assembled to build the palimpsest of the narration: the sources are erased by the overlap of the narrative text, but remain as its base and as traces which constantly resurface in a more or less perceptible way. They emerge as a formal principle, as they give the narration its structure, or as topics, as they are explicitly cited, used in metaphors and similes and, sometimes, literally quoted and interpolated in the text. Jean Paul is so very aware of his technique that in the new preface to Die unsichtbare Loge (‘The Invisible Lodge’, 1793), written for the second edition of the novel in 1821 and thought of as a kind of poetological meditation on his works, he writes: Der Verfasser der unsichtbaren Loge hatte von Lichtenberg so starke Bußpredigten gegen die Menschenunkunde der deutschen Romanschreiber und Dichter gelesen und gegen ihre so große Unwissenheit in Realien ebensowohl als in Personalien, daß er zum Glück den Mut nicht hatte, wenigstens früher als im 28ten Jahre das romantische Wagstück zu übernehmen. Er fürchtete immer, ein Dichter müsse so gut wie ein Maler und Baumeister etwas wissen, wenn auch wenig; ja er müsse (die Sache noch höher getrieben) sogar von Grenzwissenschaften (und freilich umgrenzen alle Wissenschaften die Poesie) manches verstehen, so wie der Maler von Anatomie, von Chemie, Götterlehre und sonst.25 23 The entire Nachlass consists of more than 40.000 pages and is one of the biggest left by a German author of the classic-romantic period. See Götz Müller, Jean Pauls Exzerpte (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1988) and Ralf Goebel, Der handschriftliche Nachlass Jean Pauls und die Jean-Paul-Bestände der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2002). 24 Barbara Hunfeld, ‘Textwerkstatt. Eine neue Jean-Paul-Werkausgabe und ihr Modell Hesperus’, Jahrbuch der Jean-Paul-Gesellschaft, 41 (2006), pp. 19–39. 25 Jean Paul, Die unsichtbare Loge, in Jean Paul: Sämtliche Werke, 6 vols., hrsg. von Norbert Miller and Gustav Lohmann (München: Hanser, 1959ff), vol. 1, Appendix I, p. 16: “The Author of the Invisible Lodge had read so many of Lichtenberg’s strong penitential sermons against the lack of anthropological knowledge of most German novelists and poets and against their ignorance in natural sciences and personal characters that luckily he didn’t dare before his 28th birthday to undertake this romantic feat. He always feared that a poet should

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Jean Paul explains he had waited some years before publishing his first novel, Die unsichtbare Loge, because he was conscious of the importance of having a rich and variegated knowledge to become an excellent writer and poet: an author needs firstly a deep comprehension of human nature and, secondly, readings from a wide range of disciplines that extend from physiology and psychology, which was rising at the end of the eighteenth century, to anthropology. Finally, he needs to have some knowledge in other fields, such as botany, geology and astronomy. All these disciplines, i. e. all sciences running along the domain of poetics, are ‘fringe-sciences’ and set the boundaries without which literature could not exist. Therefore, he constantly uses and manipulates sciences, padding out his novels with divagations inside the narrative itself or with appendixes, supplements and excurses, which build a very peculiar frame around the text: not a linear and complete one, but an irregular frame that jumps, zigzags and seems to grow out of proportion ad infinitum. For this peculiarity Jean Paul was considered for a long time as an incomprehensible and inconclusive author, whose works needed to be reduced before approaching them. So did the contemporary German public,26 not to mention the foreign readers, who read Jean Paul in shortened translated versions.27 Nowadays scholars have obviously revised similar opinions and exalt the modernity of Jean Paul’s writing, concentrating on his anticipation of such modern elements as intertextuality and metanarrative. It remains, however, and with good reason, the impression that Jean Paul’s style is somehow ‘monstrous’. In any case, until now, the reference to ‘monstrosity’ has been made in quite a generic way. So, when Armin Schäfer in his article published in the Jahrbuch der Jean-Paul-Gesellschaft describes Jean Paul’s writing as a “monströses Schreiben”,28 he only briefly mentions themes like Monstren and Mißgeburten, overlooking the problem of the sources and neglecting to establish a precise relation between the eighteenth-century discussion on monstrosity and the “monströses” writing about which he writes very cleverly. More adherent to the question is the recent article of Magnus Wieland, who properly underlines the analogy between body and text, in general, and deknow something so well as a painter or a carpenter, although maybe not so many things like them; yes, he even should (to go to the extreme) understand something of fringe-sciences (and all sciences fringe poetry) like the painter of anatomy, chemistry, theology etc”. The translation is mine. 26 Such an attempt was made, for instance, by Hermann Hesse, when he published a new edition of Jean Paul’s novel Titan in 1913. 27 A good example regarding this is the treatment Jean Paul’s works (the few that had been translated) received in their first reception in Italy. 28 Armin Schäfer, ‘Jean Paul’s monströses Schreiben’, Jahrbuch der Jean-Paul-Gesellschaft, 37 (2002), pp. 216–234: “monstrous writing”.

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formed bodies and Jean Paul’s ‘deformed’ texts, in the specific.29 Wieland refers to a comparison between the genesis of Jean Paul’s texts and epigenesis, by affirming that the body-text30 builds itself gradually and it does not follow or realize an originally ‘preformed’ idea, but it recollects and puts together various parts.31 Unfortunately this brilliant hypothesis is applied mainly to Dr. Katzenbergers Badereise (‘Dr. Katzenberger’s Journey to the Bath’, 1809) and is not further explored: actually, Wieland does not consider the relationship between Blumenbach’s epigenesis and the discourse on monstrosity and ignores the centrality of the concept of Trieb (‘drive’) as well as Reil’s reflection on living organisms for Jean Paul’s literary theory and praxis. Actually, when we examine the list of Jean Paul’s excerpts we discover that his reading of Blumenbach’s Über den Bildungstrieb dates at least back to 1787; at that time, the author was also reading Haller, Buffon and Erxleben. His interest for Blumenbach remains constant through the years and it lasts until 1820. The first readings of Reil’s Archiv für Physiologie can be traced back to the beginnings of nineteenth century and the first quotations from his works date at 1807–1808. In a passage dated 1811 from the Philosophische Untersuchungen, Jean Paul richly discusses the dialectic of “instinct” and “mechanism”: Instinkt – Mechanik Diese sind die größten Entgegensetzungen der Natur, oder der Seele und des Körpers. […] Gibt es Gesetzte oder Voraussehungen und Berechnungen der verschiednen Instinkte aus den Datis? Und was heißt denn Instinkt? (Der Schöpfer der Mechanik) Gesetzte gibt’s nur für Folgen, nicht für erste Ursachen. – Der Mechanism stellt – seine Ur-Ursache ausgenommen – nur regelrechte Aufeinanderfolgen dar, die wir annehmen müssen, weil sie oft da waren. – Am Ende ist alles Instinkt, z. B. die Kristallisation – Nur Wiederholung eines gemeinsamen Körper-Instinkts nennen wir Mechanism. – Instinkt eines anderes Wort für Geist oder für Freiheit – Ihr nehmt den Körperbau zu Hülfe, um das Geistige zu erklären, als ob er nicht selber früher aus dem Geistigen zu erklären wäre. – Alle mathematischen Gesetzte setzen Gesetzgeber voraus; aber diese nicht jene. Wir selber ja, so mitten in der Freiheit webend, spüren in uns nichts von Mathematik und Mechanik; alles ist Trieb, treiben wohin; und ist nicht Trieb selber durch seine Unbestimmtheit des Ziels die Aussprache der verschiednen, also geistigen Richtungen? 29 Magnus Wieland, ‘Gestörter Organismus: Jean Pauls Ästhetik der Abweichung in der Erzählung Dr. Katzenbergers Badereise’, New German Review: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 24/1 (2011), pp. 7–25. 30 The relationship between body and textual structure is established by Neumann, who studies the composition principle in Dr. Katzenbergers Badereise. See Peter Horst Neumann, ‘Die Werkchen als Werk. Zur Form- und Wirkungsgeschichte des Katzenberger-Korpus von Jean Paul’, Jahrbuch der Jean-Paul-Gesellschaft, 10 (1975), pp. 151–186. 31 Wieland, ‘Gestörter Organismus’, p. 15.

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[…] Überall finde ich Gott, als die unendliche Freiheit, nur im Instinkt, nicht im Mechan[ism] Gesetz. […] Der Instinkt ist der Apostel der Gottheit und des Geistes und der Unsterblichkeit.32

In these few lines Jean Paul summarizes the whole late eighteenth-century debate on mechanism and vitalism: the mechanical conception of nature, the image of foreseeable laws, the change of scientific paradigm due to the new concepts of life and Trieb, which Jean Paul connects to the Freiheit (‘freedom’) that man can feel inside himself. Freedom is, obviously, the antithesis of necessity, of immutable laws repeating themselves through the centuries. If a causalistic explanation has to be applied, it can account for the repeated succession of some events, but it can say nothing about its cause, since it is confined in the sphere of imperceptible. Unsurprisingly, Jean Paul also considers the Kristallisation (‘crystallisation’) as a form of Trieb, and this match enlightens Jean Paul’s syncretistic approach to his sources: since respectively Blumenbach’s and Reil’s main concepts are fused together and even each other confused, it becomes evident that Jean Paul does aim to establish a rigorous doctrine; if anything, he takes from his readings all the elements that can contribute to illuminate and support his theological and poetical vision of the world. Further proof of this is the fact that he pursues his reflection presenting an analogy, that gradually becomes an identification, between God and the Trieb itself. Indeed, he speaks of the instinct as the “Creator of the mechanism”, as the “apostle of God and immortality” and shifts his discourse into a metaphysical dimension.33 By doing this, he seems to rewrite Reil’s objection against Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb and to eventually transform it in a positive prerogative. 32 Jean Paul, Philosophische Untersuchungen, in Jean Pauls Sämtliche Werke. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, hrsg. von Götz Müller, vol. 7, Appendix II, Philosophische, ästhetische und politische Untersuchungen (Weimar : Böhlaus, 1999), p. 137: “These are the biggest contrasts of nature, or of mind and body. […] can we draw from facts the law or prevision or calculation of the different instincts? What does instinct mean? (The creator of the mechanism) There are laws only for the consequences, not for the causes. Mechanism – with exception of its prime-cause – offers only regular series, that we must recognize because they often occurred. – At the end everything is instinct, for example the crystallisation. – We call mechanism only the repetition of a common body-instinct. – Instinct is a word to express spirit or freedom – you refer to the construction of the body to explain the spirit, but it is the body that should be explained through the spirit. – All the mathematical laws presuppose a lawgiver ; but not the opposite. Waving in the middle of liberty, we don’t feel in us neither mathematics nor mechanism; everything is drive, drive to somewhere; and isn’t the drive, with its unpredictable goals, the expression of different, i. e. spiritual directions? – I see God everywhere, as infinite freedom, in the instinct, not as law in the mechanism. […] Instinct is the apostle of deity and spirit and immortality”. 33 This is quite a common attitude for Jean Paul, who in a short text of 1780 writes: “Jedes Ding in der Welt entwikkelt sich anders, als das andre. – weil iedes von iedem verschieden ist. Jedes fängt von unmerkbar Kleinen an: und steigt almälig entweder zum Mensch oder zum Tier, oder zur Pflanz u.s.w. hinauf – jedes steigt aber in Ewigkeit fort”, Jean Paul, Wie sich der

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These asystematic links between such heterogeneous disciplines and statements also permit us to understand how Jean Paul, although he generally follows the position of epigeneticists, uses for his narrative works theses that are both against and in favor of preformationism. In Des Geburtshelfers Walther Vierneissel Nachtgedanken über seine verlorenen Fötus-Ideale (‘The Obstetrician Walther Vierneissel’s Night-thoughts on his Missed Ideal of Foetus’, 1814),34 Jean Paul describes the development of a foetus along the nine months of pregnancy : according to epigenetic theory the foetus develops gradually, limb after limb, organ after organ. The foetus, which tells the story in the first person, speaks of his hopes, that are systematically deluded at each stage of his development. He feels, therefore, like a two-headed hare – incidentally a famous Mißgeburt captured in Ulm –, yearning for the sky with one head and for the earth with the other one. – As the narrator of the story admits after his birth, this is the destiny of each human foetus, because like the monstrous hare with two heads or the many polyps that emerge in Jean Paul’s works each man constantly yearns at the same time for two opposite dimensions. Again, not a casual choice, since the polyp was one of Blumenbach’s favourite objects of study. Being half animal and half plant, the polyp fascinates Jean Paul even for its ambivalent nature, which again the author connects to a metaphysical and moral dimension: “Der Mittelmäßige ist der Polype zwischen dem Guten und dem Schlechten”.35 From this paradoxical perspective each man is destined to be a Mißgeburt, since he evolves out of an ideal image (i. e. the foetus according to preformationism) to a real being, finding hindrances in his development. Jean Paul must have been cultivating this idea for a long time, since from its beginning his narrative is populated by deformed and monstrous beings, which without exception are charged with positive meanings. According to preformationism, his ‘monsters’ – and this is again a proof of how Jean Paul makes use of preformationism in a positive rather than in a critical way – can be classified into three types: monstrous by defect, double monstrous formations and monstrous by excess. Mensch, das Tier, die Pflanz’ und die noch geringern Wesen vervolkommen, in Jean Pauls Sämtliche Werke, vol. 1 Appendix II, Jugendwerke, pp. 47–48: “Each thing in the world develops in a particouar way. – because each thing is different from the others. Each thing begins from imperceptible elements: and develops into a man or an animal or a plant ecc – but each thing develops eternally”. 34 Jean Paul, Des Geburtshelfers Walther Vierneissel Nachtgedanken über seine verlorenen Fötus-Ideale, in Jean Pauls Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2 Appendix II, Vermischte Schriften, pp. 1004–1017. 35 Jean Paul, Tagebuch meiner Arbeiten. Auf das Augustmonat 1781: Am Donnerstag den 16. August, in Jean Pauls Sämtliche Werke, vol. 1, Appendix II, p. 211: “The polyp is in the middle of good and evil”.

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Examples of the first category (monstrous by defect) are lame characters such as the diegetic narrator of Die unsichtbare Loge and Dr. Fenk, one of the main characters of the same novel: Jean Paul defines the former Einbein (‘one leg’) and the latter lo Zoppo (‘the lame’, in Italian in the text). This characteristic provides an indubitable aesthetic value to the novel, because it gives the narrator and the doctor, who in some moments becomes the narrator, the possibilitiy to tell the story in a jumping and fragmented way. In the second category (double monstrous formations) we find the Doppelgänger, who are present in almost all Jean Paul’s novels and sometimes electively connected in different worksof the author : Siebenkäs and Leibgeber in BlumenFrucht- und Dornenstücke, oder Ehestand, Tod, und Hochzeit des Armenadvokaten Siebenkäs (‘Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces; or, the Married Life, Death, and Wedding of Siebenkäs, Poor Man’s Lawyer’, 1796–1797), the twins Walt and Vult in Flegeljahre (‘The Awkward Age’, 1804–5 1804–1805), but also Fenk in Die unsichtbare Loge and his palindrome-named Knef in Hesperus (1795), not to forget Fenk and the Dr. Katzenberger in Dr. Katzenbergers Badereise. The Doppelgänger confronts us again with the ‘monstrous’ double aspiration of human beings, that in this case is embodied by two opposing mirror-men. To the third and last category (monstrous by excess) belong the misshapen foeti, which in the eighteenth century were displayed in the so-called ‘horror cabinets’ by physicians hungry for knowledge, i. e. by those doctors who were hateful and indifferent, like Dr. Katzenberger, but also positive, like Fenk. A part from this classification, it is through the words of the contemptible Dr. Katzenberger that Jean Paul offers his summa on monstrosity : Gerade die Weise, wie die Natur zufällige Durchkreuzungen und Aufgaben (z. B. zweier Leiber mit einem Kopfe) doch organisch aufzulösen weiß, dies belehrt. Sagen Sie mir nicht, daß Mißgeburten nicht bestehen, als widernatürlich; jede mußte einmal natürlich sein, sonst hätte sie nicht bis zum Leben und Erscheinen bestanden; und wissen wir denn, welche versteckte organische Mißteile und Überteile eben auch Ihrem oder meinem Bestehen zuletzt die Ewigkeit nehmen? […] auch die unregelmäßigste Gestalt bildete sich nach den regelmäßigsten Gesetzen (unregelmäßige Regeln sind Unsinn).36

It re-emerges here Blumenbach’s idea of the Mißgeburten as natural creatures, although Katzenberger introduces a mechanical conception of the laws of development which has more in common with Reil’s speculation. More important, however, is the implicit idea that if monstrosity is natural, each element in 36 Jean Paul, Dr. Katzenbergers Badereise, in Sämtliche Werke, Abteilung I, vol. 6, p. 128: “The way nature resolves organically casual crosses and problems (for example two bodies with one head) is instructive. Do not tell me that monsters exist as unnatural: each one should be natural or it had never come to life and epiphany ; and do we know which hidden organic deformities and excrescences will deprive you or me of eternity? […] also the irregular shape develops following regular laws (irregular laws are nonsense)”.

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nature, including the human being, is somehow monstrous as Jean Paul demonstrates in almost all his works. Moreover, Jean Paul’s narrative is itself monstrous. Actually, Dr. Katzenberger is structured into Mißteile and Überteile and this assure to this novel a ‘monstrous’ development ad infinitum, i. e. a literary method that can be recognized in many other Jean Paul’s works

III.

Conclusions

The rising biology of the eighteenth century has been confronting itself with the mystery of life, i. e. with the invisible goals and anomalies that seems to make the comprehension of nature even more difficult than in the past. Thus it develops, in its origins, a more descriptive than assertive attitude, which assures equal legitimacy to ‘abnormal’ and ‘normal’ organisms. In a similar context the ‘monstrosity’ loses its immoral and deviant character. At that time, the originally slippery distinction made by Zedler in 1739 between Mißgeburt and Monstra, the former being ‘natural’ and the latter ‘unnatural’ and proof of an immoral behaviour,37 had already lost consistency. Only physiognomy at the end of the eighteenth century and the ‘racial discourse’ in the nineteenth century restored that ethical component and considered, on the one hand, the features of the face as signs of depravation and disposition to committing a certain crime and, on the other hand, particular characteristics of the body as proof of inferiority and bestial savageness.38 The axiological and gnoseological history of the physical deformations in the Age of Enlightenment runs parallel with the one of psychic disorders. Indeed, the rising proto-psychiatry of the century, emblematically represented by Karl Philipp Moritz’ Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde als ein Lesebuch für Gelehrte und Ungelehrte (‘Journal of Experiential Psychology, as reading for scholars and laymen’, 1783–1793), considers psychic alterations as pathological manifestations, but it refuses in most cases to consider it as the antithesis of an ethically acceptable condition: mental disturbances arise from a deteriorated balance between mental forces, but are not unmoral and surely not unnatural, simply being the other face of health.39

37 See Michael Hagner, ‘Monstrositäten haben eine Geschichte’, in Der falsche Körper. Beiträge zu einer Geschichte der Monstrositäten, hrsg. von Michael Hagner (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1995, 2nd ed. 2005), pp. 7–20 (in particular, p. 8). 38 See Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration. A European Disorder. c. 1848 – c. 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 3ff. 39 See Elisa Leonzio, ‘Spaltung des Ichs: Alterität und Devianz in psychologischer Rücksicht am Beispiel Salomon Maimons’, in Andersheit um 1800. Figuren – Theorien – Darstellungs-

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Of course, this kind of reflection, both on physical and psychic anomalies, is also inspired by the more or less conscious will of classifying, bringing anomalies back to an order and rationalizing them.40 In any case, they are no longer considered unnatural or supernatural.41 This change of paradigm will also gradually pervade philosophical and fictional works, especially during the late eighteenth and at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Jean Paul, with his encyclopaedic knowledge and his combinatorial and digressive texts, represents the author par excellence in this milieu. Monstrosity is for him at the same time a principle of composition and a dominant topic with metaphysical implications. A monster similar to a living organism, developing itself with protuberances and excrescences, duplicating itself and often interrupting its own evolution before reaching a completed form, is – as it has been highlighted in this paper – the narrative process itself. Moreover, many of Jean Paul’s characters are monstrous and they embody the author’s idea that man is himself a ‘monstrous’ endowed with a double nature.

formen, hrsg. von Elisabeth Johanna Koehn, Daniela Schmidt und Johannes-Georg Schülein (München: Fink, 2011), pp. 79–91. 40 See Patrick Tort, L’ordre et les monstres. Le d{bat sur l’origine des d{viations anatomiques au XVIIIwme siwcle (Paris: Syllepse, 1980). 41 See Javier Moscoso, ‘Vollkommene Monstren und unheilvolle Gestalten. Zur Naturalisierung der Monstrosität im 18. Jahrhundert’, in Der falsche Körper, pp. 56–72.

Raul Calzoni

Liminal Figurations of the Vampire in the German Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang and Romanticism

In German tradition, the vampire represents one of the rare figures whose date of birth can be quite exactly traced back, since the very first evidences of this night creature in medical and philosophical writings go back to the year 1728, when the first reports on living dead humans began to appear. In spite of the first official publications on the vampire, reports on the so-called Nachzehrer – a German sort of vampire that according to the folklore did not eat blood, but consumed already dead bodies, like ghouls – had appeared as early as 1517.1 Nevertheless it only was in the first half of the eighteenth century that some treatises were exclusively devoted to vampires, and they contributed to the sedimentation of this “modern myth” in German and European culture.2 In his de masticatione mortuorum in tumulis (Oder von dem Kauen und Schmatzen Der Todten in Gräbern,) liber singularis: Exhibens Duas Exercitationes, Quarum Prior Historico-Critica Posterior Philosophica est (1728),3 Michael Ranft commented on vampire cases that took place in 1725 in the Eastern part of the Habsburg Empire. In the 1732 and 1734 editions of this book, Ranft, who in 1727 was eventually appointed Deacon of the city of Nebra, integrated the results of his researches on supposed vampire cases occured between 1731 and 1732 in Serbia and about which many official reports were available.4 In particular, many cases of “vampirus serviensis”5 were reported in 1 On the Nachzehrer, see Rebecca Tille, Der Vampir als Element der Literaturgeschichte: Literaturwissenschaftliche Untersuchung zur schwarzromantischen Vampirmotivik (Hamburg: Diplomatica Verlag, 2013), pp. 11–12. 2 See Matthew Beresford, From Demons to Dracula: The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth (London: Reaktion Books 2008), pp. 99–114. 3 Michael Ranft, de masticatione mortuorum in tumulis (Oder von dem Kauen und Schmatzen Der Todten in Gräbern,) liber singularis: Exhibens Duas Exercitationes, Quarum Prior Historico-Critica Posterior Philosophica est (Martini: Leipzig, 1728). 4 Many sources on the vampire, including the so-called Flückinger-Gutachten entitled Visum et repertum, were at that time available in Johann Christian Fritsche, Eines Weimarischen Medici Muthmaßliche Gedancken von denen Vampyren, oder sogenannten Blut-Saugern (Leipzig: M. Blochberger, 1732) and in the anonymous Acten-mäßige und Umständliche Relation von

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those years from the eastern frontiers of the Habsburg Empire, i. e. from Slavonia to Bukovina. Ranft’s illuministic approach to the cases of both Peter Plogojowitz (Serbian: Petar Blagojevic´) occured in 1725 in a village named Kisilova, possibly the modern Kisiljevo, and Arnold Paole – an early German rendition of a Serbian name, perhaps, Arnaut Pavle – in 1732 in Medved¯a, located at the Morava river near the town of Parac´in, paved the way for German medical and scientific research on the vampire. Therefore Ranft’s de masticatione mortuorum in tumulis is to be considered a landmark in the socalled Leipziger Vampirdebatte, i. e. the scientific, medical, and theological “debate on the vampire” that took place in Leipzig around Plogojowitz’s and Paole’s cases.6 Situated in the decade between 1724 and 1734, this debate was fundamental during German Enligthenment for the birth of the vampire in western European culture and it was mainly based upon the official report on Plogojowitz’s vampiric case by the Imperial Provisor Frombald of Gradiska. In this report, written on April 6 and published on July 21 1725 in the Wienerisches Diarium, the Austrian officer reported that the bloodsucking Peter Plogojowitz was responsible for the death of eight people who passed away within 24 hours after they contracted a misterious infection. All the victims were said to have received a nightly visit by Plogojowitz, who incidentally had died at least three months earlier. Even if his widow reported that after his burial the man paid a visit to her, asked for his shoes and eventually left the village for ever, its inhabitants insisted to open his grave, where they found a body revealing all the possible features of a vampire: his beard, hair and nails had grown after death, but above all Plogojowitz’s “body, a part from the fallen

denen vampiren oder Menschen-Saugern, Welche sich in diesem und vorigen Jahren, im Königreich Serbien herfür gethan […] (Leipizig: Martini, 1732). The first report on Paole’s case, Visum et repertum (1732), was actually written by Johannes Flückinger and it “was to throw the still relatively young German Enlightenment into considerable disarray”, see Susanne Kord, Murderesses in German Writing, 1720–1860: Heroines of Horror (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 43. An edition of the most important reports and treatises on the vampire of the period is Mortuus non mordet. Dokumente zum Vampirismus 1689–1791, hrsg. von Klaus Hamberger (Wien: Turia und Kant, 1992). On Ranft’s handling of the sources, see Leo Ruickbie, ‘Evidence for the Undead: The Role of Medical Investigation in the 18thCentury Vampire Epidemic’, in The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend, ed. by James Doan and Barbara Brodman, (Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press/ Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), vol. 1, pp. 75–90. 5 Jutta Nowosadtko, ‘Der “Vampyrus Serviensis” und sein Habitat: Impressionen von der österreichischen Militärgränze’, Militär und Gesellschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit, 8 (2004), pp. 151–167. 6 On this debate, see Oliver Hepp, ‘Vom Aberglauben hin zur “magischen Würckung” der Einbildung – Michael Ranfts Tractat von dem Kauen und Schmatzen der Todten in Gräbern’, in Vampirglaube und magia posthuma im Diskurs der Habsburgermonarchie, hrsg. von Christoph Augustynowicz und Ursula Reber (Wien: Lit, 2011), pp. 105–123.

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off nose, [was] almost fresh”.7 Actually, the corpse was exhumed after the orthodox Pope had been consulted, and it showed all the vampiric traits people were looking for, including blood getting out of his mouth, a clear evidence of his nightly visit to the inhabitants of the village. According to the traditional rite against vampires, his heart was thus penetrated with a wooden stake and, as a further evidence for his vampiric nature, it began to bleed. His body was then burned in order to preserve the village from a possible return of this night creature. Not only are the reports on the vampire coming from the Austrian Empire, like Plogojowitz’s, telling for a localistic folklore,8 but they do testify to the persistence and the pivotal role played by the church in the sedimentation of the myth of this night creature: in the vampire the church recognized a new enemy to defeat, once the witch-hunt of the Reformation had ended. In the Enlightenment the vampire became the substitute for the witch, since he started to embody the causes for diseases, plagues and epidemies breaking out in Europe during the eighteenth century. This is why both witches and vampires had to be burned in order to be destroyed and definetely sent to hell. But this also explains the reason why vampires had, according to the early reports, the capability of transforming themselves into fog, but also into rats, wolves and bats, i. e. in such animals that were able to spread epidemics, nourishing themselves with blood or living at night.9 But since their first scientific and literary appearences, vampires, like witches, have also been strictly connected with seduction and with the attempt of “sexualizing death”.10 This is the case of the first literary evidence of the vampire in German literature, i. e. Der Vampir (‘The Vampire’, 1748) by Heinrich August Ossenfelder, a poem that has strong erotic overtones and deals with a night visit of a vampire to a pious maiden, who refused to marry him in obedience to her mother’s denial: Mein liebes Mägdchen glaubet Beständig steif und feste, An die gegebnen Lehren Der immer frommen Mutter ; 7 Frombald, ‘Copia eines Schreibens aus dem Gradisker District in Ungarn’, Wienerisches Diarium, 21. 07. 1725, pp. 11–12, quoted from the reprint ‘Bericht des Kameralprovisors Frombald an den Wiener Hof’, in Hamberger, Mortuus non mordet, p. 44: “der Co¨ rper außer der Nasen, welche etwas abgefallen, gantz frisch”. 8 See Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality (Yale: Yale University Press 1990). 9 See Heiko Haumann, Dracula: Leben und Legende (München: C. H. Beck, 2011), p. 104. 10 Elisabeth Bronfen, ‘The Vampire: Sexualizing or Pathologizing Death’, in Significance of Medicine in Modern German Culture, ed. by Rudolf Ka¨ ser and Vera Pohland (Ithaca, NY: Western Societies Papers, 1991), pp. 71–90.

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Als Völker an der Theyse An tödtliche Vampiere Heyduckisch feste glauben. Nun warte nur Christianchen, Du willst mich gar nicht lieben; Ich will mich an dir rächen, Und heute in Tockayer Zu einem Vampir trinken. Und wenn du sanfte schlummerst, Von deinen schönen Wangen Den frischen Purpur saugen. Alsdenn wirst du erschrecken, Wenn ich dich werde küssen Und als ein Vampir küssen: Wenn du dann recht erzitterst Und matt in meine Arme, Gleich einer Todten sinkest Alsdenn will ich dich fragen, Sind meine Lehren besser, Als deiner guten Mutter?11

The poem reveals the tension, typical of the period, between the values of Christianity – Christine is not by accident the name of the visited maiden – and the risks of heathendom, i. e. such corruption of the body and the soul embodied by the vampire and brought about by the refusal of religion.12 The short poem thus confirms the role played by religion in the sedimentation of the vampiremyth during the Enlightenment and it is “the first case in which the monster serves to represent a psychological state”.13 Furthermore it also alludes to the 11 Heinrich August Ossenfelder, ‘Der Vampir’, Der Naturforscher. Eine physikalische Wochenschrift auf die Jahre 1747 und 1748, 25 (1748), pp. 380–381: “My dear young maiden clingeth / Unbending fast and firm / To all the long-held teaching / Of a mother ever true; / As in vampires unmortal / Folk on the Theyse’s portal / Heyduck-like do believe. / But my Christine thou dost dally, / And wilt my loving parry / Till I myself avenging / To a vampire’s health adrinking / Him toast in pale tockay. /And as softly thou art sleeping / To thee shall I come creeping / And thy life’s blood drain away. / And so shalt thou be trembling / For thus shall I be kissing / And death’s threshold thou’ it be crossing / With fear, in my cold arms. / And last shall I thee question / Compared to such instruction / What are a mother’s charms?”. 12 See Poetische Wiederga¨ nger : Deutschsprachige Vampirismus-Diskurse vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, hrsg. von Julia Bertschik und Christa A. Tuczay (Tu¨ bingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag, 2005); Norbert Borrmann, Vampirismus oder die Sehnsucht nach Unsterblichkeit (München: Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1988); Matthew Bunson, Das Buch der Vampire. Von Dracula, Untoten und anderen Fu¨ rsten der Finsternis. Ein Lexikon (Bern-Mu¨nchen: Scherz Verlag, 1997); Susanne Pütz, Vampire und ihre Opfer. Der Blutsauger als literarische Figur (Berlin: Aisthesis 1992). 13 Erik Butler, Metamorphoses of the Vampire in Literature and Film: Cultural Transformations in Europe, 1732–1933 (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2010), p. 63.

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degeneration of reason itself and to its capability of creating monsters when asleep, as Goya’s famous painting of 1797 testifies. This suggested double reading of the poem is relevant in order to understand the role of the many dead persons coming back to life and visiting their beloved in the literature of German late Enlightenment and Romanticism. In fact Christianity and Paganism, on the one hand, and reason and superstition, on the other, represent the keystones of the debate on the vampire during the Enlightenment and they perdure in the literature of the late eighteenth century, when the Sturm und Drang re-interpretated the myth of the vampire by insisting on the “night side” of human nature – to quote Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert’s Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (‘Views of the Night Side of Natural Science’, 1808), where the vampire is briefly described as a particular type of bat.14 The Stum und Drang allowed for the emergence of such obscure forces that had been repressed in the previous decades by the domination of a reason whose unilateral and strumental use had prooved to be ruinous. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno wrote: Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity. Enlightenment’s program was the disenchantment of the world.15

While the Enlightenment dealt with the myths of the past in order to detect them “not only in semantically unclarified concepts and words, as linguistic criticism imagines, but in any human utterance which has no place in the functional context of self-preservation”,16 the Sturm und Drang played a pivotal role in the reenactment of superstition and folklore that eventually characterized the description of the vampire in German late Romanticism and, in particular, in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s narrative. In this sense, a first evidence is to be found in Gottfried August Bürger’s Lenore (‘Ellenore’, 1773), a ballad telling the story of a young woman who remains inconsolable after the loss of her lover. Wilhelm and Lenore will even14 See Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (Dresden: Arnold, 1808), p. 293. On the influence of this analysis on Romantic handling of the ‘night’ and on the different ‘views’ of the ‘night side’ of human nature, see Monika SchmitzEmans, ‘Night-sides of existence: Madness, dream, etc.’, in Romantic Prose Fiction, ed. by Gerald Gillespie, Manfred Engel and Bernard Dieterle (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008), pp. 139–167. 15 Max Horkeimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, engl. trans. by E. Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2002), p. 1. See further, Vincenzo Ferrone, The Enlightenment: History of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), pp. 30–34. 16 Horkheimer, Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 22.

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tually disappear in a grave at the end of this ballad, composed of thirty-two eightversed stanzas, in which, on the one hand, the lover is said to have passed away in the Battle of Prague during the Seven-Years war and, on the other hand, religion plays – once again – an important role. Lenore’s mother actually believes that Wilhelm is not dead, but he has become involved with another woman “im fernen Ungerlande” (“in the distant lands of Hungary”).17 This induces her to try to console her daughter by calling on God’s wisdom and the holy sacrament. The reference to Hungary is important, since it alludes to the lands where the vampire was supposed to come from and it casts on the ballad the doubt that Wilhelm might have been the victim of a vampire. In the last stanzas, while Lenore cannot find any comfort in religion and keeps on despairing for the loss of her lover, Wilhelm’s spectre appears to take the maiden with him and “after a spooky, ghostly ride through an eerie, moonlit night, the rider along with his horse and Lenore disappear in the depths of a grave followed by a procession of howling ghosts and spirits”.18 Although no explicit reference is made to the vampire, the theme of love and death, which is so essential to the vampire’s life, the geographical context, the allusion to Wilhelm’s engagement with a eastern unknown woman and the disappearing of the couple in the grave surrounded by ghosts and spirits allow for a vampiric reading of a ballad whose reputation mainly depends upon the theme of the “nightly ride”, as Bram Stoker also let us understand with his Dracula (1897), where the following line of the ballad is quoted: “Denn die Todten reiten schnell” (“For the dead ride fast”).19 Indeed the theme of the lover raped by the spectre of the beloved returns in the most famous “vampiric poem” – as its author twice called it20 – of German literature by the turn of the century : Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Die Braut von Korinth (‘The Bride of Corinth’, 1798). With respect to Lenore, here the roles are inverted, since the ballad tells the story of a Greek bride returning from the realm of the dead and raping his promised man. Nevertheless the handling of religion and the terrific aspects pervading the ballad are not so different from 17 Gottfried August Bürger, ‘Lenore’, in Sämtliche Werke, hrsg. von Günter und Hiltrud Häntzschel (München, Wien: 1987), p. 180. 18 Gabriele Dillmann, ‘Transcending Borders: Loss and Mourning in Bürgers Lenore’, in Romantic Border-Crossings, ed. by Jeffrey Cass and Larry H. Peer (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Press, 2008), p. 89. 19 Diane Milburn, ‘“Denn die Toten reiten schnell”: Anglo-German Cross-Currents in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, in The Novel in Anglo-German Context. Cultural Cross-Currents and Affinities, ed. by Susanne Stark (Amsterdam, Atlanta, GA: Rodopi 2000), pp. 229–240. 20 In his diaries Goethe definies Die Braut von Korinth a “vampyrische(s) Gedicht” (“vampiric poem”). See Karl Eibl’s comment on the ballad in Goethes Sämtliche Werke. Briefe. Tagebücher und Gespräche, hrsg. von Friedmar Apel und Hendrik Birus (Frankfurt am Main: Dt. Klassiker-Verlag, 1987), vol. 1, hrsg. von Karl Eibl, p. 1233. On this topic, see also Mathias Mayer, ‘Goethes vampirische Poetik. Zwei Thesen zur Braut von Korinth’, Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft, 43 (1999), pp. 148–158.

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Bürger’s ones. According to Goethe, the ballad was inspired by the account of the encounter of the philosopher Apollonius with a lamiai, i. e. a primarily demonic being in Greek mythology who sucked blood from young children, but in fact it is based on the story of Philinnon as related by Phlegon of Tralles in a poem (130 A.D.) on a young woman from Amphipolis who had died a virgin and returned to life to experience sex before leaving the mortal realm.21 To face the theme of love and death in a vampiric perspective within a classical frame, Goethe took inspiration from ancient Greece tales, from Bürger’s Lenore and the dissertation Trait{ sur les apparitions des esprits et sur les vampires ou les revenans de Hongrie, de Moravie, etc. (‘Treaty on the Apparitions of Spirits and Vampires, or Ghosts of Hungary, Moravia, & c.’, 1751) written by the priest and scholar Augustin Calmet.22 The ballad tells the story of a young man who gets to Corinth to meet for the first time his future wife, the daughter of his father’s comrade. During the voyage to Corinth, the man wonders if the arranged marriage can be celebrated, because he and his family remained atheists, while his future bride has in the meanwhile been christened. Once arrived in the city, the man is received by the maiden’s mother, who gives him the most beautiful room of the house, where he finds a rich dinner waiting for him. The man refuses to eat and goes to bed, but he suddenly receives an uncanny visit: Denn er sieht, bei seiner Lampe Schimmer Tritt, mit weißem Schleier und Gewand, Sittsam still ein Mädchen in das Zimmer, Um die Stirn ein schwarz- und goldnes Band. Wie sie ihn erblickt, Hebt sie, die erschrickt, Mit Erstaunen eine weiße Hand.23

Thinking that the spectre is his future wife, the young man falls in love with the maiden and desires to celebrate the marriage immediately. The ballad, actually, “turns less on religious difference than on the pivotal encounter between man 21 See John Gordon Melton, The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead (DetroitLondon: Ink Press, 1999), pp. 296–297. 22 On Camlet’s influence on Goethe, see Milan V. Dimic, ‘Vampiromania in the Eighteenth Century : The Other Side of the Enlightenment’, in Man and Nature: Proceedings of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, ed. by Robert James Merrett (Edmonton: Academic Printing and Publishing, 1984), pp. 1–22. 23 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Die Braut von Korinth’, in Goethe Gedichte, hrsg. von Erich Trunz (München: C.H. Beck, 1982), pp. 268; engl. trans. ‘The Bride of Corinth’, in Poems and Ballads of Goethe, translated by W. Edmoundstoune Aytoun and Theodore Martin (New York: Delisser & Procter, 1859), p. 25: “By the waning lamp’s uncertain gleaming / There he sees a youthful maiden stand, / Robed in white, of still and gentle seeming, / On her brow a black and golden band. / When she meets his eyes, / With a quick surprise / Starting, she uplifts a pallid hand”.

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and female, the quick and the dead, Christian and Greek”.24 Indeed what happens in the central stanzas of the ballad is a kind of mystical, sentimental and at the same time physical union between the stranger and the girl; moreover, we learn that it is at “midnight” that the maiden reveals her vampiric features: Eben schlug dumpf die Geisterstunde, Und nun schien es ihr erst wohl zu sein. Gierig schlürfte sie mit dem Munde Nun den dunkel blutgefärbten Wein; Doch vom Weizenbrot, Das er freundlich bot, Nahm sie nicht den kleinsten Bissen ein. Und dem Jüngling reichte sie die Schale, Der, wie sie, nun hastig lüstern trank. Liebe fordert er beim stillen Mahle; Ach, sein armes Herz war liebekrank. Doch sie widersteht, Wie er immer fleht, Bis er weinend auf das Bette sank.25

The mother of the maiden notices that something is happening in the room and opens the door. There she reveals to the young man that he was promised to the sister of the girl he has just met and it is in this moment that the Vampirin gets out of the bed and blames her mother for her premature death: Mutter! Mutter! spricht sie hohle Worte, So mißgönnt Ihr mir die schöne Nacht! Ihr vertreibt mich von dem warmen Orte. Bin ich zur Verzweiflung nur erwacht? Ists Euch nicht genug, Daß ins Leichentuch, Daß Ihr früh mich in das Grab gebracht?26 24 Ellis Dye, Love and Death in Goethe: One and Double (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2004), p. 150. See further, Ellis Dye, ‘Goethe’s Die Braut von Korinth: Anti-Christian Polemic or Hymn of Love and Death?’, Goethe-Yearbook, 4 (1988), pp. 83–98. 25 Goethe, ‘Die Braut von Korinth’, p. 270; engl. trans. ‘The Bride of Corinth’, pp. 28–29: “Dully boom’d the midnight hour unhallow’d, / And then first her eyes began to shine; / Eagerly with pallid lips she swallowed / Hasty draughts of purple-tinctured wine; / But the wheaten bread, / As in shuddering dread, / Put she always by with loathing sign. // And she gave the youth the cup: he drained it, / With impetuous haste he drained it dry ; / Love was in his fevered heart, and pained it, / Till it ached for joy she must deny. / But the maiden’s fears / Stayed him, till in tears / On the bed he sank, with sobbing cry”. 26 Goethe, ‘Die Braut von Korinth’, p. 272; engl. trans. ‘The Bride of Corinth’, p. 32: “Mother! mother! wherefore thus deprive me / Of such joy as I this night have known? / Wherefore from these warm embraces drive me? / Was I wakened up to meet thy frown? / Did it not suffice / That in virgin guise, / To an early grave you forced me down?”.

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With these words, the maiden reveals her true identity and the reasons for her night visit to the man: after her mother got over an illness, she was cloistered, as if she was a human sacrifice to God, and she passed away in solitude and forgetfulness. Now she has left her grave to drink the blood of the promised husband and to accuse her mother’s refusal of the ancient gods in favour of Christianity.27 Since the man promised her unendless love in the room by drinking wine from the globet the maiden offered him – a performative and sacrilegious reference to the Holy Communion – he will not live much longer after his encounter with the Bride of Corinth: Schöner Jüngling! kannst nicht länger leben; Du versiechest nun an diesem Ort. Meine Kette hab’ ich dir gegeben; Deine Locke nehm’ ich mit mir fort. Sieh sie an genau! Morgen bist du grau, Und nur braun erscheinst du wieder dort.28

In this stanza the maiden prays her mother to take her out of the grave where she was buried and to burn her corpse together with the young man’s body, so that they can get back to the realm of “ancient gods”: Höre, Mutter, nun die letzte Bitte: Einen Scheiterhaufen schichte du; Öffne meine bange kleine Hütte, Bring in Flammen Liebende zu Ruh; Wenn der Funke sprüht, Wenn die Asche glüht, Eilen wir den alten Göttern zu.29

The ballad shows that Goethe intended the vampire as a figure coming from the ancient politeistic faith and thus as an antagonist to God and Jesus Christ. In addition, like the madman in the Renaissance episteme described by Michel Foucault in his Folie et d{raison. Histoire de la folie u l’tge classique (‘Madness 27 Thus Walter Müller-Seidel questioned whether it was Goethe’s purpose in this poem to play off the richness of Greek antiquity against the impoverishmnet brought about by the rise of Christinanity, see Walter Müller-Seidel, ‘Goethe: Die Braut von Korinth, in Geschichte im Gedicht, hrsg. von Walter Hinck (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), p. 82. 28 Goethe, ‘Die Braut von Korinth’, p. 273; engl. trans. ‘The Bride of Corinth’, pp. 33–34: “Fair young man! thy thread of life is broken. / Human skill can bring no aid to thee. / There thou hast my chain – a ghastly token – / And this lock of thine I take with me. / Soon must thou decay, / Soon thou wilt be gray, / Dark although to-night thy tresses be!”. 29 Goethe, ‘Die Braut von Korinth’, p. 273; engl. trans. ‘The Bride of Corinth’, p. 34: “Mother! hear, oh, hear my last entreaty! / Let the funeral-pile arise once more; / Open up my wretched tomb for pity, / And in flames our souls to peace restore. / When the ashes glow, / When the fire-sparks flow, / To the ancient gods aloft we soar”.

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and Civilization. A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason’, 1961), whose madness served as a testimony to the limits of human knowledge, Goethe’s vampire “shows the limits of natural, ecclesiastical, and civil law”.30 Furthermore, Goethe insisted on two features that built up the myth of the vampire, i. e. the relationship between death and love and the connection between eroticism and necrophilia, as the central stanzas of the poem reveal: Und sie kommt und wirft sich zu ihm nieder : Ach, wie ungern seh’ ich dich gequält; Aber, ach! berührst du meine Glieder, Fühlst du schaudernd, was ich dir verhehlt. Wie der Schnee so weiß, Aber kalt wie Eis Ist das Liebchen, das du dir erwählt. Heftig faßt er sie mit starken Armen, Von der Liebe Jugendkraft durchmannt: Hoffe doch bei mir noch zu erwarmen, Wärst du selbst mir aus dem Grab gesandt! Wechselhauch und Kuß! Liebesüberfluß! Brennst du nicht und fühlest mich entbrannt? Liebe schließet fester sie zusammen, Tränen mischen sich in ihre Lust; Gierig saugt sie seines Mundes Flammen, Eins ist nur im andern sich bewußt. Seine Liebeswut Wärmt ihr starres Blut; Doch es schlägt kein Herz in ihrer Brust.31

30 Brad Elliot Stone, ‘Abnormals, Freaks and Michael Jackson: Foucault, Baldwin, and the truth of the Grotesque’, presentation delivered to “Foucault Circle”, March 5–7, 2004 Wabash College Crawfordsville, IN. See: https://www.academia.edu/420005/ABNORMALS_ FREAKS_AND_MICHAEL_JACKSON_FOUCAULT_BALDWIN_AND_THE_TRUTH_OF_ THE_GROTESQUE, p. 3. 31 Goethe, ‘Die Braut von Korinth’, p. 271; engl. trans. ‘The Bride of Corinth’, p. 29: “And she leans above him – ‘Dear one, still thee! / Ah, how sad am I to see thee so! / But, alas! these limbs of mine would chill thee: / Love! they mantle not with passion’s glow; / Thou wouldst be afraid, / Didst thou find the maid / Thou hast chosen, cold as ice or snow’. // Round her waist his eager arms he bended, / With the strength that youth and love inspire; / ‘Wert thou even from the grave ascended, / I could warm thee well with my desire!’ / Panting kiss on kiss! / Overflow of bliss! / ‘Burn’st thou not, and feelest me on fire?’ // Closer yet they cling, and intermingling. / Tears and broken sobs proclaim the rest; / His hot breath through all her frame is tingling, / There they lie, caressing and caressed. / His impassioned mood / Warms her torpid blood, / Yet there beats no heart within her breast!”.

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Love for death and/or for a dead creature – as Thophile Gautier would emblematically show later, with La morte amoureuse (The Dead Woman in Love, 1836) – is relevant to each vampiric story and is a Leitmotiv of such works devoted to this night creature which during Romanticism handled like Goethe the vampire as a “liminal” narrative tool, suspended between Christianity and heathenism, love and eternity, youth and death, life and illness. In fact, Goethe makes full use of the ambivalent potential of the vampire, who, inhabiting the liminal space between life and death, is the quintessential threshold figure. It is most telling that Goethe’s ballad is historically and geographically located in a liminal zone of cultural conflict between heathen religion and Christianity, between antiquity and the early medieval world, in which attitudes toward religion, toward the supernatural and the natural, and, most importantly for Goethe’s ballad, toward the body were redefined.32

This is also partly the case of Lord Byron’s novel The Giauor (1813), where once again two different religious perceptions – the muslim and the christian – of love, sex, death and the afterlife are embodied by the different narrators of this Fragment of a Turkish Tale, which narrates the history of an infidel “doomed to be resurrected as a vampire, cursed to prey on his own family, needing yet loathing the taboo sustenance of blood”.33 Not only did Lord Byron think of the binomial love and death when he wrote this novel, but he was also directly influenced by Goethe’s ballad when he composed his poem The Siege of Corinth (1816). Written in the same year when Samuel Taylor Coleridge published his Christabel and Mary Shelley, during a stormy night in a country house on the Lake Geneva, composed her Frankenstein (1818), this tragic poem is devoted to the day of the Ottoman-Venetian Wars (1714–1718), in which the Ottomans stormed Acrocorinth, whose destruction is described through the eyes of the impossible love between Alp, a Venetian renegade fighting for the Ottomans, and Francesca, the daughter of Minotti, the governor of the Venetian garrison. In one of the most important vampiric novella of German Romanticism, this poem is said to be “ein Meisterwerk voll der lebendigsten Bilder” (“a masterpiece of the most lively images and the most genial thoughts”).34 In 1821 E.T.A. Hoffmann actually devoted to the topic

32 Jürgen Barkhoff, ‘Female Vampires, Victimhood, and Vengeance in German Literature around 1800’, in Women and Death: Representations of Female Victims and Perpetrators in German Culture 1500–2000, ed. by Helen Fronius and Anna Liton (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2008), p. 131. 33 William Hughes, Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature (Washington DC: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), p. 56. 34 E.T.A. Hoffmann, ‘Vampirismus’, in Die Serapions-Brüder, in Sämtliche Werke, hrgs. von Wulf Segebrecht unter Mitarbeit von Ursula Segebrecht (Frankfurt am Main: Dt. Klassiker-

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‘vampirismus’ one of the novellas of Die Serapions-Brüder (‘The Serapion Brethren’, 1819–1821). Although the title Vampirismus was added to the novella by Georg Ellinger in his 1912 German editon of The Serapion Brethren, the tale represents one of the most significant romantic proses of the period dealing with this night creature. Apart from the fact that before Ellinger this tale was entitled Ein gräßliche Geschichte, Der Vampyr or Eine Vampir-Geschichte, Vampirismus summons up the entire tradition of this figure, since it recalls the German literary and scientific history of the vampire from its beginning till the moment when the novella was written. Even if it does not precisely deal with a case of vampirism, but rather with a case of necrophilia, the tale begins with a frame in which Sylvester, Lothair, Ottmar and Cyprian talk about the vampire by making reference to Lord Byron’s Siege of Corinth and by comparing the author to Walter Scott: “Sehr merkwürdig”, nahm Sylvester das Wort, “ist es doch, daß, irre ich nicht, mit Walter Scott beinahe zu gleicher Zeit ein engländischer Dichter auftrat, der in ganz anderer Tendenz das Große, Herrliche leistet. Es ist Lord Byron den ich meine, und der mir kräftiger und gediegener scheint als Thomas Moore. Seine Belagerung von Korinth ist ein Meisterwerk voll der lebendigsten Bilder, der genialsten Gedanken. Vorherrschend soll sein Hang zum Düstern, ja Grauenhaften und Entsetzlichen sein, und seinen Vampir hab ich gar nicht lesen mögen, da mir die bloße Idee eines Vampirs, habe ich sie richtig aufgefaßt, schon eiskalte Schauer erregt. Soviel ich weiß, ist ein Vampir nämlich nichts anders als ein lebendiger Toter der Lebendigen das Blut aussaugt”.35

At that time William Polidori’s The Vampyre. A Tale (1819) – incidentally begun in the same stormy night, when Frankenstein was born – was considered one of Byron’s work, thus Sylvester starts taking about the vampire by recalling this oeuvre along with the Siege of Corinth. It is thanks to this reference that E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Vampirismus reveals its aim to carry out in the literary circle of The Serapion Brethren an aesthetic debate on the representation of “the gloomy, the mysterious and the terrible” in literature by way of the vampire. This seemed to Hoffmann a suitable figure to deal with this topic, since it is endowed with the capability of transgressing aesthetic boundaries and thus, to use a well-estabVerlag, 1987), vol. 4, p. 1115; engl. trans. by Alexander Ewing, The Serapion Brethren (London-New York: George Bell, 1892), vol. 2, p. 451 [translation modified]. 35 Hoffmann, ‘Vampirismus’, p. 1115; engl. trans. The Serapion Brethren, p. 451: “‘It is remarkable,’ said Sylvester, ‘that – unless I mistake – another great writer appeared on the other side of the channel, about the same time as Walter Scott, and has produced works of equal greatness and splendour, but in a different direction. I mean Lord Byron, who appears to me to be much more solid and powerful than Thomas Moore. His ‘Siege of Corinth’ is a masterpiece, fall of genius. His predominant tendency seems to be towards the gloomy, the mysterious and the terrible; and his ‘Vampire’ I have avoided reading, for the bare idea of a vampire makes my blood run cold. So far as I understand the matter, a vampire is an animated corpse which sucks the blood of the living’”.

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lished Foucauldian term, vampire is himself a half-living transgression, i. e. “the transgression of natural limits, the transgression of classifications, of the table, and of the law as table [… ] there is monstrosity only when the confusion comes up against, overturns, or disturbs civil, canon, or religious law”.36 In other words, like Foucault, Hoffmann considered the monster, i. e. the vampire, as a figure between the signs, a liminal figure living in a middle domain between life and death, science and literature, reality and unreality : therefore as a literary body able to become a device to probe the limits of the representation of the terrible in literature. Indeed it is not by accident that in the framework of the story Lothair recalls and even quotes Ranft’s treatise and Sigmund Alexander Friedrich von Kottwitz’s account on the vampire in order to stress Sylvester’s need for the “fantastic”:37 ein Dichter wie du mein teurer Freund Sylvester, muß wohl bewandert sein in allen möglichen Zauber- und Hexengeschichten und andern Teufeleien, ja sich selbst was weniges auf das Zaubern und Hexen verstehen, da solches zu manchem Dichten und Trachten nützlich.38

Lothair’s statement describes the vampire as a “perverse ghost that holds the tale in tension required to convince the reader to suspend disbelief, a personification of Todorov’s principle of the fantastic”.39 Thus the dialogue evolves into an aesthetic debate among the Brethren that concerns the representation of the terrible and the fantastic in German and European literature at their time. In this context, the central role of the vampire as a fantastic figure is underlined by Lothair as follows: “Es mag”, erwiderte Sylvester, “es mag sich das alles im Magister Ranft nur abenteuerlich oder vielmehr aberwitzig ausnehmen, indessen erscheint, hält man sich an die Sache selbst, ohne den Vortrag zu beachten, der Vampirismus als eine der furchtbar 36 Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collwge de France 1974–1975, engl. trans. by Graham Burchell (New York: Picador Reading Group, 2003) p. 63. 37 On 26 January 1732, i. e. on the same day that Flückinger signed his Visum et repertum, the Cadet Sigmund Alexander Friedrich von Kottwitz’s sent to the doctor Michael Ernst Ettmüller (1673–1732) in Leipizig a letter from Belgrade. He enclosed a copy of this report and in the letter he referred to another instance that occurred in Kucklina, probably the village today called Kukljin, concerning the sightings of a revenant and allowed vampire. The letter was published in Acten-mäßige und Umständliche Relation von denen vampiren oder Menschen-Saugern, pp. 15–17. 38 Hoffmann, ‘Vampirismus’, p. 1115; engl. trans. The Serapion Brethren, p. 451: “a writer such as you, my dear friend, Sylvester, must of course have found it necessary to dip more or less deeply into all kinds of accounts concerning magic, witches, sorcery, enchantment, and other such works of the devil, because they are necessary for your work, and part of your stock in trade”. 39 Michael James Dennison, Vampirism: Literary Tropes of Decadence and Entropy (Frankfurt am Main-Berlin: Peter Lang, 2001), p. 15.

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grauenhaftesten Ideen, ja das furchtbar Grauenhafte dieser Idee artet aus ins Entsetzliche, scheußlich Widerwärtige”.40

Cyprian immediately replies to this aesthetic question by referring to the capability of the poet to handle properly the fantastic material and thus to succeed in writing a work of art able to trascends the horrible and the terrible, reaching the sublime. In other words, he sums up his aesthetic credo as follows: “Und”, fiel Cyprian dem Freunde ins Wort, “und demunerachtet kann aus dieser Idee ein Stoff hervorgehen, der von einem fantasiereichen Dichter, dem poetischer Takt nicht fehlt, behandelt, die tiefen Schauer jenes geheimnisvollen Grauens erregt, das in unserer eigenen Brust wohnt, und berührt von den elektrischen Schlägen einer dunkeln Geisterwelt den Sinn erschüttert, ohne ihn zu verstören. Eben der richtige poetische Takt des Dichters wird es hindern, daß das Grauenhafte nicht ausarte ins Widerwärtige und Ekelhafte; das dann aber meistenteils zugleich aberwitzig genug erscheint, um auch die leiseste Wirkung auf unser Gemüt zu verfehlen. Warum sollte es dem Dichter nicht vergönnt sein, die Hebel der Furcht, des Grauens, des Entsetzens zu bewegen? Etwa weil hie und da ein schwaches Gemüt dergleichen nicht verträgt? Soll starke Kost gar nicht aufgetragen werden, weil einige am Tische sitzen, die schwächlicher Natur sind oder sich den Magen verdorben haben”.41

Thanks to this statement, Theodor has the possibility of remembering that there is no occasion for Lothair’s “Apologie des Grauenhaften” (“vindication of the horrible”),42 since all The Serapion Brethren are aware that the great writers have moved men’s hearts by means of it. In particular, Theodor remembers Shakespeare’s tragedies and Ludwig Tieck’s tale Liebeszauber (‘Love-Spell’, 1811) as the very examples of the representation of the fantastic in literature. About the latter, Hoffmann actually writes: 40 Hoffmann, ‘Vampirismus’, p. 1117; engl. trans. The Serapion Brethren, p. 453: “‘All this of Magister Ranft’s,’ said Sylvester, ‘may, no doubt, be sufficiently absurd and even rather crack-brained; but, at the same time, if we keep to the subject of vampirism itself, never minding in what particular fashion it may be treated, it certainly is one of the most horrible and terrible notions imaginable. I can conceive nothing more ghastlily repulsive to the mind’”. 41 Hoffmann, ‘Vampirismus’, p. 1117; engl. trans. The Serapion Brethren, p. 453: “‘Still,’ said Cyprian, ‘it is capable of providing a material, when dealt with by a writer of imagination possessed of some poetical tact, which has the power of stirring within us that profound sense of awe which is innate in our hearts, and when touched by the electric impulse from an unseen spirit world causes our soul to thrill, not altogether unpleasantly after a fashion. A due amount of poetic tact on the author’s part will prevent the horror of the subject from going so far as to be loathsome; for it generally has such an element of the absurd about it that it does not impress us so deeply as if that were not the case. Why should not a writer be permitted to make use of the levers of fear, terror, and horror because some feeble soul here and there finds it more than it can bear? Shall there be no strong meat at table because there happen to be some guests there whose stomachs are weak, or who have spoiled their own digestions?’”. 42 Hoffmann, ‘Vampirismus’, p. 1118; engl. trans. The Serapion Brethren, p. 453.

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Die Idee dieses Märchens muß in jeder Brust eiskalte Todesschauer, ja der Schluß das tiefste Entsetzen erregen, und doch sind die Farben so glücklich gemischt, daß trotz alles Grauens und Entsetzens uns doch der geheimnisvolle Zauberreiz des Tragischen befängt, dem wir uns willig und gern hingeben.43

According to Theodor, Tieck’s novella is a model for the representation of the fantastic and, needless to say, the debate on the terrible and the fantastic ends up in a reflection on the genius, i. e. on such genial writer, dessen Anerkennung in seiner ganzen hohen Vortrefflichkeit der Nachwelt vorbehalten bleibt, während schnell aufflackernde Irrlichter, die mit erborgtem Glanz das Auge im Augenblick zu blenden vermochten, ebenso schnell wieder verlöschen.44

Lothair, who speaks these words intervening into the debate, explicitally remembers Heinrich von Kleist as the only romantic genius who was able – thanks to his tale Das Bettelweib von Locarno (‘The Beggar-Woman of Locarno’, 1810) – to demonstrate, “daß die Fantasie durch sehr einfache Mittel aufgeregt werden könne, und daß das Grauenhafte oft mehr im Gedanken, als in der Erscheinung beruhe”.45 The tale is actually based on a frightening idea and represents a suitable example of the penetration of the invisible into the visible, since it tells the story of a beggar woman, who is sent contemptuously, as if she were a dog, to lie behind a stove, and dies there, but she is heard every night hobbling across the floor towards the stove, even if nothing is to be seen. With his novella Kleist proves therefore to possess the “Genialität des vollendeten Meisters” (“the genius of most finished master”) in the representation of the horrible: since his psychological novella exploits the horror inside common life and simple people, his merit in German Romantic literature was to create lively images, like Byron with his Siege of Corinth, whitout representing supernatural beings or monsters: “Er durfte keinen Vampir aus dem Grabe steigen lassen, ihm genügte ein altes Bettelweib”.46 Kleist’s plastic and at the same time horrible approach to reality and Tieck’s fantastic rendering of the world converge in the figure of the vampire in E.T.A. 43 Hoffmann, ‘Vampirismus’, p. 1118; engl. trans. The Serapion Brethren, p. 453: “full of the utmost fear and horror ; but still the colours are blended so admirably that, in spite of all the terror and dismay, the mysterious magic charm so seizes upon us that we yield ourselves up to it without an effort to resist”. 44 Hoffmann, ‘Vampirismus’, p. 1118; engl. trans. The Serapion Brethren, p. 454: “the full recognition of whom, in all his grand super-excellence and variety, is reserved for posterity, whilst Wills o’ the Wisp rapidly scintillating into our ken and blinding the eye for a moment with borrowed light, go out into darkness just as speedily”. 45 Hoffmann, ‘Vampirismus’, p. 1118; engl. trans. The Serapion Brethren, p. 454: “the imagination can be moved by very simple means, and that it is often more the idea of the thing than the thing itself which causes our fear”. 46 Hoffmann, ‘Vampirismus’, p. 1119; engl. trans. The Serapion Brethren, p. 454: “did not need to raise a vampire out of the grave, all he needed was an old woman”.

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Hoffmann’s Vampirismus. In this tale the vampire embodies an aesthetic limen and it is itself a liminal narratological figure: it is the subject of the aesthetic debate carried out in the Rahmenerzählung (‘frame story’), but it is not the subject of the Binnenerzählung (‘embedded story’), i. e. of the tale itself, thus it lives between the two parts of Vampirismus and becomes itself a limen between what is real and what is terrific. Actually, needless to say, the vampire represents one of the most abnormal and liminal bodies of the Western cultural tradition: Throughout the whole vast shadowy world of ghosts and demons there is no figure so terrible, so dreaded and abhorred, yet endowed with such fearful fascination as the vampire; who is himself neither ghost nor demon but who partakes of the dark natures, and possesses the mysterious and terrible qualities of both. […] A demon has no body, although for purposes of his own he may energize, assume, or seem to assume one, but it is not his real and proper body. So the vampire is not strictly a demon […]. Neither may the vampire be called a ghost or phantom, for an apparition is intangible. The vampire has a body and his craving for blood is to obtain sustenance for that body. He is neither dead nor alive; but living in death. He is an abnormality ; the androgyne of the phantom world; a pariah among the fiends.47

Hoffmann exploited this characteristics of the vampire in his tale and turned them into a narratological metaphor of the writing process itself,48 whose vampiric nature is directly adressed in the frame of the story, where he makes explicit reference to Ranft’s de masticatione mortuorum in tumulis and to a precise contemporary literary tradition that thematized the vampire and from which his tale takes nourishment, since ein Vampir nichts anders ist, als ein verfluchter Kerl, der sich als Toter einscharren läßt, und demnächst aus dem Grabe aufsteigt und den Leuten im Schlafe das Blut aussaugt, die dann auch zu Vampirs werden, so daß nach den Berichten aus Ungarn, die der Magister beibringt, sich die Bewohner ganzer Dörfer umsetzten in schändliche Vampirs. Um einen solchen Vampir unschädlich zu machen, muß er ausgegraben, ihm ein Pfahl durchs Herz geschlagen, und der Körper zu Asche verbrannt werden. Diese scheußlichen Kreaturen erscheinen oft nicht in eigner Gestalt, sondern en masque.49 47 Montague Summers, The Vampire. His Kith and Kin (London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1928) quoted in Clemens Ruthner, ‘Zur Theorie der Liminalität oder Die Grenzwertigkeit der Fantastik’, in Der Schauer(roman). Diskurszusammenhänge – Funktionen – Formen, hrsg. von Mario Grizelj (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010), p. 83. 48 See Inge Kolke, ‘“… Aus den Gra¨ bern zerrst du deine A¨ tzung, teuflisches Weib!” Verwesung als strukturbildendes Element in E.T.A. Hoffmanns “Vampirismus”-Geschichte’, Mitteilungen der E.T.A. Hoffmann Gesellschaft, 33 (1997), pp. 34–49. 49 Hoffmann, ‘Vampirismus’, p. 1116; engl. trans. The Serapion Brethren, p. 452: “a vampire is nothing other but an accursed creature who lets himself be buried as being dead, and then rises out of the grave and sucks people’s blood in their sleep. And those people become vampires in their turn. So that, according to the accounts received from Hungary and quoted by this magister, the inhabitants of whole villages become vampires of the most abominable

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Just as a vampire, who often appears “en masque”,50 masticates the deads and lives thanks to other people’s blood, Hoffmann’s Vampirismus reinforces itself and grows up by devouring the literary oeuvres the author read and even cannibalized on this topic,51 as Cyprian’s reference to digestion in the frame of the history already underlines: “Soll starke Kost gar nicht aufgetragen werden, weil einige am Tische sitzen, die schwächlicher Natur sind oder sich den Magen verdorben haben”.52 This kind of metamorfic reading is by the way reinforced by the tension between the frame of the story and the tale itself, since the former talks about a dead, a vampire indeed, who survives by sucking other people’s blood, while the latter speaks of live people who devour dead people, probably vampires. This “chiastic structure”53 of the narration is worth a reading, since it allows to sketch out the characteristics of the vampire in Hoffmann’s tale. After the aesthetic debate on the horror and the fantastic,54 Cyprian begins to tell “eine größliche Geschichte” (“a ghastly story”) he heard or read.55 The plot of the story is quite simple and immediately refers to the figure of the vampire dealt wih in the frame of Vampirismus by reenacting its image in an old Baroness, who along with her daughter Aurelia pays a visit to a Count, Hippolytus. The man falls at once in love with the maiden and wants to marry her. This in spite of the fact that Aurelia’s mother seems to him “eine angeputzte Leiche”

50

51 52 53

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description. To render those vampires harmless they must be dug out of their graves, a stake driven through their hearts, and their bodies burnt to ashes. Those horrible beings very often do not appear in their own proper forms, but en masque”. Not only because the vampire takes often the form of a bat, a wolf or fog, but also because as a half dead he plays life itself by taking nourishment by other people’s life. This disguisement is also a metaphor for Hoffmann’s writing process, as it is demonstrated in Britta Herrmann, ‘“Buchstaben sind Vampire”: Zur Poetik des Untoten (Herder, Hoffmann, Eichendorff)’, in Dracula unbound. Kulturwissenschaftliche Lektüren des Vampirs, hrsg. von Christian Begemann, Britta Herrmann und Harald Neumeyer (Freiburg i. Br.: 2008), pp. 141–162. The relationship between cannibalism and vampirism has been underlined by Maggie Kilgour in From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 172–173. Hoffmann, ‘Vampirismus’, p. 1117; engl. trans. The Serapion Brethren, p. 453: “Shall there be no strong meat at table because there happen to be some guests there whose stomachs are weak, or who have spoiled their own digestions?”. Nicole A. Sütterlin, ‘Überschreitungen. Zur (De)Figuration des Vampirs in E.T.A. Hoffmanns Vampyrismus-Erzählung’, in Figur – Figura – Figuration: E.T.A. Hoffmann, hrsg. von Daniel Müller Nielaba, Yves Schumacher und Christoph Steier (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2011), p. 187. In this context one cannot forget that the vampire as an expression of the horror is underlined by Mary Shelley in her Frankenstein, when “Victor Frankenstein says: ‘I consider the being I cast among mankind … nearly in the light of my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave, and forced to destroy all that was dear to me’”, M. Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. by Maurice Hindle (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 124. Hoffmann, ‘Vampirismus’, p. 1119; engl. trans. The Serapion Brethren, p. 455.

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(“a bedizened corpse”), her “cadaverous body”56 is invalid and she behaves like a Nachzehrer : Niemals hatte eine Person, ohne im mindesten häßlich zu sein, in ihrer äußern Erscheinung solch einen widerwärtigen Eindruck auf den Grafen gemacht, als eben die Baronesse. Bei dem Eintritt durchbohrte sie den Grafen mit einem glühenden Blick, dann schlug sie die Augen nieder und entschuldigte ihren Besuch in beinahe demütigen Ausdrücken. […] Seinen besten Willen beteuernd faßte er die Hand der Baronesse, aber das Wort, der Atem stockte ihm, eiskalte Schauer durchbebten sein Innerstes. Er fühlte seine Hand von im Tode erstarrten Fingern umkrallt, und die große knochendürre Gestalt der Baronesse, die ihn anstarrte mit Augen ohne Sehkraft, schien ihm in den häßlich bunten Kleidern eine angeputzte Leiche.57

On the wedding day, the Baroness suddently dies and Aurelia begins to suffer from the fear that her mother could rise from her grave and take her into perdition. After the marriage, Aurelia actually explains that when she was a child, the Baroness cast the following spell on her : “Du bist mein Unglück, verworfenes heilloses Geschöpf, aber mitten in deinem geträumten Glück trifft dich die Rache, wenn mich ein schneller Tod dahingerafft. In dem Starrkrampf, den deine Geburt mich kostet, hat die List des Satans”.58

Shortly after telling this story, the Countess begins to feel sick and a doctor is called at the castle. Unable to make a precise diagnosis and even if he believes that Aurelia is pregnant, he tells a terrible story concerning a woman in that condition that become possessed and acted against her husband: “Doch”, sprach er, “hat man auch Beispiele von den abnormsten Gelüsten, durch die Frauen verleitet wurden zu der entsetzlichsten Tat. So hatte die Frau eines Schmieds ein solch unwiderstehliches Gelüste nach dem Fleisch ihres Mannes, daß sie nicht eher ruhte, als bis sie ihn einst, da er betrunken nach Hause kam, unvermutet mit einem 56 Susan E. Gustafson, ‘The cadaverous bodies of vampiric mothers and the genealogy of pathology in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tales’, German Life and Letters, 52 (1999), pp. 238–254. 57 Hoffmann, ‘Vampirismus’, p. 1120–1122; engl. trans. The Serapion Brethren, pp. 456–457: “Never had any one, without being at all ill-favoured in the usual acceptation of that term, made by her exterior such a disagreeable impression upon the Count as did this Baroness. When she came in she looked him through and through with a glance of fire, and then she cast her eyes down and apologized for her coming in terms which were almost over humble. […] In warmly enforcing this request he took her hand. But the words and the breath died away on his lips and his blood ran cold. For he felt his hand grasped as if in a vice by fingers cold and stiff as death, and the tall bony form of the Baroness, who was staring at him with eyes evidently deprived of the faculty of sight, seemed to him in its gay many tinted attire like some bedizened corpse”. 58 Hoffmann, ‘Vampirismus’, p. 1128; engl. trans. The Serapion Brethren, p. 464: “You are my misfortune, horrible creature that you are! But in the midst of your imagined happiness vengeance will overtake you, if I should be carried away by a sudden death. In those tetanic spasms, which your birth cost me, the subtle craft of the devil”.

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großen Messer überfiel, und so grausam zerfleischte, daß er nach wenigen Stunden den Geist aufgab”.59

At the end of the doctor’s tale the Countess faints and she starts to refuse food, in particular meat. The maiden is then discovered by her husband to go out for walks in the night-time, as her mother was said to do, through the park to a churchyard. When the Count finally decides to follow her, he finds his wife in a satanic circle and devouring a man: Durch den Park nach dem Kirchhofe zu, nahm die Gräfin ihren Weg, dort verschwand sie an der Mauer. Schnell rannte der Graf hinter ihr her, durch die Pforte der Kirchhofsmauer, die er offen fand. Da gewahrte er im hellsten Mondesschimmer dicht vor sich einen Kreis furchtbar gespenstischer Gestalten. Alte halbnackte Weiber mit fliegendem Haar hatten sich niedergekauert auf den Boden, und mitten in dem Kreise lag der Leichnam eines Menschen, an dem sie zehrten mit Wolfesgier – Aurelie war unter ihnen!60

Shocked by the horrific scene, the Count rides back to the Castle and waits for Aurelia’s return, but he finds her already asleep in her bed. The day later, Hippolytus faces Aurelia and the tale ends with the final catastrophe of the Count’s madness, provoked by the bite of the maiden on his husband’s breast: “Verfluchte Ausgeburt der Hölle, ich kenne deinen Abscheu vor des Menschen Speise, aus den Gräbern zerrst du deine Atzung, teuflisches Weib!” Doch sowie der Graf diese Worte ausstieß, stürzte die Gräfin laut heulend auf ihn zu, und biß ihn mit der Wut der Hyäne in die Brust. Der Graf schleuderte die Rasende von sich zur Erde nieder, und sie gab den Geist auf unter grauenhaften Verzuckungen. – Der Graf verfiel in Wahnsinn.61

59 Hoffmann, ‘Vampirismus’, p. 1131; engl. trans. The Serapion Brethren, p. 467: “’Moreover,’ he said, ‘there are cases on record in which women have been led, by these strange, abnormal longings, to commit most terrible crimes. There was a certain blacksmith’s wife, who had such an irresistible longing for her husband’s flesh that, one night, when he came home the worse for liquor, she set upon him with a large knife, and cut him about so frightfully that he died in a few hours’ time’”. 60 Hoffmann, ‘Vampirismus’, pp. 1133–1134; engl. trans. The Serapion Brethren, p. 469: “The Count ran quickly after her in through the gate of the burying-ground, which he found open. There, in the bright moonlight, he saw a circle of frightful, spectral-looking creatures. Old women, half naked, were cowering down upon the ground, and in the midst of them lay the corpse of a man, which they were tearing at with wolfish appetite. Aurelia was amongst them”. 61 Hoffmann, ‘Vampirismus’, p. 1133; engl. trans. The Serapion Brethren, p. 470: “‘Accursed misbirth of hell! I understand your hatred of the food of mankind. You get your sustenance out of the burying-ground, damnable creature that you are!’ As soon as those words had passed his lips, the Countess flew at him, uttering a sound between a snarl and a howl, and bit him on the breast with the fury of a hyena. He dashed her from him on to the ground, raving fiercely as she was, and she gave up the ghost in the most terrible convulsions. The Count became a maniac”.

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The tale ends with this vampiric image and it remains unclear if Aurelia’s necrophilia depends on a supernatural cause or on a trauma suffered by the maiden. Anyway the priciple of ambiguity between supernatural and natural is typical of Hoffamnn’s Serapion Brethren and it finds in the vampire one of its most telling expressions. The vampire thus stands in his production for a metaphor of Hoffmann’s creative process, that needs to take nourishment from its sources and eventually becomes itself a source that will be “eaten” by others writers – and so on, ad infinitum.62 This is indeed the case of such works quoted in the frame of the story, as Ranft’s treatise rememebered in the tale itself, but last but not least of a further hypotext of Vampirismus: the Story of S~di Nu’mtns, told in the Arabian Nights (1706),63 in which a man discovers his wife devouring the dead in a churchyard. In conclusion, Hoffmann with Vampirismus wanted to demonstrate that literature is a cannibalic act and that it survives by eating its sources. Thus in the tale Aurelia’s embodies both necrophagia and the vampiric disposition surrounding the literary and creative process.64 This confirms that literature is first of all intertexuality and “cross-fertilization”,65 as later Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) and Stoker’s Dracula would confirm, since both works vampirically reenact the literary tradition established in Germany after the Leipziger Vampirdebatte.

62 See Kristen Guest, Eating Their Words: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Cultural Identity (New York: State University of New York Press 2001). 63 See the commentary of ‘Vampirismus’ by Wulf Segebrecht in E.T.A. Hoffmann, Die Serapions-Brüder, pp. 1634–1636. 64 One should not forget that one of the first evidence of the vampiric attitude of literature in German Romanticism is August Klingemann’s novel Nachtwachen von Bonaventura (‘Nightwatches of Bonaventura’, 1804), as it is argued by Horst Fleig in Literarischer Vampirismus: Klingemanns “Nachtwachen von Bonaventura” (Tu¨ bingen: Niemeyer, 1985). 65 Clemens Ruthner entitles “Cross-fertilization im Text-Grab: zum vampirischen Intertextualität” the third paragraph of his contribution ‘Untote Verzahnungen. Prolegomena zu einer Literaturgeschichte des Vampirismus’, in Poetische Widerga¨ nger. Deutschsprachige Vampirismus-Diskurse vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, hrsg. von Julia Bertschik und Christa Agnes Tuczay (Tübingen: Francke, 2005), pp. 11–42.

Lorella Bosco

A ‘Mosaic Work’: The Poison Mixer’s Body between Monstrosity and Deception Was will, was soll, was heißet denn das Recht? Hast du die Macht, du hast das Recht auf Erden. Selbstsüchtig schuf der Stärk’re das Gesetz, Ein Schlächterbeil zugleich und Fangenetz Für Schwächere zu werden. Der Herrschaft Zauber aber ist das Geld: Ich weiß mir Bess’res nicht auf dieser Welt, Als Gift und Geld. Adelbert von Chamisso, Die Giftmischerin

In Heinrich von Kleist’s play Kätchen von Heilbronn oder Die Feuerprobe (‘Katie of Heilbronn or The Trial by Fire’, 1807–1808) Kunigunde von Thurneck makes her appearance on the stage as the rival of the beautiful and innocent fifteen-year old Kätchen, the supposed daughter of the blacksmith Teobald. Kunigunde is pictured as a prosthetic beauty, “eine mosaische Arbeit aus allen drei Reichen der Natur zusammengesetzt”,1 in the words of Burgrave Freiberg, one of the many suitors she manipulates and then drives away : Ihre Zähne gehören einem Mädchen aus München, ihre Haare sind aus Frankreich verschrieben, ihrer Wangen Gesundheit kommt aus den Bergwerken in Ungarn, und den Wuchs, den ihr an ihr bewundert, hat sie einem Hemde zu danken, das ihr der Schmidt, aus schwedischem Eisen, verfertigt hat.2

Her physique, then, is a misshapen, monstrous conglomerate of body parts of different origins and she owes her beauty to well applied concealment make-up and to costuming. She simulates life even though her body is made out of 1 Heinrich von Kleist, Kätchen von Heilbronn, in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Band 2. Dramen 1808–1811, hrsg. von Ilse-Marie Barth and Hinrich C. Seeba (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987), pp. 422–23; engl. trans. Kätchen of Heilbronn, in Fiction and Fantasy of German Romance. Selections from the German Romantic Authors 1790–1830, ed. by Fredrick E. Pierce and Carl F. Schreiber (New York-London: Oxford University Press, 1927), p. 333: “A piece of mosaic, put together from all the three kingdoms of nature”. 2 Kleist, Kätchen von Heilbronn, pp. 422–423; engl. trans. Kätchen of Heilbronn, pp. 334–335: “Her teeth belong to a girl in Munich, her hair was ordered from France, the healthy glow of her cheecks comes from the mines of Hungary, and the graceful figure which you admire in her she owes to a shirt that a smith made for her out of Swedish steel”.

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anorganic, “dead” materials like metals. She is indeed a combination of metal, flesh and humanoid prostheses, a sort of ‘female Golem’3. Whereas Kätchen, whose double she is, seems to embody – though not perfectly – the schöne Seele (‘beautiful soul’), the highest female ideal of the Age of Goethe, the figure of Kunigunde is entirely reduced to a bodily and material dimension that also encompasses her main concerns in power and possessions. She embodies theatricality in the play, by using mimicry, rhetoric and body language in order to hide her intentions and deception. A bare surface made to be stared at and admired, she embodies the very idea of Schauspiel. The variant of the tenth scene, published in the journal Phöbus and later, for dramaturgical reasons, significantly shortened in the play, contains a dialogue between Kunigunde and her lady-in-waiting Rosalie that reveals how self-confidently and consciously the gentlewoman deals with the semiotics of fashion: Die Kunst, die du an meinem Putztisch übst, / Ist mehr, als bloß ein sinnereizendes / Verbinden von Gestalten und von Farben. / Das unsichtbare Ding, das Seele heißt, / Mögt’ ich an allem gern erscheinen machen, / Dem Toten selbst, das mir verbunden ist. / Nichts schätz ich so gering an mir, daß es / Entblößt von jeglicher Bedeutung wäre. / Ein Band, das niederhängt, der Schleif ’ entrissen / Ein Strauß – was du nur irgend willst, ein Schmuck, / Ein Kleid, das aufgeschürzt ist, oder nicht, / Sind Züg’ an mir, die reden, die versammelt / Das Bild von einem innern Zustand geben. / Hier diese Feder, sieh, die du mir stolz / Hast aufgepflanzt, die andern überragend: / Du wirst nicht leugnen, daß sie etwas sagt. / Zu meinem Zweck heut beug’ ich sie danieder : / Sie sagt nun, dünkt mich, ganz was anderes. / Wenn mich der junge Rheingraf heut besuchte, / So lobt’ ich, daß du mir die Stirn befreit; / Doch weil’s Graf Wetter ist, den ich erwarte, / So laß ich diesen Schleier niederfallen; / Nun erst, nun drück’ ich aus, was ich empfinde, / Und lehr ihn so empfinden, wie er soll.4

3 Rudolf Drux, ‘Kunigundes künstlicher Körper. Zur rhetorischen Gestaltung und Interdiskursivität eines mosaischen Motivs aus Heinrich von Kleists Schauspiel Das Kätchen von Heilbronn’, Kleist-Jahrbuch (2005), p. 109. 4 Heinrich von Kleist, Dramen 1808–1811, p. 311 (Italics mine): “The art that you practise at my dressing table is more than simply assembling a sensuous combination of shapes and colours. I want to ensure that everything, even the dead element I am bound to, displays that invisible thing called ‘soul’. Nothing I deem so low in me that it would be bereft of any meaning. A ribbon dangling from a bow that has come undone, a posy, or anything you like. Some ornament, a dress that is gathered up, or not as the case may be; all these tell a story ; taken together they convey an illusion of an inner state. Here, look at this feather, that you proudly fixed over the others: you would not deny that it tells something. Today I will bend it to my purpose: I guess it acquires a completely different meaning. If the young Rhinegrave were to visit me today, I should praise you for keeping my forehead free; but since I am expecting Count Wetter, so I shall let this veil fall down” (translation mine).

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What clearly emerges in the quotation above is Kunigunde’s mastery of signification and allegorical practices.5 Her dressing table is situated at the interplay of form, sensual cognition and colours. It is like a theater of cosmetics where Kunigunde stages her play, creating meaning and evoking with her virtuosistic command of rhetoric exactly the impressions, feelings and responses she wants in her male perceivers. As she is merely a polished surface without “that invisible thing called soul”, she mirrors with her body the different images and male fantasies that men project onto her, while at the same time pursuing her own goals. In the “Futteral”-episode, which can be read as a true poetological key to the entire play, Kunigunde strikes Kätchen who has misunderstood her instructions and saved the picture of Count von Strahl, rather than its container, from fire. Kunigunde’s insistence on the container (in which, by the way, there are also the documents supporting her land claims) is an appropriate reflection of her own situation as a mere package, a vacuum draped in a “romantic dress”. With physiognomical and anthropological features which seem to conform perfectly with the female ideal of her age, she ultimately disappoints male expectations. Language does not serve the purpose of communication, but merely that of concealment. For her, words are a means to an end. Kunigunde is well aware of the ambiguity of language. She does not not display any interest in other human beings, she is only concerned with increasing her powers and possessions by playing her numerous lovers off against each other for her own benefit. She uses her artificial beauty as a weapon (“die Waffen ihres kleinen schelmischen Angesichts”,6 as von Strahl puts it) and it would be more accurate to see her as both an equal and antagonist of Count von Strahl rather than of Kätchen. At one point in the drama, Count von Strahl suffers a wound to his left hand, while helping Kunigunde dismount from her horse. Like him, Kunigunde is enmeshed in steel, since steel armour gives her artificial height and a noble, gracious posture. It would seem that the only time she does not wear it is when Kätchen sees her in the grotto. It is her second, armoured body which wounds von Strahl. Kunigunde is not only an actress, however: she also directs and stage-manages. Her active role and her overriding interest in the exercise of power and in dynastic feuds can be labeled as typically male. Kunigunde thus represents the negative sides of aristocratic culture and of civilisation. As Norbert Elias has argued in his study of court society, with their conspicuous consumption practices the aristocracy lived life at court as a theatre 5 See on this topic Bernhard Greiner, Kleists Dramen und Erzählungen. Experimente zum ‘Fall’ der Kunst (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), p. 175. 6 Kleist, Kätchen von Heilbronn, p. 354; engl. trans. Kätchen of Heilbronn, p. 274: “her insidious little face as a weapon”.

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performance, while on the other hand theatre was considered a perfect mirror image of court-life. The exhibition of status within fashionable society was part of a broader concept of civilisation and served to confirm one’s prestige through behaviour. In court society there was in fact an unresolved tension between authenticity and rationality, between the true expression of one’s emotional character and its management in order to increase power and prestige. “Affective outbursts are difficult to control and calculate. They reveal the true feelings of the person concerned to a degree that, because not calculated, can be damaging. […] Above all, they are a sign of weakness; and that is the position the court person fears most of all”.7 On the other hand, the more austere manner of dress and moral code of the bourgeois class with their sharp distinction between public and private life announced the beginning of the industrial era. In this sense Kunigunde is a truly representative of her aristocratic class. At the end of the play Strahl refers to Kunigunde as a “Giftmischerin” – a poison mixer. Here Kätchen, the true bride, takes the place of Kunigunde, attired in a wedding dress, thus provoking a vehement verbal reaction from the abandoned lady, who swears vengeance (“Pest, Tod und Rache! Dieser Schimpf sollt ihr mir büßen!”).8 Strahl’s accusation deserves further examination as Kunigunde herself vehemently declares her intention of poisoning her rival Kätchen, who has by chance discovered her true appearance beneath the concealment offered by her costume and make-up. Interestingly, at one point during the Secret Court trial at the beginning of the play, Count von Strahl is himself suspected of having used poison and magic potions to bewitch Kätchen, Theobald’s daughter. Furthermore, in the third scene of the second act, he expresses the wish to poison the March snow that Kunigunde uses to wash, in order to stop her repeated efforts to provoke a feud over her land claims (“Daß sie die Pocken kriegte! Ich wollte, ich könnte den Nachttau in Eimern auffassen, und über ihren weißen Hals ausgießen! Ihr kleines verwünschtes Gesicht ist der letzte Grund aller dieser Kriege wider mich; und solange ich den Märzschnee nicht vergiften kann, mit welchem sie sich wäscht, hab ich auch vor den Rittern des Landes keine Ruhe”).9 The accusation against Count von Strahl underpins the radical questioning of the conventional views of male dominance and female subservience in the play. Kunigunde’s prosthetic body serves to construct the monstrosity of the 7 Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), p. 111. 8 Kleist, Kätchen von Heilbronn, p. 434; engl. trans. Kätchen of Heilbronn, p. 344: “Plague, death, and revenge! You shall pay me for this insult”. 9 Kleist, Kätchen von Heilbronn, p. 352; engl. trans. Kätchen of Heilbronn, p. 273: “Pox take her! I wish I could gather up the night-dew in basins and pour it over her white neck. That accursed little face of hers ist the final reason for all these wars against me. Until I can poison the March snow, with which she bathes, I cannot expect peace from the knights of the empire”.

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poisoner at the interplay between visibile and invisible, truth and deception. Her mastery of aesthetic effects is evidence of a complexity that belies the simplistic categorization of her as a fairy-tale witch.10 Her presence in the play is extremely innovative and modern, but was completely rejected by Kleist’s contemporaries who deplored that the playwright had introduced a character so aesthetically and dramaturgically at odds with the simulated medieval, fairy tale-like atmosphere of the drama. For the critics, Kunigunde’s prosthetic body was the reason why Kleist had failed to create a masterpiece. Moreover, her monstrous body is never exposed on the stage. Its dreadful appearance is merely suggested by Kätchen’s appalled reaction in the bathing scene, where the young girl is so shocked that she cannot speak a word; it is only later that a description is actually provided (by Freiburg). Kunigunde’s beauty as well as her ugliness are then conveyed from an exclusively male perspective. Unlike Kätchen, who as the truly ‘natural woman’ is for most of the time presented as nearly naked, Kunigunde’s beauty is completely externalised and exposed, is entirely made out of clothes and makeup. There is nothing beneath that and once her charms are penetrated by a critical male gaze, they only cause terror and repulsion. The prosthetic beauty of Kunigunde, all make-up effects and concealment, bears a close resemblance to the spectacle that witnesses will experience at the undressing scene of the infamous poison mixer Gesche Gottfried, a serial killer who would be executed in Bremen in 1831: Mit Erstaunen und Entsetzen zogen die Wärterfrauen der wohlgebildeten Madame Gottfried, als sie dieselbe, dem Reglement zufolge, entkleiden mussten, dreizehn Korsette, eins über dem andern, aus. Ihre lieblichen rothen Wangen waren Schminke, und nachdem alle Toilettenkünste entfernt, stand an der Stelle der blühenden, wohlbeleibten Dame vor den erschreckten Weibern ein blasses, angstvoll verzerrtes Gerippe.11

As for the other accusation, that of her being a witch, this is no cause for wonder. As we know for instance from a Royal Edict, issued in 1682 by King Louis XIV in France (the French Court had been shaken by a widespread poison and black magic scandal, that became known as “The Affair of the Poisons”), poisoning 10 See Ruth Klüger, ‘Die andere Hündin: Kätchen’, Kleist-Jahrbuch (1993), pp. 103–115 (in particular, p. 109). 11 Der Neue Pitaval. Eine Sammlung der interessantesten Criminalgeschichten aller Länder aus älterer und neuerer Zeit (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1842), hrsg. von Julius Eduard Hitzig, Wilhelm Häring (Willibald Alexis), vol. 2, p. 303: “When Madame Gottfried, in accordance with the prison rules, had to undress, the horrified, astonished wives of the prison warders took thirteen corsets, one after the other, off her well-built frame. Her lovely red cheeks were all make-up and, after all the make-up concealments had been removed, instead of a blossoming, corpulent lady, it was a pale, ghastly, fear-stricken skeleton that stood before the scared women” (translation mine).

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was associated with witchcraft and fortune-telling, because fortune-tellers are able to deceive credulous people and to persuade them to commit dreadful crimes like poisoning in order to fulfil their predictions. One of the reasons why Kleist did not insert the tenth scene in the final version of his drama as it was published in Phöbus was that he preferred instead to let the maid Brigitte reveal Count von Strahl’s prophetic dream to Kunigunde and Rosalie. By doing so, he allows Kunigunde to act as if she were the bride the cherubin had chosen for von Strahl in his dream. Here Kunigunde pretends to play the role of fate, by attempting to fullfil the prophecy in the way most suited to her plans. When Kleist wrote his play (1807–1808), murder by poison was a very controversial and hotly-debated issue. A few years earlier, in 1803 in Berlin, the alleged memoirs of Countess Charlotte Ursinus, a privy councillor’s widow from the highest ranks of Prussian society, proved a hit with readers. Between 1779 and 1803, she had used arsenic to murder her husband, her lover and her aunt, before failing in an attempt to kill a servant.12 As a result of the publication of the book she had been imprisoned despite the lack of striking concrete evidence of her guilt. Like Anna Margaretha Zwanziger and Gesche Gottfried (two notorious German poison mixers of the first half of the nineteenth century) after her, she never confessed her crimes. A description of her case can also be found in Alexis and Hitzig’s Der neue Pitaval,13 a set of famous criminal cases collected in the middle of the nineteenth century. Kleist might have known about the Ursinus case and perhaps read the book, but, since he rarely alludes directly to other literary works in his letters, this cannot be established beyond doubt. Bekenntnisse einer Giftmischerin, von ihr selbst geschrieben (Confessions of a Poisoner, Written by Herself , 1803),14 this was the name of the book, soon turned out to be a fictional account, presumably written by the well-known journalist and Aufklärer Friedrich Buchholz, who was at that time editor of the Vossische Zeitung for the Unger publishing house.15 Politically, he campaigned brilliantly

12 On the sensation caused by the book on its appearance see also Christoph Martin Wieland, ‘Rechtfertigung der berühmten Frau von Maintenon gegen eine höchst ungerechte Anklage’, hrsg. von Bernhard Seuffert, Zeitschrift für Bücherfreunde, 4 (1913), pp. 308–314 (in particular p. 310). 13 See Hitzig, Häring (Alexis), Der Neue Pitaval, pp. 161–216. 14 Bekenntnisse einer Giftmischerin, von ihr selbst geschrieben, ed. by Raleigh Whitinger and Diana Spokiene (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2009); engl. trans. Confessions of a Poisoner, Written by Herself, translated and introduced by Raleigh Whitinger and Diana Spokiene (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2009). 15 See Carl Friedrich Zelter’s answer to Goethe, who had been making enquiries on the identity of the author of the Confessions of a Poisoner, starting from the premise that it had to be a man, “ein tüchtiger Mann in jedem Sinne” (“a clever fellow in every sense”, Letter to Zelter, 29th August 1803), in Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Goethes Werke (144 volls., Weimar : Böhlau,

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for the ideals of the Berliner Enlightenment circles against the representatives of the romantic and conservative movements such as Friedrich von Gentz and Adam Müller.16 Countess Charlotte Ursinus herself is never overtly mentioned in the book, although the memoirs bear many points of resemblance to her story. The main character remains as anonymous and mysterious as the authorship. The focus of the book lies elsewhere, as the publisher puts it in the foreword when addressing the reader directly : “Take all that is or appears to be factual in these confessions in such a way as to arrive in doing so at the solution of a remarkable psychological problem”.17 What clearly emerges in the novel is a vivid depiction of the dark side of enlightened Berlin, the Prussian capital also known as “Athens on the Spree” in the second half of the eighteenth century. The book shows the precautions and dissimulation behind a woman’s acting or speaking in order to protect her good reputation and to project an image of outer innocence, thus concealing her deviant personality and moral decline through role-playing and affected behaviour. The anonymous main character is, for her time, an uncommonly welleducated woman who shares the increasing interest of her age in culture, philosophy, theatre and Bildung (‘education, formation, culture’)-issues. In fact, the book can be considered both a reverse example and a counterpart of a Bildungsroman (narrative of formation), a widespread and very popular genre during the Goethezeit when heroes were prevalently male. It is no wonder that the poisoner’s struggle for Bildung (“at that time we were going through the era of pedagogy with its mania for improving the world through certain modifications of the educational system”)18 ends in failure; the fulfilment of her individual development and social integration in a male-dominated world can only be purchased by marriage or by criminal means or by both. “It was my fate” she states “that none of my qualities were to develop fully”.19 By writing her memoirs, she only aims to understand herself and how she has become what she is, although her crimes have not yet been detected. Divided into three books, the Confessions are written in the form of a long letter sent by the anonymous main character to her deeply admired and virtuous friend Julie Z. (the name “Julie” is obviously reminiscent of Rousseau’s Julie in

16

17 18 19

1887–1919), vol. 16, Goethes Briefe 1802, 1803, p. 275. In his answer, Zelter explicitly named Friedrich Buchholz as the author of the book. On Buchholz see also Iwan Michelangelo D’Aprile, ‘Die letzten Aufklärer. Politischer Journalismus in Berlin um 1800’, in Berliner Aufklärung. Kulturwissenschaftliche Studien, 4 vols., hrsg. von Ursula Goldenbaum und Alexander Kosˇenina (Hannover-Laatzen: Wehrhahn, 2011), vol. 4, pp. 179–206. Confessions of a Poisoner, p. 3. Confessions of a Poisoner, p. 87. Confessions of a Poisoner, p. 35.

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the epistolary novel La nouvelle H{loise). In a sharp social critique the poisoner describes her own moral decline as an obvious consequence of “her split life of outward propriety and hidden depravity”.20 She gives a powerful insight into the situation of women in the social, cultural and literary context of the day. Focusing on the opposition between uncorrupted rural spaces and the new metropolitan environment as a non-regulated space which can foster women’s liberation from existing social conventions and norms, the city is perceived as a threat to the traditional assignment of women to the domestic sphere and therefore viewed in negative terms. The new urban environment proves to be a formidable source of diversion for women who are there provided with new forms of entertainment and leisure activities. As the poisoner writes in her memoirs: “Domesticity totally lost its worth in my eyes. I craved pleasure more and more. I came to need drama and theater in particular, and I missed no concert, no public entertainment”.21 In fact, for the poisoner a short stay in the country does not mean anything more than a welcome change of scene that allows her to play the innocent child of nature with the countryside in the background, while at the same time committing adultery unhindered. During the eighteenth century, women began to build up an eager readership that vividly participated in the public discussion on new directions in philosophy, education, child rearing and female models. The increasing female interest in matters of culture also had a downside, though, in that it fostered a deprecable inclination to mistake idealistic fantasies for reality. The Confessions have thus to be read against the emerging concepts of gender and gender roles established by the major works and authors of this time (Rousseau, Richardson, Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, Humboldt, to name a few). Works of Richardson and Rousseau are explicitly cited in the novel by the poisoner, who unmasks with a subversive twist their narratives of pure female virtue rewarded by male heroes or of women’s sacrifice to the family unity. Her story proves that these fictions have a deleterious impact on young women’s expectations. Her unrepentant account of her own misfortunes, in contrast, affirms the failure of those romantic ideals of love and womanhood and, for that matter, of education. But even more subtly it counters the ideal of the schöne Seele (‘beautiful soul’), as it had especially been developed by Schiller in his treatise Über Anmut und Würde (‘On Grace and Dignity’, 1793). The title of the book itself, Confessions (Bekenntnisse) of a Poisoner, signals an allusion to a well-known inlaid text in Goethe’s pivotal Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre (‘The Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister’, 1795–1796): Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele (‘Confessions of a Beautiful Soul’), that makes up the sixth book of the novel. The story of the 20 ‘Introduction’, in Confessions of a Poisoner, p. x. 21 Confessions of a Poisoner, p. 99.

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“beautiful soul”, “a subtext in Goethes’s male bildungsroman”22 outlines the spiritual development of an anonymous lady who voluntarily chooses to relinquish the outside world and the distractions of society life, while entirely devoting herself to introspection and pious activities, according to the principles of true Pietistic religiosity. To achieve the freedom of mind she longs for, she renounces marriage and motherhood, the conventional roles for a woman of her state. It is worth pointing out that the very word “confessions” (Bekenntnisse) used by the poisoner originates from the same pietistic background as Goethe’s schöne Seele. For German has three equivalents of the word confession: Beichte, which is used only in religious contexts, Geständnis, used in a legalistic sense, and confession, which underlines the role of modern subjectivity in discovering the self and uncovering the truth about emotions and drives. It also contains a reference and a provocative challenge to the Rousseauesque tradition of Confessions. Rousseau’s homonymous work was translated into German in 1782 as Bekenntnisse by a woman author, Friederike Helene Unger, the wife of Johann Friedrich Unger, in whose publishing house both the Confessions of a Poisoner and Goethe’s Apprenticeship were to appear. Friedrike Unger published anonymously three years after the Confessions of a Poisoner her own Confessions of a Beautiful Soul. This circumstance gave rise to speculations about the identity and gender of the author of both Confessions, leading to lively controversy and discussion. Many a reader argued that Friederike Unger might also have been the author of the Confessions of a Poisoner, a speculation that has been supported by recent analysis of both works, but still awaits archival corroboration.23 Writers such as Goethe and Wieland also intervened in the debate on the book, the former arguing in favour of male authorship, the latter of a female pen.24 The episode of the poisoner’s unhappy and precocious relationship with her tutor, the French expatriate nobleman Vaudreuil, also echoes in a distorted way (the class relation between the two lovers is reverted) Julie’s love for her teacher Saint-Preux. Vaudreil is moreover the one who initiates his pupil not only into the sphere of sexuality, but also into poison and monstrosity : as he fears that she may be pregnant, he gives her an abortive potion (“a distillate of all Hell itself”) that nearly kills her. Upon recovering, she finds herself deserted by her lover, who has returned to France: in her view, Vaudreil has turned into “one of those monsters who do their dastardly deeds in Clarissa and Grandison”.25 The erotic 22 ‘Introduction’, in Confessions of a Poisoner, p. xxii. 23 See on this point Susanne Zantop, ‘Afterword’, in Friedrike Helene Unger, Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele, von ihr selbst geschrieben (Hildesheim: Olms, 1991), pp. 385–416. 24 See ‘Introduction’, in Confessions of a Poisoner, p. xxv. See also Wieland, ‘Rechtfertigung’, pp. 310–11. 25 Confessions of a Poisoner, p. 33.

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liaison with the French nobleman itself reveals a successful training in deception and hypocrisy, qualities also encouraged by her family environment and by her father’s behaviour. After the breakup with Vaudreuil, the young girl devotes herself to ostentatious religious practices culminating in the act of confirmation, during which she experiences (note the choice of word) how “people poison the most sacred rites”. She furthermore realizes that “a person could deceive and reap great thanks for the deception”. Returning home from her confirmation she feels “as exhausted as any actress who had spent several hours on end offering herself up as a sacrifice to her public”.26 At the same time as showing off her piety and virtue, she entirely abandons herself to vice by committing incest with her father. She even starts enjoying the pleasure of the contradiction betweeen her actions and the prevailing rules. Knowing nothing of what she is really like, the outside world looks up to her as a model of virtue and proper behaviour. Unlike her friend and addressee Julie, but like Kunigunde, the poison mixers’ life course does not conform to the notions of female virtue and submissive renunciation that constituted the new bourgeois ideal of woman around 1800. Not surprisingly, the narrator often mentions and refers to women of fashion or courtesans, like Catherine de Medici, Ninon de Lenclos, Henrietta of England, Madame de Maintenon or Madame Du Barry, or even the notorious poisoner Madame de Brinvilliers, all known for their libertine views and epicurean way of life and closely connected to the world of aristocracy, to the ancien r{gime. This is, as we have seen above, Kunigunde’s world. Throughout her confessions, the poisoner compares her situation with that of the great ladies or aristocrats at the court of Kings Louis XIV, XVand XVI who are for her clearly a model, despite, or perhaps because of, their immoral conduct. As a bourgeois fascinated by aristocratic fashions, the poisoner is clearly from early on deeply impressed by drama and theatre. What she learns from her first theatre visits is that “a person can be one thing and seem another”.27 Not surprisingly she prefers tragedy to every other genre, since, before Lessing’s reform of German theatre, tragic drama, inspired by the great French tragedians, had a mainly courtly function and served to offer ideological support to the court aristocracy. But the preference for tragedy can also be explained as a signal of what her life will soon become: as a poisoner she will act in secret, unseen and without a sound reason, just as fate does in tragic plays. Taking up the passion for theatre that characterized the era, the young girl even seriously considers becoming an actress, a plan that she later gives up, though she will ultimately regret doing so: “I would have had greater unity of character ; whatever happened, I would have had the greater freedom I needed and been able, if not to gain virtue, 26 Confessions of a Poisoner, p. 44. 27 Confessions of a Poisoner, p. 18.

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then at least to learn to avoid crime.” We need to be aware of Schiller’s concept of grace in order to understand this statement. In his essay Über Anmut und Würde, Schiller defines grace as the expression of a condition in which there is no tension between a person’s moral commitments and his desires and feelings. Morality has thus become part of the character of the person and seems as natural as it is voluntary. A beautiful soul is one “wo Sinnlichkeit und Vernunft, Pflicht und Neigung harmoniren” (“where reason and sensuousness, duty and inclination, accord with each other”) and “Grazie ist ihr Ausdruck in der Erscheinung” (“Grace is its epiphany”).28 This condition, revealed by the motions and gestures that accompany a person’s directly willed actions, but are not themselves consciously willed, allows “beauty of play” to ensue. According to Schiller, grace is to be found more in the female sex, which – on account of its bodily frame and character – is better-suited to receive impressions and to set them in play in moral harmony of feelings: Alle Bewegungen, die von ihr ausgehen, werden leicht, sanft und dennoch belebt seyn. Heiter und frey wird das Auge strahlen, und Empfindung wird in demselben glänzen. Von der Sanftmuth des Herzens wird der Mund eine Grazie erhalten, die keine Verstellung erkünsteln kann. Keine Spannung wird in den Minen, kein Zwang in den willkührlichen Bewegungen zu bemerken seyn, denn die Seele weiß von keinem. Musik wird die Stimme seyn, und mit dem reinen Strom ihrer Modulationen das Herz bewegen.29

Kunigunde and the poisoner are clearly very far away from conforming to this ideal, which they can barely feign to embody. At one point in his essay, Schiller moreover radically questions the assumptions that grace can be learned or imitated. Imitated grace is “ein würdiges Gegenstück zu derjenigen Schönheit, die am Putztisch aus Karmin und Bleyweiß, falschen Locken, Fausses Gorges, und Wallfischrippen hervorgeht, und verhält sich ohngefähr eben so zu der wahren Anmuth, wie d i e To i l e t t e n - S c h ö n h e i t s i c h z u d e r a rc h i t e k t o n i s c h e n verhält”.30 Schiller writes further :

28 Friedrich Schiller, Über Anmut und Würde, in Schillers Werke. Nationalausgabe, hrsg. von Benno von Wiese und Helmut Koopmann (Weimar : Böhlau, 1962), vol. 20, Philosophische Schriften, Erster Teil, p. 288; engl. trans. On Grace and Dignity, translated by George Gregory, in Friedrich Schiller. Poet of Freedom (Schiller Institute, Washington DC, 1988), vol. 2, p. 363. 29 Schiller, Über Anmut und Würde, p. 288; engl. trans. On Grace and Dignity, p. 369: “All movements which issue from her grace become light, soft, and yet vigorous. Merry and free shall the eye gleam, and therein emotions glow. From the gentleness of the heart shall the heart receive a grace such as no pretense can feign. There shall be no tension seen in gestures, no coercion in willful movements, for the soul knows of none. The voice shall become music, and move the heart with the pure flow of its modulations”. 30 Schiller, Über Anmut und Würde, p. 269; engl. trans. On Grace and Dignity, p. 353: “a worthy counterpart to that beauty which issues from the dressing table from rouge and bleach, wigs,

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Auf einen ungeübten Sinn können beyde völlig denselben Effekt machen, wie das Original, das sie nachahmen, und ist die Kunst groß, so kann sie auch zuweilen den Kenner betrügen. Aber aus irgend einem Zuge blickt endlich doch der Zwang und die Absicht hervor, und dann ist die Gleichgültigkeit, wo nicht gar Verachtung und Ekel, die unvermeidliche Folge. […] Aus Geist sehen wir plötzlich Materie geworden, und ein Wolkenbild aus einer himmlischen Juno.31

For Schiller real grace is thus unlikely to be feigned or even imitated. Of course, he does not mean to deny that dancemasters or actors could not achieve true grace in their performances, but that this happens only if the rules learned through training have passed over into nature. Schiller requires actors whose graces have not been learned at a dressing table. Since what is demanded from an actor is both truth and beauty of performance and grace, which cannot be learned by training, he must first of all ensure that his humanity reaches its full development and then represent it on stage. If the poisoner had been able to become an actress, she could have at least found an outlet for the humanity within her. But the contrary is here the case. The more the narrator of the Confessions, driven mad by her passion for a handsome and virtuous young man, begins to consider the idea of using poison in order to ensure the happy ending she thinks her love deserves, the more she resembles a maenad, and her self-styled composure begins to crack. Besides, the same comparison is drawn for Kunigunde, who is labelled by von Strahl, upon hearing of her plans to provoke a feud, as “eine rasende Megäre”.32 In fact, Kunigunde, who descends from an old aristocratic family and counts Saxon emperors among her ancestors, seems to belong, like the poisoner, to an archaic, Amazonian world of matriarchy, often evoked in German literature around 1800. She resembles “Thalestris, Queen of the Amazons, when she processed down from the Caucasus to ask Alexander the Great to kiss her” (“Thalestris, die Königin der Amazonen, als sie herabzog vom Kaukasus, Alexander den Großen zu bitten, daß er sie küsse”).33 Her outwardly gorgeous body has an untamable, false breasts, and girdles, and is related in approximately the same way to true grace as toilette beauty is to architectonic beauty”. 31 Schiller, Über Anmut und Würde, p. 270 engl. trans. On Grace and Dignity, p. 388: “Upon a practiced sensibility, both can have the same effect as the original which they imitate, and if the art is great, they can even deceive the expert for a time. But, from some motion or other will the compulsion and intention ultimately shine forth, and then indifference, if not even contempt and disgust, are the inevitable result. […] We see matter having suddenly been created out of mind, and an image of clouds out of a divine Juno”. 32 Kleist, Kätchen von Heilbronn, p. 351; engl. trans. Kätchen of Heilbronn, p. 273: “The raving Megaera!”. 33 Kleist, Kätchen von Heilbronn, p. 356; engl. trans. Kätchen of Heilbronn, p. 277: “Thalestria, queen of the Amazons, when she came journeying down from the Caucasus to beg Alexander the Great for a kiss”.

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uncontrollable quality that both seduces the male and threatens his supremacy. Hence the comparisons with the Greek fire, with Helena, with Cleopatra and with Eva (“ihr dient alles, was eine Ribbe weniger hat, als sie”).34 Upon being rescued from kidnapping by Count von Strahl, she turns up on the stage “mit entfesselten Haaren” (“with loose hair”), thus underlining her autonomy from the male world and her close connection to that ecstatic sphere of the maenad which is not bound by any laws. The comparison with a maenad marks a turning point also in the Confessions, suggesting that the pretended grace could in fact be merely a manifestation of a disruptive maenad in disguise, a perverted ideal of what is good and proper behaviour for a woman. This view is supported by the fact that the events recollected in the book are supposed to take place at the outbreak of the French Revolution. The poisoner makes an overt reference to the Reign of Terror, the period of violence and mass executions after the onset of the revolution, admitting to have been “the only female creature in all Europe” that, despite the natural inclination of the female sex to pity, was not in the least moved by hearing the terrible tales from France. On the contrary, she was enthralled to learn “that there was at least one place on earth where there were people who, driven by conflicting passions, found no other alternative but to commit murder.”35 We need only think of Schiller’s condemnation of the French Revolution in his aesthetics writings and of his fear that, given the circumstances, women might ignore their innate inclinations and turn from beautiful souls into wild, untamable hyenas. German authors from this era seem to fear the subversion of gender roles and the end of patriarchal society that the Revolution might bring about.36 Kleist and Buchholz’s works are both deeply influenced by the shock caused by the Terror in France and by the challenge that the emergence of new female gender paradigmas posed to the old social structures. With his representation of a strong, self-confident Amazon queen, Kleist provided the audience with an in many ways unique drama (Penthesilea) for the period shortly after 1800 when the ideal of the beautiful soul was still dominant. The attention drawn to the figure of the poisoner in Kleist and, a few years earlier, in the Confessions should be viewed within this framework. The poisoner herself admits in her memoirs, after revealing her spectacular criminal career, that the moral of her story resides 34 Kleist, Kätchen von Heilbronn, p. 351; engl. trans. Kätchen of Heilbronn, p. 273: “She makes a vassal of everything that has one rib less than she”. 35 Confessions of a Poisoner, p. 153. 36 On this point, see Inge Stephan, ‘Da werden Weiber zu Hyänen. Amazonen und Amazonenmythen bei Schiller und Kleist’, in Inszenierte Weiblichkeit. Codierung der Geschlechter in der Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts, hrsg. von Inge Stephan (Köln: Böhlau, 1994), pp. 113–134.

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in the acknowledgment of the importance of a proper education for young girls. It should be kept within the bounds of femininity and therefore not usurpe that active, rational character which only pertains to men. Whereas Julie, as a true schöne Seele, has never experienced any incompatibility between the deepest inclination of her heart and the fulfilment of her duties as a spouse and a mother, and is consequently able to always show herself as she is, “eschewing all false adornment”,37 the poisoner, on the other hand, whose inner self is characterised by dreadful ugliness which remains despite every effort to outwardly conceal it, seems concerned with “the twisted caricature that my inner physiognomy had become”.38 As a young girl, she is strongly attracted by her father’s personality : in the ruthless pursuit of his goals, he resembles Cesare Borgia. Like the Renaissance prince, he does not hesitate to poison his wife, whom he despises for her discontent due to her unfulfilled moral development. Scarred by a “contradiction that was never resolved”, the mother does not provide a positive role model for her daughter who witnesses with increasing detachment her struggle not merely to be considered virtuous by others “but also to appear virtuous to herself, while every day giving her weakness free rein”.39 In the eyes of the daughter “this moral duplicity is the product of a female upbringing that unfortunately does not allow us to be open and honest”.40 The Confessions of a Poisoner thus deepens the close relationship between poison murder and gender-discourse that we have already seen at work in the character of Kunigunde. The second volume of Der Neue Pitaval brings together the cases of four female poisoners, starting with the notorious Marquise de Brinvilliers, who with her accomplice had poisoned several members of her aristocratic family. The other three poisoners, including Ursinus, belong to the middle class and remain an enigma, since they seem to have committed their crimes without a plausible reason. The new science of criminal psychology sought to throw light on the hidden reasons that lead an apparently normal and reasonable individual to commit monstrous deeds. In her crimes the female poisoner remains invisible and she therefore acts like fate. Although female poisoners can be traced back to Medea, it is only around 1800 they they begin to constitute the “literarische Figur von Falldarstellungen, gemacht aus Worten, aus Zuschreibungen”,41 but at the 37 38 39 40 41

Confessions of a Poisoner, p. 4. Confessions of a Poisoner, p. 4. Confessions of a Poisoner, p. 11. Confessions of a Poisoner, p. 11. Michael Niehaus, ‘Schicksal sein. Giftmischerinnen in Falldarstellungen vom Pitaval bis zum Neuen Pitaval’, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, 31 (2006), p. 133: “the literary figure of case studies, made of words and attributions” (translation mine). See also Michael Niehaus, ‘Das verantwortliche Monster’, in Monströse Ord-

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same time also the subject of anthropological narratives where words and attributions demonstrate their inability to properly describe the phenomenon they are dealing with. On the one hand, the poisoner’s stories provide a plausible explanation of the reasons that may lead a human being to crime and monstrosity, while at the same time suggesting that such an explanation may not be valid. In fact, what we see at the crime scene when a death is caused by poison is the effect of the means used to kill, not the killer himself/herself, who remains invisible at the crime scene. There is no evidence of a violent act or of the exercise of brutal physical strength. It is just if the victim had died alone, by his or her own hand. Since it has been observed that poisonings frequently occur within a family environment, where victim and perpetrator know each other, this kind of crime has commonly been associated with weakness, cowardice and deceit, all faults that were traditionally ascribed to the ‘weaker sex’. Whence the definition of poisoning as a typically female crime. The monstrous natures of Kunigunde and of the narrator of the Confessions are not immediately evident because, like poison, they act without being seen, secretly. There is of course one important difference between them: the aristocratic poisoner Kunigunde has an accomplice, Rosalie, whereas the narrator in the Confessions, being a truly bourgeois criminal, acts completely alone, without anybody’s help or knowledge.42 Yet they both act – or feign to act – like fate, unseen but inexorable and necessary. One of the issues raised by the poisoner in her Confessions is whether a proper education and development of the self might help one to avoid committing crime. As she claims: “Never was it my plan to be bad, and yet I have become so in an unavoidable manner”.43 So what role does fate play in shaping a criminal’s personality? Is there an inborn inclination to vice at work that cannot be eradicated by means of education and should instead be analysed and recognised as if it were a scientific subject? Contrary to Rosseau’s belief (shared by her own age) in the power of education, the poisoner is faced with the failure of her own efforts to educate a young protege who finally revolts against her with hatred. As a result, she comes to the conclusion that any notion of positive upbringing would lead to the creation of “a mere machine”, i.e the opposite of what the Bildung-ideal aimed at, and such a thought would also be unbearable to the young person undergoing the process. “For though we are but tools of a nature that, all things considered, always achieves the opposite of what we would wish to happen, we nevertheless are still ultimately formed and shaped by human willfulness.”44 As she cries out when she confesses her first nungen. Typologie und Ästhetik des Anormalen, hrsg. von Achim Geisenhanslüke und Georg Mein (Bielefeld: transcript, 2009), pp. 81–101. 42 On this point, see Niehaus, ‘Schicksal sein’, p. 139. 43 Confessions of a Poisoner, p. 72. 44 Confessions of a Poisoner, p. 90.

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murder : “I am a monster, I know it, but I still feel I am a human being”.45 The acknowledgment that monstrosity might be situated not beyond, but within human nature was one of the shocking conclusions reached by criminal science around 1800, leading to a radical questioning of the notion of the humane as a whole as advocated by Weimarian classicism. In one of his lectures, held at the Coll{ge de France between 1974 and 1975 and collected under the title Abnormal, Michel Foucault analysed how the character of the moral monster that appears between the eighteenth and the nineteenth century leads to the establishment of legal medicine. While over previous centuries “monstrosity as the natural manifestation of the unnatural brought with it an indication of criminality”,46 the new monster, the moral monster, is the invisible monster. It overlaps with two previous monster figures: “the monster from below and the monster from above, the cannibalistic monster represented above all by the figure of the people in revolt”, as it had been experienced in the turmoil of the French Revolution, “and the incestuous monster represented above all by the figure of the king. […] In their very twinship, these two figures will haunt the problematic of abnormal individuality”.47 The poisoner’s incestuous relationship with her father in the Confessions or, more generally, the use of food as a necessary instrument to administrate poison (see the cannibalistic monster) are both elements that endorse Foucault’s views. Like the criminal, both, the king and the people in revolt, are those who break the pact whenever they want to. “The criminal is a temporary despot, a despot of the moment, through blindness, fantasy, passion, or whatever. […] The despot is a criminal by his status whereas the criminal is a despot by accident.”48 Similarly, a revolutionary people is a monster that breaks the social pact by revolting. Kunigunde can therefore be seen as a typical product of the transition age between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: she has a monstrously assembled body, but she looks gorgeous and attractive. Her moral monstrosity lies precisely in the discrepancy between what she seems to be and what she really is, while monsters throughout the eighteenth century were supposed to be immediately recognisible through body signals and through their peculiar morphology. Kunigunde’s monstrous bodily peculiarities are hidden; it is her use of poison that provides increasing evidence about her true core. The emergence of her 45 Confessions of a Poisoner, p. 146. 46 Michel Foucault, Abnormal. Lectures at the Collwge de France 1974–75, translated by Graham Burchell (London: Verso, 2003), p. 81. On the notion of monster and monstrosity see also Hans Richard Brittnacher, Ästhetik des Horrors. Gespenster, Vampire, Monster, Teufel und künstliche Menschen in der phantastischen Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), pp. 183–198. 47 Foucault, Abnormal, p. 101. 48 Foucault, Abnormal, p. 94.

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undisguised monstrous body (which is notably described, but never exhibited in the play) is simply final proof of what she is. The various tests for arsenic detection were highly unreliable at the beginning of the nineteenth century, so crimes could in many cases pass unnoticed for a long time. Only in 1836 did the chemist James Marsh develop a test – that would be named after him – a highly sensitive method for the detection of arsenic. This invisibility is rather paradoxical, since monstrosity, as its Latin etymology suggests, should be clear and visible to everyone. For this reason, in her Confessions the poisoner, who like her historical model is well trained in legal matters, goes so far as to plead for the institution of public autopsies by which experts could ascertain the natural or unnatural cause of death. Before 1800, it is worth remembering, murders by poison occurred above all among aristocrats and at court, largely because such substances were very difficult to obtain. Scholars in criminology have therefore argued that murders by poisoning bear more than a passing resemblance with political and genealogical crimes. They are political crimes, in the sense that they are designed to remove any hindrances on the way to power or any threats to an already established social position. In this respect they pertain to the sphere of sovereignty, since the king was for a long time the only one allowed to use poison for his political goals and needed someone to taste his food in order to avoid his being poisoned by his enemies. One is not surprised to read Paul Johann Anselm Feuerbach, a distinguished jurist and writer in criminal law who studied the case of the poisoner Anne Zwanziger, defining poison as “a magic scepter”.49 Murders by poison are genealogical crimes because they are frequently committed in order to break the main line of succession and to gain properties and heritage. In France, in fact, arsenic was known as “poudre de succession”.50 Besides, arsenic can be dosed, doctored, administered, experimented with and can be used for purposes other than killing people. Unlike a weapon, it has more than one function, so its toxicity can be disguised and be hence made “invisible”. And around 1800 it had become quite easily available and was largely employed for domestic use, for example to exterminate insects or mice. The character of Kunigunde as well of that of the poisoner should thus be read in the framework of contemporary scientific, juridical and public discourse on (mainly female) poisoners and on the seemingly elusive monstrosity that their body both reveals and conceals. For instance, one of the signs of the oddity of the poisoner in the Confessions, which her cunning acting and pretences cannot mask, is the barreness that haunts her throughout the second and the third part of her memoirs. In fact, the 49 See Niehaus, ‘Das verantwortliche Monster’, p. 95 note 53. 50 See Niehaus, ‘Schicksal sein’, p. 135.

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unseen monstrosity of the poisoner must somehow be made visible, apparent in the body, on its outer surface or on its hidden parts. Monstrosity is always connected to the body. The narrator of the Confessions links her barreness up with her precocious loss of innocence, especially with her relationship with Vaudreuil, whom she suspects of having made her infertile: There are feelings that language cannot express because men have given them form and women have received them. One of these feelings is the desire to become a mother, although one cannot exactly insist that it ranks foremost among powerful drives. Few women have known this feeling, because nature has been kind enough to anticipate their desire, and to all these women what I have just said will seem silly exaggeration.51

The intense desire to get pregnant is one of the reasons that gradually brings her to murder. Nevertheless, as she remarks not without irony : “The important thing is merely to have the good intentions of looking for reasons, and they are sure to be found”.52 The drive to become a mother is one of the cracks in her apparently faultless composure and drives her to despair, turning her into “a raving madwoman who does not herself know what she wants”.53 Barrenness leads to insanity and crime. Later in the book, once she has become a serial killer, the decline of her attractiveness acts as a physical symbol of her moral decline: owing to her lascivious lifestyle, the pores of her skin are now enlarged and her face is remarkable for an ugliness “that bordered on the disgusting and that resisted all artful means”54 of improving its color. As Schiller points out in his essay on Grace and Dignity, when a person gives up her autonomy and allows sensuality and vice to rule over himself “so verschwindet mit seiner innern Selbstständigkeit auch jede Spur derselben in seiner Gestalt. Nur die Tierheit redet aus dem schwimmenden ersterbenden Auge, aus dem lüstern geöfneten Munde, aus der erstickten bebenden Stimme, aus dem kurzen geschwinden Athem, aus dem Zittern der Glieder, aus dem ganzen erschlaffenden Bau. Nachgelassen hat aller Widerstand der moralischen Kraft, und die Natur in ihm ist in volle Freyheit gesetzt.”55 The moral decline is pictured as a death process, in which life becomes a mask, a mere simulacrum: Die todten Naturkräfte fangen an, über die lebendigen der Organisation die Oberhand zu bekommen, die Form von der Masse, die Menschheit von gemeiner Natur unter51 52 53 54 55

Confessions of a Poisoner, p. 86. Confessions of a Poisoner, p. 82. Confessions of a Poisoner, p. 93. Confessions of a Poisoner, p. 185. Schiller, Über Anmuth und Würde, p. 281; engl. trans. On Grace and Dignity, p. 362: “Every trace of freedom in his form vanishes as well. Only bestiality speaks forth from the rolling, glassy eye, the lusting, open mouth, the strangled, trembling voice, the quickly gasping breath, the trembling limbs, from the entire flaccid form. All resistance of moral power has given way, and nature in him is set in total freedom”.

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drückt zu werden. Das seelestrahlende Auge wird matt, oder quilt auch gläsern und stier aus seiner Höhlung hervor, der feine Inkarnat der Wangen verdickt sich zu einer groben und gleichförmigen Tüncherfarbe, der Mund wird zur bloßen Oefnung, den seine Form ist nicht mehr Folge der wirkenden sondern der nachlassenden Kräfte, die Stimme und der seufzende Athem sind nichts als Hauche, wodurch die beschwerte Brust sich erleichtern will, und die nun bloß ein mechanisches Bedürfniß, keine Seele verrathen. Mit einem Worte: bey der Freiyheit, welche die Sinnlichkeit s i c h s e l b s t nimmt, ist an keine Schönheit zu denken.56

The same connection between sexuality, crime and monstrosity can also be found in Kleist’s Kunigunde. Freiburg compares her – rather crassly – to a diseased hen “vom Aussatz zerfressen”, thus suggesting that her artificial beauty may conceal a sexual disease. Her peculiar body configuration recalls death, the inorganic world and therefore infertility. Her appearance of life is only a mask of inner death (“dies wesenslose Bild”)57. Hence Freiburg’s suggestion to Count von Strahl, in the Phöbus-version of the play : “Wenn er sich einen Erben will erzielen / […] In einem Beinhaus freit er eine Braut”.58 If Strahl were to look beneath the splendid concealment of his betrothed, he would soon be changed into a pillar of salt like Lot’s wife. Through the use of poison, Kunigunde is able to turn life into death, to reduce human beings to ashes and dust. Yet both poisoners eagerly desire to marry in order to fulfil their otherwise impossible socialisation and to lend them an air of normality to counter any suspicions about them. For monsters are lonely beings, unable to be a part of human society. They are not capable of feeling empathy towards other human beings. “Where there is no marriage, women are either children or monsters.”59 On the other hand, as the life of the anonymous poisoner shows, marriage soon turns out to be a trap without escape, even worse than the abhorred condition of spinster. There is one last point that facilitates understanding of the “monster upon whom others look with astonishment”: “people are compelled by the very nature 56 Friedrich Schiller, Über Anmuth und Würde, p. 281; engl. trans. On Grace and Dignity, p. 362: “The dead forces of nature begin to take the upper hand over the living ones of organization; form begins to be repressed by mass, humanity by common nature. The soul-beaming eye becomes lustreless, or stares glassily and vacant out of its socket; the fine, rosy color of the cheeks thickens into a coarse and uniform bleachy flush; the mouth becomes a mere hole, since its form is no longer the effect of active, but of waning forces; the voice and sighing breath, nothing but noises, by means of which the heavy chest seeks relief, and betrays now merely a mechanical need, but no soul. In a word: with the freedom which sensuousness usurps unto itself, beauty is inconceivable”. 57 Kleist, Kätchen of Heilbronn, p. 356; engl. trans. Kätchen of Heilbronn, p. 277: “this unreal image“. 58 Kleist, Dramen 1808–1811, p. 309: “If he (Count von Strahl) wishes himself an heir, he should court his bride in an ossuary” (translation mine). 59 Confessions of a Poisoner, p. 76.

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of a crime to repeat it”.60 By repeating his/her crime and becoming a serial murderer, the criminal comes to identify himself/herself with its deathly drive. The compelling drive to kill over and over again is the unseen monster that, from a certain point on, steers the actions of the criminal. It becomes one with the criminal, while poisoner and crime continue to be an enigma to those – judges, psychologists, philosophers – responsible for judging crimes and understanding the criminal mind. As the historical Ursinus stated in her skilful defence at her trial, reported by Der neue Pitaval: Vergeblich werden sich Richter, Psychologen und Philosophen bemühen, bei dieser unseligen Begebenheit überlegte Vorsätze, durchdachte Pläne, berechnete Motive und konsequente Absichten darzutun. Alle Voraussetzungen, Hypothesen, Konjekturen und Probabilitäten werden und müssen in ihre eigene innere, unhaltbare Nichtigkeit zusammenstürzen, weil auch hier die Wahrheit ihr Recht behauptet und ihr zum Trotz der menschliche Witz und Scharfsinn in einer Begebenheit keinen Zusammenhang erschaffen kann, der nicht vorhanden war, und den Zweck einer Handlung nicht festzustellen vermag, wo kein Zweck gedacht wurde. Wo keine Besonnenheit stattfand, wo Beschränkung des Willens, Befangenheit der Urteilskraft und Krankheit des Seelenorgans die einzigen Bedingungen der Möglichkeit sind, eine Handlung zu begehen, da können auch sie allein nur hinreichende Gründe sein, die Wirklichkeit der Handlung zu begreifen, und die wahre Entschuldigung solcher Vergehen ist die wahre Geschichte ihrer Entstehung.61

60 Confessions of a Poisoner, p. 195. 61 Das Gelöbnis der drei Diebe. Kriminalfälle des Neuen Pitaval, hrsg. von Julius Eduard Hitzig und Wilhelm Häring (Willibald Alexis) (Berlin: Das neue Berlin, 1981), p. 80: “In vain, judges, philosophers, psychologists will endeavour to establish deliberate intentions, thought-out plans, calculated reasons and consistent consequences of this unfortunate occurrence. All premises, hypotheses, conjectures and probabilities shall and must collapse in their inner unsustainable invalidity, since on this point the truth also claims its right. Human wit and acumen, in explaining an occurrence, cannot provide a framework where there is none, and cannot determine the purpose of an act where there was no such purpose. Where there was no deliberation, where restriction of the Will, partiality of judgment and sickness of the soul are the only instigators of such acts, even then it might not be possible to understand their real cause. The real explanation for such misdemeanors is the true story of how they came about” (translation mine).

Micaela Latini

Angels and Monsters: On Stifter’s Turmalin

It was the merit of Walter Benjamin to have evidenced, in a letter addressed to the composer and writer Ernst Schoen dated June 17, 1918, the demonic character of the female protagonists of Adalbert Stifter’s novels as a sort of rebellion of nature against the constraints of society.1 Figures that represent the unexpected, the unforeseeable, the unthinkable, and are monstrous because of this. This interpretation seems particularly u propos for the short story Turmalin (‘Tourmaline’, 1853).2 A monster wanders undisturbed in Stifter’s literary architecture, and in particular in the underground of the eccentric “House Perron” described in Turmalin, whose protagonist is a girl with an abnormally large head.3 The title Turmalin refers to a particularly dark mineral, compared with the other stones of Stifter’s collection of short stories entitled Bunte Steine. Ein Festgeschenk (‘Colored Stones. A Holiday Gift’, 1853), where it was published. This choice is eloquent. The dark colour of the tourmaline reflects the terror and the gloomy atmosphere of the short story, and the venations of the mineral can also be seen 1 See Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence. 1910–1940, trans. by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 138. 2 As it is known, an earlier version of Turmalin had been published for the first time, with the title Der Pförter im Herrenhause, in 1852 in the journal “Libussa”. For a comparison between the two versions of the story see Joachim Müller, ‘Stifters “Turmalin” – Erzählhaltung und Motivstruktur im Vergleich beider Fassungen’, Vierteljahresschrift des Adalbert Stifter-Instituts, 17, 1–2 (1968), pp. 33–45. See also: Eva Mason, ‘Stifter’s “Turmalin”: A Reconsideration’, The Modern Language Review, 72, 2 (1977), pp. 348–358. 3 It is worth remembering that in the 19th century the French scientist Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, in his writing Philosophie anatomique des monstruosit{s humaines, had classified the Hydrocephalus as a subclass of the Macrocephalus, and the latter as an Anomacephalus, in other words as a monster. For a general study on deformity and its perception, see Monströse Ordnungen, hrsg. von Achim Geisenhansluecke und Georg Mein (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009); Birgit Stammberger, Monster und Freaks. Eine Wissensgeschichte außergewöhnlicher Körper im 19. Jahrhundert (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011); Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis, Mostro. L’anomalia e il deforme nella natura e nell’arte (Milan: Guerini, 1992; new edition, Milan: Guerini, 2012).

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as an allusion to the internal stratifications of the plot.4 Indeed, in the incipit of Tourmaline, the author himself advises the reader that the short story is gloomy like the stone at hand. The topics it deals with are gloomy : isolation, pain, death, physical malformation, madness. In fact, to create the atmosphere of the story, Stifter repeatedly avails himself of dark colours. Black is the velvet that borders the portrait of the ‘Madonna with Child’ that hangs on the wall of the room of the protagonist’s apartment.5 In the second part of the short story, black is the colour of the jackdaw (which at the beginning is mistaken for a ouzel), which is the only friend in the girl’s tragic existence. The dark basement recalls the dungeons of Gothic literature and it is here that many events in the story take place. It can be reached through a dark red door. In the second part of the short story all the events occur under the sign of darkness and opacity. This marks a contrast with the first part of the story, where the colour white is the dominant note. There can be no doubt that the basement in which most of the short story’s events take place signalizes a dimension of mental insanity. The central motif of the story is the obscure pain (infirmity), which infects mind and soul with melancholia. In his introduction to Turmalin, Stifter explains how human destiny should be at the centre of the story, highlighting the moment when the light of reason in the protagonist is dimmed, as soon as, in a condition of mental blindness, he abandons its inner law; “when he surrenders utterly to the intensity of his joys and sorrows, loses his foothold” and falls prey to an indefinable condition. In this sense Turmalin is a short story about the monstrosity of insanity, as suggested by the incipit of this very somber tale, where it is said that: Es ist darin wie in einem traurigen Briefe zu entnehmen, wie weit der Mensch kömmt, wenn er das Licht seiner Vernunft trübt, die Dinge nicht mehr versteht, von dem innern Gesetze, das ihn unabwendbar zu dem Rechten führt, läßt, sich unbedingt der Innigkeit seiner Freuden und Schmerzen hingibt, den Halt verliert, und in Zustände geräth, die wir uns kaum zu enträthseln wissen.6 4 See Lori Wagner, ‘Schick, Schichten, Geschichte. Geological Theory in Stifter’s Bunte Steine’, Vierteljahresschrift des Adalbert Stifter-Instituts, 2 (1995), pp. 34–36. 5 Interestingly, in Thomas Bernhard’s novel Auslöschung (‘Extinction’, 1986) the protagonist mentions a painting of a Madonna with a hydrocephalous Child that was in his parents’ home. 6 Adalbert Stifter, ‘Turmalin’, in Bunte Steine. Ein Festgeschenk (Pesth: Verlag von Gustav Heckenast, 1853), vol. 1, p. 195; engl. trans. ‘Tourmaline or the Doorkeeper’, in Limestone and Other Stories, trans. and with an Introduction by David Luke (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), p. 105: “It [Tourmaline] is like a sad letter that tells us to what extremity man may come when he dims the lights of his reason, when he no longer understands life, when he abandons that inner law which is his steadfast guide along the right path, when he surrenders utterly to the intensity of his joys and sorrows, loses his foothold, and is lost in regions of experience which for the rest of us are almost wholly shrouded in mystery”. See Margaret Gump, Adalbert Stifter (Boston: Blackwell, 1974), pp. 82–84.

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The “solar eclipse” of the mind frees the underground of the soul and the monsters that inhabit it. The doorkeeper in Turmalin has abandoned the way of the reason, to walk on a dark and lonely road, taking along his daughter, a girl with an abnormal head. It is easy to see in the silhouette of the girl a monster, in the original sense of the word, attested in Friedrich Kluge’s Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, where the entry “monster” points out to the Latin verb monere, i. e. to remember, to advice, a reference to the warning of the Gods against those who abandon the straight and narrow (path).7 In this sense the verb errare (to wander/to be mistaken, to follow a false way) is evidently a reference to the detour in the underground of the run-down House Perron. It is the underground world from which springs the aggressiveness and emotional violence that Thomas Mann saw hidden in the literary works of Stifter.8

The time of the monster The distant past in which the facts narrated by Stifter take place is lost in the convoluted mists of time. The events are revealed only gradually and are narrated from two perspectives: the main narrator and a friend of his, a woman directly involved in the story. As we read, we become increasingly aware that the inhabitants of Vienna are divided into two groups: the normal ones, who tell stories, and the weird ones, about whom stories are told.9 The two reports, which in overlapping compose the short story but come together only late in the narration, are however insufficient to clarify the story entirely. Many of the turning points remain unclear as though shrouded in the obscurity of a mythical time. They seem to take place in the mythical cave mentioned at the end of the first part of the story and seem to totter on the verge of sinking into the abyss of oblivion. Indeed the theme of oblivion emerges as fundamental at the close of the short story. After all oblivion is a central Leit-

7 Friedrich Kluge, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011): “Monstrum Sn ‘Ungeheuer’ std. (16. Jh.). Entlehnt aus l. monstrum (eigentlich ‘mahnendes Zeichen der Götter durch eine widernatürliche Erscheinung’) zu l. monere ‘erinnern, mahnen’; dann verallgemeinert. Selben Ursprungs sind das französische Lehnwort monströs und die englische Entlehnung Monster (evtl. frz. monstre)”. See also: Karl Ernst Georges, ‘Monstrum’, in Ausführliches lateinisch-deutsches Handwörterbuch (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1913), p. 998. 8 See Joachim Müller, ‘Thomas Mann über Adalbert Stifter’, Vierteljahresschrift des Adalbert Stifter-Instituts, 12, 1–2 (1963), pp. 60–63, expecially p. 59. 9 See Peter Demetz, ‘On Stifter’s and Fontane’s Realism: Turmalin and Mathilde Möhring’, in Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. by Joseph P. Strelka (Bern/Frankfurt am Main/New York: Peter Lang, 1985), pp. 767–782.

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motiv in Stifter, a result of the lapses in time, of the speed with which memory works and its inevitable blank spots. In the second part of the short story, many enigmas are solved, yet many remain obscure. Stifter knows that there is no narrative form capable of shaping the formless destiny of a person who has abandoned the path of reason. He also knows that there is no key to the puzzle, no thread capable of definitely knitting together the scattered tatters that composed the original narrative nucleus of the short story.10 In the light of the lacunae that characterize the chronological sequence of Stifter’s short story, it might be useful to clarify certain aspects of the tale, i. e. three strange events which happen at different times to the lady of the Viennese bourgeoisie who narrates the second part of the novel: 1) leaning out of the window of her apartment, which is located in a suburb in Vienna, she sees a strange couple walking down the street, just below her window: a middle-aged man, unusually dressed in a way remindful of Goethe’s Werther, and, close to him, a young girl, also dressed in an unusual fashion. The girl attracts the attention of passers-by because of her strange head. A head so big as to be almost scary. Her curiosity awaken, the woman goes into the street and starts following them, but soon loses sight of them in the meanders of streets around the church, near a uninhabited building, known in the neighborhood as the “House Perron”; 2) On a full-moon evening, while walking back from the theatre, the woman and her husband hear a weird, uncanny and Dionysian music. It is a strange melody that sounds like a magic flute and seems to come from an apartment of the building that is to be taken down: the House Perron. But the two are unable to discover where the music comes from, and perhaps they are not able to appreciate its unusual character, which goes counter to their expectations. The woman describes it as disquieting and unruly : a strange and indistinct tonality, unsettling yet at the same time almost moving, as if the musicians were trying to convey a suffering, but lacked the adequate media.11 For her husband, the music is simply eccentrically foolish; 3) Some time later the son of the middle-class couple, a well-mannered teenager named Alfred, comes back home extremely frightened. He tells his mother that he has just seen, walking on the sidewalk in front of House Perron, a blackbird (this is another Gothic motif), which looked disoriented. When he had tried to approach and pat it, he had been reproved by a strange person: a girl with an abnormally large head who had popped out of a 10 In his book, which was the first complete study of Stifter’s work to appear in English, Eric Blackall notes the numerous narrative gaps in Turmalin. See Eric A. Blackall, Adalbert Stifter. A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, I ed. 1948). 11 These themes highlight also the connections with E.T.A. Hoffmanns Ritter Gluck (‘Knight Gluck’, 1809), Franz Grillparzer’s Der arme Spielmann (‘The Poor Musician’, 1847) and Theodor Storm’s Ein stiller Musikant (‘A Quiet Musician’, 1875).

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window situated at the level of the street, who had told him to leave the animal alone. Frightened by the apparition, he had run off home. The central role of the mysteries and the moments of ominous suspense in Turmalin reinforce the Gothic atmosphere. The three events, described in the woman’s first person narrative which makes up the second part of the story, represent three tesserae of a complex mosaic, which is not fully evident in the novel. There is no thread that can knit together and mend the lacerated memory or the secrets that spark human life. But one thing we know: the three tesserae all lead to House Perron, i. e. to the home of the monster.12

The home of the monster Differently from other works by Stifter set in the Austrian countryside, the background in which the events narrated in Turmalin take place is the metropolitan dimension of Vienna. This is no accident: according to Stifter the city is the typical place of disorder and dispersion. As one reads in the collection of essays Wien und die Wiener (‘Vienna and the Viennese’, 1841–1844), Stifter underlines, anticipating the later critique, the dimension of alienation and inhumanity that characterized the life of the metropolis. As we read at the beginning of the story Turmalin, the city of Vienna is also marked out, according to Stifter, by the eccentricity of its inhabitants. In Turmalin the male leading character is also the protagonist of a ‘changement’. At the beginning of the short story the protagonist is a strange pensioner, but later in life, he becomes a typical ‘Sonderling’ and works as a doorkeeper and a busker. After his wife tells him she has been unfaithful and then decides to disappear, he himself is transformed from loving father into an eccentric misfit, a socially marginalized person. Stifter describes the protagonist of the first part of the short story as a man who is unable to come to terms with reality and with his suffering, a man destined to social failure and marginality.13 He has abandoned his apartment in the centre of Vienna, to go into exile with his daughter in the suburbia. The new lodgings are inhospitable and unhealthy : the basement of an old building in the outskirts of town. It is in this non-place, underneath House Perron, that the nameless girl has been growing up for some years, in an uncivilized, dirty, damp room, that is bad 12 See Lee Byron Jennings, The Ludicrous Demon. Aspects of the Grotesque in German PostRomantic Prose (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963), pp. 109–115. 13 See Hans Esselborn, ‘Adalbert Stifters “Turmalin”. Die Absage an den Subjektivismus durch das naturgesetzliche Erzählen’, Vierteljahresschrift des Adalbert Stifter-Instituts, 34, 1–2 (1985), pp. 9–14.

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for her health. House Perron is a place of darkness, of the uncanny. It is a building destined to be demolished, and almost empty at the time of the events. The building is described by the woman narrator in the second part of the short story. For the first time in her life she had entered the “haunted palace” with the aim of returning a book to a family friend, named professor Andorf. Since the man was not at home, she had left the book with a strange man who presented himself as the doorkeeper of the building. This spectral man is the only other lodger of House Perron, along with professor Andorf. Through the perception of the woman, we are made aware of the decadent atmosphere that characterizes the building. As we read in Turmalin, on the external walls people see the record of the “gradual decline and decay and dissolution” of things. One also sees “wie die Vögel und andere Thiere nach und nach von dem Mauerwerke Besitz nahmen, aus dem sich die Menschen zurück gezogen hatten”.14 The description evokes the image of a haunted castle typical of the Gothic literature: a ruined scenario where the most sordid and primitive instincts of human beings emerge. The transformation of the male protagonist in the course of the short story is paralleled by the contrast – which is also interesting from a social topography perspective – between House Perron and his previous apartment, which is on the fourth floor of a building in the centre of Vienna, on Sanct Petersplatz, where the pensioner lived with his wife and his daughter before the betrayal. The apartment in the centre of the city is visited in the short story before and after the traumatic event that sparks the pensioner’s latent insanity. Few writers are capable of conveying with Stifter’s efficacy the entanglement between the locations, the objects and the psychological dimension. In Stifter’s poetics the description of the places translates into a metonymic depiction of the characters who live there.15 In the transgression of the conventional order, an important role is played by two chronologically far apart descriptions of the rented apartment in the centre of Vienna, by details and by the objects of the house (some of them are prophetical, since they are related to forthcoming events). In the first description of the apartment, we are struck by the so-called “room of heroes”: it is the showroom where the pensioner, who is a connoisseur of the fine arts, indulges in his disquieting passion: a collection of the portraits of important persons. Faces crowd the walls of this strange private collection: paintings of “heroes” (monsters of perfection in every learning field), which the pensioner has hung on the 14 Stifter, ‘Turmalin’, p. 229; engl. trans. ‘Tourmaline’, p. 124: “birds and other kind of animals gradually taking possession of the wall, from which the people had withdrawn”. 15 See Gunther Hertling, “‘Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr”. Zur Zentralsymbolik in A. Stifters Turmalin’, Vierteljahresschrift des Adalbert Stifter-Instituts, 26, 1–2 (1977), pp. 17–34. See, in particular, pp. 17–23.

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walls to gaze on them at his leisure. To better study the portraits, he has furnished the sofas with wheels that allow him to move himself in all directions, to survey the whole room, and to achieve different observation points. Thus he satisfies his desire for a panoptic dominion on the totality of the world of the heroes. An attitude which, together with the collection, reveals his anxiety over losing his possessions. However, anticipating future events, the centre of this room is occupied by the so-called “Dall’s armchair” (Dall being the actor who becomes his wife’s lover).16 The wife’s rooms are described using a kind of “duplication through difference”:17 a place whose centre is assigned to the white cradle of the couple’s daughter. The narrator notes the rosy cheeks and delicate features of the baby, who, in these lines, is reduced to yet another object of the house, ready to be entered into an inventory. The whole apartment embodies the idea of ‘order’: a perfectly clean and tidy place, an embalmed family atmosphere, the hallmark of the bourgeois world. When, in the uncanny duplication of the second description, the apartment of Sanct Petersplatz is observed by the eye of the same narrator, after the break of the harmonic order, it is the state of decay (Zerfall) that prevails. The space of the house, whose interiors are again scrutinized, appears the same as before yet different. The objects in the apartment are covered by a layer of dust, while spiders and moths have taken possession of the house. The domestic bliss evoked by the rosy color of the baby’s cheeks is gone. The baby was protected by the veils of the cradle and a golden angel statuette but now the spiders move about suggesting the anxiety of loss. Everything in the house suggests a regression to an animal condition and ultimately to death.18 The decadence of the house parallels the moral and social degradation of the pensioner, the loss of harmony and the stifling pall of depression. The man’s unstable mental balance has been definitely compromised by the traumatic events he has undergone. The contrast between the two aspects of the house – the apparent well-ordered harmony and the decadent condition described later – introduces the motif of the descensus ad inferos in the second part of the short story. After the departure of his wife, the pensioner wants to vanish from the face of the earth. He moves with his daughter to a miserable and inhospitable subterranean lodging, under 16 On the role of this character, see Hans Kristian, ‘Adalbert Stifters “Turmalin” in seinen Beziehungen zur Selbstbiographie des Burgschauspielers Joseph Lange’, Vierteljahresschrift des Adalbert Stifter-Instituts, 12 (1963), pp. 146–150. 17 See Marino Freschi, ‘Turmalin: la pietra dello scandalo di Stifter’, preface to the Italian edition of Turmalin, ed. by Emilia Fiandra (Venice: Marsilio, 1990), pp. 9–33. 18 On the animal nature of human beings, see Stifter’s essay Zuversicht (‘Confidence’, 1846), in Werke und Briefe. Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, hrsg. von Johannes John und Sibylle von Steinsdorff (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2003), vol. 3,1, pp. 83–92.

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the building known as House Perron, far from the elegant centre of the city. The pensioner turns aside the main street and locks himself in a vault in suburbs, marginalizing himself and the daughter physically and symbolically from the normal world of the Vienna bourgeoisie. He survives working as a strolling musician and as the doorkeeper of House Perron. The apartment, chosen by the pensioner as a prison-refuge for himself and his daughter (whose name remains unknown), is like a cave in a hill destined to be destroyed. A degraded underground habitation, where – enacting the metropolitan legend mentioned in the first part of the short story – the pensioner has hidden along with his daughter. Darkness, dirtiness, poverty, humidity, malnutrition characterize the surroundings and accompany the insanity of the inhabitants. And it is this unsound environment that probably causes the hydrocephalic illness of the daughter, as we are told in the second part of the story.

The body of the monster The undisputed protagonist of the second part of the short story is the girl during her adolescence. The character owes much to the poetics of E.T.A. Hoffmann19 but it has also some elective affinities with other characters invented by Stifter: Pia in Narrenburg (‘Castle Crazy’, 1843), the brunette in Katzensilber (‘Muscovite’, 1845–53), Juliana in Waldbrunnen (‘Forest Fountain’, 1866). The girl is certainly an eccentric presence in Stifter’s works compared to the other young and beautiful protagonists and heroes of Bunte Steine. This eccentricity is not solely tied to her deformity but extends to her personality. The protagonist of Turmalin is not a person capable of pursuing her objectives, but a sick girl, who must trust in adults, while searching to escape the dead end in which she has been trapped by the adults she trusts. As we discover progressively, she has spent a lot of time in the underground room, with a jackdaw as her only companion and bread and water as her only food. The girl is worn-out by the oppressive melancholy of the father, a defeated human being who personifies the pitfalls of the Romantic outlook and its rejection of reason. As his music reveals, he has been unable to contain his pain, to elaborate it. Instead of it, he has accentuated its disruptive and dissonant effects – in other words: the dark powers of sentiments. He transfers his internal infirmity to his daughter, the malformed head functioning as a sort of projected psychosomatic illness. Stifter emphasizes the monstrosity of the girl by contrasting it with her aspect as a baby. In her white 19 This affinity is pointed out also by Rudolf Gottschall in ‘Adalbert Stifter. Ein Essay’, Unsere Zeiten. Deutsche Revue der Gegenwart. Monatsschrift zum Conversation-Lexikon. Neue Folge, 4, 1 (1868), pp. 745–766, particularly p. 759.

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gown, the baby had been described as a little angel with small red lips, rosy cheeks, her little eyes confidently shut. Now she has become a monster with an abnormal head: a face to scare the people and catalyze the attentions of the “good Samaritans”. The girl’s deformation is the irradiating nucleus of the second part of the story : her awful and frighteningly large face (“ein fürchterlich großes Angesicht … erschreckend groß”), together with her pallor and her disquieting, fixed and unexpressive gaze. Her eyes seem to belong to a soulless automaton. Her empty gaze evokes her suffering and stands as a silent accusation against her father. She is certainly one of the most helpless figures in Stifterian fiction: the innocent expiator of her father’s faults. Locked in the underground basement, in a prison that shuts her off from life, the girl carries on herself the marks of her suffering.20 The forced isolation from all human contacts compounds the lack of food and heat, and induces a regression into a quasi bestial condition. In the absence of human affection, the girl develops a pathological tie to the jackdaw, her only friend. A stranger to humanity, it is only at the animal level that she finds comfort.

The language of the monster While the squalid underground lodging described by Stifter through the eyes of the woman narrator is remindful of the underworld in Jean Paul’s Die insichtbare Loge (‘The Invisible Lodge’, 1793), there are also many motifs which were to resurface, many years later, in Franz Kafka’s works: from the idea of “living in a hole” in Der Bau (‘The Burrow’, 1923) to the dirty bedroom where Gregor Samsa in Die Verwandlung (‘The Metamorphosis’, 1915) shuts himself with cooperation of his family.21 Like Kafka’s protagonists, the girl in Turmalin also undergoes a regression towards a non-human world. While in the first part of the short story, the symbolic custodian of the baby had been the golden statue of the angel, in the second part Stifter entrusts the role to the domesticated jackdaw, the girl’s only friend. Only to the animal can the girl speak, and she speaks in a demonic language, which is at the same time poetic and unintelligible to human ears. The jackdaw in reply nods its head and answers with sounds which are similarly incomprehensible to humans. It 20 As in Stifter’s Abdias and particularly the character of Ditha, the blind girl. 21 See Naomi Ritter, ‘Stifter und Kafka: Berührungspunkte’, VASILO 27 (1978), pp. 129–136 and Stefan Gradmann, Topographie/Text. Zur Funktion räumlicher Modellbildung in den Werken von Adalbert Stifter und Franz Kafka (Berlin: Hain, 1990). W.G. Sebald too emphasizes the affinities between the two writers in Die Beschreibung des Unglücks. Zur österreichischen Literatur von Stifter bis Handke (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2006, I ed. 1985), p. 17–18 and p. 37.

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is significant that when the girl finally escapes from her underground prison, she brings along, as mementos of that archaic world, the jackdaw and her father’s magic flute, that is to say the two ‘embodiments’ of her private language and her mythical dimension. With a sadistic cruelty that only such followers of Stifter like Franz Kafka and Thomas Bernhard were able to recognize in their parents, the pensioner had assigned to his daughter the macabre task of describing a scenario of pain and suffering: Beschreibe den Augenblick, wenn ich todt auf der Bahre liegen werde, und wenn sie mich begraben […]. So beschreibe, wie deine Mutter von ihrem Herzen gepeinigt in der Welt herumirrt, wie sie sich nicht züruck getraut, und wie sie in der Verzweiflung ihrem Leben ein Ende macht.22

The writings of the girl, which after the father’s death fall in the hands of the woman narrator, are themselves monstrous: gruesome notebooks, which in a highly poetical style strive to convey the pain but lack adequate artistic means and show little signs of reason beyond the superficial correctness of the sentences. An empty art, marked by the absence of any profound rationality, which evokes the atmosphere of Gothic literature. When the narrating I of the second part of the short story reads the writings of the girl, she perceives their poetic strength, but deems their contents utterly incomprehensible, completely mystifying: Ich würde sie Dichtungen nennen, wenn Gedanken in ihnen gewesen wären, oder wenn man Grund, Ursprung und Verlauf des Ausgesprochenen hätte enträthseln können. Von einem Verständnisse, was Tod, was Umirren in der Welt und sich aus Verzweiflung das Leben nehmen heiße, war keine Spur vorhanden, und doch war dieses alles der trübselige Inhalt der Ausarbeitungen. Der Ausdruck war klar und bündig, der Satzbau richtig und gut, und die Worte, obwohl sinnlos, waren erhaben.23

The middle-class lady does not understand that poetry can exist also in the absence of order and understanding. According to the woman, the girl seems to have found joy in these artistic pursuits, which she is skilled at, yet whose significance 22 Stifter, ‘Turmalin’, cit, p. 258; engl. trans. ‘Tourmaline’, p. 141: “Describe how one day I shall lie dead in my coffin […] describe how your mother wanders about the world in the torment of her heart, and how she dare not return, and how in the end she does away with herself in despair”. 23 Stifter, ‘Turmalin’, pp. 263–264; engl. trans. ‘Tourmaline’, p. 195: “I should call them stories or poems if they had contained any intelligible thought or if there had been any discernible rhyme or reason or continuity in the text. There was not a trace of any understanding of the meaning of death, or of wandering about in the world and doing away with oneself in despair, and yet these melancholy themes were the sole content of the girl’s writing. Her expressions were clear and incisive, her sentences correct and well constructed, and her words, although senseless, were noble and lofty sublime”.

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seem to escape her. The same is true for the words she utters: interviewed by the woman, the hydrocephalic girl answers in the purest literary language, but what she says is almost incomprehensible. Weird sentences come out of her mouth, different from the ones normally found in everyday interactions. The language of the young girl is poetic, but abnormal, compared to ordinary communication.24 It is the verbal equivalent of her physical anomaly and it compounds her alienation from the normal world. It could not be otherwise. On the one hand the girl, in her primitiveness, represents the power and the demonic forces of the imagination, as a kind of knowledge which cannot be totally translated into a form. The poetic language, which precedes logical understanding, refers to itself and resists transparency, remarks its intelligible and transitive aspects. The opacity of poetry evokes the sensitive and intransitive character of representation: the poetry does not reproduce the world but produces it.25 On the other hand, the girl is the perfect representative of the chaotic world of the story. In her monstrous silhouette (large head and starred eyes) she is the paradigm of deformity and obscurity. There is no doubt: through the character of the hydrocephalous girl, Stifter intends to offer a negative view of Romantic poetry, as a kind of artistic temperament that requires a distance from the normal world, which flourishes in solitude, illness, insanity and suffering. Stifter’s reservations on the Romantic tradition are expressed also through the representation of her father. The pensioner significantly dies falling from a ladder on which he had climbed to look at the lights of the external world. Through the death of the father – a typical incarnation of the ‘Sonderling’ of Romanticism26 – Stifter signals the fate of the Romantic literary movement and the final fall as its necessary outcome.

The metamorphosis of the monster Paradoxically it is the enacting of the expected ending, the death of the father, that brings the girl back to life and restores to her the potential future she had been denied. The old world must die for her to rise from the dead. This signals also the acceptance of an extreme, amoral art.27 It was the desire for light, for a 24 See Enrico De Angelis, Dal mito al progetto. Note su Adalbert Stifter (Pisa: SEU, 1986), pp. 125–130. According to De Angelis, in this story Stifter delineates two kinds of communication, and the second is the poetic one. 25 See Jennings, The Ludicrous Demon, pp. 109–115. 26 See Hans Geulen, ‘Stifterische Sonderlinge’, Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft, 17 (1973), pp. 415–431. 27 See Isolde Schiffermüller, ‘Kunst und Wahnsinn in Adalbert Stifters Turmalin. Zur figura-

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glimpse of the external world that had led the father to scramble up the ladder, trying to reach the window-port hole.28 And his accidental fall is the turning point in Tourmaline’s unhappy life. It allows for the opening of the little dark red door, almost black with dirt, of the basement, and her emergence into life. But, when the girl re-emerges from the underworld – like the slaves in Plato’s cave –, she exposes to the world her oversized head and her strange gaze. The anomaly of her head signals the heredity of her parent’s chaotic and disturbed way of life. From this point of view the girl, who shows evident autistic symptoms, seems close to the character of Kaspar Hauser in the homonymous 1832 book by Anselm von Feuerbach.29 The girl, as well as the foundling from Nuremberg, who lived also for several years inside a dungeon, embodies the enigma of life and its alterity. There is one event that transforms her from a deprived automaton into a feeling human being: the tears she sheds when she experiences the frailty of the human dimension at the death of her father. The liminal experience of death, which the young girl has always explored through her writings, becomes here the driving force in her metamorphosis. Like Gustav in Jean Paul’s Unsichtbare Loge, at the beginning the girl does not understand the meaning of the verb “to die”.30 But then, as she experiences it through her father and comes to understand it, a new life starts for her. As the woman narrator tells us at the moment of her father’s death: “Da fing es heftig zu weinen an, ich suchte es zu trösten, aber meine Worte verfingen nichts”.31 That the woman’s words have no power is not simply due to the suffering but to the fact that the language of the woman is “other”: it is the language of rationality and not the girl’s poetry one. For this reason the sublime writings of the girl appear to the lady as cryptic texts, remote from her own conventions just like the melody of his father’s flute.

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tiven Praxis der Erzählung’, Quaderni di Lingue e Letterature dell’Universitu di Verona, 19 (1994), pp. 217–229. The ladder, which in the previous life had been used by the pensioner to closely examine the faces of the heroes in his private collection is, in the second part, barely high enough to allow him to look out of the basement from a window at street level: “Da sah ich die Säume von Frauenkleidern vorbei gehen, sah die Stiefel von Männern, sah schöne Spitzen von Rocken oder die vier Füsse eines Hundes. Was an den jenseitigen Häusern vorging, war nicht deutlich”, Stifter, ‘Turmalin’, p. 259; engl. trans., ‘Tourmaline’, p. 141: “I could see the hems of women’s dresses going past, and I saw men’s boots or fine coattails or the four feet of a dog. I could not make out what was happening by the houses on the other side of the street”. See Müller, ‘Stifters “Turmalin”’, p. 41. See Eugen Geulen, ‘Adalbert Stifters Kinder-Kunst’, in Der imaginierte Findling. Studien zu Kaspar-Hauser-Rezeption, hrsg. von Ulrich Struve (Heidelberg: Winter, 1995), pp. 123–143. For a comparison between the two writers, see Beatrice Mall-Grob, Fiktion des Anfangs. Literarische Kindheitsmodelle bei Jean Paul und Adalbert Stifter (Stuttgart/Weimar : Metzler, 1999), pp. 360–371. Stifter, ‘Turmalin’, p. 254; engl. trans. ‘Tourmaline’, pp. 138–139: “At this she began to weep bitterly. I tried to comfort her, but my words had no effect […]”.

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The death of the father is a breakthrough that puts the girl again in contact with the community, but she pays a price, renouncing her creativity, her poetry and her freedom. Since the death of the father, with the benevolent woman as tutor, the girl undertakes a re-educational path, which the woman defines as transforming that fragmentary and abnormal expression into harmonious and logical thoughts. In other words, the woman intends to reshape the girl making her again capable to integrate herself into the normal world, to educate her as a useful member of the community. We are told that the girl begins to conform to the regularities of an ordered life, imposed on her by her educators. In fact, the lady admits in passing that the girl has to be brought into society through gentle means, leaving her the illusion of freedom. Not so differently from Kafka, Stifter reveals in this passage how an illusion of freedom is all that is allowed to the middle-class.32 As we know from the ending of the short story, time and her new well-ordered life have also a beneficial effect on her abnormality. When asked about the hydrocephalitis, the doctor explains the swelling of the head as a glandular affection due to the dampness of the basement she was living in. He recommends thermal treatment with iodine water and a healthy lifestyle until the head returns to normal. The cure succeeds and after some time the head becomes smaller and with more regular and more pliable traits. From a realistic point of view there is, of course, no medical and scientific explanation for this kind of recovery or for the connection between the strange hydrocephalitis and Tourmaline’s lifestyle. The malformation can be understood only symbolically, insofar as the monster represents always a menace for the normally and orderly standard of life. The recovery means that the lady had successfully changed the head of the girl. The metamorphosis of the girl’s face is paralleled by the transformation of the town over the years, which involves House Perron and the surrounding buildings. Along with the characters who occupied the story, the old house also disappears as it is demolished, and new buildings take its place. The town’s face also changes.33 Through his description of the new topographic order, Stifter expresses the passing of the time, the mutability of human passions, the forgetfulness that characterizes the new generations, who know nothing of House Perron and the events associated with it. Tourmaline’s story has been replaced by other ones, buried under stratification of new houses, people, lives, memories. Yet the tourmaline is a stone, a stone that can lie hidden under the flowers and the

32 See Demetz, On Stifter’s and Fontane’s Realism, p. 775. 33 The connection between the body of the monster and the city plays an important role also in the novel of Honor de Balzac La Fille aux yeux d’or (‘The Girl with the Golden Eyes’, 1834–35).

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grass. While these wither, the stones are capable of resisting the passing of time and the upheavals of geology. Houses may fall down, people go away, but one can still remember those who once lived there. And this is after all what characterizes the whole of Stifter’s works: the attempt to crystallize time.

Anna Cappellotto

Creating Life Artificially: Robert Hamerling’s Homunculus

The idea of creating life artificially is not only linked to the contemporary age, and to the speculation on artificial intelligence, cybernetic and cloning, but it is a challenge that humanity has always aspired to conquer. The first attempts to describe the processes of producing human beings in what we now call a laboratory dates back to Paracelsus (1493–1541),1 who theorized in his treatise De generatione rerum naturalium (1537) the receipt of his man-made man, a little creature having the appearance of a newborn, the so called homunculus. To reach the final result human semen had to putrefy for forty days in a recipient under special conditions: the time was necessary for creating a sort of transparent being that could turn into a little baby in the flesh if nourished with human blood for forty weeks. Rudolf Steiner, during a series of conferences held in Berlin at the beginning of the previous century focused again on the meaning of the homunculus by providing two of the most significant literary examples taken from the nineteenth century : J.W. Goethe’s Faust and Robert Hamerling’s Homunculus. Modernes Epos in zehn Gesängen (‘Homunculus. A Modern Epic in 10 Cantos’, 1888).2 His lesson consists, de facto, in a hard criticism of the positivist attitude 1 Other sources date back to Johannes Praetorius (1537–1616), who entered into a heated debate with Paracelsus. See Joachim Müller, Die Figur des Homunculus in Goethes “Faust” (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1963), p. 16; Maria Selinger, ‘The Homunculus “Motiv” and the End of the “Classical Walpurgis Night”. A Contribution to the Study of the Unity of “Faust II”’, The Modern Language Review, 41, 2 (1946), pp. 177–185 (in particular, p. 178); Wilhelm Emrich, Die Symbolik von Faust II (Frankfurt am Main-Bonn: Athenäum, 1964), p. 252; Kathleen R. Snow, ‘Homunculus in Paracelsus, “Tristram Shandy” and Faust’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 79, 1 (1980), pp. 67–74. For further details on the homunculus-sources compare also Künstliche Menschen. Dichtung & Dokumente über Golems, Homunculi, Androiden und lebende Statuen, hrsg. von Klaus Völker, II Bd. (München: Carl Hanser, 1971), vol. 2, pp. 32–71. 2 Robert Hamerling was born as Rupert Hammerlin in Kirchberg am Walde in a humble family in 1830 and died in 1889. He moved to Vienna, where he attended the “Schottengymnasium” and in 1946 he began to study philosophy. He worked for several years as a teacher in a secondary school. Some of his masterpieces are Ahasver in Rom (1865), König von Sion (1868),

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Nicolaas Hartsoeker, Essai de dioptrique (Paris, 1694), p. 230.

of natural sciences, who purported to have a complete comprehension of the human being. In his opinion ! but the discussion on the theme has been heated and controversial up to now !3 modern science sees the Geisteswissenschaften as “Phantastereien und Träumereien”4 and man made only of physical, chemical and mineral elements: Und so meint diese Weltanschauung: wenn es ihr einmal gelungen sein wird, alle die natürlichen Gesetze und Stoffe kennenzulernen, die im menschlichen Nervensystem bis in die feinsten Vorgänge des Gehirnes herauf walten, dann wird es auch, soweit es wissenschaftlich möglich ist, klar sein, wie aus den in Naturgesetze eingespannten Vorgängen hervorgehen menschliches Denken, menschliches Fühlen, menschliches

Aspasia (1875). Other works are: Venus im Exil (1858); Danton und Robespierre (1870); Lord Lucifer. Ein Lustspiel in fünf Aufzügen (1880); Amor und Psyche (1882); Blätter im Winde (1887); Homunculus. Modernes Epos in zehn Gesängen (1888); Die Atomistik des Willens. Beiträge zur Kritik der modernen Erkenntniß (1891). See Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon 1815–1890, hrsg. von der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaft unter der Leitung von Leo Santifaller, bearbeitet von Eva Obermayer-Marnach (Graz-Köln: Hermann Böhlaus, 1959), II, pp. 168–169. For further details on Hamerling’s biography see Thomas Kracht, Robert Hamerling. Sein Leben – Sein Denken zum Geist (Dornach: Verlag an Goetheanum, 1989), in particular chapter II, pp. 35–65. 3 To be more precise it is not only the discussion on what extent the natural sciences are able to answer questions which have been traditionally within the humanities, but also the homunculus has been transferred into the modern neurosciences most of all through Wilder Penfield’s work. 4 Rudolf Steiner, Homunkulus. 1 Vortrag, Berlin, 26. März 1914, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 63, Geisteswissenschaft als Lebensgut (Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1959); open access: http:// anthroposophie.byu.edu/vortraege/063_11.pdf, p. 2: “Fantasy and dreaming” (All translations are mine unless otherwise noted).

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Wollen. Den Menschen rein naturwissenschaftlich zu begreifen, ist ein Ideal, will man es einseitig festhalten: ein berechtigtes Ideal dieser Weltanschauung.5

Steiner claims that “Geist und Geisteswelt” (“Spirit and spiritual world”) have to be inquired through “geisteswissenschaftliche Methoden” (“Methods derived from the humanities”).6 The problem concerns not only the human sciences but typically literature and literary creations.7 Thus the experiment of creating life artificially is connected with creating life through the means of poetry, and that of demonstrating, through literature, to what extent a human being could be “human” if we consider only the “natürliche Kräfte und Stoffe und die Naturgesetze” (“Natural forces and substances and natural laws”).8 Homunculus in this perspective represents an intermediary stage between the pure spirit and the physical appearance of human being as in his physical appearance.9 Goethe’s homunculus is considered “das Problem der Probleme in Faust II” (“The problem of the problems in Faust II”),10 where it appears in the second act, in the scene Laboratorium. It is interesting and useful to describe only briefly the circumstances in which the process of giving birth to homunculus take place, and to point out some of the most significant characteristics of this experiment. First of all, according to several scholars, it is rather ambiguous to infer who the father of this creature is: the ambiguity is due to the fact that while Wagner11 is working at his stills Mephistopheles enters the scene conveying the idea that he could be the father. His extraneousness, nevertheless, is confirmed by the questions he asks to Wagner as he declares that a human creature was being created at that moment: “ein Mensch? Und Welch verliebtes Paar / Habt ihr ins Rauchloch 5 Steiner, Homunkulus, p. 3: “And this Weltanschauung means: if once it succeeded to become acquainted with all the natural laws and substances, which reign upon the human nervous system until reaching the finest processes of the brain, then it will be clear, as far as it can be possible to science, how human thought, human feeling, human will derives from the busy processes developed in the natural laws. To understand men from a purely scientific perspective is an ideal which should be unilaterally recorded: a legitimate ideal of this Weltanschauung.” 6 Steiner, Homunkulus, p. 4. 7 Steiner, Homunkulus, p. 5. 8 Steiner, Homunkulus, p. 6. 9 Steiner, Homunkulus, p. 7: “Es stellt sich bei der menschlichen Wiederverkörperung ein Zwischenglied hinein zwischen das rein Geistige, das da waltet zwischen dem Tode und einer neuen Geburt, und dasjenige, was dann in der physischen Welt als Mensch vor uns steht”: “During the human re-embodiment a middle level is set between the pure spirit, which reigns between the death and a new birth, and what then is in front of us, human beings, in the physical world.” 10 Hans Ahrens, Kommentar zu Goethes Faust II (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1989), p. 372. 11 In Steiner’s opinion, Goethe’s Wagner alludes to Johann Jakob Wagner, a philosopher who stated that life could originate through a chemical process. See Steiner, Homunkulus, p. 12.

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eingeschlossen?”12 However other critics try to demonstrate that there is a close kinship between the two, an argument that the following statement, uttered by Mephistopheles, should support: “Am Ende hängen wir doch ab / Von Kreaturen, die wir machten”.13

Laboratorium, “Apparate zu phantastischen Zwecken”. Xylographische Anstalt E. Helm. Goethes Faust. Mit Bildern von Franz Simm (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1899), p. 126.

The question is open to many answers, as Latimer observes: “the figure of Homunculus is many sided, difficult to fix exactly as meaning this or that. He would therefore be in Goethe’s terminology a symbol, presumably containing within himself multiple, if not inexhaustible semantic ambiguities”.14 It does not matter that homunculus refers to Mephistopheles as his cousin (“Vetter”)15 because these kinds of epithets have to be intended as they were in the past, that means as nouns signaling the belonging to the same social standing. If it is unclear whether Mephistopheles is the “biological” father of homunculus, there is no doubt about the fact that both creatures are linked to

12 Goethe, Faust II, in Faust, hrsg. und kommentiert von Erich Trunz (München: C.H. Beck, 1996), act II, v. 6837; engl. transl. Goethe’s Faust. Parts I. & II, translated by Albert G. Latham (London: J.M. Dent & Sons; New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1914): “A man? And pray what couple tender / have ye shut up i’ the chimney there?”. 13 Goethe, Faust II, act II, v. 7003–7004: “Marry, at last we all depend / on creatures that ourselves created.” On this ambiguity see Albert Scholz, ‘Goethe’s Homunculus’, The German Quarterly, 17, 1 (1944), pp. 23–27 and Müller, Die Figur des Homunculus. 14 Dan Latimer, ‘Homunculus as Symbol: Semantic and Dramatic Functions of the Figure in Goethe’s Faust’, MLN, 89, (1974), p. 812. 15 Goethe, Faust II, act II, v. 6879: “Cousin”. He calls him also “Väterchen” (“fatherkin”). The epithet will be quoted by Hamerling.

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each other by another kind of kindred: Homunculus and Mephistopheles are made of Geist.16 In the beginning of the scene Goethe describes Wagner’s Laboratorium, which is not a modern one, but rather a laboratory in the medieval sense,17 containing “weitläufige, unbehülfliche Apparate zu phantastischen Zwecken” (“Huge, unwieldy apparatus, for fantastic purposes”).18 In this medieval laboratory, a kind of alchemic kitchen,19 an extraordinary process is taking place: Das Glas erklingt von lieblicher Gewalt, Es trübt, es klärt sich: also muß es werden! 16 See also Steiner, Homunkulus, p. 10. 17 Ahrens, Kommentar zu Goethes Faust II, p. 367: “Das ganze Unternehmen gehört in den Bereich der Alchemie”. “The entire enterprise belongs to the field of alchemy.” 18 Goethe, Faust II, p. 209. Compare with Müller, Die Figur des Homunculus, p. 9: “Alles Brimborium magisch-alchymistischen Tuns ist schon in der Requisiten aufgeboten: Das Laboratorium, ‘im Sinne des Mittelalters’, enthält ‘weitläufige unbehülfliche Apparate zu phantastischen Zwecken’. In dieser mittelalterlich-phantastischen Atmosphäre ereignet sich die alchymistische Geburt – ist das was als Homunculus herauskommt ein Mensch?” (“All the Brimborium of magic-alchemic art has been already mustered in its store: the laboratory, ‘after the manner of the Middle Ages’ contains ‘extensive ponderous apparatus for fantastic purposes’. In this medieval-fantastic atmosphere an alchemic birth occurs – what is born is a homunculus, a man?”. See also Ahrens Ahrens, Kommentar zu Goethes Faust II, p. 365: “Während Goethe den erzielten Fortschritt nicht leugnet, bringt er doch zum Ausdruck, wie lächerlich unangemessen die Mittel dem gesetzten Ziel sind, wie lächerlich die Diskrepanz zwischen dem ephemeren körperlosen Geistwesen Homunculus im Glase und dem freien Menschen – Wesen aus Körper, Seele und Geist und – in Goethes Gegenwart – zwischen Wöhlers Synthese des Harnstoffs (1828), d. h. der ersten künstlichen Herstellung eines organischen Stoffes, und der Erkenntnis des Geheimnisses des Lebens, die dem Menschen allgemein die Nachschöpfung durch anorganische Komposition ermöglichte, wie man damals, überschwänglich selbstbewusst wie Wagner, dachte. Goethe konnte über solche Ansprüche nur lachen und entlud dieses Lachen bei Wagner. – Übrigens spielen die Geräte gar keine Rolle, nicht einmal der Herd wird erwähnt, alles ist reduziert auf die Phiole, die Retorte”: “While Goethe does not deny the advances in progress, he also expresses how ridiculous and inappropriate the means for this goal is, how ridiculous the discrepancy between the ephemeral and bodiless spiritual being homunculus in the still and the free man – made of body, soul and spirit – and in Goethe’s time – between Wöhler’s synthesis of the urea (1828), which was the first artificial production of an organic substance, and the knowledge of the mysteries of life, which made it possible to men the reproduction of something through inorganic composition, like people thought in the past, effusively selfconfident like Wagner was. Goethe could only laugh at such claims and unloaded this laughter onto Wagner. However the apparatus does not play any role, not once is the stove mentioned, all is reduced to the phial”. 19 The hypothesis is also confirmed by Gottfried Benn in an essay where he enquires Goethe’s relation with the natural sciences: “die Chemie, die er [Goethe] bei Spielmann hörte […] war im Grunde Alchimie, die mittelalterliche Scheidekunst voll Verwandlungsträumen”. Gottfried Benn, Goethe und die Naturwissenschaften, in Gesammelte Werke in acht Bänden, hrsg. von Dieter Wellershoff (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1960–1968), vol. 3, p. 731: “The chemistry he [Goethe] derived from Spielmann […] was in fact alchemy, the art of separating, full of transformation’s dreams”.

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Ich seh in zierlicher Gestalt Ein artig Männlein sich gebärden. Was wollen wir, was will die Welt nun mehr? Denn das Geheimnis liegt am Tage: Gebt diesem Laute nur Gehör, Es wird zur Stimme, wird zur Sprache.20

The mixture of hundred of materials that compose human matter21 are distilled and transformed into a clear mass in which Wagner recognizes the form of a little human. Although Steiner affirms that Goethe had read Paracelsus’ theories about the creation of homunculus, it is straightforward to infer that Wagner’s words have nothing to do with alchemy at all. Goethe’s homunculus is “ein Menschlein, aber nur leuchtend, ohne Körper, nicht verkörperlicht”22 far from Paracelsus in flesh being: it is an “Überzeugung” (“convinction”),23 a creature between natural and unnatural acting on men as simply as a positive force: “dasjenige im Menschen, was ein rein mechanisches Dasein führt”.24 The second example provided by Steiner deals with the Austrian poet Robert Hamerling and his modern epic Homunculus. There are only some decades separating the two authors but it is useful to take into account what kind of epoch-making changes there were during these decades, primarily because of the publication, in 1859, of Charles Darwin’s The Origins of the Species, translated into German one year later. Darwin’s theories influenced all the following natural and human sciences attempts to describe human beings.25 If the existence of Goethe’s homunculus began in the Laboratorium and ended during the Klassische Valpurgisnacht, when his phial crashed into Galatea’s shell 20 Goethe, Faust II, act II, vv. 6871–6878: “The glass rings out with an entrancing might; / It clouds, it clears: my fairest hopes approving! / What dainty vision greets my sight? / A dapper manikin a-moving! / What would be more, or what the world? For there / The secret lies to light unfolded: / Unto this sound but give an ear, / It turns to voice, to speech ’tis moulded.” 21 See Goethe, Faust II, act II, vv. 6871–6878: “Es leuchtet! seht! – nun / läßt sich wirklich hoffen, / Daß, wenn wir aus viel hundert Stoffen / Durch Mischung – denn auf Mischung kommt es an – / Den Menschenstoff gemächlich komponieren, / In einen Kolben verlutieren / Und ihn gehörig kohobieren, / So ist das Werk im Stillen abgetan”. “It brightens, – see! Sure, now, my hopes increase / That if, from many hundred substances, / Through mixture – since on mixture all depends – / The human substance gently be compounded, / And by a closed retort surrounded”. 22 Steiner, Homunkulus, p. 11: “A little man, but only shining, without a body, not embodied”. 23 Goethe, Faust II, act II, v. 6856. 24 Steiner, Homunkulus, p. 16: “That controls inside the human being a pure mechanic existence.” 25 Steiner, Homunkulus, p. 17: “Eine Zeit, in welcher es heißt: der Mensch ist nur das, was mit den gewöhnlichen, an das Nervensystem gebundenen Kräften zu erkennen ist, eine solche Zeit wird in der Mehrzahl ihrer Menschen auch homunkelhafte Züge zeigen”: “A time in which man is only recognized by the common forces linked to the nervous system, such a time will for the most part show, of its people, typical homunculus-traits.”

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and dissolved in the water – as to assert the neptunist theses against the volcanist ones – in a sort of “death-birth”26 (in nature), Hamerling’s homunculus begins his Modern Epos on earth. The author depicts the extreme consequences of what could happen if men were conceived only as a product of natural sciences, and in order to do it he assumes that science is able to create a human being.27 If Goethe’s homunculus is ‘pure spirit’ Hamerling’s man is pure flesh. The two share several features, first of all they assert, in two opposite ways and moving from two different perspectives, the same value: both creatures are busy in the attempt to create a link between “Ich” (I) and “Welt” (“world”), “Geist” (“spirit”) and “Materie” (“matter”), “Geistes-” (“humanities”) and “Naturwissenschaften” (“natural sciences”). Nevertheless the authors operate moving from very different perspectives: on the one hand Goethe is son of the romantic design of Idealism; on the other hand Robert Hamerling writes in the age of Positivism and of Darwinism, in two periods that could be summarized as follows: auf das Zeitalter der absoluten Philosophie im ersten Drittel des Jahrhunderts folgte im zweiten Drittel ein Zeitalter der absoluten Unphilosophie. Dem Überschwang des Glaubens an das Denken folgte ein Überschwang des Mißtrauens und der Abneigung.28

Thus, Hamerling looks for a philosophy which tries to link the mere experience with an indefinite “Gefühl des denkend tätigen Ichs”,29 therefore homunculus radicalizes only the first aspect, embodying the attitude of the author’s scientific and philosophical context.30 The differences between Goethe and Hamerling’s backgrounds have to be explained first of all in the ways the two homunculi come to life. Hamerling’s whole first chapter, titled Aus der Retorte, concerns the making of the creature and shows, at a first glance, a similar scene as that described in Wagner’s laboratorium: Bravo! sagte der Homunkel, Als er fertig, und hernieder Von der riesigen Retorte Sprang er auf den Tisch des wackern Hoch- und tiefgelehrten Doktors Und Magisters, welcher eben Nach unsäglichem Bemühen 26 Latimer, ‘Homunculus as Symbol’, p. 814. 27 Steiner, Homunkulus, p. 30. 28 Quoted in Kracht, Hamerling, p. 120: “In the epoch of the absolute philosophy in the first third of the century, which is followed by a time of absolute unphilosophy in the second third of the century. The exuberance of belief towards thinking followed by an exuberance of mistrust and aversion.” 29 Quoted in Kracht, Hamerling, p. 129: “Feeling of active thinking of one.” 30 See Kracht, Hamerling, p. 135.

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Mit den Mitteln der Chemie nur Aus den ersten Elementen Dargestellt und hergestellt ihn, Zum Triumph der Wissenschaft.31

However, despite the analogies that can be easily found in the elements which compose the scene – “Retorte”, i. e. “phials”, “Homunkel” and a “Doktor” – Hamerling’s verses point out immediately some differences. First, while Wagner’s creature remains in the phial which separates him from the natural world – at least until the crash into Galatea’s shell and his final dissolution in the water – Homunkel, on the contrary, jumps out of the container onto the table. Second, this laboratory does not seem to exist in the sense of the Middle Ages, but to be the product of the latest scientific progress, “a triumph of science”: “So im ganzen und vom reinen Chemisch-physiolog’schen Standpunkt Aus betrachtet, ist mein Lieber, Was du schufst, ein respektables, Lobenswürdiges Stück Arbeit. Im Detail, da wäre freilich Mancherlei davon zu sagen”. Also fortfuhr der Homunkel, Ließ dann einige gelehrte, Schätzenswerte Winke fallen, Sprach von Albumin sehr vieles, Von Fibrin, von Globulin auch, Keratin, Mucin und andrem, Und von regelrechter Mischung, Und belehrte seinen Schöpfer Und Erzeuger gründlich, wie er’s Hätte besser machen können”.32

31 Robert Hamerling, Homunculus. Modernes Epos in zehn Gesängen (Hamburg und Leipzig: Verlag von J.F. Richter, 1888), p. 1: “Bravo! Said the Homunkel, / When the doctor finished, / From the huge phial / He sprang onto the table of the upright / Highly and deeply educated doctor / And master, that even / After indescribable efforts / By the means of chemistry only / From the first elements / He represented and produced it, / To the triumph of science”. I decided not to translate the name Homunkel (and its variations e. g. Munkel) into English because it has to be considered as a peculiar linguistic choice made by Hamerling to express ‘endearment’ and, at the same time, the proper name of the character. 32 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 2: “‘So in all and if observed from a pure / Chemical physiological perspective / What you created, my dear, is / A respectable, / Praiseworthy piece of work. / In detail, something about that / Should be freely said’. / Continued the Homunkel, / Let then some erudite, / Estimable hints fall, / He talked a lot about albumin, / About fibrin, about globulin too, / Keratin, mucin and other, / And about a proper mixture, / And taught his creator / And producer thoroughly, how he / Could have made him better”.

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Despite the fact that Homunkel considers himself a praiseworthy product of science, he specifies that “there would be freely something to say about it”; that is why he starts to criticize the doctor through the means of all his chemical knowledge, even explaining to him how he could have made him better. The failure of the experiment, pointed out by homunculus’ comments and the ugly appearance of the “dwarf” serve the purpose to highlight the failure of the experiment, of homunculus’ epic and broadly speaking of Positivism: since homunculus recognizes himself in his “father”, the creature’s defects seem to be those of a mere positivist approach. To confirm the fact that the alchemic atmosphere of Faust II is substituted by a modern scientific climate there are the following words pronounced by homunculus: “Hör’doch, Väterchen!” begann er. “Was bleibt?” frug jener. “Sag’ mir,” Fuhr der Kleine fort, “wie kam dir Denn so eigentlich der Einfall, Mich, just mich zu fabrizieren? Leute gibt es ja genug schon! Besser hätte deine Mühen Dir gelohnt ein goldner Klumpen.33

Alchemy is the result of medieval thinking; Homunkel on the contrary is the outcome of progress and of the capabilities men had developed. In other words, Homunkel is the result of the positivist belief and of its consequences: “Ganz natürliches Ergebnis Fortgeschrittner Wissenschaften Bist du! Wissen, Freund, ist Können! Dich zu machen, an der Zeit war’s, Wie es niemals noch gewesen, Und wir taten’s, weil wir’s konnten, Weil wir wußten, weil wir glaubten, Daß wir’s könnten. Und so wardst du!”34

The creature thanks the doctor ironically for creating him but he has doubts about the fact that possessing a consciousness is in fact an advantage: he is not 33 Hamerling, Homunculus, pp. 3–4: “‘Listen, daddy!’ he began. / ‘What remains?’ he asked. ‘Tell me’. / The little man continued, ‘how did / The idea come properly to your mind / to manufacture me, just me? / There are already enough people! / Your efforts would have been better / Rewarded with a golden lump’”. 34 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 5: “You are an entire natural result / Of advanced sciences! / Science, friend, means to be able! / To make you, in that time it was, / Like it had never been before, / And we did it, because we could, / Because we knew, because we believed, / That we could. And you were!”

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convinced of the benefits of a “here to be” feeling, because it makes him experience all the boredom of life. It comes out here the Schopenhauerian philosophy according to life is a pendulum oscillating from pain to “Boredom of the existence” (“Langweile des Daseins”):35 “Danke für die Ehre!” sagte Der Homunkel; “aber höre, Was so eigentlich – wie sag’ich?– Das Gemeingefühl – Bewußtsein – Dazusein – das Leben anlangt, Das du mir geschenkst, so weiß ich Wirklich nicht, ob ich es dir danke. Fühle mich – hol’ mich der Geier – Nicht recht wohl in dieser meiner Haut, so fein sie auch gesponnen Und es plagt mich Langeweile!”36

As soon as Faust’s creature comes to life he is able to understand Faust’s thoughts while sleeping, as if it were a clairvoyant. Hamerling’s creature instead focuses on his body and on the defects it contains, complaining of the “Körperungemach” (“hardships of the body”)37 and criticizing his father for his iron deficiency, for his suffering from digestion or for his neuralgia. In response to his complaints the doctor scolds Homunkel for being ungrateful towards him, for the skin, for the bones, the tissues, the blood, the mind he gave to him;38 the creature is not convinced that what the doctor has given him are in fact “gifts” and desires to come back to a “Nichtsein” (“Non-existence”) stage, instead of being captured by the wheel of fortune (“Mich aufs Rad des Seins zu flechten”).39 As the doctor reminds Homunkel of the beauty of the world (“Schau’ die Welt dir an, die 35 For more details about Hamerling’s references to Schopenhauer see Peter Sprengel, Darwin in der Poesie. Spuren der Evolutionslehre in der deutschsprachigen Literatur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1998), pp. 63–65. 36 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 5. “‘Thank you for the honour!’ said / The little man; ‘but listen, / To me properly – how do I say this? / The common feeling – the awareness – / To exist – which concerns life, / That you gave me, I don’t know / Really, whether I thank you for it. / I don’t feel good – God takes me / In this skin, so thin and also spun / And boredom plagues me!’”. 37 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 6. 38 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 7: “‘Undankbar und unbescheiden / Bist du, Junge! Mir verdankst du / Diese Haut und diese Knochen, / Dies Gewebe, dies Geblüte, / Diesen Odem, diese Sinne, / Diese Denkkraft; mir verdankst du’s, / Wenn auf diesem Erdenrund du / Deine siebzig, achtzig Jährchen / Völlig wie geborne Menschen / Leibst und Lebst und liebst und leidest!’”: “‘Ungrateful and bold / you are, boy! You have to thank me for / this skin and these bones, / these tissues, this blood, / this breath, this sense / this capacity of thinking / you have to thank me for that, / if you love and suffer on this earth / your seventy, eighty little years / completely like a born man!’”. 39 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 8: “Weave me in the wheel of existence.”

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schöne! / Und genieße sie!”)40 he laughs sarcastically at him: he cannot enjoy life. The presage of failure is here close at hand. Homunkel shows not only a certain science-oriented mind, but also a poetic one, since he is busy reading a book taken from the doctor’s shelf. In his “Streben” for knowledge – in this sense he is considered Faust’s double – but first of all for action, the doctor recognizes himself in the features of homunculus: Mit Respekt still von der Seite Sah der Doktor sein Geschöpf an, Welches übrigens frappant ihm Ähnelte: dieselben klugen, Schlaffen, übernächt’gen Züge, nur daß, runzlig, der Homunkel Älter aussah als sein Vater, Anderseits jedoch ein Kind noch, Oder, wenn man will, ein Zwerg war. Allgemach begann zu kritteln Und zu nörgeln an dem Buche, Welches er in Händen hatte, Der Homunkel. Interessant war Dies dem Doktor, er notierte Die Bemerkung ins Notizbuch: “erste literar’sche Regung Eines Menschleins – Rezensieren”.41

If on the one hand Homunkel seems to have an advanced capacity of reasoning with regard to a variety of fields like human or natural sciences, the man-made man also presents several defects which his “father” would like to fix once and for all. That is why the doctor decides to put the little man in the phial he came from and to reduce him to the core. Assuming that the little man will do something great in his life (“Und zu Großem war berufen, / Ist berufen dieses Menschlein! / Eine große Rolle spielen / Muß er, wird er in der Welt noch!”)42 he needs to be made better, because his physical appearance is still an obstacle to his life ful-

40 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 8: “Take a look at the world, the beautiful world! and enjoy it!” 41 Hamerling, Homunculus, pp. 2–3: “With respect, he was silent and stood aside / The doctor looked at his creature / Which by the way looked striking / like him: the same intelligent, / slack, bleary-eyed traits, / only that the wrinkled, Homunkel / looked older than his father, / but on the other hand nevertheless still a child, / or, if you want, he was a dwarf. / Gradually he started to niggle / And to nag in the book, / Which he had in his hands, / The little man. The doctor found it / Interesting, he noted / The remark in his notebook: / ‘first literary impulse / Of a little man – to critique’”. 42 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 13: “And to great things he was called, / is called this little man! / He will and he must play / a great role in the world”.

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fillment: “Aber so mit Haut und Haaren, / Wie er ist – unmöglich wär’ es, / Daß er durchdringt!”.43 The problem the doctor recognizes in the creation of homunculus is very clear and opposite to Goethe’s: according to Wagner while animals still find a pleasure in the way they conceive, men thanks to their capacities will have higher origins,44 like his homunculus has got. Viceversa, Hamerling’s doctor thinks that homunculus’ defects can be ascribed to the fact that normally nature does not produce life all of a sudden but through a slow process he should be inspired by : therefore he puts his homunculus again in the still and turns it to the well-made “first embryonic principle”, where nevertheless the punctum saliens, i. e. his character, his inner nature won’t be changed, but his outward appearance will improve into a “präsentabler, / Hübscher, stattlicher, gediegner!” one.45 For this to occur, once homunculus has been reduced to a little “Protoplasma-Klümpchen” (“Protoplasm little lump”)46 the doctor operates through what we nowadays would call artificial insemination by transplanting Homunkel in the womb of a poor village teacher’s wife: Auf den embryonalen Zustand, Auf ein rationell gemischtes, Zartes Protoplasma-Klümpchen. Und nachdem ihm dies gelungen Mit unsäglichem Bemühen, Sacht’ den Embryo verpflanzt’ er Auf geheimnisvolle Weise In der Mutterschoß der Gattin Eines armen Dorfschulmeisters.47

43 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 13: “But with the skin and the hair, / he has, it would be impossible that he succeeds”. 44 See Goethe, Faust II, act II, v. 6838 and v. 6845–6847. 45 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 14: “More presentable, / more beautiful, more handsome, purer!”. He will not be, even after his second making of. See Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 285: “Karg genährt von Wurzeln, Kräutern, / Trotz der Schätze, die noch sein, / Ausgespart für große Zwecke, / und die Schwächen, die Gebreste / Tragend des Homunkelthumes, / Seiner künstlichen Erzeugung, / Schrumpft’ er beinah’ zum Gnomen, / Zum Alraun, zum zwerghaft welken, / Aber zaubermächt’gen Kobold”: “Sparsely nourished with roots and herbs, / though the treasures, which still are / spared for great purposes, / and the weak, who carry / the afflictions of being an Homunculus, / his artificial generation, / he shrinks almost to a gnome, / to a mandrake, to a dwarfish, wilt, / but magically powerful imp.” 46 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 15. 47 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 15. “At the embryonic stage, / At a rationally mixed, / Tender protoplasm little lump. / And after he succeeded in doing it / With indescribable efforts, / Carefully he transplanted the embryo / In a mysterious way / Into the womb of the wife / Of a poor village schoolmaster.”

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Now one may legitimately say that homunculus was born, to all intents and purposes, like every other human being, that means from a woman’s womb, but it is not so easy to untangle the problem, as the course of the dense plot proves. The second chapter, Homunkels Lehrjahre (‘Homunculus’ years of apprenticeship’), indicates that the man-made man’s apprenticeship began. It began, precisely, before coming into the world, during his intrauterine life, and immediately after : the teacher’s wife, in fact, was fond of literature, something which Homunkel had previously shown an aptitude for in front of the doctor. As a matter of fact he “became a poet” (“so war er Poet geworden”).48 His Streben49 towards action makes him feel the desire to invent “eine neue zeitgemäße / Poesie mit funkel-nagel-/Neuen Stoffen – – mit Gedanken / und Gefühlen, unerhörten!”.50 It is the first step in Homunkel’s career attempts, and at the first time he appears to succeed: his book was “hochgepriesen” (“highly praised”), but his editor refuses to give him his daughter as a wife because it was sold in only “13 Exemplare” (“13 copies”).51 Homunkel does not lose heart and he suddenly starts to feel a mysterious lust for gold in his blood,52 a sort of dream that soon comes true: “Als der Morgen angebrochen, / findet er sich reich wie Krösus”.53 After being robbed – his second attempt corresponds to a second failure – he continues his apprenticeship doing every kind of job,54 and finally he makes the third move to reach success: he founds a newspaper titled “Blatt für Alles und für Alle”, which would have been delivered for free to all who had taken out a subscription, but only under the condition they read it.55 Munkel succeeds in his business and obtains a great social acknowledgment, but all is reduced to a sort of business relationship with the world – “Käuflich immer fand er Alle, / Weil er

48 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 17. 49 See Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 22: “brauchbar’n Stoff zu finden / endlich doch für jene neue / Poesie, nach der er strebte”: “To find useful material / finally for that new / poetry he strove for”. 50 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 19: “A new modern / poetry with brand-new material with incredible thoughts / and feelings!”. 51 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 21. 52 See Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 22: “und so lag ein rätselhafter / Durst nach Gold im Munkel’s Blute”: “And a mysterious / thirst for gold was in Munkel’s blood.” 53 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 26: “Like the morning dawn, he found himself rich as Croesus”. 54 The hyperbolic and comic description of the jobs he tries to do can be found in Hamerling, Homunculus, pp. 27–28. 55 The censorship of Neo-absolutism was relaxed, it became easier to found and maintain newspapers and journals. See Deborah Holmes, ‘From “Ausgleich” to “Jahrhundertwende”: Literature and Culture 1867–1980: Introduction’, Austrian Studies, 16 (2008), pp. 1–18 (in particular, p. 9).

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käuflich war für alle” –56 which provides an example of Homunkel’s greatest weakness: the lack of a soul. By the end of the chapter Hamerling sheds light on another significant theme. Homunkel decides to sell his journal to a big stock corporation for a lot of money and becomes a “founder”: “Da verkaufte unser Munkel / Um ein Heidengeld an eine / Große Aktiengesellschaft / Sein Journal und wurde Gründer”.57 Referring to what Deborah Holmes states, the word “Gründerzeit”, “founding period”, is not only used in Germany to refer to the span of time during and after the formation of the Wilhelmine Empire in 1871, but also in Austria, which concurrently had been defeated in the Austro-Prussian war, thus resulting in the start of its decline: Austria’s status as the great German power was gone for good, and negotiating relations with the new, unified German state became a decisive factor not just in foreign but also in domestic policy. On the one hand, therefore, the “Gründerzeit” signalled a station in the Habsburgs’ decline. On the other hand, “Gründer” was not only used to refer to those who forged German unity, but also for all those who took advantage of the new situation and laws of the 1860s to found businesses, factories and banks. Following the Gewerbeordnung [trade regulations] of December 1859, which liberalized internal trade and trading professions in Austria, the Staatsgrundgesetz [constitution; literally “fundamental state law”] passed along with the Ausgleich made all Austrian citizens equal for the first time, at least in theory.58

The way Munkel is depicted makes it clear that he represents the caricature of exactly one of those men fattened from these favourable political and economic circumstances, in a sort of “Mythisierung der Gründungsidee” (“Myth of the 56 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 31: “He found all people always easily to be bought, / because he was easily to be bought for all people”. 57 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 35: “There, our little man sold his journal / for a packet to a big joint-stock company / and he became a founder”. See also Sprengel, Darwin in der Poesie, pp. 60–61. Sprengel considers Hamerling’s relation towards this period and its mise-en-scwne quite problematic: “das Charakteristische an der Inszenierung dieses Ereignisses – vom offiziellen Zeremoniell bis hin zu den diversen Verklärungen in bildender Kunst und Literatur – war ja gerade die Behauptung einer substantiellen Kontinuität, die Illusion von einer Translation der mittelalterlicher Reichstradition in die Gegenwart oder gar einer Weiterführung altgermanischer Selbstherrlichkeit […]. Nichts davon findet sich in Homunculus; die Hauptfigur des Epos bekennt sich geradezu als ‘Reinste Stoff- und Kraftnatur’ / […] / Frei vom Wuste des Vererbten”: “What characteristic is in the production of these events from what is officially formal to the diverse transfigurations in the visual art and literature, was the assertion of a substantial continuity, the illusion of a translation of the medieval tradition on the empire into the present or even the continuity of the old Germanic high-handedness […]. You cannot find anything about that in the Homunculus; the main character of the epic confesses himself ‘the purest substance and force of nature’ […] free from the pile of the heritage”. 58 Holmes, ‘From “Ausgleich” to “Jahrhundertwende”’, pp. 8–9.

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foundation idea”).59 Hamerling writes thus a “satire on Gründerzeit materialism and soullessness”,60 in other words a criticism about a time in which materialism was brought to its most extreme consequences.61 To go back to the plot of the story Homunkel has become a billionaire – third canto – but in spite of all the richness he possesses he feels miserable and sick, and all he buys seems to suffer from his same damnation: “Hier der Stein der Weisen”, sprach er, “Leider nur zu spät gefunden, Schon verwittert und zerbröckelnd! Hier Faust’s Mantel, arg verschlissen, Löcherig, drum ohne Flugkraft! Hier die einstens vielgenannte ‘Blaue Blume’ der Romantik, Duftlos, eingepreßt, getrocknet! Hier das Horn des Oberon, Das so wunderbar erklungen Durch die Schluchten, durch die Täler, In der Minne gold’nen Zeiten – – heiser jetzt und dumpf nur klingt es!”62

Everything has lost its soul, and these objects – the stone of the wise, Faust’s mantel, the blue flower of the Romantic Age, Oberon’s horn – cannot serve their function anymore because they are drained of their inner strength, of their energy, and like Homunkel they are now mere mechanisms. Homunkel is not able to understand what is going on, the reasons for his misery, until the doctor explains him that he is not the village school teacher’s son, but his own creation:63 “reine Stoff- und Kraftnatur”.64 There is here another turning point: Homunkel is proud of his origins, whose echo spread all over the world, he is celebrated and honored but a stock-crash caused his fourth collapse. The event is not invented at all: on 9th May 1873 there was a terrible stock market crash in 59 Sprengel, Darwin in der Poesie, p. 60. 60 Holmes, ‘From “Ausgleich” to “Jahrhundertwende”’, p. 16. Compare with Cornelia Kritsch, ‘Horror vacui: Robert Hamerling und die Gründerzeit’, in Die österreichische Literatur, ihr Profil im 19. Jahrhundert (1830–1880), hrsg. von Herbert Zeman (Graz: Akadem. Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt 1982), pp. 499–512. 61 Kracht, Hamerling, p. 12. 62 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 46: “‘Here the stone of the wise’, he said, / ‘Unfortunately only found too late, / Already weathered and crumbled! / Here is Faust’s coat, badly closed, / Full of holes, and so without power of flight! / Here the once frequently mentioned / «blue flower» of the Romantic age, / Without scent, stepped on, dry! / Here the horn of Oberon, / Which sounded so wonderfully / Through the gorges, through the valleys, / In the golden age of courtly love / Now its only sound, hoarse and muffled”. 63 Compare Hamerling, Homunculus, pp. 50–51. 64 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 51. “Pure substance and force of nature.”

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Vienna, due to the uncontrolled speculation fuelled by lose fiscal laws introduced at that time, and at the same time the World Exhibition was taking place in the city. Homunkel falls in the water of the Rhine but suddenly the nymph Lurlei65 saves him: the whole fourth canto is dedicated to her (Der Homunkel und die Nixe). Homunkel longs for gold and Lurlei reveals him that under their feet the treasure of the Nibelungs is hidden: “altem Schicksalspruch zufolge / kann den Schatz ein Mensch nur heben:/ […] Der gezeugt – von keinem Vater!”.66 Homunkel declares that he is right the one who can take possession of the treasure: “ich selber bin es’/ bin erzeugt von keinem Vater!”.67 In the name of gold the man-made man and the nymph fall in love and in the fifth canto, Literarische Walpurgisnacht, they finally get married: “als mit Lurlei Eins geworden / Munkel so, ein Paar zu werden, / Ringe wechselnd vor dem Altar / Sie den Seelenbund besiegelt, / […] / Gaben sie der Welt das Schauspiel / Einer übermenschlich prächtigen, / Märchenhaften Hochzeitsfeier”.68 The celebrations took place at the Blocksberg, the same mountain where the first Valpurgisnacht was located; the canto turns into a satire on the contemporary literary trends, a great carnival in which the figure of the most popular authors and characters of the time can be found: Hamerling hat in dem Gesange “Literarische Walpurgisnacht” die unerquicklichen Zustände unserer heutigen Literatur treffend dargestellt, freilich immer der Aufgabe des Dichters getreu bleibend, dessen Darstellung unbeeinflusst bleiben muss von den Tendenzen und Schlagworten der Parteien.69

In the sixth chapter Homunkel and Lurlei are looking for a new world, where to fulfill Homunculus’s mission: “zu verwirklichen im höchsten Stile den Homunculismus”,70 they founded an Eldorado. The description of the place is again 65 There are a lot of hints at Heinrich Heine in this work. For a further description see also Ritchie Robertson, ‘Robert Hamerling and the Survival of Epic’, Austrian Studies, 16 (2008), From “Ausgleich” to “Jahrhundertwende”: Literature and Culture, 1867–1890, pp. 142–153, in particular, p. 150: “Heine is even more prominent in Homunkulus, the long satirical poem in which Hamerling attacks Gründerzeit speculation, imperialism, journalism, feminism, Darwinism, Naturalism and pessimism”. 66 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 75: “According to an old saying / only a man can lift the treasure: / […] the one created by no father!” 67 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 75: “I am the one / I have been created by no father.” 68 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 91: “When he became one together with Lurlei / Munkel then, in order to become a couple / exchanged rings in front of an altar / they sealed their bond / […] / they showed the world / a superhuman magnificent, / fantastic wedding.” 69 Rudolf Steiner, ‘Robert Hamerling: “Homunkulus”. Modernes Epos in 10 Gesängen’, Deutsche Wochenschrift, 16–17, VI (1888), pp. 151–152: “Hamerling has appropriately represented in the canto Literary Walpurgis-night the unedifying stage of today’s literature, while freely maintaining loyalty to the duty of the poet, whose representation must be uninfluenced by the trends and slogans of the parties”. 70 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 130: “To fulfill homunculismus in the highest style”.

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rather hyperbolic, in particular in the way the narrator explains what this new world will be like.71 It was definitely a strange place, where no insects, no dogs, no stones, no “hair in the soup-pot”, no hate, no mirrors, no glasses, no breaking of a promise, no madmen, no sick people lived. The place is described through an incredibly long series of anaphors, which culminate in the following statement: Keinen Antisemitismus Gab es hier und keine Juden, Kein Revanchegelüste, keinen Nationalitätenhader.72

The ambiguity of the stand Hamerling makes on the Jewish question was discussed a lot. Rudolf Steiner states that “hat man Hamerlings Werk einfach so hingestellt, als wenn es das Glaubensbekenntnis eines Parteigängers des Antisemitismus wäre”:73 that is what Georg Ritter von Schönerer and his followers did, labelling the work as anti-Semitic in order to fulfill their political purposes.74 In the eighth chapter, Im neuen Israel, Hamerling deals with the foundation of the state of Israel, which ends with another great crash: the Jews go back to Europe because they miss it and it misses them and they crucify their king, Homunkel, who will be saved by the wandering Jew, Ahasver.75 Hamerling is aware that his epic came under attack from many people, as his friend Fritz Lemmermeyer explains in his Erinnerungen: seitens vieler Rezensenten wurde die Dichtung mißdeutet und verzerrt, zum Verdruß des Dichters. Zumeist ärgerte ihn, wenn er als verbittert und schwarzgallig hingestellt wurde, und er bat mich, dieses Gerücht zu zerstreuen. Wehmütig lächelnd sagte er: “Ich bin versöhnt und im Frieden mit allem”.76 71 See Hamerling, Homunculus, pp. 132–133. 72 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 133: “No Antisemitism / Was there and no Jews, / No feelings of revenge, no / Nationalities discord”. 73 Steiner, ‘Robert Hamerling: “Homunkulus”’, p. 152: “Hamerling’s work was so easily made out to be the confession of a party supporter of Anti-Semitism”. 74 See Kracht, Hamerling, p. 62: “Der Versuch Schönerers und seiner Anhänger, Hamerling aufgrund des Kapitels über das “neue Israel” zum Antisemiten zu stempeln und ihn als angeblichen Parteigänger für ihre Zwecke zu mißbrauchen, schadete ihm sehr”: “Schönerer’s and his supporters’ attempt to label Hamerling as anti-semitic on the basis of his chapter about the new Israel, and to use him as an alleged supporter for their purposes, damaged him a lot.” 75 See Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 230. Ashaver is one of the main characters of the historical epic Ahasver in Rom: he reveals himself at the end of the work as the Wandering Jew and as Cain and also as Hamerling himself, because of his final desire to go to Germany. See Robertson, ‘Robert Hamerling and the Survival of Epic’, pp. 144–145. 76 Fritz Lemmermeyer, Erinnerungen an Rudolf Steiner, Robert Hamerling, Franz Brentano, Marie E. delle Grazie, Anton Bruckner, Christine Hebbel, Alfred Formey, Fercher von Steinwand (Basel: Perseus, 1992), p. 106: “On the part of lot of reviewers, the poetry was misinterpreted and distorted, to the poet’s annoyance. Mostly it irritated him, when he was made

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Going back to Eldorado, Homunkel is “an’s Werk” (“at work”), as he always is; his “Musterstaat” (“model state”) is being founded: the most important power inside it was the law, represented by “Gott und Munkel / sein Prophet” (“God and Munkel, his prophet”), and then ministers, the Parliament and the people’s assembly, while the parties in the Parliament were ironically named after the 32 directions in which wind rises.77 Meanwhile Lurlei is pregnant but she gives birth to a dead baby, who didn’t possess any heart: the attempt to become a father failed, like his new world, and at the end of the canto Homunkel goes back to his homeland with a little boy and a little girl from Eldorado, Eldo and Dora. The man-made man is sad and disappointed, he doesn’t want to undertake anything more with humankind and thinks about another project: to educate apes, and to make them become “vernünftigen Geschöpfen” (“Reasonable creatures”),78 thanks to the means of language, science and education. The allusion is obviously based on Darwin’s Origin of the Species: War die Menschenwerdung des Affen Denn ein Traum? War dargethan sie Nicht geschichtlich als gelungen In dem Lauf der Jahrmillionen Auf dem Wege der Entwicklung? Jetzt auf kürzer’m, rascher’m Wege Den Prozess zu wiederholen, Zu vermenschlichen den Rest auch Dieser altehrwürd’gen Rasse – Munkels genialer Plan war’s.79

Homunkel’s goal consists of founding a school for apes, to imitate what humanity has done during millions of years of evolution. At a first stage the project of the school seemed to succeed (“als gebildet nun die Affen, / machten Kon-

out to be bitter and choleric, and he asked me to destroy these rumors. Laughing in a melancholic tone he said: ‘I am reconciled and at peace with all’”. Compare also with Kracht, Hamerling, p. 62: “Durch verschiedene Reaktionen auf den Inhalt des Werkes wurde die Dimension der Satire bald nach ihrem Erscheinen vernebelt. Literaten und Kritiker sahen in den Parodien der ‘Literarischen Walpurgisnacht’ die boshafte Rache eines neidischen ‘Kollegen’”: “Through different reactions towards the content of the work the dimension of satire was obscured soon after its appearance. Scholars and reviewers saw in the parody of the ‘literary Walpurgis-night’ the malicious revenge of an envious ‘colleague’”. 77 See Hamerling, Homunculus, pp. 134–136. 78 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 170. 79 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 170: “Was the evolution of the apes into human / Then a dream? Wasn’t it explained / Historically as succeeded / In the course of millions of years / through the process of evolution? / Now in short and quick manners / To repeat this process / To transform into humans the rest / Of this time-honoured race / Was Munkel’s brillian plan”.

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kurrenz den Menschen / Sie auf jeglichem Gebiete”),80 but the apes became so independent and self-confident that they even protested against the theory man derive from them. Everything came to a head and the apes rose up against the power of Homunkel, who all things considered was only a human being, indeed a man who was not his father’s son: “Man began zu munkeln / Allgemach schon, daß der große, / Stolze Munkel – – ein Homunkel; / Daß ihn nicht der “Storch” gebracht, / Daß er – – wie so mancher And’re – – / nicht der Sohn sei seines Vaters”.81 The monkeys denied Homunkel’s “organic nature” and they explained him as a “ganz gemeinen Automaten”,82 a pure mechanism; since they succeeded, as I said, in all fields, they wanted to study his uncommon nature through the means of science (“wollten so gemach sein inn’res / Trieb- und Räderwerk studieren”).83 Homunkel couldn’t handle the situation anymore. His experiment with apes had failed, exactly like all the other ventures he had undertaken: Zu vermenschlichen den Affen – – Dieses selbe kühne Wagnis Ward geschmäht nun als mißlungen Vom erboßten Menschenvolke; Als mißlungen, ja, so schmählich, Wie es stets mißlingen müsse, Wenn der Meister ein Homunkel. Zwar gebildet, hieß es, seien Nun di Affen, doch sie seien Immer Affen doch geblieben: Und dies gelte sowohl physisch Als moralisch […]84

Meanwhile Doktor Krallfratz, a sort of ape-Darwin caricature,85 had carried out a significant experiment between a male orang-outang an a female dragon, which 80 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 173: “As apes educated as men now / they competed against men / in every field”. 81 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 187: “They began already to gossip / gradually that / the proud Munkel, was a homunculus; / that he wasn’t brought by a stork / that he, like some others, wasn’t his father’s son”. 82 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 187: “Real mean machine”. 83 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 187: “So they simply wanted / to study his inner engine and mechanisms”. 84 Hamerling, Homunculus, pp. 188–189: “The intention to humanize the apes / This same brave risky venture / Was now maligned as a failure / By furious people; / As failed, yes, so shamefully, / Like it always must fail, / When an homunculus is the master. / Though they were educated, that’s to say / Now about the apes, they had / Always remained apes: / And this was meant both physically / And morally […]”. 85 Sprengel, Darwin in der Poesie, p. 62.

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gave birth to a winged ape, combining genetic traits from both species.86 It was a monstrous creature, which could alternate moments of meekness with sudden fits of rage. As well as in the previous attempts, Drako revealed itself as a creature doomed to failure, a metaphor of the breakdown mankind will undergo if it only adopts a natural science oriented perspective but it is also a metaphor of the entire epic. As a matter of fact the monstrous creature grabs Krallfratz and raised him in the air, when suddenly it lets him fall and crash onto the ground: Dieser aber faßte grinsend den Gelehrten, riß mit sich ihn In die Lüfte, ließ ihn fallen – – Und im nächsten Augenblicke Fand man unter einem Felsgrat Mit zerschelltem Haupt und Gliedern Diesen Darwin, diesen Haeckel, Diesen Büchner – – doch was sag ich? Diesen Faust des Affenvolkes!87

Doktor Krallfratz’s death symbolizes thus the death of science by the “progress” it has produced, but first of all the character represents the sort of contemporary scientist Hamerling lives with: Charles Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, Ludwig Büchner.88 According to Sprengel Hamerling’s epic is built on the coalition of progress-criticism and the reception of both Schopenhauer and Darwin.89 The allusions of Evolutionism, however, are very superficial and don’t correspond at all with a serious study of the theories, which, by the way, were in vogue in all fields in that period. Hamerling’s examination of Darwinism can be explained as follows: Hamerlings Epos […] erweist sich als seine Generalbrechung mit den Tendenzen des 19. Jahrhunderts und schließt sich als Manifest einer vehementen Fortschrittskritik direkt an die bisher behandelten Texte an. Auch darin, daß hier auf die zeitgenössische Auffassung der Natur bezug genommen wird. […] Der gesamte Komplex des Darwinismus [rückt] bei Hamerling selbst in den Vordergrund: als Paradigma eben jenes Zeitgeistes, gegen den sich die satirische Tendenz des Epos richtet.90 86 See Hamerling, Homunculus, pp. 192–193. 87 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 194: “This creature grasped with a grin / The scholar, snatched him / In the air and let him fall / And in the following moments / Under a cliff ridge you founded / With smashed head and limbs / This Darwin, this Haeckel, / This Büchner – – yes, what do I say? / This fist of human people!”. 88 Haeckel and Büchner are exponents and promulgators of Darwinism. 89 An interesting aspect Sprengel notices is Hamerling’s exchange of the artistic principles with those of Evolutionism, for example when towards the end of the epos the protagonist builds a “Luftschiff” (“airship”) following the criteria of Darwin’s theory. See Sprengel, Darwin in der Poesie, p. 61. 90 Sprengel, Darwin in der Poesie, p. 63: “Hamerling’s epic […] proved itself as a general

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The evolutionistic struggle for life refers in this epic to the mechanisms of the contemporary economic system and to the consequent greed for money and social advancement.91 In the eighth canto, as I said previously, Homunkel is Im neuen Israel. He has succeeded and failed many times, but his greatest goal is far from being achieved: “der Triumph / des Homunkelthums auf Erden”.92 While Homunkel is planning a new enterprise, which makes him reach the yearned success, Europe, and in particular Austria, is facing another problem, which Hamerling summarizes again in terms of anatomy : Zu derselben Zeit geschah es, Daß den Christen wieder einmal Nicht gefiel der Juden Nase, Die gekrümmte Judennase, Und man hörte plötzlich wieder Von verschwund’nen Christenkindern, Die geschlachtet ohne Zweifel Waren von Israeliten Zu geheimen Kultuszwecken. Gegen den bekannten foetor Judaeorum war man plötzlich Außerordentlich empfindlich Wieder und nervös geworden.93

Hamerling depicts briefly the social and political context of the fin de siwcle Austria, and the general climate of anti-Semitism which characterized those years. He does it through the traditional prejudices towards Jews: the first concerns their physical aspect and in particular their hooked nose; the second refers to the blood libel, the accusation that Jews murdered children and used their blood for religious rituals. The last four verses remind the reader of the state of tension and agitation which governed the time: they are the years of the mayor Karl Lüger, who was a member of the Austrian Parliament from 1885 and who gave rise in 1887 to the Christian Social Union, which turned later into the breaking from the tendencies of the 19 cent. and as a manifesto of a vehement criticism of progress, it follows the texts treated up to now. Also in the fact, that here it is referred to the contemporary view of nature. The complexity of Darwinism is given priority in Hamerling’s work: even as a paradigm of the spirit of the times, towards which the satiric tendency of the epic was directed”. 91 Sprengel, Darwin in der Poesie, p. 60. 92 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 203: “The triumph / of homunculity on the earth”. 93 Hamerling, Homunculus, pp. 205–206: “During the same period / The Christians once more / didn’t like the Jew’s nose / and people heard suddenly about / disappeared Christian children, / who were no doubt / murdered by Israelites / for mysterious worship purposes. / To the known foetor / Judaeorum people were suddenly / Extraordinary sensitive and nervous / One more time”.

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Christian social Party. Moreover the first Aliyah, the great Jewish migratory movement to Israel, dates back to 1882 and not many years later Theodor Herzl starts to talk about Zionism. From these perspectives Robert Hamerling’s work is prophetic94 and it seems to unmask the prejudices his epoch holds towards these people: Mit geheimen Sympathien Sah sich hingezogen Munkel zu dem unterdrückten Volke. Jüd’scher Sinn und jüd’scher Wesen, Jüdischen Verstandes Schärfe, Aetzende, wie Scheidewasser, Jüd’sche dreist-verschlag’ne Thatkraft, Und noch manches and’re Jüd’sche, Stand, so dünkt es ihn, erheblich Nahe seinem eig’nen Wesen, Nahe dem Homunculismus.95

Homunkel migrates East, where he founds the new reign of Israel and changes his name into “Gotthold Ephraim Munkel”, in the name of the most important exponent of the German Enlightenment. Lurlei, who moved away with another man at the time of Eldorado, now is back, just in time to become the queennymph of Israel. Soon the reign turns into a big ghetto, where Jews suffered from boredom. At the same time the western world began to miss them, as well the Jews also missed the west, and Homunkel became the victim of people’s annoyance and boredom, that is why they condemned him to death. Homunkel is saved only thanks to “der ew’ge Jude” (“the eternal Jew”)96 Ahasverus, but soon he realizes that Lurlei, woman with a “false”, “black” soul, had left him and gone to Constantinople with a Muslem emir. In the tenth chapter, End ohne Ende, Homunkel has definitely become a misanthrope and he wants to retire to a life far from the rest of the world: “aus der Welt sich in die tieffste / Einsamkeit zurückzuziehen / dachte Munkel. Aber schwer ward’s / Ihm zu finden eine solche”.97 Homunkel dreams of a world with 94 The conductor and composer Weingartner states: “wäre dieses Werk besser bekannt, so würde man erstaunen über seine Prophetie”: “If this work would be better known, his prophecy would astonish us”, quoted in Kracht, Hamerling, p. 63. 95 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 207: “With mysterious affections / Munkel saw himself attracted / To these oppressed people. / Jewish sense and Jewish nature, / The sharpness of Jewish reason, / Corrosive, like aqua fortis, / Jewish bold sly energy / And some other Jewish things, / Were, it seemed to him, considerably / Near his own being, / Nearer the Homunculismus.” 96 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 227. 97 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 279: “From the world to retire/ into the deepest loneliness / thought Munkel. But it was hard / for him to find such a place”.

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no signs of mankind at all, where he can stay alone, and he eventually makes his decision: Und hier warf sein reger Geist sich Mit dem ganzen zähen Eifer Und dem Starrsinn, der ihm eigen, Auf das einz’ge Feld, auf dem er Seine Kraft noch nicht erprobte: Das des Forschens, der Erkenntnis, auf das Feld der Wissenschaften. […] Als ein umgekehrter Faustus Aus dem Leben zu den Büchern Wandt’ er sich, und unablässig So studierend, meditierend.98

After building an aristotelian “Dianoƒtikon”, a sort of think-machine, he invents a huge telescope for penetrating the most profound nature and to answer all the questions men ask. Moreover he discovered a universal ‘remedy’, called “haschisch”,99 and created even a lot of other homunculi (“viele ähnliche Homunkel, / die in ihr umher nun laufen”).100 He invented a “Sehrohr” (“telescope”), a “Hörrohr” (“Ear trumpet”), “Riech- und Schmeck- und Tastgeräthe / die das Fernste nahe brachten”101 and at the end, always with the help of his thinkmachine, he built an enormous airship, which was strong and indestructible, constructed following Darwinian principles.102 He leaves with his airship through mountains and seas until he has an accident with a cloud, and as a consequence he is left hanging upside down for the rest of his journey around the world. He came upon the grave of his dead Lurlei, who had become a nun and who was buried in a cloister (“Lurlei hat gesucht / die Ruhe / nach der wilden Lebensirrfahrt / hier in klösterlicher Stille”);103 he digs up her corpse and brings it with him in his journey “zwischen Erd und Himmel” (“Between earth and 98 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 280: “And here he threw his lively spirit / With the whole tenacious enthusiasm / And stubbornness he owned / Into the only field, into which / He hadn’t tested his force yet: / That of research and knowledge, / Thus into the field of sciences. / […] / Like a reversed Faustus / From life to books / He turned, incessantly to / studying and meditating.” 99 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 287. 100 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 290: “Lot of similar Homunkel, / who walked around”. 101 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 291: “Devices to hear, to enjoy and to feel / which brought the farthest closer”. 102 See Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 298. 103 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 309: “Lurlei had looked for / the quiet / after the wild wandering of life / here in a cloistered silence”.

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sky”).104 He comes face to face with the moon, like Leopardi’s wandering shepherd – an author whose canti Hamerling had also translated into German in 1856 – and although at first the moon seems to be totally uninterested in Homunkel all of a sudden it says: “Weltdurchbummler Zwerg, was willst du? Du geberdest dich, als wolltest Du verschlingen mich, den Mond? Dünkst dich ja, so scheint’s, hier oben Selbst schon von den Unsern? Selbst ein Stern hier unter Sternen?“ […] Dich glücklich preisen Könntest du, Weltbummler Zwerg, Wärst du todt, wärst du verkommen Und verdorben und gestorben! Ausruh’n doch von deiner Irrfahrt Könntest du! So aber reißt dich Ruhelos der Flug in’s Weite!”105

In this sort of “Arche” (“ark”),106 a replacement for the world he had left, as Sprengel points out,107 Homunkel like the Sybil is condemned to remain in the air forever108 and not to die, because death is denied to those who were not born by nature: Wem nicht die Natur, die heil’ge, Die geheimnisvolle Mutter, Gab das Leben durch die Liebe, Gab das Leben in der Liebe, Dem verweigert auch den Tod sie, Und den schönsten Tod vor Allem, Das Ersterben in der Liebe – – Und kein Grab der sel’gen Ruhe, Keine Stätte ew’gen Friedens Hat für ihn das weite Weltall.109 104 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 299. 105 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 312: “Strolling dwarf, what do you want? / You behave, as if you want / To devour me, moon? / Does it seem to you / That You are one of us here in the sky? / Yourself a star here among the stars? / […] You could happily praise / Yourself, strolling dwarf, / You’d be dead, you’d be decayed / And bad and deceased! / And yet take a rest from your / wandering you could! But the flight / in the distance snatches you restlessness”. 106 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 313. 107 Sprengel, Darwin in der Poesie, p. 66. 108 The legend of the Sybil is narrated by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, but the passage (48, 8) of the Satyricon of Petronius dealing with this mytic figure is important also because it is quoted by T.S. Eliot as epigraph of The Waste Land (1922). 109 Hamerling, Homunculus, p. 319: “To them didn’t the holy nature, / The mysterious mother,

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The beginning of the epic presented very clear allusions to Goethe’s laboratorium scene, dealing also with the making of this creature. Nevertheless the Goethian homunculs, compared to Hamerling’s, can die, as he does during the Walpurgisnacht: his death is interpreted in many ways, but surely we can say that it is a death due to love and it was a death rejoining his pure spirit110 to nature, represented by the sea. His Streben to a transubstantiation is eventually fulfilled,111 and as a consequence also his dramatic function which resulted, from what Müller says, from the tension between “Körperlosigleit und Verkörperlichung” (“incorporeal and embodiment”):112 “homunculus, inasmuch as he falls in love and shatters his phial on the Cypriot’s car, sets himself in opposition to his laboratory origins and rejoins the vast hymn to nature that is Goethe’s Faust”.113 Homunculus’ ending without an ending is a kind of inverted epilogue: his life as a body without a soul denies him love, except with whom does not possess a soul too, like Lurlei. The very end of the epic deals with the image of the so called “Sonntagskinder”, the children of fortune,114 who still look at the sky at night, always seeing far away the wreckage of the airship, guessing the destiny of those who were condemned to immortality. The natural element changes from water to ether,115 a reminder of Hamerling’s

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/ Give life through love, / Give life in love, / To them she refuses also death, / And the most beautiful death above all, / Die away in love / And no grave for the blessed quiet, / No place of eternal peace / Has she for him in the vast universe”. See Müller, Die Figur des Homunculus, p. 13: “Wenn Goethe in den Entwürfen auch selbst vom ‘chemischen Männlein’ oder ‘Menschlein’ spricht oder den Glasgeist ein ‘wohlgebildetes Zwerglein’ nennt, […], so sind das poetische Metaphern, und Homunculus ist auf der Szene stets nur als leuchtende und klingende Phiole gegenwärtig, wenn man sich auch das ‘feurige Wesen’ vielleicht mit den Umrissen eines kleinen Menschen dargestellt denken könnte”: “If Goethe in his drafts speaks of a ‘chemical little man’ or ‘little man’ or he calls the spirit in the glass an ‘educated little dwarf ’, […], these are poetic metaphors, and Homunculus is staged always only as a bright and clinking phial, even if one also could reckon the ‘ardent being’ maybe with the depicted shape of a little man”. See Selinger, ‘The Homunculus “Motiv”’, p. 178: “Homunculus becomes nothing less than the spirit-being thirsting for incarnation”. Compare also with Latimer, ‘Homunculus as Symbol’, p. 814: “Far from liking his state of pure spirituality, Homunculus wishes to come into being properly, to be born, to enwrap himself with mortal coils, to acquire a body of the very kind of which Faust had so wanted to divest himself”. Müller, Die Figur des Homunculus, p. 5. Latimer, ‘Homunculus as Symbol’, p. 820. The “Sonntagskinder” were, in the tradition, children born on Sundays, who were ascribed with extraordinary power, first of all that of predicting death. The fact that they could come into contact with death made them outsiders in communities and people feared them. According to Hamerling’s philosophy theorized in the Atomistik des Willens (‘Atomistic of Will’, 1891), which was published post mortem in 1889, and which is considered, by the author, the theoretic pendant of Homunkel, there was no empty space but everything was surrounded by ether. In fact, as Sprengel maintains, “alles durch den Aether ausgefüllt zu

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philosophical theories but also to the impossibility of a reunion with nature, because Homunkel stays between earth and sky. Both homunculi share a flair for action, but in Goethe this industriousness is seen as a positive energy, in the case of Homunculus it corresponds to greed and failure. According to Gottfried Benn Goethe was the last who regarded men through “an old look” and who managed to combine “causality” and “myth”: “noch einmal die ungetrennte Existenz, der anschauende Glaube, die Identität von Unendlichkeit und Erde, noch einmal das antike ‘Glück am Sein’”.116 After him Hamerling, as Goethe’s epigone, can only take note of the impossibility to do the same and yearn for a final reunion. Certain is that the character of homunculus, no matter if it is Goethe’s or Hamerling’s, in his peculiar being between sky and earth, natural and supernatural, incorporates a third dimension: it is the one created by literature, which is able to fill the gap between spirit and matter, physiology and phenomenology, and as a consequence between humanities and natural sciences.

denken ist” (“everything is thought to be filled with ether”), Sprengel, Darwin in der Poesie, p. 68. 116 Benn, Goethe und die Naturwissenschaften, pp. 759: “Once more the unseparated existence, the contemplative belief, the identity of infinity and earth, once more the ancient ‘fortune of being’”.

Francesca Di Blasio

The Monstrous Gaze: Exotic/Subaltern/Female. Omai in Eighteenth-Century Fin de Siècle London

During the night of 14th July 1774 the Royal Navy schooner Adventure, under Captain Tobias Furneaux’s command, moored in Portsmouth, carrying on board a special cargo, “a living trophy”, as it was to be defined by some witnesses, straight from far away Polynesia. The “living trophy” was Mai, subsequently to be known in England and Europe as “Omai”, a native of Raiatea, an island of the sles de la Socit archipelago, North West of Tahiti (commonly called Otaheite, at the time). He had boarded the ship at Huahine, one of the paradise islands encountered by James Cook in the second of his expeditions in the South Pacific. The Adventure was in fact returning to Portsmouth from this same expedition, which it had started in the summer of 1772, together with another schooner, the Resolution, in the direction of Terra Australis, one of the most ‘exotic’ places in both the geography and the cultural imaginary of the age. The voyage had been commissioned by the British Government under the auspices of the Royal Society, a world known scientific academy, highly motivated to promote contacts with the last part of the planet still remaining largely unexplored and barely touched by colonialism. This land had, in fact, become extremely interesting and relevant to scientists due to its rich ‘biodiversity’. In order to grasp the many cultural, anthropological, and literary meanings of the arrival of Omai on British soil, I will first have to provide some general information on the English context, and then deal with the issue by tackling the broad ideological and epistemological implications of the event. I propose to highlight a parallelism between the Western gaze on ‘exotic alterity’ and the same gaze on ‘gender alterity’. I will discuss the analogies between the presuppositions of a Western ‘scientific gaze’ on an ‘Other’, always and already trapped in a colonial perspective, and the dominant male gaze on the female subject in patriarchal culture.1 1 Among the studies on different aspects and theories of the gaze, the following are to be mentioned: Michael Argyle, Gaze and Mutual Gaze (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Charles Barber, Sharon Kivland, Conrad Leyser, Reading The Glass:

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Omai: a paradigmatic case of the construction of the “noble savage” The “noble savage” Omai2 lands in England in 1774, and is immediately taken to London, to the dwellings of Lord Sandwich, Grand Admiral of the United Kingdom. The identity and professional interests of the witnesses of the first encounter of Omai with what was for him ‘a New World’ are undoubtedly significant in order to tease out the purpose and effects of the entire event, which was loaded with anthropological and scientific meanings. Among the ones present let me first of all recall: Robert Banks, who was to become President of the Royal Society, and his colleague, the Swede Daniel Carlsson Solander, one of Linnaeus’ disciples. They were two of the most renowned natural scientists of the time, and had already been involved with Cook’s first expedition to the Australian hemisphere from 1768 to 1771. On that occasion, the two scientists had been fascinated with the heretofore unseen richness and variety of the natural world of the Antipodes, from which they collected several samples. There had also been an attempt to bring ‘human samples’ from “Down Under” to Europe, but the Thaitian Tupia, handsome lover and counsellor of Queen Oberea, and his servant Tayeto had both died of an unspecified disease during the journey to Europe. The British were, at this particular moment in history, somehow late on this kind of ‘experiments’, since their French counterparts, i. e. Captain Louis Antoine de Bougainville, had already brought to Paris a similar ‘human trophy’ in March 1769, a Tahitian named Aoutourou, who had taken an active part in the Paris social scene for a year before being re-embarked to Tahiti in February 1770. It is also worth remembering that a couple of years later Bougainville would publish his voyage journals of round the world,3 following the pioneering publication of Charles de Brosses’ Histoire des navigations aux Terres Australes Management of the Eyes, Moderation of the Gaze (London: Book Works, 1991); Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); Mary Ann Caws, The Eye in the Text. Essays on Perception, Mannerist to Modern (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); The Female Gaze, and the Arts: Women, the Arts, and Society, Sexuality, ed. by Ronald L. Dotterer and Susan Bowers (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1992); Lynette Finch, The Classing Gaze: Sexuality, Class, and Surveillance (St. Leonards (Australia): Allen and Unwin, 1993); Francesca Di Blasio, Teorie e pratiche dello sguardo. Percorsi nella letteratura inglese e americana (Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, Edizioni Sestante, 2001). 2 See Michael Alexander, Omai: “Noble Savage” (London: Collins & Harvill Press, 1977); Eric Hall McCormick, Omai: Pacific Envoy (Auckland: Auckland University Press, Oxford University Press, 1977); Richard M. Connaughton, Omai: The Prince Who Never Was (London: Timewell Press, 2005). 3 Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, The Pacific Journal of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, 1767–1768, transl. and ed. by John Dunmore (London: Hakluyt Society, 2002).

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in 1756.4 This kind of literature had a strong impact on the collective imagination and significantly influenced the philosophical speculation of the times, including the emerging observations on equality among human beings promoted by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The myth of the bon sauvage was forged precisely on the ground of these speculations and can be seen as a cultural specular opposite to the figure of the rational Western man. The widespread polarization of savage versus civilized, primitive versus rational, that had traditionally downplayed the former to the advantage of the latter, was eventually gradually questioned, albeit not completely reversed, and the “romanticized” primitive was inflected with positive connotations. The contradictions implicit in the dichotomy did not, of course find a solution, since most of the anthropological discourses of the times would not challenge the widespread underlying presupposition of the intellectual inferiority of the “savage”, despite his “natural” moral “goodness”. This attitude obviously influenced, and largely shaped the approach of the English public to the presence of Omai (and other ‘exotic’ subjects) in London, with one interesting exception, as I will shortly explain. Besides Robert Banks and Daniel Carlsson Solander, Omai was ‘welcomed’ at the Admiralty by a wellknown historian of music, Dr. Charles Burney, who presumably wanted to have some updated information on his son James, who had participated in Cook’s expedition. Another one of the Burney’s children, Fanny Burney, was present at the second encounter of her father with the bon sauvage. The famous literary daughter had first been given a second hand account of the ‘exotic character’ from her father, but she would later meet him and thus become a significant eyewitness of Omai’s presence in England. Moreover, Fanny had conveyed the paternal account to her sister Susan in a letter, from which we also learn that James Burney was eventually to return to England on the Resolution. In this letter we find a very interesting portrait of the guest just arrived from the Antipodes: He was dressed according to the fashion of his Country, and he is a very good looking man – my Father says he has quite an interesting Countenance. He appeared to have uncommon spirits, and laughed very heartily many Times. He speaks few English words – and Capt. Furneaux a few Otaheite words – they had got Mr. Banks there, on purpose to speak with him – but Mr. Banks has almost forgot what he knew of that language. But you must know we are very proud to hear that our Jem speaks more Otaheite than any of the Ship’s Crew. – This Capt. F. told my Father, who was Introduced to this Stranger, as Jem’s father – he laughed, and shook hands very cordially, and repeated with great pleasure the name thus Bunny! O! Bunny! Immediately knowing

4 Charles de Brosses, Terra Australis Cognita, or, Voyages to the Terra Australis, ed. by John Callander (Amsterdam: N. Israel; New York: Da Capo Press, 1967).

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who was meant. And the Capt. says that he is very fond of Bunny, who spent great part of his Time in Studying the Language with him.5

Fanny Burney’s portrait is one of the most satisfactory that have reached us, not only because of its literary merits, but also because it is one of the least biased reports we have. One should notice how the writer immediately refers to her brother in Omai’s own terms, as if she had instantly and empathetically acquired his language and point of view. Empathy was certainly mediated by a shared familiarity with Jem; while Bank’s scientific knowledge is candidly put in doubt on the ground of his inability to speak Tahitian, a language in which everyone presumed and expected him to be proficient. Burney’s words are precious, not only for her candid tone, but also for the “neutral”, rather than arrogant, mode of description of the exotic guest. In her description we feel a benevolent, and not at all condescending curiosity, an interest that is not intrusive; the same attitude can be found in the other occasions in which Fanny Burney writes about Omai, and which we are lucky enough to be able to verify. In the passage quoted above, the visitor from the Pacific had just landed in the old continent, and was therefore at the very beginning of his adventure as monstrum, i. e., etymologically, as an ‘object’ of display. This attitude towards Omai’s presence on British soil would last for the next two years. A few days after his arrival, on 17th July, Omai was presented at Court, admitted to the presence of King George III and Queen Charlotte in the royal residence of Kew Palace. He greeted his royal host with a courteous but rather informal “How do you do?”, and received a friendly handshake in return. Several newspapers, including the Daily Advertiser, the London Chronicle, and the General Evening Post, reported this episode and various others concerning Omai in the following months, when he was becoming a steady presence in the social circles of his patrons, particularly Banks’s, whom he would accompany on several occasions and circumstances of the London social life. Fanny Burney would, on such occasions, always draw interesting sketches of Omai, which are very useful towards reconstructing his personality, one which, albeit always ‘defined’ by the discourses of others (rather than by his own voice), is given in Burney’s treatment an unusual fullness and respectful attention, as demonstrated by this second example: Mr Stanhope and Omai – the first with all the advantage of Lord Chesterfield’s Instructions, brought up at a great School, Introduced at 15 to a Court, taught all possible accomplishments from an Infant, and having all the care, expence, labour and benefit of the best Education that any man can receive, – proved after it all a meer pedantic Booby : – the second with no Tutor but Nature, changes after he is grown up, his Dress, 5 Fanny Burney, The Early Journals and Letters, ed. by Lars E. Troide (New York, Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 578.

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his way of Life, his Diet, his Country and his friends; – and appears in a new world like a man [who] had all his life studied the Graces, and attended with un[re]mitting application and diligence to form his manners, and to render his appearance and behavior politely easy, and thoroughly well bred! I think this shews how much Nature can do without art, than art with all her refinement, unassisted by Nature.6

This quotation, undoubtedly attuned to the general epistemic perspective of the times, focusses on the central philosophical theme of the relationship between nature and culture. Being free from ethnic or caste bias, Fanny Burney acutely manages to point out the crucial differences between a fop and “a man”, between a passive victim of social conventions and a man who is able to adapt to the most different and difficult circumstances, and to re-fashion himself in a creative and interactive process. The writer, who is almost complicit with the tone of the subject from the South Pacific, gives us, once again, a well round portrait. Through her writing she is able to create an accountable and vivid portrait. Burney breaks the mold of the conventional sketch, and she bypasses the formulaic description of the exotic monstrum. Moreover, by so doing, she manages to develop an authentic relationship with him, rather than merely positioning him in the narrow confines prescribed by the dominant gaze on the exotic. However, the destiny of the monstrum, i. e., of the ‘freaky’ object of the dominant white gaze, remains the pervasive role assigned to Omai on the old continent. It is a common destiny for ‘exotic’ visitors, one that feeds on various interpretations of Rousseau’s observations, on theories of rational primitivism, on cosmopolitan fascination with anthropological alterity, and with geographical distance. Such theories and the cultural position from which they are articulated are not free from the condescending and paternalistic tones of a colonial rhetoric, which was to reach its climax in Britain in the following century, in the doctrine of “the white man’s burden” and his supposed cultural and anthropological superiority. Two fairly recent exhibitions, one in London in 2007, and one in Paris in 2011 have recaptured the elements of this particular phase in “the history of taste”, which traverses the culture of the old continent in its engagement with the mad pursuit of a colonial Empire.7 The approach to the issue is different in each one of the two exhibitions, due to different philosophical and methodological premises. The London exhibition adopts a broad cultural studies approach, while the Paris event is more anthropologically oriented. This methodological difference highlights the different philosophical awareness of the two colonial powers to6 Burney, The Early Journals and Letters, p. 601. 7 For the French exhibition visit the following link: http://www.quaibranly.fr/fr/programma tion/expositions/expositions-passees/exhibitions.html. Two exhibitions about Omai were also organized in Australasia: one in Auckland in 1977, the other in Canberra in 2001.

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wards their loaded historical past. This difference, however, demonstrates an unfortunate re-actualization of the colonial paradigm, even in the mass of Anglophone postcolonial studies that aim at problematizing such paradigm. In fact, on a closer look we find that the London exhibition, held at the National Portrait Gallery, is entitled: Between Worlds: Voyagers to Britain 1700–1850, and that it deals with the stories of those who are, rather elusively, defined “exotic travelers”. We meet the so called “Four Kings”, Iroquois native Americans, who arrive at the court of Queen Anne in 1710. The four were in England on a diplomatic mission, given the crucial role that the Iroquois were playing in the British and French wars in North America, but outside the diplomatic milieu they ‘enjoyed’ a purely picturesque popularity. Traces of their passage are found in the works of Johannes Verelst, one of the Dutch Golden Age painters, as well as in widely sold cheap reproductions. Another “exotic traveler” is William Ansah Sessarakoo, heir of a rich African merchant who, while travelling to Britain, is mistakenly turned into a slave, and then freed by the British authorities and introduced to the Court of George III. His story makes him very popular among the wide public who is fascinated by this “Oroonoko”, who actually seems to perfectly embody the eponymous hero of the well-known work by Aphra Behn, published in 1688. Two Australian natives, Bennelong e Yemmerrawanne, are presented in the London exhibition. They had been introduced to Governor Phillip’s House in Sydney in 1789 shortly after the creation, in 1788, of the new British colony of New South Wales. In 1793 they arrive in London and the usual ‘welcoming’ pattern repeats itself: they are introduced at Court in the midst of the Londoners’ curiosity, which makes them popular for a while, even if their popularity does not compare to the one enjoyed by Omai. Incapable of adapting to Albion’s climate, Yemmerrawanne died at Etham during the year following his arrival; while Bennelong returned to New South Wales in 1795. The story of the “lady traveler” Sara (Saartjie) Baartman at the end of the century casts an even more sinister light on what appears, by now, to be a consolidated cultural habit. Her case is indeed paradigmatic of the biased scoptic attitude on “the exotic” at fin de siwcle eighteenth century. While pretending a merely cultural-anthropological interest, undoubtedly connected with the general cosmopolitanism u la mode, the gaze on this female subject (but, in terms of this particular gaze, it is perhaps more correct to say ‘object’) remains intrusive, perverse, and paternalistic. Baartman, a young Khoisan (Hottentot-Bushman) woman, is in fact, turned into the “Hottentot Venus” in 1810, but this label is far from being an admiring tribute. In fact, since the dimensions of her hips, her behind and private parts, are generally considered ‘disproportionate’, she is literally exhibited as a “freak” to the public gaze in Piccadilly in1810. In this case, the crude and condescending taste for the exotic is combined

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with a voyeuristic interest toward the ‘deformed’, and the two perverse attitudes reinforce one another and corroborate a specific use of the gaze, based on a total incapacity of admitting and including cultural difference (at whatever level), and an incapacity of establishing a relationship on an equal and respectful basis of reciprocity. This is, after all, the heart of the matter : the way in which we relate to otherness in a colonial context, in a patriarchal context, and in both. The theme of the exhibition at the Muse du Quai Branly in Paris takes its cue precisely from this aspect. Its title, L’invention du sauvage, appears to be more frankly outspoken and honest. It highlights the mechanism of the cultural “construction” of otherness, thereby challenging a traditional and supposedly natural ‘savage identity’. It dismantles all essentialist notions of a ‘savage’ ‘human nature’. All of the characters mentioned above, including Omai – along with many others – clearly have a place in this process of cultural construction. The works on display in Paris focus on the stories of women and men from the four continents who were taken to Europe and literally transformed into ‘objects’ to be exhibited, in both high and low social contexts, including: the court, circuses, social gatherings, universal exhibitions, and cultural circles. This demonstrates how difference and otherness were turned into a spectacle for a mere voyeuristic and reifying pleasure. The supposed physical, psychological, cultural, and geographical ‘abnormalities’ become the focus of stereotypical and predatory gazes, that ‘scan’ the objects they dwell on in order to find ‘anomalies’ in comparison to the canonical, and supposedly universal and optimal, white and western cultural models. The cultural specificity of the observed subjects is completely lost and denied, since all “others” become mere projections of the stereotype, and are turned into monstra to be visually (and physically) possessed.

Exotic gaze/Female gaze This cultural attitude and these dynamics are clearly comparable to those outlined in contemporary feminist theories of the gaze, according to which the collective unconscious of patriarchal society is one of the master codes that create stereotypical images of the female subject, in order to please and gratify a complacent male gaze. Laura Mulvey8 has carefully examined these visual dynamics, and has suggested that the gratification of the male gaze in a dominant patriarchal culture lies in the fact that the representations of the female subject reflect and reaffirm the culturally mainstream, and biased interpretations of sexual difference, to women’s obvious disadvantage. In this perspective and 8 Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).

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context, visual pleasure relies on and rehearses a supposedly ‘naturally’ active male gaze over the supposedly passive female subject, represented in terms of an object to be possessed and ‘naturally’ destined to be the focus of a reifying look. In her seminal work Alice Doesn’t,9 published in 1984, Teresa de Lauretis clearly advocates the urgent need to overcome such perspective, in order to give the definitions and representations of both subjectivity and gaze a more insightful and authentic import. In de Lauretis’ vision, semiotics and psychoanalysis have denied women the specific status of subjects and creators of culture, and have relegated them to the role of objects and ‘signs’ of male creativity, of male desire, and cultural production. It follows that the dominant patriarchal look theorized by feminist philosophy10 is not at all concerned with genuinely and honestly knowing the unknown; on the contrary, it is only preoccupied with re-cognizing and re-establishing the familiar clichs of traditional representations and codifications. Similar cultural dynamics can be said to affect colonial societies as well. The expectations of the dominant gaze of the colonizer on the so-called “subordinates” end up coinciding with the definitions and representations of their subjectivity tout court, a subjectivity which is thereby distorted, reduced to clich{, and ultimately denied. The similarity between the male gaze and the colonial gaze is grounded in the fact that both do not admit of or expect a return of the look. In this sense it may be worth outlining a difference between the look and the gaze. While the former is the predatory look of patriarchy and colonialism, the latter is the complex interactive and relational phenomenon implied in Lacanian and Foucaultian theories.11 Reciprocity, mutuality, recognition, and knowledge are destroyed in and by the arrogance of the reifying dominant look and the images it creates. This takes us to one of the most famous portraits of Omai, painted during his stay in Europe. Sir Joshua Reynolds is not the only one who depicted the exotic guest, we also have an engraving by Francesco Bartolozzi from a Nathaniel Dance’s sketch, a collective portrait by William Parry of Omai in the company of Banks and Solander, in addition to various other prints of lesser prestige and 9 Teresa De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t. Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). 10 On feminist philosophy and on feminist theories of the gaze see also: Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter. On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York and London: Routledge, 1993); E. Ann Kaplan, Looking for the Other : Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze (New York: Routledge, 1997); The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture, ed. by Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marshment (London: The Women’s Press, 1989). 11 See Jacques Lacan, qcrits (New York: Norton, 1977); The Seminar, Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1979); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1973).

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fame. It also noteworthy that, in the case of Omai as sitter, Reynolds himself draws sketches of what will be the finished work, which was not his regular practice. In his two-year stay in the old continent, Omai is in fact a constant ‘object’ and focus of the looks of the high and low society of the time, the catalyst of these looks, indeed an exhibited monstrum. Reynolds’ Portrait of Omai is no exception, it provides the most illustrious and lasting memory of him, immortalized in a white turban and shifty eyes, oriented towards an indefinite, anamorphic point in the painting itself. It is not surprising that the work has been said to evoke the Apollo Belvedere. Reynolds’ style systematically incorporates features and motives from the classics into the so-called Grand Style, the Grande Maniera of the ancient artists mediated by the Renaissance masters, in a long line of works aiming at recovering the ideal of classical harmony. Therefore, one can reasonably assume that the intent of the painting is more to transfigure than to faithfully and photographically represent the portrayed subject/object. As we know, the practice of the portrait was much frequented by the artist, but with different intents, more earthly and less idealistic.12 Formal rigor is programmatic in Reynolds, as can be seen in the Discourses which he delivered as President of the Royal Academy of Art. In the first of such discourses, for example, he quotes from Pope, who in An Essay on Criticism writes, in his famous heroic couplet: “From vulgar Bounds with brave Disorder part/And snatch a Grace beyond the Reach of Art”. Reynolds also invites: “[do] not destroy the scaffold until we have raised the building”. In other words, he urges, maybe for mere pedagogical anxiety (but maybe not), never to abandon compositional rigor, and not so before having become formally impeccable: How much liberty may be taken to break through those rules, and, as the poet expresses it, ‘To snatch a grace beyond the reach of art’, may be a subsequent consideration, when the pupils become masters themselves. It is then, when their genius has received its utmost improvement, that rules may possibly be dispensed with. But let us not destroy the scaffold until we have raised the building.13

Returning to the Portrait of Omai, in its lofty perfection, the painting is an indisputably admirable “building”. However, it also embodies the category of the generic and ambiguous exotic as I have defined it in relation to its fin de siwcle eighteenth-century articulations: i. e. it avoids any actual confrontation with otherness, as theorized by Edward Said: 12 John Steegman, Sir Joshua Reynolds (Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1978). 13 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, “First Discourse”, http://archive.org/stream/sirjos huareynold00reynuoft/sirjoshuareynold00reynuoft_djvu.txt.

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The real issue is whether indeed there can be a true representation of anything, or whether any and all representations, because they are representations, are embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambiance of the representer.14

The most famous portrait of Omai confirms, in its abstraction, the stereotype of the colonial gaze, and the mechanism that we have seen to replicate the patriarchal look on the female subject: I look to reconfirm what I already know (and I do not care to ascertain the validity of what I presume to know). However, if we focus on the eyes of the figure in the painting, and try to find in them a reciprocity of the gaze, we discover a slant in the classical and central perspective leading to a different angle, i. e. to a point heading to the margins, beyond those of the painting itself: it is an anamorphic point. In order to return the gaze of the depicted subject the viewer has to be dislodged from its familiar location, and metaphorically position herself in the Austral Antipodes the figure comes from.15 The dynamics of the gaze appropriately leads to look at Omai from a perspective closer to his context, so that the image received is no longer the mere stereotypical result of a reifying and opinionated look. To conclude, the story of Omai can be circumstantially traced through the testimonies of his passage in his Antipodes, which is Europe. We can analyze the figurative and verbal portraits I have discussed, and others that may be accessible, by accumulation or by collation of different materials. The fact remains that, as suggested above, Omai has no voice of his own in his zeitgeist, and that he shares in this position a fate that is eminently feminine in the social imaginary of the time. He thus combines in himself two ‘monstrous’ marginalities (the exotic and the womanly) arising from the dynamics of the gaze typical of the dominant colonial and patriarchal culture. The known history of this fascinating and mysterious figure becomes emblematic of a double mise en abyme of the social role he embodies as “the exotic subject” and as subject of a biased gender representation. His role in the society of the time, which contemporary modern post-colonial theory identifies with that of the “subaltern”,16 is combined with his transformation into an ‘object’, and monstrum, of/for the dominant gaze. It is 14 Edward Said, Orientalism. Western Conceptions of the Orient (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978) p. 272. 15 On this issue see the classical study by E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion. A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), and Ellen Handler Spitz, ‘The Artistic Image and the Inward Gaze’, in The Persistence of Myth, Psychoanalytic and Structuralist Perspectives, ed. by Peter L. Rudnytsky (New York: Guilford Press, 1988), pp. 111–128. 16 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271–313; Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993).

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a condition that contemporary psychoanalytic and feminist criticism identify as typical of women in the tradition of patriarchy and its developments. The monstrum Omai activates a series of visual dynamics and cultural issues which have strong elements of complexity in relation to the nexus between dominant and subordinate role making and between male and female gender roles. In 1776 Omai goes back to the South Pacific with Captain James Cook on his third voyage to the Antipodes. He is swallowed up again in the oblivion of Tahiti, a place that for Europe was the ultimate elsewhere, and at the same time an image ‘mapped’ into the imaginary as an ‘Arcadia’ clich{. Thanks to the landing in Tahiti, in 1789, of Captain Bligh’s Bounty, we learn of Mai’s death, which occurred towards the end of the Seventies. The figure of Omai lingers, however, in the imagery and imaginary of the time and leaves a trace, in absentia, when the playwright John O’Keefe stages, during the Christmas festivities of 1785, at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, a play entitled Omai. AVoyage ‘Round the World. It is a light operetta, a pantomime in the English sense of the word, thin and riddled with amorous and exotic adventures, just perfect to rehearse the central perspective of the dominant, colonial, and patriarchal ideology.

Sharon Ruston

Has Man “Paid Too Dear a Price for His Empire”? Monsters in Romantic-Era Literature

In William Lawrence’s entry on ‘Monsters’ for Abraham Rees’s 1819 Cyclopædia, he notes that besides the many examples of physical abnormality in human subjects, “monstrous productions are almost, if not entirely, confined to domesticated animals”.1 The lack of examples of monstrosity in wild animals leads him to reflect upon whether man has “paid too dear a price for his empire” of nature.2 In other words, man might be responsible for the incidences of monstrosity found in domesticated animals because his diseases have become theirs.3 Edmund Burke’s famous description of the populace as a “swinish multitude” accords with Lawrence’s Cyclopædia entry : humans who bear a resemblance to animals are among Lawrence’s list of human “monsters”.4 Burke’s phrase so incensed the radicals that they appropriated the term as a badge of honour, as witnessed in Thomas Spence’s periodical Pig’s Meat. The question of who is responsible for so-called ‘monstrosity’ – whether physical or moral – is one that concerns a number of writers of the Romantic period and which positions them politically. In this essay, I look at specific literary and medical theories of monstrosity in the 1790s and 1810s that reveal a change in the way monstrosity is viewed. I begin with Burke’s use of the word ‘monstrous’ in Reflections on the Revolution in France to describe the French revolution, municipal army, constitution and 1 [William Lawrence] ‘Monster’, in Abraham Rees, Cyclopædia, 39 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Browne, 1819), vol. 14 ‘MON-NEW’, (n. pag.). 2 [William Lawrence] ‘Monster’, n.p. “Man” is Lawrence’s term and the choice (as opposed to more inclusive terms) of many of the writers considered in this essay. I follow the authors’ use in my discussion. It is of course possible that Lawrence means ‘man’ here in a precise and exclusive sense. 3 Again, terms such as ‘monster’ and ‘monstrosity’ are the terms used in the period. On the Romantic era’s fascination with what was considered ‘monstrous’ see Paul Younquist, Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2003). 4 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 173.

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indeed France itself. Burke’s emphasis is upon biological difference between the monstrous poor and the rulers of society. I examine the way that he imagines monstrosity to occur, as the “incorporation” of disparate elements, and find that he also uses this idea to imagine a healthy body politic, one that is animated by the vital principle of heredity. This principle is needed to keep the otherwise monstrous populace in check. The Tory Evangelical Hannah More uses her writings to maintain social order and to keep the poor in check. She is clear on the need for the institutions of monarchy and law and represents these as part of the natural hierarchies that regulate behaviour. She finds “Sinful Sally” in her Cheap Repository Tracts individually responsible for the conditions in which she finds herself: physically deformed by venereal disease. For More, both the source and the solution of such problems begin with reformation of the individual. Lawrence’s new medical definition of monstrosity is placed in the context of the rtienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Georges Cuvier debate on the nature of generation. Geoffroy emphasizes monstrosity’s similarities with ‘normal’ bodies rather than differences and finds monstrosity to be a natural rather than unnatural occurrence. Lawrence adds his own theory to those that had been voiced before. He suggests that having colonized nature, man has inflicted monstrosity upon those animals with which he lives and suffers himself as a result. Finally I examine Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which emerges from the same radical tradition as Lawrence and which takes the view that monsters are, at least partly, the responsibility of society. Man’s attempt to conquer nature has resulted in monstrosity and in Frankenstein the monster wreaks revenge. Burke’s decision to label the French poor as a “swinish multitude” proved very revealing. It identified him as disgusted and scornful of the poor who were depicted as treading learning down in the mire with their “hoofs”.5 As Darren Howard has written, Burke’s phrase also reveals his assumption that “cultural differences are based on biological differences and that the disempowered therefore deserve their subjection […] he implies that the disempowered are like animals and ought to be treated like animals”.6 Coming soon after Burke’s extended purple prose passages on Marie Antoinette, the queen of France, the differences between rich and poor, aristocrat and labouring class, is clear. Burke thinks of the poor as themselves monstrous, a hybrid of pig and human who are unfit to govern themselves. It is worth exploring Burke’s use of the image of the monster again, despite the fact that critical attention has been paid to some aspects of this before. Burke’s vitalist theory of life allows him to imagine a positive version of the body politic, not monstrous despite being many people 5 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution, p. 173. 6 Darren Howard, ‘Necessary Fictions: the “Swinish Multitude” and The Rights of Man’, Studies in Romanticism, 47: 2 (Summer 2008), p. 161.

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incorporated into one. The principle of life superadded to the body politic gives him a trope to describe inheritance and constancy rather than revolutionary change. In this way Burke appropriates medical ideas to suit his political purpose. Burke repeatedly employs a medical language to describe France, which often extends to a description of the people and their actions as monstrous. Paul Youngquist has commented on how Burke “often styles himself a physician” in Reflections; his purpose is “to defend, against the diseased example of revolutionary France, the fundamental health of a hereditary British monarchy and its constituent social organisation”.7 Burke describes France as a “distempered state”, which does not have the constitutional health of Britain: “An irregular, convulsive movement may be necessary to throw off an irregular, convulsive disease. But the course of succession is the healthy habit of the British constitution”.8 France is diseased and Britain is healthy. Burke considered the French revolution to be an unnatural act, or as he put it, something “out of nature”.9 He repeatedly emphasizes the idea that his worldview, favouring the status quo in Britain, is the natural order of things. In contrast, as an example, the French municipal army when considered in relation to certain other components of the French state and “in a view to any coherence or connection between its parts” appears to him to be a “monster”.10 When the army begins to act not as an instrument of the monarch but of its own accord, this is not in the “nature of things”, and it becomes then “a species of political monster, which has always ended by devouring those who have produced it”.11 Elsewhere he describes France as having a “monster of a constitution”.12 By the time that Burke was writing, in the 1790s, it was a commonplace to regard ‘monstrosity’ as within the domain of medicine; while Burke’s use of the term also suggests classical mythology, his application of the term to the ‘constitution’ of France conflates political, classical, and medical meaning. Critics have pointed to the possible influence of Burke’s image of the new French state as an unnatural birth on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.13 Burke refers, for example, to “a species of property” where “the spirit of money-jobbing and speculation goes into the mass of land itself, and incorporates with it”.14 By 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Younquist, Monstrosities, p. 23. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution, pp. 116, 119. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution, p. 92. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution, p. 350. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution, p. 333. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution, p. 313. See, for example, Fred Botting, Making Monstrous: Frankenstein, Criticism, Theory (Manchester : Manchester University Press, 1991). 14 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution, p. 308.

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this ‘operation’ the result assumes “an unnatural and monstrous activity”.15 Burke has a particular loathing of “clubs”, described as being “composed of a monstrous medley of all conditions, tongues, and nations”.16 Such associations can turn the public into “monsters” themselves.17 His definition of a monster often involves some kind of assimilation, whether this is described as the “incorporation” or as a “medley” of elements. In these examples, the mixing together of disparate or usually separate things causes monstrosity. The following passage appears to have particular resonance for Frankenstein: Wickedness is a little more inventive. Whilst you are discussing fashion, the fashion is gone by. The very same vice assumes a new body. The spirit transmigrates; and, far from losing its principle of life by the change of its appearance, it is renovated in its new organs with the fresh vigour of a juvenile activity. It walks abroad; it continues its ravages; whilst you are gibbeting the carcass, or demolishing the tomb.18

Though not labelled as monstrous, this image is frightening. Wickedness will be difficult to detect because rather than dying it can move into a new body, a younger body, and thus “continue its ravages”. The key to the way that Burke perceives life to operate is here. He speaks of a “principle of life”, which is described as constant, while the matter of the body is renewed and changed. Though mentioned here in connection with a negative quality, in fact, this notion of a “principle of life” is at the heart of Burke’s ideology ; the idea that there must be some constant, even in the midst of reform, is pursued throughout.19 Heredity, inheritance, succession, and tradition all entail a degree of constancy in change. Clearly the medical notion of a vital principle, independent from and superadded to the inert material of the body, offered Burke an analogy he could use to argue his case. In a discussion of the importance of inheritance, he makes this process clear : Our political symmetry is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts; wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenour of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression.20 15 16 17 18 19

Burke, Reflections on the Revolution, p. 308. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution, p. 160. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution, p. 160. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution, p. 248. See my Shelley and Vitality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) for a more detailed discussion of debates on the principle of life in the Romantic period. 20 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution, p. 120.

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Rather than see such a body politic as monstrous, even though it has been “moulded” together and incorporates the whole human race, this image is divinely ordered and in keeping with the natural order. The result of this operation is somehow “a condition of unchangeable constancy” rather than the mismatch of disparate elements. As seen here and in the earlier quotation, Burke prefers the word “incorporate” when describing the joining of bodies and this does potentially mean the conquest of one body over another rather than a process of equal measures.21 In contrast, and very much influenced by contemporary physiological accounts of the nature of life, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s uses the terms “assimilate” and “modify” to describe the action of the living body.22 Burke’s model of the body politic, emphasizing the constancy in life, is far removed from those favoured by radicals such as Godwin and Percy Shelley. In Shelley the principle that provides for constancy is change itself, the body of living beings continually mutating into new forms, in a deliberate rejection of the principle of self.23 For Godwin, institutions, laws, and contracts are all to be distrusted because they attempt to fix meaning and halt change: government “gives substance and permanence to our errors”.24 Burke’s concept of life, as an active power, is clearly of the same nature as that put forward by vitalists such as John Hunter, and earlier in the century by George Ernst Stahl. Using physiological terms to describe inheritance it becomes clear that the vital principle of which Burke conceives exists independently of the body it inhabits: in his words, “the inheritable principle [has] survived with a sort of immortality through all transmigrations”.25 In other words the principle of heredity, like the vitalist’s principle of life, is superadded to rather than dependent upon the body itself. Given this characteristic, Burke can extend his 21 See the Oxford English Dictionary, “incorporate”. 22 S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). See, for example, ii, 26. Coleridge may well have acquired the idea of “assimilation” from the surgeon John Abernethy’s Physiological Lectures, Exhibiting a General View of Mr Hunter’s Physiology, and of his researches in Comparative Anatomy, delivered before the Royal College of Surgeons, in the year 1817 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1817). In this text, life’s “principle functions” are given as “assimilation, formation, and multiplication” (p. 204). Abernethy’s connections with Coleridge are documented in Trevor Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge: CUP, 1981). Burke does at one point combine the two ideas; he speaks of a “bland assimilation” that “incorporated into politics” the pleasing illusions that make life palatable (Reflections, p. 77). Even this passage shows, however, that he does use the term to imagine one thing becoming subsumed within another. 23 See, for example, Percy Shelley’s poem ‘Mutability’, Major Poems, ed. Michael O’Neill and Zachary Leader (Oxford: OUP, 2009), p. 112. 24 William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Mark Philp, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, 7 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1993), vol. 3, p. 21. 25 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution, p. 106.

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analogy further and claim that men’s wills, the same as their bodies, need an external controlling power : Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can only be done by a power out of themselves; and not, in the exercise of its function, subject to that will and to those passions which it is its office to bridle and subdue.26

In other words, for the good of society the individual’s passions need to be rigorously controlled, subjected to the good of the whole, and frequently thwarted or not allowed. It is impossible for men to regulate themselves; their passions must be restrained by “a power out of themselves”. As the surgeon William Lawrence was to argue in 1819, belief in such a principle supported all manner of institutions: it promised to “impose a restraint upon vice stronger than Bow Street or Old Bailey can apply ; and in all probability to convert the offices of Mr. Recorder and his assistant Mr. Ketch into sinecures”.27 Burke’s statements get to the heart of the issue: could people, particularly the poor and ill educated, be trusted to control themselves or did they need ideological state apparatuses to keep them in check? He imagined the French body politic to be monstrous, while the British state based on inheritance was a body characterized by constancy in change. The “inheritable principle”, like the vital principle and the soul, were necessary to keep the British populace in check. Without such institutions, the “swinish multitude” could spill out into many monstrous forms. Hannah More certainly agreed that the poor needed to be kept in check, even while she sympathized with their lot, and she was alive to the power that literature had in affecting the way that people thought and felt. She wrote to counteract what she saw as the pernicious influence of such texts as Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. Village Politics, published in 1792, featuring a dialogue between Tom and Jack, both labouring class; Tom has been made discontented by reading Rights of Man and Jack sets him straight on why this book is pernicious and wrong-headed.28 Without understanding enough of what he has read, Tom claims he wants “liberty” and a “new constitution”.29 He tells Jack that he would not even have known that he lacked such things had he not have read Paine’s book. Jack, who is clearly a deal cleverer than Tom, apparently misunderstands 26 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution, p. 151. 27 William Lawrence, Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man, delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons (London: J. Callow, 1819), pp. 11–12. 28 Hannah More, Village Politics. Addressed to all the Mechanics, Journeymen, and Day Labourers, in Great Britain. By Will Chip, a Country Carpenter (London: F. and C. Rivington, 1792). 29 More, Village Politics, p. 4.

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him at first and tells him to “Send for the doctor then” if he wants a “new constitution”.30 These comic misunderstandings may not be misunderstandings at all; certainly they encourage the reader to laugh at Tom’s expense. One of the central tenets of Jack’s arguments is that the French, whom Tom would imitate, do not have the trappings of justice that are found in Britain: “If they don’t like a man’s looks they are free to hang him without judge or jury, and the next lamp-post does for the gallows; so then they call themselves free, because you see they have no king to take them up and hang them for it”.31 These are precisely the institutions Burke thought were necessary to control and regulate the people, and which Godwin thought should be overthrown. Quoting Romans 31: 1 “Let every one be subject to the higher powers”, More makes it clear that there are natural hierarchies in all relationships: “For the woman is below her husband, and the children are below their mother, and the servant is below his master”.32 Hierarchies are not always quite so visible and sometimes people need to be taught what their place is in society. In the fable “about the Belly and Limbs” which Tom tells Jack to illustrate his point, we see a conventionally conservative version of the body politic trope that confirms the “natural” order of things according to More.33 The hands, feet “and all the members” decide not to “work any longer to feed this lazy belly, who sits in state like a lord, and does nothing”.34 In case we miss the point, their act is explicitly linked to that of the would-be English revolutionaries; they behave in this “just as your levellers and republicans do now”.35 In the event, while the belly is “pinched” by this action, the hands and the feet, and the rest of the members suffered so much for want of their old nourishment, that they fell sick, pined away, and wou’d have died, if they had not come to their senses just in time to save their lives[.]36

The fable urges the importance of the stomach to the health of the body politic. Clearly, and conventionally, the hands, feet and other members represent the ordinary people in the state, furthest away from the seat of power. This fable is one of Aesop’s and its function in its original context is similarly to appease “a dangerous tumult and insurrection of the people”.37 Menenius Agrippa, a Roman Consul, tells this tale to people refusing to pay their taxes. This scene is dramatized in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, where the assembly of the people are 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

More, Village Politics, p. 4. More, Village Politics, p. 4. More, Village Politics, pp. 12, 11. More, Village Politics, p. 10. More, Village Politics, p. 10. More, Village Politics, p. 10. More, Village Politics, p. 10. Fables of Æsop (Berwick: W. Phorson, 1788), p. 68.

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explicitly identified as the “big toe” in this trope because they are “one o’ the lowest, basest, poorest, / Of this most wise rebellion”.38 The moral is that while the stomach seems not to contribute much, its importance is crucial. The stomach clearly represents the government and the retelling of the fable makes More’s politics explicit. More declares her own personal belief that reform should begin with the individual taking responsibility for him or herself when she has Jack state that the “shortest way” to reform is to “mend thyself”.39 Reform begins at home and by the end of the book Tom is persuaded to refrain from drinking in the “Rose and Crown” as well as being successfully turned from his democrat and republican tendencies. This is less evidence of her faith in people’s ability to regulate themselves than it is her view that many of the problems of society lay with the individual. She attempts with her stories to cure society by curing its individual members. Clare Macdonald Shaw writes that in her tales More shows “how appropriate or unsuitable social behaviour results in the swift rise or fall of the individual within the system”.40 Anne Stott makes the point that More thinks of the poor as individuals as opposed to Burke’s “swinish multitude”; this is certainly true, and her texts are written to convince each individual to live by strict moral code.41 Monstrosity is a concept More uses in her poetry, though she does not always apply it to the individual. At the opening of Slavery : A Poem, More apostrophizes “LIBERTY”, whom she characterizes as a “sober Goddess”, “In smiles chastis’d, and decent graces dresst”.42 This Liberty, personified as gentle, mild and meek, is to be contrasted with that Other, who has been mistaken for her : Not that unlicens’d monster of the crowd, Whose roar terrific bursts in peals so loud, Deaf ’ning the ear of Peace: fierce Faction’s tool; Of rash Sedition born, and mad Misrule[.]43

This is the monstrous mob, also gendered female, who incites the “frantic vulgar” to “spurn at order” and to “outrage law”.44 More may be thinking here of the monster of the many-headed crowd, which Ian Haywood discusses in his book

38 William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, ed. by R. B. Parker (Oxford: OUP, 2008), i.1. 154–155. 39 More, Village Politics, p. 4. 40 Hannah More, Tales for the Common People and Other Cheap Repository Tracts, ed. Clare Macdonald Shaw (Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2002), p. vii. 41 Anne Stott, Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford: OUP, 2003), p. 190. 42 Hannah More, Slavery, a Poem (London: T. Cadell, 1788), p. 3 (ll. 19–20). 43 More, Slavery, a Poem, p. 3 (II. 17–20). 44 More, Slavery, a Poem, p. 3 (II. 27, 28).

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Bloody Romanticism.45 The blank verse is used to great effect in these lines, with the stress falling on the sounds described: “bursts”, “peals”, “loud”. The iamb is then inverted to become a trochee for the beginning of the next line, enacting the “Deaf ’ning” of the usually harmonious metrical pattern. The monster is dissected in the next lines (her mouth, cries, and so on) and is figured as diseased: “Convuls’d her voice, and pestilent her breath”.46 In another of her poems, “The Gin Shop: Or, a Peep into Prison”, gin is the “Monster’s name” that is the “reigning sin”.47 In both examples, she uses the word for emotive effect and to imply both physical and moral ugliness. More’s Cheap Repository Tracts were written in an attempt to counter the effects of radical chapbooks and are described by Stott as “wartime propaganda”.48 Though the word “monster” is not used in More’s The Story of Sinful Sally, one of the Tracts, the narrator seems to be thought of as monstrous by the end of the poem.49 She begins the poem by asking all women, whether from the country or city, to listen to her tale. By the end of the poem, she invokes the Latin etymology of “monstrare” when she demands that her listener (who is also, of course, the reader) look at her : “See how all my flesh is rotted / Stop, O Stranger, see me die!”50 By this point in the tale, Sally is the victim of venereal disease, which she has passed on to many others. In a brief interlude of remorse for her behaviour, she laments: Ah! how many youths so blooming By my wanton looks I’ve won; Then by vices all consuming Left them ruin’d and undone!51

It seems likely that the youths are ruined and undone because they have contracted venereal disease from Sally, then working as a prostitute; the symptoms of the disease are such that their looks will no longer be “blooming”. Her actions are compared to a spider that “poisons” every victim he catches in “his” web. Sally’s agency here – it is perhaps unusual that a woman should be the undoing of a man – continues with her recounting how she is pleased when her lover is 45 Ian Haywood, Bloody Romanticism: Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, 1776–1832 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 46 More, Slavery, a Poem, p. 4 (I. 31). 47 Hannah More, The Gin-Shop; or, a Peep into Prison (Bath: S. Hazard, 1798), ll. 12, 10. 48 Stott, Hannah More, p. 185. 49 Anon., Cheap Repository Tracts. The Story of Sinful Sally. Told by Herself […] (London: J. Marshall, 1796). This was originally published in February 1796 and is often attributed to More. See the notes to the poem in Macdonald Shaw’s edition (p. 176). 50 Anon., Cheap Repository Tracts. The Story of Sinful Sally, p. 7. See Chris Baldick on the etymology of the word, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and NineteenthCentury Writing (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987). 51 Anon., Cheap Repository Tracts. The Story of Sinful Sally, p. 6.

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hanged after she has informed on him for having committed murder at her instigation.52 Her final physical corruption mirrors her moral corruption: her “face so shrunk and spotted” is held in contrast to her innocent beauty at the start of the poem.53 There is some evidence that More questions Sally’s initial innocence though: the first-person narrative contains moments of possible ambiguity. Even when young, Sally tells us that she used to “stray” upon the meadow, a verb that is used to denote having wandered away and become lost and which is often applied to those who have become morally “lost”.54 She recalls that her parents “thought me free from blame”, which allows for the suggestion that in fact she was not free from blame. Indeed, it seems likely that More does not think Sally entirely free from responsibility for the monster that she becomes. Despite the fact that “Sir William” first corrupts her, introducing her to a life of debauchery and replacing her “simple Kersey gown” with one “bedeck’d in ribbons gay”, there are potential readings that suggest Sally has brought her misfortune upon herself.55 One such is the detail that when she first meets Sir William it is because she was “tripping” near his meadow “Vainly wishing to be seen”.56 It seems unlikely that when Sally’s repentance comes it is sufficient, and that she will be forgiven for her sins. While More’s own personal correspondence might reveal a far more understanding figure, aware of the real hardships that the poor had to undergo and of the inadequacy of the aid given by the state, such stories as that of ‘Sinful Sally’ are harsh in their condemnation. We might see in this poem the “illnatured strictness” Horace Walpole described the Cheap Repository Tracts as possessing.57 Stott writes that More’s heroes and heroines in these Tracts “rise through their own efforts and the benevolence of kind-hearted ladies, zealous magistrates, and godly clergymen – far-fetched scenarios in the 1790s”.58 Equally, the villains of the Tracts – such as “Sinful Sally”, Black Giles, and Rachel Tawney – become bad by means of their own failings; they are held responsible for their downfall and More pays little attention to possible contributing factors of a social or political nature. Though monstrosity had of course featured in medical writings before, the surgeon William Lawrence is credited with introducing to English audiences a new way of thinking about the monstrous. Lawrence’s particular contribution to representations of monstrosity was to see it as something for which the whole of 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

Anon., Cheap Repository Tracts. The Story of Sinful Sally, p. 7. Anon., Cheap Repository Tracts. The Story of Sinful Sally, p. 7. Anon., Cheap Repository Tracts. The Story of Sinful Sally, p. 1. Anon., Cheap Repository Tracts. The Story of Sinful Sally, p. 4. Anon., Cheap Repository Tracts. The Story of Sinful Sally, p. 4. Quoted in Stott, Hannah More, p. 179. Stott, Hannah More, p. 179.

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humankind had to take some responsibility. For Lawrence, the monstrous individual was the outward sign of social malaise. Melinda Cooper has written about the importance of Lawrence’s writings on teratogeny (the study of ‘monsters’) to Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein.59 Lawrence was influenced by rtienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire who had created teratogeny as a science.60 Geoffroy considered monstrosity to be important in the study of nature and invested much time in attempting to induce monstrous births in embryonic chickens. Before Geoffroy’s work, monsters had been supposed the caprice of nature, marvels to be wondered at. Working from this perspective, Georges Cuvier argued that animals were built to fit their environment and characterized them in terms of function. He believed there were four main types of living creature and that the classification of these types should be based on function. In contrast, Geoffroy believed in a “unity of composition” that existed between all living creatures and this was a law held to explain all of life.61 Geoffroy found similar structures in the bodies of many different animals, with different environments and different functions. For him, all living creatures were based on the same basic archetype and were connected to each other.62 Before Geoffroy’s work, it was thought that the mother’s imagination created the sex of the child during the formation of the foetus. Erasmus Darwin in Zoonomia (1794) writes that “monstrous births” may “depend on the imagination of the male parent”.63 Instead Geoffroy explained such occurrences as the result of universal generative laws of growth and as the effect of violent external causes: he thought he had proved this with his experiments on incubated chicks.64 Importantly for Geoffroy monsters were simply “variations on a plan of organization identical with that attributed to the normal state”.65 As Cooper puts it, for both Lawrence and Geoffroy, the monstrous was “a demonstration of nature’s unfathomable and always surprising possibilities of self-transformation, metamorphosis, and transmutation”.66 In other words, the mon59 Melinda Cooper, ‘Monstrous Progeny : The Teratological Tradition in Science and Literature’, in Frankenstein’s Science: Experiment and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780–1830, ed. by Christa Knellwolf and Jane Goodall (Surrey : Ashgate, 2008), pp. 87–117. 60 Cooper, ‘Monstrous Progeny’, p. 89. 61 See Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 8. 62 For more detail on this, see Toby Appel, The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate: French Biology in the Decades before Darwin (Oxford: OUP, 1987). 63 Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life, 2 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1794), i, 516. 64 See Stephen T. Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (Oxford: OUP, 2009), pp. 156–161. 65 Herv Le Guyader, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire: A Visionary Naturalist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 25. 66 Cooper, ‘Monstrous Progeny’, p. 88.

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strous was not unnatural but a part of nature, and showed how inventive nature could be. Going further than this, in the twentieth century, Georges Canguilhem stated that: “the normal type is the zero degree of monstrosity”.67 In other words, normality can be thought of as simply the absence of monstrosity. While Geoffroy and Lawrence did not go this far, they do consider monsters in a more positive light than had previously been the case. As Cooper points out, these arguments had consequences for contemporary politics.68 Geoffroy’s new theory of life meant that nature could be seen as constantly transforming and Burke’s “monstrous” French revolution was simply the proof of nature at work. In Lawrence’s entry on “Monster” for Rees’s Cyclopædia, he defines a monster as “a creature in whom the body in general, or some large and conspicuous part of it, deviates remarkably from the accustomed formation”.69 He lists a number of examples, ranging from the union of body parts, extra digits, “hare-lip”, to “the want of the brain”, “club feet”, spina bifida, and the resemblance of humans to animals.70 Monstrous formations can occur in bodies that are considered “otherwise perfect”.71 He admits that the “[t]he numerous examples of resemblances to animals must be referred to the imagination of the observers, as more exact modern observation does not at all confirm them”.72 He declares in no uncertain terms that monstrosity is not caused by the imagination of a parent during pregnancy. Indeed, his attitude towards ‘monstrosity’ shows the influence of Geoffrey’s work, particularly in his view that the study of monsters was invaluable for medical science: Monsters, in which considerable parts are wanting, seem particularly likely to assist in the prosecution of physiological researches. If we never saw animals, except in a perfect state, we would not form ideas of the comparative importance of the different organs.73

We need to study monsters, according to Lawrence, in order to understand how important different organs are to life. For example, when studying two preserved foetuses in the collection of John Hunter, Lawrence perceived that the foetus could develop to an advanced stage without the heart. He also found babies born without a brain whose bodies had developed otherwise.74 According to Cooper, Lawrence cared for a boy born with part of his brain missing and Lawrence’s 67 Georges Canguilhem, ‘Monstrosity and the Monstrous’, in The Body: A Reader, ed. by Miriam Fraser and Monica Greco (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 188. 68 Cooper, ‘Monstrous Progeny’, p. 92. 69 [Lawrence] ‘Monster’, n. p. 70 [Lawrence] ‘Monster’, n. p. 71 [Lawrence] ‘Monster’, n. p. 72 [Lawrence] ‘Monster’, n. p. 73 [Lawrence] ‘Monster’, n. p. 74 See Asma, On Monsters, pp. 160–62.

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observations of him “formed the basis of his Cylopedia entries on the monstrous, as well as much of his work on the brain”.75 Lawrence reveals the influence of Geoffroy’s theory of a “unity of composition” in all living beings when he notes that he has found instances of monstrosity in animals as well as humans: “We should observe, in the next place, that these deviations are not confined to the human subject; they are very frequent in animals”.76 He does admit though, that: “All the kinds of monstrosity have not, we believe been noticed in the latter”.77 So while it is the case that animals show some of the same deformities as man, they do not show them all. He goes on to make a larger distinction: We observe further, that such monstrous productions are almost, if not entirely, confined to domesticated animals; at least nearly all the recorded instances justify this assertion. Out of very numerous monstrous animals, of which the descriptions are referred to in the work of Haller, we find very few that can be suspected to have been in a state of nature.78

This suggests a divergence from Geoffroy. Wild animals do not reveal the same deformities as domesticated animals do. This leads Lawrence to conclude rather differently that the cause of monstrosity is to do with the way that we live our lives rather than a transcendental law of generation: The circumstances just mentioned; the great abundance and numerous kinds of monsters found in the human subject, their comparative rareness and fewer species in the domestic animals, and their probable entire absence in wild animals, lead us to suspect that they owe their origin to something connected with our peculiar mode of existence in this respect; in short, they resemble our diseases, which we believe to be altogether unknown to animals in a state of nature, and to exist in greater number in proportion as they are more and more completely domesticated and rendered artificial [.]79

As animals have become domesticated so they have acquired not only the habits of the humans they live in close quarters with but also their diseases. Since monstrosity is only to be found in lesser numbers of domesticated animals compared to humans, and since it has not been discovered in wild animals, this means that it must be the result of “our peculiar mode of existence”, or what we would now call our lifestyle.80 Lawrence finds that the physical deformities shared with human subjects increase in quantity as animals become “more and 75 76 77 78 79 80

Cooper, ‘Monstrous Progeny’, p. 94. [Lawrence] ‘Monster’, n. p. [Lawrence] ‘Monster’, n. p. [Lawrence] ‘Monster’, n. p. [Lawrence] ‘Monster’, n. p. Lawrence was not alone in blaming lifestyle for disease; see, for example, George Cheyne’s The English Malady (Dublin: George Risk, George Ewing, and William Smith, 1733).

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more completely domesticated and rendered artificial”. Animals move further away from their natural state as they become domesticated; they become like “artificial” rather than natural creatures. Lawrence may also be thinking about experiments in breeding to produce new, stronger, and fitter beings. A similar thing happens in Frankenstein, as by virtue of the method of his creation the Creature is similarly an artificial being far removed from anything intended by nature. Lawrence continues with a scathing attack on man’s assumed superiority over nature, which situates the surgeon within a radical tradition: At the top of the scale, whether we regard the number, the complication, or the severity of his diseases, stands the lord of the creation; if he boasts that his arts have subdued both animate and inanimate nature, the nosologist, unfolding his long and appalling catalogue, loudly proclaims that he is diseased, checks his triumph, and convinces him that he has paid too dear a price for his empire.81

Many natural philosophers at this time did boast that man was the “lord of creation” and that he had “subdued” nature. Humphry Davy is perhaps the most well-known example: his Discourse, Introductory to a Course of Lectures (1802) describes man as the “ruler of all the elements that surround him’; he has “penetrated” into nature’s ‘bosom […] for the purpose of allaying the restlessness of his desires, or of extending and increasing his power”.82 This speech has been found echoed in the lectures of Professor Waldman, Victor Frankenstein’s tutor at Ingolstadt University. In both texts man’s engagement with nature is seen as a conquest.83 In Lawrence’s quotation the response of the nosologist, who classifies disease, is to inform man of the quantity and severity of diseases to which he is vulnerable.84 The implication is that it is because of man’s conquest and empire of nature that he now suffers in this way. Man has brought monstrosity upon himself. The idea that monstrosity is a product of man’s over-reaching nature can be seen in Frankenstein. We know that Mary Shelley knew Lawrence and was well versed in the ‘vitality debate’ between him and his former mentor, John Abernethy in the Royal College of Surgeons between 1814 and 1819.85 Though his entry for “Life” for Cyclopædia is published after Shelley’s novel, Lawrence 81 [Lawrence] ‘Monster’, n. p. 82 Humphry Davy, A Discourse, Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry, delivered in the Royal Institution on the 21st January 1802 (London: J. Johnson, 1802), pp. 14–15. 83 Laura E. Crouch, ‘Davy’s A Discourse, Introductory to A Course of Lectures on Chemistry : A Possible Scientific Source of Frankenstein’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 27 (1978), 35–44. See also Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley : Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (London: Routledge, 1988). 84 The idea of empire as a source of disease is explored in Alan Bewell’s Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 85 See Ruston, Shelley and Vitality.

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mentions Geoffroy in much earlier writings.86 Comparative anatomy was a particular interest of Lawrence’s; his first publication in 1807 was a translation from the German of J. F. Blumenbach’s book on this subject.87 The Creature in Frankenstein identifies himself as a monster, asking “was I then a monster” as this realisation dawns on him, and is identified as a monster by many other characters.88 His physical deformities repulse people; at the end of the novel, Captain Walton describes his encounter with him with the following: “Never did I behold a vision so horrible as his face, of such loathsome, yet appalling hideousness”.89 The Creature cannot be considered to have brought his monstrosity upon himself: he was created this way. Frankenstein is solely culpable for having brought the Creature into existence and having chosen the monstrous features of his face and body. The disconnect between what Frankenstein intended in this regard (“I had selected his features as beautiful”) and the appearance of the living, moving corpse is shocking even to his creator : his “yellow skin”, “lustrous black” hair, “pearly” white teeth, “watery eyes” and “black lips” are repulsive.90 Read in the light of Lawrence’s entry in the Cyclopædia Frankenstein has taken something from nature and tampered with it, removing it far from anything intended by nature. He has made it monstrous. The Creature is monstrous in the classical sense too, as a hybrid between human and animal.91 The Creature can also be thought of as an ‘artificial’ being in a number of respects; using the Oxford English Dictionary definition of this term, he is “made or constructed by human skill, esp. in imitation of, or as a substitute for, something which is made or occurs naturally ; man-made”. There is some evidence to suggest that he was intended to have been an improvement on humans, having been built much taller, able to bear the extremes of heat and cold, and exist on a vegetable diet.92 Scenes in the novel prove these superior characteristics: he is more agile, faster, and can endure more physical hardship than man.93 Frankenstein can be seen as the dramatization of Lawrence’s theory of monstrosity. It is in the Creature’s acquaintance with mankind that his moral monstrosity develops: his rejection by society and the violence and horror with 86 For example, William Lawrence, An Introduction to Comparative Anatomy and Physiology […] (London: J. Callow, 1816), pp. 54, 73. 87 J. F. Blumenbach, A Short System of Comparative Anatomy, trans. by William Lawrence (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1807). Two publications by Geoffroy are also mentioned in this text, pp. 23, 344. 88 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. by Marilyn Butler (Oxford: OUP, 1993), pp. 96, 97, 104. 89 Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 187. 90 Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 39. 91 Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 37. 92 Shelley, Frankenstein, pp. 35–36, 96. 93 Shelley, Frankenstein, pp. 76, 169.

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which he is repelled create in him the desire for revenge. The Creature speaks of how his “heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and hatred”; it was “wrenched” from this state “by misery to vice and hatred” and the “violence of the change” was experienced as “torture”.94 He talks of having to “adapt” his “nature” to the new path of evil.95 Given Lawrence’s Cyclopædia definition – where only humans and domesticated animals are capable of monstrosity – the Creature’s monstrosity is, paradoxically, a peculiarly human characteristic. His desire for revenge and the murder of innocents are amongst the catalogue of monstrous acts of which humans are capable. A moral nosologist could hold Frankenstein to account for his unnatural experiment and argue that he has “paid too dear a price” for his attempted conquest of nature. Frankenstein demonstrates, more starkly than other texts produced by the Godwin circle, just how political, cultural and social institutions shape individuals. In short, the Creature becomes a murderer because of the way he is treated by society and society has to take its share of the blame for what happens. The novel encourages readers to reflect upon their own complicity in the worst crimes committed. Even in Burke’s and More’s use of the monstrous as a moral category there is a sense of physical deformity : both authors make full use of the suggestiveness of the trope of the body politic. In Frankenstein, the Creature can be seen as a physical manifestation of the outrageous and unnatural act that created him. The monstrous body is an image that is easily utilized for political purpose and both Burke and More think of the mob or the populace as a many-headed monster, whether “swinish” or diseased. Frankenstein plays on these anxieties, bringing to life their metaphorical tropes of the riotous, disenfranchised, labouring classes and giving them agency to wreak revenge. While the monster had been medicalized previously, with the emergence of Geoffroy’s work there is a new, far more positive light in which to see the monster, and Lawrence’s work – with his radical politics – brings this to the attention of Mary Shelley who exploits it to full advantage. Lawrence’s warning to man is heeded by Shelley, who makes Frankenstein pay the price for man’s treatment of nature.

94 Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 188. 95 Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 188.

Flora de Giovanni

Displaying the Anomalous Body. Wilkie Collins’s Freak Show

In Martha Stoddard Holmes’s view, “sensation fiction’s relationship to embodiment has been overdetermined from the start, given that its poetics, its plotting and characterization, and its critical reception have used the body as a nexus of expression, experience, and meaning-making”.1 The very name “sensation novel” hints at the corporeal rather than intellectual response it was believed to trigger in the reader. Its early critics, in fact, attacked it for “preaching to the nerves” (especially women’s nerves, since it was mainly aimed at a female readership). Defined in terms of bodily impact – poison, virus, plague, addictive drug, spicy food – it was accused of feeding the insatiable appetite of the modern reader, who craved for increasingly strong emotions. John Ruskin, for instance, in ‘Fiction Foul and Fair’ (1880) maintained that city life, with its dispiriting monotony and unwholesome secrecy, was among the causes for the rise of a narrative concerned with the description of monsters and disease, which, in an age of wild literary competition, relied for its excitement on grotesquely violent deaths and the “mortal phenomena of the sick-room”. Ruskin’s essay thus “provocatively locates writers, characters, and readers within one web of physical, mental and moral disease”.2 According to Meegan Kennedy, since medicine in the nineteenth century was “as much art as science” drawing upon romantic and realistic models alike, it provided a valuable tool for sensation fiction, which, in turn, was characterised by the “violent yoking of romance and realism”.3 Although the Victorian novel as a whole repeatedly dwelt on medical facts, sensation was literally obsessed with the body, which it depicted in exaggerated ways. Disability appears regularly and seems to be one of its structural features, since “what often drives ‘sensation’ is 1 Martha Stoddard Holmes, Mark Mossman, ‘Disability in Victorian Sensation Fiction’, in A Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed. by Pamela K. Gilbert (London: Blackwell, 2011), p. 493. 2 Martha Stoddard Holmes, ‘“Bolder with her Lover in the Dark”. Collins and Disabled Women’s Sexuality’, in Reality’s Dark Light, ed. by Maria K. Bachman and Don Richard Cox (Knoxville: The University of Toronto Press, 2003), p. 84. 3 Meegan Kennedy, ‘Medicine and Sensation’, in A Companion to Sensation Fiction, p. 481.

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the work of engaging, representing, and configuring unique bodily differences […], strange bodily behaviours […], and disruptions in characters’ mental and nervous lives”.4 Wilkie Collins, whose Poor Miss Finch (1872) was mentioned by Ruskin among the worst examples of what he called “fiction mecroyante”,5 was no exception. He showed a keen interest in medicine, and a fairly accurate scientific knowledge (on which he prided himself in some of the prefaces to his novels), but, at the same time, he succeeded in exploiting the emotional potential of his impaired figures to the full, adhering to – or rather, establishing – the rules of a mixed genre which was to be very popular in the last decades of the century precisely for its blending of the wild and the domestic. Officially born with Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) and practiced by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mrs Henry Wood, Sheridan Le Fanu and Charles Reade among the others, sensation fiction was a “unique mixture of contemporary domestic realism with elements of the Gothic romance”,6 which, nonetheless, reflected some of the main issues at stake in Victorian society, such as wrongful confinement to lunatic asylums, divorce, women’s property rights and their legal status within marriage.7 Though dealing with crime, adultery, bigamy and illegitimacy, the plots were set in an apparently proper bourgeois household, which in fact concealed one or more shameful secrets (hence the emergence of the detective-like figure, who was called upon to disclose the hidden truth). As a result, the traditional image of home was undermined, revealing its dark side: no longer “a shelter” and “a place of peace” ruled by women, whose duty of being pure was vital to the country and the race, the domestic sphere appeared tainted with vice, violence, and disorder. And the female image changed accordingly, the passive and angelic type turning into a passionate and purposeful heroine. Also influenced by the Newgate novel, sensational journalism, and the works of Charles Dickens, the genre partook of a number of features which belonged to stage melodrama, a most popular form of entertainment at the time: breathtaking action, startling coincidences, stereotyped and clear-cut characters, sentimentality, a happy ending where justice prevails, were common to both. Originally addressed to those who could not read, melodrama depicted a Manichean world in which depths and surfaces were synonymous, thanks to the meta-technique of externalisation: the outward appearance mirrored the char4 Stoddard Holmes, Mossman, ‘Disability in Victorian Sensation Fiction’, pp. 493–494. 5 In Ruskin’s opinion, the novel is an anatomical preparation for the general market, “in which the heroine is blind, the hero epileptic, and the obnoxious brother is found dead with his hands dropped off […]”. John Ruskin, ‘Fiction Foul and Fair’, Read Book Online (http://www. readbookonline.net/readOnLine/19618/, 06 May 2012). 6 Patrick Brantlinger, ‘What is “Sensational” about the “Sensation Novel”?’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 37 (1982), p. 1. 7 See Lyn Pickett, Wilkie Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 40ff.

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acter’s innermost soul, and the emotions, the conflicts and the moral dilemmas were made visible, expressed as they were in postures, gestures, and language, which was but one of the codes employed to convey meaning. In the nineteenth century, the novel, coming closer to the theatrical modes, increasingly relied on non-verbal signs. According to Juliet John, Dickens was among those who appropriated melodramatic aesthetics, as his choice to dramatise rather than analyse the psyche attests. Since he believed, as he wrote in ‘The Amusement of the People’ (1850), that dramatic entertainment could supply common people with an educational medium and an imaginative outlet, he imitated the popular theatre’s externality on a principle of cultural inclusivity, resorting to ostension in characterisation to an unprecedented degree.8 And Collins, a long-term friend and collaborator of his, and himself a keen theatregoer, a dramatist, and the adapter of his own novels for the stage, shared his purposes and techniques. Making the most of the body’s expressive potential, the melodramatic imagination, which nurtured popular fiction, quite often indulged in the depiction of “picturesque affliction”, staging impaired characters whose extreme physical conditions reflected equally extreme moral and emotional states and functioned as catalysts of the readers’ pathos. However, since the defective body was habitually associated with irrational excess both in literary and non-literary texts, the Victorian discourse on disability as a whole was overwhelmingly emotional and formed “a cross-disciplinary throng that encompass[ed] high and low culture and professional and popular contexts”:9 whether in debates about health, education and work or in narrative and drama, disability remained essentially a “melodramatic machine”, though increasingly perceived as a social problem in need of a programme of management. It is undeniable that nineteenth-century fiction contributed to the construction of the Victorian disabled people’s cultural identity, simultaneously drawing on and reinforcing the prejudices of the able-bodied when fashioning its maimed figures. Collins, who was a most prolific producer of crippled, blind and deaf-mutes, shaped his characters “in relation to genre and its demands for emotional charge, but also in relation to historically dynamic concepts of the body and disability”,10 relying on both melodramatic conventions and realistic modes of representation framed in the contemporary medical discourse. Concerned with marginality, interested in the psychological effects of physical impairment and the broader operations of phenomenological knowledge, and fascinated, in Kate Flint’s opinion, by the similarities between the normal and 8 Juliet John, Dickens’s Villains. Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 9. 9 Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction (Ann Arbor : The University of Michigan Press, 2009), p. 26. 10 Stoddard Holmes, Mossman, ‘Disability in Victorian Sensation Fiction’, p. 501.

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the abnormal much more than by their differences,11 he didn’t appear to adhere wholeheartedly to the current perception of impairment. If, as disability studies have recently pointed out, disability is a discursive construction and a representational system, Collins’s treatment of the non-normative body can be seen as a challenge to the conventional Victorian view of deformity, since it questioned the seemingly natural binaries able/disable, normal/abnormal, familiar/strange, on which the exclusionary concept of normalcy rested, producing cultural meanings and social relations. In analysing Hide and Seek, The Moonstone and Poor Miss Finch, for example, Martha Stoddard Holmes describes Collins’s “progressive transformation of disabled women characters from objects of pathos into sexual and domestic subjects with full access to […] courtship, marriage, and motherhood”.12 Defying the Victorian theories on the hereditary transmission of impairment, which, together with the unfavourable conditions of life, was believed to produce degeneracy in the unborn child, he gave the blind Lucilla Finch the female leading role in the story, endowing her with the ordinary destiny of any able-bodied heroine (that is, a loving husband and two children) – which was possibly among the reasons for the novel’s relative failure. According to this reading, Collins’s impaired characters cannot be labelled as freaks, in spite of their abnormal bodies which equally aroused curiosity and evoked conversation refusing to uphold the natural order and blurring the boundaries between normalcy and deviance.13 I doubt, however, that some of them – namely, the limbless Miserrimus Dexter in The Law and the Lady and the deaf and dumb Madonna in Hide and Seek – escape enfreakment. I agree with Martha Stoddard Holmes that the proxemics that governs the situation of the “afflicted” person differs substantially from that of the “monster”.14 Nonetheless, I maintain that the way both of them are gazed at throughout the narration makes a constant exhibition of them, establishing the usual visual dynamics between the able-bodied audience and the disabled exhibit, which is also a “ritual social enactment of exclusion from an imagined community of the fully human”.15 They are constituted as “spectacles” that the onlooker, whether fictional or real, is eager to watch. Their spectacularity is further emphasised by 11 See Kate Flint, ‘Disability and Difference’, in The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins, ed. by Jenny Bourne Taylor (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 153–167. 12 Stoddard Holmes, ‘“Bolder with her Lover in the Dark”’, pp. 61–62. 13 For the uncanny and thought-provoking volatility of the freak’s body, see Nadia Durbach, Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture (Berkley : University of California Press, 2010), pp. 3–4, and Marlene Tromp, Karin Valerius, ‘Toward Situating the Victorian Freak’, in Victorian Freaks, ed. by Marlene Tromp (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2008), pp. 1–18. 14 Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction, p. 14. 15 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, ‘Staring Back: Self-Representations of Disabled Performance Artists’, American Quarterly, 52 (2000), p. 335.

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their very close connection with the performance: as a matter of fact, Madonna works in a circus as a child and, once grown up, still shows her repressed inclination to entertain, staging a pantomime for the sake of her foster mother Lavvy, while Dexter engages compulsively in a number of shows of his own device, thus bringing to the fore the “invisible theater” embedded in disability.16 After the fashion of melodrama, which relies on visual identification to give its world order and shape, their bodily handicaps situate them into the fit narrative roles – respectively the angel-like speechless heroine and the villain, othered by impairment, whose hybridity, however, seems to symbolise his moral ambiguity, as we shall see. In Teresa Mangum’s opinion, “Collins’s deformities participate in a longestablished British tradition of exhibiting curiosities and of curiosity about human ‘exhibits’”.17 The literary display of their impairment, in fact, appears to resemble, in devices and effect, the freak shows of an age that Punch called of “deformito-mania” and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has recently described as “the epoch of ‘consolidation’ for freakery”,18 characterised, as it was, by the popularity of the freak show and a peculiar taxonomic obsession, which contributed to the definition of the phenomenon and to its impact on mainstream culture. Although in this period medical researchers were striving to be recognised as experts with specialised knowledge, still their classificatory systems encompassed vernacular categories and their techniques of display borrowed from public amusements – that is, scientific practices and theories “grew out of negotiations between newly-emerging professionals and the general public”.19 In their turn, in order to increase their profits, the Victorian managers resorted to doctors, who lent themselves to certify the authenticity of the prodigies on show. Like the showmen of his age, therefore, Collins relied on the reciprocal influence between medicine and popular culture to produce his freaks, their figures resulting from the blending of scientific knowledge, his actual experience of entertainment, and fictional conventions; like them, he tried to moderate “the intense social and cultural suspicion of the exhibited deformed”,20 affiliating Madonna to the respectable middle class (while Dexter, who does not share the bourgeois code of behaviour is much more disturbing, as we shall see). His display of impairment, moreover, though exploitative like theirs, equally “pro16 See Carrie Sandhal, Philip Auslander, ‘Disability Studies in Commotion with Performance Studies’, in Bodies in Commotion. Disability and Performance, ed. by Carrie Sandhal and Philip Auslander (Ann Arbour: The University of Michigan Press, 2005), pp. 1–12. 17 Teresa Mangum, ‘Wilkie Collins, Detection, and Deformity’, Dickens Studies Annual, 26 (1998), p. 289. 18 Tromp, Valerius, ‘Toward Situating the Victorian Freak’, p. 1. 19 Durbach, Spectacle of Deformity, p. 23. 20 Tromp, Valerius, ‘Toward Situating the Victorian Freak’, p. 26.

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moted discussion about the potential meaning attached to bodily anomalies”,21 provoking multiple interpretations which contributed to the public debate about the significance of physical difference and the social role of the disabled. Variously called a domestic melodrama, a proper sensation novel, a novel which has little to do with sensation, Hide and Seek is, in my opinion, a novel on the way to sensation, especially in its 1861 edition, on which Collins significantly worked between The Woman in White and No Name. Originally written in 1854, it underwent greater alterations than any other of his narratives, since he abridged and omitted those passages “which made [large] demands upon the reader’s patience”,22 an attempt, it appears, to respond to the public’s growing hunger for exciting and interesting stories. The plot unfolds along the disclosure of Mary Grice’s secret origins. A “mysterious foundling! aged 10 years!! totally deaf and dumb!!!”, as a flaming placard announces, she performs in Jubber’s circus, playing tricks with the cards, but, in fact, displaying her disability, which the ringmaster exploits to the utmost, appealing to his audience’s sympathy as Collins appealed to his: “[Mr Jubber] then lifted her upon the broad low wall which encircled the ring, and walked her round a little way […], inviting the spectators to test her total deafness by clapping their hands, shouting, or making any loud noise they pleased close at her ear”.23 Both the character and his author know how to go to the hearts of the paying public, as the children-rescue narrative that follows shows: little Mary is adopted by the painter Valentine Blyth and his sick wife Lavvy, thus entering a bourgeois home where she receives and reciprocates their loving care. Transformed into a middle-class daughter and redeemed from her dishonourable past, she is renamed Madonna after the Madonnas of Raphael, for the “softness, purity and feminine gentleness” inscribed in her features24 – a nom de plume that changes her circus star’s cheap visibility into a lofty pictorial one, though it echoes, it seems to me, the aggrandising titles that the promotional advertising frequently ascribed to circus performers. If Madonna’s family origins are unknown, her literary ones can be easily traced back to the melodrama, where mutes, epitomizing afflicted and helpless innocence, were often featured.25 “An exaggerated type of feminine virtue”, all the more so because speechless, she is, however, also a case study,26 the first attempt in English literature, as Collins himself said, “to draw the character of a 21 Durbach, Spectacle of Deformity, p. 28. 22 Wilkie Collins, ‘Preface to the Revised Edition”, in Hide and Seek (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 5. 23 Collins, Hide and Seek, p. 59. 24 Collins, Hide and Seek, p. 51. 25 See Peter Brooks, ‘The Text of Muteness’, New Literary History, 5 (1974), pp. 549–564 (p. 549). 26 Flint, ‘Disability and Difference’, p. 158.

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‘Deaf Mute’, simply and exactly after nature”27 (and this, according to Catherine Peters, is precisely what makes the novel sensational).28 For reliable materials on the subject, Collins resorted to John Kitto’s The Lost Senses (1845), a detailed description of his experience of deafness, caused by a fall from a ladder when he was a twelve-year-old boy. Madonna’s deafening (equally the result of a fall while performing in the circus), her subsequent dumbness, the doctor’s diagnosis and treatment, her sharpened faculties of observation which enable her to judge character at first glance, were all taken almost verbatim from Kitto’s memoir. Collins focused on the medical aspects of the little girl’s loss of hearing even more than on the spectacular disabling accident itself, skilfully blending pathos and science, melodrama and realism and openly recalling Kitto, possibly to confirm the trustworthiness of his reconstruction: “‘I had an exactly similar case with the mason’s boy’, ‘[the doctor] says, turning to the other doctor. ‘The shock of the fall has, I believe, paralysed the auditory nerve in her, as it did in him’”.29 But, as Elisabeth Gitter convincingly argues, she is also the “most perfectly mute fictional offspring” of Laura Bridgman, a world famous American blind-deaf, praised for her innocence and purity, who was certainly known to Collins through The Lost Senses and Dickens’s American Notes (1843). Like Laura – “the link between the ideal of feminine silence and the actual speechlessness of the deaf”30 – who was carefully taught to repress those “disagreeable” and “unladylike” noises that deaf people sometimes make, Madonna willingly renounced her unnatural gruff voice. Embracing silence, a sign of spiritualised femininity, she definitely turns into the typical Victorian heroine “too unworldly to use her tongue”, herself a recreation of the mute princess of fairy tale, much popularised by the folklorists such as the Grimm brothers. Usually, in nineteenth-century fiction impaired women were placed on the margins of the plot, where they played a minor role, promoting the others’ moral development and/or embodying those passions unbecoming to the perfect wife and mother-to-be. Based on a “twin structure”, the novels thus featured both a disabled and an able-bodied female character, the latter being the protagonist of the happy ending. In Hide and Seek, on the contrary, there is no traditional heroine to usurp Madonna’s role in the story (certainly a significant departure from the Victorian narrative pattern), but, I maintain, there is no traditional happy ending either. Like any other (hearing) girl of her age, she falls in love, but the handsome and thoughtless Zack Thorpe does not reciprocate her feeling, as the scene in which she anxiously presents him with her drawing of Venus un27 28 29 30

Collins, ‘Note to chapter VII’, in Hide and Seek, p. 431. See Catherine Peters, ‘Introduction’, in Hide and Seek, pp. VII–XXIII (p. IX). Collins, Hide and Seek, p. 97. Elisabeth Gitter, ‘Deaf-Mutes and Heroines in the Victorian Era’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 20 (1992), pp. 185–186.

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doubtedly shows. She expects the moment to be a great event in her life; her gift, however, is “placed on one side by other hands than the hands into which it had been given; laid down carelessly at the mere entrance of a servant with a tea-tray […]”.31 Although, in Martha Stoddard Holmes’s opinion, “Collins’s novels construct disabled women as figures of eros rather than pathos”,32 it seems to me that she is not substantially divested of pathos to be invested with eros, because, despite depicting her as an agent of desire, the author does not turn Madonna into an object of desire as well – which, in fact, adds to the pity she elicits in the reader : “Her eyes followed […] Zack, not reproachfully nor angrily – not even tearfully – but again with the same look of patient sadness, of gentle resignation to sorrow, which used to mark their expression so tenderly in the days of her bondage among the mountebanks of the travelling circus”.33 Even though she is objectified in erotic terms from the start, her beauty and womanly virtues cannot counterbalance her anomalous condition, which is the reason why the love story between her and Zack does not materialise. They might well be revealed to be brother and sister in the end, but it is precisely her deafness, not the spectre of incest, that “disables” the romance.34 Collins’s dissident view of the impaired girl as a sexual and domestic subject is thus re-contained within the established order it appears to undermine, reinforcing the accepted values and ultimately confirming the reader’s expectations: urged outside the borders of the normative sexual economy, Madonna is bound to end up an unmarried middleclass daughter who self-denyingly takes care of her foster parents all her life, recast, as it seems, in the role of the prepubescent, self-disciplined young woman traditionally associated with female disability. Her handicap, while excluding her from marriage and reproduction, also appears to tie her indefinitely to her past as a human exhibit. Throughout the story, in fact, she is the object of the curious gaze of those around her : whether performing in the circus as a child, or simply leading the retired life of the middle-class daughter she has become, she is on show, unwittingly staging the spectacle of her affliction by her mere presence. The deaf and dumb girl is the centre of attraction especially at Blyth’s painting exhibition, where in fact she provides a “much more interesting sight” than the pictures themselves for those who revel in the display of impairment. Collins seems to be aware of the stareand-tell ritual that, according to Rosemary Garland-Thomson, “constitutes

31 32 33 34

Collins, Hide and Seek, p. 156. Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction, p. 76. Collins, Hide and Seek, p. 156. According to some critics, “[…] Incest is brought in as an emergency measure to permit Collins to escape a real resolution of the situation between Madonna and Zack”. Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction, p. 83.

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disability identity in the social realm”,35 since in the novel Madonna’s defectiveness summons the gaze and raises questions: “[…] She happens to be the only person in Mr Blyth’s household at whom prying glances are directed, whenever she walks out. […] She seems to be fated to be used as a constant subject of conversation by her fellow creatures”.36 Blyth, who is very secretive about the girl’s past, partly fearing that her parents might show up and claim her back, removes her from sight as much as possible and disrupts the scopic dynamics between the non-disabled onlooker and the disabled curiosity : “She always wore her veil down, by my wish, when we went out; and our walks were generally into the country, instead of town way”.37 He appears to realise that all freaks are freaks of culture, not of nature, so constituted by the normal’s obsessive interest in difformity. When he first sees Madonna performing in the ring, described as “the great circle of gazers”, he distinguishes himself from the rest of the audience, who express their delight with murmurs of sympathy, kisses, lamentable exclamations: “Most assuredly, Valentine’s resolution [to go to the circus] did not proceed from that dastard insensibility to all decent respect for human suffering which could feast itself on the spectacle of calamity paraded for hire, in the person of a deaf and dumb child of ten years old”.38 Moreover, to his painterly eye, the little girl resembles an angel, a cherub, a devotional beauty, which makes her appearance in the circus all the more incongruous. Though an amusing character in Collins’s intentions, Blyth is very likely to be his author’s mouthpiece as far as criticism to scopophilia is concerned. However, Collins himself staged freak shows in his own writing, exploiting the powerful attraction prodigies and lusus naturae exerted on the public. This was basically the same for popular entertainment and the sensation novel, which Winifred Hughes significantly describes as akin “to a travelling-circus exhibition – prodigious, exciting, and agreeably grotesque”.39 Therefore, was his resistance to the coded visual distance between the subject and the object of the gaze also enacted outside his fictional world – not just between characters, that is, but also between the impaired character and his (curious) reader? Like his friend Dickens, Collins regularly attended shows and performances of different kinds and particularly Hide and Seek – in my opinion a sort of catalogue of different forms of popular entertainment – is punctuated by references to drama and pantomime, to circus and music hall, which were mostly depicted by the author as variously vicious, 35 Garland-Thomson, ‘Staring Back: Self-Representations of Disabled Performance Artists’, p. 335. 36 Collins, Hide and Seek, p. 48. 37 Collins, Hide and Seek, p. 418. 38 Collins, Hide and Seek, pp. 57–58. 39 Quoted in Andrew Radford, Victorian Sensation Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 18.

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squalid and unwholesome. Given his keen interest in the social phenomena of his time, Collins was certainly concerned with the growing importance of public amusements, that, by the 1860s, had won a great number of devotees, becoming a much debated issue. Leisure, a “relatively unstructured area […] where social divisions were particularly vulnerable”,40 was perceived as a threat to the discipline and cohesion of the middle class, and as dangerous to the young people’s development and education – an opinion that Collins appears to share as the scene at the Snuggery musical hall, which ends up in a colossal brawl, suggests. But Collins, an entertainer himself, was also aware of the importance of recreation and of the simple enjoyment it could bring even in its most unpolished and na„ve forms. In Hide and Seek, then, he appears to borrow from the circus and the music hall, scattering his novel with a number of “scenes in the circle”, which, contained in the overarching pattern of the plot, provide a diversion from the story’s main line and give his work the light touch of comedy. Blyth quite often is as awkward as a clown; Madonna’s uncle Mat Grice, temporarily renamed “The Samson of Kirk Street”, displays his exceptional strength lifting Valentine on his toe, like a strongman in the ring; he and Zack perform as jugglers respectively tossing and catching baked potatoes; Zack, “really a good mimic”, imitates Mrs Peckover’s personal peculiarities, improvising a humorous “dramatic entertainment”. And, most surprising of all, Madonna herself stages a pantomime for the amusement of Lavvy, Valentine’s bed-ridden wife, identifying the guests who attend Blyth’s painting exhibition. In accordance with her melodramatic origins, the deaf-mute girl would be expected to engage in a dumb show “at moments of particular pathos, […] of heightened moral and psychological conflict”,41 thus expressing her overwhelming emotion in postures and gestures which convey an ineffable meaning. But nothing of that sort occurs in this case: “Madonna doing the visitors [is] funnier than any play that ever was acted”.42 The scene, far from being necessary to the narrative development, appears, moreover, to shed a somewhat incongruous light on the heroine’s sweetness and innocence, altering the features of the conventional female image. In short, Madonna misbehaves, as she herself realises “looking as if she was a little afraid of the boldness of her own imitation”.43 Why, then, did Collins conceive this episode? Once more inspired by Kitto’s account of a deaf-mute who managed to describe different people by means of signs and expressions, he meant to stress, I think, two important aspects of his view of disability : namely, that bodily affliction can be borne with 40 Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and the Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 17. 41 Brooks, ‘The Text of Muteness’, p. 552. 42 Collins, Hide and Seek, p. 234. 43 Collins, Hide and Seek, p. 233.

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cheerfulness and kindness, taking its place “among the ingredients of happiness” (as he would openly state in the preface to Poor Miss Finch), and that physical deprivation can develop into compensatory strategies which enhance the impaired subject’s faculties. Thus Madonna’s pantomime is both a token of her affectionate disposition to Lavvy, who, in her turn, makes her the constant object of her motherly love, and the tangible sign of her extraordinary physiognomic ability, grounded in her quick and careful observation. Her dumbshow, however, also suggests the return of her repressed former circus self, carefully kept under control in accordance with her acquired middle-class daughter status, which prescribes propriety, seclusion – in a word, invisibility. Certainly, improvising a private show, Madonna does not locate herself within a pay-for-entry public arena, that is, she does not display her impairment and resulting abilities for hire, but Collins apparently does, supplying his circus-like sensation novel with a major attraction, one that titillates the reader’s curiosity : [Lavvy] saw the girl puckering up her fresh, rosy face into a childish imitation of old age, bending her light figure gravely in a succession of formal bows, and kissing her hand several times with extreme suavity and deliberation. These signs were meant to indicate Mrs Blyth’s father […] [Then, Madonna] raised her hand sharply, and began pulling at an imaginary whisker on her smooth cheek – then stood bold upright, and folded her arms majestically over her bosom. Mrs Blyth immediately recognized the originals of these two pantomime portrait-sketches.44

Madonna is thus exhibited on the page, her corporeal difference literally staged, her sign language amplified into a pantomime proper. As Rosemary Garland-Thomson maintains, the organizational principles that constituted freakdom between the nineteenth and the twentieth century were hybridity, excess and absence (the last one is obviously Madonna’s case).45 Collins’s most bizarre creature, Miserrimus Dexter, is characterised both by absence and hybridity. Born without legs – and, possibly, without genitals – he also embodies a number of mutually exclusive features (human/animal, organism/machine, male/female, child/adult), his corporeal instability being precisely the hallmark of the freak and the reason of his/her social and political disruptiveness.46 Moreover, he is a contradictory image of insanity, ranging from

44 Collins, Hide and Seek, p. 232. 45 Rosemary Garland-Thomson, Freakery. Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York/London: New York University Press, 1996), p. 5. 46 See Durbach, Spectacle of Deformity, pp. 3–4: “The freak was monstrous precisely because of the instability of its body : the freak could be both male and female, white and black, adult and child, and/or human and animal at the same time. Indeed, this ability to inhabit two categories at once, and thus to challenge the distinction between them, was the hallmark of the nineteenth and the early twentieth-century freak show performer […] And it was pre-

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“a state of high mania, complete with the classic symptoms of delusions of grandeur”,47 to catalepsy, amnesia, fits of laughter and histrionic gesticulations – all hysterical (and feminising) symptoms. His physical and mental derangements are somewhat connected, as Valeria Macallan suggest: “[…] Some allowance is surely to be made for the solitary, sedentary life that he leads. I am not learned enough to trace the influence of that life in making him what he is. But I think I can see the result in an over-excited imagination”.48 Dexter turns out to be an unpredictable and ever-surprising figure, whose exhibitionism is the apt counterpart to Valeria’s and – I would say – especially to the reader’s voyeurism. Collins’s imagination luxuriates in the creation of Dexter, “[who] returns a frisson of actual sensation to the sensation novel”,49 sharing with his author an irrepressible impulse towards “the exhibition rather than the repression of eccentricities”,50 which turns The Law and The Lady itself into a one-man freak show. The visual dynamics between the onlooker and the curiosity staged in the novel, places it, no doubt, within the “larger history of medical, popular, and literary displays of anomalous bodies”,51 which, on the whole, were not so different as they may seem, establishing a somewhat comparable coded distance between the subject and the object of the gaze, whether doctor and patient, or spectator and freak.52 But apparently Dexter can also be framed in nineteenthcentury psychological discourse, anticipating Nordau’s studies on degeneration (1892): verging on the border between eccentricity and madness, which, in the Darwinian theories of mental decay, were dangerously contiguous to each other, he breaks down, finally lapsing into idiocy. He is endowed with a feverish imagination (clearly a compensatory mental faculty developed in response to his defective body), that he morbidly pushes beyond its limits, departing from the normal conditions of life and losing hold of his identity : “I have an immense imagination. It runs riot at times. It makes an actor of me. I play the parts of all the heroes that ever lived. I feel their characters. I merge myself in their individualities. […] I can’t help it. I am obliged to do it”.53 According to Denis

47 48 49 50 51 52 53

cisely this corporeal and cultural volatility – this refusal to uphold the natural order – that made the freak so socially and politically disruptive and thus so frightening”. Jenny Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 224. Wilkie Collins, The Law and The Lady (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 222. Stoddard Holmes, ‘Queering the Marriage Plot’, in Victorian Freaks, p. 238. Mangum, ‘Wilkie Collins, Detection, and Deformity’, p. 289. Stoddard Holmes, ‘Queering the Marriage Plot’, p. 253. This is all too apparent in the story of John Merrick, the Elephant Man, who, initially exhibited by his impresario Norman and then by Doctor Treves, exchanged the side show for the anatomical theatre. Collins, The Law and The Lady, p. 218.

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Denisoff, “Miserrimus offers a textbook example of Nordau’s degenerate artist”,54 for his immodesty, egotism, emotionalism and lack of moral sense. Moreover, in sheer contempt for Philistine mediocrity, he equally allows his mind all sorts of licences and wanderings that he cannot ultimately keep under control, despising, at the same time, those “well-ordered civil occupations” which, in Nordau’s words, require “attention and constant heed to reality”.55 What Miserrimus lacks, it appears, is self-discipline (a feminising trait, according to the Victorian view of women as the irrational counterpart to men): when “the fit” is on him, all he can do is to abandon himself to his unbridled passions. The dialectic between excess and restraint is also characteristic of the Gothic villain, whose indulgence in emotional freedom results in self-harm. So Dexter’s self-destructive energy makes him the literary offspring of this type, while, at the same time, he borrows his seductive and genteel behaviour from the romantic criminal.56 This is “the first among melodramatic malefactors to develop a consciousness of his ability as an actor”,57 even though he is not simply a manipulator, but rather he combines, in Juliet John’s words, the principles of “heart” and “art”, exactly like Dexter. His shows are aimed at fascinating Valeria, who repeatedly visits him in the hope of throwing some light on the mystery of Sara’s death, her husband’s former wife. Miserrimus is the only one who knows that Sara, whom he was hopelessly in love with, has committed suicide. Nonetheless, he destroys her farewell letter, which would have acquitted her husband Eustace, who, consequently, is tried for murder. Valeria therefore investigates his past in order to overturn the verdict “not proven” returned by the jury and restore his name. However, he does not want her to, because, in so doing, she would hardly behave like a woman and a wife, whose task is to preside over the domestic sphere: “‘If you could control your curiosity’, [Eustace] answered sternly, ‘we might live happily enough. I thought I had married a woman who was superior to the vulgar failings of her sex. A good wife should know better than to pry into affairs of her husband’s with which she had no concern’”.58 But, since the (male) detective task is precisely to look at anything, Valeria is compelled to transgress gender boundaries. All through the narration, then, she is sub54 Denis Denisoff, ‘Framed and Hung. Collins and the Economic Beauty of the Manly Artist’, in Reality’s Dark Light, p. 48. See also Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home, p. 227. 55 Quoted in Denisoff, ‘Framed and Hung’, p. 48. 56 Among Dexter’s literary forefathers, mention can also be made of those disabled male characters of Victorian novels such as The Mill on the Floss and The Secret Garden, who, like him, are extremely sensitive, sympathetic towards women and, at times, peevish. See Flint, ‘Disability and Difference’, p. 155. 57 John, Dickens’s Villains, p. 61. 58 Collins, The Law and The Lady, p. 54.

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stantially an eye, the “bearer of the look”, especially so when she subverts the usual visual relationship between the active/male and the passive/female attending Dexter’s performances, where he takes on the traditional exhibitionist female role.59 If, in Leslie Fiedler’s view, “all freaks are perceived to one degree or another as erotic”,60 Dexter is overtly eroticised, as proved by his repeatedly emphasised beauty and especially by the scene in which he devours Valeria’s hand with kisses, “his lips burning like fire” (and she, surprisingly enough, forgives him). According to Peter Brooks, the rise of the novel is a major episode in the long history of curiosity. The novel takes this curiosity into the sphere of private life […] and it finds that what is most private, most difficult to speak of, most a problem to represent, is the private body. The body cannot be left in a non-signifying somatic realm. It must mean.61

Significantly, “curiosity”, as Teresa Mangum rightly states, seems to be a major key word in the text, referring both to Valeria’s obstinate will to discover the truth and to Dexter’s extraordinary body, which is constantly on display.62 The titles of the chapters in which Valeria meets him –‘Miserrimus Dexter : first view’ and ‘Miserrimus Dexter : second view’ – emphasise his spectacular nature, carefully prepared by the report of Eustace’s “celebrated” trial, highly sensational itself, where he appears as witness. His entrance into the courtroom, which recalls a performer’s entrance into the circus ring, is in fact utterly theatrical: “The crowded audience waited, in breathless expectation, for the appearance of the next witness. […] After a brief interval of delay, there was a sudden commotion among the audience, accompanied by suppressed exclamations of curiosity and surprise”.63 He who has simply been referred to as “the crippled gentleman” turns into the true attraction of the show, “a strange and startling creature – literally the half of a man”, who reveals himself to the spectators’ curious gaze: A coverlid, which had been thrown over his chair, had fallen off during his progress through the throng. The loss of it exposed to the public curiosity the head, the arms, and the trunk of a living human being: absolutely deprived of his lower limbs. To make this deformity all the more striking and all the more terrible, the victim of it was – as to his face and his body – an unusually handsome, and an unusually well-made man. […] 59 See Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Visual Culture: a Reader, ed. by Jessica Evand and Stuart Hall (London: Sage, 2004), pp. 381–389. 60 Leslie A.Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (New York: Anchor Books, 1993), p. 137. 61 Peter Brooks, Body Work (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 53. 62 Mangum, ‘Wilkie Collins, Detection, and Deformity’, p. 292. 63 Collins, The Law and The Lady, p. 172.

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His large, clear blue eyes, and his long, delicate white hands, were like the eyes and hands of a beautiful woman. He would have looked effeminate, but for the manly proportion of his throat and chest […].64

Miserrimus Dexter appears to be manifold, starting from his name, which combines his misery and his dexterity : his body seems to be supplemented by mechanical limbs, as his furious remark “My chair is me” undoubtedly suggests; his taste for precious and colourful clothes and his leisure activities (cooking, embroidering) are traditionally feminine; his face is youthful, his eyes as clear as a child’s, yet his smile reveals a number of old age wrinkles which are out of harmony with the rest. And, what’s more, he is perceived by the onlookers’ unsympathetic gaze as an animal: “a mixture of the tiger and the monkey”, “a monkey [that] looks best in a cage” – the missing link, in short, with which the freaks were frequently associated in promotional advertising.65 Making a spectacle of himself, “Dexter uses his social body and the gaze that constitutes it in a conscious, critical way, that returns power to him”.66 Whether in the serious plays he stages throughout the novel or in his circus act, named “Dexter’s Leapfrog”, he performs willingly, proudly, one might say, displaying both his defective body and his extraordinary mental faculties in an act of selfmaking, which reshapes his identity according to his own wishes (“I am Napoleon”, “I am Nelson”, “I am Shakespeare”, he shouts on his first meeting with Valeria). Resisting what Leslie Fiedler calls the “tyranny of the normal”, which causes “in those outside the Norm shame and self-hatred”,67 he provocatively perceives himself as arousing admiration, stubbornly refusing to recognise the grotesque effect he exerts on the spectator: […] [He] leapt rapidly over chair after chair, on his hands – his limbless body, now thrown back from the shoulders, and now thrown forward to keep the balance, in a manner at once wonderful and terrible to behold. ‘Dexter’s Leapfrog!’, he cried, cheerfully, perching himself, with his bird-like lightness, on the last of the prostrate chairs, when he had reached the further end of the room. ‘I’m pretty active, Mrs Valeria, considering I am a cripple. […]’. I seized desperately on the first excuse that occurred to me for getting away from him.68

64 Collins, The Law and The Lady, p. 173. 65 This was the case of Harvey Leach (or Leech), perhaps the prototype for Dexter, who was also known as the Man-Tiger. Leach, who had vestigial lower limbs, like Dexter performed acrobatic acts and was famous for his unpredictable temper. See Mangum, ‘Wilkie Collins, Detection, and Deformity’, p. 290. 66 Stoddard Holmes, ‘Queering the Marriage Plot’, p. 245. 67 Leslie Fiedler, ‘The Tyranny of the Normal’, in The Tyranny of the Normal. An Anthology, ed. by Carol Donley and Sheryl Buckley (Kent: The Kent State University Press, 1996), p. 9. 68 Collins, The Law and The Lady, pp. 259–260.

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Valeria, however, is the only character who does not recoil from Dexter in disgust and horror. Her response to him is mixed, insomuch as she seems to detect in him some common human traits: namely, a many-sided identity – which in Dexter’s case proliferates at an exceptionally rapid rate of progress -, and a childlike disposition to express, though “in a very reckless and boisterous way”, what the others consider weaknesses to be ashamed of. His impulse to get out of himself and live a number of vicarious lives in exchange, makes him the embodiment of human nature in a sort of unrestrained state – which, for all his otherness, is the sign of his disturbing kinship with the rest of us. A diminutive, unfinished man, he is the child in us run wild: “One of our first amusements as children (if we have any imagination at all) is to get out of our own characters, and to try the characters of other personages as a change […]. Mr Dexter lets out the secret, just as the children do – and, if that is madness, he is certainly mad”,69 Valeria remarks. Like any other freak, therefore, Dexter simultaneously symbolises “the absolute other and the essential self”,70 his bodily and mental volatility engaging the spectator/reader in disquieting speculations about what “normality” is and where its boundaries should be drawn. But what, in my opinion, makes him all the more uncanny is the setting of his acts and plays: being a gentleman of means, he gets himself a “sanctuary”, Prince Dexter’s Palace, which shields him from unwanted gazes. Here he performs for no other reason than his own pleasure – that is, he is not compelled to exhibit his deformities in order to earn a living – thus placing himself outside the entertainment industry. However, what in a “nation of ambitious shopkeepers” like Victorian England could divest the prodigies of their challenging diversity was precisely their participation in the market economy – a sign of their desire to conform to the rules, to be like all the others.71 Although Dexter’s house recalls the domain of public amusement since it resembles Madame Tussaud’s wax museum,72 it is definitely no freak show – no distinctive pay-for-entry performance space. Thus the display of his anomaly is not framed within the institutional form of the freak show, “where the performance of deviance was choreographed, where the carnivalesque potential of bodies run amok was negated by well-ordered representation”.73 Dexter, therefore, is out of control, free from all constraints, slave only to his overexcited, immoderate imagination, which finally loses him. He breaks down while acting The Story of a Mistress and a Maid, a drama of his own making, which 69 Collins, The Law and The Lady, p. 221. 70 Fiedler, ‘The Tyranny of the Normal’, p. 4. 71 Cindy Lacom, ‘“The Time is Sick and out of Joint”: Physical Disability in Victorian England’, PMLA, 120 (2005), p. 549. 72 Mangum, ‘Wilkie Collins, Detection, and Deformity’, p. 293. 73 Lacom, ‘“The Time is Sick and out of Joint”’, p. 549.

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Valeria hopes might indirectly disclose the secret of Eustace’s first wife’s death, definitely lapsing into madness in a highly melodramatic scene: He stopped abruptly, and raised himself erect in the chair ; he threw up both his hands above his head; and burst into a frightful screaming laugh. ‘Aha-ah-ah-ah! How funny! Why don’t you laugh? Funny, funny, funny, funny. Aha-ah-ah-ah–-’ He fell back in the chair. The shrill and dreadful laugh died away into a low sob. Then there was one long, deep, wearily-drawn breath. Then, nothing but a mute vacant face turned up to the ceiling, with eyes that looked blindly, with lips parted in a senseless, changeless grin.74

Medical science takes hold of Miserrimus Dexter, at last: in a state of absolute imbecility, he is confined to an asylum where he meets his death – “the best thing that can happen to that unhappy man” –,75 in accordance with a narrative paradigm which prescribes the ultimate expulsion of those elements of disorder whose subversive violations cannot be re-contained in a harmonious society. Nonetheless Collins does not label his character as a monster or as a hopeless villain, but rather does justice to him, acknowledging his mixed nature and measuring, as it is, his mischievousness: “Infamously as we now know him to have acted, the man was not a downright fiend. […] There are degrees in all wickedness”.76 Melodramatic black and white characterisation, when imported in the novel, acquires shades, evokes allowances: Valeria, who has earlier on justified Dexter’s eccentric behaviour on the grounds of his secluded and solitary life, is given the last word on him: “So that strange and many-sided life – with its guilt and its misery, its fitful flashes of poetry and humour, its fantastic gaiety, cruelty, and vanity – ran its destined course and faded like a dream!”77 Dexter’s multifarious self seems to be visibly inscribed in his centaur-like, hermaphroditic, infant body – literally an “unexpected juxtaposing of fragments” –78 which, in the fashion of melodrama, is his hallmark – a hybridity also hinting at the ambiguous moral response elicited by the character, which defies the rules of melodramatic fiction, bound to end up in a distinct, unequivocal judgement. “Melodrama works with emotions in a measured, highly structured, and definite way. […] then leaves us with the comfortable clarity of expressed pity, fear, and anger”, Martha Stoddard Holmes writes. But, she adds, the emotional closure can be incomplete, “when this feeling genre enters the more complex narrative space of the novel”.79 Collins appears simultaneously to draw on melodramatic models and to resist them, thus endowing his character with a sort of rough 74 75 76 77 78 79

Collins, The Law and The Lady, pp. 345–346. Collins, The Law and The Lady, p. 406. Collins, The Law and The Lady, pp. 401–402. Collins, The Law and The Lady, p. 407. Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home, p. 223. Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction, p. 18.

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complexity, enhanced by his ability to perform different roles and to play with identity, which, in Jenny Bourne Taylor’s view, makes him the symbol of the ambiguity of reality itself,80 hyper-represented by his unstable body and his unstable mind. However, resorting to one of his regressive rather than transgressive endings, Collins chooses to deprive Dexter of his multiple, indecipherable nature, recontaining him inside the accepted boundaries of the mainstream culture, that is, of medical science, whose authority to tell the normal from the abnormal the freak show usually called into question. Reducing him to “a specimen framed within contemporary medical discourse”,81 Collins gives medicine back his normative power and his novel a traditional closure. Dexter’s eccentricity, an early manifestation of his mental illness according to Victorian science, finally turns into insanity proper, following the degenerative model, according to which the latent signs of derangement will sooner or later emerge and take hold of the patient’s mind. Dexter is doomed from the start, as the doctor’s report clearly states: That he will end in madness (if he lives), I entertain little or no doubt. […] Without warning to himself or to others, the whole mental structure will give way ; and at a moment’s notice, while he is acting as quietly or speaking as intelligently as at his best time, the man will drop (if I may use the expression) into madness or idiocy. […] The balance once lost, will be lost for life”.82

Disability, in Collins’s intention, is not simply a device to attract the reader’s attention, but implies issues of representation and realism. Also the bodily and mentally deranged Dexter, who appears to be the champion of a fiction that derives his powerful impact from parading all sorts of irregularities, is shaped employing the findings and principles of the contemporary medical science. Impairment reveals itself to be a fundamental element of the sensation novel, one which, though duly spectacularised according to the needs of popular literature, retains nonetheless its realistic features and conforms to the description which medicine supplies. Problematised as disabled individuals, Madonna and Dexter provoke a number of reflections in the reader on the kind of existence they can aspire to and on the way disability and disease, whether bodily or mental, can be coped with. Madonna’s condition is realistically described, since, in her author’s intentions, she was meant to be the faithful literary image of a deaf-mute, as his extensive use of Kitto’s memoir proves. Dexter certainly undergoes a more fantastic reworking serving the purposes of a frankly sensational text, but his insanity equally implies Collins’s familiarity with the current notions of mono80 Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home, p. 225. 81 Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home, p. 226. 82 Collins, The Law and The Lady, pp. 281–282.

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mania and degeneration. Moreover, the writer seems to be aware that his mental illness is to be ascribed, at least in part, to his attempt to come to terms with his physical impairment and in fact, although Miserrimus plays the role of the villain in the plot, he is never utterly condemned. None of them, however, is allowed to leave his/her eccentric position and move to the centre of life being granted full access to social and sexual normality : Madonna, who has threatened the established order by desiring to become Zack’s wife, significantly does not achieve her goal and settles, so to say, for second best, contenting herself with the marginal unmarried daughter status which becomes her. Dexter, whose transgression to the accepted norms is too serious to be forgiven, is definitively banished. Although he challenges the traditional view of disability and madness, Collins appears to confirm and reinforce it in the end, following the reassuring certainties of the medical theory and practice of his age, which other the “abnormal” and confine him/her to a circumscribed, marginal space.

Alessandra Violi

Dead pro tem.: Suspended Animation and the Monstrosity of Death-Counterfeits

The undead Fans of the Gothic are sure to recognise in Edgar Allan Poe’s Valdemar one of the most monstrous of the anatomies invented by modernity. ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ (1845) tells of how Valdemar’s body, a terminal case of tuberculosis, is subjected by the doctors to an experiment in mesmerization (which we would today call hypnosis) in articulo mortis with a view to seeing whether “the encroachments of Death might be arrested by the process”.1 Once he has entered a state of deep trance, Valdemar effectively stops dying and is turned into a “sleep-waker”, surviving for about seven months in the state suspended between life and death: while his body loses little by little the signs of life (the limbs become rigid, the pulse weakens, the breath gives out), his tongue carries on regardless vibrating and producing sounds, even articulating the passage from cataleptic sleep to experienced death: “I have been sleeping – and now–now–I am dead”.2 Neither alive nor dead, Valdemar has become one of the undead, and it is only when the doctors decide to wake him from his mesmeric sleep that the process of dying renews its course: his body is reanimated for an instant with “hectic circles on the cheeks”, but it is shaken by ejaculations of “dead! dead!” which presage the imminent end, the crumbling “of his whole frame” into a liquid and putrefying mass.3 Poe is by no means a newcomer to this fascination with the threshold states between life and death: in ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’ (1844), we already have the mesmeric trance induced by a doctor which permits the character of Bedloe to live as a corpse and to narrate his own death live. The induced trance is 1 My endless gratitude to Richard Davies for his invaluable comments, support and help. This piece is dedicated to him and to the memory of my mother. E. A. Poe, ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (London: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 96. 2 Poe, ‘The Facts’, p. 101. 3 Poe, ‘The Facts’, pp. 102–103.

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not so very different from the syndrome of “suspended animation”, the unexpected catalepsy and “temporary pause” of the vital functions that afflicted the narrator of ‘The Premature Burial’ (1844), who is terrified by the innumerable cases of vivisepulture caused by similar apparent deaths.4 On the other hand, in ‘A Predicament’ (1838), it is the head of Psyche Zenobia, which has been cut off from the body by a perverse mechanism, that keeps the vital principles and the power of speech intact; and even the mummy in ‘Some Words with a Mummy’ (1845) wakes from her sleep of thousands of years to reveal that embalming is just a way of living life “in instalments […] to be revivified after a lapse of a certain period”:5 this is nothing other than another form of suspended animation, which is all the more effective for those, like her, who have been given up for dead because in a state of catalepsy and promptly embalmed while still alive: I fell into catalepsy, and it was considered by my best friends that I was either dead or should be; they accordingly embalmed me at once. […] The leading principle of embalmment consisted, with us, in the immediately arresting, and holding in perpetual abeyance, all the animal functions subjected to the process. To be brief, in whatever condition the individual was, at the period of embalment, in that condition he remained. […] I was embalmed alive, as you see me at present.6

Though they are often thought of as mere gothic clichs, the undead monsters in Poe and in much other nineteenth-century popular literature pick up the disquiets of a whole modern culture regarding the border between life and death. Elizabeth Barrett Browning writes to Poe that the case of Valdemar “is going the rounds in the newspapers […] throwing us all into dreadful doubts as to whether it can be true”, and Alison Winter confirms that “when Poe’s story was published in Britain, its audience took it seriously as an assertion of fact”.7 Indeed, Poe took his inspiration from the actual case history reported by Rev. Chauncy Hare Townshend in Facts in Mesmerism (1844), where, after stating that “the mesmeric state is a far truer image of death than sleep is”, the author recalls the case of a friend whose “life […] was prolonged, at least, two months by the action of mesmerism”.8 But what made Poe’s story true to life were the myriad bodies in hibernation, comatose and dormant yet undead that throng the Victorian scene, 4 5 6 7

Poe, ‘The Premature Burial’, in Complete Tales, p. 258. Poe, ‘Some Words with a Mummy’, in Complete Tales, p. 543. Poe, ‘Some Words’, p. 542. Quoted in Harold Beaver, ‘Commentary’, in The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. by H. Beaver (London: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 394; Alison Winter, Mesmerized. Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 121. 8 Rev. Chauncy Hare Townshend, Facts in Mesmerism: With Reasons for a Dispassionate Inquiry into it, 2nd edn (London: 1844), p. 538, p. xvi; on Poe and mesmerism see, among others, Martin Willis, Mesmerists, Monsters and Machines (Kent: The Kent State University Press, 2006), pp. 94–132.

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exhibited in private “magnetic soires” or publicly as shows, discussed in the medical literature and reported sensationalistically in the press. To cite just a few examples: the anonymous review in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1845) of Townshend’s book refers to experiments of “induced coma” observed in various “soires magnetiques” organised in private drawing rooms, where “cataleptic states” could affect either a single subject – a lady “fixed into a state of ghastly catalepsy, the eyes wide open, but the lids fixed, the features all rigid […] and pale as a corpse” – or be brought about in series, as in the terrifying chamber that contained seven patients in trance: “Not a word was spoken; the solemn silence, the immobility and deathlike pallor of the objects, was awful – they were as breathing corpses”.9 The private spectacle of the undead was then amplified in many public lectures given by itinerant hypnotisers, who often travelled with a ‘sleepwalker’ who would be put into trance when the occasion called for it in front of the public: a poster of 1844 advertising the demonstrations of W.J. Vernon, a London mesmerist who presented himself along with ‘Adolphe, the celebrated Somnambule de Paris’, thus promises to illustrate, among other extraordinary cases “the phenomena of Coma and Sleep-waking”.10 Alongside the performances of death-like states, the public was also exposed to cases of chronic sleepers. For instance, in 1850, the Times reported the peculiar case of the real-life cataleptic Ann Cromer, a young woman who had fallen into a trance-coma at the age of twelve and who had thereafter lived in a state of hibernation for nearly thirteen years. The Professor of anatomy and physiology at King’s College London, Herbert Mayo reports the effect that the “entranced girl” made on one of the many curious visitors to the house at Faringdon Gourney (Bristol), where the girl, “as pale as a corpse” and “all skin and bones, except her cheeks, which are puffy”, lived “lying in a state of general but not total suspension of the symptoms of life. Her breathing was perceptible by the heaving of the chest, and at times she had uttered low groans”.11 While Ann Cromer was protected within the domestic walls, her American analogue, a farm hand by the name of Cornelius Vroman, who had been in ‘suspended animation’ for more than five years, became one of the most popular medical attractions of the 1850s when wandering lecturer and healer Charles Came discovered him on a farm in Clarkson (New York) and decided to exhibit him on tour as ‘the Sleeping Man’, attracting not only the interest of the scientific community but also the disapproval of the press, which was scandalised by the display of a monster “not living, not dying, not dead […] a thing that should be kept out of sight and 9 ‘Mesmerism’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 57 (1845), p. 221, p. 224. 10 Winter, Mesmerized, p. 127. 11 The Times, 6 May 1850; Herbert Mayo, Popular Superstitions, and the Truths Contained Therein, with an Account of Mesmerism, 3rd edition (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1852), pp. 104–105.

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notice”.12 The cultural fixation with these threshold states was obviously fed also by the debate about the equation between the vital principle and electricity that had been set on foot by the experiments of Luigi Galvani and his followers, above all his nephew anatomist Giovanni Aldini. After subjecting the heads of some decapitated criminals to electrogalvanic reanimations – producing “strong contractions in all the muscles of the face, which were contorted in so irregular a manner that they exhibited the appearance of the most horrid grimaces” –13 in 1803 in London Aldini dedicated himself to the melodramatic resurrection of the recently executed corpse of Thomas Foster by means of electrical stimulation applied to the mouth and the ears: “On the first application of the arcs the jaws began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and the left eye actually opened”.14 As is well known, this is the medico-scientific background to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,15 but it is of interest to note that Aldini concludes his account of his experiments renaming natural death as “suspended animation”, and suggesting that galvanism might be an ideal remedy “to assist the whole animal system to resume its vital functions”.16 After all, it is thanks to the application of electricity that Poe’s mummy reawakens alive and kicking, thus numbering Egyptian embalming – which the London mummy parties of the 1830s had already turned into a spectacle –17 among the modern techniques of suspended animation.

The last nuance of life The nineteenth-century obsession with anatomies stuck in suspended animation crops up in very various social and cultural spaces and presents itself as the clearest symptom of the new concept of death that modern physiology was introducing. Beginning in the eighteenth century, doctors such as the Dane Jacques Bnigne Winslow (Mortis incertae signa, 1740) and his French translator 12 ‘Disgusting Exhibitions’, New York Daily Tribune, 22 September 1854; quoted in Fred Nadis, Wonder Shows. Performing Science, Magic and Religion in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), p. 43. 13 Giovanni Aldini, An Account of the Late Improvements in Galvanism (London: Cuthell and Martin, 1803), p. 68. 14 Aldini, Account, p. 193. 15 On Aldini, Frankenstein, and the debate on vitalism surrounding the novel see Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder (London: Harper Press, 2008), pp. 305–336. 16 Aldini, Account, pp. 207–208. 17 The famous public uwrappings of mummies, organized in London by surgeon and antiquarian Thomas Pettigrew in the 1830s, have been recently reconstructed by Roger Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 99–104. The electric resurrection of a mummy had already appeared in Jane Loudon’s proto science-fiction The Mummy, 1827.

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Jean Jacques Bruhier (Dissertation sur l’incertitude des signes de la mort, 1742), had already begun casting doubt on the traditional diagnostic signs of death and hypothesising that the end of the body was no longer a clear-cut and irreversible event, but rather a slow and gradual process inextricable from life itself.18 Both had examined hundreds of cases of the apparently dead, mostly due to catalepsy, asphyxia or other illness that simulate death, and both concluded that a body without breath, without heartbeat and without consciousness could nevertheless be reanimated; as we saw in the case of Valdemar, only putrefaction counted as an infallible proof of the death of the body. Historian Martin Pernick rightly adds that another cause of uncertainly about the signs of death was the beginning, also in the 1740s, of Ren Antoine Ramur’s experiments on artificial respiration, followed by the foundation of the first Humane Societies – the Royal Humane Society was founded in 1773 – which aimed to promote this and other techniques for reanimating victims of drowning and asphyxia.19 Death began to be seen as reversible and temporary, and Conan Doyle seems to recall this in his short tale Lot no. 249 (1892), a leading case of the late nineteenth-century stories of the uncanny about mummies. Alongside the resurrection of the “horrid, black, withered thing”,20 we find two other similar episodes: the temporary loss of consciousness of the young Egyptologist Edward Bellingham and the reanimation of his college mate William Monkhouse Lee, who had been believed dead by drowning. Doyle’s story carries “the full and clear narrative” of the young medical student Abercrombie Smith, who is both direct witness and also agent in the matter, and it concerns the supposed reawakening of an Egyptian mummy owned by Bellingham, and perhaps used by him as a weapon of revenge against his colleagues Smith and Monkhouse Lee. After a “midnight game with the mummy”, which probably caused the magic reanimation of the embalmed body that Bellingham keeps in his college room, Smith and Lee find him in a state of apoplexy. Lee thinks “he’s dying”, but Bellingham is only unconscious, with his eyes “open, the pupils dilated and the balls projecting a fixed and horrid stare”;21 restored to his senses by Smith, Bellingham then likens his state of uncon-

18 Claudio Milanesi, Mort apparente, mort imparfaite. M{decine et mentalit{s au XVIIIe siwcle (Paris: Payot, 1991), pp. 13–52. 19 See Martin S. Pernick, ‘Back from the Grave: Recurring Controversies over Defining and Diagnosing Death in History’, in Death: Beyond Whole-Brain Criteria ed. by Richard M. Zaner (Boston: Kluver Academic Publishers, 1988) pp. 17–74 (p. 22); see also Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003), pp. 211–226. 20 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘Lot no. 249’, in Tales of Unease, ed. by David Stuart Davies (Ware: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2000), p. 170. 21 Doyle, ‘Lot no. 249’, pp. 170–171.

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sciousness to the suspended life of the “gentleman” lying in the mummy case on his table: But what strange thing unconsciousness is! There is no measurement to it. I could not tell from my own sensations if it were seconds or weeks. Now that gentleman on the table was packed up in the days of the eleventh dynasty, some forty centuries ago, and yet if he could find his tongue, he would tell us that this lapse of time has been but a closing of the eyes and a reopening of them.22

Further on in the story, young Lee is found mysteriously drowned in the river, perhaps by the hand of the reanimated mummy, about whose reawakening Smith alone harbours suspicions. Even though Lee is given up for dead because of his “leaden-hued lips” and “rigid limbs”, Smith, who has been called to help because he is a medic, notices that “there’s still life in him” and, after ten minutes of “inflating and depressing the chest of the unconscious man”, manages in the end to reanimate him.23 Conan Doyle thus implicitly weaves together supernatural resurrection, suspended animation and medical reanimation, and at the end of the story insinuates a doubt about the extraordinary report of the young anatomist (“such is the narrative of Abercrombie Smith […] there is no one who can contradict his statement”),24 as if to suggest between the lines that the mummy’s supernatural reawakening might be nothing other than an extension of modern medical practice, the late nineteenth-century anatomists’ familiarity with the undead being pushed to its extreme preternatural consequences. This should come as no surprise, given not only Conan Doyle’s hankering after the occult sciences, but also the founding, in exactly the year that the story was published (1896), of the ‘London Society for the Prevention of Premature Burial’ by William Tebb to respond to the social panic created by the thousands of cases of the living dead still being recorded at the end of the century ; in the very same year Tebb collected the widely-read Premature Burial and how it May be Prevented, which bore the telling subtitle, With Special Reference to Trance, Catalepsy, and other forms of Suspended Animation.25 In his enquiry into the idea of death in the West, Philippe Ari{s tends to downplay the cultural impact of the eighteenth-century studies of Winslow and Bruhier, and to place them within the great wave of terror at apparent death that swept eighteenth-century Europe and that then, according to Ari{s, subsided with the new climate of medicalised death that was dominant in the later nine22 23 24 25

Doyle, ‘Lot no. 249’, p. 172. Doyle, ‘Lot no. 249’, p. 184. Doyle, ‘Lot no. 249’, pp. 193–194. Pernick, ‘Back from the Grave’, pp. 47–52; on Tebb and the London Society for the Prevention of Premature Burial see also George K. Behlmer, ‘Grave Doubts: Victorian Medicine, Moral Panic, and the Signs of Death’, Journal of British Studies, 42, 2 (2003), pp. 206–235 (pp. 228–235).

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teenth century : “at the end of the nineteenth century, apparent death had lost its obsessive power, its fascination. No-one believed any more in this sort of deadalive”.26 In fact, as we have seen, not only does the undead monster keep its obsessive power intact throughout modernity, but it was precisely these studies that led the way to the great replacement of the old (Christian) idea of a clear-cut and radical separation between life and death by the physiological idea of dying, which makes room for a gradual, partial and progressive extinction of the life forces spread through the bodily organs. What is more, the operation of Winslow and Bruhier is all the more interesting because, in addition to showing this concept’s genealogy, it also brings to light the interweaving of the cultural imaginary and medical science that governed how that very operation was constructed. Some of the cases of apparent death that Bruhier discusses are drawn from a reservoir of myths, legends and literary tales that run the gamut from Boccaccio’s Decameron to the fifteenth-century tale of the resurrection of the hanged Frenchwoman Anne de Grez, which then transmogrified from miraculous exemplum into the ‘scientific’ episode of the medical reanimation of Anne Green, hanged at Oxford.27 These are all hangovers from ancient superstitions and forms of the marvellous that flow into the invention of the modern lay conception of death and that, above all, follow the scheme made familiar by Terry Castle of the seventeenth-century interiorisation of the supernatural28 and migrate within human physiology, reconfiguring the body as a new territory of the uncanny. For modern medicine, apparent and transitory death is interiorised as a ‘normal’ phase of the dying body, and is a new intermediate space and time in which the stages of life and of death overlap and intertwine. In the words of the naturalist George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, who was among the first to introduce this novel concept in his Histoire Naturelle de l’Homme (1749), the body dies by degrees, and “la mort n’est que le dernier terme de cette suite de degrs, la derni{re nuance de la vie” [“death is nothing but the last term in [a] series of degrees, the last nuance of life”].29 As we find with the other denizens of the modern teratology, so also the undead monster is thus the product of the modern impulse to impose order and to classify the forms of living beings. Buffon goes so far as to posit a continuum between life and death and to hypothesise that living matter consists in “organic molecules” which, when com26 Philippe Ari{s, The Hour of Our Death, translated by Helen Weaver (London: Vintage, 1982), p. 403. 27 Milanesi, Mort apparente, pp. 40–52. 28 Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer. 18th-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 29 Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, Histoire naturelle de l’homme, in Oeuvres, dir. Stphane Schmitt and Cdric Crmi{re (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), p. 268. Our translation.

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posed and organised, go to make up the animal organism.30 This move to decentre the vital principle, which opens the way to a calculation of the energies present in different parts of the body, means that death can be relative and fragmented, and can strike some parts of the organism while it remains still living,31 supposing that the vitality of the molecules ceases with the body’s decomposition. As Diderot puts it, taking Buffon’s vitalist materialism to its logical conclusion, “Vivant, j’agis et ragis en masse … mort, j’agis et ragis en molcules … Je ne meurs donc pas?” [“Alive, I act and react as a mass … dead, I act and react as separate molecules …Don’t I die, then?”].32 Led by founding figures such as the physicians William Cullen, Robert Whytt and John Hunter, the researches of the nascent Enlightenment physiology proposed that the vital principle of matter is to be sought in the workings of the nerves and of the Life Force that animates them, an imponderable fluid that is likened to electricity, to magnetism and to galvanism; life is equated to ‘nervous sensibility’ and to ‘muscular irritability’, a sensorimotor potential that suffuses the whole of the living matter – hence Diderot’s ‘living’ as separate molecules –, and that can persist latently in states of apparent death. As we have seen, Aldini showed how electrogalvanism is able to give back spasms of neuromuscular ‘life’ to his undead in suspended animation. Along with the nervous fluid, vitalist theories also identified life as what resists the physical forces of entropy and of decomposition, a concept that comes to the fore in anatomist Xavier Bichat’s Recherches Physiologiques sur la Vie et la Mort (1800), which was a real turning point in the modern physiology of death. After having defined life as “l’ensemble des fonctions qui rsistent w la mort” [“the aggregate of functions which resist death”], Bichat proceeds to a systematic attempt to trace the many nuances of the passage between life and death: in the first place, he subdivides bodily life into ‘vegetative life’ (the organic life of “l’animal existant au dedans” [“the animal existing within”]) and ‘animal life’ (the life of the relations of “l’animal vivant au dehors” [“the animal living outside”),33 and then proceeds to study the partial, fragmentary and progressive 30 On the concept of ‘organic molecules’ between vitalist and mechanist theories in Buffon see Jacques Roger, Buffon: Life in Natural History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 135–138. 31 Buffon’s physiological theory of death placed particular emphasis on the gradual “ossification” and petrification of organic vitality with old age. He was also among the first to publish statistical studies on human mortality and life expectancy, thus contributing to the process of rationalization that would dominate modern attitudes towards death; Milanesi, Mort apparente, pp. 129–131. 32 Denis Diderot, RÞve de D’Alembert, in Entretien entre D’Alembert et Diderot, RÞve de D’Alembert, Suite de l’Entretien (Paris: rditions Bossard, 1921), p. 95. 33 Xavier Bichat, Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort, 3rd edition (Paris: Brosson, 1805), p. 1, p. 7.

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lives and deaths of the organs in an infinitesimal dispersion of death in life which, in the end, makes it inevitable to pose the question at what point in the process, if ever, does the organism as a whole cease to live?. As Peter Reill astutely observes “by the end of the century it had become an article of medical and educated belief that death was very difficult to differentiate from dying, that great differences existed between the really dead and the apparently dead”.34 It was in this climate that German doctor Christian Hufeland went so far as to posit an in-between condition between life and death, which he called Scheintod: The borderline between life and death appears by far not as certain and determined as one normally believed and as one should expect according to the traditional concepts of life and death. There exists between life and death a condition, which cannot be called life, but also which in no way can be termed death; a condition, in which our senses are not only unable to detect any trace of life, but in which the life force actually doesn’t live and has no effects or influence upon the body with which it is united.35

According to Foucault’s well-known claim in The Birth of the Clinic, this physiological approach signalled the onset of the medicalisation of death in modernity – who, except a doctor, will hereafter have the power to establish once and for all the decease of the body? –, which was already perceptible at the close of the eighteenth century in the institution of asylums for doubtful life, of “panoptica of the dead” as Reill calls them, in which bodies suspected of being ‘in-between’ were kept under surveillance, connected to a device set to ring in case they moved, for several days before final burial.36 Hufeland himself promoted the first Deadhouse in Frankfurt in 1823, which was followed by Vienna and Paris, while in England Robert Brandon argued in an article in the Medical Times of 1847 for the ‘Construction of Houses for the Reception of the Dead to be Used for the Recovery of those who are only in Trance’. By the 1880s, these medical institutions, not unlike mental asylums, had become full members of the arsenal of gothic fiction and of the panoptical spaces whose social management of monstrous deviancy that fiction mimed and contested. For instance, Wilkie Collins combines the two medical institutions in Jezebel’s Daughter (1880), a thriller set in the 1830s and concerning chemical experimentation of poisons and antidotes 34 Peter Hanns Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2005), p. 173. Reill mentions also the medical debate that arose, especially in postrevolutionary France, about the residual vital functions of guillotined heads (pp. 178–180), a theme that continued to resonate in Poe’s Psyche Zenobia and in the talking or sensitive decapitated heads of the French teratological imagination, from Nodier (Smarra) to Dumas (Le docteur myst{rieux) down to Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (Le secret de l’{chafaud); see Daniel Sangsue, Fantzmes, esprits et autres morts-vivants (Paris: Corti 2011), pp. 241–258. 35 Hufeland, Der Scheintod, oder Sammlung der wichtigsten Thatsachen und Bemerkungen darüber in alphabetischer Ordnung (Berlin: Matzdorf, 1808), quoted in Reill, Vitalizing Nature, p. 173. 36 Reill, Vitalizing Nature, p. 181; see also Pernick, ‘Back from the Grave’, pp. 31–35.

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to manipulate life and death, against the background of a critique of the treatment meted out in the Bedlam madhouse. The novel ends with a ‘resurrection scene’ in the Frankfurt Deadhouse whose detailed watching rituals, rules and “accessories” Collins specified in his dedicatory letter to have “studied on the spot”,37 and according to which the medical authority is called on in the first instance to certify death informally and subsequently, only after the three days allowed to the body to awaken, to observe the only certain and unmistakable sign of death, namely decomposition: He was allowed to certify the death informally, for the purpose of facilitating the funeral arrangements. But he was absolutely forbidden to give his written authority for the burial, before the expiration of three nights from the time of death; and he was further bound to certify that the signs of decomposition had actually begun to show themselves.38

After the inanimate body of the late Mrs Wagner has melodramatically reappeared as a ghost “over the black surface” of a curtain, the Deadhouse doctor (appropriately named Dormann, from the French for sleeping) draws up the second certificate, attesting that “the suspended vital forces in Mrs. Wagner had recovered their action in the Deadhouse of Frankfort, at half past one o’clock on the fourth of January” and that “he has professionally superintended the restoration to life”.39 Moreover, it appears that Wilkie Collins himself, in terror at the idea of being buried alive, kept on his bedside table a letter in which he directed his family to have him immediately inspected with great care by a doctor were he to be found dead of a morning.40 Despite the growing professional expertise of the medical class to which Collins himself refers, the diagnostic uncertainty about death and the enigma of the undead nevertheless continue to haunt as much medical discourse as the cultural imaginary of the fin de si{cle and later. Historian George Behlmer, who has reconstructed the social panic about death-like states in the late Victorian period, recalls how “the 1890s […] witnessed an explosion of popular concern about how dead bodies should be treated and, more fundamentally, about ensuring that the dead truly were dead”.41 Indeed, even among professional physicians great uncertainty reigned over how to distinguish “death counterfeits” from the real thing, to such an extent that doctors, such as Frazer Harris, 37 Wilkie Collins, Jezebel’s Daughter, in The Works of Wilkie Collins, 30 vols. (New York: Peter Fenelon Collier Publisher, 1895), vol. 27, p. 7. 38 Collins, Jezebel’s Daughter, p. 355. 39 Collins, Jezebel’s Daughter, p. 393, p. 397. 40 William Tebb and Edward Perry Vollum, Premature Burial and How it May be Prevented. With Special Reference to Trance, Catalepsy and Other Forms of Suspended Animation, 2nd ed. (London: Swann Sonnenschein & Company Edition, 1905), p. 188. 41 Behlmer, ‘Grave Doubts’, p. 207.

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writing in The Scientific Monthly as late as 1922, were concerned to clarify the nature of “Latent Life, or, Apparent Death”, reformulating it in the terminology of cellular death but still substantially endorsing the gradations that Buffon had picked out: “vegetables and animals can enter into a certain state in which, although they are not showing any of the ordinary signs of life, they are nevertheless not dead: this state is called latent life. […] In living matter, the molecular whirl is at its intensest; in latent life the molecular whirl is for a time arrested; in death the molecular whirl has stopped for ever”.42 Likewise, Martin Pernick confirms how in 1910, it was widely reported that suspended animation ‘so closely resembles death as to be indistinguishable from it’. […] From 1911 to the 1950s, popular articles reported these discoveries under headlines such as ‘What is death?’ Many of these publications admitted that doctors lacked a definitive definition of death, and that diagnostic mistakes were still being made.

Nevertheless, he adds, the threatening monstrosity of the undead had in the meantime evolved in a changed and more ambivalent imaginary of the inbetween body : “the unknown dimensions of death seemed to hold, not the threat of premature burial, but the hope of immortality, eternal youth, even travel through time”.43

The many deaths of Colonel Townshend The modern medicalisation of death delineated by commentators such as Foucault and Ari{s thus runs the risk of covering up a fertile archaeological terrain of the imaginary of suspended animation instead of excavating it. Limiting oneself to placing death under the aegis of the ‘panoptical’ institution and determining its progressive repression and invisibility throws a shadow over the fascinating ambivalence with which modern culture faces up to the enigma of the undead, the monstrous in-between categories that do indeed frighten but in which the extinction of life can also be transformed into its indefinite extension. We can get some grip on how this ambiguous imaginary operates by following the curious textual history of one of the first cases of suspended animation reported in English, that of Colonel Townshend, which was included in the treatise The English Malady (1773) by the well-known eighteenth-century nerve doctor, George Cheyne. In this vast catalogue of the diseases of the nerves that 42 The expression ‘death counterfeits’ is from Charles M. Tidy, Legal Medicine, (New York: Smith, Elder and Company, 1882), quoted in Behlmer, ‘Grave Doubts’, p. 209; Frazer Harris, ‘Latent Life, or, Apparent Death’, The Scientific Monthly, 14, 5 (1922), p. 432, p. 440. 43 Pernick, ‘Back from the Grave’, p. 55.

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struck modern English society, Cheyne indicates ecstatic sleep and catalepsy as the main symptoms of hysterical disturbance, thus paving the way to nineteenth-century physiology’s frequent identification between suspended animation and nervous hysteria. The case of Colonel Townshend nevertheless seems a surprising mystery also to Cheyne, to Dr Baynard and to the pharmacist Skrine, whom Townshend called on because “of an odd sensation he had for a time observed and felt in himself: which was, that composing himself, he could die or expire when he pleased, and yet, by an effort, or some how, he could come to life again; which it seems he had sometimes tried before he had sent for us”.44 Lacking any “common principle” with which to explain the phenomenon, the three scientists asked Townshend to repeat the experiment of his own death and reanimation in front of them: after they had checked that his pulse was regular, they stood by the bed on which Townshend lay, with Cheyne holding his right hand, Baynard with his own hand on Townshend’s heart and Skrine holding a mirror up to his lips; as Cheyne recounts: I found his pulse sink gradually, till at last I could not feel any […] Dr. Baynard could not feel the least motion in his heart, nor Mr. Skrine the least soil of breath on the bright mirror he held to his mouth; then each of us examined by turns his arm, heart and breath, but could not by the nicest scrutiny discover the least symptom of life in him.

While the three reasoned at length about a phenomenon that they found “inexplicable and unaccountable”, Townshend continued to remain dead, to such an extent that the doctors arrived at the conclusion “that he had carried the experiment too far, and at last [we] were satisfied that he was actually dead, and were just ready to leave him”. At the moment that they were leaving, however, they noticed that Townshend’s body was beginning to move; his pulse and his breathing started anew and the resurrected dead man began to speak, leaving the doctors “astonished to the last degree at this unexpected change […] confounded and puzzled, and not able to form any rational scheme that might account for it”.45 The very evening of the experiment, after drawing up a will, Townshend died once and for all, without the autopsy on his corpse, requested by himself, offering any scientific explanation of his mysterious ability to suspend his life at will. Having already been mentioned in Bruhier’s Dissertation as an episode that confirms the uncertain status of modern dying, the case of Townshend as the man who “could die or expire as he pleased”, became a classic of nineteenthcentury medicine about suspended animation, which, while trying to rationalise

44 George Cheyne, The English Malady (London: G. Strahan, 1733), p. 308. 45 Cheyne, English Malady, pp. 309–310.

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the astonishing phenomenon, ends up freighting it with new imaginary meanings. Walter Cooper Dendy, librarian to the medical society of London and senior surgeon to the Royal Infirmary for Children, cites the case in his The Philosophy of Mystery (1841), which was one of the most important of the many books in which early nineteenth-century doctors sought to offer physiological explanations of phenomena that had once been regarded as inexplicable or supernatural, such as belief in ghosts or, precisely, states of suspended animation. Colonel Townshend appears in the chapter on ‘Somnolence, Trance, Catalepsy’ – whose epigraph is some lines from Shakespeare’s Juliet in “borrowed likeness of shrunk death” – as a “case of undoubted authority”, even though Cheyne’s original description had been in the meantime enriched by details as much gothic as clinical: “This officer was able to suspend the action both of his heart and lungs, after which he became motionless, icy cold, and rigid, a glassy film overspreading his eyes”.46 Placed in the context of innumerable other past and present examples of sleepers, Colonel Townshend comes now to be classified as a case of voluntary trance, a nervous pathology “in which there is protracted derangement of volition or the will, sensibility and voluntary action being suspended, while the vital functions are performed, yet with diminished energy”.47 The pathological diagnosis, which treats trance as merely a state of “death counterfeit”, soon gives way – in the chapter with the telling title ‘On Resuscitation’ – to the physiology of dying where, after appropriate reference to Bruhier, Dendy treats Townshend’s condition of simulated death as effectively indistinguishable from the real death of the undead: At what moment would the mind cease to influence the body, were there no recovery from trance? [We know] nothing demonstrative. It is not, however, when the body seems dead, for consciousness, or the systemic life, may for a while be suspended by mere cold. But dissolution is that point, unknown to us, when the principle of life (whether that be the influence of arterial blood, or electricity, magnetism, or galvanism) is not excitable, when molecular death has ensued; not even irritability, that vis insita or vis nervosa of Haller remaining. Of course, mind must instantly depart on the commencement of decomposition, the brain being then totally incompatible to mind.48

From this point of view, Colonel Townshend’s “faculty of self-reanimation” suggests that the trance is not a way of counterfeiting death but rather of controlling it, to put the systemic life on hold and die but only pro tem. Instead of resolving the supernatural mystery of cataleptic states, Dendy’s medical phi46 Walter Cooper Dendy, The Philosophy of Mystery, 2nd edition (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1847), p. 370. 47 Dendy, Philosophy of Mystery, p. 366. 48 Dendy, Philosophy of Mystery, p. 387.

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losophy thus risks redoubling it, preferring to appeal to a different natural explanation, already alluded to in reference to the power of cold to suspend animation: towards the end of the book, in the chapter dedicated to ‘Analysis of Trance and its Synonyms’ Dendy hypothesises that “there is a close analogy between this state and the hybernation of animals”,49 thus leaving it to zoology to resolve the mystery. Just a few years after Dendy’s book, proto-science-fiction writing was in any case conjuring up the idea that a human being could be put into hibernation by being frozen and then woken up again at the right moment: this first effort at cryogenesis was experimented by “a very learned chemist in Stockholm” in Lydia Maria Child’s novella Hilda Silfverling: A Fantasy (1845), where the leading character, wrongly condemned to death for a supposed infanticide (just like Anne de Grez and Anne Green in Bruhier’s legends), is reprieved by a doctor so that she can be a guinea pig in his experiment in human hibernation: “he had discovered a process of artificial cold, by which he could suspend animation in living creatures, and restore it at any prescribed time. He had in one apartment of his laboratory a bear that had been in a torpid state five years, a wolf two years, and so on”.50 Rather than being in a Deadhouse, Hilda Silfverling thus undergoes her temporary death (she will be reawoken a hundred years later) in a room “built of stone and rendered intensely cold by an artificial process”, a “tomb-like apartment” surrounded by “tiers of massive stone shelves, on which reposed various objects in a torpid state”,51 which is not so very different from the rooms of so many nineteenth-century museums of comparative anatomy, in which stuffed animals and wax works of human bodies were exhibited to the public as if they were suspended in an eternal hibernation. Dreamt up by literature, the equation between trances and states of hibernation soon took on full scientific authoritativeness in the essay Observations on Trance, or Human Hybernation (1850) by James Braid, the English surgeon who passed into history having legitimated mesmeric practices converting them into those of “hypnotism”, a term that he coined in 1843 and that we still recognise today.52 Right from the start in the late eighteenth century, with the theories of animal magnetism of the Viennese doctor Franz Anton Mesmer (M{moires sur la d{couverte du magn{tisme animal, 1779), mesmeric therapy promised to be able to control the vital fluid of the human nervous system by means of the hypnotic trance, going so far, with Chastenet de Puysgur’s experiments on states of somnambulism and sleeping trance, to present itself, as we have seen, as a technique for producing, suspending and revoking the death of the body. For all 49 Dendy, Philosophy of Mystery, p. 399. 50 Lydia Maria Child, Hilda Silfverling: A Fantasy, in A Lydia Maria Child Reader, ed. by Caroline L. Karcher (Duke: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 375–376. 51 Child, Hilda Silfverling, p. 377. 52 On mesmerism and hypnosis see Winter, Mesmerized, pp. 184–185.

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that they would make it very popular in a back and forth between science and the occult well into the twentieth century, Braid held the transcendental aspects of mesmerism at arm’s length and regarded the suspended animation of trance as a mere question of natural physiology : it was a disease of the nervous system akin to the hibernation in animals, which certain special individuals had the power to reproduce “by throwing themselves into this state of temporary hybernation, or trance”.53 And here we again find the man who can die at will, the “well-attested case of Colonel Townsend [sic.]”, which Braid reports faithfully in Cheyne’s own words,54 except that he then goes on to compare it to the extraordinary feats of magician-fakirs in distant India, to which Braid’s British informants report witnessing personally. Their eyewitness accounts tell, with plenty of local detail, of the marvellous powers of these exceptional individuals, voluntarily putting themselves into a trance, to suspend their vital powers, to be buried even for more than a day and to be ‘resurrected’, or to become immune, just like corpses, to any feeling of pain or other stimulation. The technique of dying at will is described by one of Braid’s informants as an “art which has hitherto escaped the researches of European science”,55 which is thus the preserve of bizarre exotic “monsters” who deflect the pathology of trance onto the primitive elsewhere of the Indian colonies. In Braid’s view, the affair is not so very surprising when compared with the recent discoveries regarding the anaesthetic effects of such substances as ether or chloroform,56 with the ability of some animals such as bears, marmosets and other warm-blooded animals to periodically fall into a deep “winter sleep” or “hibernation”, or again with the capacity of certain animalcula to die and come back to life by reversing the process of the drying up of the vital force: “some small microscopic animals have been apparently killed and revived again by drying and then applying moisture to them”.57 Dying pro tem. is all in all the ambiguous (both marvellous and monstrous) prerogative of a human physiology that has descended to the animal level, whether that be a matter of pathology or of the exotic marvel: We have the analogue to these feats of the Fakeers, not merely in the hybernating animals which periodically pass into the torpid state, and which, consequently, in them, 53 James Braid, Observations on Trance, or Human Hybernation (London: John Churchill, 1850), pp. 7–8. 54 Braid, Observations, pp. 8–9. 55 Braid, Observations, p. 27. 56 Braid, Observations, p. 32. The question of suspended animation in the mid-nineteenth century was obviously fed also by the advent of anaesthetic techniques, and the use of mesmerism and hypnosis for this purpose before the introduction of ether (1846) and chloroform (1847); British pioneer anaesthesist Benjamin Ward Richardson called this modern chemical limbo ‘suspended animation’; see Behlmer, ‘Grave Doubts’, pp. 218–219; Pernick, ‘Back from the Grave’, pp. 40–41; Winter, Mesmerized, pp. 171–186. 57 Braid, Observations, p. 44, p. 48.

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is looked on as a mere matter of course, and not all to be wondered at; but we have it also occurring spontaneously, in the human species, in the disease called catalepsy or trance.

When Braid raises the question of the origin of the Indian practices of temporary death, it is telling that he describes them as “recent”, hazarding the response, which reveals the paradigmatically Western anxiety, that it is to avoid the sure and certain sign of death, namely decomposition: “they die voluntarily, in order that they may escape the ordinary pangs of dissolution”.58 On the one hand, given that suspended animation appears among the oldest practices in Indian culture, Braid may perhaps have had in mind the very popular “recent” shows of illusionistic magic that, after 1827, imported Brahmins and fakirs into Europe to present the number “etherial suspension”, in which a body was reduced to a state of death-like rigidity and suspended in the air ; in 1848 star magicians like Robert-Houdin and John Henry Anderson competed on the stages of London to put on the best show, which was soon dubbed by Anderson “the new cradle of mesmeric sleep”.59 The mass-entertainment magicians’ repertoires included also the number called “premature burial”, which was still being staged by the escapologist Harry Houdini in 1914, but it is symptomatic that, with the passing of time, this magical show hybridises with the scientific experiment, as a sign that different and apparently distant cultural circles shared an interest in the liminal body of the undead. In the chapter on ‘Human Hybernation’ in the collection On Premature Burial (1896), to which we have already made reference, William Tebb recalls the example of Colonel Townshend, Braid and his theories of “strange fakir feats” and “human hybernation”, and cites as yet another proof of the phenomenon, “a case of induced trance and experimental burial, not unlike that of the Indian fakirs” that had recently appeared in the London Daily Chronicle: that of lead-worker Alfred Wootton, the first man to be “buried alive by way of amusement” at the London Aquarium in 1896, before a public made up not only of medical authorities, but also of a crowd of the curious.60 If this confirms the ambiguous attraction of the undead in the culture of the time, Braid’s reference to the power of trance to slow down dissolution helps us to understand one of the reasons for the fascination it exerted: by preserving the body from decomposition, human trance and hibernation present themselves to the nineteenth-century imagination as artificial techniques to keep death in abeyance, as forms of modern embalming that are able to arrest molecular death 58 Braid, Observations, pp. 27–28. 59 On Robert-Houdin and Anderson see Simon During, Modern Enchantments (Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 114–124; for his number, Robert-Houdin made use of the newly discovered anesthetic ether. 60 Tebb and Vollum, Premature Burial, pp. 73–79.

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and so to extend life indefinitely, allowing it to be drawn out, as Poe’s mummy said, “in instalments”. It is not by chance that Braid suggests that the best therapy for the states of hibernation is precisely hypnosis, which converts the monstrous dysfunction of the body that naturally enters a temporary death into the new medical art of suspending the vital functions and creating an undead at will. If, to cap it off, we may be permitted a last text, from the very same year as Braid’s essay, in which Colonel Townshend is called on to perform his death, we call on Popular Superstitions (1850) by the physiologist Herbert Mayo, whom we have already heard taking an interest in chronic sleepers. While this should have been, to all intents and purposes, yet another debunking of the ancient superstitions that hang on in modern civilisation, Colonel Townshend lends himself to the purpose but this time enlisted among the ‘natural’ and scientific examples of ‘Vampyrism’, a phenomenon that had been considered supernatural and that was now known to the scientific community as Scheintod, the borderline condition: “the Germans express this condition of the living body by the term ‘Scheintod’, which signifies exactly apparent death; and it is perhaps a better term than our English equivalent, ‘suspended animation’. […] I propose to employ the term death-trance”.61 Unlike the trance-sleep and the trance-coma, which are classified as diseases, Mayo sees in death-trance “a positive status […] The patient, the term of the death-trance having expired, occasionally suddenly wakes, entirely and at once restored. Oftener, however, the machinery which has been stopped seems to require to be jogged – then it goes on again”.62 On the one hand, Mayo reassures his readers that the monsters known as vampires do not exist, on the other, he introduces its human counterpart, which is a ‘positive’ creature, the undead, a machine that can be stopped, jogged and set in motion again. When we come to the “most celebrated instance of Colonel Townshend”, Cheyne’s original report is modified in a telling detail, namely that his vampiric performance is rendered automatic and repeatable at will: “he had often invited them [Cheyne, Baynard e Skrine] to witness the phenomenon of his dying and coming to life again; but they had hitherto refused, from fear of the consequences to himself; at last they assented”.63 What was going on in Colonel Townshend’s performance of death? Was his body in deep sleep, counterfeiting death, suffering from a pathological trance, hybernating like an animal, arresting and replaying his vital functions, suspended vampire-like in-between life and death? Monstrous physiology or modern marvel? While the medical establishment, the popular press, the social reformers, the circles of occult magnetism and of magical shows and enter61 Mayo, Popular Superstitions, p. 42 62 Mayo, Popular Superstitions, p. 43. 63 Mayo, Popular Superstitions, p. 45.

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tainments were arguing out the issue of suspended animation, one of the last textual migrations that Colonel Townshend underwent is to be found in Bram Stoker’s notes for Dracula, passing on to the fictional imaginary the task of exploring the creative potency of this trope.

A vacant seat though marked ‘engaged’ As Anne Stiles has recently brought to critical attention, along with other notes on animal hibernation, the case of Colonel Townshend appears among Stoker’s working papers for the creation of his famous vampire, even though his source is not Mayo (whom Stoker had in any case read), but the discussion of trances in Robert Graves’ The Theory of Dreams (1808). Stoker’s interest in death-like states is well known: Stiles observes that “Dracula and his victims enter and exit deathlike trance states ‘at pleasure’ or when commanded by the Count”, and Dracula has been rightly described as “a remarkable fusion of fin-de-si{cle discourses on trance”,64 in which the newborn Society for Psychical Research’s experiments with mediums reverberate with the controversial uses of hypnotism by French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot in the cure of hysteria, which caused widespread debate in the same years as the novel was published. Hence, Stiles wonders why Stoker was interested in so hoary an episode as that of Townshend. Quite apart from the legendary pedigree that we have swiftly reviewed, one might suggest that the case of the undead Townshend crystallises that ambivalent imaginary of Stoker’s contemporaries about suspended animation, given that his Scheintod is at once a monstrous and terrifying condition as well as an emblem of a marvellous modern technique for turning extinction into extension. A few years before Stoker, J. Maclaren Cobben had already presented in his novel Master of His Fate (1890), a version of vampirism connected to a mysterious epidemic that had struck London, filling the city with bodies that were “to all appearance dead”,65 but that had really fallen into a deep death-trance. The frightful series of apparent deaths turns out to be attributable to the vampire-like figure of Julius Courtney, who had learnt the hypnotic technique for devitalising the bodies of his victims and for recharging his own with their life force from the “great Charbon” (Charcot) of Paris. For Courtney had been undead for many years: “I am dying – I have been dying for a dozen years, and for a dozen years I 64 Anne Stiles, Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 59–60, Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 210. 65 James Maclaren Cobben, Master of His Fate (Elstree: Greenhill Books, 1987), p. 45.

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have resisted and overcome death”. His friend and co-student of Charbon, Lefevre, to whom Courtney confesses his secret, replies, however, that, in his view, medicine has arrived “at something like the same discovery”,66 by studying human physiology and making use of complex hypnotic practices, electrical machines and chemical compounds with which we see him “resuscitating” the trance epidemic’s victims in hospital. For Cobben, then, both the vampire and the doctor are experts in the art of dying pro tem., and it is in this sense that, in Jani Scandura’s view, Dracula too may be seen as an emblem of the modern power of embalming life, a power that makes it similar to the cataleptic Townshend or to the techniques of hypnosis, hibernation, anaesthesia, or the literal embalming with which modern physiology has produced its undead.67 Indeed, Scandura recalls how, following the American lead, it was precisely at the end of the nineteenth century that techniques for embalming cadavers began to spread in England. Often enough this was a response to the terror of premature burial, but it expressed also the cultural fantasies surrounding suspended animation, such as those that led actress Sarah Bernhardt to perform her own death in a coffin (as we see in a very well-known photograph of 1884, which ended up also on postcards), or those that filled fairgrounds at the end of the century with ‘sleeping beauties’ who made a spectacle out of apparent death.68 As Scandura remarks, “while embalming seemed to guarantee one’s death before burial, it also made the corpse a confusing signifier of death. The sign that was prized was the deteriorating body – the body in the process of falling apart”.69 Because it is not subject to corruption, the embalmed body thus seems not so much still living as rather suspended between life and death, temporarily in pause. We should not take it for granted that the mummy is happy with this: when, after his death in 1872, the body of Italian politician Giuseppe Mazzini was embalmed by anatomist Gorini to make an eternal mummy for public exhibition, the writer Carlo Dossi adopted the position of the undead Mazzini, humiliated by still being a prisoner of his own 66 Cobben, Master of His Fate, p. 202, p. 211. 67 Jani Scandura, ‘Deadly Professions: Dracula, Undertakers, and the Embalmed Corpse’, Victorian Studies, 1996, 40, 1, pp. 1–30. 68 Kathryn Hoffman, ‘Sleeping Beauties in the Fairground’, Early Popular Visual Culture, 4, 2 (2006), pp. 139–159. 69 Scandura, ‘Deadly Professions’, pp. 14–15. Scandura mentions the 1902 newspaper advert for Bigsa embalming fluid, which showed the embalmed body of a man sitting in his armchair reading his newspaper. As Irina Podgorny has pointed out, even closer to the imaginary of suspended animation is the way in which Carl Barnes, the leading magnate of the American funerary industry, ‘staged his pictures of the embalming process as though it were a visit to a sick person’; see ‘Modern Embalming, Circulation of Fluids, and the Voyage through the Human Arterial System: Carl L. Barnes and the Culture of Immortality in America’, Nuncius. Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science, 26, 1 (2011), pp. 109–131 (p. 116).

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life, when he would have liked to dissolve his molecules in those of the living: “Egli vede, intorno a s{, le sciolte molecole degli altri corpi rientrare nella perpetua danza e rivivere in nuovi corpi. Ma egli { condannato a non dissolversi piz, a non riacquistar quindi, sotto nessuna altra forma, un’altra vita […] egli chiede a Gorini che lo ha impietrito: e che ti feci di male o Gorini?” [“he sees all around him the melted molecules of the other bodies joining in the perpetual dance and living anew in other bodies. But he is condemned to dissolve no more, and so not to regain another life under another form […] he challenges Gorini, who had petrified him: and what harm have I done to you Gorini?”].70 In the end the embalming did not work out well, but the fantasies that grew up around this undead in the public eye anticipate a reaction that we shall see again about fifty years later, with another political mummy to which we return shortly. In the meantime, the dream of life embalmed and lived in instalments gives rise in the fin de si{cle cultural imaginary to the science-fiction alter ego of the gothic vampire: the ‘sleeper’ who travels in time, a Rip van Winkle made plausible by modern science. After the experiment of time travel by means of hibernation that we have seen in Hilda Silfverling of 1845, Grant Allen imagines in a short story of 1881 that a journey through hibernation could be made possible by the great chemical discovery of ‘Pausodyne’, a substance based on the properties of the ether, with the power “of entirely suspending animation in men or animals for several hours together. […] It causes immediate stoppage of the heart’s action, making the body seem quite dead for long periods at a time”.71 In Looking Backward 2000–1887 (1887), Edward Bellamy does without chemistry and chooses hypnotism instead to put his character into a death-trance from which he wakes 113 years later. But it is with H.G. Wells and his The Sleeper Wakes (1898–1903) that the modern imaginary of suspended animation manages to prefigure a cultural future that not even its author could have suspected. The Sleeper Wakes starts from precisely the mystery of suspended animation: the novel’s main character, the new Townshend, Graham falls, for no reason whatsoever, into a deep sleep at the age of thirty, and is given up for dead. In the space of a single chapter, however, we find him still in a state of catalepsy twenty years later, with his body in death-trance laid out in a glass case like a vampire in his coffin: “he lay in that strange condition, inert and still neither dead nor living but, as it were, suspended, hanging midway between nothingness and existence. […] Not dead a bit and not yet alive. It’s like a seat vacant and marked ‘engaged’. No feeling, no digestion, no beating of the heart – not a flutter”.72 In the undead 70 Carlo Dossi, Note azzurre, (Milano: Adelphi, 2010), p. 654; our translation. The history of Mazzini’s mummy is recounted by Sergio Luzzato, La mummia della Repubblica (Turin: Einaudi, 2011). 71 Grant Allen, ‘Pausodyne’, in Strange Stories (London: Chatto and Windus, 1884), p. 239. 72 H. G. Wells, When the Sleeper Wakes (London: Phoenix, 2004), p. 15.

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state Graham passes down the centuries: when he wakes after two hundred years, he learns that some financial investments of which he was literally the ‘sleeping partner’ have made him over time the heir to a vast fortune and absolute owner of the world. But above all, he learns that he has built up around himself a political cult, that of the ‘Sleeper’, a sort of comatose Messiah whose reawakening the whole people has awaited for centuries. While he “lay insensible and motionless there”,73 thousands of pilgrims have visited the glass case, which was guarded by a custodian and technologically equipped with thermostats and feeding devices, and which was ritually exhibited on the first day of each month to adoring crowds of followers. It goes without saying that, like its predecessors, in The Sleeper Wakes Wells uses the device of time travel to throw dystopic light on a technologised future, foreseeing in particular, as Keith Williams puts it, “the use of media technology in a globalized, corporate tomorrow”.74 What Wells had not foreseen however was that, soon enough, the cult of the sleeper would have become reality in yet another transformation of the modern undead from monstrous exhibit into icon of the extension of life. Graham’s story seems indeed to set the line for the invention of the most famous ‘sleeping’ leader of the last century, namely Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. When the head of the newly-founded Soviet Union died in January 1924, the Politburo decided, after many stormy meetings, that his body would be preserved intact forever and permanently exhibited to the masses in a glass sarcophagus.75 A special organ, known as the Immortality Commission, was soon set up to take care of Lenin’s body, making use of the most advanced medico-scientific conservation techniques: Leonid Krasin, the People’s Commissar of Foreign Trade and educated as a refrigeration engineer, at first tried to freeze the body in the conviction that hibernation would have allowed the undead to reawaken in a future “when science […] will be able to recreate a deceased organism”.76 Given Krasin’s training in the refrigeration of meat, it is ironic that the glass used for Lenin’s first sarcophagus was that of a restaurant window.77 Soon, however, the cryogenic approach to conservation was replaced by mummification, although the aim was the same. The project for the tomb that would host the mummy was 73 Wells, Sleeper, p. 156. 74 Keith Williams, H. G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), p. 74. 75 My account of Lenin’s mummy is based on John Gray, The Immortality Commission (London: Allen Lane, 2011), pp. 157–170, and Christine Quigley, Modern Mummies (Jefferson and London: McFarland, 1998), pp. 28–37. Another bizarre history of a political mummy treated as if she were alive is that of Evita Peron, recounted by Gonzalez Crussi in The Day of the Dead (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993). 76 From a speech delivered by Krasin three years before Lenin’s death; quoted in Gray, Immortality Commission, p. 161. 77 Quigley, Modern Mummies, p. 31.

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put in the hands of architect A.V. Shchusev, who had travelled in Egypt where the tomb of Tutankhamen had been discovered 15 months earlier. Embalming Lenin was not only a matter of emulating the grandeur of an Egyptian pharaoh, but of keeping death in abeyance while waiting for reanimation; the original project for the mausoleum even included an underground laboratory equipped to deal with such an eventuality.78 Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, who inspired the cube shape of the mausoleum, believed indeed that the sleeper was simply travelling in a ‘fourth dimension’, that of time, which was expressed by the geometrical form of the cube: “The point of view that Lenin’s death is not death, that he is alive and eternal, is symbolized in a new object, taking as its form the cube”; the Party therefore ordered the distribution of thousands of cubes to Lenin’s followers so that they could set up ‘Lenin corners’ in factories and offices.79 From their observations of the body of the ‘sleeper’, others were convinced that he would reawaken: already during the funeral, those present noted that “there was a suggestion of someone merely resting, still possessed of an astonishing vitality”; even more than the embalmed mummy, there was also Lenin’s face – modified over time by the embalming fluids – that suggested a suspended vitality to the faithful: “In the first hours of death he looked strangely calm. Now he looked angry and sullen, tormented by guilt”.80 So as to prevent the dispersion of Lenin’s molecules, the process of embalming was repeated over the years after 1924 with various and ever more sophisticated techniques: in 1929 the body appeared rejuvenated as “of a man who is not dead but sleeping”,81 even though the rumour had spread that the real Lenin had been replaced by a waxwork, just as we find in Wells, where “the real Sleeper” is believed to have “died years ago [and] changed in the night”.82 In 1941, the sleeper was evacuated to Siberia to avoid capture by the Nazis, and during the journey his eyes opened and wrinkles appeared so that an intervention was called for to make him more supple. By the early 1970s, 27 scientists and 33 technicians were employed to take care of Lenin’s body and to carry on treating him as if it were simply ‘latent life’: as well as having his Party card renewed, his body is undressed every 18 months and inspected by a team of doctors and experts, and the clothes he wears are changed at regular intervals. Even as late as 2004, after yet another makeover, it was announced that the mummy seemed younger than ever; like Valdemar, Lenin is still sleeping but, relative to Wells’ script, we have another century to wait before the sleeper wakes. The case of undead Lenin, with its perfect montage of literary fantasy and 78 79 80 81 82

Quigley, Modern Mummies, p. 31. Quot. in Gray, Immortality Commission, p. 162. Quot. in Quigley, Modern Mummies, p. 29, p. 31. Quigley, Modern Mummies, p. 33. Wells, Sleeper, p. 87.

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medico-scientific reality, illustrates how the modern imaginary of suspended animation has migrated not only into innumerable works of science fiction in which it is most often to be found today. Examples are legion, but suffice it to think of the “half-livers” in suspended animation who appear in Philip K. Dick’s Ubik (1969), of the parody of cryogenic sleep in Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973) or of the Life Extension organisation in Amenybar’s Open Your Eyes (1997), which supplies lucid dreams to its undead while they await resurrection; moreover, most science-fiction accounts of interstellar travel, such as Ridley Scott’s recent Prometheus (2012), make use of bodily freezing to allow spatio-temporal dislocation. But the case of Lenin, in which literary mythology, politico-social imaginaries and medical theories – Valdemar, death-counterfeits, embalmed mummies and Colonel Townshend – are superimposed and interwoven in a disorderly muddle, tells another cultural history. It reminds us that the undead monsters dreamt up by modernity are the secret-sharers of its scientific rationalism, the product of the modern invention of dying without end, and it helps us to see the cultural space in-between where superstitious beliefs and science have continued, and probably still continue today, to cross-fertilise. Perhaps what are really monstrous in the modern monstrous anatomies are the stories that hybridise bodies of knowledge and that still have much to say to the present, left there dead pro tem. waiting for someone to reanimate them.

Laura Di Michele

Nineteenth-Century London as Monstrous Body

The Monstrous Body of London That London was often portrayed as the modern Babylon in the Victorian period by its inhabitants and, perhaps more, by travellers and migrs is one of the many accepted views of the modern metropolis. To foreign observers of the nineteenth century the Babylonian comparison hardly seemed excessive; what appeared to Hippolyte Taine in the course of a cab ride through the streets of London at night confirmed this image: its vast and labyrinthine complexity, its slums, gin palaces and pollution, drunkenness, street beggars and child prostitutes helped to make ‘London’ a frightening Babylon. It was an unsafe place. Above all in the 1880s and 1890s, these images were fully fed by the deepening divide between the West End and the East End: the social, economic and political distance between these ‘two cities’ was revealed through novels, poetry and tracts, and also through physical confrontation in strikes and demonstrations. The East End unemployed did choose the West End as a significant site for struggle: Trafalgar Square for the riots of 1886 and 1887 and the London Dock Strike of 1889. A large mass of monstrous bodies traversed London from East to West aiming at occupying what in fact appeared as the monstrous body of power. Already in the summer of 1866 London’s Hyde Park had been the scene of violent demonstrations that resulted in the arming of special police with truncheons; dramatic events like the Paris Commune, various mass murders and strikes in the 1870s persisted in the public’s minds to the point that the period from 1886 to 1889 came to be remembered as the “Four Violent Years”.1 In contrast with the democratic socio-political reforms between 1870 and 1890, a growing and violent turmoil was invading the western part of London in such a way as to transform it in a threatening urban volcano; Trafalgar Square, Hyde Park, Pall

1 See William B. Thesing, The London Muse. Victorian Poetic Responses to the City (Athens: The Georgia University Press, 1982), p. 94.

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Mall were the landmarks of political power, and it was there that demonstrations and confrontations took place: Whipped up by speeches in Trafalgar Square, 2,000 unemployed Londoners marched through the West End in February 1886. They carried red flags, cudgels, and stones. On their way to Hyde Park, the mob smashed the windows of the Conservative Club and looted shops on Pall Mall. The most organized rally occurred on November 13, 1887, when 100,000 demonstrators marched on Trafalgar Square. Mounted guards were called out to disperse the crowd. The day came to be called “Bloody Sunday” because police and demonstrators suffered considerable casualties and two civilians died in he fray. A year later, in the autumn of 1888, the “Jack the Ripper” murders added to urban terror when the cries of newsboys interrupted the solemnity of the new Lord Mayor’s procession. London once again became a tense and violent battleground in August 1889 when the famous dock strike paralyzed Thames River shipping. Over 60,000 dock workers rallied and won over popular sympathy through the carefully organized propaganda of John Burns.2

The London rich felt to be under siege also because they were living in a city of unprecedented size: “its population by the 1801 census was less than a million, by 1822 it was around 1.4 million, by 1841 close on 2 million, by 1851, 2.36 million”;3 besides, fear of attacks and house-breaking made them to erect screens, railings and barriers to protect their properties: “They blocked off their streets with gates and porters’ lodges, perhaps during the day allowing nonresidents’ carriages through, perhaps not. At night, the gates were closed altogether, forcing members of the public to make what could be lengthy detours”.4 But, some years later, for example when the Embankment was under construction, many landowners and aristocrats were forced to remove some gates and railings, and an act from Parliament obtained the abolition of gates and barriers (1890).

Overcrowded city of mud, dirt and fog The ‘world city’ of London, the Heart and Hub of the Empire, was itself a monster city, endowed with a monstrous, unfinished, ever growing, gigantic, dangerous, dark, and labyrinthine body all of which was to be explored, classified, known, monitored and, if the case, contained. It was compounded of at least two different, equally monstrous, ‘bodies’ spreading to the east and to the west of the 2 Thesing, The London Muse, p. 94. See also Janet Roebuck, The Making of Modern English Society from 1850 (New York: Charles Scribner, 1973). 3 Peter Thorold, The London Rich. The Creation of a Great City, from 1666 to the Present (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 246. 4 Torold, The London Rich, pp. 246–247 and 289–293.

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separation line represented by Bloomsbury, which was perceived both as a barrier and filter between the two London topographical areas, and also as a wide anatomical ‘artery’ fed by the numerous rivulets and sewers flowing down into the Thames.5 The never ending physical expansion of the city that already in 1822 Cobbett had dubbed ‘The Great Wen’ continued to grow problematically and disorderly, thus encouraging novelists, poets, reformers and journalists to recount the modern metropolis as the site of a dangerous, yet very attractive, place. London seemed not to correspond to the current images of ‘town’ or ‘city’ – as H. G. Wells clearly recognized in his Anticipations (1901) – and what made the main difference was what Peter Keating saw in the nineteenth-century literature.6 Above all, the novelists were able to invent techniques allowing them “to convey a sense of the variety, complexity, and newness of the human problems caused by the massing of large numbers of people in the modern city”.7 London was experienced not so much as part of the world; rather, it was a world in itself and, as such, it contained an infinite and amazing variety of life. In the early years of the century, Pierce Egan had given his view of the metropolis in Life in London (1821) pointing to its great contrasting ways of life with the invaluable help of his surrogate guides, Tom and Jerry : The extremes in every point of view are daily to be met with in the Metropolis; from the most rigid persevering, never-tiring industry, down to laziness, which, in its consequences, frequently operates far worse than idleness. The greatest love of and contempt for money are equally conspicuous; and in no place are pleasure and business so much united as in London. The highest veneration for and practice of religion distinguishes the Metropolis, contrasted with the most horrid commission of crimes; and the experience of the oldest inhabitant scarcely renders him safe against the specious plans and artifices continually laid to entrap the most vigilant.8

Later on in the century, it was Thomas Carlyle who, in Sartor Resartus (1831) depicted the monstrosity of the immense, moving London crowd, “[t]hat living flood, pouring through these streets, of all qualities and ages, knowest thou whence it is coming, whither it is going?”;9 naturally, he attempted to explain its 5 See Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York/London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1994). 6 Peter J. Keating, ‘The Metropolis in Literature’, in Metropolis. 1890–1940, ed. by Anthony Sutcliffe (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), pp. 129–145. See also Maria Teresa Chialant, ‘Da “The Great Wen” a “Metropolis”: H. G. Wells fra tradizione e avanguardia”, in La cittu senza confini, ed. by Carlo Pagetti (Roma: Bulzoni, 1995), pp. 165–188. 7 Keating, ‘The Metropolis in Literature’, pp. 130–31. 8 Pierce Egan, Life in London (1869), quoted in Keating, ‘The Metropolis in Literature’, p. 131. 9 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1831), quoted in Keating, ‘The Metropolis in Literature’, p. 132.

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mobility and hybridity in terms of the social and class significance he recognized in the London mob: Upwards of five-hundred-thousand two-legged animals without feathers lie round us, in horizontal positions; their heads all in nightcaps, and full of the foolishest dreams. Riot cries aloud, and staggers and swaggers in his rank dens of shame; and the Mother, with streaming hair, kneels over her pallid dying infant, whose cracked lips only her tears now moisten – all these heaped and huddled together, with nothing but a little carpentry and masonry between them – crammed in, like salted fish in their barrel – or weltering, shall I say, like an Egyptian pitcher of tamed vipers, each struggling to get its head above the others.10

A clear class and social consciousness is evident in Carlyle’s satirical words and animal-like representations of the London crowd (“Upwards of five-hundredthousand two-legged animals without feathers”; “crammed in, like salted fish in their barrel”; “weltering like and Egyptian pitcher of tamed vipers”); a striking similarity with the inhuman, inebriated mother of Hogarth’s Gin Lane (1735) comes to the readers’ mind; but in Carlyle’s description the image of the class warfare which closes the passage further transforms the already monstrous body of the metropolis, where each Londoner struggles to come up for air. Of course, in Carlyle’s view the city is a social, a human problem, and the centre of popular discontent and radicalism: it is a city where it is almost impossible to survive. When we move onwards in the century and reach Charles Dickens’s period, we realize that London still maintains its traditional problematic aspects, but a deeper need to excavate within its many, familiar and unknown areas arises and is the expression of an insatiable desire for exploring, understanding and appropriating its metaphoric and symbolic meanings, otherwise completely mysterious to its inhabitants. This attitude is something Dickens is very clever at in all his writings, as Raymond Williams acutely argues in his chapter, “People of the City”, on Dickens’s London.11 Commenting upon Little Dorrit (1857), Williams writes about the impossibility, emphasized by the novelist, to distinguish between the city’s buildings and houses, and its inhabitants: This method is very remarkable. It has its basis, of course, in certain properties of the language: perceptions of relations between persons and things. But in Dickens it is critical. It is a conscious way of seeing and showing. The city is shown as at once a social fact and a human landscape. What is dramatized in it is a very complex structure of feeling.12

10 Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1831), quoted in Keating, ‘The Metropolis in Literature’, p. 132. 11 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: The Hogarth Press, 1985), pp. 152–163. 12 Williams, The Country and the City, p. 158.

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Dickens is particularly interesting above all because of his complex formation as social reformer, journalist, and novelist, and such a prismatic identity never fails to be always present in all his writings. His novels show his marvellous ability to connect his social criticism to the realistic, at times sentimentalized, and grotesque descriptions of his characters and the urban places, buildings and streets they inhabit or traverse. The metropolis is exhibited in all its fascination and repulsion, and from this point of view Dickens’s control over language is really relevant, especially when he has to orchestrate scenarios involving the representation both of the physical and moral filth reigning in Victorian London. For instance, the ways in which Dickens works with the language and the descriptive style he chooses to open his Bleak House (1853) are highly effective as is clearly shown in his memorable and humorous rendering of the London winter streets and weather; already in the first paragraph of the first chapter, titled “In Chancery”, his description makes the readers see and imagine that part of the metropolis – Temple Bar, where Lincoln’s Inn Hall is situated – all covered in mud and marshes as if it was a place giving shelter to re-living dinosaurs of the past and to the contemporary inhabitants of the present London: London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes. – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better ; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers had been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.13

It is extremely difficult both for animals and humans to move along or walk without falling over in such a muddy place, as it is impossible for foot passengers to see anything around them because of the darkness caused by the dense black cloud of smoke coming out of the chimneys, hanging over or falling down like a strange black rain made of sooty flakes, and creating an obscuring veil that hides the sun. Images of darkness, danger, dirt and death prevail, conveying an idea of darkness that goes well beyond the literal, almost realistic and yet surrealistic description of London: probably, Dickens’s readers expect that the pictured atmosphere will soon help them to ‘see’ and understand more deeply the monstrous similarities of the place with the human but morally obscure ad13 Charles Dickens, Bleak House (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 3.

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ministration of justice. Of course, Dickens is very successful in transforming the feelings of fear and cannibalism common at the time as they were incorporated in the dinosaur models at the Sydenham Park; they were usually perceived as destabilizing modernity, progress and civilization: his grotesque and amused description of the extinct creature of a Megalosaurus emerging from the London mud, walking up Holborn Hill together with the astonished Londoners engenders curiosity and wonder, not terror. It is an ironic, contrasting perception, opposite to that described in Edward MacDermott’s Routledge’s Guide to the Crystal Palace of 1854: “What a terrible scene it would have been to have witnessed on the sedgy banks of some old Thames or Medway the megalosaurus hobbling down to the margin of these muddy streams […] the two monsters would grapple and struggle, with each other, till the dark waters were reddened with their blood”.14 Perhaps the shapelessness, deformities and cruel hideousness of extinct voracious creatures apparently lacking what was thought to be the guiding principle of harmony that structured the human body could contribute to unsettle the notion that men were created by God; both those savage, carnivorous animals and Dickens’s inhabitants of the city were associated with mud, filth, squalor, and wilderness, and consequently with monstrosity and degeneration: the general impression was that the majority of the Victorian Londoners were distancing themselves from Adam, the most well-known mud creation; at the same time, they were confounding themselves with the extinct animals, patent representations of past Otherness and also disturbing projections of modern Victorian alterity. After all, Darwin’s ideas on the evolution were already popular, and certainly the horror of being engulfed by those powerful extinct but extraordinarily re-born creatures from the past was made more frightful by the terrible thought that humanity too could be subjected to such a similar ending. It is well known that many Victorian literary narratives were inspired by such anxious pleasures, as maintained by Gillian Beer’s study.15 Besides, in the second half of the nineteenth century, attraction and repulsion were the recurring elements of those narratives where London was experienced as a pleasant-and-monstrous place possibly inhabited by dangerous ‘unexpected human’ monsters. R. L. Stevenson invented the marvellous story of the mortal struggle between the Self and its Other in his Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), thus giving fictitious and yet vividly concrete and disturbing life to the idea that hideous monsters – the Other – may inhabit the human body of the 14 Edward MacDermott, Routledge’s Guide to the Crystal Palace (1854), quoted in Nancy Rose Marshall, City of Gold and Mud. Painting Victorian London (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 245. 15 See Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fictions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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rational subject; both in this novel and in many other short stories, Stevenson emphasizes the gigantic and labyrinthine shape of the metropolis and, in his Suicide Club (1921–23), makes us encounter Lieutenant Brackenbury Rich, just arrived back home in London from imperialized India, who feels attracted by the exploration of a metropolis that he does not know and is surprised to discover that he could easily lose his sense of direction, and perhaps be killed in that inextricable and disorientating place. He becomes suspicious and observes his driver with dismay : Brackenbury was at once astonished at the fellow’s skill in picking a way in such a labyrinth, and a little concerned to imagine what was the occasion of his hurry. He had heard tales of strangers falling ill in London. Did the driver belong to some bloody and treacherous association? and was he himself whirled to a murderous death?16

Murder, illness, and mysterious, bloody societies crowd the innumerable legends feeding the metropolitan imagery of Victorian London. The image of the city as gigantic, unsafe, dark and potentially dangerous seem to dominate, even if its lit up streets and shop-windows could dissipate threatening shadows and fear. Paradoxically, the lamp-lighted city – through its regular alternation of light and darkness produced by the geometrical distribution of lamplights along the streets – contributed to heighten still further the already widespread sensation that where lights stopped something dangerous might happen to those urban nightwalkers and ‘mooners’ whose bourgeois-flaneur pleasures were primarily visual. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde describes the illuminated metropolis with the help of Mr. Enfield’s “very odd story”:17 I was coming home from some place at the end of the world, about three o’clock of a black winter morning, and my way lay through a part of town where there was literally nothing to be seen but lamps. Street after street, and all the folks asleep – street after street, all lighted up as if for a procession and all as empty as a church – till at last I got into that state of mind when a man listens and listens and begins to long for the sight of a policeman.18

The accumulation of patches of light interspersed with pools of darkness in the empty streets points to the loneliness of the character, who discovers to be the only participant in an eerie procession taking place in an empty, church-like city, sacred but oddly dreary. That London suggests strong feelings of uneasiness, fear and imminent danger. Similar impressions are very common and widespread in 16 Robert L. Stevenson, The Suicide Club (1921–1923), quoted in Rossella Ciocca, ‘Londra: labirinto moderno, pandaemonium postmoderno’, in Londra e le altre. Immagini della metropoli di fine Ottocento, ed. by Laura Di Michele (Napoli: Liguori, 2002), p. 350. 17 Robert L. Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 4. 18 Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, p. 4.

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the varied literature and nocturnal life of London especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, even if gas lighting had been introduced in the city already at the beginning of the century.19 But gas lighting did not cancel darkness: rather, it seemed to strengthen its density and the magical ability it possessed to make things and people fade away : Gas seemed to have he power equally to create illumination and to cast shadow. The chiaroscuro of gaslight, its transitional passages from light to dark, created in midVictorian London a poetics of gas. Gas does not destroy the night; it illuminates it. Its unsteady flame flares and wanes, giving objects and places an aura of perceptibility, without total, destructive visibility.20

This poetical and magical ambiguity, this being capable of creating contiguous areas of light-and-darkness, is what gave the city a pleasurable uncertainty, somewhat threatening and risky ; lights could transform intermittently and tremulously dim urban places into theatrical illuminated, precarious, day-like stages where passengers were both strange actors and viewers. As Nead acutely argues: Cities are defined by temporal as well as by spatial geographies and mid–Victorian London was seen to have a distinctive character by day and by night. Gas bore witness to night scenes, to aspects of the city that were hidden by day. Street lamps represented the intrusion of daytime order and the rational space of the improved city into the darkness of the city at night. Gaslight never fully conquered the night city, however, but was also absorbed by its poetry, evil and irrationality.21

The indecipherable ambivalence of the chiaroscuro of a metropolis that, even if capital city and heart of the empire, had become an “unknown territory”, a “jungle”, an “infernal wen”22 is echoed in many ambiguous characters of many stories and novels published in the late nineteenth century, where we find no clear divide between evil and good, between the immoral or amoral and the moral. It is sufficient here to recall Dorian Gray (whose surname suggests the grey chiaroscuro of his self and of the city alike) rambling from the elegant quarters of the West End through the dark areas of the East End, and learning to understand that the darkness of the city is mirrored in the dark side of his 19 See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialisation of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, New York and Hamburg: Berg, 1988); Linda Nead, Victorian Babylon. People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 222–228. 20 Nead, Victorian Babylon, p. 83. 21 Nead, Victorian Babylon, p. 83. 22 See Francis H. W. Sheppard, London, 1808–1870: The Infernal Wen (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1971); Samuel F. Clapp, ‘Dor in London’, in The Image of London. Views by Travellers and Emigr{s, 1550–1920, ed. by Malcolm Warner (London: Trefoil Publications in association with Barbican Art Gallery, 1987), pp. 163–70.

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complete self (body and soul), envelops and consumes him thoroughly ; at the same time, Dorian’s darkness and greyness irradiates from him taking hold of the objects and people of his desire, and obtaining thus their contamination and destruction. Talking to Henry, but surely referring above all to himself, Dorian admits: I felt that this grey, monstrous London of ours, with its myriads of people, its sordid sinners, and its splendid sins, […] must have something in store for me. I fancied a thousand things. The mere danger gave me a sense of delight. […] I don’t know what I expected, but I went out and wandered eastward, soon losing my way in a labyrinth of grimy streets and black, grassless squares.23

Attraction towards the degraded oriental Other of the magnificent city gives him pleasure, thus anticipating the sense of tragedy and violent death that will put an end also to the protagonist’s life, inevitably : “[…] man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead”.24 Of course, there is a symbiotic relationship between Dorian’s corruptions of the body and soul and the sickness of a city that is no longer confined to its East End part. Health was in extreme danger in the overcrowded and polluted London, in its rookeries where many tenants regardless of sex or age occupied the same room so that they could pay a lower rent, in its streets where contact and proximity could increase the spread of the many infections creeping into the whole city unexpected and at times invisible, fog-like. In this perspective, the story of Count Dracula is exemplary in that he succeeds in being located in one place (the West End, apparently safer than its East End counterpart) at the same time as he may appear in another place, and can easily reach his geographical and topographical Other space; he can travel from one place to another without meeting with any obstacle: his desire to suck others’ blood is so intense and unrestrained that he expands fast to contaminate the blood, the body and the soul of those infected others, who become vampires in their turn. Visible or invisible, the aristocratic vampire is always dangerous, transient and deadly, causing death-in–life, always desirous of wandering round the streets of the great metropolis. He tells Jonathan Harker : “I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is”.25 Actually, he wants to penetrate and conquer London; later on in the novel, Harker will comment clearly on Dracula’s invasion plan of England and its capital city : 23 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 39. 24 Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, p. 117. 25 Bram Stoker, Dracula (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 31.

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He was now fixed on the far east of the northern shore, on the east of the southern shore, and on the south. The north and west were surely never meant to be left out of his diabolical scheme – let alone the City itself and the very heart of fashionable London in the south-west and west.26

Sick city It was total war, complete with the arms of contamination and corruption, violent death. It is almost impossible not to think of Dracula as an extraordinary embodiment of the imperial ideologies of conquest (whose ‘greatness’ was celebrated magnificently on the occasion of the Great Exhibition of 1851) and of the frightful pollution of the Thames and the consequent contamination of drinking water, of the dreadful choking by the fog-smoke (a ‘London particular’, or ‘pea souper’), and contaminated food which increasingly caused many different types of epidemic illness. It was Dickens’s ability to capture the sense of fateful destiny of the poor city dwellers, who were affected by consumption and cholera. Already in his Nicholas Nickleby (1839) he depicts effectively the sense of impossibility of being saved from death: There is a dread disease which so prepares its victims, as it were, for death; which so often refines it of its grosser aspect, and throws around familiar looks unearthy indications of the coming change; a dread disease, in which the struggle between soul and body is so gradual, quiet, and solemn, and the result so sure, that day by day, and grain by grain, the mortal part wastes and withers away, so that the spirit grows light and sanguine with its lightened load, and, feeling immortality, deems it but a new term of mortal life; a disease in which death and life are so strangely blended, that death takes the glow and hue of life, and life the gaunt and grisly form of death.27

Here, too, the body of the victim cannot resist the deadly advance of the disease, although in Dickens’s perception her/his spirit may result victorious. No boundary, then, is feasible; the city is permeable and its myriad different inhabitants may be subjected to continuous metamorphoses, and physical and moral contagion may spread everywhere. The rich and the poor, men and women, old people and children are equally exposed to the risks of disease and death. It may be contagion obtained through the water pollution of the Thames, or air and atmosphere pollution due to industrial waste and the foul odours arising from the river, or blood infection as provoked by the vampire’s kiss, syphilis, or other diseases (cholera, consumption, and so on). It is well known that many 26 Stoker, Dracula, p. 337. 27 Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987), ch. xlix.

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were the pandemics caused by the Victorian city’s polluted air and contaminated water and food: cholera, tuberculosis and typhus, together with chronic malnourishment of the poorest class of the city dwellers. As Alan Robinson writes in his Imagining London 1770–1900: The concern with public hygiene in Victorian London reflected the very real and recurrent threat of cholera: there were major epidemics in 1832, 1849, 1854 and 1866. Typhus, typhoid, tuberculosis and smallpox were principally diseases of the poor, exacerbated by overcrowding, poor diet and insanitation; cholera was the great leveller that struck all classes alike. It may have caused fewer deaths but it literally brought home the public health problem to the middle classes.28

The monster city was consuming and devouring its inhabitants probably in the same way as they were consuming the city’s products. The city’s monstrosity as voracious and carnivorous became one of the most dreadful traits of Victorian London. Illness, fear, violence, and murder seem to be lurking in the streets and in the mind of Dorian Gray and other fictional characters of novels, short stories, news reports about the ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders, and other important events of the second half of the century ; from around the 1880s onwards, all those narrations suggest the image of blood shed in the meandering narrow streets of London, both in the East End and in the elegant part of the West End where power resides. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), for example, the desire for blood plays a central role not only in that it helps to construct the monstrous blood identity of Count Dracula, the aristocratic vampire coming from the East (Transylvania) to the West (England and London), but also because it points to a metaphorical, anticolonial, significance of the Eastern thirst for drinking the Western blood. The Empire responds in such a way as to appropriate and incorporate all that the West could signify (for instance, civilization and power); but, at the same time it infects the English soil and inhabitants by producing an epidemics capable of corrupting the British imperial centre, and by creating hybrid creatures, living – like Count Dracula – in-between life and death, in a sort of liminal, physical and mental, new geographic space, neither England nor Transylvania.29 Consumption, or tuberculosis, was one of the worst diseases of the Victorian era, as may be testified also by the emergence of what some critics call ‘sick room’ accounts (like Harriet Martineau’s Life in the Sick-Room. Essays, 1844) 28 Alan Robinson, Imagining London, 1700–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 54. 29 See Lucia Esposito, ‘Baci dalla Transilvania. La paura del contagio nella Londra di fine secolo’, in Londra e le altre, pp. 395–412; Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siwcle: Identity and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992).

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and novels;30 possibly, the most dreadful plague was represented by water pollution, because much of the capital’s drinking water was drawn from the Thames that had become the filthiest receptacle of metropolitan sewage. In July 1855 the distinguished scientist, Michael Faraday, wrote a letter to The Times, causing great stir and deep concern among people of influence; the description of the river was the following: The whole of the river was an opaque, pale brown fluid. In order to test the degree of opacity, I tore up some white card into pieces, moistened them so as to make them sink easily below the surface and then dropped some of these pieces into the water at every pier the boat came to; before they had sunk an inch below the surface they were indistinguishable, though the sun shone brightly at the time. […] Near the bridges the feculence rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface, even in water of this kind.31

Toward the conclusion, Faraday admonishes: I have thought it a duty to record these facts that they may be brought to the attention of those who exercise power or have the responsibility in relation to the condition of our river ; there is nothing figurative in the words I have employed or any approach to exaggeration: they are the simple truth. If there be sufficient authority to remove a putrescent pond from the neighbourhood of a few simple dwellings, surely the river which flows so many miles through London, ought not to be allowed to become a fermenting sewer.32

Of course, Punch (July 1855) did not fail to publish satirical pictures and vignettes on the subject of poor London sanitation system. Already in April 1850 Dickens had started his social and political campaign (Household Words, 13 April 1850) by giving his account of the visit he had done to the works of the Grand Junction Water Company at Kew; the Company had informed the Parliamentary Commission that “there is probably not a spring, with the exception of Malvern, and one or two more, which are so pure as Thames water”.33 It was only after the ‘Great Stink’ of 1858 reached its climax, that the Metropolis Local Management Amendment Act of 1855 was altered extending “the powers of the Metropolitan Board of Works for the purification of the Thames and the Main Drainage of the Metropolis”:34 the result was that Disraeli gave the Metropolitan Board and chief engineer Joseph Bazalgette authority and the money they needed to construct the main drainage. 30 See Miriam Bailin, The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction. The Art of Being Ill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 31 Quoted in Stephen Halliday, The Great Stink of London. Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis (Stroud: Sutton, 1999), p. 10. 32 Quoted in Halliday, The Great Stink of London, p. xi. 33 Halliday, The Great Stink of London, p. 25. 34 Halliday, The Great Stink of London, p. 73.

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All the same and notwithstanding the great work done, terrible outbreaks of cholera caused, in 1866, 5,596 death, and – while in the three outbreaks of 1831–2 (6,536 deaths), 1848–9 (14,137), and 1853–4 (10,738 deaths), death rates were found in the East and West Ends of London – in the fourth outbreak of 1866, high death rates were confined to the East End between Aldgate and Bow. Dr John Snow, Bazalgette and others supported the idea that, as epidemic disease was due mainly to the infected water of the Thames, it was necessary to filter water and to construct systems of the sewage from the river : so, major engineering works and the construction of the Embankments were undertaken.35 Yet, in the 1880s disease from air and water did proclaim London as ‘sick city ;’ the Hon. R. Russell published a well-documented report on the London fogs, also suggesting some urgent remedies; in his London Fogs (1880) Russell observes that a London fog is one of the worst but unnoticed evils pestering the metropolis: “It has hitherto been spared, because, like other evils of greater magnitude, its ill effects have not been very startling and sudden, and it was hard to believe that so harmless-looking and quiet a thing could do much mischief”.36 The unnoticed dangerous fog is then described both as damaging property and health and as a beastly predator, “the most easily preventable evil”.37 Again, the image of a city characterized by one of its worst components, fog and/or smoke, is linked to its representation as a deadly murderer : The small germ of typhoid or drain fever slays its thousands every year ; but this fact attracts less general attention than the drowning of five hundred by a collision or by a flood. […] So we have been content to pour the refuse from our domestic fires into the open air, and leave the work of scavenging to unaided natural forces; to disregard “matter in the wrong place”, so long as it has not killed its hundreds or thousands at a time, and have tolerated something like suffocation, so long as it performed its work slowly, made no unseemly disturbance, and took care not to demand its hecatombs very suddenly and dramatically.38

London citizens or, better, those in power have been responsible for the persistence and spreading of the disease and higher mortality rates all over the metropolis: “And smoke in London has continued probably to shorten the lives of thousands, but only lately has the sudden, palpable rise of the death-rate in an unusually dense and prolonged fog attracted much attention to the depredations of this quiet and despised destroyer”.39 Certainly, all the population may suffer indifferently from respiratory disease, mainly whooping cough, bronchitis and 35 36 37 38 39

Halliday, The Great Stink of London, p. 71. Francis Albert Rollo Russell, London Fogs (London: Edward Stanford, 1880), p. 4. Russell, London Fogs, p. 5. Russell, London Fogs, p. 5. Russell, London Fogs, p. 5.

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lung-disease,40 Russell continues, and a higher death rate is found in particular in East London districts. Other devastating effects may be seen not only in bodily hurts, but also in their moral effects: depression is one of the worst consequences of fog and smog, and such a condition must be considered very seriously by the authorities. In a long paragraph, too long to be quoted here, Russell gives a description of all the deprivations affecting the ‘quality of life’ of poor people who cannot afford to leave the city “to go to the country for fresh air”41 and lose the pleasures to look up at a clear, azure sky and a clear sun-setting or a clearrising moon, all distant prospects, urban or rural, delicate hues and forms of clouds; they have also increasing money problems (“smoke defeats attempts at cleanliness and neatness among even the most scrupulous of the poor”).42 Again, the image of monstrous voraciousness is mobilized to depict the London smoke as deadly contaminating and destroying poor people: A forced neglect thus eats into the domestic happiness, and disheartens the spirit of the best of them. Then there is the worry and trouble of smoky chimneys, chimneysweeping, window-cleaning, renewing and cleaning dirty furniture, dress, & c.; extra washing, and the annoyance of having to keep windows closed for fear of smoke or soot entering, and of window-panes covered with a thick film of dirt.43

Darkness and death further damage people and houses and buildings, suggesting something like a travel back, as it were, in the geographical locations believed to be inhabited by primitive, uncivilized people of Africa: “The sitting figures, for instance, on the north side of Burlington House might, but for their European garb, be taken for Zulus”.44 We are back to dirt and darkness, to the racialized Other, both for its moral, political and physical aspects, as encountered in Stoker’s and Wilde’s hybrid, exotic and liminal novels, where the sense of belonging is mixed with the desire of belonging elsewhere, an elsewhere which is originating not in the eastern part of the known world, but in the very heart of the British Empire, in London and on its tidal river. Above all, darkness is not a specificity of East London dwellers. In 1882 amateur archaeologist and social investigator Walter Besant published a novel, All Sorts and Conditions of Men: An Impossible Story, the huge popularity of which played an important role in sustaining the fund-raising campaign for a centre of recreation in the centre of the East End. The novel narrates the story of a young heiress recently graduated from Newham College, Cambridge, de40 41 42 43 44

Russell, London Fogs, pp. 28, 29. Russell, London Fogs, p. 33. R. Russell, London Fogs, p. 33. R. Russell, London Fogs, p. 34. R. Russell, London Fogs, p. 36.

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termined to see with her own eyes the way of life the way of life of those who labour in the East End; she discovers that the East End “is not that commonly held in the 1880s of horrific poverty and squalor, but rather she is moved by the tedium of existence”.45 What people wanted was something that they might share with all London inhabitants, as the young hero tells: What we want here…is a little more of the pleasures and grace of life. To begin with, we are not poor and in misery, but for the most part fairly well off….See us on Sundays, we are not a bad-looking lot; healthy, well-dressed, and tolerably rosy. But we have no pleasures.46

The answer was the construction of the ‘Palace of Pleasure’ paid for by the wealthy heiress from the West End, an institution which brings pleasure to the East End. The novel and its utopian and social reformist ending “shocked and aroused the conscience of all England”47 and probably had “done more than any other to familiarize the general public with the true character of that dark continent called the East End”.48 However, the fund-raising campaign for the realization of the dream People’s Palace and the building of the Palace were complicated; at a meeting held at the Drapers’ Hall (19 April 1887), Lord Rosebery, who supported the campaign, said that the Palace could cancel the existence of ‘two nations’ in London: I hold that it is a great and sacred responsibility, not merely for our statesmen … but for all our leading citizens, in whatever capacity it may be given to them to lead, to endeavour to prevent the formation of those distinct nations within our metropolis … I believe this People’s Palace may do much, not merely to raise the population of the East end of London, but also to prove the sympathy of the West end for the East-end.49

On the contrary, George Bernard Shaw did sneer cynically at what he perceived as a ‘convenient’ philanthropic operation in his letter, ‘Blood Money to Whitechapel’, to the editor of The Star (24 September 1888) where he observed that middle class attention – and money – was forthcoming only when East End poverty was brought to the headlines, through either the activities of Jack the Ripper or riots like those of 1886.50 Besant’s social philosophy did not obtain the results he was hoping for East45 Deborah E. B. Weiner, ‘The Peoples Palace. An Image for East London in the 1880s’, in Metropolis – London. Histories and Representations since 1880, ed. by David Feldman and Gareth Stedman Jones (London/New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 41. 46 Weiner, ‘The Peoples Palace’, pp. 41–42. 47 Weiner, ‘The Peoples Palace’, p. 42. 48 Weiner, ‘The Peoples Palace’, p. 42. See also Laura Di Michele, ‘Il British Museum. Tempio metropolitano del sapere’, in Momenti della cittu di Londra dalle origini a oggi, ed. by Fernando Ferrara (Napoli: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1992), pp. 119–68. 49 Quoted in Weiner, ‘The Peoples Palace’, pp. 47–48. 50 Weiner, ‘The Peoples Palace’, pp. 46–49.

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end Londoners (who, somebody thought, were in need of being educated and guided by the upper class, even when disguised, like the heroine of All Sorts and Conditions of Men, as members of the working class), was subjected to severe critique from many quarters and yet contributed to highlight the sense of social alarm needful of some solution. And, perhaps, it helped to recognize that monstrosity was not inherent to the people of that London area: monstrosity was also elsewhere, in the West End too: the difference between poverty and wealth was generated by the economic and social difference of the accepted general class system. Perhaps, when Dickens was describing the fear of Londoners walking side by side the extinct megalosaurus, he was ironically speculating on the effects of the ‘democratic’ equality between humans and frightful animals, and must have amused himself with all the discussions which followed Darwin’s publications and the geological display constructed in a hidden part of the Sydenham Crystal Palace. In a very suggestive essay on “‘A Dim World, Where Monsters Dwell’. The Spatial Time of the Sydenham Crystal Palace Dinosaur Park” Nancy Marshall significantly observes: Like the exhibits in the palace, Paxton’s landscape garden was explicitly designed to narrate a particular story of linear history and the nature-culture relationship, with the natural world becoming more and more prominent the farther away from the building one retreated. The extensive gardens reinforced a spatial and temporary hierarchy that placed British technological civilization and human history in the palace, the visitor traveled further back in time as he or she crossed the grounds, a temporal regression characterized as a movement into the wilderness. Only after wandering first through the formal Italianate gardens, then into an artificially natural English landscape, and finally down a hill and through some trees, did the sightseer enter the prehistoric geology section, which was largely hidden from the Crystal Palace itself.51

It was a voyage back in time from the present progressive age of the Victorians to the swampy depths of the deep past: not only was that temporal/spatial distance maintained, but the visitors were reassured about the superiority of their contemporary, civilized country. Moreover, the Routledge’s Guide to the Crystal Palace of 1854 presented the park layout as resembling “a human body, with the palace itself as the head and the symmetrical torso the landscape”:52 the park was like a human body contained within the humanized body of the Victorian metropolis. But, as the Guide went on by describing and showing a map of the place, it was highly meaningful that the prehistoric section of the park was conveniently situated in a hidden part of the body ; in Marshall’s words:

51 Nancy Rose Marshall, ‘“A Dim World, Where Monsters Dwell”. The Spatial Time of the Sydenham Crystal Palace Dinosaur Park’, in City of Gold and Mud, p. 239. 52 Marshall, ‘“A Dim World, Where Monsters Dwell’”, p. 239.

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Coiled in the nethermost regions was the world’s first display of full-sized, threedimensional models of extinct creatures recreated from fossil evidence. In a vivid enactment of the relative hierarchy of intellect versus vulgar physicality, the dinosaurs were placed in the bowels of the park.53

The language of mud, shapelessness, uncleanness, and filth associated with the deep time of the remote past was often used also to describe the “mud in the streets” (literal and moral) and the excrements (places and people) of the capital. That the Victorian bourgeoisie was fascinated and at once repulsed by London’s dirt was powerful commonplace, partially because dust, soot, ash, manure, and human and animal excrements helped to fix the boundaries between cleanliness and dirtiness, two categories which helped to define the spaces inhabited by the bourgeoisie and the working class, partially according to “their degrees of tolerance for dirt”.54 What happened was that many street types – chimney sweeps, as portrayed in the visual arts, advertisements, and also in the engravings by Archibald Samuel Henning in Mayew’s London Labour and the London Poor, blackface minstrels, as represented in Charles Hunt’s painting, The Original Minstrels (1873) and in Henry Mayew’s “Ethiopian Serenaders”55 were associated with mud, the filth of the urban streets, the pollution of the water of the Thames and the black dirt of the chimney smoke, and attracted the creative imagination of painters, poets, novelists, and social reformers, who represented them often with the idea of denouncing the dreadful relationships between dirt, hard labour, and class and racial belonging in a derelict urban context. Often, both the chimney sweeps and the street minstrels, either because they did not trouble to wash their faces or clothing (in Mayew’s narrative), or because they enjoyed being perceived as the opposite of a white, productive and ordered middle class, were linked with urban festivities and carnival, thus freely assuming new or inverted identities. In the case of blackface minstrelsy, they seemed to perform a “challenge to the status quo and to middle-class repressive strictures on behaviour”56 and among their forms of social resistance there certainly was the practice of blackening up, which was a visual sign of rebelliousness. They were, like the sweep, whites who could become blacks, implying a kind of boundary flux analogous to that between the shifting of city borders and gender identities. However, the fact that dirt was represented as racial blackness, and blackness as dirt, created a figure that “hesitated between self and other. Blackface minstrelsy and chimney sweeps served to mask tensions and 53 Marshall, ‘“A Dim World, Where Monsters Dwell’”, pp. 239–40. 54 Marshall, ‘“A Dim World, Where Monsters Dwell’”, p. 121. 55 See Henry Mayew, London Labour and the London Poor: The Conditions and Earnings of Those That Will Work, Cannot Work, and Will Not Work, 4 vols. (London: Griffin, Bohn & Co., 1861–1865), vol. 4. 56 Marshall, ‘“A Dim World, Where Monsters Dwell’”, p. 137 and pp. 134–143.

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anxieties, functioning as a moment of disruption that could also allow for the perpetuation of the status quo […] [They] set up but defused an apparent threat”.57 They also helped viewers at the Royal Academy to visualize empire and to perceive London itself as a monstrous microcosm of that large imperial territory, including all races, classes, and types of people, and thus both fascination and concern were generated. “The white yet blackened figures in images of the Victorian public sphere therefore functioned as constitutive of not only the racial Other but also the white bourgeoisie”.58 Dirt became confused with skin colour, to the point that blackness was the dominant characteristic both of the poor and of colonial subjects:59 “Crossing sweepers, the so called “mudlarks” (those who gleaned the banks and shallows of the Thames for old metal, coal, or other scraps of value), chimney sweeps, blackface minstrels, and street children and a range of other street types became the personifications or urban filth”.60 However, in Henry Mayew’s London Labour and the London Poor: The Conditions and Earnings of Those That Will Work, Cannot Work, and Will Not Work (1861–2) urban dirt is looked at with disgust and has to be removed, but then it needs to be redefined and accepted as it is seen as extremely beneficial to agriculture: Hence, in order that the balance of waste and supply should be maintained – that the principle of universal compensation should be kept up and that what is rejected by us should go to the sustenance of plants, Nature has given us several instinctive motives to remove our refuse from us. She has not only constituted that we egest the most loathsome of all things to our senses and imagination, but she has rendered its effluvium highly pernicious to our health […] thus it has been made not only advantageous to us to remove our refuse to the fields, but positively detrimental to our health, and disgusting to our senses, to keep it in the neighborhood of our house. In every wellregulated State, therefore, an effective and rapid means for carrying off the ordure of the people to a locality where it may be fruitful instead of destructive, becomes a most important consideration. Both the health and the wealth of the nation depend upon it.61

57 Marshall, ‘“A Dim World, Where Monsters Dwell’”, p. 142. 58 Marshall, ‘“A Dim World, Where Monsters Dwell’”, p. 118. 59 See Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie: The Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1991); Barringer, Tim, ‘Images of Otherness and the Visual Production of Difference: Race and Labour in Illustrated Texts, 1850–1865’, in Victorians and Race, ed. by Shearer West (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996), pp. 34–52. 60 Marshall, ‘“A Dim World, Where Monsters Dwell’”, p. 117. 61 Marshall, ‘“A Dim World, Where Monsters Dwell’”, p. 124.

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Mayew then suggests: Up to the present we have only thought of removing our refuse – the idea of using it never entered our minds. It was not until science taught us the dependence of one order of creation upon another, that we began to see that what appeared worse than worthless to us was Nature’s capital – wealth set aside for future production.62

Notwithstanding Mayew’s progressive proposal, dirt and waste continued to be associated with the poor of the East End and the racialized Other, represented above all by immigrants and Jews. And then, in an era when Britain was building an empire founded on an ideology of race superiority, it was strategically authoritative for the powerful strata of the Victorians to conflate class-samenessand-difference and race-sameness-and-difference, social harmony and struggle, whiteness and blackness, and self and ‘Other’.63 In Anne McClintock’s discussion on Victorian filth, dirt is seen as highlighting an extensive crisis in those values which cemented the hierarchical organization of the British and urban society, and was unseemly evidence that the fundamental production of industrial and imperial wealth lay in the ends and bodies of the working class, women, and the colonized. Dirt, like all fetishes, thus expresses a crisis in values, for it contradicts the liberal dictum that social wealth is created by the abstract, rational principles of the market and not by labor.64

So, the crowded streets of the metropolis accept the opposite and yet coexistent figures of wealthy and poor people, of white and black (or blackened-white) people who inhabit London both in its rich neighbourhoods and in its more squalid quarters. In a way, the monstrosity of the body of the city – just like the monstrosity of the contemporary ‘presence’ of the dinosaur models in Crystal Palace Park and the muddy streets of Bleak House – may reside precisely in the continuous reworking of the shifting boundary between dirt and cleanness within the urban area and, in particular, between the East End and the West End. Of course, a major role in emphasizing such a mobile divide was clearly shown by the dirty water of the Thames flowing across the whole city, taking into the sea all the different types of filth and refuse: but, as the Thames is a tidal river, most of this mass of refuse remained in London instead of flowing out to sea as had been hoped. The tides also contributed to one of the great scourges of the metropolis – the mudflats. Running along the river’s margins, these vast muddy banks measured 62 Marshall, ‘“A Dim World, Where Monsters Dwell’”, p. 124. 63 See Homi K. Bhabha, ‘The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism’, in The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2012, 2nd ed.), pp. 94–120. 64 Anne McClintok, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1995); see also Marshall, City of Gold and Mud, p. 122.

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as much as 700 feet in width at Waterloo Bridge and averaged a depth of six feet. They also harboured deposits of reeking sewage.65

The physical deterioration of the Thames was very high in mid–century, as the river was used both as water source and waste basin by all those factories that operated in it (paper mills, tanneries, dye-works, breweries, coal trade, gasworks, and passenger steamship companies), not to mention the reeking byproducts of slaughterhouses, cattle yards and various types of refuse that continued to drain into the Thames, as they had for centuries and as Jonathan Swift had not failed to mock in his city eclogues. Naturally, the increase in population contributed to the poor condition of the Thames, depicted as the “Stygian Pool” by Benjamin Disraeli, handkerchief to nose, while fleeing from the Chamber of the House of Commons.66 Recurrent images of the Thames as ‘cloaca maxima’, hell, poison, plague, and death heighten the visualization of the polluted water of a river that links, and equally contaminates, the West and the East of London. Long after the ‘Great Stink’ of 1858,67 literature still reflected on the dangers coming out from the London river ; at the close of the century, though, Joseph Conrad elaborated differently on the idea of deadly Thames, spreading its poisonous contagion non only in London but all over the British empire. He imagines it as a gigantic and powerful snake which sank into the sea surrounding England and reached the river Congo in Africa: metaphorically and imaginatively the English river has become the Congo river double, offering an anxious feeling that the African darkness-and-wilderness of the ‘dark’ continent is also there, along the Thames and London as the centre of an imperial, ferocious darkness that had already spread all over Africa and in particular the Congo region. The symbolic political meaning attributed to the river and to London, together with the highly symbolic absence of light and prevalence of darkness throughout Marlow’s narration, makes Conrad and his readers conscious of the poisonous infection imperialism brings with it under the ‘mask’ of Western civilization. Sitting on the Nellie at anchor on the estuary of the Thames, Marlow thinks: The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of the day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth. We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs for ever, but in the august light of abiding memories.68 65 Michelle Allen, Cleansing the City. Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), pp. 58–59. 66 Halliday, The Great Stink of London, p. ix. 67 See Halliday, The Great Stink of London; Clare Clark, Il ventre di Londra (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2005). 68 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 28.

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After evoking nostalgically the proud atmosphere of past history and the patriotic sentiments guiding the Elizabethan generals, knights, and all those who “had gone out on that stream”,69 the narrator’ attitude changes while his thoughts reach again the present and the landscape around is quite different: The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream, and light began to appear along the shore. The Chapman lighthouse, a three-legged thing erect on a mud-flat, shone strongly. Lights of ships moved in the fairway – a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farthest west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in the sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.70

Soon Conrad (and Marlow) discovers how easily Europeans (and the English, in particular) who set forth in ships to enlighten and civilize can corrupt and destroy, and he emphasizes what human nature is like: whiteness and light may turn out to be blackness and darkness, and blackness and darkness may be relatively pure. All of a sudden Marlow refers to London thus: “And this also…has been one of the dark places of the earth”.71 It is not by chance that the Congo (=Thames) is deciphered imaginatively on the map that “has ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery”72 as a snake: It had become a place of darkness. But there was in it one river especially especially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land. And as I looked at the map of it in a shop-window, it fascinated me as a snake would a bird – a silly little bird. […] I went on along Fleet Street, but could not shake off the idea. The snake had charmed me.73

For three times Marlow repeats the word and image of an uncoiled big snake occupying an immense territory : its dangerous, abject and predatory position on the map and on the African (but also London) land, is extremely fascinating though repulsive. Fear, disgust and pleasure constitute Marlow’s desire for the abject that disturbs identity, system and order,74 and London, tainted by the infected, poisonous and mortal river, is an abject city. The Dickensian dark fog does not envelop only the natural landscape of the ‘great (and filthy) city’; it creeps into the boats and ships at anchor on the Thames and penetrates the bodies of old and young people:

69 70 71 72 73 74

Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 29. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 29 (italics mine). Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 29. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 33. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 33. See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror : An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

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Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.75

The physical personification of the fog that attacks the people in many ways: “wheezing” and coughing with asthma”, or “cruelly pinching the toes and fingers”, and surrounding the passengers on the bridges completely in such a manner as to give them the impression of being suspended in the air. The fog itself is a threatening monster in that it deprives everything and everybody of familiar and recognizable traits at the same time not allowing to acquire new clear visibility. The fog is London, London is the fog, and as the fog is a monster, London is a monster too. And it is “at the very heart of the fog”, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, that Dickens locates the High Court of Chancery ; his comments are humorously tasty and exciting: “Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire to deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth”.76 After establishing the metaphorical connections between the fog-and-mud and the High Court of Chancery, the Victorian author goes on humorously and satirically to shed light on the obscure workings of that institution; he unmasks it: On such an afternoon some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be – as here they are – mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horsehair warded heads against walls of words and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might. On such an afternoon the various solicitors in the cause, some two or three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who made a fortune by it, ought to be – as are they not? – ranged in a line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for truth at the bottom of it) between the registrar’s red table and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters’ reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them. Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out.77

An ‘outcast London’, foggy, misty, dirty, contagious, and potentially dangerous for those who did not belong there. In the course of the century, its East End body came to be the dominant image to the point that it came to be not only described 75 Dickens, Bleak House, p. 3. 76 Dickens, Bleak House, p. 3. 77 Dickens, Bleak House, p. 3.

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but anatomized, opened up, scrutinized, looked at in the middle of a process of decay, degeneration, and corruption. The monstrous body of London was thus completely established both materially and imaginatively. At the same time, the metropolis city of London was considered an object either to be contemplated by admiring artists and intellectuals (e. g., Claude Monet, Whistler, Ford Madox Hueffer, among others) as an aesthetic, prodigious ‘manufactured and imaginary place and a gigantic, unfinished topographical and geographic monster offering itself to the descriptive engaged experiments of the social reformers’ gaze (among others, Pierce Egan, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Booth, etc.) and to the narrative voices of many socio-politically-minded authors of the second half of the nineteenth century (Charles Dickens, George Gissing, R. Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Herbert G. Wells, and many others). Above all, the principal contrast between the different approaches to London was one of extreme wealth and poverty represented, realistically and fictionally, in the two ‘nations’ of the West End and the East End of the ‘world city.’ But, more than this imagined rigid division, based on the gaze from above and from the outside which was the result of map makers and cartographers, social reformers, curious travellers and tourists, all of them, in fact, coming from the Western territories of the world (not necessarily coming only from the British islands) who desired to run the risk of dangerous encounters in the unknown London, what came to the fore was the recognized fictionality of the ideological and social construction of that border. As a matter of fact, the current literary and socio-political stereotypes organized around the paradigms of class, gender, race, and nationality soon demonstrated they could no longer be safe tools to affirm and confirm the almost ‘supernatural existence of neat and fixed borders among London’s inhabitants. The very sociological inquiries and the great adventurous master narratives of the nineteenth century into the yet unknown territory of the oriental part of the metropolis succeeded in showing that it was highly monstrous to think of the metropolitan, gigantic, labirynthine and unfinished body of the city as a static and well defined site; on the contrary, London exhibited its territories as a mobile body, full of vital energy, continuously changing, and always trespassing its permeable borders; indeed, London was made up of varieties and multifarious differences, but they were perceived, artificially and iconically, as conflicting, irreconciliable, and monstrous, instead of being experienced and lived as the rich expression of an extraordinary plurality of cultures.

Maria Teresa Chialant

‘The Thing’. Unidentified Monstrous Objects in Victorian Fiction The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (5. 1. 12–17)

1. Monsters have assumed, throughout history, different and multiple shapes. Many early monsters were represented as animal-human creatures, as in the bird-headed and cat-headed gods and goddesses of Egypt, while in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Duessa is seen as a grotesque witch, complete with fox’s tail, bear’s paw, and eagle’s claw. In early seventeenth-century Europe, there are examples of a fascination with the design and creation of new, ingenious figurations of monstrosity. The Dutch silversmith Arendt von Bolten has left an album of his work dating from c.1595 to c.1603 containing innumerable monsters and grotesque decorations; alongside these drawings there is a small collection of bronzes attributed to him because of their close similarity to the illustrations in the album. In one case, for instance, we have the spectacle of “a monster with a reptile’s head, a bird’s body (the wings replaced by snail’s shells), an erect curly tail, and the long legs of a bird of prey”.1 More recent representations of monstrosity straddle not only the uncertain boundaries between the human and the animal species, but extend also into the even more indefinite territory of the formless and/or the unnameable. In the Western nineteenth-century literary imaginary, the most significant archetype of monstrosity is undoubtedly Victor Frankenstein’s creation in Mary Shelley’s novel (1818).2 This being is variously labelled, throughout the narra-

1 Dawn of the Golden Age: Northern Netherlandish Art 1580–1620, ed. by Ger Luijten et. al. (Yale: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 411, quoted in Stephen Bann, ‘Introduction’, in Frankenstein. Creation and Monstrosity, ed. by Stephen Bann (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), p. 3. 2 Stephen Bann writes that Frankenstein is not only a powerful narrative about creation, but it is also a novel with the propensity “to generate myths”, being a text “which hands on, to drama

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tive, as “Creature”, “wretch”, or “monster”, but in the first stage of its existence (after its flight from the laboratory), it is classified by Victor as a neuter being: I perceived in the gloom a figure which stole from behind a clump of trees near me; I stood fixed, gazing intently ; I could not be mistaken. A flash of lightning illuminated the object and discovered its shape plainly to me; its gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect, more hideous than belongs to humanity, instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the filthy daemon to whom I had given life.3

When Victor realizes that this is his little brother William’s killer, he immediately shifts to the male pronoun: “He was the murderer!”4 From this point on, the creature becomes a person who, after his other crimes, is defined not only as a monster, but also (and more often) as a fiend and a daemon. On the contrary, for the female companion Victor is going to create under the latter’s threatening request, and which he destroys before completing his work, another word is introduced: the thing: “I thought with a sensation of madness on my promise of creating another like to him, and trembling with passion, tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged”.5 The term can be explained not only by the fact that this new creature is still lifeless, but also as the starting point for a new figuration of monstrosity, when compared to the usual representations of monsters: it is no longer a hybrid, on the threshold between humans and beasts, or a mixture of different beasts, but an indefinite being. Actually, when Victor returns to the laboratory the day after, this female organism presents itself to him as a fragmented body, a mere mass of flesh: “The remains of the half-finished creature, whom I had destroyed, lay scattered on the floor, and I almost felt as if I had mangled the living flesh of a human being”.6 With such a gruesome scene, a gendered violence takes place. If it is true, in fact, that Victor refuses to give life to a creature “equal in deformity and wickedness”7 to the previous one, in order to avoid the reproduction of a “race of devils”, one might wonder why he had not had similar scruples about the creation of the male monster. Judith Halberstam proposes a suggestive interpretation: The female monster represents, in a way, the symbolic and generative power of monstrosity itself, and particularly of a monstrosity linked to femininity, female sexuality, and female powers of reproduction. […] The male monster represents a sublimity

3 4 5 6 7

and the cinema as well as to the storytelling tradition, the infinitely suggestive combined themes of creation and monstrosity” (Bann, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1-2). Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, in Three Gothic Novels, ed. by Peter Fairclough, intr. Mario Praz (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1968] 1974), pp. 337–338. Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 338. Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 436. Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 440. Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 437.

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which is missing from the female monster, and while he becomes part of his author’s identity, she threatens her maker with his own dissolution. […] The reduction of the female monster to pulp gives us a very literal metaphor for the threat of female monstrosity as opposed to the threat figured by male monstrosity. […] The power of the male monster is that it does precisely become human and so it makes humanity intrinsic to a particular kind of monstrosity and vice versa. The female monster cannot be human because it is always only an object, a thing, “unfinished”.8

The last words of this quotation are important not only from a gender perspective but also – and more importantly in the present context – from a genre perspective. Nineteenth-century Gothic (to which Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus obviously belongs) is characterized by the recurrence of such abstract terms as vice, violence, danger and death. Also the kind of terror that villains inspire in the heroines who are victims of their harassment is a “nameless dread”, whose “object is diffuse, unclear, insusceptible of definition”.9 In the case of Frankenstein’s female monster, we have a formless object – a “pulp”, in fact -, which resists any definition. The category of the formless has been introduced into contemporary critical debate by Georges Bataille who, as Alessandra Violi illustrates,10 attacks the category of “form” as devoid of any ontological foundation. In his article “Informe”, which first appeared in Documents, Bataille argues that “form” is not in things but is only “une redingote mathmatique” which we attribute to reality in order to be able to communicate through definitions.11 He does not deny the necessity of form, and explains that what is designated by informe does not possess a statute of its own. Bataille does not want to substitute forms (or their representation) with the formless, but only challenge the traditional, academic aesthetic horizon and its norms which tend to preserve and transmit not only a strict system of forms but also an idealized version of form: the good/fine form (the fine arts). So, the formless does not deny the form; it only downgrades the “fine form”, revealing all the other forms which survive it as imaginary threats. Being against the very idea of the definition of words and of the dictionary itself, Bataille does not define the formless, but attributes to it the performative task of deconstructing the very notion that everything must have its own definite form, his intention being to provide a tool by which to “see” a counter-history of art. 8 Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 50–51. 9 Eugenia Delamotte, Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of 19th-century Gothic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 16. 10 Alessandra Violi, ‘L’immagine informe: Bataille, Warburg, Benjamin e i fantasmi della tradizione’, F@rum (2004), pp. 1–26. 11 George Bataille, ‘Informe’. Documents 7 (December 1929), p. 382. Reprinted in Bataille, Documents, 2 vols. (Paris: E˙ditions Jean-Michel Place, 1991).

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In her discussion of the “formless image”, Violi remarks that the formless is not a new category, but it is already present in the Western tradition as the site of anxiety, or unrest, of fine forms, as is the case with Leonardo da Vinci’s Trattato della pittura (Treatise on painting).12 Here, the Italian artist urges us to look at the creation of forms out of nothing, and at the metamorphosis of the human into an object, or, viceversa, at the antropomorphisation of things. Which is what, three centuries later, John Ruskin would call “pathetic fallacy”, that is, the exchange of attributes between the animate and the inanimate. In the nineteenth century, in fact, “the attention to the formless becomes pervasive”:13 from Ruskin, who remarked (in Modern Painters, Book 5) that Turner was fascinated by waste, detritus, debris, smoke, soot, dust, to Dickens, who adopted the narrative device of the pathetic fallacy in his writing, and was a superb describer not only of objects (his fiction is literally overcrowded with things), but also of formless entities – such as dust, rags and fragments – which occur particularly in Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend. It is another Victorian writer, Edward Bulwer Lytton, who gives the monster as a formless thing its most uncanny representation in his ghost story The Haunted and the Haunters. Here, the monster assumes so many different shapes that the narrator cannot define it by any other term but “the Thing”. 2. Edward Bulwer Lytton is well known as the author of historical novels such as The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), and of social and political novels which exploit the conventions of Gothic formulaic fiction (Falkland, Pelham, Paul Clifford), but he also wrote a kind of fiction which exhibits a strong interest in the occult. It is not by chance that a critic has described them as “metaphysical novels”.14 A Strange Story (1862), on the figure of the Wandering Jew, and The Haunted and the Haunters (1857) both belong to this narrative subgenre. The latter, as its subtitle “The House and the Brain” announces, has to do with haunted houses and supernatural phenomena to which the narrator attempts to give scientific explanations. The link between a “haunted house” and “the uncanny” would be 12 Violi, ‘L’immagine informe’, pp. 5–6. Leonardo invites the observer to see “nelle macchie dei muri, nella cenere del fuoco o nelle nuvole, nei fanghi o in simili luoghi – informi – invenzioni di battaglie, d’animali e di uomini, paesi e cose mostruose come diavoli e simili cose” (Trattato della pittura, n. 63). Elio Grazioli suggests a relationship between Leonardo’s “stains in the walls” and the formless in La polvere nell’arte (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2004), pp. 9–10 (quoted in Violi, ‘L’immagine informe’, p. 24 n. 6). 13 Violi, ‘L’immagine informe’, p. 9. David Trotter has attempted to trace an artistic and literary history of the formless in the 19th century, which explicitly takes inspiration from Bataille, in Cooking with Mud. The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth-Century Art and Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); see Violi, L’immagine informe’, p. 26 note 35. 14 Edwin Eigner, The Metaphysical Novel in England and America. Dickens, Bulwer, Melville, and Hawthorne (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1978).

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made clear, a few decades later, by the etymology of unheimlich in Freud’s article ‘Das Unheimliche’ (published in Imago in 1919). The plot of Bulwer Lytton’s short story unfolds around mysterious events which take place in a London house that its owner is not able to let because the tenants flee in terror after the third night spent there. The first-person narrator, drawn by curiosity, makes up his mind to personally explore and experience the mystery, ready (and eager) to hear or see “something, perhaps, excessively horrible”.15 In fact, a series of “strange phenomena” gradually occur when he moves into the house: a door which opens and closes quietly by itself, footfalls and sudden draughts which mark the presence of “somebody” moving through the house, as if to follow the narrator’s and his servant’s steps. More interesting than particular incidents that usually take place in a ghost story is the narrator’s perception of them. This is conveyed to the reader by a crescendo of eerie atmospheres, with descriptions of ethereal objects and amorphous shapes which, in their puzzling and disturbing dimension, remain indefinite – formless, in fact. We both saw a large pale light – as large as the human figure but shapeless and unsubstantial – move before us, and ascend the stairs that led from the landing into the attics. I followed the light, and my servant followed me. […] The light then collapsed into a small globule, exceedingly brilliant and vivid; rested a moment on a bed in the corner, quivered, and vanished.16

The “large pale light” will go through a variety of metamorphoses and assume different names, among which one in particular is first introduced, “the THING”17, as if to confirm the impossibility of finding a more definite and stable term for the inexplicable event. This presence starts haunting not only the rooms of the house but also the rooms of the mind; the narrator’s argument is that terror can be kept under control by human will, because the “supernatural” does not exist but is only something natural, unknown to us: “Now my theory is that the Supernatural is the Impossible, and what is called supernatural is only a something in the laws of Nature of which we have been hitherto ignorant”18. This statement is followed by various remarks on mesmerism or electrobiology ; practices by which a person’s mind can be influenced through a peculiar agency : a “living material form” – that is, a medium. The text is interspersed with frequent comments of a scientific kind; these narratorial intrusions have more than one function: to support the thesis according to which any phenomenon has a human or natural origin; to delay the 15 Edward Bulwer Lytton, ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’, in A Strange Story and The Haunted and the Haunters (Kila, MT: Kessinger Publishing Company, n. d.), pp. 4–5. 16 Bulwer Lytton, ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’, pp. 8–9. 17 Bulwer Lytton, ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’, p. 11. 18 Bulwer Lytton, ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’, pp. 11–12.

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explanation of the uncanny events, creating an effect of suspense in the narrative; to exhibit the mise-en-scwne of the conflict between science and magic, and the oscillations between the narrator’s intention to fight any superstition concerning the existence of ghosts and the inevitability and ineffability of supernatural phenomena. But when the “showing” is taken up again in the narrative, after the “telling”, something new and dreadful presents itself: I now became aware that something interposed between the page and the light, – the page was overshadowed. I looked up, and I saw what I shall find it very difficult, perhaps impossible, to describe. It was a Darkness shaping itself forth from the air in very undefined outline. I cannot say it was of a human form, and yet it had more resemblance to a human form, or rather shadow, than to anything else. As it stood, wholly apart and distinct from the air and the light around it, its dimensions seemed gigantic, the summit nearly touching the ceiling. While I gazed, a feeling of intense cold seized me. […] As I continued to gaze, I thought – but this I cannot say with precision – that I distinguished two eyes looking down on me from the height.19

At this point, the narrator has the impression of “an immense and overwhelming Power opposed to [his] volition”, and is taken by a “horror to a degree that no words can convey”20. The insistence on the unutterable dimension of the monstrous apparition is reiterated throughout the text, whose strength lies in the fact that the author “does not make the mistake of trying to describe the form itself; he chooses rather to heighten its impact by leaving it vague and amorphous while closely specifying the developing feelings which it arouses”.21 The narrator’s inner conflict – to surrender to what he calls “an illusion”22 or to react by the strength of reason and will – occupies the central space of the narrative: “[…] in a few minutes the room was in utter darkness. The dread that came over me, to be thus in the dark with that dark Thing, whose power was so intensely felt, brought a reaction of nerve”.23 From this point on, descriptions of the new forms assumed by “the Thing” – “[t]he dark Thing, whatever it might be”24 – follow one another in quick progression: a woman’s hand, “sparks or globules like bubbles of light, many coloured”,25 a woman’s shape, a young man’s shape. And yet, “both the male shape and the female, though defined, were evidently unsubstantial, impalpable –

19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Bulwer Lytton, ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’, p. 13. Bulwer Lytton, ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’, p. 13. David Punter, The Literature of Terror (London and New York: Longman, 1980), p. 170. Bulwer Lytton, ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’, p. 14. Bulwer Lytton, ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’, p. 14. Bulwer Lytton, ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’, p. 14. Bulwer Lytton, ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’, p. 14.

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simulacra – phantasms”.26 In the background, a dark Shadow, wrapping the two phantoms in darkness, towering between them, grasping them, swallowing them up. And, in the end, among the visible figurations of “the Thing”, the most monstrous apparition of all: Nothing was left but the Shadow, and on that my eyes were intently fixed, till again eyes grew out of the Shadow – malignant, serpent eyes. And the bubbles of light again rose and fell, and in their disordered, irregular turbulent maze, mingled with the wan moonlight. And now from those globules themselves, as from the shell of an egg, monstrous things burst out; the air grew filled with them; larvae so bloodless and so hideous that I can in no way describe them except to remind the reader of the swarming life which the solar microscope brings before his eyes in a drop of water – things transparent, supple, agile, chasing each other, devouring each other – forms like nought ever beheld by the naked eye. As the shapes were without symmetry, so their movements were without order. In their very vagrancies there was no sport; they came round me and round, thicker and faster and swifter, swarming over my head, crawling over my right arm, which was outstretched in involuntary command against all evil beings.27

Chaos seems to govern the whole scene, which closes on the return to a sort of primeval darkness: “all things were swallowed up in the darkness of the dark Shadow, as if out of that darkness all had come, into that darkness all returned”28. This passage evokes the Freudian desire for “undifferentiation” to a modern reader. The desire for undifferentiation is close to the instinct Freud identifies in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), and in his late works, as the most fundamental drive in man: a drive towards a state of “inorganicism”. It is not simply a “death wish”, but the most radical form of the pleasure principle: “This condition he termed a state of entropy, and the desire for undifferentation he termed an entropic pull, opposing entropy to energy”.29 Rosemary Jackson maintains that the fantastic mode can be seen as corresponding to the first stage in Freud’s evolutionary model, the stage of a magical and animistic thought. The Haunted and The Haunters belongs, in fact, to the typology of the ‘fantastic’ mode that “refuses difference, distinction, homogeneity, reduction, discrete forms”.30 Throughout the text, the descriptions of “the Thing” alternate with the narrator’s remarks on the unacceptability of the apparitions as inexplicable events, and on the need, instead, to look for a scientific – or pseudo-scientific – explanation, perhaps in mesmerism: 26 27 28 29

Bulwer Lytton, ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’, p. 15. Bulwer Lytton, ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’, p. 16. Bulwer Lytton, ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’, p. 16. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy. The Literature of Subversion (London and New York: Methuen, 1981), pp. 72–3. 30 Jackson, Fantasy, p. 71.

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Whether, in so doing, tables walk of their own accord, or fiendlike shapes appear in a magic circle, or bodiless hands rise and remove material objects, or a Thing of Darkness, such as presented itself to me, freeze our blood – still am I persuaded that these are but agencies conveyed, as by electric wires, to my own brain from the brain of another. In some constitutions there is a natural chemistry, and those constitutions may produce chemic wonders; in others a natural fluid, call it electricity, and these may produce electric wonders.31

And yet, not even animal magnetism can provide a satisfactory explanation, as it is the narrator’s conviction that the weird phenomena originate “in some brain now far distant”: a brain endowed with an immense power which would have destroyed him if he had let himself be subjugated by terror. That power is exercised by “some material force” that only his own will could oppose and resist.32 So, we see the narrator hesitate between galvanism and mesmerism, scientific explanation and mystery, a ‘new’ belief in the strength of the unconscious mind and a residual belief in some sort of magic. Whenever his rational convictions are put to the test more sorely, he resorts to his volume of Macaulay’s Essays, to look for comfort and support. (‘His Macaulay’ is naively evoked – or, rather, invoked – five times, to prove the difficulty of the situation he finds himself in!). The story ends following the usual pattern of Victorian sensation fiction, with the discovery of “skeletons in the cupboard” – and not only in a metaphorical sense. The haunted house was once the stage of some violent drama, as the narrator finds out from two letters dated thirty-five years back, which confusedly hint at some secret not of love but of crime. Suspecting that a particular room “forms a starting point or receptacle for the influences which haunt the house”, he strongly advises its owner “to have the walls opened, the floor removed,– nay, the whole room pulled down”33. At this point, the story exhibits all the paraphernalia of the Gothic romance – hidden nooks, secret drawers, miniature portraits with engravings on the back, Latin inscriptions – which reproduce the claustrophobic and labirinthine spaces typical of the genre.34 Towards the end of the story, the description of further secret spaces and objects, in which the language of magic intertwines with that of alchemy, contributes to the weird atmosphere of the house: 31 32 33 34

Bulwer Lytton, ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’, p. 20. Bulwer Lytton, ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’, p. 21. Bulwer Lytton, ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’, p. 21. See Eugenia Delamotte, Perils of the Night, p. 15: “This kind of architecture is the repository and embodiment of mystery. Specific secrets are hidden in it, and to discover them one must confront the mystery of the architecture itself: its darkness, labyrinthine passageways, unsuspected doors, secret staircases, sliding panels, forgotten rooms. The architecture is also a repository and embodiment of the past. It contains evidence of specific life histories”.

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Upon a small, thin book, or rather tablet, was placed a saucer of crystal: this saucer was filled with a clear liquid; on that liquid floated a kind of compass, with a needle shifting rapidly round; but instead of the usual points of a compass were seven strange characters, not very unlike those used by astrologers to denote the planets. A peculiar, but not strong nor displeasing, odour came from this drawer, which was lined with a wood that we afterwards discovered to be hazel. Whatever the cause of this odour, it produced a material effect on the nerves.35

The continuous oscillation between the supernatural and the scientific dimensions is consistent with the spirit of the age, and with the author’s personal vision: “Scientific experimentation was opening up new fields of enquiry and discovering new forms of energy. […] Many people, including Lytton, could reasonably ask why other forces, hitherto labelled mysterious, should not come within the scrutiny of science. […] He was happiest when arguing that the supernatural was simply what science had not yet explored and codified”.36 A constant feature of the Gothic romance is at work in The Haunted and the Haunters: “Because not knowing is the primary source of Gothic terror, the essential activity of the Gothic protagonist is interpretation”.37 The relations among reason, faith, and imagination are a crucial focus of Bulwer Lytton’s short story, and the narrator’s main concern. The introduction, and reiteration, of the term “thing” (or “the Thing”) in this story has a double function: on the one hand, its indefiniteness underwrites, and connects to, the indistinctness of boundaries typical of the Gothic romance, in which borderlines shift and blur;38 on the other hand, its very weirdness prefigures a new representation of monstrosity which will find full expression in late Victorian ghost stories, and eventually in a new narrative genre of the fantastic mode: science fiction.

35 Bulwer Lytton, ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’, p. 24. 36 Leslie Mitchell, Bulwer Lytton. The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Man of Letters (Hambledon and London: St Martin’s Press, 2003), pp. 131, 140. 37 Delamotte, Perils of the Night, p. 24. 38 “[I]n the world of Gothic romance, the physical and metaphorical boundaries that one ordinarily depends on prove unstable, elusive, ineffective, nonexistent”. Delamotte, Perils of the Night, p. 22.

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3. The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) is acknowledged as one of H. G. Wells’s most disturbing novels. The author himself was well aware of it: in 1924, he defined his text a “theological grotesque”,39 and, in 1933, he referred to it as “an exercise of youthful blasphemy”, written under Jonathan Swift’s influence.40 The mention of Swift contributes to situate this novel in the tradition of the discourse on monstrosity. The analogies between Gulliver’s Travels and Doctor Moreau are many : they both belong to the dystopian narrative genre, and adopt a particular kind of animal imagery. Gulliver’s disgust for his fellow-men on his return to England from his fourth voyage is very similar to the feeling of revulsion Prendick experiences when he comes back from the island; memories of the Beast Folk keep haunting him: I would go out into the streets to fight with my delusion, and prowling women would mew after me, furtive craving men glance jealously at me, weary pale workers go coughing by me, with tired eyes and eager paces like wounded deer dripping blood, old people, bent and dull, pass murmuring to themselves, and all unheeding a ragged tail of gibing children. […] Particularly nauseous were the blank expressionless faces of people in trains and omnibuses; they seemed no more my fellow-creatures than dead bodies would be, so that I did no dare to travel unless I was assured of being alone.41

The Island of Doctor Moreau is a story of the devolutionary process nature and humankind will eventually undergo. In the article ‘Zoological Retrogression’,42 Wells argues that the “invincibly optimistic spirit” of the popular view of evolution as a steady ascent was based on a wilful disregard of Nature’s shadow side; he gives examples of the “fitful and uncertain nature” of evolutionary advance, and concludes that human ascendancy is precarious and that some other species might emerge to “sweep homo away into the darkness”. The final words of the article seem to anticipate something to which Wells would give narrative form five years later in Doctor Moreau: “The Coming Beast must […] be reckoned in any anticipatory calculations regarding the Coming Man”.43 The conclusion of the novel, with the Beast Folk’s reversion to the original feral state, and hu39 ‘Preface’ to the Atlantic Edition of the Works of H. G. Wells, 28 vols. (London: Unwin, 1924–27), vol. 2 (1924), p. ix. 40 H. G. Wells, ‘Preface to The Scientific Romances’ (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933), reprint in H. G. Wells’s Literary Criticism, ed. by Patrick Parrinder and Robert M. Philmus (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1980), p. 243. 41 H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau (London: Penguin Books- Signet Classic, 1988), p. 137. 42 H. G. Wells, ‘Zoological Retrogression’, first published in Gentleman’s Magazine, 271 (September 1891), pp. 246–253, then included in Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction, ed. by Robert M. Philmus and David Y. Hughes (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1975), pp. 158–168. 43 The quotations refer to H. G. Wells, ‘Zoological Retrogression’, pp. 158, 167, 168, 168.

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mankind’s “sense of dethronement”, can be read as a sort of parody of Darwin’s evolutionary doctrine.44 Two terms recurring in the novel with a particularly eerie meaning are thing and face; they are both referred to the Beast Folk and even occur in the titles of chapters 3 and 9, as if to underline their importance in the narrative. “Thing” (as already seen in Frankenstein and The Haunted and the Haunters) has a strong effect on the reader as it contains in itself both the idea of materiality and its opposite, of something which is animate and inanimate at the same time;45 “face”, although apparently more clear-cut and ‘human’, turns out to define the very monstrosity of the inhabitants of the island. At the beginning of ch. 3 (“The Strange Face”), Prendick – immediately after the shipwreck of the Lady Vain – meets the first exemplar of the Beast Folk, “a misshapen man, short, broad and clumsy, with a crooked back, a hairy neck and a head sunk between his shoulders”.46 What strikes the narrator is his “black face”: It was a singularly deformed one. The facial part projected, forming something dimly suggestive of a muzzle, and the huge half-open mouth showed as big white teeth as I had ever seen in a human mouth. His eyes were bloodshot at the edges. With scarcely a rim of white round the hazel pupils. There was a curious glow of excitement in his face. […] I had never beheld such a repulsive and extraordinary face before, and yet – if the contradiction is credible – I experienced at the same time an odd feeling that in some way I had already encountered exactly the features and gestures that now amazed me.47

The “odd feeling” experienced by Prendick derives from the encounter with something both unknown and familiar, something uncanny : it is an encounter with das Unheimliche. In this case, with “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar”. Further on in the text (in ch. 14), it is another type of fear that is evoked: the fear created where there is “intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one”.48 Here, the uncertainty pertains to the liminal dimension of the Beast Folk. In fact, as Moreau explains to Pre44 A “sense of dethronement” – an expression which occurs in The War of the Worlds (II, 6) – is “a recurrent nightmare of the early Wells” according to Patrick Parrinder, who gives this title to a chapter of his Shadows of the Future. H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1995): “A Sense of Dethronement. The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau” (pp. 49–64). 45 See Michael Fried, ‘Impressionist Monsters: H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau’, in Frankenstein. Creation and Monstrosity, pp. 95–112. 46 Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, p. 10. 47 Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, pp. 10–11. 48 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., ed. and trans. by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), vol. 17 (1955), pp. 220, 233.

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ndick, “[t]hese creatures you have seen are animals carven and wrought into new shapes”,49 “[they] seemed strange and uncanny to you as soon as you began to observe them, but to me, just after I make them, they seem indisputable human beings”,50 except for their inevitable tendency to relapse to their original condition: “And they revert. As soon as my hand is taken from them the beast begins to creep back, begins to assert itself again…”.51 The Beast Folk are neither men nor animals: they escape easy and reassuring taxonomies, because, as Jeffrey Cohen writes, the monster expresses the crisis of categories, challenges them: monsters are always hybrid creatures whose bodies resist any attempt to include them in any systematic structure.52 The uncertain condition of the beings created by Moreau recalls the state of original “undifferentiation”, mentioned above. This kind of imaginative figuration is certainly exhibited in the Beast Folk, and particularly in the “thing” described by Moreau in ch. 14, which strongly recalls Frankenstein’s unfinished female monster : […] after I had made a number of human creatures I made a Thing – […] It wasn’t finished. It was purely an experiment. It was a limbless thing with a horrible face that writhed along the ground in a serpentine fashion. It was immensely strong and in infuriating pain, and it travelled in a rollicking way like a porpoise swimming. It lurked in the woods for some days, doing mischief to all it came across, until we hunted it, and then it wriggled into the northern part of the island […] Montgomery shot the thing.53

In ch. 9 (“The Thing in the Forest”), it is Prendick who uses this term as many as seven times – three times it is accompanied by the locutions “whatever it was”54 and “if it existed”,55 which express his doubts about its actual reality. “The Thing” is first introduced by a series of questions the narrator puts to himself about the nature of the mysterious creatures that have appeared to him among the trees, and the impossibility of classifying them as either men or animals. His feeling of uneasiness in watching “their grotesque and unaccountable gestures” derives from “the two inconsistent and conflicting impressions of utter strangeness and yet of the strangest familiarity. […] Each of these creature,

49 50 51 52

Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, p. 72. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, p. 78. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, p. 79. See Jeffrey J. Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’, in Monster Theory. Reading Culture, ed. by Jeffrey J. Cohen (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 3–25 (p. 6). 53 Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, pp. 77–78. 54 Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, pp. 41, 43. 55 Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, p. 43.

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despite its human form, […] had woven into it […] some now irresistible suggestions of a hog, a swinish taint, the unmistakable mark of the beast”.56 It is probably not a coincidence that this last expression is to be found in the title of Kipling’s short story “The Mark of the Beast” (published in Life’s Handicap in1891, five years before The Island of Doctor Moreau), which presents a character (the Silver Man) whose face had been consumed by leprosy.57 The lack of the face – as the lack of sight in another horror story by Kipling, A Matter of Fact (1893), to which I will come back later – suggests a further consideration on the figurations of monstrosity. If we share the assumption that “the monster’s body is a cultural body”,58 it is also legitimate to state that monstrosity expresses itself primarily through the physical body. The visual is, in fact, the monster’s main dimension, and the body – in literature and art – is the privileged medium through which the monster’s Otherness manifests itself. The monster exists, first of all, as a visible surface; therefore, its body, signalling a deviation from the norm, inscribes itself in the category of monstrosity only by revealing itself. And yet, this is not always so: sometimes monstrosity reveals itself by indefinite, shapeless configurations, literally body-less (as already seen in The Haunted and the Haunters), or – paradoxically – by invisibility, as in the case of ghosts. In H. G. Wells’s scientific romance The Invisible Man (1897), the source of horror lies in the lack of physical body of the mysterious stranger who comes into the town of Iping, all wrapped up in bandages; in this case, monstrosity expresses itself, rather than by the presence of a repulsive body, through absence.59 In The Island of Doctor Moreau, on the contrary, monstrosity manifests itself by an excess of visibility, which the narrator can convey only by a word – both indistinct and all-embracing – like “Thing”. The Beast Folk stand for the break of natural order, the devolution of humankind and the return to chaos: the opposite of what was supposed to be the Darwinian doctrine of evolution. Wells had understood Darwin correctly, as his (already mentioned) article ‘Zoological Retrogression’ demonstrates. What Wells describes there is “a narrative model more consistent with Darwin’s own: a model of random movement, non-directive, non-telic, aimless and errant”: For Darwin, […] the intricacy and superb functionality of biological forms contrasted markedly with the chaotic randomness of the processes that, accidentally, generate 56 57 58 59

Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, p. 40. Fried, ‘Impressionist Monsters: H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau’, p. 104. Cohen, ‘Monster Culture’, p. 4. Rosemary Jackson mentions other works in which the fantastic mode manifests itself by the narrative device of invisibility : Mary Shelley’s The Invisible Girl, Margaret Armstrong’s The Man with No Face, G. M. Winsor’s Vanishing Men, E. L. White’s The Man Who Was Not There (see Jackson, Fantasy, p. 22).

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form. The fin-de-siwcle Gothic, however, envisioned something rather more terrible. In its plots of both parallel evolutions and abhuman becomings, a randomly-working Nature is figured as too imaginative, too prolific.60

In the present discussion, I shall leave aside other considerations concerning either the colonial subtext of Doctor Moreau or the nineteenth-century scientific and pseudo-scientific doctrines which lie behind the text: on the one hand, Darwin’s evolutionary theory and T. H. Huxley’s Social Darwinism, on the other hand, phrenology and criminal anthropology (commonly associated to Lombroso’s theory of the “born criminal”). I want to return, instead, to the category of the “abhuman”, introduced in Hurley’s book quoted above. Its author remarks that “Moreau constructs his abhumans from an indiscriminate range of animal materials”, so that the human body “reveals its morphic compatibility with, and thus lack of distinction from, the whole world of animal life”. The consequence of this is that “[h]umaness in general is fractured across many boundaries separating the human from the not-human”. The multiple hybrids created by Moreau are “chaotic bodies”: they are “complex” bodies, as Prendick notes, “but complexity here denotes indifferentiation and abomination rather than integrity and perfection”.61 In the novel’s penultimate chapter (“The Reversion of the Beast Folk”), foul acts and ghastly scenes occur ; while Prendick makes his escape off the island in a lifeboat, he is overwhelmed by “spasms of disgust”, and “a frantic horror” succeeds his repulsion:62 “The human body in all its gross materiality is fully on display here: the decomposing bodies of the sailors, the hybridized bodies of the hungry beast people, the abject body of Prendick […] No human body retains specificity ; all have long since become Things”.63 In recent years, theories of the post-human have been developing in the areas of moral philosophy, philosophy of science, and psychobiology, and new sciences like biotechnology and human engineering are flourishing.64 In the revolutionary passage from homo faber to homo creator that has characterized modernity, a particular place in the Western collective imaginary must be re60 Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 89, 90. 61 Hurley, The Gothic Body, p. 103. “Chaotic bodies” is, in fact, the title of the chapter dealing with The Island of Doctor Moreau (pp. 89–113). 62 Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, p. 133. 63 Hurley, The Gothic Body, p. 113. On the phenomenology of disgust, see Georges Bataille, ‘L’abjection et les formes misrables’, in Œuvres completes, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), pp. 217–221, mentioned by Georges Didi-Huberman in Phasmes. Essai sur l’apparition (Paris: Les rditions de Minuit, 1998), pp. 47–48 note 18. 64 The bibliography on these studies is immense; I shall restrict myself to a fairly recent collection of essays published in Italy : Umano, post-umano. Potere, sapere, etica nell’etu globale, ed. by Mariapaola Fimiani, Vanna Gessa Kurotschka and Elena Pulcini (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2004).

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served for Mary Shelley and H. G. Wells for having envisaged the risks and challenges of science and technology in creating monsters. 4. The present attempt to trace a genealogy of “the Thing” in Victorian fiction – however tentative and incomplete it may be – must include the mention of at least three late nineteenth-century short stories in which creepy, unknown creatures become the projections of the protagonists’ fears. We move, here, into the territories of horror literature, which has been thriving since then, and has been so pervasive also in twentieth-century cinema.65 Confining myself to firstclass writers only, two names stand out: H. G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling. “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” and “In the Avu Observatory” (both published by Wells in Pall Mall Budget, August 2nd and 9th, 1894) tell of a monstrous “thing” which threatens men’s lives, in a sort of foreshadowing of the Beast Folk. In “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid”, the plant imported from India, reveals itself to be a very aggressive creature, a hybrid between the vegetable and animal worlds, but apparently endowed with a human will. The orchid – “a shrivelled rhizome […] not identified” – is first described as having an “ugly shape”, or, rather, “scarcely to have a shape”;66 then it grows aerial rootlets that “look like fingers trying to get at you”67 and remind one of “tentacles reaching out after something”;68 finally, it envelops Wedderburn, the protagonist, clinging to him by “a tangle of grey ropes”, to the point of almost choking him by its “sucker rootlets”. In the end, these have to be torn through, in order to release the man, “white and bleeding”.69 “In the Avu Observatory” tells, instead, of a weird beast – a sort of enormous bat – described as “[s]ome huge vague black shape, with a flapping something like a wing”.70 It eventually attacks Woodhouse (an assistant in the observatory at Avu, Borneo), who is watching a group of stars through a telescope. He is at first just scared by “the thing, whatever it was”, and wonders whether it is inside or outside the observatory ;71 then, he has to confront the strange being, presumably a night-bird, in a proper battle. It almost kills him.72 65 Noƒl Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), p. 6. In the present context, a film worth mentioning for its title is The Thing from Another World, by Christian Nyby (USA 1951). 66 H. G. Wells, ‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’, in The Complete Short Stories of H. G. Wells, ed. by John Hammond (London: Phoenix Press, 1998), p. 11. 67 Wells, ‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’, p. 2. 68 Wells, ‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’, p. 13. 69 Wells, ‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’, p. 14. 70 H. G. Wells, ‘In the Avu Observatory’, in The Complete Short Stories of H. G. Wells, p. 18. 71 Wells, ‘In the Avu Observatory’, p. 18. 72 Similarly, in ‘The Moth’ (first published as ‘A Moth-Genus Novo’, in Pall Mall Gazette, March

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In these stories, one can detect a colonial subtext, as both the setting (“In the Avu Observatory”) and the origin of the creature itself (“The Flowering of the Strange Orchid”) are Oriental. The association to the ‘savage’ and mysterious East, by distancing the events from what is known and, therefore, familiar and reassuring, contributes to the overall atmosphere of estrangement, typical of Science Fiction, as well as to the effect of horror. This is also true of Kipling’s A Matter of Fact (published in Many Inventions, 1893).73 Here, a ship-crew and three journalists sailing from Cape Town to Southampton, aboard a tramp steamer, make an extraordinary encounter : Some six or seven feet above the port bulwark, framed in fog, and as utterly unsupported as the full moon, hung a face. It was not human, and it certainly was not animal, for it did not belong to this earth as known to man. The mouth was open, revealing a ridiculously tiny tongue – as absurd as the tongue of an elephant; there were tense wrinkles of white skin at the angles of the drawn lips, white feelers like those of a barbell sprung from the lower jaw, and there was no sign of teeth within the mouth. But the horror of the face lay in the eyes, for those were sightless-white, in sockets as white as scraped bone, and blind. Yet for all this the face, wrinkled as the mask of a lion is drawn in Assyrian sculpture, was alive with rage and terror.74

The horrid “face” over the ocean turns out to belong to a dying sea-creature which, from now on, is labelled as a “Thing” by the narrator : “Then […] a Thing came up – a grey and red Thing with a neck – a Thing that bellowed and writhed in pain. […] we could see that the thing on the water was blind and in pain. Something had gashed and cut the great sides cruelly and the blood was spurting out”.75 And then, all of a sudden, a second head and neck appear on the horizon: The two Things met – the one untouched and the other in its death-throe – male and female, we said, the female coming to the male. She circled round him bellowing, and laid her neck across the curve of his great turtle-back, and he disappeared under the 28th, 1895), a strange butterfly – up to then unknown to the entomologist Hapley, and termed “the thing” –, becomes, with its obsessive presence, the recipient of the protagonist’s nightmares and hallucinations, and haunts him to madness: “So now Hapley is spending the remainder of his days in a padded room, worried by a moth that no one can see”, H. G. Wells, ‘The Moth’, in The Complete Short Stories of H. G. Wells, p. 91. 73 In a previous story set in India, “The Phantom ‘Rickshaw” (first published by Kipling in The Phantom ’Rickshaw and Other Eerie Tales, 1888), the ghost of a woman in her rickshaw is identified as “the Thing” by the frightened narrator, a former suitor who had abandoned her, and is now haunted by this apparition which leads him to increasingly erratic behaviour and final madness: “I saw the infernal Thing blocking my path in the twilight. The dead travel fast, and by short cuts unknown to ordinary coolies”, Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Phantom ‘Rickshaw’, in The Man who would be King and Other Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 37. 74 Rudyard Kipling, ‘A Matter of Fact’, in Many Inventions (Kelly Bray, U. K.: House of Stratus, 2001), p. 134. 75 Kipling, ‘A Matter of Fact’, pp. 134–135.

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water for an instant, but flung up again, grunting in agony while the blood ran. […] The Thing was so helpless, and, save for his mate, so alone. No human eye should have beheld him; it was monstrous and indecent to exhibit him there in trade waters between atlas of latitude. He had been spewed up, mangled and dying from his rest on the seafloor, where he might have lived till the Judgement Day.76

So, what had first appeared as a horrible sea-monster – neither human nor animal – proves to be a poor creature in pain, endowed with human sensations and feelings, which dies leaving its mate bellowing desperately, “blind and lonely in all that loneliness of the sea”.77 The neuter “thing” metamorphosizes into a sentient being, and what appears monstrous, instead, is the sight of “him” (the male creature) in “trade waters”. By an anthropomorphic process, a “chaotic body” – “the formless” – acquires specificity and joins the animal species. By an act of pietas, the journalists who have witnessed the strange event decide not to report the story in their newspapers: a gesture of respect towards the monster’s Otherness, which is probably the only way to exorcize the monsters in us. I would like to conclude with the mention of a fine essay by the Italian philosopher Michela Marzano, La filosofia del corpo (The philosophy of the body), and particularly of ch. IV, ‘Abiezione e reificazione: l’opacitw della materia’ (‘Abjection and reification: the opacity of matter’), which contains a discussion of Primo Levi’s Se questo w un uomo (If This Is a Man). This section of Marzano’s book – in which she speaks of the monstrosity of Nazi concentration camps, where men’s and women’s bodies were reduced to things – has a title that is very telling in the present context: “Un corpo/cosa” (A body/thing).78

76 Kipling, ‘A Matter of Fact’, pp. 135–136. 77 Kipling, ‘A Matter of Fact’, p. 136. 78 Michela Marzano, La filosofia del corpo (Genova: il melangolo, 2007), pp. 79–81.

Francesca Guidotti

The Dis-Appearance of the Body in an Age of Science: H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man

1.

The eye of the gathering storm

Visual imagination was unquestionably crucial to late-Victorian society. Critics have referred to the unprecedented multiplication and consumption of images at the time in terms of “the scopic regime”1 or of “the frenzy of the visible”.2 Whatever name we give to this late-19th century cultural phenomenon, it is quite certain that “the Victorians were fascinated with the act of seeing, with the questions of reliability – or otherwise – of the human eye, and with the problem of interpreting what they saw”.3 At the end of the century, in the realm of science, conflicting views and instances of blatant inaccuracy seemed to call for higher accountability and unbending vigilance. Recent studies have shown that metrology, the science of measurement aimed at the definition of standards, was then a key ground for contention: on the one hand, advocates of absolute measures and flawless calculations based on ethical concerns; on the other, rival entrepreneurs engaged in scientific and commercial disputes by way of competing narratives of quantification.4 The widespread adoption of common standards proved generally insufficient to build consensus, so that each separate case called for provisional choices, largely based on contingent trust, and mostly dependent on the alleged trustworthiness of a scientist’s trained eye. Sight was believed to provide conclusive evidence, and blindness, both figuratively and literally, was considered as a teratological dysfunction. Con1 Martin Jay, ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’, in Vision and Visuality, ed. by Hal Foster (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1989), pp. 3–23. 2 Jean Louis Comolli, ‘The Frenzy of the Visible’, in The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. by Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (New York: St. Martins Press, 1980), pp. 121–142. 3 Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 1. 4 G.J.N. Gooday, The Morals of Measurement: Accuracy, Irony, and Trust in Late Victorian Electrical Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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temporary British medical reports and popular fiction associated sightlessness with disease – even sexually transmitted disease5 – and the eye was tested, inspected and scrutinized more than in any previous century.6 Being considered one of the greatest calamities, blindness was often acknowledged as a source of emotional pain to be relieved, both for individual and social wellness.7 Accordingly, blind patients must either be cured or removed from sight, and specialty hospitals were appropriate for both.8 In a world where virtually everything was on display, as attested by the everincreasing number of museums and exhibitions, mass manufacturing of glass eventually altered the paradigms of objectivity and clarity. In a way, the unprecedented popularity of mirrors and glass panels, including shop-front windows, drew public attention to the power and the limits of the gaze, to the mediation between seer and seen, to a transparency that lies mostly in the eye of the beholder. Accordingly, within the scope of the so called “glass culture”, the bodily experience of sight took on philosophical implications.9 The design of telescopes and microscopes also profited from late-19th century advances in glass and lens technology, which greatly contributed to undermining the general confidence in the immediate clarity of nature by opening up the knowledge of distant worlds and invisible creatures. At a time when the microscope was rapidly gaining in popularity outside the scientific community to become some sort of “domesticated tool”,10 lenses and mirrors could also be used to make non-mimetic images, “simulacra […] at the juncture of the visible and invisible, the seen and the unseen, body and mind”,11 as in the case of the magic lantern, the kaleidoscope, the stereoscope, the pseudoscope and the zoetrope. With their spectral images, such optical inventions and motion toys were able to turn the domestic and the urban environment alike into a source of both enjoyment and displacement. The border between the real and the visible became increasingly slippery, with marked consequences on the notions of subjectivity, perception and point of view. John Henry Pepper’s lectures on optics and spiritualism at the London Poly5 Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (Ann Arbor : The University of Michigan Press, 2009), p. 64. 6 Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 28. 7 Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction, p. 26. 8 Several eye hospitals had been founded since the beginnings of the nineteenth century, on the Moorfields, London (1805), in Bristol (1810), Bath (1811), Manchester and Dublin (1814). See Otter, The Victorian Eye, p. 34. 9 Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination: 1830–1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 114–116. 10 Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination, p. 2, p. 5. 11 Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, p. 253.

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technic were accompanied by illusive phantasmagorias, ghost-like appearances and striking experiments, devised to show scientific and technological innovations and to expose the tricks behind deceptive magic. “Pepper’s ghosts”, surprisingly realistic phantoms that could mimic almost anyone and anything, including the floating heads of Hamlet or Lear voicing Shakespeare’s soliloquies, became the latest gem in London’s entertainment scene.12 Their enthusiastic spectators, be they workers or members of the upper class, were constantly reminded that each optical trick had a scientific explanation and that, no matter what seemed to be perceived through the naked eye, not everything was in fact visible. Pepper was one of those popularizers thanks to whom, in the second half of the nineteenth century, scientific theories and discoveries came to be known to a wider audience and the Victorian visual imagination was greatly enhanced. H.G. Wells, himself an advocate for properly communicated “popular science”,13 maintained that the book that had had the greatest influence on his intellectual development had been written precisely by one of those popularizers.14 That book was Natural History by Rev. John George Wood, famous for his subtle use of iconic strategies, all of which were designed to make science more accessible to broad audiences. As a writer, Wood set great store by illustrations, which had to be committed to the best artists and engravers as a guarantee for their accuracy and perfect execution. In many cases, drawings were just outlined and had no colours: in the text readers were expected to find all the information they needed to paint them. Wood urged “the possessor of […] [his works] to colour […] illustrations as he [would] […] thus fix the insects firmly in his mind, and quadruple the value of the volume to other readers”.15 He was also an innovative lecturer, famous for his use of sketches and drawings. Instead of resorting to pre-arranged lantern slides and diagrams, Wood drew rapid impromptu colour pastel sketches of animals on a black canvas, with seemingly spontaneous but carefully prepared gestures which the audience regarded as a proof of scholarly expertise. Although Wood’s scientific credentials have occasionally been questioned, 12 Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2007), pp. 202–209. 13 H.G. Wells, ‘Popularising Science’, Nature 50 (July 26 1894), pp. 300–301. 14 Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science, p. 216. In his introduction to Boulenger’s book on natural history, Wells wonders “what book, what teacher, what experiences” had the “greatest influence upon […] [his] mental growth” (H.G. Wells, ‘Introduction’, in E. G. Boulenger, World Natural History, London: B. T. Batsford, 1937, pp. xv). Surprisingly enough, instead of mentioning T. H. Huxley, his mentor at the Imperial College, Wells refers to Wood’s Natural History. 15 Rev. J.G. Wood, Insects, Their Structure, Habits, and Transformations (1871; repr. http://ar chive.org/stream/insectsathomebe00wood/insectsathomebe00wood_djvu.txt, retrieved July 29, 2015), p. vi.

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his success relied on his extensive and effective use of iconic representation,16 including the image of the Australian gorilla that scared and fascinated the seven-year old Wells.17 Wells would later on pay his debt to this pervasive visual culture by recognizing its central importance and ubiquity while, at the same time, unravelling the tangle at its core. In fact, sight, blindness and invisibility are recurrent themes in Wells’s fiction, where they often become tools for exposing the flaws of society. Scope and vision always rely on given standards, ultimately linked to issues of morality ; the underlying assumption is that, in a perfect or desirable world, the un-seen, like the un-measurable, ought to be removed from the public domain. And yet, quite abruptly, the un-seen, like a subversive monster, breaks into ordinary perception. Wells’s irruptions take the shape of monstrous anatomies, like the bandaged-headed criminal of The Invisible Man evoking, with his horrid frame, the intrinsic limits and overconfident bias of established ways of seeing. Although Wells’s monstrosity partly results from the disappearance of the body, it is the unsettling physicality of his monsters that haunts our imagination;18 a physicality which is, paradoxically, both solid and spectral, cohesive and disjointed, like the textured narrative that shapes it and yet hardly contains it.

2.

A body that matters

The Invisible Man is not about the abstract condition of invisibility : it is rather about an invisible human body. In other words, the body matters, even more than its hiddenness to human eyes. Bodily needs are always in the foreground: starting with the very first page where Griffin steps into the Coach and Horses inn on a cold snowy day and asks for fire and a good meal, and up to the final capture plan devised by Dr. Kemp. Kemp knows all too well that his invisible opponent can be smelled by dogs and can be spotted also by looking both at the unassimilated food he has eaten and at the traces left by his bleeding feet after he has walked on powdered glass.19 This is “the enchanting wonder of his being 16 Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science, p. 196. 17 M. Geduld, ‘Introduction’, in The Definitive Time Machine: A Critical Edition of H.G. Wells’s Scientific Romance, ed. by Harry M. Geduld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), pp. 1–27. According to Geduld (p. 28), Wood’s gorilla can be considered a source of inspiration for the Morlocks in The Time Machine. 18 Precisely in so far as the protagonist of The Invisible Man conceals his invisibility by wearing clothes, gloves, bandages, dark glasses, a false beard and a cardboard nose, his improbable appearance attracts the eye in a remarkable way. Christopher Priest, ‘Introduction’, in H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man (1897; repr. London: Penguin Books, 2005), p. xxii: “People cannot help staring at him, so paradoxically he is more noticeable than an ordinary man”. 19 Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 128.

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there – eating, sleeping, playing tricks, stealing, killing – without being seen”, of a body that, “is made artfully invisible, but […] is still there, with all its needs, its sensations, its shape and weight, even its blood, which uncomfortably shows and betrays him when it coagulates in horrid clots: a body […] not to be dismissed”.20 Both corporeality and its drives are known to be central for Wells who, in the ironic words of Brian Aldiss, “had an obsession with food – with both eating and being eaten”, as shown by the Martians invasion in The War of the Worlds aimed, so to say, at “having a good meal”.21 It seems that Wells got the idea for The Invisible Man from W.S. Gilbert’s comic poem The Perils of Invisibility (1869),22 the story of a fat man, Old Peter who, being offered by a fairy the gift of invisibility, decides to use it in order to escape his wife whenever she starts grumbling (”My dear, your rage is wasted quite–/Observe, I disappear from sight!”).23 A funny role reversal takes places as the woman hides his oversize pants and remains obstinately deaf to her husband’s protests (“Now, madam, give them up, I beg –/I’ve had rheumatics in my leg;/Besides, until you do, it’s plain/I cannot come to sight again!”).24 The poor old man, a decent fellow in the age of Victorian respectability, is then forced to remain invisible until he loses weight and can find a new pair of pants; in the meanwhile his apparently empty clothes can be seen running and training, a humorously frightening spectacle for those he encounters (“And shrieking peasants whom he meets,/Fall down in terror on the peats!”).25 There is a clear connection between Gilbert’s divertissement and Wells’s scientific novel. The latter amplifies, “with scientific rigor and Wellsian thoroughness, the problems encountered by an invisible man with visible appurtenances”.26 Be it as it may, in Wells’s hands the motif of invisibility, ultimately coming from the theoretical speculations of Platonic philosophy, acquires a surprisingly corporeal dimension that was lacking in the philosophical model. In Plato’s Republic, Glaucon relates the story of the ring of Gyges, a magical artefact capable of temporarily rendering its bearer invisible. Having come into 20 Giovanna Mochi, ‘Preface’, in Alessandra Calanchi, Dismissing the Body: Strange Case of Fictional Invisibility (Bologna: CLUEB, 1999), pp. vi–vii. 21 Brian Aldiss, ‘Introduction’, in H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (London: Penguin Books, 2005), p. xxiii. 22 Sir William Schwenck Gilbert, a parodist, dramatist, poet, illustrator and librettist who mostly owed his fame to a series of light operas written in collaboration with composer Arthur Sullivan, published this poem in 1869 under the pseudonym of Bab. On Gilbert as a source for Wells see The H.G. Wells Scrapbook, ed. by Peter Haining (London: N. Potter, 1978), pp. 59–62, and Priest, ‘Introduction’, pp. xvii–xviii. 23 All quotations of Gilbert’s poem are taken from http://www.readbookonline.net/rea dOnLine/43544/ (retrieved July 29, 2015). 24 Gilbert, The Perils of Invisibility. 25 Gilbert, The Perils of Invisibility. 26 Philip Holt, ‘H.G. Wells and the Ring of Gyges’, Science Fiction Studies, 19 (1992), p. 239.

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possession of that miraculous jewel, Gyges the Lydian uses its power to seduce the king’s wife and usurp the throne. In Plato, Gyges’s ring is not just a narrative contrivance: it is, above all, a philosophical device through which the text poses ethical problems about the conduct of those who, being invisible to the watchful eyes of guardians and chastisers, know they will be able to elude social detection. The discussion takes the shape of a debate, in which Glaucon argues that people opt for justice merely out of necessity and fear, as “all men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual”.27 To that Socrates replies that, for those rational human subjects who, having their appetites in subjection to the moral and intellectual organs, chose “wisely and […] live diligently, there is appointed a happy and not undesirable existence”.28 More than by any speculative hypothesis, Wells is fascinated with the “practical problems of invisibility, and beyond that, [with] the inescapable physical and biological limitations of human power”.29 His concern is science, not magic. He addresses actual social practices, not conceptual argumentation, and he engages the limits of sight, not the power of the invisible. The focus then is on the body – the body of man, of society, and of the text – not on the ring. In Wells’s novel, Griffin, who lacks moral scruples, turns, like Gyges, the power of invisibility to criminal ends. Unlike Gyges, however he is not a would-be king, but a gifted scientist who, from the very beginning of his career, has experienced the difficult condition of being visible but not seen or, at least, not seen enough. He is one of those metaphorically transparent human beings who struggle against insignificancy, against the risk of remaining no-body while they are desperately trying to assert themselves.30 These features emerge in chapter 17, when, with an abrupt recognition, the protagonist reveals to an astonished Dr. Kemp, his former schoolmate at the University College, that he is “Griffin, […] a younger student […], almost an albino, six feet high, and broad, with a pink and white face and red eyes, […] who won the medal of chemistry”.31 Griffin, whose body is not visually perceivable, asks Kemp to conjure up his memories from a distant past, with no guarantee at all. Though he claims to be tall and powerfully built, Griffin is now just a voice, which sets off a search for spatial localization rather than an attempt at personal identification; in the text, 27 Plato, Republic (360 B.C.E.; Trans. Benjamin Jowett, 1892; repr. , retrieved July 29, 2015), 2,3: 60b-d. 28 Plato, Republic, 10:612 b. 29 Holt, ‘H.G. Wells and the Ring of Gyges’, p. 238. On the differences and similarities between Wells and Plato see also Michael Haldane, ‘From Plato to Pullman – The Circle of Invisibility and Parallel Worlds: Fortunatus, Mercury, and the Wishing Hat, Part II’, Folklore, 117 (2006), pp. 261–278. 30 Mochi, ‘Preface’, p. vii. 31 Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 79.

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therefore, the invisible man is frequently asked “where he is”, irrespective of “who he is”.32 Even while announcing that he is real, present and identifiable – not visible and yet, in a way, metaphorically looking for an increased visibility – Griffin’s words seem to confirm that he was doomed to become the monster he is: first of all, he is genetically marked by albinism, which, as we shall learn later on, has greatly contributed to the success of his scientific experiment;33 secondly, he is an award-winner brilliant science student, which, paradoxically enough, as we shall see, entails being either exploited and neglected, or forcibly vowed to silence.34 Griffin knows it all too well, and behaves accordingly : Oliver, my professor, was a scientific bounder, a journalist by instinct, a thief of ideas, – he was always prying! And you know the knavish system of the scientific world. I simply would not publish, and let him share my credit. I went on working, I got nearer and nearer making my formula into an experiment, a reality. I told no living soul, because I meant to flash my work upon the world with crushing effect, – to become famous at a blow.35

Griffin’s predisposition to invisibility is the driving force behind his hunger for fame,36 but the path to self-assertion inexorably leads him to isolation,37 to a withdrawal that culminates in actual disappearance and, predictably, in eventual self-extinction. Both literally and metaphorically, scientific proficiency entails hiddenness and secrecy : until made known publicly, the results of science must be concealed and preserved from unscrupulous ends. And yet Griffin – the good scientist – is, in turn, a ruthless appropriator who 32 Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 45. 33 Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 92: “‘One could make an animal – a tissue – transparent! One could make it invisible! All except the pigments. I could be invisible!’ I said, suddenly realizing what it meant to be an albino with such knowledge. It was overwhelming. I left the filtering I was doing, and went and stared out of the great window at the stars. ‘I could be invisible!’ I repeated”. As regards albinism, see also Anne B. Simpson, ‘The Tangible Antagonist: H.G. Wells and the Discourse of Otherness’, Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 31 (1990), pp. 134–147, and David J. Lake, ‘The Whiteness of Griffin and H.G. Wells’s Images of Death, 1897–1914’, Science Fiction Studies, 8 (1981), pp. 12–18. Simpson notes that Griffin “is indeed human – but sufficiently unlike the average specimen to protect us ‘average’ readers from an uncomfortable recognition of our own potential to be the Other” (p. 139). Lake considers the whiteness of Griffin, symbolically, as an image of death. 34 On the relationship between scientist and society in the novel see Steve McLean, ‘Science Behind the Blinds: Scientist and Society in The Invisible Man’, Revue du Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Victoriennes et Edouardiennes de l’Universit{ Paul Val{ry (Montpellier), 65 (2007), pp. 161–184. 35 Wells, The Invisible Man, pp. 91–92. 36 A similar struggle for visibility has been credited to Wells himself by some biographers (Mackenzie, Smith), although others dismiss the idea (Coren). 37 Jeanne Murray Walker, ‘Exchange Short-Circuited: The Isolated Scientist in H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man’, Journal of Narrative Technique, 15 (1985), pp. 156–168.

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does not hesitate to rob his father and drive him to suicide with no tinge of remorse: “I did not feel a bit sorry for […] [him]. He seemed to me to be a victim of his own foolish sentimentality. The current cant required my attendance at his funeral, but it was really not my affair”.38 In the early stage of his progress towards invisibility, Griffin seems quite prone to dehumanization. It is as if, for the sake of scientific progress – the summum bonum – all means were legitimate: he has no room for compassion, let alone filial affection. Apparently, Griffin is empty inside: he is experiencing a depersonalization, a leap into the void that lies at the core of his pursuit and of his whole being. It is therefore not surprising that, after his transformation is complete, Griffin’s clothes – and even his body – should be described over and over again as horribly and inconceivably hollow. Snippets and glimpses is all we can see:39 “an enormous mouth wide open, a vast and incredible mouth that swallowed the whole of the lower portion of his face”, “a handless harm”, two “extraordinarily hollow” eye sockets, and an astonishing, overwhelming idea of “blackness”.40 In chapter 4 we are confronted with the enigma of this apparently absent presence, whose “empty sleeve” is, oddly enough, kept “up and open, [even] if there is nothing in it”.41 This is an oxymoronic apparition, a nothingness capable of nipping a real nose, and of grasping like real fingers do. In the same way, although invisible, the apparition feels, when touched, like a real body : “I tell you, it felt exactly like hitting an arm. And there wasn’t an arm! There wasn’t the ghost of an arm!”.42 In the novel invisibility is often mistaken for emptiness by the characters, who cannot put flesh on the bones of so frightening a mystery.43 These figurations – an emptied being44 or a bodiless voice45 – become meaningful in view of the 19th century paradigm shift in theories of light: from Newton’s corpuscular theory, 38 Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 95. 39 Priest, ‘Introduction’, p. xxiv : “Wells plays with the characters in the story, rather than with the reader”. We know the novel’s title, therefore “we are in on the secret, while the hapless inhabitants of Iping are left to work things out for themselves”. 40 Wells, The Invisible Man, pp. 11, 17, 19, 20. 41 Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 25. 42 Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 26. 43 Calanchi, Dismissing the Body, p. 33. 44 A search through the text shows that the word “empty” and its derivatives occur 38 times. References are made to “an empty sleeve” (Wells, The Invisible Man, pp. 25–26, 39), “empty clothes” (p. 39) and “an empty dressing-gown” (p. 126); to “a voice coming as if out of empty space” (p. 126), to “an empty bandage” (p. 78) and to an “emptiness” one can put his hand into (p. 95). See also Calanchi, Dismissing the Body, p. 33 (footnote 12). 45 In chapter 9 an astonished Marvel tells the invisible man: “‘What! Ain’t there any stuff to you. Vox et – what is it? – jabber. Is it that?’”, Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 46). The reference is to Apophthegmata Laconica (literally “The Sayings of the Spartans”), a work attributed to Plutarch: “Vox et praeterea nihil”, meaning “voice and nothing more”.

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which explained rays of light as streams of small particles, to Huygens’s wave theory, according to which light beams were propagated in longitudinal waves through a material called the aether.46 Given the obvious association between light and vision, this shift from pure matter to a partly independent form of energy – at a time when matter and energy were not yet conceived as two sides of the same coin – could be taken as an invitation to reinterpret, or to question the boundaries between the seen and the unseen, between solid bodies and less corporeal presences.47 I would actually argue that The Invisible Man is a narrative reworking of the idea, grounded in science, whereby all given theories may someday need to be amended and revised.48 Insofar as they are models designed to represent and to map reality, scientific explanations cease to be valid exactly when something unexpected or not yet experienced exposes the limits of their scope, the partiality of their perceptions and the inadequacy of their understanding. Because he does not fit within the established theoretical and social framework, the invisible man is precisely the monster whose redemption and cultural assimilation would entail a major revision of the dominant paradigm and of standards of perception; to the visually impaired, however, re-visions are not easy to undertake. When newly transformed Griffin boasts that he feels “as a seeing man might do, with padded feet and noiseless clothes, in a city of the blind”,49 he envisions the general condition of late Victorian London and rural southern England, i. e. the synecdoche of a whole world unable to come to terms 46 The debate over the nature of light dates back to the seventeenth century, when Isaac Newton and Christiaan Huygens devised the two above mentioned competing theories. At first the corpuscular model prevailed, mostly because of Newton’s popularity, but in the early-nineteenth century experiments by the French engineer and physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel and by the English polymath Thomas Young provided evidence for Huygens’s wave theories. See Henry Crew, Christiaan Huygens, Thomas Young, Augustin Jean Fresnel, FranÅois Arago, The Wave Theory of Light; Memoirs of Huygens, Young and Fresnel (1900; repr. Charleston, South Carolina: Nabu Press, 2010). 47 As we already mentioned, the novel was written in the age of daguerreotype and phantasmagorias, of stunning wonders and technical inventions through which the physical body was, in a way, dematerialized, turned into an insubstantial ghostly image. Such marvels greatly contributed to an unprecedented circulation of theories and devices which, so to say, brought science closer to society : adjoining spheres communicating though not always on the same ground. Wells’s scientific background made him all the more able to detect and, so to say, to report divergences, discrepancies and incongruities, especially concerning the treatment of irreducible otherness. 48 In the novel, scientific theory and practice are directly called into question as a way of explaining Griffin’s discovery to Dr. Kemp, whom he visits while looking for shelter. Such detailed scientific hypothesis concerning optics and physics – probably the most na„ve and old-fashioned part of the story – are interesting in so far as they show Wells’s approach not only to science, but also to literature and society, as we shall try to explain. 49 Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 103.

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with the irruption of an unexpected and unsettling otherness.50 The community is blind – in the Nietzschean sense wilfully blind to the other51 – as shown by the following list of hypotheses about the stranger : It was inevitable that a person of so remarkable an appearance and bearing should form a frequent topic in such a village as Iping. Opinion was greatly divided about his occupation. Mrs Hall was sensitive on the point. When questioned, she explained very carefully that he was an ‘experimental investigator’ […]. Her visitor had had an accident, she said, which temporarily discoloured his face and hands; and being of a sensitive disposition, he was averse to any public notice of the fact. Out of her hearing there was a view largely entertained that he was a criminal trying to escape from justice by wrapping himself up so as to conceal himself altogether from the eye of the police. […] Elaborated in the imagination of Mr Gould, the probationary assistant in the National School, this theory took the form that the stranger was an Anarchist in disguise, preparing explosives […]. Another school of opinion followed Mr Fearenside, and either accepted the piebald view or some modification of it; as, for instance, Silas Durgan, who was heard to assert that ‘if he choses to show enself at fairs he’d make his fortune in no time,’ and being a bit of a theologian, compared the stranger to the man with the one talent. Yet another view explained the entire matter by regarding the stranger as a harmless lunatic. That had the advantage of accounting for everything straight away.52

All the interpretations shed light less on the identity of the seen than on that of the seers, who all belong to a small, seemingly vigorous and cohesive community of Sussex villagers. From now on, every explanation will be a variation on the recurrent topics of commonsense talk, spoken in a simplified, accessible language. These villagers are perfectly represented by the innkeeper, Mr. Hall, who “found it incredible that he had seen anything very remarkable happen upstairs. Besides, his vocabulary was altogether too limited for his impressions”.53 To put it in Foucaldian terms, a restricted language code enforces identification with

50 Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 7. 51 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886; trans. Ian Johnston, Arlington, Virginia: Richer Resources Publications, 2009), p. 142 (aphorism 230). Nietzsche discusses how the spirit deals with the otherness of the “outside world”: on the one hand it reveals a “strong inclination to assimilate the new with the old, to simplify what is diverse, to ignore or push away what is totally contradictory”; on the other, “a suddenly erupting decision in favour of ignorance, an arbitrary shutting out, a slamming of its window, an inner cry of No to this or that thing, a refusal to let something in, a kind of defensive condition against much that can be known, a satisfaction with the darkness, with the sealed-off horizon, an affirmation and endorsement of ignorance”. See also Simpson, ‘The Tangible Antagonist’, p. 138. 52 Wells, The Invisible Man, pp. 22–23. 53 Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 17.

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communal practices and norms while also contributing to policing the border by denying all forms of resistance to social power.54 No real change in perspective occurs in the course of the story apart from the gradual converging on the criminal hypothesis: soon the inhabitants of Iping, as well as those of Port Stowe and Burdock,55 decide that the alien is a dangerous villain and an offender, a delinquent to be chased and seized, dead or alive. Everyone thinks the same way, irrespective of their experience of the world and level of education. In chapter 14, for instance, a mariner declares: ‘It makes me regular uncomfortable, the bare thought of that chap running about the country! He is at present At Large, and from certain evidence it is supposed that he has – taken – took, I suppose they mean – the road to Port Stowe. You see we’re right in it! None of your American wonders, this time. And just think of the things he might do! Where’d you be, if he took a drop over and above, and had a fancy to go for you? Suppose he wants to rob – who can prevent him? He can trespass, he can burgle, he could walk through a cordon of policemen as easy as me or you could give the slip to a blind man! Easier! For these here blind chaps hear uncommon sharp, I’m told. And wherever there was liquor he fancied–’56

Ironically enough, the quote is taken from a conversation between a speaker – the mariner – who knows nothing but says a lot, and a listener – Griffin’s reluctant helper, a tramp called Marvel – who knows a lot but cannot speak. The mariner, who has just read the news about the invisible man and who is unknowingly talking in his presence,57 behaves as if he were familiar with Griffin’s circumstances and inclinations. Having come to Port Stowe, to the place they are “right in”, the mysterious foreigner has become a deviant – yet integral – part of that community and can therefore be judged by its own standards: he turns out to be a robber, a burglar, a violent drunkard, exactly as anyone would be if only 54 Michel Foucault, ‘The Order of Discourse’, in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. by Robert Young (1971; New York, London and Henley : Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 51–78. In Simpson’s words, “that the townspeople themselves are bankrupt is illustrated by their notably limited discourse on Otherness. Their discussions of the Other reflect what Michel Foucault has described as the ‘policing’ that discourse demands in order that speakers attain the status of being right, or ‘in the true’; the terms of a discourse are restricted in order to allow for its potent enactment” (Simpson, ‘The Tangible Antagonist’, pp. 136–137). 55 Iping is a real place, well known to the author ; other toponyms are clearly identifiable pseudonyms: “Bramblehurst” stands for Midhurst, “Port Burdock” for Southsea and “Port Stowe” for Portsmouth. According to Priest: “At the time Wells was writing his scientific romances, the idiom of the fantastic was not at all well established in popular fiction. He therefore cast his fantasies in a realistic mould by use of a framed narrative, and sometimes by using real locations” (Priest, ‘Introduction’, p. xvi). 56 Wells, The Invisible Man, pp. 66–67. 57 In this case the invisible man seems to embody a very common human fear : that of “being overheard, […] secretly observed, silently judged, by an observer who does not make his present known” (Priest, ‘Introduction’, p. xvii).

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he were given the chance. With another touch of irony, in the last part of the quotation the representatives of public safety and crime control are once again compared to the visually impaired (“he could walk through a cordon of policemen as easy as me or you could give the slip to a blind man”); indeed, policemen are less attentive and vigilant than sightless people, who have exceptionally good hearing and, presumably, an equally uncommon capacity to listen (“Easier! For these here blind chaps hear uncommon sharp, I’m told”).58 It is therefore no coincidence that, in the following part of the chapter, the mariner should be prevented from listening to a firsthand account of the story, as Griffin forces Marvel to suddenly interrupt the conversation. Even the well-educated Dr. Kemp, whose “scientific pursuits have made him a very observant man”,59 seems to hear, rather than listen to, the invisible man’s story. He does not even start a discussion with Griffin, he shows no desire to understand his motives, let alone to make him change his mind:60 he just wants to judge him, in a caricatured, simplified way not much different from the villagers’.61 To inquisitive police officer Adye, Kemp self-assuredly declares that Griffin “is mad, […] inhuman. He is pure selfishness. He thinks of nothing but his own advantage, his own safety. […] He will kill […] unless we can prevent him”.62 The attitude of the community consequently evolves from mistrust to

58 In chapter 21 Griffin sees a blind man approaching and flees, fearing “his subtle intuitions” (Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 107). 59 Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 77. From the very beginning, Dr. Kemp is symbolically described as a man who watches without seeing, who tries to look beyond without succeeding: “He went to the south window, threw it up, and leaning out stared down on the network of windows, beaded gas-lamps and shops with black interstices of roof and yard that made up the town at night. ‘Looks like a crowd down the hill,’ he said, ‘by the Cricketers,’ and remained watching. Thence his eyes wandered over the town to far away where the ships’ lights shone, and the pier glowed, a little illuminated pavilion like a gem of yellow light. The moon in its first quarter hung over the western hill, and the stars were clear and almost tropically bright. After five minutes, during which his mind had travelled into a remote speculation of social conditions of the future, and lost itself at last over the time dimension, Dr. Kemp roused himself with a sigh, pulled down the window again, and returned to his writing-desk” (Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 76). 60 Kemp belatedly and timidly expresses his disagreement as a way of taking time before the policemen break into his house: “‘I don’t agree to this, Griffin,’ he said. ‘Understand me, I don’t agree to this. Why dream of playing a game against the race? How can you hope to gain happiness? Don’t be a lone wolf. Publish your results; take the world – take the nation at least – into your confidence. Think what you might do with a million helpers –’” (Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 125). 61 Dr. Kemp explains invisibility first in terms of deceitfulness (“This is – this must be – hypnotism. You must have suggested you are invisible”, Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 80) and then of derangement and criminal behavior (“‘He’s not only invisible,’ he said, ‘but he’s mad! Homicidal!’”, p. 86). 62 Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 127.

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scapegoating, from self-justifying defence strategies to aggressive acts of violence. In response to this growing hostility, a hacked off Griffin exclaims: ‘The fact is, I’m all here: head, hands, legs, and all the rest of it, but it happens I’m invisible. It’s a confounded nuisance, but I am. That’s no reason why I should be poked to pieces by every stupid bumpkin in Iping, is it? […] It’s strange, perhaps, but it’s not a crime’.63

And again: ‘I am just a human being – solid, needing food and drink, needing covering too – But I’m invisible. You see? Invisible. Simple idea. Invisible’.64

Griffin’s reference to a body that matters – a body not only invisible, but unthinkable to his interlocutors – is a way of saying that, far from being acceptable, their suppositions should be questioned and, ultimately, dismissed. Nothing is more real and essential than a tangible body, with its physiological needs; and yet, this is not enough to discard a whole set of given interpretations. Nor is Griffin put forward as the depositary of a more lucid and all-encompassing point of view. He is himself slave to an illusion, and the victim of his own unlimited, unrestrained ambition.65 His project to establish a “Reign of Terror” which means, more modestly, to “take some town […] and terrify and dominate it”,66 is unrealistic because he is, first and foremost, just a man with a naked body,67 both daringly ambitious and in need; beyond detection and exposed to hardships; demanding leadership and miserably alone.68 Griffin’s vision is ultimately deficient: he is both unseeing and unseen. 63 Wells, The Invisible Man, pp. 39–40. 64 Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 46. 65 As Christopher Priests puts it, any invisible being is “endowed with powers which seem the greater and more mysterious for being deployed invisibly” (Priest, ‘Introduction’, p. xviii). When the invisible man tells Kemp his story, he still believes in the power of invisibility and wants to make the most of it, after which he will find “a way of getting back”, “of restoring what […] [he has] done” (Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 122), of becoming visible again. 66 Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 125. 67 The invisible man soon realizes “the full disadvantage of […] [his] condition”: “‘I had no shelter, no covering. To get clothing was to forego all my advantage, to make of myself a strange and terrible thing. I was fasting; for to eat, to fill myself with unassimilated matter, would be to become grotesquely visible again. […] I could not go abroad in snow – it would settle on me and expose me. Rain, too, would make me a watery outline, a glistening surface of a man – a bubble. And fog – I should be like a fainter bubble in a fog, a surface, a greasy glimmer of humanity. Moreover, as I went abroad – in the London air – I gathered dirt about my ankles, floating smuts and dust upon my skin. I did not know how long it would be before I should become visible from that cause also. But I saw clearly it could not be for long” (Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 114). 68 In order to avoid loneliness, Griffin initially forces Marvel to become his helper (“Help me – and I will do great things for you. An invisible man is a man of power”, Wells, The Invisible

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Sight, the first source of advice and guidance, is either overabundant or lacking in the novel, much to the same end. Scenes of social life are portrayed vividly, and characters frequently introduced through more or less long-winded descriptions, as typical of much Victorian fiction: the more detailed the overall vision, the easier to understand and decipher both public and individual behaviour. It is well known that late-19th century literature was impacted by the growing popularity of physiognomy and phrenology in all fields of learning. Characterization was often based on the supposed transparency and one-way correspondence between outer appearance and inner truth. Wells’s narration both reproduces and discards ongoing literary models, as shown by the key presence of an invisible character : indescribable, unportrayable and therefore unfathomable, both alien to all forms of social communion and resistant to classification.69 Implicit and corrosive irony operates thematically,70 and explicit narration is further undermined by Wells’s frequent use of comic sketches and ironical reversals through which identities are both constructed and de-constructed all the way down. The commonsense of Iping villagers is mocked and praised, as in the case of the innkeeper Mrs. Hall who, after meeting the invisible man, dreams of “huge white heads like turnips […] trailing after her at the end of interminable necks, and with vast black eyes” but, “being a sensible woman, […] [subdues] her terrors and […] [turns] over and […] [goes] to sleep again”.71 Griffin’s Man, p. 48), and then addresses Dr. Kemp (“What I want, Kemp, is a goalkeeper, a helper, and a hiding-place, an arrangement whereby I can sleep and eat and rest in peace, and unsuspected. I must have a confederate. With a confederate, with food and rest – a thousand things are possible”, p. 124). However he is always unable to communicate, to “make his behavior understood even by those whom he designates and confederates” (Simpson, ‘The Tangible Antagonist’, p. 137). 69 The contrast is effectively portrayed in chapter 7: “It was the finest of all possible Whit Mondays, and down the village street stood a row of nearly a dozen booths and a shooting gallery, and on the grass by the forge were three yellow and chocolate waggons and some picturesque strangers of both sexes putting up a coconut shy. The gentlemen wore blue jerseys, the ladies white aprons and quite fashionable hats with heavy plumes. Wodger, of the Purple Fawn and Mr. Jaggers the cobbler, who also sold secondhand ordinary bicycles, were stretching a string of union jacks and royal ensigns (which had originally celebrated the Jubilee) across the road… And inside, in the artificial darkness of the parlour, into which only one thin jet of sunlight penetrated, the stranger, hungry we must suppose, and fearful, hidden in his uncomfortable hot wrappings, pored through his dark glasses upon his paper or chinked his dirty little bottles, and occasionally swore savagely at the boys, audible if invisible, outside the windows” (Wells, The Invisible Man, pp. 34–35). 70 The thematic irony becomes explicit in chapter 21 when Griffin runs into a Salvation Army march singing the hymn “When shall we see his Face?”. Invisibility to human eye is indeed an attribute of the divine; the protagonist, however, for the time being is not longing for omnipotence, but simply striving to survive. 71 Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 15.

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discernment is likewise scorned, since he starts by outlining “a magnificent vision of all that invisibility might mean to a man, – the mystery, the power, the freedom”,72 to later state that it is “only good in two cases: It’s useful in getting away, it’s useful in approaching”.73 In Wayne Booth’s terms we might say that, besides instances of “stable irony” with a clear rhetorical intent, the novel includes several “intended instabilities” that resist or, at least, complicate interpretation.74 A detached, ironic stance potentially provides the reader with a double, or multiple vision, ultimately calling for critical assessment.75 The text weaves together a number of different perspectives. After eighteen chapters written in the third person, the invisible man takes the floor and tells his own story for the following five chapters. Through a shift in point of view, Griffin’s gaze unveils another truth, or another version of it. His snobbish and contemptuous descriptions of the people he comes across and who variously affect his entirely new invisible life point to his inflated self-assuredness and to his feeling of superiority over the rest of the world, which he considers baffling, uncooperative, unworthy and utterly vulgar :76 ‘By Heaven, Kemp, you don’t know what rage is! To have worked for years, to have planned and plotted, and then to get some fumbling purblind idiot messing across your course! Every conceivable sort of silly creature that has ever been created has been sent to cross me’.77

Griffin is seen to mistreat, abuse and attack his neighbours and interlocutors on more than one occasion: he drags his landlord by the collar and later sets his house on fire;78 knocks a shopkeeper on the head, ties him up in a sheet and robs him;79 addresses everyone at Iping indignantly, in a “tone of abnormal exasperation”,80 steals from the vicarage and eventually sets “to smiting and overthrowing, for the mere satisfaction of hurting”;81 tugs, intimidates and even tries to kill Mr. Marvel;82 violently catches up and throws aside “a little child playing near Kemp’s gateway […], so that its ankle […] [is] broken”;83 murders 72 Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 92. 73 Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 124. The passage proceeds to describe assassination as a possible use of invisibility ; however, in the light of the foregoing, we can say that it is Griffin who ends up being killed. 74 Wayne C. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 1–32. 75 Simpson, ‘The Tangible Antagonist’, p. 139. 76 Simpson, ‘The Tangible Antagonist’, p. 137. 77 Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 122. 78 Wells, The Invisible Man, pp. 98–102. 79 Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 118. 80 Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 19. 81 Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 60. 82 Wells, The Invisible Man, pp. 43–75. 83 Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 129.

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Mr. Wicksteed84 and shoots policeman Adye.85 A callous, arrogant subject, Griffin develops a predatory behaviour that defies the reader’s sympathy. The self-absorbed, almost autistic nature of Griffin’s personal conduct in public and private life ultimately points to his bias for sight. The story is progressively exposed for what it is: a fictional account, sometimes “exceedingly brief”,86 and some other time enriched by the addition of “certain minor facts” which, nonetheless, do not “throw light” on the actual truth.87 Disruption reaches deeper in the last phases, when a restored thirdperson voice88 overtly renounces omniscience in favour of unverifiable conjectures. Wicksteed’s murder will be reported in terms of a doubtful guess,89 as a somewhat hesitant narrator offers a tentative explanation of the dynamics of crime. Like a detective, he examines all evidence and facts; follows the clues; evaluates psychological profiles and then comes to the most logical conclusion: If our supposition that the Invisible Man’s refuge was the Hintondean thickets is correct, then we must suppose that in the early afternoon he sallied out again, bent upon some project that involved the use of a weapon. We cannot know what the project was, but the evidence that he had the iron rod in hand before he met Wicksteed is to me at least overwhelming. We can know nothing of the details of the encounter. It occurred on the edge of a gravel pit, not two hundred yards from Lord Burdock’s lodge gate. Everything points to a desperate struggle, – the trampled ground, the numerous wounds Mr Wicksteed received, his splintered walking-stick; but why the attack was made – save in a murderous frenzy – it is impossible to imagine. Indeed the theory of madness is almost unavoidable.90

In this whole chapter, the reader is obsessively reminded that, although the attainment of truth is impossible (“we cannot know”, “we can know nothing”, “it is impossible to imagine”), there is always room – and need – for supposition: the gaze is utterly denied,91 and yet the narrative voice must necessarily speak. 84 85 86 87 88

Wells, The Invisible Man, pp. 129–133. Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 139. Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 42 Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 87. Griffin’s narrative is interrupted by Kemp’s betrayal and by the following hunting of the invisible man (Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 127). 89 Chapter 26 “The Wicksteed Murder” (Wells, The Invisible Man, pp. 129–133). The chapter consists almost entirely of hesitant suppositions which are worth exemplifying, but cannot be quoted at length. 90 Wells, The Invisible Man, pp. 130–131. 91 The only eyewitness is a little girl who, “going to her afternoon school, […] saw the murdered man ‘trotting’ in a peculiar manner across a field towards the gravel pit. Her pantomime of his action suggests a man pursuing something on the ground before him and striking at it ever and again with his walking-stick. She was the last person to see him alive. He passed out of her sight to his death, the struggle being hidden from her only by a clump of beech trees

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Once again, in order to conceive and convey the invisible, it is necessary to go beyond observable reality until the discernible bodily presence of verbal communication comes to the fore. Once it has been exposed to sight, the text can eventually be made to signify : so far the readers have been trained to come to terms with the unseen; now they are ready to let their imagination conjure up what is still missing,92 and to propose a final interpretation, among the many available. That is what the narrator does, and asks us to do: to foster doubt and banish all preconceptions in order to make sense as autonomously and even as unconventionally as possible. One may even side with the brutal offender, who was probably only “making off – quietly in order to avoid discovering his presence in the neighbourhood” and might therefore have “taken the rod as a weapon indeed, but without any deliberate intention of using it in murder”; Wicksteed “may then have come by and noticed this rod inexplicably moving through the air […], – finally striking at it”.93 “But this” – even this – “is pure hypothesis”.94 The open-endedness of the narrative, written in “the first outpouring of Wells’s novels”, when many drafts and revisions were usually done by the author,95 is confirmed by the existence of different endings.96 In the case of The Invisible Man, although there are no surviving manuscripts, discrepancies can be traced across the various editions, particularly between the first English book publication by C. Arthur Pearson (September 1897)97 and the following Atlantic edition by Arnold (November 1897) which, according to some critics, Wells regarded as definitive.98 There are at least four different versions of chapter 28’s conclusive words, originally meant as the last paragraph in the book; a “highly elaborate, pseudo-Conradian sentence”99 included in the Pearson edition and in

92 93 94 95 96

97 98 99

and a slight depression in the ground” (Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 131). Needless to say, her testimony is not decisive. A few lines later, the text explicitly addresses the reader by saying that “to those who appreciate the extraordinary irascibility of the Invisible Man, the rest of the encounter will be easy to imagine” (Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 132). Wells, The Invisible Man, pp. 131–132. Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 132. Priest, ‘Introduction’, p. xiii. The alternative endings can be somehow considered an expression of writer’s “radical uncertainty both as to the appropriate fate for […] [the protagonist] and as to the significance of that fate and the explicitness with which it should be presented”, as it happens in the short story The Country of the Blind (Patrick Parrinder, ‘Wells’ Cancelled Endings for “The Country of the Blind”’, Science Fiction Studies, 17, 1990, p. 72). An abridged serial version had already appeared in Pearson’s Weekly between June and August of the same year. See Andy Sawyer, ‘Notes’, in H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man (London: Penguin Books, 2005), pp. 151–161. Patrick Parrinder, ‘Notes on the Text’, in Wells, The Invisible Man, p. xxix. Patrick Parrinder, ‘Selected Variant Readings’, in Wells, The Invisible Man, p. xxxiv.

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many subsequent British reprints but usually absent from recent reissues, deserves quotation: And there it was, on a shabby bed in a tawdry, ill–lighted bedroom, surrounded by a crowd of ignorant and excited people, broken and wounded, betrayed and unpitied, that Griffin, the first of all men to make himself invisible, Griffin, the most gifted physicist the world has ever seen, ended in infinite disaster his strange and terrible career.100

This eulogy of the late lamented scientist, whose unequalled genius is brutally set against the sordid anonymity of the suburban interior and of its narrow-minded community of dwellers, recalls Griffin’s narcissistic vision – the mother of all evil – along with its ironical reversal. The obvious suggestion is that Griffin’s superior talent might have served better purposes. This provisional conclusion also reinstates and highlights the unavoidable distance between voice and gaze, between words and vision, between what must be said and what can – or cannot – be seen. The body that is “broken and wounded, betrayed and unpitied” is not only Griffin’s: it is the body of the text progressively showing through its monstrous anatomy, invisible to short-sighted eyes, the texture of an age of science rich in visual imagination and yet, often, surprisingly narrow in scope. For we are reminded that vision, like science, is a matter of choice and interpretation. In the “Epilogue” that follows – the last chapter of the book in its final version –101 the reader is again confronted with the shortcomings of vision and with the ambiguous power of words. Thomas Marvel, the droll vagrant formerly recruited by the invisible man as his assistant and eventually fled, presumably with Griffin’s stolen money and scientific notes,102 has now become a respectable innkeeper, with “a reputation for wisdom and for a respectable parsimony in the village”.103 Unable to prove and to state conclusively (in figurative terms, unable to see unequivocally) that he is a thief, his fellow villagers show admiration:104 success, after all, breeds complacency. To those who want to know, Marvel is ready to tell the true story of his life “in […] [his] own words – barring one”,105 which “might be a reluctance to reveal that he has Griffin’s notebooks, but […]

100 Parrinder, ‘Selected Variant Readings’, p. xxxiv. 101 The “Epilogue” was added to the American edition, being “apparently sent over to Arnold some weeks after the main text” (Parrinder, ‘Notes on the Text’, p. xxviii); it was not present in the previous Pearson edition. 102 In chapter 24, while speaking with Kemp, Griffin accuses Marvel of having hidden his books (Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 123). 103 Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 150. 104 Simpson, ‘The Tangible Antagonist’, p. 140. 105 Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 149.

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[may also simply] mean that he has been warned against swearing”.106 However partial, that story is not reported to the readers who, instead, are shown a tell-tale scene. Marvel – the prudent and reputable landlord who can also be seen as an uneducated, selfish and deceitful social climber – is sitting in his locked bar parlour, like “every Sunday morning all the year round, […] and every night after ten”.107 In this secluded private space, another re-appearance takes place, similar to the one of Griffin’s dead body in chapter 28.108 In a solemn, somehow mock-heroic tone, the three volumes of Griffin’s scientific papers are now taken out of their hiding place and carefully perused by their new owner. The final words of the novel show an intrigued and bemused Marvel hopelessly trying to decipher the mysterious language and symbols that recount the discovery of invisibility :109 His brows are knit and his lips move painfully. ‘Hex, little two up in the air, cross and a fiddle-de-dee. Lord! what a one he was for intellect!’ Presently he relaxes and leans back, and blinks through his smoke across the room at things invisible to other eyes. ‘Full of secrets,’ he says. ‘Wonderful secrets! ‘Once I get the haul of them – Lord! ‘I wouldn’t do what he did; I’d just – well!’ He pulls at his pipe. So he lapses into a dream, the undying wonderful dream of his life. And though Kemp has fished unceasingly, and Adye has questioned closely, no human being save the landlord knows those books are there, with the subtle secret of invisibility and a dozen other strange secrets written therein. And none other will know of them until he dies.110

The Invisible Man is certainly a cautionary tale, a story that issues a warning. Its bitterly humorous, open-ended conclusion reminds us that, despite Marvel’s vague anticipations (“I wouldn’t do what he did; I’d just – well!”), the story could easily begin anew, as long as those who are in a position to understand – either scientist Dr. Kemp or police officer Adye – are allowed to read, or the only one who can read – the illiterate tramp Marvel – is made to understand. Griffin’s notebooks, like Wells’s novel, are first and foremost a narrative: ultimately they do not resist interpretation, they demand it. Once again, it is the body that matters; the body of the text, made of words and symbols that speak of in106 Sawyer, ‘Notes’, pp. 160–161. 107 Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 150. 108 On occasion of the raid in the Coach and Horses inn, Marvel had already been wrongly identified as “the Invisible Man suddenly become visible” (Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 58); the association is now somehow recalled by this re-appearance. 109 In a previous part of the story, the books had been handed to Mr. Bunting, Iping’s vicar, who was supposed to know some Greek; later on they were stolen by the invisible man and his accomplice, much to Bunting’s relief (chapter 11). The notebooks are actually written in ciphers, as Griffin reveals later on (Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 95). 110 Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 150.

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visibility and of “a dozen other strange secrets”. Such monstrous anatomy, like Griffin’s, calls for a different gaze and for a new, unsettling form of visibility ; it becomes the terrain of “tangible antagonisms”111 and the icon of a necessarily provisional corpus of knowledge.

111 Wells, The Invisible Man, p. 130.

Sara Damiani

Unthinkable Hybrids: The Somatic Unconscious of the Transplanted Body

Modern monstrosity is directly associated to the fundamental turn in the perception of the human body which characterised the nineteenth century, when anatomical morphology was subject to a revision both on a scientific level and in the cultural imaginary. On the one hand, as Ed Cohen points out in his brilliant book A Body Worth Defending (2009), medicine adopted the legal and political concept of ‘immunity’ in biology, interpreting it as a form of bodily self-defense: in 1881, the discovery, made by the Russian scientist rlie Metchnikoff, of mobile cells which “serve in the defense of the organism against intruders”1 established once and for all the modern body as an enclosed and autonomous unity, isolated from all the other living things – microbes, viruses, bacteria, and human beings –, against which it must henceforth protect itself. In other words, at the end of the nineteenth century the open and metamorphic anatomies of Mikhail Bakhtin’s “grotesque body” were completely banned, to be replaced with a “proprietary body”, an individualistic structure with well-marked borders which is constantly engaged in defense strategies against external aggressions.2 On the other hand, the separation between nature and man through which modern society defines its own identity can be paradoxically effective – following the provocative opinion of Bruno Latour (We Have Never Been Modern, 1991) – only with the subterranean existence of “hybrids” that, by carrying forward the mixed union of the two domains, ensure the possibility of their bifurcation.3 Only by banishing what is considered anomalous and heterogeneous from the 1 rlie Metchnikoff, Souvenirs: Recueil d’articles autobiographiques, quoted in Ed Cohen, A Body Worth Defending. Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 1. 2 Cohen, A Body Worth Defending, pp. 7–8. Mikhail Bakthin, Rabelais and His World, trans. by Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1984). 3 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. by Catherine Porter (New York [etc.]: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993); Cohen, A Body Worth Defending, pp. 12–15.

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socio-economic reality can modern man build his own identitarian unity. Consequently, all those ‘repressed’ forms of hybridization which affect modern society constitute, just because they are concealed, relegated, and unrecognized, a sort of ‘invisible’ monstrosity which becomes the (uncontrolled) matrix of new possibilities of contamination. As Latour argues: [b]y rendering mixtures unthinkable, […] the moderns allowed the practice of mediation to recombine all possible monsters without letting them have any effect on the social fabric, or even any contact with it. Bizarre as these monsters may be, they posed no problem because they did not exist publicly and because their monstrous consequences remained untraceable. […] The less the moderns think they are blended the more they blend.4

In this view the body, being the privileged and inevitable meeting point between the oppositions that characterise and preoccupy modernity – nature and culture, biology and politics, empiricism and transcendence –, becomes one of the most emblematic manifestations of what Latour significantly calls “the unthinkable, the unconscious of the moderns”,5 namely all those subterranean ambiguities that society has chosen to eliminate or ignore from the seventeenth century onwards. For this reason, the immune and inviolable body of nineteenth-century medical knowledge is also a haunted body, constantly threatened by the terror of being infested by unknown and dangerous elements capable of invalidating its structural equilibrium. Even more so when it is manipulated, fragmented, and reassembled by scientific activities which, though aimed at preserving the body, end up undermining its supposed unity, as in the case of those nineteenthcentury medical practices – embryonic experimentation, genetic mutation research, animal cell cultivations, artificial prosthesis engineering, and so on – which transformed the human body into a ‘patchwork’ of anatomical fragments.6 From this biotechnical “leaky body” emerges a much more ambiguous and elusive anatomical morphology than that encoded by the official medicine, namely the disturbing “spectre of the other who haunts the selfsame”7 identified by Margrit Shildrick as the monstrous otherness par excellence of the modern imaginary (Embodying the Monster, 2002). This process of bodily spectralization can be best investigated in relation to 4 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, pp. 42–43. 5 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, p. 37. 6 See Erin O’Connor, Raw Material: Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000). 7 Margrit Shildrick, Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (London: Sage, 2002), p. 5.

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organ transplant surgery, which began in the 1880s just when human biological immunity was being determined.8 The operation of replacing the sick organ of a person with a healthy one removed from the body of another person (usually a corpse), inevitably involved the reformulation of the boundaries of the self both from the physical and the cultural points of view, generating a series of problematic hybridizations such as the disruption of the traditional concepts of life and death, the distribution and commercialization of spare body parts, the creation of new social relationships between the organ recipient and the donor (or the donor’s kin). As Susan Lederer clearly demonstrates in her anthropological essay Flesh and Blood (2008), if, to start with, organ transplantation was welcomed enthusiastically by many patients eager to return to good health, the physical and moral ‘corruption’ that this new surgical treatment might bring about generated many ethical and social doubts, since it was to entail ‘monstrous’ somatic fusions between different living beings.9 These concerns manifested themselves primarily in the literary and cinematic productions of the early twentieth century, where the transformativity of individual anatomy became the subject of intense exploration, especially because seen as an instance of modern biopower manipulations.10 In particular, fictions and films dwelt on the invisible anomaly hiding within the recipient, who frequently felt invaded by an alien organic memory, i. e. the donor’s souvenirs, characteristics, and tastes that the transplanted body part was believed to retain. Indeed, the embodiment of a foreign organ seemed to coincide, at least on a psychological level, with the embodiment of the historical and private experiences that this organ incarnated. The phenomenon is well recognised even today : “cell memory” has been recently defined as the stock of preferences and affections that a single cell of our organism is thought to be able to store and then transmit when transplanted into another person, what would explain, according to some anthropologists, the strong popular resistance to the scientific objectification of body parts.11 But already in the early nineteenth century, when there were experiments in 8 See Thomas Schlich, The Origins of Organ Transplantation. Surgery and Laboratory Science (Rochester : University of Rochester Press, 2010). Schlich argues against the many historical accounts that, on the evidence of all the hybrid monsters found in legends, myths and religions of different cultures, define the practice of transplantation “an ancient dream of mankind” (ch. 1). 9 Susan E. Lederer, Flesh and Blood: Organ Transplantation and Blood Transfusion in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 10 The obvious reference is to Michel Foucault’s work. 11 About cell memory, see Leslie A. Sharp, Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed Self (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 199–200.

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skin grafting between human beings or between humans and animals, this hybridization of both organs and personality was the focus of many cultural anxieties, as Grimms’ fairy tale Die drei Feldscherer (The Three Army-Surgeons, 1815, Fig. 1) clearly demonstrates.12 It’s a tale about three travelling army surgeons who, in order to prove their skills, decide to remove their organs – respectively one hand, the heart, and the eyes –, asking an innkeeper to take care of them until the next morning, when they would put them back in their place. During the night, the inattention of a servant girl allows a cat to steal and eat the surgeons’ body parts. Thus, in order to help his girlfriend, the servant’s lover goes looking for alternative organs: he cuts the hand off a thief who was hanging on the gallows, cuts out the eyes of the guilty cat, and fetches the heart of a pig from the cellar. In the morning, the three doctors re-attach the missing body parts using a mysterious ointment they carry with them, and, after impressing the innkeeper with their ability, continue on their journey. But they soon become aware that something is wrong: one of them, the doctor with the porcine heart, begins rooting around in the dirt; another, the one with cat’s eyes, doesn’t see well in broad daylight, but at night he sees some details that other humans can’t perceive; and the third, the surgeon who has the hand of a thief, finds he cannot help stealing. Once they realize what happened, they go back to the innkeeper and ask him a great deal of money, even if “sie hätten aber doch lieber ihr richtig Werk gehabt” (“they would rather have had their own proper organs”).13 Significantly, the transplant and xenotransplant operations that the doctors (unknowingly) experiment on their bodies don’t change anything about their physical appearance: the monstrous component – that is, the bestial and criminal deviation – is totally internal, an abomination that occurs first on the phantasmatic level and is then translated into involuntary actions by the acquired organs. Indeed, the unrestrainable urges, altered visions, and thieving hands (“Ei,’ sagte er, ‘was kann ich dafür! es zuckt mir in der Hand ich muss zugreifen, ich mag wollen oder nicht’” [“how can I stop myself ? My hand twitches, and I am forced to snatch things whether I will or not”])14 recounted by the Grimms’ tale don’t display the physical heterogeneity typical of traditional 12 The tale is inspired by an episode of the medieval Gesta Romanorum which is about an exchange of eyes between a physician and a goat. See “Of Concord”, in Gesta Romanorum, or, Entertaining Stories Invented by the Monks as a Fire-Side Recreation and Commonly Applied in Their Discourses from the Pulpit, edited by Thomas Wright, 2 vols (London: John Camden Otten, [1871]), vol. 1, Tale lxxvi, pp. 264–267. 13 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Die drei Feldscherer, in Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm: Urfassung, edited by Friedrich Panzer (Augsburg: Reichl Verlag, 2007), n. 32, p. 448; trans. by Margaret Hunt, The Three-Army Surgeons, in The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales (Digireads.com Publishing, 2009), n. 118, p. 270 14 Grimm, Die drei Feldscherer, p. 447; trans. The Three-Army Surgeons, p. 270.

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Fig. 1: Arthur Rackham, The Three Army Surgeons , illustration in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Little Brother & Little Sister and Other Tales (London: Constable, 1917), p. 140.

monsters; instead, they reveal the unconscious hybridism of the nineteenthcentury closed body, a sort of ‘spirit possession’ generated by the organism itself, once ‘opened-up’ and disrupted by transplantation surgery. Through the union of different anatomical parts (even of animal origin), the body becomes the site for the development of suspicious behaviours, where the boundaries of self dissolve, giving rise to the representation of an altered and multifaceted ego. It’s what the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, who is himself a heart transplantee, calls the “intruder”,15 specifically the organ of the donor, but also the new body image of the self, i. e. an individual whose biological integrity is modified, who is threatened by his/her own immune system defenses – all transplant patients must take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of their lives –, and is tormented by fantasies about alienness. Therefore, the insidious and invisible monstrosity of the moderns is to be found in the gap between the concrete and self-enclosed body that trans-

15 See Jean-Luc Nancy, L’Intrus (Paris: Galile, 2000).

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plantations biotechnology attempts to restore to full health and the imaginary and leaky one that inevitably results from this kind of surgical operations.16 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) is a good, early example of this gap. Shelley’s novel offers several key themes for an analysis of the interaction between biomedicine and society, which is why its story still resonates in contemporary cultural debates especially in relation to transplantations: as psychiatrist Stuart F. Youngner has aptly remarked, today Frankenstein and his Creature impersonate “the dark side”17 of human organ exchanges, namely the invisible illness that can be generated by a ‘jigsaw body’. Not surprisingly in 1967, upon awakening after the first heart transplant operation by Christiaan Barnard, Louis Washkansky told his nurses “I am the new Frankenstein”,18 introducing what in current medical terminology is called the “Frankenstein syndrome”, a psychiatric pathology that includes the anguish caused by the spectralization of the intruder organ. Thus, Shelley’s early nineteenth-century “hideous phantasm of a man”19 imposes itself as the founding myth of transplant surgery, and of its ability to defy the laws of nature together with the complex hybridization process that this same ability puts in place; Jon Turney describes the widespread and articulated presence of Shelley’s novel in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural imaginary as “[a] subterranean and invisible diffusion”,20 implicitly drawing attention to the interior and hidden constituent of modern monstrosity that Frankenstein explores and exhibits.21 16 See David Le Breton, La Chair u vif. De la leÅon d’anatomie aux greffes d’organes (Paris: Mtaili, 2008), pp. 281–329. 17 Stuart F. Youngner, ‘Organ Retrieval: Can We Ignore the Dark Side?’, Transplantation Proceedings, 22, 3 (June 1990), pp. 1014–1015. For the reception of Frankenstein in relation to biomedical technologies, see also Rosslyn D. Haynes, ‘Frankenstein: The Scientist We Love to Hate’, Public Understanding of Science, 4 (1995), pp. 435–444, and Jon Turney, Frankenstein’s Footsteps: Science, Genetics and Popular Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998). 18 See Lederer, Flesh and Blood, p. 201. 19 Mary Shelley, ‘Author’s Introduction to the Standard Novels Edition (1831)’, in Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, edited with an Introduction and Notes by Maurice Hindle (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 9. 20 Turney, Frankenstein’s Footsteps, p. 26. 21 This ‘subterranean diffusion’ characterizes also the surgical field and scientific literature, which are both permeated by the image of the Frankensteinian monster, despite transplantation professionals forbid patients to evoke it. There is an extensive bibliography on the subject: see, among others, Deborah C. Beidel, ‘Psychological Factors in Organ Transplantation’, Clinical Psychology Review, 7 (1987), pp. 677–694; Le Breton, La Chair u vif; and most of Lesley A. Sharp’s publications, including Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies: Death, Mourning, and Scientific Desire in the Realm of Human Organ Transfer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Strange Harvest (2006); ‘The Commodification of the Body and Its Parts’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 29 (2000), pp. 287–328; ‘Organ

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Indeed, the aberration of Frankenstein’s living being is to be found not in the appearance of the different body units that make it up – they are all “beautiful” – but in their assemblage; in addition to forcing Frankenstein to create a giant – “[a]s the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make the being of a gigantic stature”22 –, this putting together of parts modulates such a leaky body that it denies the protective covering of skin, showing “the work of muscles and arteries beneath” along with two ghostly “watery eyes”. When the scientist confronts for the first time the Creature he forged using the organs of several corpses, he exclaims: His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! – Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.23

After seeing this automaton of flesh, “the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled […Frankenstein’s] heart”.24 The scientist’s dream to reproduce life dissolves into the horror of a body that is no longer intact or impermeable, but rather a collection of fragmented corpses, from which a new and gruesome perception of the individual arises.25 The Creature’s threat consists in exhibiting everything that modernity is committed to hide, that is a bodily interior made of ‘butchered’ and interchangeable flesh cuts that give substance to the hybrid and its unavoidable identitarian uncertainties: “My person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my

22 23 24 25

Transplantation as a Transformative Experience: Anthropological Insights into the Restructuring of the Self ’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, New Series, 9 (3) (Sep., 1995), pp. 357–389. On Shelley’s novel and its role as modern myth, see Turney, Frankenstein’s Footsteps, p. 3. Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 54. Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 58. Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 58. Franco Moretti describes the Creature as “an assemblage of different corpses”. Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders. Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. by Susan Fischer, David Forgacs and David Miller (Verso: London and New York 1988, 1997), p. 288, note 6. Actually, Shelley’s monster can be considered the modern equivalent of the “animated cadaver” that was depicted in traditional anatomical plates and whose aesthetic codes of integrity and formal plasticity are replaced at the end of the eighteenth century by representations of bodies in pieces looking so realistic as to be traumatic. See Janis McLarren Caldwell, ‘The Strange Death of the Animated Cadaver: Changing Conventions in Nineteenth-Century British Anatomical Illustration’, Literature and Medicine, 25, 2 (Fall 2006), pp. 325–357.

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destination? – the monster asks himself – These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them”.26 The somatic and social fluidity of the self that Frankenstein inaugurates and insinuates into the collective ‘body’ of modernity, undermining its constitutive cohesion, can be found at the end of the nineteenth century in another novel about scientific hubris: H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896).27 Soon after it was published, The Times called it “perverse”, “loathsome” and “repulsive”, and The Critic warned that it could be dangerous “even for physicians and scientific men – especially those of an experimental turn of mind”,28 who might follow in the footsteps of the protagonist. The Island of Dr. Moreau is the account of a physiologist who lives in exile for his questionable professional conduct: he attempts to change animals into humans via vivisection, plastic surgery, and hypnosis (Moreau’s experiments are allegedly inspired by those of John Hunter, an eighteenth-century Scottish surgeon who conducted transplants between different animals). But what worries the scientist is not so much the creatures’ change in form – from animal to human – as the uncontrollability of their inner emotions: The human shape I can get now, almost with ease, so that it is lithe and graceful, or thick and strong […] But […] least satisfactory of all is something that I cannot touch, somewhere – I cannot determine where – in the seat of the emotions. Cravings, instincts, desires that harm humanity, a strange hidden reservoir to burst forth suddenly and inundate the whole being of the creature with anger, hate, or fear. “These creatures of mine seemed strange and uncanny to you as soon as you began to observe them, but to me, just after I make them, they seem to be indisputable human beings […]”.29

In short, in Moreau’s opinion the monstrosity of his creations is not to be found in their appearance – he thinks they are humans in all respects –, but in their “strange hidden reservoir” of unknown irrationality, which he cannot overmaster, despite the use of hypnosis and brain control. Seemingly, Moreau’s apprehensions of a rebellious somatic unconscious were shared by one of the best known organ transplant pioneers, the French surgeon 26 Shelley, Frankenstein, p. 131. 27 Leslie A. Fiedler interprets Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Stoker’s Dracula (1897) as the four key texts that in the nineteenth century anticipate and prepare the surgical imaginary of organ transplantation and blood transfusion. See ‘Why Organ Transplant Programs Do Not Succeed’, in Stuart J. Youngner, Rene C. Fox, and Laurence J. O’Connell, Organ Transplantation: Meanings and Realities (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), pp. 56–65. 28 Patrick Parrinder, H.G. Wells: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 9. See also Turney, Frankenstein’s Footsteps, p. 56. 29 H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau (New York: Signet Classic, 2005), p. 120.

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Alexis Carrel (1873–1944), who arranged meetings with his colleagues to discuss Wells’s novel, described by him as “a “quaint and curious” tale”.30 Although at the beginning of the twentieth century Carrel’s reputation was highly widespread and he received thousands of letters from people eager to accept new kidneys, hearts, eyes, arms, or legs even from criminals sentenced to death,31 he decided to abandon his research on transplantation precisely because the problem of organ rejection persisted and for what he called “the unconscious life of organs”.32 Thus, Carrel’s surrender was due not only to the body immune system’s defense mechanisms – they would be treated successfully solely after the invention of cyclosporine in the 1970s –, but also to that ‘hidden and monstrous life’ originating in the biological hybridization with alien anatomies that defeated any attempt to reconstruct self unity. Nevertheless, Carrel’s personality permeated the early twentieth-century imaginary, emphasizing that ‘prohibited’ heterogeneity of the moderns which Frankenstein and Moreau had already carried out on the fictional level. Carrel was such a histrionic character that he was even portrayed as a magician with a tray full of animal hybrids (Fig. 2); in the newspapers too he was depicted in an ambiguous manner, halfway between mysticism – he usually operated in black surgical garb – and biotechnology.33 His figure found an explicit fictional equivalent in Cerral (an obvious anagram of Carrel), the brilliant and unconventional surgeon who operates the limbs graft in Maurice Renard’s Les Mains d’Orlac (The Hands of Orlac, 1920). Renard’s novel, very similar to Arthur Train’s Mortmain published several years before (1906) in the Saturday Evening Post, is about a concert pianist, Orlac, whose hands are mutilated in a terrible train accident and then replaced through transplantation with those of a guillotined murderer. The operation involves a series of changes in the personality of the musician, who becomes bizarre, unnatural, and at times monstrous. In the chapter emblematically entitled “Phantasms”, Orlac is described as a victim of an indefinable “tranget” (“oddness”), despite his improving physical state:

30 31 32 33

Lederer, Flesh and Blood, p. 25. Lederer, Flesh and Blood, p. 22. Le Breton, La Chair u vif, p. 281 (my translation). As evidence of the Frankensteinian aura surrounding Carrel, an article which was published in the Buffalo Express on November 6, 1912, and was probably a fabricated invention, told how “in a refrigerator of the Rockfeller Hospital – where Carrel had his laboratory and was experimenting with tissue culture – may be seen sections of living bones, pieces of living muscle, bits of liver, of veins, of arteries, of kidneys, of almost any part of the human body”. Quoted in Turney, Frankenstein’s Footsteps, p. 81.

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Fig. 2: Georges Villa, Caricature of Dr. Alexis Carrel practising transplants on animals, from Chanteclair, February 1914.

Il y a dans son moi quelque chose de nouveau, d’imprvu, de surprenant, un lment quasi monstrueux, fait de peur, d’garement et de fanfaronnade, que l’tat de se mains ne justifie nullement! (There was about him a quality that was new; something unforeseen, a surprising quality, an almost monstrous element compounded of fear, of bewilderment and of braggadocio that the state of his hands in no way justified!)34

After his initial total dismay, the protagonist tries to “faire de [… ses] secondes mains des mains d’artiste et d’honnÞte homme, w les naturaliser orlaciennes, ces intruses, ces rfugies, ces parasites si ncessaires” (“[familiarize with] those stranger’s hands […] to naturalise those interlopers, those refugees, those necessary parasites as Orlac’s hands”)35 by following a variety of treatments and procedures to make them look like his original hands. But the results are in vain; 34 Maurice Renard, Les mains d’Orlac (rdition Ebooks Libres et Gratuits, 2009), p. 69; The Hands of Orlac, trans. by Iain White (London: Souvenir Press, 1981), p. 65. 35 Renard, Les mains d’Orlac, p. 279; The Hands of Orlac, p. 253.

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they do not alleviate Orlac’s fear of having the limbs of a murderer and, through them, of becoming a murderer himself: he will find relief only in the finale, when he discovers that his donor, Vasseur, has never been an assassin. In Robert Weine’s film adaptation (The Hands of Orlac, 1924), the somatic unconscious tormenting the pianist appears as a clenched fist that threatens him in his dreams (Fig. 3):36 in short, Orlac’s monstrosity is that of an instinctive and rebellious body, whose foreign component turns against the individual and almost fully possesses him.

Fig. 3: Robert Wiene, Orlacs Hände (The Hands of Orlac), 1924.

The graft of the hand, an external and visible body part which helps build social relationships, is not surprisingly one of the most common devices to represent both the physical changes and the psychological alterations that are produced by the fusion of different anatomical pieces. The Brothers Grimm had already dealt with the fears generated by a criminal limb, but, in addition to the above-mentioned examples, ‘alien’ hands are represented from a number of different perspectives, often even in the form of civil complaints for the potential buying and selling of human organs fostered by transplantation surgery (usually at the expense of poorer classes). In the 1908 film by James Stuart Blackton, The Thieving Hand, for example, the human appendage is sold in a shop bearing the explicit name of “Limbs” and leads a fully autonomous life: the hand, which was bought by a rich man as a gift for the crippled beggar who returned his lost wallet,37 will lead the unfortunate 36 In addition to Wiene’s movie, there are several film versions of Renard’s novel, including Karl Freund’s Mad Love (1935) and Edmond T. Greville’s The Hands of Orlac (1960). 37 As Blackton’s film implicitly indicates, there exists a common ‘gift of life’ rhetoric in support of organ transplantation, though this could entail a sort of emotional blackmail on recipients. For the “tyranny of the gift”, see Rene C. Fox, Judith P. Swazey, Spare Parts: Organ Replacement in Human Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), ch. 2; Rene C. Fox, ‘Afterthoughts: Continuing Reflections on Organ Transplantation’, in Youngner, Fox, and

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recipient to prison because of its many thefts, and then abandon him after finding there its already jailed original owner. Again, in the science fiction tale The Black Hand (Amazing Stories, January 1931), Charles Gardner Bowers tells the story of the painter Van Puyster, who decides to receive an arm transplant from a black criminal sentenced to death penalty, and so pays him an agreed reward.38 Thanks to the “strange”39 compatibility between the donor’s blood and the recipient’s, the operation is successful, and Van Puyster is able to paint masterpieces again, even if he is constantly wearing gloves. As time goes on the progressive darkening of the painter’s works, verging more and more on the grotesque, coincides with his questionable behaviour, characterized by paranoid-hallucinatory states and an explicit aversion to black people, whom he fears because he thinks they might claim his new hand back. After pleading guilty to a series of violent crimes against blacks, Van Puyster is imprisoned for insanity and then found dead in his cell, where he bled to death for the amputation of the grafted arm. The ambiguous ending seems to suggest that, rather than a suicide, Van Puyster’s death could be a murderous act done by the legitimate owner of the limb who had come back to reclaim it.40 In addition to bringing into play racial issues that were very sensitive in the US during the initial period of organ transplant operations – since the 1870s skin grafts between different ethnic groups, usually from black donors to white recipients, had raised social and ethical questions about excessive hybridizations41 – Bowers’s tale focuses on the ‘conflict’ between a donor and a recipient who are both committed to claim the exchanged organ as their own. Thus, the difficult dismantling of the ‘proprietary body’ runs parallel to the gradual barbarization of the painter, who is afraid of being dispossessed of the new limb and, just for this reason, more and more similar to the murderous donor – especially in his

38

39 40 41

O’Connell, Organ Transplantation: Meanings and Realities, pp. 252–272; Margaret Lock, Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: The University of California Press, 2002), pp. 331–336. Many tales and films of the early decades of the twentieth century explore the complex issue of the sale of human organs, which at that time was even advertised in the newspapers: see, for example, Charles E. Mixer, The Transposition of Stomachs, The Black Cat (April 1900), pp. 39–42; W. Alexander, New Stomachs for Old, Amazing Stories, 1, 22 (February 1927), pp. 1039–1041 + 1073, and the films After His Own Heart (1919) by Harry L. Franklin’s and A Blind Bargain (1922) by Wallace Worsley. Charles Gardner Bowers, The Black Hand, Amazing Stories, 5, 10 (January 1931), pp. 909–11 + 923 (p. 910). See Susan Merrill Squier, Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 193. Lederer, Flesh and Blood, ch. 6. From the 1960s, black people will grow more and more suspicious about transplant surgery, because of the fear of being exploited for their organs.

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desire to assassinate all the possible claimants of the hand and protect himself against mutilation. In any case, Van Puyster’s psychological and cultural rejection turns into a monstrous spectralization of the self/other, so that Bowers concludes his narrative with the following notice: A patient with a negative psychiatric history became criminally insane following a graft of a negro’s arm, although the operation was a physical and physiological success. From this we may conclude that it is advisable for a surgeon to consider the mental, as well as physical, aspects of any such similar operation.42

Actually, even nowadays the postoperative changes in transplanted patients – the feelings of being stronger with a young man’s lung or gentler with a woman’s heart, the modifications of tastes or habits, and so on – are underestimated by medical professionals, who insist on depersonalizing the donors’ organs, reducing them to mere mechanical devices in order to make them easily replaceable (the heart is described as a pump, the kidneys as filters, and so on).43 While configuring the body into a mobile structure made up of interchangeable parts, biotechnology denies the concept of a fluid and intercorporeal self, mostly because, in accordance to Cartesian dualism, it ascribes the individual personality to the brain, and consequently excludes from the discourse of identity all other physical components.44 Perhaps just for this reason, since the beginning of transplant surgery brain recycling – an operation that is still impossible today – has proved a source of great fascination for writers and filmmakers eager to undermine that immutable stability of the self that modern civilization has always striven to promote.45 For example, in the most popular film version of Frankenstein, James Whale’s movie of 1931, the Creature’s perilousness is due to the fact that it has received 42 Bowers, The Black Hand, p. 923. 43 Sharp, ‘Organ Transplantation as a Transformative Experience’ and ‘The Commodification of the Body and Its Parts’. 44 See Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994). About the influence of Descartes in biomedicine, see Ian Hacking, ‘Our Neo-Cartesian Bodies in Parts’, Critical Inquiry, 34, 1 (Autumn 2007), pp. 78–105; Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Material Continuity, Personal Survival, and the Resurrection of the Body : A Scholastic Discussion in Its Medieval and Modern Contexts’, History of Religions, 30 (1), The Body (August, 1990), pp. 51–85. Cartesian dualism played a major role in the 1968 report published by an ad hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School and defining ‘irreversible coma’ and ‘brain death’ criteria, which resulted in increasing the supply of human organs. 45 The exchange of heads is a frequent subject in Asian mythology ; in his tale The Transposed Heads (1940), Thomas Mann adapts a traditional Indian fable and offers a satirical retelling of the theme. See Wendy Doniger, ‘Transplanting Myths of Organ Transplants’, in Youngner, Fox, and O’Connell, Organ Transplantation: Meanings and Realities, pp. 194–220 (p. 210).

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the brain of a murderer and consequently inherited his criminal deviance; but already in 1920, the silent film Go and Get It features a murderous gorilla with a transplanted human brain, thus emphasizing the absolute transgression of boundaries that such an operation involves.46 Similarly, Mikhail Bulgakov’s satirical novel The Heart of a Dog, first published in 1925, is about the transformation of a dog into a man after a human pituitary transplant. The stages of the animal metamorphosis are particularly interesting: the “dog” changes into a “homunculus” and starts to lose its hairs, walk upright, speak coarsely just as the dead donor did, eventually getting “the hormones of a man’s image”,47 that is the outward appearance but also the ‘imaginative’ nature of the self in society. However, as in the film Go and Get It, the dog’s humanizing process involves the assumption of questionable behaviours on the part of the animal, which, by developing an anthropomorphic identity, becomes, significantly, socially ‘monstrous’. As well as a degenerating fusion between men and animals, the dismantling of anatomical, racial and social borders brought out by brain transplantation finds its expression also as a revised relationship – inevitably bound to turn into a distressing experience – between natural organisms and biomedical devices. For instance, in the 1926 short story The Talking Brain (Amazing Stories), M.H. Hasta reports the terrible suffering that a student’s brain experiences when the scientist Murtha – a character inspired by Alexis Carrel and his in vitro cultivation – moves it “from the kind, familiar habitation of flesh and blood to […a] still, dead body of wax and steel which was never meant to hold a fragile living spirit”.48 Unable to identify itself in the prosthetic ‘cage’ that was provided by Murtha, the young man’s brain begs the doctor to kill it, and then leads to the suicide of Murtha himself. In Alexander Beliaev’s novel Professor Dowell’s Head, written a year before Hasta’s tale, human brains kept artificially alive are provided with new bodies, in order to reduce the torture of a life without limbs or organs. However, for an isolated and intubated brain the body becomes a ghostly presence, generating a sort of phantom limb syndrome that stages an unbearable and “horrible” deficiency both in the waking state and in dreams (thus, on an unconscious level):

46 The film, directed by Marshall Neilan and Henry Roberts Symonds, is now almost forgotten, but in 1941 Stuart Heisler made a remake entitled The Monster and the Girl. Still in the 1920s, the Austrian director Alfred Lampel staged another brain transplant in Doctor Hallin (1921). 47 Mikhail Bulgakov, The Heart of a Dog, trans. by Michael Glenny (London: Vintage Books, 2009), p. 66. 48 M.H. Hasta, The Talking Brain, Amazing Stories, 1, 5 (August 1926), p. 445.

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No, it’s better not to have dreams – Professor Dowell’s severed head says –. But, […] I’m tormented by more than dreams. When I’m awake, I’m tormented by false sensations. Strange as it may seem, sometimes I think that I can feel my body […] it is horrible.49

The ‘somatic ghost’ of Professor Dowell is the ghost of the self, who spectralizes his own (absent) body ; the comparison between this “strange” sensoriality and that which haunts the inner organs when dissociated from the control of the mind is illustrated in Joseph Green’s The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, a 1962 film that recalls and elaborates all the themes which have emerged in the narratives of the 1920s. The movie focuses on Jan Compton, a young woman whose head, after a car accident, is preserved alive by her boyfriend, Dr. Cortner. As Dr. Cortner seeks for a new body to attach to his fiance’s head, Jan, who does not accept the transplant and would rather die, learns to communicate telepathically with the horrific creature that the scientist keeps locked in a closet near his laboratory ; this way, she manages to convince it to kill the person responsible for their atrocious lives. Thus, the film ends with the death of Dr. Cortner and his assistant, while the imprisoned mutant escapes from the lab on fire, carrying the unfortunate girl who would have had to provide a body for Jan away to safety ; in the final scene, when the screen has already become black, Jan is heard laughing sardonically, thus emphasizing the victory of monstrosity over the normative intentions of science. For, if on the one hand Jan’s disembodied head carries out her plan to refuse a body other than her own (that is the perfect female body that Cortner chose for her), on the other hand she chooses to identify with an aberrant assemblage of flesh, whose deformity remains hidden for most of the film, as if to stress its internal and visceral nature. In fact, Jan refers to this Frankensteinian “mass of grafted tissues” as the “Thing inside”, while she calls herself the “Thing outward”, as if the former represented the somatic unconscious that, just as in transplant operations, has both to confront itself with a brain that is not its own and to ‘embody’ the sensations of an anatomical structure that is separated from the mind.50 Meaningfully, the giant and disproportionate creature in Green’s movie – played by Eddie Carmel, who was to become famous thanks to Diane Arbus’s photograph Jewish Giant, taken at Home with His Parents in the Bronx, NY, 1970 – recalls another ‘monster’ which, at that time, was asked to illustrate the role of the body within the brain: the homunculus drawn by the Canadian neurologist 49 Alexander Beliaev, Professor Dowell’s Head, trans. by Antonine W. Bouls (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1980), pp. 12–13. 50 See Patrick Gonder, ‘Like a Monstrous Jigsaw Puzzle: Genetics and Race in Horror Films of the 1950s’, The Velvet Light Trap, 52 (Fall 2003), pp. 41–43.

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Wilder Penfield in 1950 to represent the sensory and motor areas distributed along the cortical surface (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4: (above) Joseph Green, The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, 1962; (below) Wilder G. Penfield, Three-dimensional Sensory Homunculus, 1951, London, The Natural History Museum.

Penfield’s somatosensory map shows an improbable human being, with very huge hands, feet and mouth (due to the high density of their sensory receptors) and a bodily shape where, as Jean Clair points out, the disposition of the limbs seems to be the outcome of a series of operations by a crazy surgeon. Since the chest is missing, the hands and the feet are grafted together ; the tongue, being removed from the palate, protrudes alone a little below the chin. The genitals, being cut off, look as if they were thrown at the feet of the figurine.51

But the grotesque conformation of Penfield’s homunculus, which was meant to stress the higher relevance of some organs in the neuronal system, seems also to endorse the existence of a human anatomy that is different from objective corporeality, a ‘monstrous’ and non-homogeneous anatomy that alters the 51 Jean Clair, Hubris: La Fabrique du monstre dans l’art moderne. Homoncules, G{ants et Ac{phales (Paris: Gallimard, 2012), p. 48 (my translation).

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conventional (and aesthetic) codes of the modern body by referring exclusively to the world of the senses.52 It is significant, in this respect, that the brain is not present in the homunculus, because it is not among the body parts that can have sensory-motor stimuli, being the site of their registration.53 Unlike Bulgakov’s homunculus, whose ‘image’ was generated by the pituitary gland and showed the ordinary anatomical features of a human being, Penfield’s homunculus is the result of a biological structure which does not belong to the order of the visible but can be perceived only through the senses. Although in a completely different frame of reference, this kind of corporeality can be found in the alienating presence of ‘intruder’ organs in transplanted patients: indeed, some of them develop an acute sensitivity to their grafted organ, to the extent that they even seem to be able to ‘perceive’ it inside their bodies, though doctors strictly exclude this possibility. For example, Francisco Varela admits to feel the presence of his transplanted liver, know its position, and be aware of its adherences and tensions; he thinks that this could be due to some connective tissue membranes that were left in the hole of his previous liver, and are still unable to adapt themselves to the new one.54 Hence, the transplantee’s new anatomical configuration – the awareness of a “leaky body” that is made up of heterogeneous parts – is not much different from Penfield’s homunculus, which Clair aptly defines as the scientific representation of the “deranged man” (“homme drgl”) characterizing modern aesthetics: a being that is “exceptional, excessive, disproportionate, distorted, dismembered, disarticulated, stretched here and compressed there”.55 Actually, starting from the pre-Frankensteinian figures of Goya (Fig. 5), down to the detachable bodies of Mli{s, or to the Cadavres exquis of the Surrealists, the nineteenth- and twentieth-century artistic imaginary is built around a human body that is misshapen and rearrangeable. But what makes the ‘monstrosity’ of the transplanted body highly pregnant, and almost turns it into a paradigm of the modern era, is its potential invisibility, something that cannot be seen and consequently circumscribed: the intruder organ possesses the individual from the inside, forcing him/her to reconfigure the psychic image of the self and the normative canons that regulate it. Latour’s modern “hybrids” find somatic expression in a body of this sort: unsettled by a ‘foreign’ and phan-

52 See Margrit Shildrick, ‘Corporeal Cuts: Surgery and the Psycho-social’, Body & Society, 14, 1 (2008), pp. 31–46. Shildrick brings into correlation the homunculus of Penfield with the imaginary anatomy described by Freud and Lacan. 53 See Grosz, Volatile Bodies, pp. 34–35; Clair, Hubris, p. 54. 54 See Francisco J. Varela, ‘Intimate Distances: Fragments for a Phenomenology of Organ Transplantation’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8, 5–7 (2001), pp. 259–271 (p. 264). 55 Clair, Hubris, p. 63 (my translation).

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tasmatic unconscious which is still not recognized (seen) by science and which, precisely because of that, will continue to proliferate.

Fig. 5: (left) Francisco Goya, Los Chinchillas, plate 50 from the series Los Caprichos, 1799, Etching and aquatint; (right) James Whale, Frankenstein, 1931.

Daniela Crocetti

Taming Gender: How Hermaphroditism Became Pseudo and Gender Fled the Body

I was asked to write a chapter for this book because for some time I have been conducting historical and contemporary anthropological research on the medicalization of various syndromes now called DSD (Disorders of Sex Development)1 in which there are variations in the gendered components of the body. My research has focused primarily on Italy ; therefore this text will depart from the strict national boundaries of England and Germany. However, many of the things we will discuss were defined and categorized by English and German doctors. There was also a high level of international exchange in these communities at the time. The literature I will be referencing is medical literature: the stories doctors tell that are transformed into bodily facts through disciplinary consensus. DSD was coined in 2006 in Chicago,2 departing from the term Intersex that was in turn coined in 1917 by the German born geneticist Richard Goldschmidt.3 The majority of these syndromes are invisible to the naked eye, revealed by technology, chromosome tests and internal exams. However, the collective imagination, and occasionally medical literature (including the Italian national health system code for rare diseases), often still links these syndromes to the mythical and monstrous category of the hermaphrodite. 1 For a discussion of this term see Elizabeth Reis, Bodies in Doubt (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2009), pp. 153–162; http://oii-usa.blogspot.it/; http://www.intersexinitia tive.org/articles/intersextodsd.html. 2 See Ieuan Hughes, ‘Disorders of sex development: a new definition and classification’, Best Pract Res Clin Endocrinol Metab., 1 (2008), pp. 119–134. 3 See Alice Domurat Dreger, Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 31. There is a lot that could be said about the role of genetics, and Goldschmidt himself, in the metaphorical linguistic shift from monster to mutant. Goldschmidt was considered scientifically heretical in that he rejected the classical gene model and hypothesized about macro-mutations as “hopeful monsters”. He envisioned random mutation as a key factor in evolution, not just natural selection. See Michael R. Dietrich, ‘Richard Goldschmidt:hopeful monsters and other “heresies”’, Nature Reviews Genetics, 4 (2003), pp. 68–74.

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Many authors, including Alice Domurat Dreger,4 claim that in the end of the eighteenth century the European medical profession became obsessed with the concept of the hermaphrodite. However, the scope of this obsession was to establish a true measure of gender, and erase any possible ambiguity or duplicity implied by the hermaphroditic category. The nineteenth century tossed the word hermaphrodite about, used it in various and ambiguous ways (including for what would now be called transexuality or homosexuality), and in the end decided it was impossible human physical category. From the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, hermaphroditism became first spurious, then pseudo. The term Hermaphrodite comes from Greek myth, transposing a story of illfated love (not many Greek myths had happy love stories) onto the gendered body. Hermaphroditus was the beautiful child of Hermes and Aphrodite who would become two-sexed. Ovid recounts that the nymph Salmacis fell in lust with Hermaphroditus, tried to seduce him and was rejected. Thinking Salmacis gone, Hermaphroditus entered the nymph’s pool, only to find her embracing him and kissing him from behind. She called on the gods ‘to never let them part’, a wish which was granted by blending their bodies into one form. And the two bodies seemed to merge together, One face, one form… So these two joined in close embrace, no longer Two beings, and no longer man and woman, But neither, and yet both…5

The most common image of a hermaphrodite that springs to mind is of a feminine beauty with male-sized genitals like the “Borghese Hermaphroditus” statue.6 That is a beautiful being that, however, does not have the genital form we would expect to be associated with their cultural genitals. The idea of cultural genitals was first developed by Harold Garfinkle,7 and refers to the genital form one is assumed to have based on cultural and somatic cues. According to the Louvre catalogue, where the famous statue now lies, the piece was re-discovered in 1619. In the centuries leading from the statue’s original construction to its re-

4 See Dreger, Hermaphrodites; Alice Domurat Dreger, Intersex in the Age of Ethics (Maryland: University Publishing Group, 1999). 5 Publius Ovidius Naso, Metamorphosis, trans. by A. S. Kline (http://etext.virginia.edu/latin/ ovid/trans/Metamorph4.htm#478205198, 2000), Book IV, pp. 346–388. 6 Sleeping Hermaphroditus. Hermaphroditus: Greek marble, Roman copy of the 2nd century CE after a Hellenistic original of the 2nd century BC, restored in 1619 by David Larique; made by Gianlorenzo Bernini in 1619 on Cardinal Borghese’s request. Stored in the Louvre, Paris. http://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/sleeping-hermaphroditos. 7 See Harold Garfinkle, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Upper Saddle River : Prentice Hall, 1967), pp. 116–185.

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discovery, the idea of the Hermaphrodite had shifted from beautiful marvel to monster, and was about to shift again.

On Monsters and Marvels The ambiguity and historical fluidity of hermaphroditism is interlinked with the fluctuation of thought surrounding monstrosity as a larger conceptual cultural category. The physical definition of hermaphroditism lies in the genitals and the somatic sexual characteristics, and yet the majority of medical literature directs its concern to social issues such as gender, sexuality and morality. By the nineteenth century, modern teratology8 came to redefine ‘monstrosity’ as part of the natural process. Teratology, the study of perceived abnormalities in physical development, etymologically derives from the greek teratos, both marvel and monster. The desire to categorize the natural world that inspired Ambroise Par’s seminal work in the 1500s, On Monsters and Marvels, had transformed into the desire to describe the natural world separate from supernatural influences. By the early nineteenth century both the belief that monsters were bad omens, and that thinking about or seeing monsters would produce a monstrous child, had practically disappeared.9 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein10 drew on the new idea that monsters were part of a developmental process and could actually be created, as Teratologist Camille Dareste experimented in reallife.11 Georges Canguilhem states that “[t]he existence of monsters calls into question the capacity of life to teach us order”, continuing to write, “[a] breach in 8 Teratology was established by MM Geoffroy Saint Hillaire in the nineteenth century ; Dreger, Hermaphrodites, p. 33. 9 See Kathleen Long, Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Michel Foucault, Abnormal: lectures at the Collwge de France, 1974–1975, ed. by Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, trans. by Graham Buchell (New York: Picador, 2003); Lorraine Daston, Katherine Park, ‘The Hermaphrodite and the Orders of Nature: Sexual Ambiguity in Early Modern France’, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, 1 (1995), pp. 419–438. 10 See Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, 3 vols. (London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor and Jones, 1818). 11 M. Camille Dareste on monsters and the developmental model: “In reality, there are no monsters. This result I derive from all the labors of the teratologists, and particularly of the two MM Geoffroy Saint Hillaire, as well as from my own studies. I have seen formed almost all the types described by teratology, and I can see in monstrosity nothing but a modification of development, most frequently an arrest produced by an accidental cause. In these new conditions the development continues so far as the anomaly is compatible with life. When a period arrives in which it ceases to be compatible with life, the monster dies, but only for this reason”; Paul Janet, William Affleck, Final Causes, 2nd edition (New York: Scribner, 1889), pp. 163–164; Camille Dareste, Recherches sur la production artificielle des monstruosit{s, ou, Essais de t{ratog{nie exp{rimentale, 2nd edition (Paris: Reinwald, 1891).

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this confidence, a morphological divergence […] is enough for us to be gripped by radical fear”.12 With respect to order and the body, sex and gender are also powerful and confusing categories in the collective imagination, that access primordial fears, much like the monster category. Therefore, the category of the hermaphrodite, a morphological divergence of sex and gender, would continue to ride the strange boundary land between scientific investigation and social fascination. This chapter will address some conceptual transformations regarding the Hermaphrodite that occurred throughout the course of the nineteenth century. In particular, the Hermaphrodite shifted from a monstrous body, to the risk of a deviant sexuality hidden in a duplicitous body.13 The medicalization of the hermaphroditic body in the nineteenth century came to insist that the hermaphrodite, a person of mixed sexual characteristics, did not actually exist.14 Every person was “really” male or female, and it was medicine’s15 job to define these parameters. As we will discuss later on in further detail, the need to define the gender of the individual was essentially a medically driven social project, intent at preventing gender deviant and homosexual activity. Hermaphroditic (dual or mixed sex) qualities and terminology were in turn also applied to social categories such as sexuality and gender. Julia Ward Howe in 1840s North America16 and Virginia Woolf in 1920s England17 used the hermaphrodite trope and gender shifting characters respectively to explore social gender and its restrictions. At the end of the nineteenth century, the term “psychic hermaphroditism” (inversion)18 would be used where we now would use Homosexual, Transsexual, or Transgender. These theories regarding sexual orientation and gender identity were part of a growing trend in the nineteenth century that attempted to explain complex behaviors through biology. Magnus Hirschfeld,19 like Karl-Heinrich Ulrich,20 believed that if homosexuality could be 12 Georges Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, trans. by Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 134. 13 Elizabeth Reis, Bodies in Doubt (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2009), pp. 23–54. 14 Dreger, Hermaphrodites, p. 166. 15 Where we would now say science’s job, in the nineteenth century this was the realm of natural philosophers and surgeons (medical practitioners). 16 See Julia Ward Howe, The Hermaphrodite, ed. by Gary Williams (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); written probably in the years 1846–47, the novel was published for the first time in English in 1880. 17 See Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (New York: Harcourt, 1928). 18 See Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 2 (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/ 13611/13611-h/13611-h.htm,1927); David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 411–412. 19 Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935) was a German physician and sexologist. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality, pp. 410–411. 20 Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895), born in Hanover, Germany, is seen today as the pioneer

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demonstrated to be a biological variant, it could no longer be defined as socially deviant. This rationale was aided by the scientific shift in teratology to remove social and metaphysical weight from physical deviance and monstrosity. However, the biologically and physically different were to be integrated into God’s plan only in part, as the eugenic movement would soon, yet again, define physical difference as morally repugnant.21 These conceptual transformations regarding gender and the body continue to inform contemporary conceptual developments in biological and social sciences as well as popular cultural movements. Modern social sciences separate the categories of sex and gender (as I have been doing thus far), in which sex comes to refer to the biological aspects and gender to the social performance.22 This conceptual separation has origins in our nineteenth-century discussion, as natural philosophers and physicians attempted to force the body to match the European heterosexist two-gender social system, as well as biologically explain both female inferiority and same-sex desire. Many of the terms we now use – homosexuality, sexual orientation, gender identity, gendered behavior, gender presentation – were yet to be coined, or were conceptually overlapped. In 1911 Wilhelm Johannsen proposed the genotype-phenotype distinction that paved the way for biological sex to be separated into genetic and somatic components, resolving some of the key issues of nineteenth-century researchers.23 This was part of eventual erasure of Hermaphroditism as a “real” category, social or biological. Variations in the gendered body would soon be explained through the developmental model of the body that teratology dreamed of, as seen in Goldschmidt’s genetic-hormonal model of Intersexuality, and later further medicalized as DSD (Disorders of Sex Development). These contemporary medical categories, unfortunately, often continue the legacy of medicalizing social gender.24 As hinted at earlier, the contemporary category of DSD includes many syndromes that are revealed through technology and our new molecular conception

21 22 23 24

of the modern gay rights movement. See Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality, pp. 408–411; Karl Heinrich Ulrich, Araxes: a Call to Free the Nature of the Urning from Penal Law (Germany : Numa Numantius, 1870). See Lennard Davis, The Disability Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1997); Ellen K. Feder, ‘Imperatives of Normality : From “Intersex” to “Disorders of Sex Development”’, Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 15 (2009), pp. 225–248. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990). See Lisa S. Parker and Rachel A. Ankeny, Mutating Concepts, Evolving Disciplines: Genetics, Medicine, and Society (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), p. 28. See Dreger, Intersex; Katrina Karkazis, Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Susan Kessler, Lessons from the Intersexed (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998).

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of biological gender. This has expanded the diagnostic category to include many new syndromes that have little to do with “ambiguous” genital form, totaling roughly 1 in 1000 live births. The syndrome – AIS (Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome) – represented by the main Italian DSD patient group, AISIA (Associazione Italiana Sindrome da Insensibilitw agli Androgeni),25 results statistically as 1 in 13.000 live births.26 If not for modern internal medicine, hardly any woman diagnosed with AIS would have ever discovered the syndrome. The invisible nature of the syndrome hardly makes it seem includable in a monstrous category. Yet, in the Italian health system this syndrome is still coded as pseudohermaphroditism. Therefore, most of the contemporary individuals diagnosed with AIS must still face the legacy of medical stigma that has conceptual origins in the nineteenth century.

Medical literature It would be hard to define contemporary medical articles, often written in choppy synthetic English, as literature. It is, instead, easy to argue that nineteenth century medical writing was closer to the prose form, as it often deviated from the mere representation of empirical data into commentary and even poetic social critique. The authors digress, as well as support their argument through analysis of previous authors. This is particularly evident in writing about hermaphrodites, where the definition of the medical object had the direct aim of establishing a clear social gender. In his seminal work, A Mechanical and Critical Enquiry into the nature of Hermaphrodites, James Parsons MD27 waxes poetic in the flowery manner common to his period, which seems obsequious to the contemporary ear : An indolent Person is always the most credulous of Novelty, at the same Time that his Supineness hinders him from examining the Truth of any Rumour whatsoever […]. What, but ignorance or Superstition, could perswade Men to Imagine, that poor human Creatures (which were only distorted in some particular Part, or had any thing unusual appearing about them, from some morbid Cause affecting them, either in the Uterus, or after their Births) were Prodigies or Monsters in Nature? What, but Ignorance and Superstition, could urge Men to make Laws for their Destruction or Exclusion from the common Benefits of Life? In fine, what, but these very Causes, could make several harsh Laws continue still in Force against them in many Places, which Suppose those Women that happen to be Macroclitoridae, to be capable of exercising the Functions of either 25 http://www.aisia.org/home.html. 26 See Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 53. 27 See James Parsons, A Mechanical and Critical Enquiry into the nature of Hermaphrodites (London: J. Walthoe, 1741).

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Sex, with regard to Generation; and, further, restraint them under severe Penalties to that Sex only which they should choose? As if poor Women could exercise the Part of any other Sex but their own.28

Both German and English medical literature joined the European effort to explain sexual physical ambiguity out of existence. Medical literature continuously references larger social mores and changes. Above, Parson seems to claim that natural science, and therefore better classification, will save people from being punished as hermaphrodites. Hirschfield too hoped that outlining a biologically based category could save people from social and legal punishment. Marchetti,29 in line with Foucault,30 indicates changing political forms as necessitating clear legal gender roles. Government increasingly governed the individual and populations, as apposed to masses, which Foucault describes as the side effect of democratization. Marchetti delineates the ‘invention of bisexuality’ in Italian law, a process well in motion in both England and Germany. This process required the citizen to have a single legal gender, coupled with the outlawing of cross-gender dress and same-gender sexual relations. The medical profession became the regulatory body to have authority over the true gender of an individual.31 Already in 1741, James Parson was building on the new medical tendency to describe most cases of hermaphroditism as erroneous. He is particularly interested in the misinterpretation of the macro-clitoris: “as some words are often repeated through the whole Essay, I could not avoid taking the Liberty of forming the adjective Word Macroclitorideus; which tho’ not in Use before, as I could find, is highly necessary here […]”.32 Helen King notes, however, that Parson himself switches positions from his 1740 letter claiming that all persons with macroclitorus’ were female, to stating in a 1771 lecture that these individuals should be categorized as male.33 The size of the genital organ held moral and medical fascination (and con28 Parsons, A Mechanical and Critical Enquiry, pp. xi–xvii. I have taken the liberty of using the contemporary English “s” instead of the modern English “f”. 29 See Valerio Marchetti, L’invenzione della bisessualitu. Discussioni fra teologi, medici e giuristi del 17. secolo sull’ambiguitu dei corpi e delle anime (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2001). 30 See Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. by Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973); Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. by Colin Gordon (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980). 31 See Michel Foucault, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth Century French Hermaphrodite, trans. by Richard McDougall (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980); Reis, Bodies in Doubt; Dreger, Hermaphrodites. 32 Parsons, A Mechanical and Critical Enquiry, p. vii. 33 See Helen King, Midwifery, Obstetrics and the Rise of Gynaecology : The Uses of a SixteenthCentury Compendium (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 178–180. King also makes interesting observations regarding the “hermaphroditic” nature of the man-midwife.

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tinues to) for many different reasons. The most obvious is the gender we ascribe to the esthetic appearance of the genitals, as well as the role of the genitals in sexuality. On another level, Laqueur and Schiebinger argue that a “one sex model” of the body dominated well into the nineteenth century.34 This theory indicates that the medical understanding of anatomy that rose from the Galenic tradition saw the male body as the standard for the normal human body, uninterested in the particularities of femaleness. In this model female genitals were merely under-cooked (and reversed) male genitals. Helen King argues, instead, that with the return of the Hippocratic corpus in the sixteenth century, the female body was already seen as distinct, separate and gendered, even though gynecology did not rise as independent discipline until the late nineteenth century.35 In either case, the clitoris, and its size on a female-identified person, was the center of many a moral debate from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth. In his 1898 compilation, Cesare Taruffi (Professor of Pathological Anatomy of the University of Bologna), cites many cases from the late fifteen hundreds to the late eighteen hundreds in which the clitoris is part of the explanatory structure of medical interest in female homosexuality.36 Taruffi at the end of the nineteenth century, like Parsons at the end of the eighteenth, is particularly interested in the divergence of the female body and the enlarged clitoris. In Taruffi’s treatise on Teratology, entitled Ermafroditismo ed Agenosoma, the clinical section on masculinized women is divided into seven full 34 See Londa Schiebinger, ‘Skelettestreit’, Isis, 94 (2003), pp. 307–313; Thomas Laqueur, ‘Sex in the Flesh’, Isis, 94 (2003), pp. 300–306; Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). 35 Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park indicate that there are important nuances that are different between the Aristotelian and Hippocratic models. “This model expressed the characteristic Aristotelian interpretation of sexual difference, which presented male and female less as points on a spectrum, in the Hippocratic manner, than as polar opposites admitting no meaningful mediation. Thus from the Aristotelian point of view, hermaphroditism was a condition only of the genitals-the product of the excess of matter and imbalance of male and female principles-rather that of the entire organism. There could be no true hermaphrodites in the sense of the Hippocratic model; the animal was either male or female, and the other set of genitals was always inoperative, resembling in that respect a tumor or growth” (Aristotle 1953, bk. 4, ch.4; 772b26–35). Although both the Hippocratic and the Aristotelian accounts were purely naturalistic, they differed greatly from each other in their sexual implications. The Hippocratic model was sexually charged; allowing for a spectrum of intermediate sexual possibilities, it posed a potential challenge to the malefemale dichotomy. The Aristotelian model, on the other hand, had none of these resonances; the sexual ambiguity of the hermaphrodite was never more than superficial, leaving the bipolar sexual order intact”. Daston and Park, ‘The Hermaphrodite and the orders of nature’, pp. 119–120; see also King, Midwifery, pp. 26–30. 36 See Cesare Taruffi, Ermafroditismo ed Agenosoma (Bologna: Gamberini e Parmeggiani, 1898).

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chapters; general traits, macrosomia (abnormal height), body hair, elephantiasis of the clitoris, psychological virilization, sexual inversion, and tribadism.37 The section on feminilized men is not even a quarter as long. Taruffi’s treatment of this confluence of the female body, anatomy, morality, sexual behavior and teratology is ambiguous. While the anatomical section attempts to firmly root hermaphroditism in a biological taxonomical structure, the clinical section belies anatomical knowledge and focuses on social manifestations of gender and sexual behavior in which the hermaphroditic body disappears. As a historian, he evidences predominating theories and preoccupations on the biological nature of gender behavior without clearly stating an individual position. The predominant treatment of female behavior within an anatomical construct indicates a marked historical anxiety surrounding female social position. Taruffi defines historical Italian female intellectuals (such as Laura Bassi 1711–1778), who left such a strong impression on the British imagination,38 as suffering from psychopathic virilization. Taruffi hypothesizes that ‘normal’ inferior female intelligence is tied to the body and brain weight.39 In other observations, instead, he dismisses the idea that this characteristic (intelligence) is tied to other physical attributes such as height and masculine traits. The tribadic or lesbian body is also localized (although in the clitoris, not in the brain) and is not necessarily associated with other masculine attributes. In the numerous chapters dedicated to these phenomena, Taruffi ponders the relationship of the clitoris to hysteria, same sexdesire and masculine behavior. Paula Findlen traces an interesting story of the overlap of medical writing, literature and illicit literature at the end of the eighteenth century through a case study of Giovanni Bianchi.40 The anatomist Bianchi posthumously examined a

37 Chapter titles: Virilization (women with some male characteristics): 1. General characteristics; 2. Female macrosomia; 3. Hypertrichosis in a woman; 4. Clitoral elephantiasis; 5. Psychological virilization; 6. Sexual inversion; 7. Tribadism. [Invirilismo (femmina con alcuni caratteri maschili): 1. Caratteri generali; 2. Macrosomia femminile; 3. Ipertricosi nella donna; 4. Elefantiasi della clitoride; 5. Invirilismo psicologico; 6. Inversione sessuale; 7. Tribadismo.] in Taruffi 1898. 38 Traveling English men were particularly struck by Italian women intellectuals and scientists such as Laura Bassi of Bologna. See Italy’s Eighteenth Century in the Age of the Grand Tour, ed. by Paula Findlen, Wendy Roworth and Catherine Sama (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). 39 Luigi Calori, one of the many illustrious men of Europe, who sustained that women and Africans were inferior to white men based on their biology (especially their skulls), was director of the faculty of Medicine at the University of Bologna (Anatomy Professor for 52 years) while Taruffi was professor. See Alessandro Ruggeri, Luigi Calori Una Vita Dedicata alla Scienza (Bologna: Medimond, 2007). 40 See Paula Findlen, ‘The Anatomy of a Lesbian: Medicine, Pornography, and Culture in

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young person who had confessed to being a woman right before their death. The subject, originally named Catherine Vizzani, had lived for eight years as a man, but had been mortally wounded in 1743 after trying to elope with a woman. The objects of medical investigation were the hymen (certificate of virginity), gendered physical attributes such as fat distribution, and clitoris size. Bianchi writes: This young woman did not have a clitoris greater than others, as it was written from Rome that she had, and as they say that all those women whom the Greeks called Tribades, or who follow the custom of Sappho have. Rather, it can be said that hers was very ordinary and should be placed among the small instead of large or medium.41

Bianchi was punished by the Papal States for having contested their claim to the biological origin of tribadery (lesbianism). It was also claimed that a large clitoris would lead to immoral behavior, that is, immoral for a woman. Paula Findlen contextualizes Bianchi’s findings as part of the larger debate on “medical sexology” in the Enlightenment. Findlen’s analysis, however, contains subtext regarding the English perception of Italian morality, gender and sexuality in the age of the Grand Tour. Findlen claims that the English of this period were obsessed “with the alleged homosexuality of the Italians”.42 A popular version of Bianchi’s work was published in England by John Cleland, author of the infamous Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748). Cleland transforms Bianchi’s heretical anatomical observations into a baudy pseudo-medical text,43 The True History and Adventures of Catherine Vizzani, A YOUNG Gentlewoman a Native of Rome, who for many Years past in the Habit of a Man; was killed for an Amour with a young Lady ; and found on Dissection, a true Virgin.44 Cleland’s version focuses on the immoral behavior of women who take on male dress. We may add to all this, that from hence may be borrowed a very just Reason for punishing more severely, or at least not making so light of a Practice not altogether uncommon, which is that of Women appearing in public Places in Men’s Cloaths; a

41 42 43

44

Eighteenth-Century Italy’, in Italy’s Eighteenth Century in the Age of the Grand Tour, pp. 216–250. Findlen, ‘The Anatomy of a Lesbian’, pp. 222–223. Findlen, ‘The Anatomy of a Lesbian’, p. 30. Bianchi was a medical professor but not quite a pure intellectual figure himself. He got into trouble numerous times for his satirical writing under the name Jano Planco. He is also rumored to have created a collection of preserved hymens, which was his primary obsession instead of the clitoris. See The True History and Adventures of Catharine Vizzani, By Giovanni Bianchi (London: Printed for W. Reeve, Fleet-street, and C. Sympson, at the Bible-warehouse, Chancery-lane, 1755).

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Thing that manifests an extreme Assurance, and which may have many ill Consequences […]. This, by the Mosaic Law, is considered as a capital Offence, which deserves so much the more Reflection, as it will be found, upon a strict Enquiry, that most of the Laws in that Code, are founded upon the most perfect Knowledge of human Nature. It is also looked upon as a great Crime by our Law, as well for political as moral Reasons.45

The object has shifted unabashedly from anatomical inquiry to illicit behavior. The fear of cross-dressing and hidden homosexual behavior seemed to increase as the nineteenth century unfolds.46 Foucault references Antide Collas as the last hermaphrodite killed (in 1599) for the simple fact of having a hermaphroditic (monstrous) body. Foucault attests that in later cases the punishable crime becomes alleged homosexual behavior.47 Elizabeth Reis indicates that doctors were called to testify at court cases, and to investigate the anatomical “truth”.48 Reis highlights that treatment was not uniform, but that in most cases, a doctor would do what he could to establish the patient as a heterosexual body. A heterosexual body, to borrow from Foucault, is a “useful body” to society, which produces legitimized social products. Reis also highlights the growing suspicion of the deceptive body. Reis cites medical and newspaper accounts that denounce people who “passed” for white, or male, or who “changed” from black to white or from male to female in the course of their life. The biological patrimony of gender and race both provided distinct privilege and participatory status in birthing democracies, and therefore it was important to appoint an authority that would regulate these boundary-lines.

Creating the pseudo-hermaphroditic text If we are to step away from the idea of literature even further into the analysis of the text, we are ready to examine the dissolution of gender ambiguity through medical writing. Into the late half of the nineteenth century medical writing on hermaphroditism became less concerned with its social-literary value and more 45 The True History, pp. 64–65. 46 In the seventeenth century, England, France and the Americas adopted specific laws that punished both male and female transgression of civic gender category through dress. Elizabeth Reis cites cases in 1652 and 1677 in New England where women were punished for wearing men’s clothing until a specific law was developed in 1696 in Massachusetts. Reis, Bodies in Doubt, p. 15. 47 Foucault, Abnormal, p. 67. 48 See Reis, Bodies in Doubt.

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concerned with classification. How could gender fraud be avoided when medical authorities were still in disagreement over exactly which body parts held the key to biological identity? While authors would still fill pages with their social and moral opinions, what would become the meat of their work were their charts and definitions. James Parson at the end of the eighteenth century gives us a somewhat confused account of why human hermaphrodites are not actually part of the natural order. The medical models that followed step away from super-natural explanations for normality. It can be argued however, as does Canguilhem, that simply a new configuration of the supernatural, morality, normality and biology equation was imposed. Dreger refers to the end of the nineteenth century century as the “age of the gonads”.49 All classification systems by the end of the century would prioritize gonadal tissue, recently ‘discovered’ to be gendered, as the indicator of the true sex of the pseudo-hermaphrodite. French teratologist Isodore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire presented his classification of the hermaphroditic body in 1833.50 It consisted of dividing the body into six segments, three for the left and the right of the body, which included the: “profound portion”, ie ovaries, testicles and their dependants; the “middle portion”, the uterus, prostrate, vesicles and their dependants; the “external portion”, clitoris, vulva, penis and scrotum. Any juxtaposition of male and female segments indicated hermaphroditism. Saint-Hilaire does not posit the absence of hermaphrodites as his English predecessor and followers will, but he does posit that the gonadal tissue is the most likely indicator of biological sex. The morality of difference is hidden for a moment, the hermaphroditic subject is simply victim of an excess in development. Teratology as a discipline indirectly tamed the supernatural aspects of monsters, describing difference as morphological. The potential homosexuality of ambiguous gender still proved a threat to the “natural order”, yet it could too be tamed by categorizing people into the “right” gender categories. In the same period, the English doctor James Young Simpson introduced the division of spurious and true hermaphroditism. Despite the fact that Simpson was less taxonomically precise than Saint-Hilaire, he helped schematically introduce the medical subordination of “true hermaphroditism”. Spurious and True; the spurious comprehending such malformations of the genital organs of one sex as make these organs approximate in appearance and form to those of the opposite sexual type; and the order, again, of true hermaphroditism including

49 Dreger, Hermaphrodites, p. 139. 50 Dreger, Hermaphrodites, p. 141.

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under it all cases in which there is an actual mixture or blending together, upon the same individual, of more or fewer of both the male and female organs.51

This short passage confirms that the conceptual transition that sees men and women as “opposite sexual types” has become canonic. It is however interesting to note, that even though Young Simpson was already a Professor of midwifery,52 he does not at any point discuss the function of any of the said organs. Despite the new attempts at classification and growing understanding of the gonads, biological gender at the beginning of the nineteenth century is not yet unanimously tied to reproductive function. The nineteenth century established tissue difference between the ovary and testicles, establishing a biological sexualization of the gonads. It also saw great discoveries in the developmental model and internal anatomy. Researchers Wolff, and then Müller, further refined ideas about developmental pathways and ducts in the determination of the gendered embryo, which was largely delineated by the development of ovaries or testicles.53 The deterministic role of the gonads in development was then applied to the taxonomy of the hermaphroditic body. Dreger delineates this historical change: The classification system for hermaphroditisms presented in 1876 in the Handbuch der pathologischen Anatomie by Theodor Albrecht Edwin Klebs (1834–1913) functioned something like a constitution for the Age of the Gonads. Klebs’s taxonomy, apparently the first of its kind, codified the belief that the true sex should be based exclusively on the nature of the gonads. I. True hermaphroditism (presence of ovaries and testes in one individual): 1. True bilateral hermaphrodism: one testicle and one ovary on each side of the body. 2. True unilateral hermaphrodism: on one side an ovary or a testicle, on the other an ovary and a testicle. 3. True lateral hermaphrodism: (also called alternates hermaphrodism) an ovary on one side, a testicle on the other. II. Pseudohermaphrodism (spurious hermaphrodism; “doubling of the external genital apparatus with a single kind of sexual gland”): 1. Masculine pseudohermaphroditism: presence of testicles and evident development of the feminine genital parts. 2. Feminine pseudohermaphroditism: presence of ovaries with some predominance of the masculine genital parts. 51 Dreger, Hermaphrodites, p. 143. 52 The professionalization of midwifery, specifically as a male profession, and the following establishment of gynecology as a specific (male-run) discipline is analytically linked to the rise of the uterus and childbirth as symbolically feminine and hence the hysteria-histerectomy cure. King, Midwifery. 53 Wolffian and Müllerian ducts. See Caspar Friedrich Wolff, Theoria generationis, Doctoral dissertation (Halle and der Saale 1759); Johannes Peter Müller, Bildungsgeschichte der Genitalien (Bonn University, 1830).

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Note that one of the most significant results of Klebs’ system was that a being could appear almost entirely feminine internally and externally and still be considered a true male by virtue of the possession of testicles and lack of ovaries.54

For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the gendered gonads floated in limbo, their specific internal processes still relatively unknown. In this period, after it was decided that the gonads were bi-sexual (belonged to one of two gender categories), experiments focused on reproductive behavior. Reproductive behavior refers to the practices and actions that a given animal goes through in the act of mating, not the internal processes involved in fecundation and gestation. Through Berthold’s 1849 experiments, in which he reinserted gonads back into the bodies of castrated chickens, one could begin to speculate on gonad function.55 Berthold’s experiments showed that gonadal removal and replacement affected not only reproductive capacity and mating behavior, but also bodily form. Berthold’s chickens showed gendered differences in what are now considered secondary sex characteristics, which are primarily aesthetic non-functional markers of the gendered body. In the case of chickens, what humans observe are based on the waddle and the crest. Obviously what humans observe in each other as secondary sex characteristics are much more complex. Gendered physical traits such as body hair and fat/muscle mass ratio vary enormously in the human species, requiring different social groups to develop aesthetic gendered coding systems that may require reinforcement through clothing, make-up, plastic surgery etc. In contrast to moral speculation surrounding hyper-clitorises, early research into sex hormones focused on what is considered a positive trait of the male domain; sex drive. Scientist Charles-Edouard Brown-Sequard was initially ridiculed in 1889 when he addressed the Socit de Biologie by stating that he had injected himself with animal testicles as an experimental therapy to renew vigour and mental clarity.56 However, soon afterward a rash of therapies and treatments bloomed that mostly treated men, but sometimes also women, with gonadal mixtures. These mixtures claimed rejuvenation properties in a manner that linked sexual prowess with energy and intellectual ability.57 This overlap of biology, behavior and sexuality would add to the confusion of terminology, where the word hermaphroditism is applied ambiguously to gender identity and sexual orientation. 54 See Dreger, Hermaphrodites, p. 145. 55 See Victor Cornelius Medvei, A history of Endocrinology (Lancaster : MTP, 1982), p. 217. 56 See Nelly Oudshoorn, Beyond the Natural Body; An Archaeology of Sex Hormones (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 18. 57 See Oudshoorn, Beyond the Natural; Chandak Sengoopta, The Most Secret Quintessence of Life: Sex, Glands, and Hormones, 1850–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

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This link between gonads, reproduction and gender would be impossible to remove from the hormonal model that followed, despite the systemic model of endocrine function. At the end of the nineteenth century science was itching to delve further into the body. The biological model was shifting, but technical practice had not yet investigated the functional tissue of a live body. Following Klebs’ model that aligned all bodies into male or female categories based on gonadal material, British researchers Blacker and Lawrence used Kleb’s model in 1896 to analyze and dismiss past cases of alleged hermaphroditism using gonadal material.58 Their case studies show no data about the individual, only slides of the gonadal tissue make up.59 Scientific affirmation regarding the Hermaphroditic body often focused on posthumous information. Dreger points out that this “truth”, represented by gonadal material, was still often invisible in the live patient. And while she states that Blacker and Lawrence also make little mention of gonadal function, she also indicates that “[i]n late nineteenth century biomedical texts on sex differences, reproductive difference was most often cited as the fundamental difference between Man and Woman, the thing that was in turn the source of all their other difference”.60 At the same time that gonads were being implanted in men, gynaecology was about to see the controversial rash of ovary removal that spanned from the 1890s to the 1910s. Chandak Sengoopta attributes the rise of the ovary removal to Edourdo Porro’s61 expanded caesarean section, which included the removal of the uterus and ovaries in 1876.62 The expanded caesarean had the initial purpose of preventing future pregnancies, however, women with osteomalacia63 were often seen to improve after the procedure. The technique was adopted as a cure not only for osteomalacia, but also breast cancer, hysteria and other female behavioral disturbances. They were confusing times. Awoman was a woman because of her ovaries and their reproductive functions, yet she was often better without them. A man, on the other hand, might need an extra set of gonads to boost his “natural” inclinations. The rise of the study of pathological anatomy and teratology intimately linked all theories of “normal” masculinity and femininity to theories regarding the disappearing hermaphrodite. The “monstrous” was dissolving 58 59 60 61

Kleb’s model is also present in Taruffi, Ermafroditismo ed Agenosoma. See Dreger, Hermaphrodites, p. 148. Dreger, Hermaphrodites, p. 151. Porro also investigated the hermaphroditic body. See Edoardo Porro, ‘Ermafroditismo; Indagine Cruente Per Giudicare Con Sicurezza Del Sesso’, Italia Medica: Rendiconto Annuale della Clinica Chirurgica (1883). 62 See Chandak Sengoopta, ‘The Modern Ovary : Constructions, Meanings, Uses’, History of Science, 38 (2000), p. 435. 63 Osteomalacia is the softening of the bones caused by defective bone mineralization secondary to inadequate amounts of available phosphorus and calcium.

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through chemical explanation of the body, and yet morphological difference would become one of the big social evils through eugenics at the beginning of the twentieth century.64

The freak show trope – taming sexuality Exhibitions of living human oddities had been around in the form of traveling fairs, circuses and taverns in England since the 1600s. Reflecting historical social attitudes, some of the individuals displayed were simply from other places and other cultures, representing and reinventing the fear of difference in its many forms. Strangely enough one could say the rise of the freak show in the early 20th century marked the end of monstrosity. It was commonly understood that many acts were fake, and the audience was in the comfortable position of power over those displayed. African women such as “the Venus Hottentot” were displayed as stupid and overly sexualized, reinforcing racist stereotypes. The end of the nineteenth century would see an increase in popular morbid curiosity regarding sexual difference in circuses and freak shows, particularly in the US. The presentation of a person with mixed sexual traits, if only a bearded woman, was a fixture of these traveling shows. Throughout the nineteenth century we have medical literature that refers to various people who were exhibited, drawn and later photographed by many doctors. I bring up the freak show trope to indicate what was going on in closed medical studios was not very different, just more exclusive. There are stories of those who managed a meager living by exhibiting themselves for ‘medical porn’. However, the lack of first hand accounts of what the patients experienced makes it hard to write about. Foucault’s detached “clinical gaze” is painfully evident. The case of Herculine Barbin, made public through the publication of her memoirs by Michel Foucault,65 was well known and much commented on by medical practitioners of the period. Adelaide Herculine Barbin was born in 1838, changed her civil gender status from female to male in 1860 and committed suicide in 1868. In her diary Adelaide describes a break with her happy youth when she was diagnosed as a male pseudo-hermaphrodite. Her relationship with her female co-worker leads to punishment and investigation regarding her sex. The loss of her lover, the change of civil status and the social hardships of being alone and unaccustomed to the male working-world fill the pages of the diary 64 The modern field, and term Eugenics, were first formulated by Sir Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s half-cousin, in 1883. See Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (London: Macmillan, 1883), p. 199. 65 See Foucault, Herculine Barbin.

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with sadness. In contemporary practice, Adelaide probably would have been allowed the choice to continue to live as a woman, due in part to the fact that lesbianism is no longer a criminal act in France. In his Question M{dico-l{gale de L’identit{ dans ses Rapports avec les Vices de Conformation des Organes Sexuels, presiding medical practitioner Auguste Tardieu writes: The extraordinary case that remains for me to report indeed furnishes the most cruel and painful example of the fatal consequences that can proceed from an error committed at the time of birth in the establishment of civil status. We are about to see the victim of such an error, who after spending twenty years in the clothing of a sex that was not his own, at the mercy of a passion that was unconscious of itself until the explosion of his senses finally alerted him about the nature of it, had his true sex recognized and at the same time became really aware of his physical disability, whereupon, disgusted with his life, he put an end to it by committing suicide.66

The account of both the doctor and Barbin are riddled with awareness of the social condemnation of possible homosexual behavior. The doctor attributes Herculine’s unhappiness to the original gender assignment, which however, masked “his physical disability” as a man. One could reasonably postulate Adelaide/Herculine’s unhappiness instead originates in being forced to change civic gender category. Nowhere is it indicated that her lover had problems with her body. Even in contemporary diagnosis, homosexuality is indicated as a marker of potential mistaken gender assignment. Parsons too partakes in the physical examination of an 18-year-old girl from Paris, who was exhibited in London for 2s 6d.67 He disagrees with the publisher of the broadsheet, who is displaying her for profit, stating that the girl simply has an enlarged clitoris: The vagina is concealed by a skin growing up from the perineum, and continued to the labium of each side quite over it; which, if snipp’d with scissars, would lay the orifice of the vagina bare, and shew the person a perfect female, having only this morbid size of the clitoris. This is really the fact relating to the present subject; which any one may be satisfied of, by passing a finger down under this skin to the perineum, and he will meet the orifice of the vagina, and find it is as perfect as that of any other woman of the same age.68

66 Foucault, Herculine Barbin, p. 122. 67 See M. Vacherie, An Account of the Famous Hermaphrodite, or, Parisian Boy-Girl, Aged Sixteen, Named Michael-Anne Drouart, at This Time (November, 1750) upon Show in Carnaby-Street, London (London: Sam Johnson, 1750). 68 See James Parsons, ‘A Letter from James Parsons, M.D. F.R.S. to the Royal Society, Giving a Short Account of his Book Intituled, A Mechanical Critical Inquiry into the Nature of Hermaphrodites. London, 1741. In 8vo’, Philosophical Transactions, 91 (1739), pp. 650–652.

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What may pass un-noticed at first glance is the invitation that any one “pass a finger down under this skin to the perineum”, while paying to examine this 18 year old girl. This treatment forms part of what patients and disability theorists now refer to in the categories of ‘medical rape’ and ‘medical stripping’.69 Taruffi examined 40 year old Virginia Mauri in 1896. His account follows the contemporary style, including personal information relevant to sexual activity, and detailed reference to gendered physical attributes. A detailed drawing is commissioned that portrays Virginia reclining with her legs apart, naked except for a string of pearls, feminine boots and thigh stockings, with her expressionless face slightly turned to the side. The striking difference from pornography of this era is that this medical diagram is much more graphic, photographically detailing the contours of the vaginal entrance and the hypertrophied clitoris. There is no mention of why Virginia is being examined, what her interests might be, or what the outcome of the examination is. Instead we read about the doctors’ hands that palpate and penetrate, seeking internal indications of sex, such as the mouth of the uterus, or internal testicles. Virginia does not allow a rectal exam, thereby setting the limit of negotiation of authority and morality on her body. Taruffi’s contemporary, Edoardo Porro, reports on the use of diagnostic surgery, also mentioned in Taruffi’s text. The idea that internal evidence can be obtained from a live body is relatively new, in fact Porro comments: “[a] quanto mi consta { questo il primo caso di operazioni chirurgiche istituita per constatare indubbiamente il sesso” (“as far as I know this is the first surgical intervention instituted to establish the sex beyond a doubt”).70 Porro reports that the patient T.G. had requested a medical examination because he wanted to be legally declared a man. T.G. had lived 22 years as a woman, but at 18 he had already had one medical examination that legitimized his desire to live as man. T.G. was examined internally by at least six doctors in one sitting, including the rectal exam that other patients often refused. Porro proceeded to the surgical examination of the gonads, because none of the other examinations clearly indicated whether the gonads were ovaries or testicles. Taruffi comments on this case stating not only that he considers these cases of “doubtful sex” frequent, but that they often go unnoticed due to hidden testicles. 69 ‘Medical stripping’ and/or ‘rape’ is the practice of repeated public denudation, touching, palpation, and/or penetration performed for medical curiosity as opposed to health treatment. See Lisa Blumberg, ‘Public Stripping’, in The Ragged Edge: The Disability Experience from the Pages of the First Fifteen Years of the Disability Rag, ed. By Barrett Shaw (Louisville: Avocado Press, 1994), pp. 73–77, and Sarah Creighton, Julie Alderson, S. Moira Brown and Catherine Minto, ‘Medical photography : ethics, consent and the intersex patient’, BJU international, 89 (2002), pp. 67–71. 70 Porro, ‘Ermafroditismo’, p. 23.

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These medical cases give us a clear picture of the intellectual debate that covered the gendered body at the end of the nineteenth century. It is perhaps less clear what was happening in the general population, and how many of these types of cases went un-noticed by those directly involved. The handful of following cases shed a bit of light on this ambiguity between what doctors, scientists and legislators saw as serious issues, and what was relevant to those who fell under this medical gaze. While doctors and scientists searched ever deeper into the body to identify the biological locus of gender identity, individuals usually had no problem identifying the gender category that they felt they belonged to. Problems could arise when the gender identity conflicted with their sexual object, rendering them performatively homosexual and therefore deviant. Moving beyond the correlation to homosexual behavior, how relevant was genital appearance in heterosexual relationships? This question is extremely relevant to the rise of the interventionist model. Obviously doctors and anatomists had formed a precise idea about what the male and female body was supposed to look like. However, we have also seen that the heterosexual act was defined by penetration of one partner by the other. The case studies refer to many individuals who were ‘discovered’ post-mortem as having had ‘ambiguous’ sexual attributes. Specifically we see cases of individuals that are self- and socially defined as married heterosexuals, later diagnosed as having incongruent genitals. In these cases the genitals are problematic in a medical context, but not always in a hetero-normative social context. Ernesta N. stimata ed educata per una femmina, a 16 anni sent† una grande affezione per un giovane, ed a 17 anni e mezzo spos~ un giovane del suo paese, con cui visse per 12 anni in buona intellegenza, sebbene i rapporti sessuali non potessero mai compiersi regolarmente. Rimasta vedova le inclinazioni sessuali si modificarono, ed ebbe molti amanti con cui i rapporti sessuali si compievano normalmente, ma dopo poco tempo si ammal~ e mori. Alla necroscopia si trov~ un pene simile a quello di un fanciullo di 12 anni affetto di ipospadia. [Ernesta N. regarded and raised as a female, at 16 years she felt great affection for a young man, and at 17 and a half years married a young man from her town, with whom she lived for 12 years in good faith, even though sexual relations could never be carried out regularly. Widowed, her sexual orientation shifted, and she had many lovers with whom she carried out sexual relations normally, but after a short time she became ill and died. At the necropsy a penis was found, similar to that of a 12year-old child affected by hypospadia].71

The medical investigation of ‘mistaken sex’ in life generally occurs when the individual begins what are considered same-sex activities, as Reis affirms. Earlier in the section, Taruffi refers to the case of Faustina Mauro, who after 10 71 rmile Magitot, ‘Sur un nouveau cas d’hermaphrodisme’, in Taruffi, Ermafroditismo, p. 67/ 367.

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years of marriage falls in love with a woman (who unfortunately is her brother’s wife) and asks for her marriage to be annulled.72 Faustina is brought to trial in 1870 on charges of adultery with a married woman and later, in 1884 granted divorce and legal status as a man.73 When the sexual object does not change, individuals (and their lovers) are not interested in changing their gender status. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Vincenzio Chiarugi reports several cases of women who either “lived in happy matrimony even at her death”74 or were unhappy at being declared medically of the opposite sex (like Foucault’s Herculine Barbin).75 Commenting on a French girl who was unhappily forced to change sex after medical examination, he states: “[b]ut it’s inconceivable how she could have believed, to be of the female sex […]”.76 Chiarugi states that these cases should put experts of the art of health (“periti nell’Arte Salutare”) on their guard against imposters and attempts to deceive. Taruffi’s 1898 work indicates a century full of experts ‘on their guard’. Taruffi imparts a vision of the end of the nineteenth century that is instead sure of its diagnostic tools, hoping to reveal the hidden nature of gender under the skin, regardless of how invasive these physical exams might be.

Psychic Hermaphrodite The term “hermaphrodite” would slip out of the taxonomy of the body and into the taxonomy of the self, and become analogous to the new term homosexual. Same-sex sexual behavior and opposite sex dressing were increasingly subject to punitive jurisdiction after the sixteenth century. The nineteenth century naturalized sexual behavior, reconfiguring same-sex relationships a biological object. As we hinted earlier, many of the protagonists who advocated for a congenital model of homosexual orientation, also advocated for same-sex desire’s place in the natural order and society. Pioneering activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, defined uranism in 1870 as a biologically based difference of sexual orientation, or a third gender.77 Ulrichs contributed to the conception of homosexuality as sexual hermaphroditism, on the one hand identifying same-sex desire as a third gender/sex, and on the other, 72 73 74 75

See Taruffi, Ermafroditismo, Osservazione 66, p. 58/702. Unclear if this ruling is based on medical or Faustina’s testimony. Taruffi, Ermafroditismo, p. 58/702: “Visse in tranquillo matrimonio perfino alla sua morte”. See Vincenzio Chiarugi, Sopra una supposta specie di ermafroditismo (Firenze: Stamperia Arcivescovile, 1819). 76 Chiarugi, Sopra una supposta specie, p. 13: “Ma { inconcepibile come abbia potuto ella credere, d’essere di sesso femminile […]”. 77 See Taruffi, Ermafroditismo, p. 30/330.

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rendering the study of homosexuality a scientific biological pursuit. What would later be called sexual inversion was seen as an inborn reversal of gender traits leading to same-sex desire. Ulrichs’ objective, however, was to de-criminalize homosexual behavior (specifically in Germany) by giving it a ‘natural’ place in the biological schema.78 Magnus Hirschfeld, at the beginning of the twentieth century, frequently cited Ulrichs’ theories of biological homosexuality in Homosexuality of Men and Women,79 seeking to combat paragraph 175 in German law with the campaign “justice through Science”. Psychiatrist and sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing in the late nineteenth century attempted to classify deviant and normal sexual behaviors much in the same way anatomists of his era attempted to classify deviant bodies.80 KrafftEbing localizes these behaviors in the body, identifying a distinction between the sexual impulse and the sexual organs. He was the first to utilize the terms homosexual and heterosexual. In his theory same sex desire involves a congenital disturbance of the nervous centers that communicate between the sexual organs and the sensory organs, which form the idea of what being male or female is. As instead the chemical model gained weight at the beginning of the twentieth century, the gonads resumed their important symbolic role in sex differentiation. Internal secretions, soon to be known as hormones, were believed to sway the body towards on gender or one sex. Oudshoorn highlights the fixation on gender differences and social roles in early hormonal experimentation: In the 1910s the Viennese gynecologist Eugen Steinach attributed the idea of sex antagonism to the concept of sex hormones. With Heape and with scientists like the Dutch sexologist T. R. Van de Velde he shared a conservative reaffirmation of the traditional distinction between the sexes, emphasizing that the appropriate social roles for women were rooted in biology and were opposite to men’s roles.81

Steinach experimented with hormones as his predecessor Berthold experimented with gonads, coming to the conclusion that both hermaphrodism and homosexuality were caused by malfunctions in the gonads and the hormonal equilibrium. Correspondence with Hirschfeld, ironically, inspired Steinach to attempt to cure homosexuality through gonadal transplants.82 These social-scientific ex78 See Ulrich, ‘Araxes’, p. 2: “The Urning, too, is a person. He, too, therefore, has inalienable rights. His sexual orientation is a right established by nature […]”. 79 See Magnus Hirschfeld, Homosexuality of Men and Women, trans. by Michael A. LombardiNash (New York: Prometheus Books, 1922). 80 See Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (Stuttgart: Verlag Von Ferdinand Enke, 1886), pp. 185–192; Taruffi, Ermafroditismo. 81 Oudshoorn, Beyond the Natural, p. 22. 82 See Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body, p. 332.

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periments would fall in disrepute, yet posed an ambiguous message. If gonadal transplants or hormone injections could modify gender, sexuality and the body, was gender in the body a fixed entity? In trying to establish what biological aspects affected gendered somatic traits, gender identity, sexual orientation and similar attributes, the essential nature of sex seemed to dissolve. Foucault indicates the contrasting moments at work: The appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and “psychic hermaphroditism” made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of “perversity”; but it also made possible the formation of a “reverse” discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or “naturality” be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified.83

Conclusion At the end of the eighteenth century the concept of the hermaphrodite was transforming from a monster to a morphological difference. While the moral stigma of difference would lessen, the sexual undertones and allusions to homosexuality would remain a powerful subtext. In Julia Ward Howe’s The Hermaphrodite, written at the beginning of the nineteenth century, gender roles are very clear, the main character lives as a man throughout the text. However his ambiguous yet hidden status causes his father to shun him and a potential lover to go mad. She saw the bearded lip and earnest brow, but she saw also the falling shoulders, slender neck, and rounded bosom-then with a look like that of the Medusa, and a hoarse utterance, she murmured: “monster!” “I am as God made me, Emma.” A shriek, fearful to hear, and thrice fearful to give, followed by another, and another, and a maniac lay foaming and writhing on the floor at my feet.84

Later in the text Howe has the protagonist flee from another potential lover, this time male, who believes to see the woman in him. Howe’s hermaphrodite is a beautiful intelligent gentleman, well liked and sought after, who, however, must refrain from real intimacy for fear of harming others. The text steps lightly into the social awareness of the different life afforded to a man versus a woman, yet

83 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. by Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1998), vol. 1, The Will to Knowledge, p. 101. 84 Howe, The Hermaphrodite, p. 19.

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barely strays from gender stereotypes. The monster trope, along with the beauty of the “Borghese Hermaphroditus” statue remains intact in this portrayal. By the 1920s, the hermaphrodite was no longer. All aberrant bodies had been neatly relegated into either the male pseudo-hermaphrodite or female pseudohermaphrodite category. And yet, the social aspects, gender role, gender behavior, gender identity and sexual orientation were slowly brewing in the cauldron of both social regulation and social unrest. Many men of science were still in the processes of looking for a biological basis for the natural inferiority of women and non-European races. And yet these groups were on the edge of being given the vote and the semblance of equal rights in many of the same European nations. Woolf writes in her diary on 5 October 1927: And instantly the usual exciting devices enter my mind: a biography beginning in the year 1500 and continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita; only with a change about from one sex to the other.85

The semi-biographical novel comments on the impositions and restrictions of social gender categories, while describing the fluidity of gender through many of its characters. The psychic hermaphrodite had become cultural currency, both as an explanatory model, and as a means of subtly defending the departure from the “normal”. Woolf herself states that changing the gender of her character is an exciting device through which to explore the world of the character. In fact, the novel is as much as a comment on the shifting of social mores throughout the centuries as it is on gender roles. And yet, she does not identify her character as a physical hermaphrodite, that idea is gone, replaced by the exciting new focus on social roles. Shortly before Woolf ’s novel, the term Intersex would began to take its place alongside pseudo-hermaphroditism in medical and biological writing. With the ‘discoveries’ of chromosomes, sex hormones, genes and developmental stages, a full biological model would grow into the present day model of sex development. Hermaphroditism may return to the arenas of literature and mythology, once again a beautiful creature instead of a fearful monster. And yet, the social stigma and medical normalization surrounding DSD syndromes, associated not just with different bodies but gender and sexuality, remains a potent issue even today. Deeper than our understanding of human variety, often, lies our fear of difference.

85 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf (Orlando: Mariner Books, 1981), vol. 3, 1925–1930, p. 161.

Michele Cometa

The Survival of Ancient Monsters: Freud and Baubo Also hat Gott diese Kreaturen dem Menschen auch etwa vorgestellt und sie sehen lassen, mit den Menschen wandeln, reden und dergleichen, auf dass dem Menschen im Wissen sei, dass solche Kreaturen in den vier Elementen sind, die da wunderbarlich vor unseren Augen erscheinen. […]Darum ermesset alle wohl solche Dinge, und seid nicht blind mit sehenden Augen, und stumm mit guten Zungen, dieweil ihr doch nicht stumm noch blind geheißen sein wollt. (Paracelsus, Liber de Nymphis)

Monsters in the Twentieth Century Monsters, prodigies, and fantastic creatures still inhabit the twentieth century, with an insistence that we may think to have occurred in the dark ages only. Monsters especially dwell in twentieth-century “theory”, and in its overall visions. All the great adventures of modernity are permeated in some way by monsters, from Freudian psychoanalysis to Jung’s depth psychology, from Jurgis Baltrusˇaitis’s morphology to the poetics of the ‘fantastic’, from Victor Hugo to Roger Caillois – to mention only the most significant cases. As especially literary theorists have demonstrated,1 the monster is the place of the other. In nineteenth-century literature, its obsessive representation sought to compensate for the fear of what technology and professionalization – as well as the teleologically-oriented Positivistic philosophy that aimed to understand them – attempted to exorcise and remove. The monster was used not only to foreground ancestral fears – as was explained by fin-de-siwcle psychology – but also to tame the different other, so that it could be named and represented. It is no coincidence that Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology, loved to be surrounded – and to surround his patients – with countless statues, coming from very different cultural backgrounds and often embodying monsters. 1 For an adequate treatement of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century aesthetics of the monster see Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis, ‘“Monstre”. rtienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and the Science of Monstrosity”, Medicina nei secoli, 25: 2 (2013), pp. 25–35; Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis, ‘The Classification of Monsters: Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and His Teratologic Taxonomy’, in Evolutions of Forms, ed. by Luigi Russo (Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2013), pp. 3–24.

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Monsters feature prominently in Freud’s theory, as is the case with the dwarf-like Bes (who is discussed in Freud’s work on Moses), the dwarf divinity Pataikos (a manifestation of Ptah), the bird-men depicted on some Greek vases (Freud’s own obsession, as seems clear from his study on Leonardo da Vinci), and the mythological Egyptian, Greek, Latin, Eastern Zwitterwesen (“hermaphrodites”),2 starting from the Sphinx, a half-woman, half-animal monster which has become the icon of psychoanalysis itself. Freud’s monsters form a repertoire which accompanied all of his private and professional life and which (as in the tradition of the great seventeenth-century Wunderkammer)3 attempted to “tame” the uncanny that resulted from the contamination of different realms of being (animal/inorganic, vegetable/animal, earthly/unearthly etc.) (fig. 1).

Fig. 1

It is remarkable, therefore, that in his now-classic study Tzvetan Todorov, the most influential twentieth-century theorist of the ‘fantastic’, wrote that [psychoanalysis] “has replaced (and thereby made useless) the literature of the fantastic. There is no need to resort to the devil in order to speak of an excessive sexual desire, and none to resort to vampires in order to designate the attraction exerted by corpses: psychoanalysis, and the literature which is directly or in-

2 See Lydia Marinelli, ‘Meine … alten und dreckigen Götter’. Aus Sigmund Freuds Sammlung (Wien: Sigmund-Freud-Museum, 1999). 3 Adalgisa Lugli, Wunderkammern. Le stanze delle meraviglie (Turin: Umberto Allemandi, 1997) and Patrick Mauries, Cabinets of Curiosities (London: Thames and Hudson, 2011).

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directly inspired by it, deal with these matters in undisguised terms”.4 Rather, the opposite seems to be true: psychoanalysis and the literature inspired by it have hosted those monsters which had been exiled by the unconscious in the scientific and pseudoscientific literature of all time. In the Middle Ages, monsters had found a place in the great theological theories; as a result, they seem to have been fed less by literature than by theology. In later centuries, monsters featured in the scientific domains of geographical explorations, zoology and alchemy. While in the nineteenth century monsters became the domain of physiology as well as of comparative anatomy and of the bizarre science of teratology, in the twentieth century they come under the jurisdiction of the sciences of the psyche. These sciences retain a double function: on the one hand, they come to account for the workings of the soul; on the other, in the wake of the aesthetical quality that is typical of early psychology, they explore the fantastic world that can be found in literature, which taps into the depths of the psyche itself. From at least E.T.A. Hoffmann onwards, the ‘fantastic’ has been first of all a form of deep investigation of the functioning of the psyche, and fin-de-siwcle Positivism could do little to divert authors from a cultural phenomenon that no empirical inquiry had managed to undermine. Not surprisingly, one of the first seminal steps of Freud’s psychoanalysis is to be found in the study of the ‘fantastic’ (‘phantasieren’), starting from the psyche but also, essentially, from literature and its monsters. In this respect, one of the most important cases is certainly the category of the ‘uncanny’ (‘das Unheimliche’), which – if not directly founded on the monstrous – certainly represented an extraordinary discovery both for psychoanalysis and literary theory. When we speak of twentieth-century monsters or wonders, it is impossible not to mention Freud’s essay ‘Das Unheimliche’ (‘The Uncanny’, 1919)5 as well as the work of Freud’s pupil, Carl Gustav Jung. Jung’s work is even more relevant in this respect in that he explored thoroughly the repertoires of Western and Eastern imagination, which is extremely prodigal of monsters and prodigies. Jung’s archetypal psychology is indeed the domain in which modernity has placed its imagination about monsters, according to a new kind of topography that has not been developed so much in time and space as in the unconscious dimension that emerges in myths and fairy tales. To Jung, the monster is the 4 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, transl. by Richard Howard (Cleveland: Press of Western Reserve University, 1973), p. 160. On the ‘fantastic’ see also Roger Caillois, The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader (Edinburgh: University of Duke Press, 2003). 5 Sigmund Freud, ‘Das Unheimliche’, in Gesammelte Werke, hrsg. von Anna Freud (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1947), vol. 12, pp. 227–268; eng. transl. ‘The “Uncanny”’, in Writings on Art and Literature, transl. James Strachey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 193–233.

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embodiment of those forces with which the anima/animus has to be confronted when engaged in a very special adventure: namely, the process of individuation. Jung’s merit is therefore to have shown that this confrontation/conflict is something positive – and, to some extents, necessary : the depths of the psyche – the collective unconscious – are indeed studded with and inhabited by these Zwitterwesen, midday demons, monsters and prodigies that for Jung are the main characters in the theatre of the self: personifications of the shadow, antagonists to be found on the way leading to individuation. The reality of the imagination for Jung is even more flexible than it is for Freud, and the transcultural approach allows the father of depth psychology to do exactly what was implicit in bestiaries and in the prodigiorum liber : namely, to ponder over the migration of symbols and mythologies, and to analyse the fears and fantasies of civilization, with no limitations of time and space. For Jung, the monsters are the characters that the long history of civilization has moved outside the psyche, because it was no longer able to accept its contradictions to the full extent. Fear is the inevitable retaliation that occurs in psychic life when monsters are no longer integrated. When rationality (and repression) marginalizes the monsters, they come back in dreams and art. Or, more precisely, in Jungian terms, the dragon/shadow is the obstacle – usually not the only one – that the ego/hero must overcome (often in a brutal way) in order to move closer to and take back the anima/girl, the ‘other’ that needs to be reintegrated into the Self. The monsters belong to our process of individuation also for other purposes and tasks: they can be projections of anima/animus, totem animals and spirit guides, or simply symbols of the Self, since they integrate organic and inorganic elements (e. g. from Medusa to cyborgs), male and female; finally, they can be imaginary representations of the union of opposites, like the androgynous and the rebis (in this respect, it is not surprising that Jung drew freely from the Middle Ages and alchemical iconography). In the twentieth century, in short, the ‘science’ of monsters, which had until then mainly belonged to the domain of literature, sought allies among the other sciences. This was important in order to turn the swarm of ancient monsters into a theory, a vision, so that through the process of objectification monsters could lose their threatening aspects for the psyche. In the pages that follow I will focus on the very specific case of a psychological study that stands halfway between ‘fantastic’ teratology and visual culture; indeed, it may be considered, in a way, the germinal cell of a theoretical thrill that has travelled throughout twentieth-century psychology. In other words, I will explore a case that emblematizes an aspect that was at the core of important reflections for twentieth-century mythocritics: namely, the survival of ancient mythologems, for whose understanding the perspective of visual culture cannot be underestimated.

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The image at the core of this essay is that of Baubo, who undergoes countless metamorphoses and can rightly claim an archetypal significance. After a long sleep in the archives of European thought, Baubo emerges in one of Freud’s early writings, ‘Mythologische Parallele zu einer plastischen Zwangsvorstellung’ (‘A Mythological Parallel to a Visual Obsession’, 1916),6 an apparently marginal essay that remains one of the best mythological digressions by Freud. As is often the case with Freud’s work, in this short essay he manages to hide one of his very personal obsessions, in which psychological reflections are welded together with his passion for archaeology. Like the more famous interpretations of Medusa or Gradiva, ‘A Mythological Parallel to a Visual Obsession’ is a masterpiece that conceals more than it reveals, and it represents one of Freud’s most interesting reflections on the visual. Moreover, in its foregrounding a sexually conscious gaze, the essay shows the extent to which Freud can be recognized as one of the fathers of contemporary ‘Visual Studies’. As in the study ‘Eine Teufelsneurose im siebzehnten Jahrhundert’ (‘A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis’, 1923),7 focused on some seventeenth-century emblems, in the short essay that we intend to analyse Freud does not hesitate to consider the age-old image of Baubo and to brilliantly envisage it also in some modern caricatures that were widely circulating in finde-siwcle Vienna, like the ones collected by Eduard Fuchs in his seminal works on the graphic erotomania of modernity.

A Phenomenology of Baubo Freud introduces the bizarre mythological figure of Baubo in one of those illuminating mythological short essays that can often be found in his work: often disguised as extremely cultured archaeological and mythological digressions,8 these essays seem casual and eccentric with respect to Freud’s analytical practice as well as to his psychological analysis. This is the case, for example, of ‘Gross ist die Diana der Epheser’ (‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians’, 1911)9 and ‘Das Haupt 6 Sigmund Freud, ‘A Mythological Parallel to a Visual Obsession’, in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XIV, transl. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 337–338. 7 Sigmund Freud, ‘A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis’, in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, transl. by James Strachey (London: Vintage, 1923), vol. 19, pp. 67–105. 8 Statuettes of Baubo had been just digged up (1898) in German archaeological expeditions. This is evidence of how quickly Freud was ready to use the most up-to-date archaeological findings for his analytical practice. 9 Sigmund Freud, ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians’, in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, transl. by James Strachey (London: Vintage, 1958), vol. 12, pp. 342–344.

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der Medusa’ (‘Medusa’s head’, 1922),10 the famous description of the shield by Caravaggio; in all of these works the starting point is provided by an analysis of images which constitute the basis of Freud’s visual culture, and which were important to him in that they obsessively offer a representation of the symbols of femininity. However, if one is acquainted with Freud’s style of writing, it is easy to realize that in these fragments he hides valuable theoretical supplements to his work, and that these papers are related to one another for reasons that go well beyond Freud’s undoubtedly strong passion for images. In the specific case of the short essay on the obsessive visual representation, the moment of vision has a long history in Freud’s imagination, and not surprisingly this essay establishes a connection to the final scene evoked in the essay on Medusa as well as, to a certain extent, to the essay on Artemis of Ephesus,11 because in both cases what is depicted is a myth of fertility. The text is, among other things, a perfect integration of psychoanalytic reasoning, teratological and mythological evocation – the figure of Baubo herself – as well as a reflection on the survival of this image in modernity (since Freud cites Fuchs’s study of erotic caricature). What we find then is a form of syncretism that in addition to pointing to the analytical procedure that is being nowadays followed by the scholars of Visual Studies – namely, a distinctive iconographic contamination between ancient and modern – can also be recognized as a major milestone of twentieth-century psychic teratology. As Freud himself recalls, Baubo is the mythical wife of Disaule, as well as the maid/nurse who welcomes Demeter in Eleusis – the esoteric navel of Europe – when she is desperately seeking for her daughter Persephone. Because Demeter refuses to touch food, Baubo makes her laugh by lifting her dress and obscenely revealing her genitals.12 Also Iacchus, her son, is reputed to have been present at this scene, and to have applauded wildly – which draws Demeter’s laughter, and emphasises the comic aspect of the episode. In some versions of the story, Iacchus is said to have crept under the skirts, so that his face appeared in place of the genitalia when Baubo displayed her pudenda. This may be read as an allusion to Baubo’s fertility – she may be pregnant – and therefore as an indication of hope for the far more significant fecundity that Demeter herself has to find again, in order to rescue the world from eternal winter. Finally, according to another version, Baubo is believed to have painted the boy’s facial features around her genitals or her stomach, thereby moving Demeter to laughter. In his Against the Pagans, Arnobius condemns the obscene scene at Eleusis: 10 Sigmund Freud, ‘Medusa’s Head’, in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey (London: Vintage, 1922), vol. 18, pp. 273–274. 11 Freud, ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians’. 12 In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Baubo appears with the name of Iambe – eponym of iambic poetry – which makes the scene take on an even more complex character.

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With these words she at the same time drew up her garments from the lowest hem, And exposed to view formatas inguinibus res, Which Baubo grasping with hollow hand, for Their appearance was infantile, strikes, touches gently.13

What we can glimpse in this scene is the mystery of fertility (clearly related here to the cult of Demeter-Persephone), evoked by Baubo when she reveals her womb. As Erich Neumann has argued in his seminal study on the female configurations of the unconscious, this is a mystery that is not deprived of uncanny aspects: In the Baubo figures of Priene, the belly character of the woman is not symbolically represented by the vessel; rather, the belly of the goddess represents the numinous fertility symbol. Whereas in the frontal position the goddess’s whole naked womanhood is permeated by the numinous, which emanates from her as a fascination for good and evil, this limitation to the zone of the belly or womb expresses the inhuman gruesome aspect, the radical autonomy of the belly over against the “higher centers” of the heart, breast, and head, and enthrones it as sacred. Here again, the accent is on the numinous power of the child-bearing principle and not on that of sexual attraction.14

According to Neumann, displaying one’s genitals is certainly a ritual fact that certainly alludes to fertility – and in this sense it is used as a symbol of auspicious wish for Demeter – but it also relies on a sphere that is not controlled by the ‘higher centres’ and therefore is unheimlich (whence perhaps Demeter’s laughter), uncontrollable and disturbing; indeed, it seems to be something akin to monsters and prodigies. Lifting her skirts and hiding her head, Baubo creates a monster and obliterates reason. It is precisely this mixture of fertility and obscenity – an expression of what is uncontrollable socially and rationally – that is foregrounded in the Baubo ritual statuettes found at Priene (figs. 2, 3, 4), which Freud reproduced in a drawing on the margins of his essay (fig. 5). Freud is certainly aware of the survival of the myth in modernity, starting from the legendary Walpurgisnacht in Goethe’s Faust, where a ‘voice’ says: “Our ancient Baubo rides alone / with a mother sow beneath her buttocks”.15 This is moreover the character – whose popularity is well documented also in archaeology (fig. 6) – that Goethe chooses to introduce the infernal procession. The fact that in Goethe’s work Baubo becomes a witch riding a pig is just another symptom of unresolved sexuality : fertility typically reverses into obscenity. Finally, the Baubo of mythology resurfaces in another crucial moment of 13 Arnobius of Sicca, The Case Against the Pagans, transl. by George E. McCracken (New York: Newman Press, 1949), p. 434. 14 Erich Neumann, The Great Mother (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 138. 15 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust: Part I (New York: Bentham Books, 1985), p. 271.

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Figs. 2, 3, 4

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Fig. 6

German culture before Freud: namely, in the preface to the second edition of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (‘The Gay Science’, 1882), where Nietzsche writes: Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons for letting us see her reasons. Perhaps her name is – to speak Greek – Baubo? Oh these Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance.16

It is difficult not to see in this analogy all the contempt for a kind of truth that pretends to be an act of re-velation and instead is often reduced to a game of obscenity : Freud must have been well aware of the etymological meaning of the character, who in the form Baubo was linked to the female genitalia. Moreover, baubon was an object of leather, in the shape of a phallus, which was used for female masturbation. This seems to be evoked through the emphasis on the movements of Baubo’s hand and belly while displaying her genitals – something that, not surprisingly, Arnobius refers to with contempt. The embarrassing sexual duplicity of the word is clearly present in Freud’s analysis, who not coincidentally draws on both male and female representations of this gastrocephalous monster. 16 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, transl. by Walter Kauffmann (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010), p. 38.

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It is especially thanks to the church fathers – from Clement of Alexandria to Arnobius – and their hostility to the cults of Eleusis that we can learn the extent to which the evocation of fertility, which is not surprisingly joyful, is inextricably connected to a form of obscenity that is both liberating and uncanny. As Jurgis Baltrusˇaitis has demonstrated in his groundbreaking work on Gothic aberrations,17 it is not a coincidence that the Middle Ages were the moment when the anxieties emanating from the Greek myth came to be exorcised through a number of monstrous figures which were used to decorate manuscripts and cathedrals: heads with legs, claws, faces in trunks, elongated necks departing from the stomach. The widespread diffusion of such figures is evidence of a syncretism that is the result of the collaboration of all civilizations, both Western and Eastern, as well as of different historical moments. Gastrocephalous monsters – certainly a variant of Baubo of Eleusis – have then spread everywhere, and are well known to scholars of iconography. One only needs to recall the Blemmyes (mentioned by Pliny as well as in Mandeville’s travels [fig. 7]), Schedel’s Weltchronik (fig. 8), the countless late medieval depictions, or, in Baltrusˇaitis’s words, all that “Flemish periphery” which put together gastrocephalous, acephalous and stethocephalous monsters with the caprices that populated medieval codes and cathedrals and, much later, the pictorial fantasies by Bosch and Brueghel.

Fig. 7

17 Jurgis Baltrusˇaitis, Aberrations: An Essay on the Legend of Forms, transl. by Richard Miller (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989).

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Fig. 8

Even Othello mentions “men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders”,18 a fantastic creation that Shakespeare drew from his experiences with travel literature. These are transcultural images, as evidenced by the existence of analogous creatures like Sheela Na Gig (Celtic culture), Amaterasu (Japan), and Hathor (Egypt): namely, goddesses who move others to laughter by baring their genitals. Certainly in all of these cases we are confronted with mythologies related to the theme of fertility and of transcending death. Baubo, who is both a servant and a nurse, and probably gave birth to Iacchus, shows Demeter (who is upset because of her fate) that sexuality can overcome death and regenerate the world. All the myths mentioned so far actually seem to agree on this interpretation. Scholars have not failed to notice the disturbing connections coming from the overlapping between the female genitals and the mouth; according to Erich Neumann’s interpretation, the connection points to the representation of the toothed vagina, which obviously evokes the spectre of castration.19 As a matter of fact, Freud concludes his essay on Medusa – which, as is well known, focuses on the male castration complex – by insisting on the apotropaic meaning involved in displaying one’s genitals. He moreover implicitly evokes Baubo of Eleusis: If Medusa’s head takes the place of a representation of the female genitals, or rather if it isolates their horrifying effects from the pleasure-giving ones, it may be recalled that displaying the genitals is familiar in other connections as an apotropaic act. What arouses horror in oneself will produce the same effect upon the enemy against whom one is seeking to defend oneself. We read in Rabelais of how the Devil took to flight when the woman showed her vulva.20

The monstrosity of this being, whose sex and mouth overlap, is thus recognized also in psychoanalytic and archetypal terms. The nexus mouth-vulva is indeed 18 William Shakespeare, Othello, I, iii, 167–168 (New York: Washington Square Press, 1993), p. 39. 19 Erich Neumann, The Great Mother, transl. by Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 168. 20 Freud, ‘Medusa’s Head’, p. 274.

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so explicit that Ren Magritte, an experienced interpreter of psychoanalysis, has immortalized it in Le viol, a painting of 1934 (fig. 9) that is both evocative and disturbing, and whose title leaves no room for doubt.

Fig. 9

The long road that leads from Baubo to Magritte – passing through the Blemmyes – undergoes an interesting twist in Freud’s essay ‘A Mythological Parallel to a Visual Obsession’, where it takes on deeper semantic connotations that are worth considering more in details. Freud tells of a patient who, in the presence of his father, experiences an obsessive linguistic as well as visual association: The word was Vaterarsch [‘father-arse’]; the accompanying image presented his father as the naked lower part of a body, provided with arms and legs, but without the head or upper part. The genitals were not indicated, and the facial features were painted on the abdomen.21

21 Freud, ‘A Mythological Parallel to a Visual Obsession’, p. 337.

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Freud considers this obsessive image as a caricature of the father, an obvious symptom of anal sexuality and of the son’s contempt for the greed and profligacy of his much feared and hated father. The image brings to mind a male version of the myth of Baubo, much celebrated in German-speaking countries hostile to Britain: namely, the caricature to be found in Jean Vber’s L’impudique Albion (‘Impudent England’, 1901 [fig. 10]), reproduced in the famous book Das erotische Element in der Karikatur (‘The Erotic Element in Caricature’, 1904) by Eduard Fuchs.22

Fig. 10

It is not difficult to recognize that Freud here ‘shifts’ from a decidedly female figure (such as Baubo) to the masculine ‘re-writing’ operated by his patient and endorsed by Freud himself by indirectly quoting Vber’s caricature. While the patient actually sees an image that can be traced back to Baubo, the word “Va22 We may also recall that the liberating gesture of displaying the genitals is obsessively repeated also in can-can dance, a widespread and important performance in Freud’s contemporary culture.

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terarsch” and the reference to the caricature operate as an imperceptible and yet significant reversal between male and female, recto and verso: as a matter of fact, Freud transforms into a masculine myth a traditionally feminine celebration of female reproduction and female camaraderie, which programmatically excluded the male world. Moreover, a closer look at Magritte’s disturbing figure – which is completely in line with Freudian interpretations – reveals that Baubo’s joyful ‘face’ is transformed into a phallic symbol via an unsettling extension of the neck (fig. 9) that is highly reminiscent of medieval monsters. And if we read the essay on Baubo in relation to the conclusion of the essay on the head of Medusa, we realize that Freud interprets the act of laying bare the genitals as the aggressive displaying of a phallic symbol, thus completely deforming the Greek myth; after him, also George Devereux will do the same.23 This is perhaps the strongest evidence of a theoretical problem which not only reveals the strong sexual component inherent in the representations of gastrocephalous and stethocephalous monsters from the Middle Ages to modernity, but also exposes the uncanny aspect of the monster, through the oscillation between a female (more playful) and a male (more threatening and aggressive) model. Freud seems unable to decide for one option only ; rather, he confuses the two images, thereby simultaneously revealing his embarrassment and foregrounding, albeit unconsciously, the problematic nature of those archetypal images which partake of this sexual duplicity, as will be explained by Freud’s pupil, Jung. This may be read as a desperate attempt to exorcise the other, which psychoanalysis now locates in the feminine (in this way provoking reactions which lasted for over a century), although centuries of patriarchal culture had already constantly and obsessively imagined it (= the feminine) as the other. Baubo, the joyful servant at Eleusis, who is ready to do anything to move her friend Demeter to laughter, who does not spurn obscenity, exhibitionism, and disguised autoerotism, resurfaces under the constrained guise of a monster, which emerges in all its awfulness in Velber’s caricature and Magritte’s painting and which has been partly rehabilitated only by late-twentieth-century feminist theory. The survival of ancient monsters – which constitutes an example of the more general process of survival of the ancient imagination described by Jean Seznec –24 extends to the twentieth century and finds refuge in the psyche and in the science that studies it. After the many metamorphoses and wanderings that they have undergone, monsters are likely to have finally come back home.

23 George Devereux, Baubo, la vulve mythique (Paris: Jean-Cyrille Godefroy, 1983). 24 See Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods. The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art (New York: Princeton University Press, 1981). The book was originally published in French as la survivance des dieux antiques, Studies of the Warburg Institute, vol. 11 (London: The Warburg Institute, 1940).

The Authors

Lorella Bosco, Dr. phil. habil., is tenured Assistant Professor of German Literature at the University of Bari (Italy). In 2010 she was awarded an Alexandervon-Humboldt-Fellowship for experienced researches for her research project about the modernist author and performer Emmy Hennings. Among her publications: “Das furchtbar-schöne Gorgonenhaupt des Klassischen”. Deutsche Antikebilder (1755–1875) (2004), Jakob Wassermann, Il mio cammino di tedesco e di ebreo e altri saggi, introduzione e traduzione a cura di Lorella Bosco (2006) and Tra Babilonia e Gerusalemme. Scrittori ebreo-tedeschi e il ‘terzo spazio’ (2012). Raul Calzoni is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Bergamo. His research areas include German Classic and Romantic Ages and the following aspects of German literature and culture in the 20th century : the strategies of recollection of the past and transmission of European cultural memory in contemporary German and Austrian literature; the relation between witness, memory and history in the literature after World War II; the theories of intermediality at the wake of the relationship between science and literature and music and literature. His publications include Walter Kempowski, W. G. Sebald e i tabu` della memoria collettiva tedesca (2005), “Ein in der Phantasie durchgefu¨ hrtes Experiment”. Literatur und Wissenschaft nach Neunzehnhundert (ed. with M. Salgaro, 2010), L’eta` delle macerie e della ricostruzione. La letteratura tedesca del secondo dopoguerra (1945–1961) (2013) and Ecfrasi musicali. Parola e suono nel Romanticismo europeo (ed. with M. Sirtori, 2013). Anna Cappellotto was awarded a PhD in Modern Philology at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, with a thesis on Durs Grünbein’s poetics of space. She is currently working towards a second PhD at the University of Verona, where she has undertaken a project examining the translation of classical literature in the German Middle Ages and early modern period. She is writing a thesis on Albrecht von Halberstadt’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

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Maria Teresa Chialant was Professor of English literature at the University of Salerno. Her main fields of research are the Victorian novel, Literary Genres and Gender Studies. Her publications include two books on Dickens (one of which with C. Pagetti), and various articles on Gissing and H. G. Wells. She has (co) edited several volumes of essays, among which: Incontrare i mostri (2002), Literary Landscapes, Landscape in Literature (2007) and Time and the Short Story (2012). She has contributed to international journals and collections; among the latter : The Reception of H. G. Wells in Europe (2005), Imagining Italy : Victorian Writers and Travellers (2010), Writing Otherness: The Pathways of George Gissing’s Imagination (2010), George Gissing and the Woman Question. Convention and Dissent (2013) and Dickens and the Imagined Child (2015). She edits the series “Scritture d’Oltremanica” for Aracne (Rome). Michele Cometa is Full Professor of Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies and Visual Culture at the University of Palermo. His main fields of research are: Theory of Literature, Aesthetics and Culture of the Age of Goethe, Visual culture, the aesthetics of architecture in Germany, the European Cultural Studies. His recent publications include L’etu di Goethe (2008 [2006]); with Alain Montandon, Vedere. Lo sguardo di E.T.A. Hoffmann (2009); L’etu classico-romantica (2009); Studi culturali (2010); La scrittura delle immagini (2012) and Mistici senza Dio. Teoria letteraria ed esperienza religiosa nel Novecento (2012). He has edited works by J.J. Winckelmann, F. Schlegel, M. Mendelssohn, G.E. Lessing, J.W. Goethe, K.F. Schinkel, J.I. Hittorff, G. Lukycs, O. Weininger, K. Kraus, E. Jünger. He recently co-edited Die Kunst, das Leben zu “bewirtschaften”. Bios zwischen Politik, Ökonomie und Ästhetik (2013). He is the main editor of the Italian website on Cultural Studies, www.studiculturali.it. Daniela Crocetti was born in the US, but has lived and worked in Italy since 2004. Her main research interests revolve around science, the body and society, to which she applies a mixed historical and anthropological method. She has continued her research at the University of Bologna, where she received her doctorate in Science, Technology and Humanities in 2011, and where she taught the seminar course ‘Gender, Sexuality and the Body’ (no longer offered). During her research she has collaborated with patient and activist groups such as AISIA (Associazione Italiana Sindrome Insensibilitw Androgeni), KIO (Klinefelter Italia Onlus) and MIT (Movimenti Identitw Transessuale). Among her recent publications are: L’invisibile intersex. Storie di corpi medicalizzati (2013), Queering the genitals: an operation useful for all (in «About Gender», vol. 1, n. 3, 2013); Hormone Replacement Therapy (in P. Whelehan and Anne Bolin, eds., The Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality, 2013).

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Sara Damiani is the Vice–Chancellor’s delegate for Visual Communication of the University of Bergamo. She is member of Punctum. Centro Studi sull’Immagine, Balthazar. Polo di studi sul cinema, and The Cultural History of Dreams. A Network of Studies. Her main areas of research include the relationship between visual culture, literature and anthropology. Among her publications: Medusa: la fascinazione irriducibile dell’altro (2001), Locus Solus 4: I volti di Medusa (2006), L’atelier dei sogni: rappresentazioni dell’onirico nelle arti visive (2012), “Il cinema e il trapianto iconoclasta delle immagini” (Agalma, n. 26, 2013); Fuori quadro. Follia e creativitu fra arte, cinema e archivio (ed. with E. Grazioli and B. Grespi, 2013). Flora de Giovanni is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Salerno (Department of Humanistic Studies). She has published widely on translation, fictional characterization, the relationship between literature and painting in Modernism (especially in the works of Woolf and Wyndham Lewis) and, more recently, on Wilkie Collins and the sensation novel. Her current work focuses on popular entertainment, disability studies and the literature of the Great War. Her books include La pagina e la tela. Intersezioni in Virginia Woolf (2007), Scritture dell’immagine. Percorsi figurativi della parola (co-edited with Antonella d’Amelia and Lucia Perrone Capano, 2007), Tradurre in Pratica (ed. with Bruna Di Sabato, 2010). She has translated Woolf ’s essays on visual arts (Immagini/Pictures, 2002) and Stevenson’s early essays (In difesa dell’illuminazione a gas e altri saggi, 2013). She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Testi e Linguaggi. Francesca Di Blasio is Associate Professor of English literature at the University of Trento. Her areas of research are Literary Theory, Early Modern Literature, Modernism, Indigenous Australian Literature. She has published several articles on George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Shakespeare, and a volume on the theories of the gaze in English Literature (Teoria e pratiche dello sguardo, 2001). She has been working for over a decade, and is still working on Australian Aboriginal Women and the post(?)-colonial gaze, and on this topic she is the author of various articles and of three books: The Pelican and the Wintamarra Tree: voci della letteratura aborigena australiana (2005), La sfida dell’arte indigena australiana. Tradizione, innovazione e contemporaneitu (ed. with F. Tamisari, 2007), Oodgeroo Noonuccal. Con We Are Going (ed. with M. Zanoletti, 2013). She is currently working on a project on the representation of the Antipodes in Early Modern literature, for which she got a fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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The Authors

Laura Di Michele taught English at the University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’ (1970–1997) and at L’Aquila University from 1998 until her retirement in 2012. She is the author of books and articles on Shakespeare, the novel and poetry of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the city and its representations, multicultural diversity, cultural and gender studies. Her works on Shakespeare include Teatro, politica, spettacolo (1988); Aspetti di ‘Othello’ (1995); Tragiche risonanze shakespeariane (2001); Shakespeare. Una tempesta dopo l’altra (2002); Shakespeare’s Writing of Rome in ‘Cymbeline’ (2009); L’assedio delle passioni nell’universo tragico di Shakespeare (2013). Recently, she has also published Performance and the City : Constructing Urban Identities in Contemporary London (2013), ‘Smart Cities’ tra fantascienza e nuova realtu metropolitana (2014), and Shakespeare in Dickens fra teatro e racconto (2014). She is currently writing a book on Measure for Measure and on Talking Objects in Shakespeare. Francesca Guidotti is tenured Assistant Professor (Ricercatore confermato) of English literature at the University of Bergamo. She has worked on the gothic and post-apocalyptic novel, science fiction, contaminations between literature and the media, and contemporary re-appropriations of Shakespeare by popular culture. Her publications include the book Cyborg e dintorni: le formule della fantascienza (2003) and essays on science fiction: Ballard, Philip K. Dick, cyberpunk, disasters in the cold war era and in the nuclear age. She has also worked on Shakespeare and management and is currently writing a book on the catastrophic imagination in the 1950s and 1960s. Micaela Latini is tenured Assistant Professor of German Literature at the University of Cassino. She has written a monograph on Ernst Bloch (Il possibile e il marginale, 2005) and, more recently, two books on Thomas Bernhard (La pagina bianca, 2010 and Il museo degli errori, 2011), which are going to be translated into German. She is also co-editor of a volume on Contemporary German Aesthetics (with A. Campo) and on Günther Anders (with A. Meccariello). She has worked on a new edition of The Man without Qualities by Robert Musil (transl. I. Castiglia, 2014) , and on an anthology of E. Bloch’s essays (Ornamenti, 2012). Elisa Leonzio studied Philosophy at the University of Turin (BA, MA 1999–2003). In 2004–08 she completed a PhD in German Studies and Comparative Literatures, jointly supervised by the University of Turin and the Freie Universität Berlin. Her specialism is eighteenth-century literature and culture from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. She devoted her essays especially to the connections between philosophy, literature and medicine in the German

The Authors

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and English Enlightenment, but also to poetry and narrative in twentieth-century Germany, colonial literature, hermeneutics, ethics and translations studies. In 2012–13 she was Postdoctoral Fellow in Literature and Philology at the Freie Universität Berlin and from 2013 she is researcher at the Institute of German Literature of the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. She also works as literary translator. Greta Perletti holds a PhD in Textual Analysis and Theory at the University of Bergamo. Her research interests focus on the interaction between literary and scientific discourse: in this field she has published a number of articles on nineteenth-century British culture as well as a monograph on Victorian mental sciences and culture (Le ferite della memoria. Il ritorno dei ricordi nella cultura vittoriana, 2008). More recently, her research interests have included the interaction between literary discourse and visual culture in mid- and late nineteenthcentury culture. About this topic she has edited an issue of Elephant and Castle on the visual and literary imagination of metamorphosis in natural science (2011) and has recently completed a monograph on consumption as the symptom of the transparent – and therefore interesting – identity (Il mal gentile. La malattia polmonare nell’immaginario moderno, 2012). Sharon Ruston is Chair of Romanticism at Lancaster University. She is the author of Shelley and Vitality (2005; paperback 2012), Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine in the 1790s (2013), and Romanticism: An Introduction (Continuum, 2005); the editor of special issues of Essays and Studies on ‘Literature and Science’ (2008) and of Romanticism on Thomas De Quincey (2011); and the co-editor of the Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy (http://www.davy-letters.org.uk/, OUP, 2018). She co-edited Teaching Romanticism (2009) with David Higgins. She has published further essays on literature and science in the Romantic period in The Lancet, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Romanticism, Keats-Shelley Review and the Keats-Shelley Journal. Alessandra Violi is Full Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Bergamo, where she coordinates the Doctorate in Intercultural Humanistic Studies and the research group Punctum, which is dedicated to the study of the image in an intermedial and multidisciplinary key. Her research work has focused on the points of contact among literature, aesthetics and the human sciences, with particular attention to the medical imaginary and, specifically, the sciences of anatomy and neuropathology, on which she has published the volumes Le cicatrici del testo (1998) and Il teatro dei nervi (2004). In addition, she has written books on the theme of the body as a medium (Impronte

316

The Authors

dell’aria, 2008), as artistic-anthropological material (Capigliature, 2008), and, more recently, in the cultural imaginary (Il corpo nell’immaginario letterario, 2013).