Febvre

Biological Discourses
The Language of Science

and Literature Around 1900
ROBERT CRAIG AND

INA LINGE (EDS)
Peter Lang
CULTURAL HISTORY AND
LITERARY IMAGINATION
The relationship between biological thought and literature, and

between science and culture, has long been an area of interest by no
means confined to literary studies. The Darwin Anniversary celebrations
of 2009 added to this tradition, inspiring a variety of new publications
on the cultural reception of Darwin and Darwinism. With a fresh scope
that includes but also reaches beyond the ‘Darwinian’ legacy, the
essays in this volume explore the range and diversity of interactions
between biological thought and literary writing in the period around
1900.
How did literature uniquely shape the constitution and communication
of scientific ideas in the decades after Darwin? Did literary genres
dangerously distort, or shed critical light upon, the biological theories
with which they worked? And what were the ethical and social
implications of those relationships? With these broad questions in
mind, the contributors consider the biological embeddedness of
human nature, perspectives on sexual desire, developments in racial
thinking and its political exploitation, and poetic engagements with
experimental psychology and zoology. They also range across different
literary traditions, from Germany, France, Italy, and the Netherlands,
to Britain and the USA. Biological Discourses provides a rich cross-
section of the contested relationship between literature and biological
thought in fin-de-siècle and modernist cultures.
Robert Craig is Postdoctoral Teaching and Research Fellow at the

University of Bamberg in Germany. He holds a PhD in German from
the University of Cambridge. His doctoral thesis examined the dialectic
of nature and self in the work of the modernist author Alfred Döblin
(2016). He has also published articles on Günter Grass and on the
philosophy of social networking technologies. His work has been
funded by the AHRC and the DAAD.
Ina Linge is Associate Research Fellow in the Centre for Medical History
at the University of Exeter. She holds a PhD in German from the University
of Cambridge. Her doctoral thesis focused on the performance of
queer livability in German sexological and psychoanalytic life writings,
c.1900–1933 (2016). She has published articles on fin-de-siècle and
modernist literature and culture, and the interdependence of sexology
and autobiography. Her work has been funded by the AHRC, the
MHRA, and the Wellcome Trust.
www.peterlang.com
CULTURAL HISTORY AND LITERARY IMAGINATION
EDITED BY CHRISTIAN J. EMDEN & DAVID MIDGLEY
VOL. 27
EDITORIAL BOARD
RODRIGO CACHO, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
SARAH COLVIN, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
KENNETH LOISELLE, TRINITY UNIVERSITY
HEATHER WEBB, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien
The Language of Science
and Literature Around 1900
Robert Craig and Ina Linge (eds)
PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien
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Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbiblio-
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2017007741
Cover Image: ‘Chordaria Flagelliformis’ by Anna Atkins. From Photographs of British

Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, London(?), 1843–1853, 3 vols, Vol. II © British
Library Board (C.192.c.1 Vol. 2, p. 89).
Cover design: Peter Lang Ltd.
ISSN 1660-6205
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© Peter Lang AG 2017
Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers,

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and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this Work.
All rights reserved.

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This publication has been peer reviewed.

Contents
Acknowledgements ix

Robert Craig and Ina Linge
Introduction: Can Science and Literature Share
a Language? 1

Part I: Legacies of Evolution

Introduced by Staffan Müller-Wille 31

Elena Borelli
1 The Beast Within: Darwinism and Desire in the Italian

Fin de Siècle 39

Anahita Rouyan
2 Resisting Excelsior Biology: H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine

(1895) and Late Victorian (Mis)Representations of Charles
Darwin’s Theory of Evolution 63

Pauline Moret-Jankus
3 Jules Soury and Paul Bourget, or the Influence of Haeckelian

Biology on Fin-de-Siècle French Literature 87

Godela Weiss-Sussex
4 The Monist Novel as Site of Female Agency: Grete Meisel-

Hess’s Die Intellektuellen (1911) 111

vi
William J. Dodd
5 Darwin’s Imperialist Canvas: Dolf Sternberger’s

Panorama oder Ansichten vom 19. Jahrhundert (1938)
as Cultural History in the Shadow of National Socialism 135

Part II: Constructions of Desire

Introduced by Heike Bauer
159
Michael Eggers
6 Cryptogamic Kissing: Adalbert Stifter’s Novella Der Kuss

von Sentze (1866) and the Reproduction of Mosses 169

Charlotte Woodford
7 Biology, Desire, and a Longing for Heimat in Lou

Andreas-Salomé’s Novel Das Haus (1921) and Her Essay
‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’ (1900) 189

Linda Leskau
8 Botanical Perversions: On the Depathologization

of Perversions in Texts by Alfred Döblin and Hanns
Heinz Ewers 211

Cyd Sturgess
9 (Re-)Constructing the Boundaries of Desire: Sexual

Inversion and Sapphic Self-Fashioning in Josine Reuling’s
Terug naar het eiland (1937) 235

vii
Part III: Projections of Otherness

Introduced by David Midgley 259

Aisha Nazeer
10 Scientific and Gothic Constructions of the Degenerate,

Racial ‘Other’: Reading the Abject in Florence Marryat’s
The Blood of the Vampire (1897) and H. Rider Haggard’s
She (1887) 269

Michael Wainwright
11 Narratives of Helminthology: Thomas Spencer Cobbold,

Bram Stoker, and The Lair of the White Worm (1911) 291

David Midgley
12 A Journey into the Interior: The Self as Other in Robert

Müller’s Novel Tropen (1915) 317

Part IV: The Poet, the Senses, and the Sense of a World

Introduced by David Midgley 339

Sarah Cain
13 Attention and Efficiency: The Experimental Psychology

of Modernism 349

David Wachter
14 Amoeba, Dragonfly, Gazelle: Animal Poetics Around 1908 371

viii
Robert Craig
15 The City as Creature: Reconfiguring the Creaturely Self in

Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) 397

Notes on Contributors 423

Index 429

Acknowledgements
The publication of this volume was supported by grants from the Association
for German Studies (AGS) and the German Endowment Fund of the
Department of German and Dutch at the University of Cambridge. We
are extremely grateful to both for making the volume possible.
We would like to extend our sincere gratitude to all our contributors.
We thank them for all their hard work and patience throughout the editing
process, and for helping to make the work on this volume such an enrich-
ing and enjoyable experience.
Biological Discourses grew out of an international, interdisciplinary
conference that took place on 10 and 11 April 2015 at St John’s College,
University of Cambridge. The conference was supported by grants from
the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Schröder
Fund (Department of German and Dutch, University of Cambridge). We
would like to thank them for their generous support, without which we
would not have been able to host such an inspiring gathering of present-
ers and delegates from far and wide. The conference was organized by the
editors of this volume and David Midgley, Annja Neumann, and Godela
Weiss-Sussex. They sparked the conversation around the theme of ‘biologi-
cal discourses’, and helped to craft the programme that became the book.
Angus Nicholls’s excellent conference commentary, in turn, helped us to
decide what kind of book we wanted to produce.
We would also like to thank the British Library for giving us permis-
sion to reproduce Anna Atkins’s cyanotype impression ‘Chordaria flagel-
liformis’ from Photographs of British Algae (1843) to serve as the cover
image for this volume.
Finally, a special thank you goes to David Midgley, who has supported
our work on this volume from the very first day, has shared his knowledge
and experience with us, and has offered invaluable support and sugges-
tions for improvements during the editing process. We would also like to
Contents
Acknowledgements ix

a Language? 1

Part I: Legacies of Evolution

Introduced by Staffan Müller-Wille 31

Elena Borelli
1 The Beast Within: Darwinism and Desire in the Italian

Fin de Siècle 39

Anahita Rouyan
2 Resisting Excelsior Biology: H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine

(1895) and Late Victorian (Mis)Representations of Charles
Darwin’s Theory of Evolution 63

3 Jules Soury and Paul Bourget, or the Influence of Haeckelian

Biology on Fin-de-Siècle French Literature 87

Godela Weiss-Sussex
4 The Monist Novel as Site of Female Agency: Grete Meisel-

Hess’s Die Intellektuellen (1911) 111


a Language?
Perceptions of the relation between literature and biology in the English-

speaking world tend to be dominated by associations with Charles Darwin.
A little more than a week after the Darwin Year of 2009 had drawn to a
close, the historian of science Steven Shapin took stock of what it had (or
hadn’t) added to our understanding of the Victorian gentleman naturalist.
History’s ‘biggest birthday party’, as he called it in the London Review of
Books, was both Darwin’s 200th and the 150th anniversary of On the Origin
of Species. The anniversary was marked by an unprecedented array of smaller
parties across the globe, from conferences, through theatre performances,
exhibitions, and pilgrimages to the Galápagos Islands, to banknote re-issues
and even folksy bumper stickers. Darwin’s latent importance to countless
aspects of modern self-understanding – our crumbling sense of human
uniqueness, our ethics, our politics, our culture, our religion – found rec-
ognition in myriad quarters, whether scientific, literary or even ecclesias-
tical. From Richard Dawkins to the Vatican, authorities of all kinds paid
homage.1 But in spite of their focus on the ‘dangerous idea’ of evolution
by natural selection, to quote Daniel Dennett’s famous title from 1995,2
Shapin had his doubts about the curiously de-historicized character of the
celebrations: the sense that the Darwin mythos had transcended any attempt
to relate it back to the cultural context of Victorian Britain.
1 Steven Shapin, ‘The Darwin Show’, London Review of Books 32:1 (2010), pp. 3–9

<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n01/steven-shapin/the-darwin-show> [accessed 21
September 2016].
2 Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life,

London 1995.
2
This volume is certainly not only concerned with Darwin or

Darwinism. We look beyond Darwin, and travel beyond Victorian Britain,
to investigate other dimensions of the complex relationship between lit-
erature and biological thought around 1900. Nonetheless, the contrived
commemorations of the Darwin bicentenary are so revealing because they
remind us that the supposedly timeless ideas of science are in fact intensely
historical products. Even in the face of the ‘verifiability’ or ‘falsifiability’ of
empirical evidence (itself a socially contested authority),3 scientific theo-
ries emerge and develop as the subject matters of particular conversations
that are by no means limited to the realm of the strictly scientific. In 1995,
Dennett famously suggested that as a kind of ‘universal solvent’, natural
selection might both account for, and further, the development of human-
ity’s biological, social, and cultural processes.4 But this suggestion of an
all-encompassing triumph has obscured a far more convoluted story. The
radical materialism of natural selection, as first expounded in the Origin of
1859, was facing growing opposition by the turn of the nineteenth century.
Alternative evolutionary models, notably that of Lamarckism, appeared to
some to be a better fit for an intellectual culture still shaped by a sense of
compatibility between evolution and theistic design; apparent discontinui-
ties in the fossil record cast doubt on the timescales of natural selection; and
the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s theories of inheritance around 1900
seemed for several decades to provide a more immediate account of devel-
opment than the gradualism of natural selection.5 It was only in the period
between the world wars that the so-called modern ‘evolutionary synthesis’
3 For a seminal intervention in the modern ‘sociology of scientific knowledge’, see

Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle,
and the Experimental Life, Princeton, NJ 1985. With a focus on the debate between
Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes over Boyle’s air-pump experiments in the 1660s,
the work demonstrated the extent to which supposedly objective ‘knowledge’ is the
product of ‘human actions’ in response to sets of social and political conditions and
demands: see especially pp. 332, 344.
4 Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, p. 521; see also p. 63.

5 See Peter J. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in

the Decades around 1900, Baltimore, MD 1983, pp. 22–3, 44–7; and Steven Rose, ‘How
to Get Another Thorax’, London Review of Books 38:17 (2016), pp. 15–17 <http://www.
Introduction: Can Science and Literature Share a Language? 3

was achieved between Darwinian natural selection and Mendelian genet-
ics.6 As we consider the life sciences around 1900, then, we are confronted
not with a single Darwinian ‘solvent’, but an historical reality of competing
ideas and seemingly contradictory evidence.
If debates about natural selection itself presented a fascinating picture,
then this book sounds out the cultural resonances of an even more complex
and interesting web of theories and disciplines. With their roots in the
mythologies and philosophies of Western civilization, a variety of evolu-
tionary theories – whether Darwinian or not – provided a wellspring for
literary imaginations in the second half of the nineteenth century. The sheer
suggestiveness of these ideas, not to mention their adaptability to broader
social truths, were key to their attraction for literary authors working in
late Victorian Britain.7 Not only that, but cross-contamination was rife as
evolutionary ideas assumed different forms, and were adapted to very dif-
ferent ends, across national and cultural borders. Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919)
played the pivotal role in propagating Darwin’s theories throughout conti-
nental Europe in such best-selling and much-translated works as Natürliche
Schöpfungsgeschichte (The Natural History of Creation, 1868) and, later, Die
Welträthsel (The Riddle of the Universe, 1899). His monistic adaptations of
Darwinism were precisely that: adaptations, steeped in a German Romantic
tradition reaching back to Goethe and Humboldt, with its spiritualist sense
of deus sive natura (God and nature as one).8 As several chapters will show,
lrb.co.uk/v38/n17/steven-rose/how-to-get-another-thorax> [accessed 13 December

2016].
6 See Rose, ‘How to Get Another Thorax’.

7 As Bernard Lightman and Bennett Zon have recently shown, theories of organic

development from the simple to the more complex had their roots in the ‘ancient
idea of the Great Chain of Being’, which descended from the thought of Plato and
Aristotle. See ‘Introduction’, in Lightman and Zon (eds), Evolution and Victorian
Culture, Cambridge 2014, pp. 1–15: pp. 2–3, 9.
8 See Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over

Evolutionary Thought, Chicago, IL 2008, pp. 8–9; see also Nicholas Saul, ‘Darwin in
Germany Literary Culture 1890–1914’, in Thomas F. Glick and Elinor Shaffer (eds),
The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, 4 vols, vol. III,
London 2014, pp. 46–77: especially pp. 50–1. The concept of deus sive natura finds
4
Haeckelian appropriations fed into radically different literary attempts to

reconfigure the human being’s meaning in relation to itself, its society and
its natural world. Currents of Darwinism also mixed with the ateleologi-
cal pessimism of Arthur Schopenhauer’s theory of Will and Eduard von
Hartmann’s conception of ‘the Unconscious’, ideas which were particularly
prominent in European intellectual culture in the years leading up to 1900.
Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud forged unique brands of thinking
in response to these inheritances, reconceiving the embodied self in ways
that drew upon scientific and literary methods. Fin-de-siècle and modern-
ist bodies (individual and politic) became the shifting screens for biologi-
cal, social, and political projections that often had little in common with
Darwin’s circumspect and, as Nicholas Saul puts it, ‘speculation-averse’
theories of natural selection.9
But even in specialisms apparently removed from the reaches of evo-
lution, new developments were quietly reshaping the disciplinary land-
scape of the life sciences. In German laboratories, the 1870s and 1880s
witnessed new modes of quantitative measurement in experimental psy-
chology, against the backdrop of a growing challenge to a biological and
physiological determinism that had seen its European heyday some forty
years earlier.10 By contrast, the first three decades of the twentieth century
saw the biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) develop radically new
qualitative methods for observing animal behaviour and agency: Uexküll’s
its origins in Spinoza’s pantheism: see Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, ed. and trans.
G. H. R. Parkinson, Oxford 2000, p. 226 (part IV, preface) and p. 231 (part IV,
axiom, proposition 4).
9 For a brief discussion of Darwin’s own studious avoidance of racial categorizations

in The Descent of Man (1871) – and his articulation by contrast of ‘gradations’ in
human characteristics – see David Midgley’s introduction to Part III of this volume;
cf. Saul, ‘Darwin in German Literary Culture 1890–1914’, p. 50.
10 On the history of modern experimental psychology as it emerged in Germany

under Wilhelm Wundt, see Mathias Kiefer, Die Entwicklung des Seelenbegriffs in
der deutschen Psychiatrie ab der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts unter dem Einfluss
zeitgenössischer Philosophie, Essen 1996, pp. 67–74. On the Anglo-American devel-
opment of experimental psychology, and its significance for T. S. Eliot’s poetry, see
Chapter 13 of this volume.

aim was to pursue a biology independent of the positivist foundations of
physics and chemistry, and of Haeckel’s seemingly anthropomorphic con-
ception of evolution.11 To put it simply, Darwinism and its descendants were
far from being the only games in town around 1900. The literary works of
the period crystallized different ways of rethinking questions of identity,
ethics, and society through a loosely interlinked but diverse set of scientific
ideas, as this volume demonstrates: psychotechnics and modernist poetry
come together to explore human attention and efficiency; animal agency
is shown to be debated in ecological, zoological, and poetic works alike;
and German sexological theories are re-negotiated in Dutch lesbian fiction.
In tracing that rich diversity, we also invite readers to consider anew
the famous (and remarkably persistent) sense of cultural dichotomy laid
out by C. P. Snow in his Rede Lecture of 1959, The Two Cultures.12 Snow’s
strong sense of the opposed academic cultures of literary studies and the
natural sciences was very much the product of the Cambridge of the late
1950s, and yet another example of the historical mutability of disciplinary
boundaries and battlegrounds. Snow saw science and literature as standing
in an antithetical relationship and competing with one another for atten-
tion and resources within the educational sphere. In contrast to what he
saw as the reactionary potentials latent in modernist literary explorations
of alienation, he situated scientists and engineers well and truly on the
side of intellectual, social, and political progress.13 The notoriously bitter
dispute that ensued between Snow and F. R. Leavis harked back to the cul-
tural politics of a debate of the 1880s between T. H. Huxley and Matthew
Arnold. Huxley’s advocacy of the physical sciences as the basis for a new
educational model drew Arnold’s vigorous defence of a traditional diet of
the literary classics.
11 See Malte Herwig, ‘The Unwitting Muse: Jakob von Uexküll’s Theory of Umwelt

and Twentieth-Century Literature’, Semiotica 134:1 (2001), pp. 553–92: 569–70.
12 C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures, ed. with an Introduction by Stefan Collini, Cambridge

1998. For a thorough exploration of the ‘two cultures’ controversy and its broader
repercussions, see Guy Ortolano, The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature
and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain, Cambridge 2009.
13 See Ortolano, The Two Cultures Controversy, pp. 26–34.

6
Yet even that controversy was not fought out in the stark terms of
mutual exclusion, revealing a complex history to the relationship between
science, society, and the world of letters. The nineteenth century saw a
looser connection between the main branches of the life sciences than
twentieth-century developments might suggest. ‘Biology’ first emerged in
the years around 1800 as a designation of the study of human life, but in
English it was only in the 1850s that its modern meaning started to enter
into general currency.14 The term covered two broadly different discipli-
nary orientations: physiology, bacteriology, cell biology, and neurology
focused on forms and functions, and fed into modern cultures of experi-
mentalism; whereas theories of evolution came to deal with questions of
organic transformation over unimaginable stretches of time.15 The sociolo-
gists Auguste Comte (1798–1857) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) saw
a deep interdependence between these perspectives. Haeckel’s biogenetic
law, which stated the single organism’s recapitulation of every stage of its
species’ evolution, came to the fore in Spencer’s The Principles of Sociology
(1876). On that basis, in 1882 he would argue that ‘the law of organic
progress is the law of all progress’, resulting in the evolution ‘of the simple
into the complex, through the process of continuous differentiation’ in
both the natural world and human society.16 As Anne-Julia Zwierlein has
noted, Comte’s and Spencer’s theories of organicism – and most notably
Spencer’s theory of the ‘Social Organism’ – highlighted the ramifying affini-
ties between biological forms on the one hand, and the configurations of
the late Victorian ‘social body’ on the other. In contrast to a more recent
sense of incompatible cultures, the biological sciences and the humanities
still largely spoke a shared language.17
14 See here Peter Morton, The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination,

1860–1900, London 1984, pp. 12–13
15 For an excellent account of these distinctions, see Anne-Julia Zwierlein, ‘Unmapped

Countries: Biology, Literature and Culture in the Nineteenth Century’, in Zwierlein
(ed.), Unmapped Countries: Biological Visions in Nineteenth-Century Literature and
Culture, London 2005, pp. 1–12: pp. 2–3.
16 Herbert Spencer, ‘Progress: Its Law and Cause’, Humboldt Library of Popular Science

Literature 17:2 (1882), p. 234. See here also Lightman and Zon, ‘Introduction’, p. 3.
17 See here Zwierlein, ‘Unmapped Countries’, p. 4; cf. p. 1.


Within that context, Thomas Huxley had spoken in 1854 of ‘the sci-
ence of society or Sociology’ as a ‘higher division of science’ that might
explicitly deal with ‘the relation of living beings to one another’.18 This
idea was echoed in ‘Science and Culture’, an essay originally delivered as
an address in Birmingham in 1880, where he argued that literature was
important for a complete intellectual culture. This in turn found some-
thing of a mirror image in Arnold’s insistence, in ‘Literature and Science’
(1882), that ‘a genuine humanism is scientific’.19 And as we move forward
into the debate’s twentieth-century incarnation, we find nothing funda-
mentally new in C. P. Snow’s suggestion in 1963, after the unanticipated
public interest sparked by his Rede Lecture, that forms of social scientific
inquiry might come to constitute a kind of ‘third culture’ in addressing
‘the human effects of the scientific revolution’.20
The further diversification of disciplines in more recent decades has
led to ever more sophisticated attempts to reach across the boundaries. In
his essay of 1980, ‘Modernity: An Unfinished Project?’, Jürgen Habermas
pointed to the need to find effective modes of communication beyond the
‘esoteric bastions’ of different disciplines.21 In the wake of national reunifi-
cation, German universities have played host to numerous public debates
over the relationship between the Naturwissenschaften (the natural sciences)
and the Geisteswissenschaften (approximately, the humanities).22 One such
18 Thomas H. Huxley, ‘On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences’

[1854], in Science and Education: Essays, New York 1893, p. 58.
19 Thomas H. Huxley, ‘Science and Culture’, in Science and Culture and Other Essays,

London 1888, p. 18; see also Matthew Arnold, ‘Literature and Science’ [1882] <http://
homes.chass.utoronto.ca./~ian/arnold.htm> [accessed 22 September 2016]. For the
background to this debate, see Lightman and Zon, ‘Introduction’, pp. 7–8.
20 C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures, p. 70.

21 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Modernity: An Unfinished Project’ [1980], in Maurizio Passerin

d’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib (eds), Habermas and the Unfinished Project of
Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge,
MA 1997, p. 38ff.
22 The German debates of the 1990s also entailed a re-evaluation of the social function

of the traditional Geisteswissenschaften and, in some instances, their re-designation
as Kulturwissenschaften.
8
conversation, between philosopher Jürgen Mittelstraß and literary critic

Ulrich Gaier, brought to the fore the vital role of the arts in pointing to
elements of experience that challenge our understanding of the world we
inhabit, and in highlighting the constitutively narrative processes of inter-
pretation which make us who we ‘are’.23 However, even that now seems to
present too clean a division between science and literature. More recently
still, Elinor Shaffer has shown how, after the work of Thomas Kuhn and
Michel Foucault, the notion of a ‘third culture’ has come ever more explic-
itly to characterize academic investigations into the relationship between
the disciplines: one grounded in an on-going (if often unacknowledged)
interaction through which literature and science have in different ways
– sometimes antagonistic, sometimes co-constitutive – emerged as the
products and producers of ‘discourse’.24 In his lecture, C. P. Snow had
intimated that ‘it is bizarre how very little of twentieth-century science
has been assimilated into twentieth-century art’.25 According to Snow,
scientific knowledge had hardly ever made its way into art and literature
and, in the rare cases where this ‘assimilation’ had taken place, poets only
seemed to be getting it wrong. The present collection aims to paint a far
more nuanced picture of an epistemic and aesthetic exchange between
literature and the biological sciences.
The scholarship on the relationship between ‘literature’ and ‘biology’
after Darwin is voluminous, with Darwin himself often providing the main
focal point. Gillian Beer’s classic Darwin’s Plots (1983) not only excavated
23 See Jürgen Mittelstraß, ‘Geist, Natur und die Liebe zum Dualismus: Wider den

Mythos von zwei Kulturen’, in Helmut Bachmaier and Ernst Peter Fischer (eds),
Glanz und Elend der zwei Kulturen: Über die Verträglichkeit der Natur- und
Geisteswissenschaften, Konstanz 1991, pp. 9–28: p. 10. Cf. Ulrich Gaier, ‘Verfehlte
Gewohnheiten im Denken und Handeln: Die zwei Kulturen sind weniger wichtig
als eine vierte Gewalt’, in ibid. pp. 91–106: p. 96.
24 See Elinor S. Shaffer, ‘Introduction: The Third Culture – Negotiating the “two

cultures”’, in Shaffer (ed.), The Third Culture: Literature and Science, Berlin 1998,
pp. 1–12: especially pp. 2–3. See also George Levine, ‘One Culture: Science and
Literature’, in Levine (ed.), One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature, Madison,
WI 1987, pp. 3–34: especially pp. 8–9, 12–14.
25 C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures, p. 16.


the younger Darwin’s considerable repertoire of reading, from Shakespeare
and Milton to Wordsworth and Byron; Beer also sounded out the deep
poetic and metaphorical resonances in the gestating versions of the Origin,
not to mention the potential for (mis)interpretation.26 Darwin’s world was
one in which natural theology still shaped the concepts of natural history,
and from within that world he was eking out a precise yet adaptable lan-
guage to describe not a teleological sense of purpose, but an ‘uncontrolla-
ble welter of [evolutionary] possibilities’.27 Following in a similar vein, the
volume Science, Literature, and the Darwin Legacy (2010) underlined the
interconnections of genre and form between literary and biological writing
in nineteenth-century culture.28 Subsequent collaborations have adopted
a range of approaches to the ‘Darwin Legacy’ in literary cultures. Darwin
in Atlantic Cultures (2010) explicitly followed Foucault in reconstructing a
‘Darwinist episteme’ around a group of thematic areas, including gender and
sexuality, race, and colonization and ‘progress’.29 In an ambit that reaches
right up to the present day, The Evolution of Literature: Legacies of Darwin in
European Cultures (2011) moves beyond conventional questions of histori-
cal reception in a bracing yet (admittedly) elusive search for ‘an authenti-
cally Darwinist, evolutionary aesthetic’.30 Returning to a more contextual
approach, The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe
26 Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and

Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 3rd edn, Cambridge 2009, pp. 26–44, 45–52. See espe-
cially pp. 26–8 for a detailed exposition of Darwin’s range of reading.
27 Beer, Darwin’s Plots, p. xviii.

28 See Paul White, ‘Introduction’, in White (ed.), Science, Literature, and the Darwin

Legacy. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 11 (2010), pp. 1–7:
pp. 2–5.
29 See Jeannette Eileen Jones and Patrick B. Sharp (eds), Darwin in Atlantic Cultures:

Evolutionary Visions of Race, Gender, and Sexuality, London 2010. Cf. Zwierlein
(ed.), Unmapped Countries, which investigated the cultural resonances of a range of
nineteenth-century scientific disciplines, from parasitology to anthropology.
30 Nicholas Saul and Simon J. James, ‘Introduction: The Evolution of Literature’, in

Saul and James (eds), The Evolution of Literature: Legacies of Darwin in European
Culture, Amsterdam 2011, pp. 9–18: p. 15; see also pp. 10–11. Cf. Joseph Carroll,
Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature, New York 2004.
10 Robert Craig and Ina Linge

(2014), as the latter half of a four-volume set on Darwin’s influence, has
presented the most comprehensive survey yet of his cultural impact across
the continent.31 Broad-based surveys of the literary impacts of Darwinism
combine with examinations of evolutionary resonances in such authors as
Zola and Proust; and through an engagement with lesser-known literary
figures, a number of our chapters build on that groundwork.
Regardless of natural selection’s empirical durability and explanative
scope,32 literature is certainly not ‘just’ another evolutionary product; and
in precisely that light, we want to ask if its cultural relationship with biol-
ogy around 1900 is simply one of historical ‘reception’ or ‘assimilation’. A
number of publications have already beaten new paths in challenging any
notion of a one-way street. In The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary
Imagination, 1860–1900, Peter Morton pointed to a dynamic relation-
ship between the late Victorian literary imagination and natural selec-
tion, Galtonian eugenics, and Lamarckian reconceptions of inheritance.
The close links between Victorian literature and biology owed much to
the intellectual accessibility and imaginative resonance of contemporary
theories of evolution and heredity.33 Staffan Müller-Wille argues in the
introduction to our first section that biological works – both in British
and German culture – constituted a best-selling ‘genre’; but as Beer has
shown, the connections have to do with more than just a lively culture
of intellectual exchange between biologists, journalists, and writers. The
resources of myth and metaphor fed not simply into a new theory of natural
selection, but a powerful new conceptual vocabulary.
More recently, scholars have ventured beyond Darwin to consider
lesser-explored examples of the interplay of ‘the aesthetic’ and ‘the scientific’
in fin-de-siècle and modernist cultures. With a focus on parasitology and
contagion, the volume Contagionism and Contagious Diseases: Medicine
and Literature 1880–1933 (2013) explores the topic of ‘contagion’ as both
a concept and a trope that is co-constructed through medical discussions,
31 Thomas F. Glick and Elinor Shaffer (eds), The Literary and Cultural Reception of

Charles Darwin in Europe, 4 vols, London 2014.
32 See Saul and James, ‘Introduction’, p. 11.

33 Peter Morton, The Vital Science, especially pp. 36–50.


concepts in the social sciences, and literary and visual-aesthetic repre-
sentations.34 In that direction, the German-speaking world, in particular,
has recently played host to new developments in the so-called ‘poetol-
ogy of knowledge’ and ‘literary anthropology’.35 Building upon Foucault’s
archaeologies of knowledge, the former highlights the senses in which the
‘objects’ of knowledge are constituted through rhetorical, performative,
and literary strategies. Literary anthropology has taken a more explicitly
existential approach to the ways in which twentieth-century literature has
shaped forms of knowledge about our hybrid existences in the discursive
spaces between biology, psychology, and sociology – knowledge that might
transcend the explanative limitations of the natural sciences.36
We draw upon aspects of these trends; but like a collection of con-
nected case-studies, our close readings aim to let authors and texts reveal
their sui generis engagements with scientific ideas, rather than filtering
them through a single set of presuppositions about ‘the way’ in which
biology related to literature. The ‘discourses’ of our title bring into play
a terminology that reaches back to Foucault’s famous treatment of the
concept in Les mots et les choses (The Order of Things, 1966); and this col-
lection relates to that work’s ‘archaeological’ attempt to situate the modern
notion of humanity, from the nineteenth century onwards, at a point of
conjunction between biological, socio-economic, and philological thought.
But we also go beyond Foucault’s specific sense of an ‘épistémè’ as the uni-
fied and unifying a priori that is the defining condition for the horizon
34 Thomas Rütten and Martina King (eds), Contagionism and Contagious Diseases:

Medicine and Literature 1880–1933, Berlin 2013.
35 See here Albrecht Koschorke, Körperströme und Schriftverkehr: Mediologie des

18. Jahrhunderts, Munich 1999; and Joseph Vogl (ed.), Poetologien des Wissens um
1800, Munich 1999. ‘Literary anthropology’ can be traced back to the debate between
Mittelstraß and Gaier.
36 See, for example, Armin Schäfer, ‘Poetologie des Wissens’, in Roland Borgards, Harald

Neumeyer, Nicolas Pethes, and Yvonne Wübben (eds), Literatur und Wissen: Ein
interdisziplinäres Handbuch, Stuttgart 2013, pp. 36–40; and Wolfgang Riedel, Nach
der Achsendrehung: Literarische Anthropologie im 20. Jahrhundert, Würzburg 2014,
especially pp. iv–xxv.

of possible knowledge – and its constituent discourses – in a particular
epoch.37 Instead, we aim to bring into view a looser and more permeable
sense of a discourse as an historically variable nexus of collective rules for
thinking, speaking, and acting: a nexus which, as the literary scholar Jörg
Schönert has cogently argued, has no existence in and of itself, but rather
emerges through processes of retrospective ‘reconstruction’.38
Both forms of knowledge (literary and scientific) occupied creative
and cultural spaces in which ideas, concepts, and trends were co-con-
structed rather than simply exported and imported. If the present vol-
ume’s approaches are shaped by the current critical resources of a ‘third
culture’, then its chapters themselves probe elusive ‘third cultures’ around
1900:39 ambiguous sites of confrontation and appropriation which traversed
national, imperial, and disciplinary borders, forming a network of rhizo-
matic connections – as is suggested by Anna Atkins’s cyanotype image of
seaweed on our front cover.
Circulations and exchanges: A common language?
Our contributors visit various sites of exchange between ‘the literary’ and
‘the scientific’ around 1900, many of which extended markedly beyond
both Darwin and Darwinism(s). One particular ‘site’, which straddled the
disciplinary boundaries of science and literature in the early years of the
37 Cf. Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines, Paris

1966, pp. 355–9.
38 See Jörg Schönert, ‘Bilder von “Verbrechermenschen” in den rechtskulturellen

Diskursen um 1900’, in Schönert (ed.), Erzählte Kriminalität, Tübingen 1991,
pp. 497–531: p. 497.
39 See Angus Nicholls, ‘Conference Commentary’ for the conference Biological

Discourses, St John’s College, Cambridge, April 2015, pp. 1–8: p. 4 <http://www.mml.
cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/biological_discourses_blog_revised.pdf> [accessed 11
December 2016].

twentieth century, was that of sexuality and biological reproduction. The
sexual sciences of psychoanalysis and sexology, which provide the theoreti-
cal orientation for a number of our investigations, stand as examples of a
complex interplay of biological inquiry and literary insight in the years
around 1900.
In their exploration of desire, sexual behaviour, and the sexed bio-
logical body, these ‘disciplines’ drew deeply from literary sources. Take,
for example, Sigmund Freud’s The Schreber Case (1911), in which the key
psychoanalytic concepts of transference and the Oedipus complex come to
bear on Judge Daniel Paul Schreber’s autobiographical and highly literate
account of his illness. Here, Freud’s position as analyst in the clinical set-
ting is transposed to the encounter with an autobiographical text. Freud
becomes a literary critic – and not for the last time. While the myth of
Oedipus took centre stage in the development of his psychoanalytic theory
of the human psyche, his analysis of Hilda Doolittle, the American poet
and novelist better known as H. D., centred on the figurine (and Greek
mythological figure) of Athena. Freud’s admiration of Arthur Schnitzler’s
work, his psychoanalytic reading of Vilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva (1906), his
analysis of Goethe’s childhood memory, all speak to a deep concern for
literature and a literary way of narrating what in fact are clinical case stud-
ies which serve to illuminate his scientific investigations. As much as his
medical, physiological, and zoological training, then, myth and literature
also shaped Freud’s psychoanalytic inquiry.
Sexology, the twin science of psychoanalysis, equally relied on liter-
ary sources to build its terminological repertoire. Krafft-Ebing’s noto-
rious Psychopathia Sexualis (first published in 1886) contained clinical
case studies and literary examples, side by side. The Jahrbuch für sexuelle
Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for Sexual Intermediate Types), the main plat-
form for sexological discussions in Berlin from 1899, featured a regular sec-
tion entitled ‘Biographisches und Literarisches’ (biographical and literary
miscellanea). But not only did the sexual sciences rely heavily on profoundly
literary examples, which fundamentally shaped their clinical encounter;
literature, in turn, popularized sexological and psychoanalytic discourses.
As Anna Katharina Schaffner has argued in Modernism and Perversion,
the modernist works of Thomas Mann, D. H. Lawrence, Marcel Proust,

Franz Kafka, and Georges Bataille all engaged with so-called perversions
as they were discussed by both psychoanalysts and sexologists. Schaffner
thus reveals that, in the context of the sexual sciences and European mod-
ernist literature, ‘the conceptual transfer between literature, medicine and
psychology […] works in both directions’.40 In English Literary Sexology,
Heike Bauer, who introduces Part II of this volume, also showed that
British sexologists, such as John Addington Simmons, Havelock Ellis, and
Edward Carpenter, were more closely linked to social reform movements,
rather than originating from the medical profession as did their coun-
terparts in mainland Europe. Bauer shows that it was Victorian women
writers in particular, such as Olive Schreiner, Sarah Grand, and Edith Ellis,
who engaged with the theorization of masculinity, femininity, and sexual
inversion, and shaped the ways in which gender and sexuality could be
understood.41 We shall re-encounter the contribution of these so-called
New Women, along with the fear of them, in the course of this volume,
not just in Victorian Britain (Nazeer), but also in Germany (Weiss-Sussex)
and the Netherlands (Sturgess).
A number of the chapters more broadly illustrate the significant role
of literature in shedding light on philosophical and ethical questions sur-
rounding sexuality, biological reproduction, and ‘embodiment’ itself at
the fin de siècle. Through an exploration of a wide range of inter-related
topics, from eugenics (Woodford), sexual pathology (Leskau), bryological
reproduction (Eggers), and sexual ethics (Weiss-Sussex), to psychoanalysis
(Wainwright) and sexological discourses (Sturgess), we explore how lit-
erature and biological discourses came together to explore how issues of
40 Anna Katharina Schaffner, Modernism and Perversion: Sexual Deviance in Sexology

and Literature, 1850–1930, Basingstoke 2012, p. 23.
41 Heike Bauer, English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion, 1860–1930,

Basingstoke 2009. For a further discussion of how sexual sciences exceeded the
medical realm, see also Kate Fisher and Jana Funke, ‘British Sexual Science Beyond
the Medical: Cross-Disciplinary, Cross-Historical, and Cross-Cultural Translations’,
in Heike Bauer (ed.), Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters
Across the Modern World, Philadelphia, PA 2015, pp. 95–114.

gender, sexuality, and reproduction could be rethought at the turn of the
twentieth century.
A further dimension of the relationship between biological thought
and literature, in particular in the context of discussions around heredity
and genetics, was the question of human-animal kinship. Darwin’s writings
on biological evolution, natural selection, and a common ancestral species
were quickly and prolifically (mis)appropriated in myriad ways. As Elena
Borelli will show in Chapter 1, late nineteenth-century ‘Darwinian’ anthro-
pological models, grounded in a sense of the pursuit of human evolution
towards rationality, crossed with the philosophical works of Schopenhauer
and Hartmann and their pessimistic view of desire, leading to a rejection of
the ‘beast within’ in the intellectual and literary culture of fin-de-siècle Italy.
In this figuration the human subject is understood as split between rational
human thought and animalistic desire. Human-animal kinship brings
humans and non-human animals conceptually closer, only to immediately
wish them apart, as the human subject is filled with a desire to overcome
its bestial instincts as the only way to become sovereign.
Darwinian evolutionary thought and its appropriations thus propelled
the figure of the animal into the domain of the human. At the height of
its colonial enterprise, Victorian Britain saw the white Victorian gentle-
man as the pinnacle of evolutionary achievement; the same could be said
of the European nations in general. This point of perceived climax was
marked both by convictions of human progress, and a terror of evolutionary
degeneration into simpler organic forms. When H. G. Wells’s famous Time
Traveller reaches the distant future, one half of humanity’s offspring (as he
interprets it) appears as ape-like beasts, while the other half has become
effete and docile. Darwinian thought certainly triggered a fear of the ‘beast
within’, stemming from an awareness of a shared ancestry between humans
and non-human animals. Yet, as Anahita Rouyan argues in Chapter 2,
H. G. Wells held the concept of ‘degeneration’ to be a critique of myths
of inevitable socio-biological progress; and his narrative is a vivid literary
projection – beyond even the conceptual reach of Darwinian evolutionary
theory – of disintegrated future forms and possibilities.
Such strange figurations stalked the literary imaginations of the fin de
siècle, and intertwined with a set of broader cultural, social, and biological

concerns. Perhaps no genre more urgently explored the convergence of
biological discourses, and its themes of gender, sexuality, and species dif-
ferentiation, than that of the Gothic novel. In The Gothic Body: Sexuality,
Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle, Kelly Hurley argues that
fin-de-siècle Gothic was profoundly concerned with the ‘defamiliarization
and violent reconstitution of the human subject’, a process she describes as
reflecting a concern with the ‘abhuman’.42 This concept of the ‘abhuman’ is
akin to Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, the ambivalent psychic trait
whereby the ego at once defends a sense of self-identity and welcomes
the erosion of its boundaries. Taking its cues from the natural disorder
described by Darwin, and from sexological, pre-Freudian, anthropological,
and degeneration theories, the Gothic novel remodels the human ‘as bodily
ambiguated or otherwise discontinuous in identity’, bringing in its wake
a loss of sexual and species specificity.43 In this volume we dissect several
famous examples. Wells’s Time Traveller encounters this dissolution of
the future human subject into disparate parts (or indeed new species). As
Aisha Nazeer discusses in Chapter 10 on Haggard’s She, the frightful god-
dess Ayesha meets her end in a moment of devolution, which reduces her
to an abject and ape-like figure. Finally, in Chapter 11, Michael Wainwright
shows how Bram Stoker presents us with literary enactments of parasitic
infestation that turn both body and text into abhuman figurations. Stoker’s
work unveils the subversive power of Gothic tropes in tracing the helminths’
violations of the discursive taboos imposed upon them: their bodily and
their disciplinary intrusions.
Biological theories of species differentiation and medico-scientific
inquiries into the distinction of sexual and pathological types also went
hand in hand with the taxonomical ordering of races, hence with the rein-
forcement of boundaries and hierarchies. Precisely this Victorian enthu-
siasm for racial and biological classification in turn re-emerged in the
medicine and anthropology of the fin de siècle. Building on earlier works by
Carl Linnaeus and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the nineteenth-century
42 Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin

de Siècle, Cambridge 1996, p. 4.
43 Ibid. p. 5.


physical anthropology of Arthur de Gobineau and Karl Vogt extended the
taxonomy of nature to the classification of man into different types and
physiologically differentiated races. The ‘negroid type’ was considered to
represent the most primitive surviving variety. The literary works of colo-
nialism imagine the consequences of this taxonomical categorization. In
Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire, as Nazeer shows, the female vampire
Harriet sucks the psychic energy from those who come too close to her.
We are led to believe that Harriet is a danger to European society because
of her blood relation to her Jamaican grandmother who was bitten by a
vampire bat. It is here that animal, racial, and sexual others come together
as a threat to Western society. But in the logic of this Gothic narrative, it
is not Harriet’s miscegenated maternal blood alone that positions her as a
threat to society, but also her relationship to her father, Henry Brandt, a
scientist expelled from a Swiss hospital for conducting illicit experiments.
He later flees to Jamaica to set up a laboratory, where he experiments with
vivisection on animals and humans alike. Marryat’s critique of vivisection,
not uncommon in Victorian society, expresses the fear of a movement
from experimenting on animals to experimenting on humans. Even this
fear, though, finds its shadow-side in the racialized sense of a collapse of
clear distinctions between the human and the animal.
Time and again, then, we can see how biological ideas were distorted
to ideological ends. Peter Morton suggests that late nineteenth-century
biology offered up ‘malleable’ concepts, quite ready to ‘plasticise under
pressure and ready to fill every cranny of whatever mould had been pre-
pared to receive them’.44 The tension between evolutionary ‘progressiv-
ism’ and ‘degeneration’ is a powerful case in point – and it also shows that
philosophical and scientific ideas themselves helped to reshape the very
moulds into which they flowed. As we shall encounter in different shapes
and forms, a growing fear at European populations’ biological proximity to
their ‘others’ gave birth to ever more noxious attempts to shore up a sense
of cultural, moral, and racial superiority.
44 Peter Morton, The Vital Science, p. 224.


Nonetheless, the intermixing of literature, biological theories, and
philosophy also allowed for the shaping of moulds of very different kinds.
In her study of French literary and cultural receptions of Ernst Haeckel
in Chapter 3, Pauline Moret-Jankus shows how philosophical monism’s
unification of matter and spirit made it a foundation for an ideology in
which heredity and race might become all-explaining categories for human
thought and action – a world view which, through the work of Paul Bourget
and other prolific novelists, ambiguously seeped into French literary cul-
ture in the 1880s and 1890s. But, as Charlotte Woodford demonstrates in
Chapter 7, a doctrine predicated on the interconnection of the natural
world and the human mind also held open the promise of a mystical and
material reaffirmation of human life and its deep kinship with animals: a
sense of restored wholeness that found expression in the psychoanalytic
thinking of Lou Andreas-Salomé in the early years of the new century. And
in her reading of the German-Jewish author Grete Meisel-Hess, active in
the same period, Godela Weiss-Sussex, in Chapter 4, argues that monism’s
removal of dualistic distinctions between mind and matter helped to open
up an exemplary aesthetic space in which the social and sexual liberation
of women might be championed.
Literature thus discloses its subversive function in helping us to reflect
upon the ways in which science relates to both self and society. That func-
tion becomes all the more vital as we consider the toxic discourses that
flourished in European society as the twentieth century progressed. William
J. Dodd’s chapter (Chapter 5), for example, reveals how a rhetorically bril-
liant misreading of natural selection from 1938 served as a veiled attack on
National Socialism’s murderous social Darwinism. And yet early twentieth-
century literary forms might also offer us more hopeful perspectives on
the ethical question of how to live in the world in relation to other beings
of all kinds. One such example, as we see in David Wachter’s reading of
Rainer Maria Rilke’s Dinggedichte (thing poems) in Chapter 14, concerns
the perceptual fields of animals, and the poetics of observation (and etho-
logical knowledge) that emerge from our encounters with them. Here and
elsewhere, the figure of the animal becomes a place of convergence between
biological research and literary reflection.

Literary discourses, then, allow us to explore alternative spaces,
unknown future forms and territories, and possibilities of knowledge that
remain beyond the reach of scientific methods. We can certainly speak of
shared discursive spaces between literature, biology, and philosophy; but
it is perhaps in literary works that the biological sciences are most keenly
brought to bear on the messiness, the contradictoriness, of human life.
***
Our book is divided into four parts. Part I focuses on evolutionary theory
and its cultural appropriations. Elena Borelli takes us first to fin-de-siècle
Italy with her study of literary diffusions of what she calls a Darwinian
‘anthropological model’. Her focus is on three of the era’s most prominent
literary figures: the prolific novelist Antonio Fogazzaro, poet and classi-
cist Giovanni Pascoli, and the larger-than-life Gabriele D’Annunzio, now
most familiar to us for his role in the history of twentieth-century Italian
nationalism. ‘The beast within’ is an embodiment of desire, understood in
the wake of Schopenhauerian philosophical pessimism as a nexus of residu-
ally animalistic impulses and instincts, to be enlightened and overcome
through ‘will’ and ‘volition’. The post-Darwinian figure of the ‘split subject’
is variously enacted in the work of each of these writers: striving towards a
perfectly rational re-configuration of human nature, he – and typically it
is he – is forced continually to suppress his own bestial awakenings.
If D’Annunzio finds an answer to the ‘split subject’ in the image of
the ‘body-machine’, Anahita Rouyan, in Chapter 2, is concerned with a
different kind of machine, and a different set of cultural representations.
Against the backdrop of scientific specialization and popularization in
late Victorian intellectual culture, she offers a subtle new reading of H. G.
Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), one of the pioneering works of modern
science fiction and a touchstone in any discussion of literature and science.
In the light of Wells’s own journalistic stances towards Victorian popular
science, Rouyan focuses on the figure of the Time Traveller, presented to
us as an expert scientist fully wedded to an ‘Excelsior’ concept of evolu-
tionary biology: the idea of a progression towards ever higher and better
species, its apex unsurprisingly to be found in the Victorian gentleman.

The Traveller’s encounters with bizarre future forms forces him back onto
his anthropocentric assumptions, caught between a sense of man’s pro-
gress and the ingrained fear of degeneration. Rouyan shows us how this
gentleman naturalist, from the vantage point of literature’s first modern
time machine, indirectly channels Wells’s critique of discourses of scientific
popularization and utopianism in Victorian England.
Pauline Moret-Jankus then takes us to France with her examination of
the dissemination of Haeckelian biology in fin-de-siècle French literature
in Chapter 3. A now virtually forgotten figure, the anti-Semitic thinker
Jules Soury was indisputably influential in his time. His interpretations of
Ernst Haeckel infused Haeckel’s evolutionary monism with a strong current
of racial anti-Semitism. The chapter then turns to the immensely prolific
and widely read novelist Paul Bourget who, as Moret-Jankus argues, incor-
porated aspects of Soury into his own works: both Soury’s appropriations
of Haeckelian ideas, and even Soury the ‘bilious’ ascetic himself. Once
again, we are invited to contemplate the ways in which literature becomes
an ambivalent, even slippery, gatekeeper between scientific theories and a
broader cultural landscape.
Moving forward a few years and crossing into Germany, Godela Weiss-
Sussex and William J. Dodd bring our first part to a close with two very
different kinds of reception in Chapters 4 and 5, respectively. By the age
of twenty-two, the prodigious novelist and essayist Grete Meisel-Hess was
already recognized as one of the most promising figures in the German
women’s movement. Weiss-Sussex reads her novel, Die Intellektuellen (The
Intellectuals, 1911), against a very different social and political understand-
ing of metaphysical monism. By rethinking human life in continuation with
the laws of nature, the writings of Haeckel, Wilhelm Bölsche, and Auguste
Forel offered the scope for a wide-ranging re-conception of sexual ethics
and social conventions. As a literary reflection of the reformist movement
in eugenics, through the powerful lens of monism, the novel itself emerges
as an intriguing mix: of its time, to be sure, but shrewdly committed to
radical visions of sexual and social agency. William J. Dodd then explores
a very different kind of ‘use’ for biological discourses. The political theorist
Dolf Sternberger, best known today in Germany for his later coinage of
the term ‘Verfassungspatriotismus’ (Constitutional Patriotism) in 1979,

is presented here in the German tradition of ‘inner emigration’ under the
Nazi regime. Sternberger’s collection of essays, Panorama oder Ansichten
vom 19. Jahrhundert (Panorama of the Nineteenth Century, 1938), is osten-
sibly a polemical critique of the social and political implications of natural
selection; but Dodd also uncovers a masterful piece of veiled resistance,
and raises difficult questions about the divergence of scientific theories
and their political (mis)appropriations.
Against this post-Darwinian backdrop, Part II turns its focus to literary
representations of sexual desire. It begins with a view of nineteenth-century
German literature in Michael Eggers’s chapter (Chapter 6) on Adalbert
Stifter’s novella Der Kuss von Sentze (The Kiss of Sentze, 1866). In Stifter’s
novella, a kiss between relatives becomes much more than a ritual sign of
peace-making passed on through the generations of the family of Sentze.
Indeed, Eggers argues that this kiss functions analogously to an evolution-
ary jump from asexual to sexual procreation in the lives of mosses. Over
the course of his argument, Eggers reveals how Stifter’s work drew on the
botanical and zoological works of Carl Linnaeus and the botanical (in
particular the bryological) work of Johannes Hedwig. Just as the family
tradition has to undergo a generational shift from a kiss of peace to a kiss of
love in order to conserve the Sentze species, the German botanist Wilhelm
Hofmeister showed that generations of mosses that reproduce sexually and
those that do not must alternate regularly in order to maintain the spe-
cies. Eggers thus shows that Stifter’s characters are not only closely bound
to their natural surroundings, but that human and botanical spheres here
function according to the same rules of evolution.
In Chapter 7, Charlotte Woodford explores Lou Andreas-Salomé’s
novel Das Haus (The House, 1919) and her essay ‘Gedanken über das
Liebesproblem’ (Thoughts on the Problem of Sexuality, 1900), which
engage with evolutionary thought in a very different way. Here, Woodford
shows how Andreas-Salomé’s writing expresses a desire to find meaning in
human existence, a desire not met by the post-metaphysical, Darwinian
story of evolution and origin. Here, too, questions of family and inheritance
play a major role. The question of genetic inheritance turns into another
one: how can one live on through a biological line? The German evolution-
ary biologist Wilhelm Bölsche, who posits a theory of a consolatory kinship

across the generations, thus provides the impetus for Andreas-Salomé’s
exploration of kinship. But for her, the question of the meaning of human
existence is not answered here, because despite this living on through the
next generation, genetic inheritance pays no attention to individuality
and autonomy. In response, her writing portrays a sense of psychic long-
ing for a harmonious union of self and world. Woodford’s chapter takes us
through Andreas-Salomé’s psychoanalytical, biological, and monist ideas,
which critically navigate contemporaneous discourses of heredity, race,
and sexuality. Her chapter shows how, for Andreas-Salomé, succession
and heredity not only relate to discussions of race, sexuality, and illness,
but also to questions about the meaning of human existence.
Linda Leskau next draws our attention, in Chapter 8, to the demarca-
tion of ‘normality’ from ‘abnormality’ in biopower as it first emerged, on
Michel Foucault’s account, during the second half of the eighteenth century.
She situates Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s work on psychopathologies in this
discursive field, pointing in turn to German Expressionism’s preoccupation
with taboos and abnormalities of disease, crime, and sexuality. This is the
basis of a discussion of texts by Alfred Döblin and Hanns Heinz Ewers.
Döblin’s novella Der schwarze Vorhang (The Black Curtain, 1912) and his
short story Die Ermordung einer Butterblume (The Murder of a Buttercup,
1910) enact what Leskau calls ‘botanical perversions’: disturbing crosso-
vers between vegetal and botanical metaphors and scenes of sexual and
physical violation. Ewers’s novel Alraune (Mandrake, 1911) also embodies
this figurative ambiguity, albeit in a world in which gendered distinctions
of sadism and masochism are breaking down. But it is in their blurring
of deeper distinctions – between humanity and nature, and between the
‘normal’ and the ‘abnormal’ – that both Döblin and Ewers challenge psy-
chiatric and sexological criteria for defining and categorizing perversions
and pathologies in the years around 1900.
Cyd Sturgess’s chapter (Chapter 9) concludes this part with an explo-
ration of literary representations of same-sex desire amongst women in the
Dutch context. Her reading of Josine Reuling’s Terug naar het eiland (Back
to the Island, 1937), a little-discussed text despite being the first of its kind
in the Dutch language, investigates how literary explorations of lesbian love
critically engaged with the biologically founded sexological discourse of

the time. Although sexologists like Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Auguste Forel,
and Magnus Hirschfeld discussed at length the origins and implications
of same-sex desire amongst men, lesbian desire remained a little-explored
phenomenon, either described as a temporary affliction (Forel) or charac-
terized by the psychological as well as anatomical masculinity of the lesbian
lover (Hirschfeld). Yet Sturgess shows how Reuling’s novel subverts the
rigidity of contemporary sexological paradigms by rejecting the idea of
lesbian love as a form of masculine desire. Sturgess reveals that Reuling’s
writing thereby redefines the boundaries of ‘normative’ desire and offers
a model of identification and promise of possibility. The literary text is
shown to powerfully reject and correct biological discourses.
Part III investigates different representations of the sexual and racial
‘Other’, with a particular focus on projections of pathology and contagion.
Aisha Nazeer’s reading of H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887) and Florence
Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897), in Chapter 10, explores how the
Victorian Gothic novel provided a platform for the discussion of scientific
theories of degeneration. She argues that scientists themselves reveal a
Gothic sensibility in their terminology and desire to classify and point out
difference, distinction, and dissimilarity. In fin-de-siècle cultures, discourses
around race crossed over with medical discourse and became infused with
a language of disease, such that questions of race intermixed with questions
of pathology and its diagnoses. Nazeer’s postcolonial reading understands
the pathologization of racial otherness as an Orientalist style of classifica-
tion, portrayed in the novels of Haggard and Marryat. Nazeer also shows
how racial otherness becomes linked to perverse sexuality, in a manner
similar to the depiction of the New Woman, who threatened to infect other
women with her independence and confident sexuality. Accordingly, the
female racial Other becomes a particular threat – only for the link to be
made back to the Victorian woman, accusing her, too, of sexual savagery.
Nazeer’s conclusion shows that both biological discussions of race and the
Gothic novel depict miscegenated racial types as monstrous, abject, and
outside the norms of Victorian culture.
In a further exploration of degenerationist discourses, we then join
Michael Wainwright in Chapter 11 on a journey through Bram Stoker’s
digestive tract. Opening with a discussion of scientific discourses and their

boundaries, and the taboos that determine what cannot be talked about,
he homes in on the helminth (the parasitic worm) as a figure of discur-
sive exclusion, transgression, and re-infestation. Through metaphors of
parasitic invasion, Wainwright shows how parasitology and helminthol-
ogy entered British scientific discourse, notably through Thomas Spencer
Cobbold’s Entozoa: An Introduction to the Study of Helminthology (1864),
only to become subject to new taboos in the face of cultural fears of species
degeneration. The plethora of signs and symptoms in Bram Stoker’s fictions
is then read, with a fine-grained methodology that draws upon psychoa-
nalysis and deconstruction, to trace out his literary enactments of these
discursive (and corporeal) taboos. With a powerful new take on The Lair
of the White Worm (1911), Wainwright raises unsettling questions about
the complex relationship between medical discourses, literary production,
and the body of the author.
David Midgley rounds off Part III, in Chapter 12, with a fresh read-
ing of Robert Müller’s novel Tropen (1915), a work that has attracted much
recent scholarly interest in the German-speaking world. Tropen consists of
the frame narrative of an expedition to set up a Freeland colony in the border
region between Venezuela and Brazil that had been overtaken by an Indian
revolt in 1907. Midgley shows how this account, a fictional posthumous
manuscript by the German expedition member Hans Brandlberger, takes
on a dual significance: ostensibly the encounter of a supposedly ‘civilized’
European mind with an Amazonian world supposedly ripe for coloniza-
tion, it also provides a richly layered exploration of that mind’s proximity
to its own physiological underpinnings. Through its intricate traces of
Haeckel, Nietzsche, and Freud, the novel draws into question the suitability
of Brandlberger for this imperial mission. But for all of Müller’s personal
attachment to ideas of Empire, his ‘brainteaser’ of a novel – as Midgley puts
it – suggests that this endeavour to transcend European constraints leads all
the more destructively back into the nature that lurks just beneath them.
Part IV considers poetic responses to the impulses of experimental
psychology, along with human (self-)representations in a world where we
finds ourselves unnervingly close to modes of animal existence. Sarah Cain
opens in Chapter 13 by exploring the rise of experimental psychology in
Anglo-American thought. She illuminates the influence of the work of

Hugo Münsterberg, a pioneer of applied psychology, on his students T. S.
Eliot and Gertrude Stein. Cain shows that more than any other individual
before or since, he shaped the scope and future directions of experimental
psychology throughout the twentieth century. Münsterberg’s work was
multi-disciplinary and included the earliest study of the psychology of
film. Cain’s chapter shows that for Stein and Eliot, he provided a produc-
tive counterpart to their own modernist explorations of the interrelation
between aesthetic practice and psychology, and revealed a shared interest
in human energy, attention, monotony, and efficiency.
In our penultimate chapter, David Wachter outlines points of contact
and divergence between scientific and literary texts in their engagement
with animal poetics. Wachter’s chapter shows that the pioneering work
of Karl Möbius in the field of ecology, the zoological writings of Jakob
von Uexküll, and the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke uniquely negotiate
an encounter with the animal at a remove from anthropocentric assump-
tions. Derived from poiesis, the Greek word for ‘production’, the concept
of animal poetics signifies a site for construction and activity, but poetics
also encompass a sense of beauty that the biological works of Möbius and
the poetry of Rilke share. Wachter’s focus on poetics also foregrounds the
significance of narrative, rhetoric, and linguistic form in both biological and
literary works. At the turn of the twentieth century, cultural perspectives
on the status of the non-human animal shifted, as both biological thought
and literature developed from passive object to constructive producers of
environment and subjects of perception. Wachter closes his chapter with
a powerful conclusion: the relationship between literature and biology
is a multifaceted one, not of unidirectional transfer, but of co-existing
approaches to complex problems. Literature’s unique analytical role and
the methods of the humanities have the potential to articulate how bio-
logical discourses participate in the processes by which human beings
understand themselves.
Robert Craig brings the volume to a close in Chapter 15 by revisiting
Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), a modernist masterpiece
that prompts rather different reflections on the problem of human self-
conception. As a medical doctor with a strong interest in nature philoso-
phy, Döblin’s eclectic work has recently attracted much attention for its

richly interdiscursive qualities. The chapter begins by examining Döblin’s
biologically inflected aesthetics and anthropology, briefly setting them in
counterpoint to Haeckel’s famous attempt to link the laws of nature and
the laws of art. Following a critique of Franz Biberkopf ’s repeated attempts
to achieve some kind of sovereignty over himself and his environment,
the chapter then turns to consider the novel’s creaturely dimensions. By
drawing upon Eric Santner’s conception of the creature, Craig shows that
Berlin Alexanderplatz repeatedly exposes the proximity of modern urban
existence to a barely concealed animal condition. And yet that uncanny
closeness may provide an aesthetic point of departure for reconfiguring
the place of the individual right at the heart of the modern city. As this
final chapter suggests, the resources of literature may yet help us to think
modern humanness as amounting, however improbably, to far more than
its biological reality.
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F. Glick and Elinor Shaffer (eds), The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles
Darwin in Europe, 4 vols, vol. III, London 2014, pp. 17–45.
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Decades around 1900, Baltimore, MD 1983.
Buchanan, Brett, Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger,
Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze, Albany, NY 2008.
Carroll, Joseph, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature,
New York 2004.
Dennett, Daniel, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, London
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Fisher, Kate, and Jana Funke, ‘British Sexual Science Beyond the Medical: Cross-
Disciplinary, Cross-Historical, and Cross-Cultural Translations’, in Heike Bauer
(ed.), Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters Across the
Modern World, Philadelphia, PA 2015, pp. 95–114.
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Gaier, Ulrich, ‘Verfehlte Gewohnheiten im Denken und Handeln: Die zwei Kulturen
sind weniger wichtig als eine vierte Gewalt’, in Helmut Bachmaier and Ernst Peter
Fischer (eds), Glanz und Elend der zwei Kulturen: Über die Verträglichkeit der
Natur- und Geisteswissenschaften, Konstanz 1991, pp. 91–106.
Glick, Thomas F., and Elinor Shaffer (eds), The Literary and Cultural Reception of
Charles Darwin in Europe, 4 vols, London 2014.
Habermas, Jürgen, ‘Modernity: An Unfinished Project’ [1980], in Maurizio Passerin
d’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib (eds), Habermas and the Unfinished Project of
Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cam-
bridge, MA 1997.
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de Siècle, Cambridge 1996.
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[1854], in Science and Education: Essays, New York 1893.
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Part I
Legacies of Evolution
Introduced by Staffan Müller-Wille
Darwin, as literary scholars such as Gillian Beer or George Levine have
argued, was not only a naturalist; he was also a skilled author who tailored
his many books to the sensibilities and tastes of Victorian reading pub-
lics.1 On the Origin of Species (1859) sold impressively well and went into
several editions and translations; but the same is also true for Darwin’s
many other books that dealt with such varied topics as climbing and insec-
tivorous plants, orchid contraptions to trick insects into pollination, the
intricacies of self- and cross-fertilizing, expressions of emotion in humans
and animals, and the descent of man and sexual selection. Darwin’s last
book – a fable on the evolutionary meaning of work, leisure, and death,
which used earthworms as its protagonists – was also his best-selling: 6,000
copies had been sold, with translations into French, German, Italian, and
Russian at the ready, little more than a year after its publication in 1881.2
And Darwin was not at all alone among biologists enjoying literary suc-
cess. Ernst Haeckel and August Weismann, to name only two German
examples, were likewise best-selling authors. Biology, one can state with-
out exaggeration, was just as popular a genre in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries as it is today.
This has caused problems for commentators, from Sir Karl Popper to
the American creationist Richard Weickart, who have sought to construct
lines of influence connecting Darwin and nineteenth-century Darwinians
with right-wing ideologies of the twentieth century, especially Nazism.3
First, biological literature in the nineteenth century on the subjects of
inheritance, development, and evolution was just too varied to be reduc-
ible to just one fatal idea. A good indicator of this richness is a slim book
1 See Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and

Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 3rd edn, Cambridge 2009; and George Levine, Darwin
the Writer, Oxford 2011.
2 Charles R. Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms,

London 1881. On the publication history and various editions of this book, see R. B.
Freeman, The Works of Charles Darwin: An Annotated Bibliographical Handlist, 2nd
edn, Hamden, CT 1977, pp. 164–8.
3 See Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, London 1957, Chapter 4; and Richard

Weickart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in
Germany, Basingstoke 2004.
34 Staffan Müller-Wille

published by the Danish botanist Wilhelm Johannsen in 1914 on ‘false
analogies with respect to similarity, affinity, inheritance, tradition, and
evolution’.4 Johannsen was one of the founders of genetics, and in his polem-
ical account of nineteenth-century biology, Darwin was not foregrounded
as having introduced the concept of natural selection, but for his ‘provi-
sional hypothesis of pangenesis’ which imputed agency to the microscopic
units – cells or ‘gemmules’ as Darwin called them – of which organic bodies
were made up. Secondly, and more importantly, the popularity of biologi-
cal theorizing in the nineteenth century implies that it actually resonated
with popular notions of life, its meaning, and its destiny. ‘Popularization’
was not tantamount to filling in the tabula rasa of a lay public, but also
aimed to meet demands for entertainment and enlightenment by reading
audiences. From this perspective, public opinion shaped science just as
much as science shaped public opinion.
With one tell-tale exception, the contributions to this part reflect this
by focusing on aspects of Darwinian and Darwinist theorizing that defy
the optimistic picture of inexorable progress by natural selection and reveal
that ‘biology’ was also associated with the irrational and unconscious, hence
with threats and fears. Elena Borelli sets the scene from the start with a
chapter that explores how fin-de-siècle Italian writers dealt with one of the
big themes in nineteenth-century philosophy, the Unconscious in the form
of instinct or desire. Darwin’s work resonated well, and in often surprising
ways, with the outlook on desire and its rational sublimation that writ-
ers like Antonio Fogazzaro, Giovanni Pascoli, and Gabriele D’Annunzio
developed; and this is neither an accident nor due to a ‘misreading’ of his
work. Atavism, or regression, was one of the key concepts of Darwinian
evolution, and the ‘obscure energy of instinct’, as Borelli puts it, was posited
as an essential condition of progressive evolution. Of necessity, evolution
produces subjects ‘split’ between a primitive past and a superior future in
4 Wilhelm Johannsen, Falske analogier med henblik paa lighed, slægtskab, arv, tradition

og udvikling, Copenhagen 1914. This wonderfully sarcastic pamphlet was unfor-
tunately never translated, except for a rather superfluous translation into Swedish
(Stockholm 1917).
Part I: Legacies of Evolution 35

an endless race for adaptation and perfection, with the post-human ‘body-
machine’ of the futurists as its logical outcome.
While the Italian authors that Borelli covers remain wedded, in the
final analysis, to a progressivist vision of evolution, Anahita Rouyan revisits
a well-known literary masterpiece, H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine: a work
which struggled to convey an understanding of evolution without direc-
tion, neither ‘up’, nor ‘down’, nor ‘back’. We are familiar with the startling
and disruptive turns that the Time Traveller’s investigation of the symbi-
otic relationship between the Eloi and the Morlocks takes. What Rouyan’s
chapter reveals is that this resulted from a deliberate strategy that Wells
chose as an ‘educator and popularizer’. By telling his story, he revealed that
there was not one story to be told about evolution. What seems refined
and accomplished can turn out degenerate and abject, and what seems
primitive and brutish can turn out advanced and even superior.
Pauline Moret-Jankus turns to Jules Soury, ‘France’s propagator of
Ernst Haeckel’s evolutionary monism’, and his influence on a number of
French authors, especially Paul Bourget. Soury used Haeckel’s work, which
he translated copiously and freely, to promote a vicious and radical version
of anti-Semitism. Moret-Jankus identifies Soury as the model for one of the
main characters of Paul Bourget’s novel Le Disciple (1889). In doing so, she
uncovers how Soury’s influence was due to a complex amalgam of ‘scien-
tific’ ideas: race and the struggle for existence, to be sure, but also Haeckel’s
biogenetic law (according to which ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny),
his theory of ‘cellular souls’, and the mystic depths of the Unknowable.
Bourget, in fact, was a conservative, and depicted these ideas as destruc-
tive of the traditional order of society. At the same time, this only further
demonstrates the sway that a biologist like Soury held over public discourse:
in the words of Anatole France, he, too, was an ‘admirable writer’ whose
style was ‘supple, vigorous, colourful and sometimes of a strange splendour’.
Haeckelian influence is also the subject of Godela Weiss-Sussex’s chap-
ter on the novel Die Intellektuellen (The Intellectuals), published in 1911 by
Grete Meisel-Hess. The author was a public figure already, well known for
her feminist attack on Otto Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and
Character, 1903) and a book entitled Die sexuelle Krise (The Sexual Crisis,
1909). Weiss-Sussex asks, in her own words, whether the background of

‘monist philosophy and biological science […] allows Meisel-Hess to pre-
sent an emancipatory, progressive model of female agency’. And her short
answer is: it does. Die Intellektuellen is a piece of Weltanschauungsliteratur,
parading protagonists who, unhampered by the constraints of traditional
society, follow their instincts and act in accordance with biological princi-
ples, thus realizing the monist ideal of a union of instinct and intellect, and
in that sense, a eugenic future. Instinct here is anything but deterministic.
It spurs subjects on to act, but what shape those actions take depends on
rational deliberation.
The final chapter in this part, by William J. Dodd, takes us into the
1930s, hence into a period when Darwinism found itself increasingly
associated with natural selection and right-wing totalitarian ideologies.
Analysing Dolf Sternberger’s Panorama oder Ansichten vom 19. Jahrhundert
(Panorama of the Nineteenth Century, 1938), a remarkable product of the
‘inner emigration’ of a cultural philosopher, Dodd takes us back to the
origins of the grand narrative that it was the ‘rise of a scientific world view
and its challenges to democratic, enlightened, and religious (Christian)
values’ that led to the catastrophes of the twentieth century. Dodd reveals
the misrepresentations of Darwinian theory on which this grand narra-
tive was constructed, especially the idea that Darwin brought ‘the whole
mass of organic forms and millennia under the sway of a single power’. But
he also draws attention to the fact that Sternberger’s work instrumental-
izes tropes and genres shared between scientific and political discourse
‘to challenge the primacy of the biological and re-focus attention on the
ethics of being human’.
What all five chapters thus reveal is the subversive power of biological
discourses. It is true that biology is sometimes invoked to cement prejudice
and insulate traditional institutions from critique. But a ‘science of life’ deals
by definition with the restless, the temporary, and the Unconscious. Biology,
and especially evolutionary biology, is the quintessentially modern science.
Part I: Legacies of Evolution 37

Bibliography
Darwin, Charles R., The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms,
London 1881.
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Johannsen, Wilhelm, Falske analogier med henblik paa lighed, slægtskab, arv, tradition
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Elena Borelli
1 The Beast Within: Darwinism and Desire in the

Italian Fin de Siècle
abstract
In this chapter I explore the depiction of desire in the works of three late nineteenth-
century Italian authors: Antonio Fogazzaro, Giovanni Pascoli, and Gabriele D’Annunzio.
I claim that their representation of desire is embedded in an anthropological paradigm
much indebted to the popularization of Charles Darwin theories. In this context, desire
is seen as the remnant of mankind’s brutish ancestors, and, therefore, something to be
repressed and overcome. In portraying desire as an obscure inner force, Fogazzaro, Pascoli,
and D’Annunzio reappropriate not only Darwin’s theory, but also Arthur Schopenhauer’s
notion of the Will, and Eduard von Hartmann’s idea of the Unconscious. The texts I analyse
show that this biological discourse of fin-de-siècle Italy in turn anticipated the advent of
Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis.
In the posthumous collection of aphorisms published under the title The

Will to Power, Friedrich Nietzsche gives a brief account of the Zeitgeist of
the past centuries in Europe. When he arrives at the nineteenth century,
the philosopher describes it as
more animalistic and subterranean, uglier, realistic and vulgar, and precisely for that
reason ‘better’, ‘more honest’, more submissive before every kind of ‘reality’, truer;
but weak in will, but sad and full of dark cravings, but fatalistic. Not full of awe
and reverence for either ‘reason’ or ‘heart’; deeply convinced of the rule of desires
(Schopenhauer spoke of ‘will’ but nothing is more characteristic of his philosophy
than the absence of all genuine willing). Even morality reduced to one instinct, pity.1
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale,

New York 1967, p. 59.
40 Elena Borelli

Nietzsche’s Aphorism 95 aptly captures the nineteenth century’s obsession
with desire, which is seen as an obscure force that cannot be subjugated com-
pletely to intellect and reason. Much like instinct, of which it is only a more
refined form, desire stems from that part of human nature that we share with
the animals, and that derives from our brutish ancestors. In the late nine-
teenth century, desire was intended as one of the many manifestations of
the Will, and as such, akin to both instinct and volition. For instance, in his
two-part The World as Will and Representation (1819, 1844), which gained
particular currency in the 1890s,2 Arthur Schopenhauer postulates that grav-
ity is to nature what instinct is to animals, and desire to humans.3 The same
concept occurs in Eduard von Hartmann’s The Philosophy of the Unconscious
(1869): ‘Will stands behind its concrete dispositions, which then, conceived
and informed by the will, are called impulses, and is realised in the resulting
volition, which receives its particular content through the psychological
mechanism of motives, impulses and desires.’4 This nineteenth-century
depiction of desire is deeply embedded in an anthropological paradigm
that derives from Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Within this frame-
work, human nature is split between a rational, ‘Apollonian’ part, towards
which the process of evolution is directed, and an obscure, irrational one,
which is a remnant of the earlier stages of evolution, and which manifests
itself in instincts and uncontrollable desires. The idea of an instinctual,
unknown side of human nature prepares the way for the notion of the
Unconscious, which came to light in the early twentieth century. In fact,
the discovery of the ‘Unconscious’, intended as the domain of those mental
processes that are not directly present in awareness, but whose existence
can be inferred from experience,5 precedes Freud by at least a century and
2 Ritchie Robertson, ‘Modernism and the Self 1890–1924’, in Nicholas Saul (ed.),

Philosophy and German Literature, 1700–1990, Cambridge 2002, pp. 150–96: p. 151.
3 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne,

New York 1969, I, p. 156.
4 Eduard von Hartmann, The Philosophy of the Unconscious, trans. C. K. Ogden, New

York 2000, I, p. 171.
5 Lancelot Law Whyte, The Unconscious before Freud, New York 1960, pp. 21–5.

The Beast Within: Darwinism and Desire in the Italian Fin de Siècle 41

a half, as both Lancelot Law Whyte and Henri Ellenberger have shown.6
The thinkers who postulated a hidden dimension within the human mind
mostly drew attention to unconscious processes such as ‘instinct’, ‘vitality’,
‘will’, ‘imagination’, ‘dissociation’, ‘dream’, and ‘mental pathologies’, among
others.7 Freud, on the other hand, expounded the connection between
instincts and the structure of human mind: ‘To the oldest of these mental
provinces or agencies we give the name of id. It contains everything that
is inherited […] above all, therefore, the instincts, which originate in the
somatic organization and which find their first mental expression in the
id in forms unknown to us.’8
The Darwinian model of evolution, within which desire is chastised as
the ‘beast within’, both encountered and interacted with the philosophical
currents of late nineteenth-century pessimism, most notably Schopenhauer’s
and Hartmann’s respective works. Both texts, which became very influential
in fin-de-siècle Europe, discuss desire: the former prescribes the annihila-
tion of desire, and the latter ‘the clarification of instinct into rational will’,
and ‘the deepening and magnifying of the sphere of consciousness at the
expenses of the Unconscious’.9 According to Hartmann, civilization pro-
ceeds towards the enlightenment of the Unconscious into consciousness,
and towards the complete revelation of all unconscious motives behind
people’s actions.10 The idea of the progressive purification of instinct, along
with late nineteenth-century anthropological speculations on the evolu-
tion of mankind towards perfect rationality, foregrounds the proto-futurist
and futurist fantasy of the body-machine: that is, a body without desire,
or, in other words, a body that has cut its ties with the animalistic roots of
the human species.
6 See previous footnote; see also Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious:

The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry, New York 1970.
7 Law Whyte, The Unconscious before Freud, p. 67.

8 Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey, New York 1949,

p. 2.
9 Hartmann, XI, p. 39.

10 Hartmann, I, p. 133.

42 Elena Borelli

In this chapter, I want to bring these discursive strands together by
focusing on the diffusions and reappropriations of a Darwinian ‘anthro-
pological model’, within which the negative view of desire is embedded,
amongst the most prominent authors of Italian fin de siècle. These authors
are deeply indebted to late nineteenth-century Lebensphilosophie (life phi-
losophy), that is, a body of thought that ultimately derived from Darwin’s
theory and its popularizers, but also meshed with Schopenhauer’s ideas,
resurgent as these were around the turn of the century.11 In particular, I
analyse the works of Antonio Fogazzaro (1842–1911), Giovanni Pascoli
(1855–1912), and Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938), the most prominent
literary figures of late nineteenth-century Italy. All of these three figures
variously re-elaborate and put into play the notion of the ‘split subject’,12
which derives from a certain reappropriation of Darwin’s theory. The ‘split
subject’ is a subject in the making, heading towards the perfected ver-
sion of human nature, but haunted inside by the remnants of its bestial
origins. In all of these authors one can trace the occurrence of an unsta-
ble view of human nature which, in spite of the direction of evolution, is
constantly threatened with the possibility of regression. The return to the
beast is invariably signalled, in the texts I examine, by the awakening of
desire. Specifically, I use ‘desire’ as an umbrella term, covering a number
of concepts such as impulse and instinct, thus following Schopenhauer’s
concept of the Will, of which desire is an individual manifestation. Like
desire, these phenomena are characterized by a conscious mental represen-
tation and an unconscious source, originating in our brutish nature. Will
and volition, on the contrary, are those in which the obscure energy of
instinct has been completely enlightened by reason.13 As I have suggested,
11 See Robertson, ‘Modernism and the Self 1890–1924’, p. 151.

12 The paradigm of the ‘split subject’, dominating late nineteenth-century Italian lit-

erature, has been convincingly illustrated by Vittorio Roda in two seminal studies:
Homo duplex: Scomposizioni dell‘io nella letteratura italiana moderna (Bologna 1991);
and Il soggetto centrifugo: Studi sulla letteratura italiana tra Otto e Novecento (Bologna
1984).
13 The distinction between desire and volition becomes important when Nietzsche

criticizes Schopenhauer’s condemnation of desire. For Nietzsche, when the subject
freely embraces his or her own desires, he or she turns them into conscious will, which

the nineteenth-century speculation on desire, informed by evolutionism,
envisioned the progressive transformation of instinct into rational will.
Indeed, in the works of Gabriele D’Annunzio, and those of Mario Morasso
(1871–1938), whom I also consider in this chapter, the theme of the subli-
mation of desire into pure rationality and a strong will is embodied in the
image of the body-machine.
Darwinism in Italy
The diffusion of Darwin’s ideas in Italy began soon after the publication of
The Origin of Species (1859) and lasted well into the twentieth century. As
Giuliano Pancaldi has shown, the success of Darwin’s theory in Italy was
due to the existence of a pre-evolutionistic background of scientific research
in the fields of anthropology and zoology, which was moving towards the
discussion of man’s place in nature.14 Darwin’s ideas were enthusiastically
adopted by the scientific community in Italy: in 1881, one member of the
is no longer a source of slavery and suffering: ‘Schopenhauer’s basic misunderstand-

ing of the Will (as if craving, instinct, drive were the essence of the Will) is typical:
lowering the value of the Will to the point of making a real mistake […] [This is a]
great symptom of the exhaustion or the weakness of the Will: for the Will is pre-
cisely that which treats cravings as their master and appoints to them their way and
measure’ (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 52). However, as early as The Philosophy
of the Unconscious, Hartmann considers volition to be the endpoint of a process of
‘wanting’, where all motives, even the unconscious ones, are unearthed, and the sub-
ject fully embraces his or her will. This idea marks the difference between Hartmann
and Schopenhauer, inasmuch as the latter calls for the suspension of desire, and the
former the necessity of knowing what we want, and why, before embracing it.
14 Cf. Giuliano Pancaldi, Darwin in Italy: Science Across Cultural Frontiers, Bloomington,

IN 1991, p. 88: ‘In sum, there is enough evidence to show that, in spite of the novelty
of its concepts and the hopes it raised for a new synthesis of recent work in biol-
ogy – evolutionism was viewed by Canestrini and many of his Italian colleagues as
being profoundly grounded in the zoology of the first half of the century.’
44 Elena Borelli

Italian parliament even observed that the names Darwin and Spencer
were so popular that simply mentioning them in conversation was hardly
a marker of intellectual sophistication.15 This huge success, however, did
not betoken a thorough knowledge of Darwin’s theory, as very few of the
politicians, academics, and intellectual figures responsible for the diffusion
of evolutionism in Italy had actually read Darwin’s books. His ideas were
shrewdly used as a means of imparting a positivistic belief in progress to the
Italian population, and educating the new nation, where before only the
Catholic Church had maintained a monopoly of instruction. Furthermore,
although in The Origin of Species Darwin makes no mention of humans, in
Italy evolutionism became a theory of descent: a new vision of the human
race was created on the basis of semi-scientific speculations. These specu-
lations can be grouped together under the name of ‘social Darwinism’, a
Weltanschauung in which the circulation of ideas such as natural selection
and evolution formed an anthropological model, as well as a social theory,
in which man was seen as evolving towards an increasingly perfect version
of the race. One need only look at the titles of books that appeared in
Europe in the years immediately following the publication of The Origin
of Species: Thomas Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature (1863); Charles Lyell’s
The Antiquity of Man (1863); Carl Vogt’s Vorlesungen über den Menschen
(Lectures on Man) (1863); and, in Italy, Giovanni Canestrini’s Origine
dell’Uomo (The Origin of Man) (1866). Canestrini, the first Italian transla-
tor of The Origin of Species, contributed to the perception of evolutionism
not as a hypothesis but as a proven theory and focused on the idea of a
progressive betterment of the human race, which in turn helped to shape
the concept of desire.
It is only in The Descent of Man, of 1871, that Darwin directly tackles
the question of human beings. This book was immensely successful in Italy,
mainly because it found fertile ground in a myriad of pre-Darwinian theo-
ries on the evolution of mankind, and in the widespread faith in progress
and civilization. As early as the 1850s, the writings of Cesare Lombroso, a
prominent criminologist better known for his theory of atavism, show the
15 Pancaldi, Darwin in Italy, p. 152.


circulation of pre-Darwinian ideas concerning the betterment of mankind,
and the inevitable movement of evolution towards complete rationality:
‘All social progress’, Lombroso writes, ‘is marked by the victory of reason
over instinct’.16 Conversely, the criminal and the insane are more inclined
to recklessly follow their instincts, and therefore bear the signs of an occa-
sional regression to the condition of the animal ancestors of the human
species.17 A similar notion is present in Darwin’s The Descent of Man. In
discussing the relationship between impulses and the social instinct, which
he sees as the source of rational morality, Darwin affirms that:
Man, prompted by his consciousness, will through long habit acquire such perfect
self-command, that his desires and passions will at last yield instantly and without
a struggle to his social sympathies and instincts, including his feeling for the judg-
ment of his fellows. Thus at last man comes to feel, through acquired and perhaps
inherited habit, that it is best for him not to obey his more persistent impulses.18
The positivistic elite ruling the country embraced this paradigm of moral
progress, appropriating it as a cultural weapon to impose a normative view
of morality as imbued with rationality. The case of Lombroso is emblem-
atic of late nineteenth-century Italian positivism. Within this context,
Darwin’s theory was distorted to fit a triumphant worldview: the survival
of the fittest would inaugurate a better society of stronger and healthier
individuals, a notion that is not at all present in Darwin’s writings. Although
in Italy the biological doctrines of evolution did not lend themselves to
racial or political propaganda to the extent seen in Germany, for instance,
Darwinism nonetheless became the cornerstone of an anthropological
and sociological theory.
Another author who was deeply indebted to Darwin’s theories of
evolution, and was very popular in fin-de-siècle Italy, was Max Nordau, in
particular on account of his treatise Degeneration (1892). Nordau describes
16 Cesare Lombroso, Influenza della Civiltà su la Pazzia e della Pazzia su la Civiltà,

Milan 1856, p. 106. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of Italian texts are
my own.

18 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, London 1871, p. 90.

46 Elena Borelli

the end of the nineteenth century as the ‘unchaining of the beast’ and
‘the shameless ascendency of base impulses and motives’,19 and he reads
the cultural manifestations of this time as a sort of regression to lower
stages of evolution. Interestingly, the degeneration characterizing fin-de-
siècle culture is seen by Nordau as the product of ‘excessive emotionalism,
impulsiveness’ and the proclivity to recklessly follow one’s desires: ‘[For
degenerate people] there exist no law, no decency, no modesty. In order
to satisfy any momentary impulse, or inclination, or caprice, they trespass
with the greatest calmness and self-complacency and they do not compre-
hend that other persons take offence thereat’.20 In contrast to the present
generation of weak, degenerate people, Nordau describes the future genera-
tion, whose members will be able to dominate their impulses completely:
‘[The generation of the twentieth century] will know how to find its ease
in the midst of a city inhabited by millions, and will be able, with nerves of
gigantic vigour, to respond without haste or agitation to the almost innu-
merable claims of existence.’21 In foreshadowing the future state of human
evolution as a condition of full rationality, Nordau echoes both Darwin
and Lombroso: ‘Psychology teaches us that the course of development is
from instinct to knowledge, from emotion to judgment, from rambling
to regulated association of ideas.’22 This image in turn anticipates the idea
of the body machine, which I will discuss below.
The writings of Antonio Fogazzaro represent a particularly striking
example of the incorporation of the Darwinian model of the split sub-
ject. Fogazzaro was one of the most prominent intellectual figures of the
newly founded kingdom of Italy: a prolific writer, and the author of many
successful novels, he was a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature on
several different occasions, and was elected Senator for life in the Italian
parliament. His novels put into play the dichotomy between passion and
duty, between feelings and reason, and the clash between the world before
Italy’s unification and the advance of modernity. Although Fogazzaro was
19 Max Nordau, Degeneration, London 1895, p. 25.

20 Ibid. p. 35.

21 Ibid. p. 541.

22 Ibid. p. 543.


a fervent Catholic, he was also a supporter of the modernist reform of the
Church, to the extent that one of his novels, Il Santo (The Saint) (1905),
was included in the index of forbidden books by the Catholic Church. In
particular, throughout his life Fogazzaro strove to reconcile the Christian
belief in creationism with the Darwinian theory of evolution, which he
had enthusiastically adopted. Fogazzaro found in Saint Augustine’s theory
of an original matter, which develops independently in accordance with
God’s will, an important precedent for the notion of an imperfect brutish
body, which changes over time to become more refined. Man evolves from
being a brute, blindly prone to succumb to his most primeval instincts, to
becoming a fully rational and moral being. The evolution of fleshly instinct
into a noble and spiritual inclination represents the core concept of his col-
lection of essays Ascensioni umane (Human Ascensions) (1842–1911), in
which he attempts to find various points of contact between Darwinism
and the Christian faith. Indeed, desire, as embodying the full spectrum of
human tendencies, from blind instinct to rational volition, is the central
concern of Fogazzaro’s concept of the evolution of mankind, in its devel-
opment ‘from innocence to virtue’,23 through a progressive detachment
from the natural world. In particular, sexual desire is the quintessential
manifestation of instinct, and the drive that, even more than others, will
have to be purified through the process of evolution:
Ma se una legge d’infinito progresso davvero governa l’universo, anche dalla specie
umana uscirà, poco importa come, una specie superiore; e se l’istinto sessuale, che
salì sempre più vivace per la scala degli organismi ha preparato l’amore umano, anche
l’amore umano prepara una ignota forma futura di sentimento, e l’evoluzione sua
continua nella vita tenuta sin qua che conduce ad un raffinamento sempre maggiore
della materia, ad una potenza sempre maggiore dello spirito.24
(But provided that a law of indefinite progress really rules the universe, a superior
species will emerge even from the human race, no matter how and when; and if
sexual instinct, which has so quickly ascended the ladder of organisms, has given
birth to human love, then certainly it will be transformed into an unknown future
23 Antonio Fogazzaro, Ascensioni umane, Milan 1899, p. 44.

24 Ibid. p. 113.

48 Elena Borelli

form of feeling; its evolution continues, in the present day, towards an increasingly
refined form of matter and higher power of spirit. It is written in nature that from
an inferior species a superior one will emerge, effortlessly, and that it will move in
the direction of its most perfect form.)
Echoing Lombroso’s notion of regression, Fogazzaro acknowledges the

persistent presence, even at the present stage of evolution, of the ‘beast
within’, that is, the remnant of our bestial origins, which manifests itself in
uncontrollable impulses and desire. The ghost of the brute needs to be con-
stantly fought, in order to promote the advent of the fully rational human
being, which will constitute the endpoint of evolution. In psychoanalytic
terms, Fogazzaro advocates the suppression of the libido in favour of the
victory of the super-ego:
Spesso mi pareva di sentir nel mio profondo tutto il tormento della vita inferiore
ond’è uscita passo a psso l’umanità, un fermento che ha strane e impetuose maree,
che sale talvolta a strepitar nel cuore con mille avidi sinistri clamori bestiali, e poi,
domato o pago, ne ridiscende, lasciandovi un silenzio triste.25
(Often I thought I felt deep in my heart the turmoil of the various inferior lives from
which step by step human nature emerged, a turmoil that has strange and impetuous
tides, that sometimes climbs up and cries within my heart with a thousand greedy
and sinister bestial cries, and then, once it is satisfied and sated, it subsides leaving
a sad silence behind.)
A similar view of desire informs the Weltanschauung of Giovanni Pascoli,

whose poetry, which is replete with disquieting and uncanny images, has
invited psychoanalytic readings. However, it is in his very personal interpre-
tation of Dante’s Divine Comedy that the influence of evolutionism is most
evident. Pascoli’s exegetical work encountered very little critical acclaim
during his lifetime, in spite of his expectations of great fame. The lack of
academic recognition that accompanied his Dante scholarship probably
owed much to his peculiar methodological approach, which had little to
do with the principles of textual philology in vogue at the time. Pascoli’s
25 Ibid. p. 118.


‘proto-structuralist’26 analysis of the Comedy aims not for an historical
reconstruction of the text, but rather an unveiling of the poem’s deep mes-
sage. On his reading, the Divine Comedy is a multi-layered parable of the
passage from the vita activa to the vita contemplativa, which signifies the
progressive abandonment of all earthly desires in favour of a state of per-
fect morality. At the same time, Pascoli interprets the Divine Comedy as a
metaphor for the evolution of mankind. Mankind initially found itself in
a state of innocence similar to that of animals and children – a condition
that is not innocent or pure, but rather full of uncontrollable desire. The
course of evolution will bring mankind to tame and overcome desire, and to
embrace a fully rational morality. Concurrently, the evolution of mankind
is replicated exactly in the life of the individual (an idea that he derives from
Ernst Haeckel’s principle of recapitulation),27 such that the brutish phase
of the human species corresponds to childhood.28 The idea of the ‘beast
within’ appears in Pascoli’s writings in a way that almost echoes Fogazzaro:
né io ho racchiuso nella mia natura tanti bestiali empiti e bramiti, e non posso farne
carico ai miei genitori, né essi ai loro; ma non perció io sento meno il loro strepito,
che giunge dai lontanissimi primordi sino a me, perché è in me, e si compone di tutti
i gridi, dal gorgogliare del batraco allo squittire del piteco, dal grugnito del ciacco al
ruggito del leone e all’ululo del lupo. Noi fuggiamo …29
26 Guido Gugliemi, ‘Pascoli Lettore di Dante’, in Testi ed esegesi pascoliana: Atti del

convegno di studi di San Mauro Pascoli 23–4 Maggio 1987, Bologna 1988, pp. 75–87:
p. 81.
27 See Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, Berlin 1866, p. 8: ‘The

second and most significant step […] is the recognition that the natural system is the
family tree of all organisms; the highest significance of the history of the individual’s
development can be explained on the basis of the fact that the development of a single
organism is the shorter and more compact repetition, actually, a recapitulation of
the paleontological development of the species, that is, phylogeny.’ The translation
is my own.
28 Intriguingly, in those years, independently of each other, both Pascoli and Sigmund

Freud reconfigured childhood as a condition of wholeness but also as the lack of
human identity – as a semi-animalistic state. See Maria Truglio, Beyond the Family
Romance: The Legend of Pascoli, Toronto 2007, pp. 56–7.
29 Giovanni Pascoli, L’Era Nuova, Milan 1984, pp. 181–2.

50 Elena Borelli

(I’m not the one who’s imbued my own nature with so many bestial cries, and I cannot
blame my parents for it, either; nor can they blame their parents, but that does not
mean that I do not hear their noise, which reaches me from our remote origins, and
encompasses all the animalistic cries, from the croaking of the frog to the squeal of
the ape, and from the grunting of the hog to the roaring of the lion and the howling
of the wolf. We flee from this …)
The ascent to contemplation, which constitutes the main theme of the

Divine Comedy, can be read, in Pascoli’s interpretation, as an allegory of
the human evolution towards the progressive transformation of instinct
into rational will. The ‘beast within’, of Darwinian derivation, will be pro-
gressively tamed and transformed into the homo humanus, the endpoint of
evolution. In the preface to La Mirabile Visione (The Marvellous Vision)
(1902), Pascoli acknowledges his debt to Darwin, and points out the simi-
larities between the message of the Divine Comedy and evolutionism:
Dante credeva in una Grazia misteriosa, pari ad una luna che fosse piena nella nostra
notte, e pur non fosse veduta, la quale faceva usci l’uomo dal suo fatale aggroviglia-
mento vegetativo, risvegliandone nel suo torpor di piant la volontà. Ora, la scienza
non ci dichiara come l’uomo sia diventato uomo se non con una parola, ‘evoluzione,’
che ripete la domanda e non le risponde; con una parola misteriosa quanto la Grazia
[…] Dante spiegava la nostra ascensione come la spieghiamo noi, ossia non la spiegava,
ossia non la dichiarava spiegabile.30
(Dante believed in a mysterious Grace, similar to a moon in the night sky, full though
invisible, which makes men grow out of their vegetal entanglement, waking the will
in them from their plant-like sleep. Now, science does not explain how men became
men, but it uses a word, ‘evolution’, which repeats the question without answering it;
with a word as mysterious as ‘grace’, […] Dante explained our ascension the way we do;
in other words, he did not explain it, but neither did he claim that it was explicable.)
Pascoli was very much aligned with late nineteenth-century evolutionism

and the model of the split subject derived from it. The advent of the homo
humanus requires not only that we purge ourselves of the brute within us,
but that we also remove ourselves from the life of engagement, the vita
activa, where worldly ambitions and individual desires prevail. Thus, Pascoli
30 Pascoli, Prose, ed. Augusto Vicinelli, Milan 1952, III, p. 770.


equates the instinct that rules the animal world with the desire that is the
propeller of every human action, and which pushes the human species to
improve its condition on earth:
È un vecchio concetto, codesto, e non vero, che sia l’intelligenza che distingua l’uomo
dal bruto. Non è vero: le case le edifica anche la rondine, e di fango impastato come
noi; e la lucciola ha saputo, con lunga esperienza, scegliere tali sostanze con cui aver
luce nelle sue notti, e con lunga esperienza ha saputo l’ape scegliere tale cibo con cui
fare il miele e la cera; o le formiche hanno i loro granai, e i castori hanno le loro città.
L’intelligenza e la conservazione della vita sono tra loro in tal nesso, che se chiamate
istinto naturale quest’ultima, dovete chiamare istinto anche quella prima. E istinto
vuol dire qualcosa a cui non possiamo sottrarci, e che s’impone come una necessità.
e non c’è mirabile opera umana, non c’è macchina, non c’è traforo di monti, non c’è
navigazione di mari, non c’è volo tra le nubi, non c’è asservimento di forze cieche
e libere che, considerati da esseri più perfetti, i quali dimorino in altri pianeti, non
facessero loro pensare che noi abbiamo ubbidito, con ciò, alla stessa necessità a cui i
conigli, che so io, gli uccelli e gli insetti alati, le lucciole e i ragni.31
(It is an old concept, this one, and a mistaken one, that it is intelligence that distin-
guishes men from brutes. This is simply not the case: swallows, too, build houses,
made of mud like ours; […] Intelligence and the preservation of life are connected to
each other in such a way that if you call the latter ‘instinct’ you have to give the same
name to the former. And instinct means something we cannot avoid, which imposes
itself upon us as a necessity. And there is no wondrous human work, no machine,
no tunnel in the mountains, no navigation on the seas, no flight among the clouds,
no enslaving of blind and free natural forces that, if more perfect beings from other
planets were to look upon us, would prevent them from thinking that we obeyed the
same necessity as that of, say, rabbits, birds or winged insects, or fireflies, and spiders.)
Moral evolution, Pascoli affirms, comes from the taming of desire, both
in the form of the instinct and the desire that turns humans towards more
and more ambitious conquests in the fields of science and technology.
While sharing the faith in the progressive ascent of man, which informed
the contemporary belief, then, Pascoli stresses the importance of a moral
evolution, based on the suppression of the beast within.
31 Pascoli, L’Era Nuova, p. 157.

52 Elena Borelli

Desire in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s novels
The ‘third crown’ of fin-de-siècle Italy, Gabriele D’Annunzio, was one of

the most prolific authors of his time, as well as a notorious figure, always
in the spotlight: not only was he a poet, a novelist and a playwright, but he
also served as a member of the Italian Parliament and as a soldier in World
War I. He had a flamboyant personality, multiple love affairs, and an adven-
turous and extravagant lifestyle, which contrasted strikingly with Pascoli’s
isolated, simple life and humble demeanour. However, both authors enact
in their work the paradigm of the split subject and the notion of desire as
the mark of the ‘beast within’.
Jared Becker has convincingly illuminated the Darwinian underpin-
nings in D’Annunzio’s works.32 Becker illustrates how the notion of the
‘struggle for life’ influences D’Annunzio’s early works, such as the poetry
collection Canto Novo (New Song) (1882) and the novel Le vergini delle
rocce (The Maidens of the Rocks) (1895). In this novel, in particular, Becker
sees the Darwinian narrative of the survival of the fittest turning into
‘the story of the uplift and renewal, especially a national and imperialistic
renaissance of the Italian people’.33
I want to suggest that we can find traces of the Darwinian influence
on D’Annunzio’s works, particularly in the paradigm of the ‘split subject’,
which characterizes the male protagonists in his novels from Il Piacere (The
Child of Pleasure), published in 1889, to Il Fuoco (The Flame) in 1900.
The male protagonist is a quintessential modern man, according to Hugo
von Hoffmansthal’s definition: ‘Moderno è Paolo Bourget, è Buddha, è il
divider gli atomi, è il giocare a palla con il tutto; moderno è decomporre
un capriccio, un sospiro, uno scrupolo’34 (Modern are Paul Bourget and
the Buddha; modern is the splitting of the atom, playing ball with the
32 See Jared Becker, ‘D’Annunzio and Darwinism: from the Giaguaro Famelico to the

Nazione Eletta’, Italica 67:2 (1990), 181–95.
33 Ibid. 186.

34 Quoted by Gabriele D’Annunzio in D’Annunzio, Scritti giornalistici, ed. Annamaria

Andreoli, Milan 1996, II, 159.

universe: modern is the dissection of every whim, every sigh, every scruple).
In other words, D’Annunzio portrays a man equipped with a hypertrophic
brain, prone to analyse every experience, and feeding on art and culture;
at the same time, this man is haunted by desire, specifically erotic desire,
which exerts a tyrannical power on him, tearing up the unity of his soul.
This desire, as a force that is antithetical to the sophisticated intellect of
the modern man, is seen as the mark of the brute, and the remnant of our
animalistic ancestors.
The Child of Pleasure rightfully belongs to the canon of decadent litera-
ture. It is the story of a wealthy Italian young gentleman, Andrea Sperelli,
who has a talent for art and literature, but lacks a clear direction in life,
and is completely dominated by his erotic desire. In fact, the novel revolves
around Sperelli’s conquest of two women, who embody two antithetical
aspects of femininity, the voluptuous Elena Muti and the chaste Maria
Ferres. Indeed, the novel can be read as a parable of the dangers of desire.
Desire, the forza sensitiva,35 is a force that is alien to the complex, educated,
and sophisticated nature of the modern man, and as such, it threatens to
precipitate the disintegration of his self. Interestingly, Andrea Sperelli,
along with many of the male protagonists in D’Annunzio’s novels, attempt
to recompose the rupture in the self created by their double nature through
the temporary wholeness that comes with the possession of a woman.
However, this attempt invariably fails, and carnal desire always triumphs.
The opposition portrayed here is between desire in its most animalistic
form, sexual drive, and the harmonious unity of rationality and action that
is the trait of the evolved man. Here D’Annunzio is much indebted to late
nineteenth-century evolutionism, and to the fantasy of the fully rational
man constituting the endpoint of evolution. On the contrary, desire is, in
the words of Maria Ferres, ‘something obscure and burning – a something
35 Gabriele D’Annunzio, Il Piacere, in Prose di romanzi, ed. Annamaria Andreoli and

Niva Lorenzini, Milan 1998, I, p. 37. English translation: Georgina Harding (trans.),
The Child of Pleasure, New York 1990, p. 24.
54 Elena Borelli

that has suddenly awakened in me like a latent disease, and now begins to
creep through my blood and into my soul in spite of myself ’.36
Throughout the novel, Sperelli tries to sublimate or suppress his uncon-
trollable desire by engaging the Schopenhauerian solution of artistic con-
templation. Beauty seems, at times, to soothe desire and provide an axis to
his unbalanced nature.37 However, this strategy is bound to fail miserably:
the novel ends with him falling even more deeply into an abyss of depra-
vation, after obtaining the love of Maria Ferres, whom he has deceivingly
seduced under the pretence of noble and chaste feelings. Actually, as Guido
Baldi has observed, the artistic patina with which Sperelli coats his love
affairs is nothing but a clever stratagem for the ‘beast within’ to achieve
its goal. This is particularly visible in the conquest of Ferres, during which
Sperelli pretends he wants to redeem himself from his dissipated life. In
order to seduce this pious lady, he engages all his knowledge of courtly
love poetry and confessional literature. Art, which in the model of the
split subject belongs to the sphere of the rational man, is bent to serve the
ends of lust and the goal of desire.
In his novels of the early 1890s, D’Annunzio’s protagonists are truly
from the same mould as Sperelli, inasmuch as they live out an internal con-
flict between their bestial lust and their over-analytical and sophisticated
intellect. Furthermore, all these novels put into play the failure of strategies
to overcome desire, strategies that were inspired by the doctrines of late
nineteenth-century pessimism, such as Arthur Schopenhauer’s philoso-
phy. This is particularly evident in Il Trionfo della Morte (The Triumph of
Death) (1894), with which D’Annunzio completes his first cycle of novels
entitled Il Ciclo della rosa (The Cycle of the Rose). The Triumph of Death
can be read as a critique of philosophical pessimism, and the theme of the
36 D’Annunzio, The Child of Pleasure, 158; Prose di romanzi, I, p. 211: ‘Una cosa oscura

bruciante è in fondo a me, una cosa che è apparsa d’improvviso come un’infezione
di morbo e che incomincia a contaminarmi il sangue e l’anima, contro ogni volontà,
contro ogni rimedio; il Desiderio.’
37 Guido Baldi, Le ambiguità della ‘decadenza’: D’Annunzio romanziere, Naples 2008,

p. 11.
x
Acknowledgements
thank Christian J. Emden for supporting the publication of this volume;

Laurel Plapp, our commissioning editor at Peter Lang, for her assistance
in steering it to completion; Andrew J. Webber for his feedback on a draft
of the Introduction; and our anonymous peer reviewers for their time and
useful advice.
56 Elena Borelli

The horror and morbid fascination Giorgio feels towards his father reveals
his awareness that the same brutish nature is in himself, manifest in his
obsession with Ippolita’s body: ‘Egli portava nel suo organismo i germi
ereditati dal padre- Egli, l’essere d’intelligenza e sentimento, portava nella
carne la fatale eredità di quell’essere bruto’40 (At the profoundest depths of
his substance he bore the germs inherited from his father. He, the creature
of thought and sentiment, had in his flesh the fatal heredity of that brut-
ish being).41 The only solution to the problem of the demons of desire in
D’Annunzio’s novels is for the male protagonist to push desire onto the
woman, who is usually his lover. He either kills her, or transposes onto her
the torment of desire by using her, and then abandoning her. However,
in his last novel Forse che si forse che no (Maybe Yes Maybe No) (1910),
D’Annunzio inaugurates a new solution to the problem of desire. Not only
is the woman cast away, but the protagonist transforms his own desiring
body into a body without desires thanks to his interaction with the machine.
Paolo Tarsis is a pilot of planes and cars, the new technological wonders of
the time. The story narrates his tormented love for the enigmatic Isabella,
as well as his flying and racing adventures. The relationship with Isabella
is torturous because he cannot completely possess the woman’s ambigu-
ous and mysterious personality. When his love story ends, as Isabella goes
mad and ends up in a mental asylum, Paolo finds solace in his passion for
the new machines. Paolo’s lustful love for Isabella is portrayed in the novel
as an imbestiamento, the victory of the bestial side of human nature that
traps the man into his fleshly body. The prison of lust is described in almost
Gnostic tones, by employing the semantic opposition between the earth
and the sky, low and high: the body, with its brutish needs, chains man
to this earth. This idea finds a counterweight in the near-divine freedom
with which the man is invested when he experiences the flight. The novel
ends not only with the expulsion of the woman from the narrative, but
also with the mystical experience of Paolo’s flight on a plane over the seas,
in which he finally feels at one with the universe. Free at last of his love for
Isabella, he compares his body to the machine he is piloting:
40 D’Annunzio, Prose, I, p. 788.

41 D’Annunzio, The Triumph, p. 170.


Il moto dei congegni non aveva risonanza ma era simile al moto del cuore e delle
arterie, che l’uomo non ode quando egli è in armonia con sé e con l’Universo […]
ed egli aveva perso la memoria della riva di giù, ma non di quel viaggio, ché egli si
ricordava di averlo compiuto.42
(The motion of the engine had no resonance but it was similar to the beating of the
heart and the pulsing of the arteries, which one does not feel while being in harmony
with oneself and the Universe […] and he had lost the memory of the shore below,
but not of the journey, as he remembered he had finished it.)
In D’Annunzio’s last novel the liberation of the ‘beast within’ is obtained by

substituting a machine for the fragile human body. The mechanical body
represents the true endpoint of evolution in the early twentieth-century
reflection on the post-human, which perhaps brings Darwinism to its
logical conclusion. Within that context, the equivalent of Pascoli’s homo
humanus is the machine, which in this case is no longer a moral being, but a
mechanical body that has annihilated all instincts and desires. Furthermore,
the adoption of the model of the machine as the product of man’s intellect
and high intelligence implies that the human body becomes more power-
ful, less fragile, and less subordinated to the laws of nature.
This idea is embodied in his image of the ‘centaur of modernity’, which
D’Annunzio describes in one article published in 1907 in the Italian news-
paper Il Corriere della sera:
Non è raffigurata in quell’attitudine la specie tragica e ascetica dell’uomo nuovo che,
avendo impresso alla sua propria vita i più terribili impulsi degli Elementi, solleva in
sommo il suo spirito per signoreggiare l’eccesso di quella veemenza pronta a travolgerlo
e ad annientarlo s’egli per un attimo interrmpa la sua disciplina o allenti il suo volere?43
([In the Centaur] we see the ascetic and tragic nature of modern man, who, con-
taining within himself the strongest impulses of the Elements, lifts up his spirit to
rule over that violence that can easily annihilate him if he relents in his discipline
and his control.)
42 D’Annunzio, Prose, II, pp. 865–6.

43 Gabriele D’Annunzio, Prose di Ricerca, ed. Annamaria Andreoli and Giorgio Zanetti,

Milan 2005, II, pp. 1577–8.
58 Elena Borelli

Here it is the human part, responsible for creativity and technological
progress, which imparts order to the bestial side, as well as taming desire.
The opposition between the ingenious, creative part of man and desire
is not new: indeed, it is the central theme of an essay by Mario Morasso,
called La nuova arma: La macchina (The New Weapon: The Machine)
(1905). Morasso’s writings are quite significant in the panorama of early
twentieth-century Italian literature, to the extent that they prefigure many
central themes of Italian futurism, such as the cult of speed and the exalta-
tion of technological modernization. Morasso anticipates the speculation
on the human evolution towards a mechanical body, or the body-machine,
which can be found, for instance, in the influential writings of Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti.44 Morasso’s essay The New Weapon: The Machine had
a significant impact on the first generation of Italian futurists, and in it,
Morasso talks about the multiplication of desires characterizing modernity:
in the modern metropolis, with its fast pace, and in modern democracies,
where everything seems within reach for everyone, desires are multiplied:
Talché a misura che noi ascendiamo, la maggiore quantità di desideri che noi pos-
siamo soddisfare va a giacere presso quelli che già ci infastidiscono, mentre altri
di nuovi e sempre più vasti, più grandiosi e numerosi pullulano nel nostro essere,
accrescendo la nostra incontentabilità e la nostra smania. e per quanto si acceleri
la velocità della nostra ascesa, per quanto si accresca la possibilità di accontentare
un maggior numero di desideri, si accrescono e si ingigantiscono e con altrettanta
maggiore velocità nuovi desideri da soddisfarsi, così che la nostra situazione resta
invariata se pur non peggiore.45
(Therefore, the more we ascend, the number of desires that we can satisfy lies by those
which are still troubling us, while new ones, larger, grander, and more numerous ones,
pullulate within ourselves, increasing our unhappiness and our restlessness. And no
matter how much the speed of our ascent increases, no matter how much larger the
possibility of satisfying a larger number of desires is, the new desire increases faster,
so that our situation is unchanged, or worse.)
44 See for instance Marinetti’s novel Mafarka le Futuriste (1909), which ends with the

protagonist generating a son who is a mechanical creature.
45 Mario Morasso, La nuova arma, la macchina, Turin 1994, p. 12.


Morasso foresees a new generation of people for whom the interaction
with the machine has become the way to overcome the strength of desire,
as we read in the following passage:
E così è: il giovane moderno che è a contatto con questa forza bruta e gigantesca, che
la soggioga e la guida, che ha acquistato l’esperienza di questi impeti formidabili di
corsa e che inmezzo a tale follia dello spazio e delle cose mantiene la sua via dritta
fermamente, ha avuto una scuola di volontà e di energia più efficace di qualsiasi altra;
tale via egli non smarrirà e la meta raggiungerà anche in altre corse pazze, quelle della
passione, o in mezzo agli odi e agli amori, dove altri periscono. Un po’ del suo cuore
egli ha dato al mostro di metallo e fuoco, ma il mostro lo ha ricambiato con un po’
della sua possa e durezza.46
(And so it is the modern young man, who is in touch with this brutal and gigantic
force, who subdues it and guides it, who has acquired the experience of this formida-
ble running impetus, and who amidst the madness of space and things firmly sticks
to his course, and has received the most effective training for his will and energy:
he will not lose his way, and he will reach his goal even in other mad competitions,
those of passions, amongst love and hate, where other men perish. A bit of his heart
he has given to the monster of metal and fire, but in exchange the monster has given
him some of his power and force.)
The dream of the body-machine, as portrayed by both D’Annunzio and

Morasso, anticipates and parallels one of the most important ethical facets
of futurism: the machine as the realm in which humankind experiences
a rebirth that will lead to a new understanding of humankind itself.47
D’Annunzio and Morasso represent an important link between the late
nineteenth-century speculation on the origin and evolution of mankind
and the early twentieth-century discussion of the post-human. The bestial
origins of mankind surface in the consciousness of the modern man through
his most uncontrollable desires. The goal of evolution is to purge desire;
and Pascoli’s and Fogazzaro’s homo humanus, or the senseless machine,
represent the necessary outcomes of this process.
46 Morasso, La nuova arma, p. 38.

47 Ernesto Livorni, ‘The Machine as the Rebirth of Humankind: Marinetti and First

Futurism’, in Giuseppe Gazzola (ed.), Futurismo: Impact and Legacy, Stony Brook,
NY 2011, pp. 110–16: p. 100.
60 Elena Borelli

Pascoli, along with Fogazzaro, foresees the advent of a fully moral man,
a man who has overcome desire and incorporated it into a fully rational
mind. This process inaugurates a new humanism, and new sense of broth-
erhood among men. Pascoli for his part does not include technological
modernization as part of the ascension of the human race. On the con-
trary, he sees technology as a way of feeding man’s most dangerous desire,
namely, the desire for power and supremacy over others.48 Conversely, for
D’Annunzio, Morasso, and the early twentieth-century generation of Italian
futurists, the problem of desire finds a solution in the merging of human
impulses into the disciplined power of the engine, and in the equation of
the human body with a body-machine.
The authors whose work I have discussed in this chapter variously
engage with the sociological and anthropological reappropriations of
Darwin’s theory of evolution circulating in Italy in the late nineteenth
century. As Ritchie Robertson observes, the interconnection between these
theories and their literary dramatizations can be found in the concept of
the self,49 which is a core concern of each of these authors. The dissociated
self, the animalistic self and its counterpart, the mechanical self, characterize
the writings of Fogazzaro, Pascoli, and D’Annunzio. These concepts reflect
the notion of a rupture of the human self, an idea which in turn found deep
resonance in contemporary biological and philosophical discourses, and
which paved the way for the Freudian Unconscious.
Bibliography
Baldi, Guido, Le ambiguità della ‘decadenza’: D’Annunzio romanziere, Naples 2008.

D’Annunzio, Gabriele, The Child of Pleasure, trans. Georgina Harding, New York 1990.
Prose di Ricerca, ed. Annamaria Andreoli and Giorgio Zanetti, Milan 2005.
48 See Pascoli’s discussion on the impact of technology on the evolution of humans in

L’Era nuova, pp. 157–9.
49 Robertson, ‘Modernism and the Self ’, p. 152.


Prose di romanzi, ed. Annamaria Andreoli and Niva Lorenzini, Milan 1998.
Scritti giornalistici, ed. Annamaria Andreoli, Milan 1996.
The Triumph of Death, trans. Arthur Hornblow, New York 1896.
Darwin, Charles, The Descent of Man, London 1871.
Ellenberger, Henri, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of
Dynamic Psychiatry, New York 1970.
Fogazzaro, Antonio, Ascensioni umane, Milan 1899.
Freud, Sigmund, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey, New York 1949.
Guglielmi, Guido, ‘Pascoli lettore di Dante’, in Testi ed esegesi pascoliana: Atti del
convegno di Studi S. Mauro Pascoli 23–4 Maggio 1987, Bologna 1988, pp. 75–87.
Haeckel, Ernst, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, Berlin 1866.
Hartmann, Eduard von, The Philosophy of the Unconscious, trans. C. K. Ogden, New
York 2000.
Law Whyte, Lancelot, The Unconscious before Freud, New York 1960.
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NY 2011, pp. 100–16.
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1856.
Morasso, Mario, La nuova arma, la macchina, Turin 1994.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Holling-
dale, New York 1967.
Nordau, Max, Degeneration, London 1895.
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IN 1991.
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Prose, ed. Augusto Vicinelli, Milan 1952.
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Philosophy and German Literature, 1700–1990, Cambridge 2002, pp. 150–96.
Roda, Vittorio, Homo Duplex: Scomposizioni dell’io nella letteratura italiana moderna,
Bologna 1991.
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gna 1984.
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New York 1969.
Truglio, Maria, Beyond the Family Romance: The Legend of Pascoli, Toronto 2007.
Anahita Rouyan
2 Resisting Excelsior Biology: H. G. Wells’s

The Time Machine (1895) and Late Victorian
(Mis)Representations of Charles Darwin’s Theory
of Evolution
abstract
The chapter analyses H. G. Wells’s characterization of the The Time Machine’s protagonist
and narrator, the Time Traveller, whose story serves as part of Wells’s broader strategy for
criticizing late Victorian modalities of science communication to non-specialist audienc-
es.1 The Traveller’s ability to translate his scientific expertise into economic and social
mobility is accompanied by ‘gift of speech’ which positions him as a potential popular-
izer of scientific knowledge. Wells addresses this capacity in his narrative of the future,
which is embedded in late Victorian cultural discourses founded on misinterpretations
of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. As a scientist who fails to
distance himself from popular fallacies about evolution, the Traveller’s persona reflects
deep frustration with widespread misunderstandings of science: a frustration which Wells
concurrently expressed in his journalism.
Four months after the publication of The Time Machine in 1895, Israel
Zangwill dedicated his Pall Mall Magazine column to a review of the first
scientific romance authored by Herbert George Wells. Zangwill argued
that contrary to literary utopias produced in the last quarter of the nine-
teenth century, The Time Machine did not portray the future as either ‘grey
with evolutionary perspectives’ or ‘gay with ingenuous fore-glimpses of a
1 I would like to thank Giuliano Pancaldi for his advice and encouragement in exam-

ining the persona of the young H. G. Wells.
4
Haeckelian appropriations fed into radically different literary attempts to

reconfigure the human being’s meaning in relation to itself, its society and
its natural world. Currents of Darwinism also mixed with the ateleologi-
cal pessimism of Arthur Schopenhauer’s theory of Will and Eduard von
Hartmann’s conception of ‘the Unconscious’, ideas which were particularly
prominent in European intellectual culture in the years leading up to 1900.
Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud forged unique brands of thinking
in response to these inheritances, reconceiving the embodied self in ways
that drew upon scientific and literary methods. Fin-de-siècle and modern-
ist bodies (individual and politic) became the shifting screens for biologi-
cal, social, and political projections that often had little in common with
Darwin’s circumspect and, as Nicholas Saul puts it, ‘speculation-averse’
theories of natural selection.9
But even in specialisms apparently removed from the reaches of evo-
lution, new developments were quietly reshaping the disciplinary land-
scape of the life sciences. In German laboratories, the 1870s and 1880s
witnessed new modes of quantitative measurement in experimental psy-
chology, against the backdrop of a growing challenge to a biological and
physiological determinism that had seen its European heyday some forty
years earlier.10 By contrast, the first three decades of the twentieth century
saw the biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) develop radically new
qualitative methods for observing animal behaviour and agency: Uexküll’s
its origins in Spinoza’s pantheism: see Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, ed. and trans.
G. H. R. Parkinson, Oxford 2000, p. 226 (part IV, preface) and p. 231 (part IV,
axiom, proposition 4).
9 For a brief discussion of Darwin’s own studious avoidance of racial categorizations

in The Descent of Man (1871) – and his articulation by contrast of ‘gradations’ in
human characteristics – see David Midgley’s introduction to Part III of this volume;
cf. Saul, ‘Darwin in German Literary Culture 1890–1914’, p. 50.
10 On the history of modern experimental psychology as it emerged in Germany

under Wilhelm Wundt, see Mathias Kiefer, Die Entwicklung des Seelenbegriffs in
der deutschen Psychiatrie ab der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts unter dem Einfluss
zeitgenössischer Philosophie, Essen 1996, pp. 67–74. On the Anglo-American devel-
opment of experimental psychology, and its significance for T. S. Eliot’s poetry, see
Chapter 13 of this volume.
Resisting Excelsior Biology 65

protagonist as a well-known figure in London’s scientific circles, as well
as an accomplished businessman: ‘He did not confine himself to abstract
science. Several ingenious, and one or two profitable, patents were his:
very profitable they were, these last, as his handsome house in Richmond
testified.’6 The Time Traveller’s ability to translate his scientific expertise
into economic and social mobility recalls not only Wells’s own career path,
but also that of his mentor and key influence, Thomas Henry Huxley.7
Both the British and American versions of The Time Machine suggested
that the Traveller enjoyed entertaining guests with stories – in the Holt
manuscript, he is described as possessing a ‘gift of speech’, allowing him to
express opinions about scientific topics with such zest that he appears ‘as
unlike the popular conception of a scientific investigator as a man could
be’.8 His account of the future is recognized for its narrative value when, at
the end of the second chapter, the Editor cries ‘Story!’ and offers the Time
Traveller ‘a shilling a line of verbatim note’,9 clearly signalling the charac-
ter’s potential as a communicator of knowledge, a position reinforced by
his social status of a scientist.10 This capability is addressed by Wells in the
Traveller’s narrative of the future, which is situated in cultural discourses
founded on misinterpretations of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by
natural selection that were circulating in late Victorian culture. Coming of
age during that period, Wells had witnessed Darwin’s theory fall victim to
6 All quotations from The Time Machine are drawn from the Holt manuscript of the

novel: Herbert George Wells, The Time Machine: An Invention, New York 1895, p. 1.
7 Wells himself repeatedly acknowledged the influence of Huxley on his work and

life, see Herbert George Wells, ‘Huxley’, Royal College of Science Magazine, 13 April
1901, pp. 209–11; Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of
a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866), Philadelphia, PA 1967, p. 161. For a more recent
reflection, see Leon Stover, ‘Applied Natural History: Wells vs. Huxley’, in Patrick
Parrinder and Christopher Rolfe (eds), H. G. Wells Under Revision: Proceedings of the
International H. G. Wells Symposium, London, July 1986, London 1990, pp. 125–33.
8 Wells, The Time Machine, p. 2.

9 Ibid. p. 34.

10 For a reflection on Wells’s literary depictions of scientists’ position in the social fabric,

see Colin Manlove, ‘Charles Kingsley, H. G. Wells, and the Machine in Victorian
Fiction’, in Harold Bloom (ed.), H. G. Wells, Philadelphia, PA 2005, pp. 11–33: p. 22.
66 Anahita Rouyan

sensationalism and misrepresentation. The frustration with a widespread
misunderstanding of science that Wells expressed in his early journalism
found an outlet in his mocking description of the Traveller, a scientist who
in constructing his narrative fails to distance himself from popular falla-
cies about evolution.
Recent criticism has frequently positioned Wells’s very first protago-
nist as a figure portraying the faults of the late Victorian middle class.11
While scientific themes in Wells’s early writings have received a consider-
able amount of scholarly attention, his approach towards popularizing
science has been overlooked by critics who have examined his early literary
creations.12 The present study offers a new reading of the Time Traveller’s
narrative by interpreting The Time Machine alongside Wells’s early journal-
istic pieces, where he repeatedly expressed a dissatisfaction with the state
of public knowledge about science. Wells articulated his views on science
and its role in social development in articles published in newspapers and
periodicals between 1887 and 1896, the period during which he produced
five different versions of The Time Machine. In his account of the future,
the Time Traveller constructs a number of hypotheses to explain the socio-
biological order that he encounters. The reasoning and language of the
story’s protagonist and narrator are informed by widespread and highly
influential interpretations of Darwin’s theory of evolution, such as the
view of evolutionary progressivism or the notion of degeneration. The
Time Traveller’s narrative is recounted by an unnamed narrator, accurately
compared by Charlotte Sleigh to a young scientist writing an article for
11 For a selection of scholarship examining the Time Traveller, see Bernard Bergonzi,

The Early H. G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances, Manchester 1961; Robert J.
Begiebing, ‘The Mythic Hero in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine’, Essays in Literature
11:2 (1984), 201–10; John Batchelor, H. G. Wells, Cambridge 1985, p. 1ff. For a review
of criticism, see Martin T. Willis, ‘Edison as Time Traveler: H. G. Wells’s Inspiration
for His First Scientific Character’, Science-Fiction Studies 26:2 (1999), pp. 284–94:
pp. 284–5.
12 For studies of scientific topics in Wells’s early fiction, see Roslynn D. Haynes, H. G.

Wells: Discoverer of the Future, The Influence of Science on His Thought, London 1980;
Steven McLean, The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells: Fantasies of Science, Basingstoke
2009.
6
Yet even that controversy was not fought out in the stark terms of
mutual exclusion, revealing a complex history to the relationship between
science, society, and the world of letters. The nineteenth century saw a
looser connection between the main branches of the life sciences than
twentieth-century developments might suggest. ‘Biology’ first emerged in
the years around 1800 as a designation of the study of human life, but in
English it was only in the 1850s that its modern meaning started to enter
into general currency.14 The term covered two broadly different discipli-
nary orientations: physiology, bacteriology, cell biology, and neurology
focused on forms and functions, and fed into modern cultures of experi-
mentalism; whereas theories of evolution came to deal with questions of
organic transformation over unimaginable stretches of time.15 The sociolo-
gists Auguste Comte (1798–1857) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) saw
a deep interdependence between these perspectives. Haeckel’s biogenetic
law, which stated the single organism’s recapitulation of every stage of its
species’ evolution, came to the fore in Spencer’s The Principles of Sociology
(1876). On that basis, in 1882 he would argue that ‘the law of organic
progress is the law of all progress’, resulting in the evolution ‘of the simple
into the complex, through the process of continuous differentiation’ in
both the natural world and human society.16 As Anne-Julia Zwierlein has
noted, Comte’s and Spencer’s theories of organicism – and most notably
Spencer’s theory of the ‘Social Organism’ – highlighted the ramifying affini-
ties between biological forms on the one hand, and the configurations of
the late Victorian ‘social body’ on the other. In contrast to a more recent
sense of incompatible cultures, the biological sciences and the humanities
still largely spoke a shared language.17
14 See here Peter Morton, The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination,

1860–1900, London 1984, pp. 12–13
15 For an excellent account of these distinctions, see Anne-Julia Zwierlein, ‘Unmapped

Countries: Biology, Literature and Culture in the Nineteenth Century’, in Zwierlein
(ed.), Unmapped Countries: Biological Visions in Nineteenth-Century Literature and
Culture, London 2005, pp. 1–12: pp. 2–3.
16 Herbert Spencer, ‘Progress: Its Law and Cause’, Humboldt Library of Popular Science

Literature 17:2 (1882), p. 234. See here also Lightman and Zon, ‘Introduction’, p. 3.
17 See here Zwierlein, ‘Unmapped Countries’, p. 4; cf. p. 1.

68 Anahita Rouyan

his career as a science journalist at a time when the periodical press served
as a significant, if not the primary, medium for disseminating scientific
knowledge, chosen by major scientific figures as their preferred commu-
nication platform.16 While developing the narrative of The Time Machine,
first serialized in the National Observer and later in the New Review, Wells
published a considerable number of press articles and consequently gained
an in-depth understanding of editorship and its role in the construction
of science popularization accounts.
Wells’s formative period in London furnished him with experiences
that shaped his views about the value of science popularization for British
society. His scientific outlook crystallized during the first years of his schol-
arship in London, studying at the Normal School of Science in South
Kensington under Thomas Henry Huxley, whom he considered ‘the acut-
est observer, the ablest generalizer, the great teacher, the most lucid and
valiant of controversialists’.17 Recalling the first year at the Normal School
in his autobiography, Wells represented this period as a point of departure
for his later career:
James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and

Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Chicago, IL 2000;
Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New
Audiences, Chicago, IL 2007; Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman (eds), Science in the
Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences, Chicago, IL 2007. Science
professionalization is examined by Richard Yeo in Defining Science: William Whewell,
Natural Knowledge and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain, Cambridge 2003.
16 Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth, ‘Introduction’, in Geoffrey Cantor and Sally

Shuttleworth (eds), Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth
Century Periodicals, Cambridge, MA 2004, pp. 1–15: pp. 2–7. The role of periodical
press in science popularization is examined in Geoffrey Cantor et al. (eds), Science
in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature, Cambridge
2004.
17 Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, p. 160. For scholarship on Huxley’s populari-

zation activities, see Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science, p. 353ff.; Adrian
J. Desmond, Huxley: The Devil’s Disciple, London 1994; J. Vernon Jensen, Thomas
Henry Huxley: Communicating for Science, London 1991.

That year I spent in Huxley’s class was beyond all question, the most educational year
of my life. It left me under that urgency for coherence and consistency, that repug-
nance from haphazard assumptions and arbitrary statements, which is the essential
distinction of the educated from the uneducated mind.18
Anne DeWitt notes that Wells was an inheritor of the ‘dual legacy of sci-
entific naturalism’, where science represented not only a profession, but a
philosophy – acknowledged by Wells himself as a specific ‘vision of life’.19
Following that first year of study, Wells became deeply disillusioned with
British science education, a sentiment only strengthened by his subsequent
occupation as a science teacher at a variety of educational institutions.20
Journalism opened the door to a career which allowed him to extend the
scope of his educational activities and take the science popularization
scene by storm.
That Wells was deeply involved with the topic of public scientific edu-
cation is evident in his early pedagogic and journalistic works. Between
April 1894 and August 1895, he produced a biology textbook and wrote
numerous essays devoted to subjects ranging from scientific education to
popularization.21 In 1894 alone, he dedicated three articles to the former
18 Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, p. 161.

19 Anne DeWitt, Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel, Cambridge

2013, p. 168; Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, p. 164.
20 For instance, he accused institutions of producing a ‘swarm of mechanical, electrical

and chemical business smarties, guaranteed to have no capacity for social leadership,
constructive combination or original thought’ (Wells, Experiment in Autobiography,
p. 169). Wells also noted that graduates of English educational institutions were
‘grossly ignorant of physical science, history or economics […] and with just enough
consciousness of their deficiencies to make them suspicious of, and hostile to, intel-
lectual ability and equipment’ (Experiment in Autobiography, p. 265).
21 The full list of relevant articles published in this period includes: ‘Flat Earth Again’

(Pall Mall Gazette 58, 2 April 1894); ‘Popularising Science’ (Nature 50:1291, 26 July
1894); ‘Science, in School and After School’ (Nature 50:1300, 27 September 1894);
‘Peculiarities of Psychical Research’ (Nature 51:1310, 6 December 1894); ‘The Sins
of the Secondary Schoolmaster’ (Pall Mall Gazette 59, 15 December 1894); ‘The
Sequence of Studies’ (Nature 51:1313, 27 December 1894); and ‘Bio-Optimism’
(Nature 52:1348, 29 August 1895). Selections of these early articles have been reprinted
70 Anahita Rouyan

issue and did not shy away from expressing his dissatisfaction with ‘a funda-
mentally faulty system of scientific education’ in other formats, for instance
in a lecture entitled ‘Science Teaching – an Ideal, and some Realities’ deliv-
ered before the Royal College of Preceptors at the end of 1894.22 Wells
found disseminating scientific knowledge to non-specialist audiences just
as challenging as had his mentor, Thomas Henry Huxley, almost forty
years previously. Contrary to Huxley, Wells did not need to negotiate the
social boundary between scientific practitioner and mere popularizer, but
he shared with his mentor a preoccupation with controlling public percep-
tions of science.23 In an article entitled ‘Popularising Science’ published
in an 1894 edition of Nature, Wells presented a critique of contemporary
modalities of science popularization, stating how ‘a considerable propor-
tion of the science of our magazines, school text-books, and books for the
general reader, is the mere obvious tinctured by inaccurate compilation’.24
Wells condemned as inadequate what he believed to be two prevailing
popularization models followed by professional scientists, proposing a novel
strategy based on inductive reasoning. ‘Intelligent common people’, argued
Wells, ‘come to scientific books neither for humour, subtlety of style, nor
for vulgar wonders of the “millions and millions and millions” type, but
for problems to exercise their minds upon’.25 Pointing to detective fiction
authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, Wells suggested
that the popularity of their works demonstrated that ‘the public delights
in the ingenious unravelling of evidence’.26
in Philmus and Hughes, H. G. Wells, and John S. Partington (ed.), H. G. Wells in
Nature, 1893–1946: A Reception Reader, Frankfurt am Main 2008.
22 Herbert George Wells, ‘The Sequence of Studies’, in Partington, H. G. Wells in Nature,

pp. 59–62: p. 59. The lecture was later printed as ‘Science Teaching – an Ideal, and
some Realities’, Educational Times, 1 January 1895, pp. 23–9.
23 For Huxley’s approach to science popularization, see Lightman, Victorian Popularizers,

pp. 353–97.
24 Herbert George Wells, ‘Popularising Science’, in Partington, H. G. Wells in Nature,

pp. 21–6: p. 21.
25 Ibid. p. 24.

26 Ibid.


David Hughes and Robert Philmus note that Wells’s model of com-
municating scientific knowledge finds a parallel in the narrative structure
of his early scientific romances, but the implications of this suggestion for
the text of The Time Machine remain unexplored.27 As the Time Traveller
observes what he believes to be the future descendants of humankind and
produces several hypotheses formulated on the basis of highly limited
evidence, his line of reasoning clearly follows the logic of Wells’s rule for
science popularization: ‘First the problem, then the gradual piecing together
of the solution.’28 Wells exploited this model of inductive reasoning in the
Traveller’s narrative to expose the fallacy behind late Victorian cultural and
political interpretations of the evolutionary theory.
The Time Traveller’s evolutionary imagination
In his autobiography, Wells remarked that the last two decades of the nine-
teenth century had witnessed a rise of public interest in Charles Darwin’s
theory of evolution, which ‘remained […] a field for almost irresponsi-
ble speculation’.29 Evolution served as a significant source of inspiration
for Wells, a theory he employed with equal passion in his literary and
27 See David Y. Hughes and Robert M. Philmus, ‘The Early Science Journalism of H. G.

Wells: A Chronological Survey’, Science-Fiction Studies 1:2 (1973), pp. 98–114: p. 100.
28 Wells, ‘Popularising Science’, p. 24. For a close reading of the Time Traveller’s reason-

ing process, see Michael R. Page, The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to
H. G. Wells: Science, Evolution and Ecology, Farnham, UK 2012, pp. 157–70.
29 Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, p. 161. Wells’s reflection echoed Huxley’s contem-

porary assessment captured in the prologue to his 1892 collection of essays published
in periodicals such as Fortnightly Review and Nineteenth Century, where he stated
that ‘so many strange misconceptions are current about this doctrine – it is attacked
on such false grounds by its enemies, and made to cover so much that is disputable
by some of its friends’: see Thomas Henry Huxley, Essays Upon Some Controverted
Questions, London 1892, p. 37.
72 Anahita Rouyan

journalistic writings.30 A fundamental misrepresentation present in the
reception of the evolutionary theory examined by Wells was the under-
standing of evolution as a necessarily progressive process. That entanglement
of evolution and progress had powered the sensational account of Vestiges
of the Natural History of Creation, which captured the Victorian imagina-
tion for the better part of the century.31 In an article entitled ‘Zoological
Retrogression’, Wells complained that the educated audience
has decided that in the past the great scroll of nature has been steadily unfolding to
reveal a constantly richer harmony of forms and successively higher grades of being,
and that it assumes that ‘evolution’ will continue under the supervision of its extreme
expression – man.32
The article offered Wells’s most spirited attack on what he called ‘Excelsior’
view of biology, ‘a popular and poetic creation’ expressing ‘that inevitable
tendency to higher and better things with which the word “evolution”
is popularly associated’.33 Wells alluded to this view throughout his early
journalistic writings. In ‘The Man of the Year Million’ he quoted from an
imagined volume: ‘Evolution is no mechanical tendency making for perfec-
tion according to the ideas current in the year of grace 1892.’34 He later sati-
rized the progressive view of evolution in ‘Concerning the Nose’, imagining
how ‘[o]ne may conceive “advanced” noses, inspired with an evolutionary
striving towards something higher, remoter, better – we know not what’.35
Wells paired this critique with a reflection on the anthropocentrism
inherent in narratives of natural progress that often followed the logic of
the Great Chain of Being, imagined as ordering the animal kingdom in
30 W. Warren Wagar, ‘Wells’s Scientific Imagination’, in Harold Bloom, H. G. Wells,

pp. 1–9: p. 2.
31 See Secord, Victorian Sensation, pp. 11–17.

32 Herbert George Wells, ‘Zoological Retrogression’, in Philmus and Hughes, H. G.

Wells, pp. 158–68: p. 158.
33 Ibid. p. 159.

34 Herbert George Wells, ‘The Man of the Year Million’, Pall Mall Gazette, 6 November

1893, p. 3.
35 Herbert George Wells, ‘Concerning the Nose’, The Ludgate, l April 1896, pp. 678–81.


the younger Darwin’s considerable repertoire of reading, from Shakespeare
and Milton to Wordsworth and Byron; Beer also sounded out the deep
poetic and metaphorical resonances in the gestating versions of the Origin,
not to mention the potential for (mis)interpretation.26 Darwin’s world was
one in which natural theology still shaped the concepts of natural history,
and from within that world he was eking out a precise yet adaptable lan-
guage to describe not a teleological sense of purpose, but an ‘uncontrolla-
ble welter of [evolutionary] possibilities’.27 Following in a similar vein, the
volume Science, Literature, and the Darwin Legacy (2010) underlined the
interconnections of genre and form between literary and biological writing
in nineteenth-century culture.28 Subsequent collaborations have adopted
a range of approaches to the ‘Darwin Legacy’ in literary cultures. Darwin
in Atlantic Cultures (2010) explicitly followed Foucault in reconstructing a
‘Darwinist episteme’ around a group of thematic areas, including gender and
sexuality, race, and colonization and ‘progress’.29 In an ambit that reaches
right up to the present day, The Evolution of Literature: Legacies of Darwin in
European Cultures (2011) moves beyond conventional questions of histori-
cal reception in a bracing yet (admittedly) elusive search for ‘an authenti-
cally Darwinist, evolutionary aesthetic’.30 Returning to a more contextual
approach, The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe
26 Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and

Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 3rd edn, Cambridge 2009, pp. 26–44, 45–52. See espe-
cially pp. 26–8 for a detailed exposition of Darwin’s range of reading.
27 Beer, Darwin’s Plots, p. xviii.

28 See Paul White, ‘Introduction’, in White (ed.), Science, Literature, and the Darwin

Legacy. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 11 (2010), pp. 1–7:
pp. 2–5.
29 See Jeannette Eileen Jones and Patrick B. Sharp (eds), Darwin in Atlantic Cultures:

Evolutionary Visions of Race, Gender, and Sexuality, London 2010. Cf. Zwierlein
(ed.), Unmapped Countries, which investigated the cultural resonances of a range of
nineteenth-century scientific disciplines, from parasitology to anthropology.
30 Nicholas Saul and Simon J. James, ‘Introduction: The Evolution of Literature’, in

Saul and James (eds), The Evolution of Literature: Legacies of Darwin in European
Culture, Amsterdam 2011, pp. 9–18: p. 15; see also pp. 10–11. Cf. Joseph Carroll,
Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature, New York 2004.
74 Anahita Rouyan

to the future civilization as ‘an old-world savage animal’.40 The tension
between the expectation of progress and fear of degeneration is temporar-
ily resolved upon the first encounter with the inhabitants of the future.
Depicting the Eloi within the framework of the Victorian race discourse as
childlike and ‘indescribably frail’, the Traveller regains his confidence and
asserts his physical superiority in the vein of that ‘savage animal’ he previ-
ously envisioned himself to be: ‘I could fancy myself flinging the whole
dozen of them about like ninepins.’41
As soon as the Traveller notes that the frail bodies of the Eloi do not
house a remarkable intelligence, he ceases to hide his disregard for the
species, exclaiming how they seem ‘to be on the intellectual level of one
of our five-year-old children’.42 Observing physical resemblances between
male and female Eloi, conveyed as ‘the same girlish rotundity of limb’,43
the Time Traveller emphasizes his superiority to ‘this fragile thing out of
futurity’,44 exhibiting a mindset worthy of a British Empire colonialist.
While the Eloi are granted a degree of humanity, Morlocks are nothing
but ‘queer little ape-like figure[s]’, ‘human spider[s]’, ‘Lemurs’, ‘vermin’, or
‘brutes’, the latter a common contemporary term for describing organ-
isms located lower on the evolutionary scale.45 Evaluating his status in the
future society composed of two humanoid species, the Traveller constantly
refers to the ascending scale of animal kingdom as his organizing metaphor
and foundation for inferences about the prevailing social order amongst
the Eloi and Morlocks. His narrative is informed by an anthropocentric
view on evolution where the Victorian white gentleman figures as its most
sophisticated product. Exploring the future reality and discovering new
40 Ibid.

41 Ibid. pp. 48–53. For an examination of late Victorian scientific concept of race, see

John S. Haller, Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority,
1859–1900, Carbondale, IL 1971.

43 Ibid. p. 66.

44 Ibid. p. 52. For a reflection on the loss of ‘manliness’ exhibited by the Eloi, see Kelly

Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration in the Fin de Siècle,
Cambridge 1996, pp. 82–5.
45 Wells, The Time Machine, pp. 108–9, 119, 160.


facts about the relationship between the two species, he is forced to ques-
tion his previous assumptions and consequently suffers from a condition
Patrick Parrinder aptly calls ‘a sense of dethronement’.46 Nevertheless, the
scientist strives to maintain his superior status, convinced of his belonging
to the Victorian society which, as he believes, represents ‘the ripe prime
of the human race’.47
Wells problematized the Time Traveller’s superiority on numerous
occasions by exploiting the tension between human reason and animal
instinct, a common trope in late Victorian fiction and of particular impor-
tance to the author’s own The Island of Dr. Moreau, published less than a
year after The Time Machine. Wells had challenged the Traveller’s human-
ity in an episode which appeared exclusively in the New Review serializa-
tion of the narrative. Entitled ‘The Further Vision’, the chapter presented
the Traveller as a caricature of a Victorian amateur naturalist as he kills
a creature, a ‘grey animal or grey man, whichever it was’, in an effort to
acquire a specimen for his collection. As he proceeds with an anatomical
examination in search for human characteristics, he feels ‘disagreeable
apprehension’ at the thought of this humanoid species having descended
from the Victorians.48 For Kathryn Hume, the episode signals the anthro-
pocentric disposition of the Traveller who ‘cherishes himself for being
the only “real” human and therefore the only creature with rights’.49 The
American and British editions of The Time Machine include an episode
which questions the emotional detachment that Wells considered to be
part of scientific inquiry. The scene brought up by Zangwill in his review
of The Time Machine sees the scientist facing the disappearance of his
invention and experiencing an ‘anguish of mind’.50 This is also when the
46 Patrick Parrinder, Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy,

Syracuse, NY 1995, p. 49.

48 Herbert George Wells, ‘The Further Vision’, in Philmus and Hughes, H. G. Wells,

pp. 96–104: pp. 97–8.
49 Kathryn Hume, ‘Eat or Be Eaten: H. G. Wells’s Time Machine’, in Harold Bloom

(ed.), H. G. Wells, pp. 35–51: p. 37.


concepts in the social sciences, and literary and visual-aesthetic repre-
sentations.34 In that direction, the German-speaking world, in particular,
has recently played host to new developments in the so-called ‘poetol-
ogy of knowledge’ and ‘literary anthropology’.35 Building upon Foucault’s
archaeologies of knowledge, the former highlights the senses in which the
‘objects’ of knowledge are constituted through rhetorical, performative,
and literary strategies. Literary anthropology has taken a more explicitly
existential approach to the ways in which twentieth-century literature has
shaped forms of knowledge about our hybrid existences in the discursive
spaces between biology, psychology, and sociology – knowledge that might
transcend the explanative limitations of the natural sciences.36
We draw upon aspects of these trends; but like a collection of con-
nected case-studies, our close readings aim to let authors and texts reveal
their sui generis engagements with scientific ideas, rather than filtering
them through a single set of presuppositions about ‘the way’ in which
biology related to literature. The ‘discourses’ of our title bring into play
a terminology that reaches back to Foucault’s famous treatment of the
concept in Les mots et les choses (The Order of Things, 1966); and this col-
lection relates to that work’s ‘archaeological’ attempt to situate the modern
notion of humanity, from the nineteenth century onwards, at a point of
conjunction between biological, socio-economic, and philological thought.
But we also go beyond Foucault’s specific sense of an ‘épistémè’ as the uni-
fied and unifying a priori that is the defining condition for the horizon
34 Thomas Rütten and Martina King (eds), Contagionism and Contagious Diseases:

35 See here Albrecht Koschorke, Körperströme und Schriftverkehr: Mediologie des

18. Jahrhunderts, Munich 1999; and Joseph Vogl (ed.), Poetologien des Wissens um
1800, Munich 1999. ‘Literary anthropology’ can be traced back to the debate between
Mittelstraß and Gaier.
36 See, for example, Armin Schäfer, ‘Poetologie des Wissens’, in Roland Borgards, Harald

Neumeyer, Nicolas Pethes, and Yvonne Wübben (eds), Literatur und Wissen: Ein
interdisziplinäres Handbuch, Stuttgart 2013, pp. 36–40; and Wolfgang Riedel, Nach
der Achsendrehung: Literarische Anthropologie im 20. Jahrhundert, Würzburg 2014,
especially pp. iv–xxv.

The Time Machine: A degenerationist romance?
The last decades of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a concept
which challenged the progressive view of evolution and its accompanying
sense of ‘cosmic optimism’. Famously articulated during the last decade of
the nineteenth century by a German physician, Max Nordau, the notion
of degeneration had woven itself into scientific and cultural discourses of
the Victorian period. Notably, the English translation of Degeneration
was published in 1895, the same year as The Time Machine.55 Daniel Pick
remarked that for the Victorians, degeneration was ‘more than simply an
instrument of […] sciences’, or a theory circulating among select social
groups. ‘[I]t could not easily be put back or abandoned even in the face
of specific, powerful technical critiques, precisely because it remained for
so many commentators an assumed common sense, an inevitable home
truth’.56 In the context of the Victorian utopian imagination, degeneration
inspired a new metaphor of humanity’s progress as a parabola. Frank Hill
Perry Coste captured the complexity of this novel conceptualization of pro-
gress in a theoretical work published just a year before The Time Machine,
where he constructed the following vision of evolution: ‘Humanity’s per-
fection will prove to be only the halting halfway-house whence are beheld
in retrospect primeval barbarism, and in prospect terminal barbarism’. He
continued: ‘To use a favourite expression – Huxley’s simile – existence is a
double cone’,57 suggesting that living organisms emerge from a multitude
55 For studies on degeneration in British culture and literature, see William Greenslade,

Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1940, Cambridge 1994; Kelly Hurley,
The Gothic Body; Marja Härmänmaa and Christopher Nissen (eds), Decadence,
Degeneration and the End: Studies in the European Fin de Siècle, New York 2014.
The most comprehensive study of Wells’s position in fin-de-siècle culture remains
Bernard Bergonzi, The Early H. G. Wells, pp. 1–22.
56 Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–1918, Cambridge

1989, p. 203.
57 Frank Hill Perry Coste, Towards Utopia: Being Speculations in Social Evolution,

New York 1894, p. 3. Huxley did use the expression ‘double cone’ when referring
to cellular division: see Thomas Henry Huxley, The Crayfish: An Introduction to
78 Anahita Rouyan

of possibilities and generate an equally vast number of possible future
developments. When discussing Wells’s take on degeneration, scholars
point to Edwin Ray Lankester’s influential 1880 study, perhaps overlook-
ing the fact that Wells’s views on degeneration differed from those of his
instructor and later friend.58
In his work, Lankester remarked upon the popular misinterpretations
of Darwin’s theory of evolution, only to commit a similar error himself
when comparing evolution to the development of human societies.59 He
defined degeneration as ‘a loss of organization making the descendant far
simpler or lower in structure than its ancestor’ and ‘a gradual change of
the structure in which the organism becomes adapted to less varied and
less complex conditions of life’.60 His terminology clearly suggests that he
endorsed the progressive view of evolution. Lankester ended his study on
an optimistic note, suggesting that since for ‘us’, Western societies, ‘it is
possible to ascertain what will conduce to our higher development [and]
what will favour our degeneration’ by means of scientific inquiry, thus ‘it
is possible for us to control our destinies’.61 He concluded: ‘The full and
earnest cultivation of Science […] is that to which we have to look for the
protection of our race – even of this English branch of it – from relapse
and degeneration.’62 Even if a modicum of a similar hope guided Wells
in his understanding of the role science played in social development, he
the Study of Zoology, London 1880, pp. 200–1. To my knowledge, the only relevant
simile describes life following the trajectory of a ball fired from a mortar: see Thomas
Henry Huxley, ‘The Struggle for Existence in Human Society’, in Huxley, Collected
Essays, vol. 9, New York 1911, pp. 195–236: p. 199. I would be grateful for suggestions
regarding the source of Perry Coste’s quotation.
58 Richard Barnett, ‘Education or Degeneration: E. Ray Lankester, H. G. Wells and The

Outline of History’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical
Sciences 37 (2006), pp. 203–29: p. 212.
59 Edwin Ray Lankester, Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism, London 1880,

pp. 58–62.
60 Ibid. pp. 30–2. Emphasis in the original.

61 Ibid. p. 61.

62 Ibid. p. 62.


rejected Lankester’s model of socio-biological degeneration in favour of
Huxley’s interpretation of the process.
In The Time Machine, Wells created a protagonist and narrator whose
entire reasoning is founded on the tension between the dream of evolu-
tionary perfection and the nightmare of degeneration, captured in the
entropic metaphor of ‘the sunset of mankind’.63 The Time Traveller states
that absence of environmental limitation produces ‘[a]n animal perfectly
in harmony with its environment […] a perfect mechanism’, almost quot-
ing verbatim another Victorian cultural appropriation of the evolutionary
theory, the view of degeneration articulated by Samuel Butler in his uto-
pian novel of 1872, Erewhon.64 The Traveller’s narrative of degeneration is
shaped by his readings of texts ranging from 1870s utopian fiction and the
social investigations of Charles Booth to the discourse of the ‘Population
Question’.65 He initially presents the social organism of the future as struck
with degeneration deriving from the ‘subjugation of Nature’66 and the
consequent security granted by human civilization, represented as ‘an odd

64 Ibid. p. 187. I am referring to the following fragment from Samuel Butler’s Erewhon:

‘[The writer] feared that the removal of the present pressure might cause a degeneracy
of the human race, and indeed that the whole body might become purely rudimentary,
the man himself being nothing but soul and mechanism [the later edition reads: an
intelligent but passionless principle of mechanical action]’ (Samuel Butler, Erewhon,
pp. 221–2).
65 The Population Question was a late Victorian current of thought advertising

modern methods of birth control as the answer to social ills, initiated by Annie
Besant and Charles Bradlaugh’s provocative reprint of a birth control handbook,
Charles Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy (1832). Early in the text, the Time Traveller
presents a Malthusian vision of a world ‘where population is balanced and abundant,
[where] much childbearing becomes an evil rather than a blessing to the State’ and
‘the specialization of the sexes’ is no longer required for the development of society
(Wells, The Time Machine, p. 67). In a later reflection, he again brings up a Malthusian
theme when examining the future society of the Eloi and Morlocks: ‘Possibly the
checks they had devised for the increase of population had succeeded too well, and
their numbers had rather diminished than kept stationary’ (ibid. pp. 76–7).

80 Anahita Rouyan

consequence of the social effort in which we are at present engaged’.67 The
Traveller’s hypothesis of degeneration is based on a belief in the regulatory
mechanism of natural selection, creating ‘conditions under which the active,
strong, and subtle survive and the weaker go to the wall’.68 It is certain that
Wells supported the view that environmental security led to biological
degeneration. In 1895, he presented it to Huxley as the central theme of
his romance.69 However, Wells’s notion of degeneration represents a vari-
ant of evolutionary adaptation rather than descent on the ‘scala naturae’ of
the animal kingdom; a decline understood in moral terms emerging from
the entanglement of the concept of ‘scale’ with the theological concept of
the Great Chain of Being. But observing the relations between the Eloi
and Morlocks, the Traveller adjusts his theory of degeneration, this time
proposing the reality of the future to be the result of Victorian capitalist
relations of production. This hypothesis clearly suggests that his logic of
degeneration is based on an assumption that the Eloi and Morlocks had
descended from human species. The ruins of human civilization, the pres-
ence of cultural artefacts, or the engineering expertise of Morlocks, provide
enough proof for the Traveller, who never considers an alternative explana-
tion of the origin of the two humanoid species.
The anthropocentric perspective of the Time Traveller clearly resonates
with his audience, reiterating Wells’s motivation for assuming a cautionary
approach towards the capacity of cultural narratives for appropriating and
reshaping biological discourses in directions which he deemed ‘unscientific’.
Indeed, this perspective stands in stark contrast to the viewpoint reflected
in Wells’s journalistic pieces, where he repeatedly entertained a vision of
precarious humanity which will either lead itself to extinction or fall prey
to a better-adapted product of evolution, something he described as ‘the
67 Ibid. p. 70.

68 Ibid. p. 73.

69 Wells sent a copy of the text to Huxley together with a covering letter which sug-

gested the central idea of the work to be ‘degeneration following security’: see here
Harry M. Geduld, The Definitive Time Machine: A Critical Edition of H. G. Wells’s
Scientific Romance, Bloomington, IN 1987, p. 5.

Coming Beast’.70 Familiar with the many late Victorian literary utopias,
Wells had been aware of the contemporary tendency to imagine the future
exclusively in terms of humanity’s development and achievement – in ‘On
Extinction’, he wrote that ‘[w]e think always with reference to man. The
future is full of men to our preconceptions, whatever it may be in scientific
truth’.71 For Wells, degeneration provided a challenge to the widespread
belief in evolutionary progressivism, an antidote to the ‘Excelsior’ view of
biology. Rather than serving as ‘an exemplary “blue-print” of degeneration-
ist concerns’,72 The Time Machine emerges as a text which contrasts Wells’s
vision of science popularization with contemporary public discourses of
evolution, exposing the Time Traveller’s narrative to be a product of popular
strategies for representing the evolutionary theory during the final decades
of the nineteenth century. The scientific method of observation, interpre-
tation, and generalization employed by the Traveller to explain the socio-
biological order of the future is informed by widespread misinterpretations
of the evolutionary theory. Described as ‘one of our most conspicuous
investigators in molecular physics’, the Traveller may be expected to rely
on ‘that urgency for coherence and consistency’ which Wells considered
paramount to scientific inquiry.73 And yet, what he produces are precisely
‘haphazard assumptions and arbitrary statements’, founded on partial evi-
dence and fuelled by misrepresentations of scientific knowledge.74
Writing about Wells’s third scientific romance, The War of the Worlds,
a reviewer from Nature described Wells as a novelist who ‘was not only
familiar with scientific facts, but who knew them intimately enough to
70 This theme in Wells’s non-fiction writings is examined in Philmus and Hughes, H. G.

Wells, pp. 148–52.
71 Herbert George Wells, ‘On Extinction’, in Philmus and Hughes, H. G. Wells, pp. 169–

72: p. 171.
72 Pick, Faces of Degeneration, p. 157. On Victorian fears of degeneration more generally,

see Edward J. Chamberlain and Sander L. Gilman (eds), Degeneration: The Dark Side
of Progress, New York 1985; and Pick, Faces of Degeneration.
73 Ibid. p. 1; Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, p. 161.

74 Ibid. p. 161.

82 Anahita Rouyan

present a view of the future’.75 During the last decade of the nineteenth
century, Wells had been just as concerned with the future of humanity
as with its present, in particular the contemporary modalities of science
popularization and education. At an early stage in his career, Wells placed
an emphasis on communication in scientific training, viewing it as ‘a train-
ing in babbling, in blurting things out, in telling just as plainly as possible
and as soon as possible what it is [that the scientist] has found’.76 Wells’s
concern about the scientific education of the general public, evident in his
early journalistic and literary work, would gradually lead him to assume the
role of Britain’s primary public educator at the dawn of the new century.
Interestingly, Wells’s protagonist and narrator does not concern himself
exclusively with the future, either. The Time Traveller seems to be well
aware of the conventions governing the genre of his story. He first criticizes
the unrealistic tendency of Victorian utopian fiction to provide detailed
descriptions of utopian realities, but more importantly, he reflects on his
own tendency to project Victorian social and cultural norms onto the future
reality: ‘And it was natural to assume that it was in the underworld that
the necessary work of the overworld was performed. This was so plausible
that I accepted it unhesitatingly.’77 Wells’s pessimistic outlook on the state
of public knowledge about science and his constant effort to educate non-
specialist audiences suggest that what he held responsible for limiting the
imagination of the Victorians was the circulation of inaccurate scientific
interpretations: a dissemination of discourses which fuelled the tension
between the progressive view of human evolution and its potential degen-
eration. The conflict rendered alternative futures invisible to a society where
cultural authority for communicating scientific knowledge belonged to
figures who did not shy away from adding a ring of sensationalism to their
accounts of science, consequently perpetuating scientific misinformation
in the style of The Time Machine’s narrator.
75 Richard Gregory, ‘Science in Fiction’, in Parrinder, H. G. Wells in Nature, pp. 179–81:

p. 179.
76 Herbert George Wells, New Worlds for Old, in W. Warren Wagar (ed.), H. G. Wells:

Journalism and Prophecy 1893–1946, Boston, MA 1964.
77 Wells, The Time Machine, pp. 95–6, 113.


Wells launched his career as both a science popularizer and a writer of
fiction, acutely aware of the role storytelling played in the dissemination of
contemporary evolutionary discourses. As I hope to have shown, The Time
Machine reflects Wells’s dual preoccupation through the characterization
of the Time Traveller. Turning to literature as a means for communicating
the intricate relationship between science and society, however, he did not
dismiss storytelling itself as a dangerous practice that might distort legiti-
mate scientific discourses. In his later career as an educator and popularizer,
indeed, he would repeatedly employ literary narratives to express his views
about the role of science in the context of a mass democracy, acknowledging
the value of the discursive space offered by literature for critical engagement
with scientific discourses circulating among the British public. The Time
Machine’s particular construction as a nested narrative – as the Traveller’s
story is situated in the story of a different narrator – allowed Wells to open
up a space for critical reflection on the authoritative status of scientists as
communicators of expert knowledge in Victorian society.
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3 Jules Soury and Paul Bourget, or the Influence

of Haeckelian Biology on Fin-de-Siècle French
Literature
abstract
This chapter aims to show how Haeckel’s monism influenced the French scholar Jules Soury,
who used the Haeckelian take on Darwinism to fuel his racial and anti-Semitic ideology,
and who, in turn, influenced French literary culture through Paul Bourget’s novels and
essays. It thus intends to shed light on the propagation of the biological discourses from the
scientific field to the cultural field as well as from Germany to France, but also to illustrate
the intricate relationship between literary and biological discourses.
This chapter proposes to analyse the biological theories of Jules Soury

(1842–1915), a scholar who specialized in the history of religions and neu-
ropsychology, who was well known for his anti-Semitism, and who had a
significant impact on French literature around 1900. To this end, I shall first
present Soury’s life and his work’s main characteristics, before examining
his intellectual relationship with Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919). This will shed
light on the elaboration of biological science in a European context, and
specifically of the elaboration of the concept of race. Finally, I shall argue
that Soury’s work, though sometimes abstruse, and always rather extreme,
has considerably influenced French writers – most notably, the likes of Paul
Bourget (1852–1935) and Maurice Barrès (1862–1923). For reasons of space,
this chapter will focus on Paul Bourget’s novels and essays.
88 Pauline Moret-Jankus

Jules-Auguste Soury
In his recent bibliography of the political right in France, Alain de Benoist

writes that, to date, no detailed research has been dedicated to Jules Soury’s
work.1 De Benoist does cite articles by Toby Gelfand and Pierre Huard,2
and valuable analyses have also been contributed by Pierre-André Taguieff,
Sandrine Schiano-Bennis, and Daniel Gasman,3 but his claim remains to
some extent justified: the reception of Soury by French literary circles, in
particular, has not been thoroughly studied.4 It also shows how forgotten
this figure has now become.
Soury’s social climbing is a legend of its own and one which he never
hesitated to cultivate.5 Born in May 1842 to a poor Parisian family – his
1 Alain de Benoist, ‘Jules Soury’, in Bibliographie générale des droites françaises, IV, Paris

2005, p. 401. Unless otherwise stated, all translations in this chapter are mine. I am
indebted to Julia C. Hartley for her kind help in reviewing my English.
2 Toby Gelfand, ‘From Religious to Bio-Medical Anti-Semitism: The Career of Jules

Soury’, in Ann La Berge and Mordechai Feingold (eds), French Medical Culture in the
Nineteenth Century, Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA 1994, pp. 248–79; Pierre Huard
and M.-J. Imbault-Huard, ‘Jules Soury 1842–1915’, Revue d’histoire des sciences et de
leurs applications 23:2 (1970), pp. 155–64.
3 Pierre-André Taguieff, ‘Soury, Jules, 1842–1915’, in Pierre-André Taguieff (ed.),

Dictionnaire historique et critique du racisme, Paris 2013, pp. 1715–30; Pierre-André
Taguieff, La Couleur et le Sang: Doctrines racistes à la française, new edn, Paris 2002,
pp. 150–97; Sandrine Schiano-Bennis, ‘Jules Soury: Le drame moderne de la connais-
sance’, in Jean-Claude Pont, Laurent Freland, Flavia Padovani, and Lilia Slavinskaia
(eds), Pour comprendre le xixe siècle: Histoire et philosophie des sciences à la fin du siècle,
Florence 2007, pp. 511–29; Daniel Gasman, Haeckel’s Monism and the Birth of Fascist
Ideology, New York 1998.
4 Zeev Sternhell has examined the links between Soury and Barrès, a point to which

I shall return later.
5 See the autobiographical text Ma Vie (My Life) in Jules Soury, Campagne nationaliste,

Paris 1902, pp. 17–71; and the article ‘Soury, Jules-Auguste’ in Claude Augé (ed.),
Le Nouveau Larousse illustré, Paris 1897–1904, VII, p. 770. In a letter to Anatole
France, Soury claims that all facts and dates from this small biography were provided
by himself (letter from 27 October 1891, BnF, Paris, Département des Manuscrits,
NAF 15438, fo 575). In this same private letter, he again tells the story of his life, with
Jules Soury and Paul Bourget, or the Influence of Haeckelian Biology 89

father was a hand-worker and made optical instruments – Soury would have
to work night and day to be able to study. He read Buffon, Voltaire, and
Rousseau. Clever and talented, he earned a diploma of archivist-palaeogra-
pher in 1867, faithfully followed Ernest Renan and Michel Bréal’s lessons,
and broke through all obstacles until he achieved his final accolade: the
award, in 1881, of his own chair at the prestigious École Pratique des Hautes
Études, shortly after having successfully presented his doctoral thesis at the
Sorbonne. Soury’s first books belong to the field of the comparative study
of the history of religions, but he also rapidly developed an interest in more
scientific fields, such as physiological psychology and neuropsychology, of
which he is now regarded as one of the founding fathers.6 His book of 1878,
Jésus et les Évangiles ( Jesus and the Gospels), caused a scandal. In this text,
Soury tried to go even further than Renan and his well-known ‘Jésus, cet
homme admirable’ by applying Moreau de Tours and Lélut’s theories of
genius as a mental illness7 in order to demonstrate that Jesus was nothing
more than a sick man, a victim of some brain disease (meningoencepha-
litis): ‘Jésus fut atteint de cette maladie mentale; il en mourut: voilà tout’
( Jesus suffered from this mental illness; it caused his death: that is all).8
An extreme pessimist, Soury saw the world as a ‘hospice banal’ (dull
almshouse).9 Some private letters also attest to his peculiar personality.
In 1891, he wrote to Anatole France the following lines:
main points, and even whole sentences, that are similar to what will later become
Ma Vie.
6 More specifically, he is recognized as one of the founders of the history of neurol-

ogy. Francis Schiller and Webb Haymaker (eds), The Founders of Neurology, 2nd edn,
Springfield, IL 1970, pp. 573–6; and Pierre Huard and M.-J. Imbault-Huard, ‘Jules
Soury 1842–1915’, pp. 155–6.
7 Jacques Moreau de Tours, La Psychologie morbide dans ses rapports avec la philosophie

de l’histoire, ou de l’influence des névropathies sur le dynamisme intellectuel, Paris 1859.
Louis-Francisque Lélut, in Du démon de Socrate: spécimen d’une application de la sci-
ence psychologique à celle de l’histoire, Paris 1836, tried to demonstrate that Socrates
was a madman.
8 Jules Soury, Jésus et les Évangiles, Paris 1878, p. 18.

9 Soury, Campagne nationaliste, p. 67.


Les opérations sanglantes, même sur cadavre, vous seraient-elles déplaisantes? La
vue et l’odeur du sang déterminent en moi des réactions toutes contraires. L’espèce
d’ivresse qu’elles m’apportent m’est délicieuse. Mes deux ans de clinique chirurgicale
de Saint-Louis m’ont laissé le souvenir des plus violentes voluptés que j’aie éprouvées.10
(Are bloody operations, even on a corpse, unpleasant to you? The sight and smell
of blood have quite the opposite effect on me. The sort of ecstasy they bring me is
delicious. My two years at the clinical surgery of Saint-Louis have left me memories
of the most violent delights I have ever felt.)
A strong advocate of Darwin’s theories, Soury was France’s propagator of

Ernst Haeckel’s evolutionary monism, and therefore one of the French rep-
resentatives of social Darwinism, as Pierre-André Taguieff puts it.11 As a
staunch materialist, he believed that everything could be brought back to
purely anatomical considerations. It was this conviction, as well as a strong
traditionalist stance,12 which brought about a furious racialism and an enraged
anti-Semitism. Thus, as we shall see, for Soury ‘le judaïsme n’est pas un fait
confessionnel, mais un fait de race’ ( Judaism is not a religious fact, but a
racial fact).13 His anti-Dreyfus commitment stemmed logically from such
thoughts. ‘Le Juif Alfred Dreyfus est certainement un traître […], encore
qu[e ce mot] ne signifie guère appliqué à un Étranger, à un être d’une autre
race, d’une autre espèce peut-être, et partant, d’une mentalité différente de
la nôtre’ (The Jew Alfred Dreyfus is certainly a traitor […], although [this
word] has little meaning for a foreigner, a being from another race, from
another species maybe, and therefore, with a mind different from ours).14
10 Letter to Anatole France, 25 October 1891, BnF, Paris, Département des Manuscrits,

NAF 15438, fo 573.
11 Taguieff, ‘Soury, Jules’, p. 1716.

12 Ibid. pp. 1720–1. Toby Gelfand argues that Soury’s anti-Semitism could also have

been the result of a personal rancour regarding his professional ambitions, which led
him to believe in a conspiracy against him instigated by his Jewish and Protestant
colleagues. See Gelfand, ‘From Religious to Bio-Medical Anti-Semitism: The Career
of Jules Soury’, p. 257.

14 Letter from Soury to Louis Havet, 2 May 1902, Bnf, Paris, Département des

Manuscrits, NAF 24506, fo199–200.

Furthermore, Soury claimed to be a ‘clérical athée de tradition catholique’
(an atheist clericalist in the Catholic tradition).15 Although he believed only
in science, he did indeed see himself as the heir of a French Catholic tradition.
But beyond tradition, the source of this paradoxical position can be found in
his adherence to Emil du Bois-Reymond’s ignoramus et ignorabimus (we do
not know and will not know),16 a motto which Soury would keep on repeating
throughout his works, and which he probably came across while translating
Haeckel’s response to the criticisms of Rudolf Virchow, which appeared in
French under the title Les Preuves du transformisme in 1878, and in English
as Freedom in Science and Teaching (1879). Ironically enough, in this book,
Haeckel opposes the ignoramus doctrine because, he explains, professing the
limits of scientific knowledge leaves too much room for a renewed religious
faith.17 And yet it is precisely this contradictory marriage of ‘the oratory and
the laboratory’ which took place in Soury’s thought.18
Promoting German biology in France
Soury translated works by several German biologists: Eduard Oscar

Schmidt (1823–86),19 William Thierry Preyer (1841–97),20 and above
all, Ernst Haeckel. He also wrote a foreword for the translation of Hugo

16 Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Über die Grenzen des Naturerkennens: Die sieben Welträthsel:

Zwei Vorträge [1872], Leipzig 1898, p. 51.
17 Ernst Haeckel, Les Preuves du transformisme: Réponse à Virchow, trans. Jules Soury,

Paris 1878, pp. 119–20.
18 This is an expression taken from Soury’s text entitled ‘Oratoire et laboratoire’, in

Campagne nationaliste, pp. 233–94.
19 Eduard Oscar Schmidt, Les sciences naturelles et la philosophie de l’inconscient, trans.

Jules Soury and Edouard Meyer, foreword by Soury, Paris 1879.
20 Although Preyer was an Englishman, he worked in Germany most of his life – even-

tually holding a chair at Jena. He also wrote in German. William Thierry Preyer,
Éléments de physiologie générale, trans. Jules Soury, Paris 1884.

Magnus’s study on colours.21 However, it is his relationship with Haeckel
which most interests us, for Ernst Haeckel, a professor at the University of
Jena, was widely regarded as Darwin’s German heir,22 fostered psychology
as a branch of physiology, promoted the idea that ontogeny recapitulates
phylogeny (the so-called biogenetic law, which will be discussed in greater
detail below),23 and applied evolutionary theory to men. Daniel Gasman
famously argued that Haeckelian monism was a source of fascism and that
it contributed to a ‘scientific legitimation of Fascist ideology’.24
Jules Soury significantly contributed to promoting Haeckel’s work and
theories in France, mainly through his translations. Thus Freie Wissenschaft
und freie Lehre (1878) became Les Preuves du transformisme (1879); Das
Protistenreich (1878) was turned into Le Règne des protistes (1879); and parts
of the Gesammelte populäre Vorträge aus dem Gebiet der Entwicklungslehre
(1878–9) appeared as Essais de psychologie cellulaire (1880). As a transla-
tor, Soury was sensitive to all aspects of the books. He strived to adapt
21 See Hugo Friedrich Magnus, Histoire de l’évolution du sens des couleurs, foreword by

Jules Soury, Paris 1878.
22 Unlike Darwin, Haeckel proposed clearly and directly that men came from apes.

See, for instance, The Riddle of the Universe [1899], trans. Joseph McCabe, London
1929 (3rd impression, 1934), p. 71.
23 Ontogeny designates the development of the individual; phylogeny, the development

of the species. Haeckel’s idea was that an organism, from embryo to its death, goes
through the same steps and stages as the species itself.
24 Gasman, Haeckel’s Monism, p. vii. This book has sparked a fierce debate among his-

torians of science, and many have criticized Gasman’s theory. Weikart, for instance,
writes that ‘Gasman’s approach is too blinkered’ (Richard Weikart, From Darwin
to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, New York 2006,
p. 216), but he does caricature him when claiming that it is merely a ‘Haeckel-to-Hitler’
hypothesis. Gasman’s scope is much broader and more nuanced: he sees Haeckel as
‘one of the earliest and prime exponents of the movement towards cultural “whole-
ness” and organicism that mesmerized German civilization after the middle of the
nineteenth-century’ (pp. 11–12), and insists several times that Haeckelian monism
is, of course, not an exclusive source of fascism. See also Paul Weindling’s review in
The British Journal for the History of Science 35:3 (2002), issue 1, 117–18; and Robert
J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary
Thought, Chicago, IL 2008, pp. 269–76.

Haeckel’s texts to make them more acceptable to what he thought was the
French taste in the matter: he proposed new titles,25 wrote enthusiastic
prefaces,26 compared and dealt with various publishers,27 and refused any
kind of salary for his task because, in these translations, he saw a work of
philosophical propaganda, a way of preaching a new gospel.28 In addition,
Soury reviewed many of Haeckel’s publications in French journals, such as
the Revue internationale des sciences, La République française or the Revue
scientifique de la France et de l’étranger; and to fuel this output, he repeat-
edly urged the biologist to send him everything he published, books and
articles alike, so that he could continue to propagate Haeckel’s ideas and
discoveries among the French public.29 Finally, in 1878 Soury organized a
banquet at the Grand Hôtel in Paris, in honour of Haeckel’s visit.30
25 A letter to Haeckel, dated 2 August 1878, states: ‘[…] ne pensez-vous pas qu’un

autre titre conviendrait mieux pour l’édition française, un titre qui viserait moins
la polémique avec M. Virchow que le contenu même du livre, c’est-à-dire la théorie
de la descendance, la psychologie cellulaire, etc., et surtout la grande conception de
l’évolution universelle opposée à l’idée caduque d’une création?’ ([…] do you not
believe that another title would suit the French edition better, a title that would aim
less to argue with Mr Virchow and reflect the actual substance of the book, that is
to say the descent theory, the cellular psychology, etc., and above all the grand con-
ception of universal evolution as opposed to the obsolete idea of creation?). And
in another letter, dated 24 October 1878, he argues that, at least in France, shorter
titles are preferable. Archives of the Ernst-Haeckel-Haus, Jena, Soury file [hereafter
Ernst-Haeckel-Haus].
26 With a hint of nostalgia, Soury wrote to Haeckel in 1914: ‘Quelles Préfaces j’écrivis

alors, dans mon enthousiasme et ma foi! Et cette foi en la Théorie de l’Evolution
est demeurée entière, et mon enthousiasme pour le maître d’Iéna a toujours grandi’
(What prefaces did I write then, out of enthusiasm and faith! And this faith in
Evolutionary Theory has remained unaffected, and my enthusiasm for the master
of Jena has always grown). Letter of 17 February 1914, Ernst-Haeckel-Haus.
27 His preference went to the publishing house Baillière rather than Reinwald, because

the former could advertise much more widely, whereas the latter published the books
with many errors left uncorrected. Letter of July or August 1879, Ernst-Haeckel-Haus.
28 Letter of 8 November 1878, Ernst-Haeckel-Haus.

29 Letter of July or August 1879, Ernst-Haeckel-Haus.

30 See the account published in the journal Le Temps: ‘Discours de M. Haeckel.

L’évolution et le transformisme’, Le Temps, 30 August 1878, p. 3.

Such a close intellectual relationship would, unsurprisingly, rub off
on Soury, as Gasman has already shown.31 Just like Haeckel, Soury saw
the field of psychology as ancillary to physiology: ‘Jamais je n’ai rien pu
entendre à une proposition quelconque de psychologie sous laquelle il
m’est impossible de voir une structure et une texture d’éléments anatom-
iques’ (I have never been able to understand any psychological proposition
under which I have not been able to see a structure and a texture made of
anatomical elements).32 But it is mainly Soury’s racial, anti-Semitic view
of biology that retains the influence of Haeckelian Darwinism. This does
not necessarily imply that Haeckel’s theories were anti-Semitic,33 but that
Soury used his understanding of Haeckel to sustain his own views. As
Linda L. Clark reminds us, Soury’s anti-Semitic views were profoundly
different from Édouard Drumont’s – the journalist and writer who wrote
La France juive ( Jewish France, a best-selling anti-Semitic pamphlet of
1886): as opposed to Drumont, ‘Soury’s anti-Dreyfusard polemics explic-
itly enlisted Darwinism to buttress racial theories’.34 For Soury, the world
is a ‘war of races’,35 and in the following correspondence with Haeckel in
1881, we can clearly see the alliance between a version of Darwinism and
racial anti-Semitism:
J’applaudis au mouvement antisémitique de votre nation. Mais il faut bien qu’on sache
que le judaïsme n’est pas un fait religieux, mais un fait de race, qu’un juif baptisé, ger-
manisé, francisé, italianisé, etc. n’en reste pas moins toujours un juif, un sémite, dont
la patrie véritable est dans la vallée du Jourdain. Les Sémites et les Indo-européens
constituent deux races humaines absolument hétérogènes, et, dans la lutte, pour
l’existence civile, sociale, économique, les Sémites, plus souples, plus capables de
s’adapter aux conditions extérieures, l’emporteront à la fin, si l’on n’y prend garde, sur
31 Gasman, Haeckel’s Monism, pp. 101–33.


33 This is, again, a controversial point. Robert J. Richards argues that Haeckel was not

anti-Semitic, since he placed Semites ‘at the pinnacle of his tree of human progress’
(The Tragic Sense of Life, p. 274), whereas Gasman claims that Haeckelian monism
held the Jews accountable for the invention of a monotheistic God (Haeckel’s Monism,
pp. 25–6).
34 Linda L. Clark, Social Darwinism in France, Tuscaloosa, AL 1984, p. 97.



les Indo-Européens. Cette fois, ce ne seront pas les meilleurs, au moins moralement,
mais les plus aptes, qui triompheront, au grand dommage de la civilisation moderne.
Bon courage donc, et sus aux Juifs!36
(I applaud your nation’s anti-Semitic movement. It must be acknowledged that

Judaism is not a religious fact, but a racial fact, and that a baptised Jew, or a Jew who
has become German, French, Italian, etc., is nevertheless a Jew, a Semite, whose real
motherland is located in the valley of the River Jordan. Semites and Indo-Europeans
constitute two human races that are absolutely heterogeneous, and, in the struggle
for civil, social, economical existence, the Semites, who are more flexible and better
able to adapt to external conditions, will eventually prevail, if we are not careful, over
the Indo-Europeans. This time, it is not the best – at least in a moral sense – that
will triumph, but the fittest, at the great expense of modern civilization. Stay strong,
then, and have at the Jews!)
The expressions ‘la lutte pour l’existence’ and ‘les plus aptes’ clearly point
towards a Darwinism applied to civilization; while ‘deux races humaines
absolument hétérogènes’ expresses a deep belief in evolutionary inequality
and possibly in polygeny.37 As in this example, evolutionary science, and
in particular Haeckelian science, is often used and perverted by Soury in
order to sustain and strengthen his racial theories. In Études historiques sur
les religions, les arts, la civilisation de l’Asie antérieure et de la Grèce (1877),
Soury attempted to demonstrate that Semitic mythology and religion
are intrinsically poor because they are the product of ‘cerveaux racornis’
(shrivelled brains).38 Much later, he expanded this idea in Campagne
nationaliste (Nationalist Campaign, 1902), where he explained that the
monotheistic God is a Semitic concept, ‘un résidu de la poubelle judaïque,
36 Letter of 2 January 1881, Ernst-Haeckel-Haus. As for all the letters cited here, Haeckel’s

answers have not been preserved.
37 The monogenist theory proposed that men descend from only one stem, whereas

polygenists believed that human differences could be explained by the fact that
men have evolved from separate origins. Haeckel claimed to be essentially mono-
genist, but nonetheless argued that an analysis of human language proves that the
races of men have evolved independently from different sorts of apes (Natürliche
Schöpfungsgeschichte [1868], 8th edn, Berlin 1889, pp. 720–1).
38 Jules Soury, Études historiques sur les religions, les arts, la civilisation de l’Asie antérieure

et de la Grèce, Paris 1877, p. 3.

particulièrement étranger au génie de notre race. Un Aryen […] ne demande
pas de compte à l’univers comme on en demande à son banquier’ (some
residue of the Judaic rubbish bin, particularly foreign to our race’s mind. An
Aryan […] does not ask the universe for an account as one asks a banker).39
This bitter philippic can find its origins in Haeckel’s belief, expressed in
Die Welträthsel (The Riddle of the Universe, 1895–9), that ‘anthropomor-
phic monotheism’ originated ‘in an imaginative enthusiast of the Semitic
race’40 – although, unlike Soury, Haeckel considered it as an ideology rather
than a biological deformity. In Études historiques, Soury also recommends
reading Haeckel’s Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (The Natural History of
Creation, 1868) even more than Darwin, in order to understand evolution
and heredity, which constitute the basis for a ‘history of races and nations’,41
and a few lines further on, he refers to Haeckel’s classification of human
races.42 In the same chapter, Soury gives Sparta and Rome as examples of
societies that managed to build their political philosophy on the laws of
selection: ‘Dans l’ancien monde, Sparte et Rome ont surtout excellé à dresser
les hommes et à produire par ce genre de sélection les plus admirables types
de puissance virile, de santé morale et de rude vertu’ (In the ancient world,
Sparta and Rome excelled especially in taming men and in producing
through that sort of selection the most admirable types of virile strength,
of moral health, and sturdy virtue).43 As Gasman has already noted44 this is
an appropriation of Haeckel’s argument in Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte
where he praised the Spartans for their biological selection, based on the
elimination of weak children.45 As in the other examples cited above, it is
clear that Soury, while focusing mainly on the most ambiguous passages,
used Haeckel as a scientific seal to legitimate his own radical writings.
39 Soury, Campagne nationaliste, pp. 46–7.

40 Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe, p. 230f.

41 Soury, Études historiques, p. 317.

42 Ibid. p. 319.

43 Ibid. p. 321.

44 Gasman, Haeckel’s Monism, p. 115.

45 Haeckel, Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, p. 153.


The case of Paul Bourget
Un point d’histoire littéraire incontestable et que les critiques et les historiens litté-
raires ne veulent pas connaître (il leur serait évidemment pénible de lire et de suivre
les x–1870 grandes pages du Système Nerveux Central de Jules Soury) est celui-ci:
[…] Maurice Barrès a emprunté toutes ses théories, toutes ses idées générales à Jules
Soury […].46
(An unquestionable fact of literary history, and which critics and historians do not
wish to acknowledge (it would clearly be unpleasant for them to read and understand
the x–1870 great pages of Jules Soury’s Central Nervous System), is the following:
[…] Maurice Barrès has borrowed all his theories, all his general ideas, from Jules
Soury […].)
This is how Camille Vettard, a French literary scholar of the early twenti-
eth century, sums up the intellectual relationship between the well-known
French writer Maurice Barrès and Jules Soury, a connection that has been
further developed by Zeev Sternhell in his studies of French fascism and
other far-right movements.47 In similar vein, I want to suggest that Paul
Bourget’s novels and essays transmit aspects of Soury’s thoughts and,
through Soury, aspects of Haeckel’s take on biology – and we should bear
in mind that Bourget was one of the most prolific and famous writers of
the turn of the century. In a short opuscule published in 1904, Joseph
Grasset, a medical doctor, demonstrated that biology in Paul Bourget’s
novels is ‘la charpente de fer qui soutient l’édifice’ (the iron framework
46 Camille Vettard, ‘Le fournisseur d’idées de Barrès: Jules Soury’, in Du côté de chez …

Valéry, Péguy et Romain Rolland, Proust, Gide, Barrès et Soury, Sartre, Benda,
Nietzsche, Albi 1946, p. 61. Vettard’s emphasis.
47 Zeev Sternhell, Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français, Paris 1972; ‘Le détermin-

isme physiologique et racial à la base du nationalisme de Maurice Barrès et de Jules
Soury’, in Pierre Guiral and Émile Temime (eds), L’Idée de race dans la politique
française contemporaine, Paris 1977, pp. 117–38; La Droite révolutionnaire 1885–1914:
Les origines françaises du fascisme, Paris 1978.

supporting the edifice).48 Yet linking Bourget and Soury may seem, at first
sight, rather paradoxical. Indeed, Bourget is better known for being a mor-
alist, a conservative writer, who had little esteem for science, which brings
only ‘un pain d’amertume et un breuvage de mort’ (a bread of bitterness
and a beverage of death).49 This seems to suggest nothing in common with
Jules Soury’s radical atheism. But a close reading of Bourget’s texts tells a
different story, a reappraisal supported by the fact that Bourget attended
Soury’s lessons at the École Pratique des Hautes Études,50 and wrote a
vibrant in memoriam after his death.51
The novel Le Disciple (1889) depicts how a young man, Robert Greslou,
seduces the daughter of a noble family. The plot seems at first rather pre-
dictable, for the lady ends up killing herself out of despair for having lost
her honour, and Greslou is shot dead by her brother. But if Greslou courts
the young Charlotte de Jussat, it is, at first, not out of love, and not even
out of pure desire, but for the sake of science, or biological science and
philosophy, to be more precise. Greslou is the disciple of Adrien Sixte,
a well-known scientist and philosopher, who professes Darwinian and
Spencerian theses: religion is a sickness, only science is true, men come from
apes, and everything – even our feelings – can be analysed as physiological
48 Joseph Grasset, L’Idée médicale dans les romans de Paul Bourget, Montpellier 1904,

p. 79.
49 Bourget, Outre-Mer, Paris 1895, I, p. 7. That being said, Bourget’s thoughts on the

matter evolved: if he was at first a republican and an anti-moralist, in 1900 he had
fully converted to monarchism and to Roman Catholicism, as Emilie Sonderegger
explains in Paul Bourget et l’étranger, Fribourg 1942, p. 15. Another sort of criticism
of Darwinian theories can be found in Sternberger’s text, analysed by William J.
Dodd in Chapter 5 of this volume.
50 Dr Mousson-Lanauze, ‘Jules Soury’, Paris médical: La semaine du clinicien 66 (1927),

pp. 30–5: p. 31.
51 This in memoriam was published in the right-wing journal L’Action française, under

the pseudonym of ‘Junius’. Vettard later reported that Bourget had told him he was
the author of this small obituary. See Camille Vettard, Du côté de chez …, p. 84.

and mechanical facts. Seducing Charlotte was, for Greslou, just another
way of corroborating Sixte’s ideas.52
Many have seen in Sixte a portrayal of Hippolyte Taine, Immanuel
Kant or Herbert Spencer.53 It is undeniable that these figures, among others,
influenced Bourget – Sixte is even, at one point, nicknamed ‘le Spencer
français’.54 Sandrine Schiano-Bennis and Toby Gelfand, however, claim
that Sixte is a disguised portrait of Soury,55 and I intend to provide further
proof of that. Indeed, many points correspond to Soury’s biography: Sixte’s
father is a hand-worker (here, a clockmaker); he is very chaste, if not a
virgin;56 he has specialized in brain physiology,57 just as Soury had in 1899
published a monumental work, Le Système nerveux central (The Central
Nervous System), consisting of two volumes and nearly 2000 pages;58 he
hates Christianity as a mere sickness of humanity; and he has published
a Psychologie de Dieu (Psychology of God) that caused a scandal, just as
Jésus et les Évangiles did.59
52 Wilhelm Bölsche’s description of the monist novel as a place where writers should

demonstrate ‘that love is determined by natural laws and functions, which take their
fixed and proper position in the state of cells of the human organism’, as quoted and
brilliantly analysed by Godela Weiss-Sussex in Chapter 4 of this volume, corresponds
perfectly to Greslou’s, Sixte’s, and Soury’s ideas on feelings. In that sense, we could
certainly call Le Disciple an anti-monist novel.
53 Jean Borie, ‘Esquisse d’une étude littéraire et idéologique du Disciple de Paul Bourget’,

in Marie-Ange Fougère and Daniel Sangsue (eds), Avez-vous lu Paul Bourget?, Dijon
2007, pp. 9–20: p. 10; Niklas Bender, ‘La théorie et ses abîmes: Herbert Spencer dans
le Disciple de Paul Bourget’, Arts et Savoirs 4 (2014), pp. 81–91.
54 Paul Bourget, Le Disciple, Paris 1889, p. 2.

55 Sandrine Schiano-Bennis, ‘Jules Soury: Le drame moderne de la connaissance’, p. 514;

Gelfand, ‘From Religious to Bio-Medical Anti-Semitism’, p. 266.
56 Bourget, Le Disciple, pp. 12, 21. Regarding Soury’s misogyny, see Camille Vettard,

‘Maurice Barrès et Jules Soury’, Mercure de France 170:68, March 1924, pp. 685–95:
p. 688.
57 Bourget, Le Disciple, p. 13.

58 Jules Soury, Le Système nerveux central. Structure et fonctions, histoire critique des

théories et des doctrines, Paris 1899.
59 Bourget, Le Disciple, pp. 18, 13.


Physical characteristics also indicate a link between Soury and Sixte. In
his in memoriam, Bourget describes Soury as a ‘tout petit homme, entière-
ment rasé, de mine chétive et qui vivait dans un ascétisme sans conces-
sions. On n’en trouverait l’équivalent de nos jours que chez les religieux’
(very small man, entirely shaved, of puny appearance, and who lived in an
uncompromising asceticism. Nowadays, only among clergymen would we
find anything equivalent).60 Likewise, Sixte shows a ‘visage rasé […], un teint
bilieux […] – voilà sous quelles apparences se présentait ce savant, dont
toutes les actions furent dès le premier mois aussi méticuleusement réglées
que celles d’un ecclésiastique’ (a shaved face […], a bilious complexion […]
– thus were the scientist’s looks, whose actions were all from the very first
month as meticulously organized as those of a clergyman).61 Last but not
least, Bourget is alleged to have said privately that Adrien Sixte was indeed
Soury, although he had not yet met him by the time he wrote Le Disciple.62
Soury’s influence on Le Disciple is paradoxical, since, as its plot shows
clearly enough, this novel is a stark denunciation of how – in Bourget’s
conservative opinion – evolutionary science can destroy traditional soci-
ety, embodied by Charlotte. In this regard, the description of a personal
tragedy through the alternation of a third-person and a first-person narra-
tive (Greslou’s diary) creates a captivating and lively text, one that manages
to be critical without being too overtly moralizing. But at the same time,
the first-person narrative, as a textual construction, also makes Greslou’s
character more endearing to the reader. And after all, Greslou is not guilty
of any crime; he really was in love with Charlotte, his death is dignified
(he refuses to run away);63 and the very last page shows Greslou’s mother,
in the attitude of the Virgin Mary, keeping a vigil over her son’s mortal
remains, while Sixte is silently crying. I want to suggest, then, that the lit-
erary ‘discourse’ that was supposed to undermine the biological discourse
may even ultimately reinforce it.
60 Junius, ‘Le billet de Junius’, L’Écho de Paris, 16 August 1915, p. 1.

61 Bourget, Le Disciple, pp. 5–6.

62 Camille Vettard, ‘Le drame de Jules Soury’, p. 259.



However, even deeper links emerge if we look beyond the roman à
clef aspect of Bourget’s production. We can distinguish three main strands:
at the forefront, an obsession with the concepts of race and heredity; sec-
ondly, Haeckel’s biogenetic law and theory of cellular souls; and finally,
the problem of the ignoramus et ignorabimus doctrine.
If in French the word race had various possible meanings at that time,64
it is clear that the biological perspective is what worries Bourget when in
Cosmopolis, a novel that describes the international society of Rome around
1890, he explores the family of Florent Chapron, the great-grandson of a
black woman: they have ‘le sang des esclaves’ (slave blood).65 Florent’s father
died young, because his body was typical of what ‘le croisement de la race
noire et de la race blanche […] produit souvent, athlétiques d’apparence,
mais d’une sensibilité trop vive et chez qui la résistance vitale n’est pas en
proportion avec la vigueur musculaire’ (what the crossing of black race
and white race often produces: athletic on the outside, but of too vivid a
sensitivity and in whom vital resistance is not in proportion with muscular
vigour);66 his sister Lydia, a ‘femme stérile de toutes manières, demeu-
rée étrangère à la volupté comme à la maternité’ (a barren woman in all
senses, who remained foreign to pleasure as well as to motherhood).67
The descriptions of Florent’s father and sister both suggest that human
interracial crossing leads to the same results as animal crossings between
different species: weak and infertile beings.68 Such a conclusion can only
lead to a racialist view of human nature. In the same novel, the writer Julien
Dorsenne declares that
64 Race could simply describe a social group or any group (thus Bourget at one point

mentions the ‘race féminine’, in Cosmopolis, Paris 1894, p. 302), or a noble lineage
(as in the adjective racé – see Arlette Jouanna, L’Idée de race en France au xvie siècle
et au début du xviie siècle, revised edn, Montpellier 1981).
65 Bourget, Cosmopolis, p. 198.

66 Ibid. pp. 202–3.

67 Ibid. p. 286.

68 Two animals are said to belong to different species when they cannot procreate, or

when their offspring is infertile.

ces personnes sont […] des créatures arrivées de points très divers du monde et de
l’histoire. Vous les étudiez avec tout ce que vous savez de leur origine et de leur héré-
dités, et, petit à petit, sous le vernis du cosmopolite vous démêlez la race, l’irrésistible,
l’indestructible race ! …69
(these people are […] creatures that have come from very different points in the
world and in history. You study them through all that you know of their origin and
heredities, and, little by little, under the varnish of the cosmopolitan, you untangle
race – irresistible, indestructible race!)
And just as Soury spoke of a war of races, Bourget predicts ‘des conflits
de caractères et presque d’espèces’.70 Although Bourget was also an anti-
Dreyfusard,71 one important difference lies in the fact that anti-Semitism
is not significantly present in his novels. Of course, Justus Hafner is pre-
sented as a Jew whose main love is money, and mundane vanity (he leads
a ‘struggle for high life’);72 but none of this is comparable to Soury’s pro-
found hatred of Jews.
Haeckel’s theories on cellular psychology, much praised by Soury,73
also appear in places, as in Le Disciple, where Sixte’s intellectual work is
described in the following terms:
Grâce à une lecture immense et à une connaissance minutieuse des Sciences Naturelles,
il a pu tenter pour la genèse des formes de la pensée le travail que Darwin a essayé
pour la genèse des formes de la vie. Appliquant la loi de l’évolution à tous les faits qui
constituent le cœur humain, il a prétendu montrer que nos plus raffinées sensations,
nos délicatesses morales les plus subtiles, comme nos plus honteuses déchéances, sont
l’aboutissement dernier, la métamorphose suprême d’instincts très simples, transfor-
mation eux-mêmes des propriétés de la cellule primitive ; en sorte que l’univers moral
69 Bourget, Cosmopolis, p. 30.

70 Ibid. p. 31.

71 Yehoshua Mathias reminds us that, although Bourget signed the anti-Dreyfusard

petition of the Ligue de la patrie française, he never really engaged with social and
political affairs publicly: his ideas were almost exclusively expressed through his
novels. See ‘Paul Bourget, écrivain engagé’, Vingtième siècle, revue d’histoire 45:1
(1995), pp. 14–29: p. 16.
72 Bourget’s italics. Cosmopolis, p. 54.

73 See, for instance, his foreword to Haeckel’s Essais de psychologie cellulaire, pp. v–xxix.


reproduit exactement l’univers physique et que le premier n’est que la conscience
douloureuse ou extatique du second.74
(Thanks to his considerable learning and a meticulous knowledge of the Natural

Sciences, he was able to attempt, for the genesis of forms of thought, the same work
that Darwin has undertaken for the genesis of forms of life. By applying the laws of
evolution to all of the facts that constitute the human heart, he strived to show that
our most refined sensations, our most subtle moral delicacies, as well as our most
shameful degradations, are the final outcome, the supreme metamorphosis of very
simple instincts, which themselves are transformations of the primary cell’s properties;
in such a way that the moral universe is an exact replication of the physical universe,
and the former is nothing more than the painful or ecstatic awareness of the latter.)
It is apparent here that Sixte’s ideas stand for Haeckel’s work in France.
Many passages from Les Preuves du transformisme, Haeckel’s text as trans-
lated by Soury, can help to substantiate this connection, not least this one:
[L]a nature de l’homme, comme celle de tout autre organisme, ne doit être conçue
que comme un tout unique, que le corps et l’esprit sont inséparables et que, comme
tous les autres phénomènes de la vie, les phénomènes de la vie psychique reposent
sur des mouvements matériels, sur les changements mécaniques (physico-chimiques)
des cellules.75
([M]an’s nature, like that of any other organism, must be conceived of only as a
unique whole, where body and mind cannot be separated and where, as with all other
phenomena in life, the phenomena of psychic life are based on material movements,
on the mechanical changes (physical and chemical) of cells.)
I also maintain that Haeckel’s biogenetic law was known to Bourget via
Soury. Revealingly, these are the exact terms in which Haeckel expressed
the idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: ‘die individuelle
Entwicklungsgeschichte [ist] eine schnelle, durch die Gesetze der Vererbung
und Anpassung bedingte Wiederholung der langsamen paläontologis-
chen Entwicklungsgeschichte’ (the history of individual development is
a rapid recapitulation of the slow history of paleontological development,

75 Haeckel, Les Preuves du transformisme, p. 70.


according to the laws of heredity and adaptation).76 Bourget seems to make
a veiled reference to it in Le Disciple, when Greslou says he is ‘persuadé
[…] des lois de l’atavisme préhistorique’ (convinced […] by the laws of
prehistoric atavism).77 Although fascinating in many aspects, Greslou is
nonetheless described as despicable throughout the novel. Bourget’s refer-
ence can therefore be read as a critique of a theory that would hardly suit
his religious views. In contrast, in L’Étape (The Step – another moralistic
novel, this time denouncing social climbing), we read the following lines:
[C]haque génération n’est réellement qu’une minute d’une même race, l’épisode d’une
même histoire. Alors les parents peuvent soutenir de leur expérience un enfant qui
n’est qu’eux-mêmes prolongés, un aîné devenir l’éducateur de cadets qui ne sont que
lui-même commençant.78
([E]very generation is ultimately nothing more than a minute in one and the same
race, the episode of one and the same history. Thus, with their experience, parents
can support a child, who is nothing other than an extension of themselves; and a
firstborn can become the educator of his younger siblings who are no more than
himself starting out.)
Indeed, the words ‘minute’, ‘épisode’, and the expression ‘lui-même com-
mençant’ allude to a conception of human history that is not only circular,
but in which offspring are a repetition, on a smaller scale, of the whole
race – a word, which, unsurprisingly, also appears many times in L’Étape.
It seems that in this later novel (1905, as opposed to Le Disciple of 1889),
Bourget has finally adopted these theories.
Finally, I want to consider the ignoramus doctrine. In Le Disciple, a
novel that develops the drama of immoral atheism, the doctrine’s contra-
dictory stance offers space for theoretical reflections that digress from the
narrative plot. For instance, Sixte is the
auteur du livre sur Dieu, et qui avait écrit cette phrase: ‘Il n’y a pas de mystère, il n’y
a que des ignorances, …’ se refusait à cette contemplation de l’au-delà qui […] amène
76 Haeckel, Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, p. 10.


78 Bourget, L’Étape, pp. 331–2.


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oratory and the laboratory, faith and science, can live together. Is this not
exactly what we read in Bourget’s discourses on the American educational
system? His essay Outre-Mer (Overseas, 1895) demonstrates ‘la réconcilia-
tion possible de la Religion et de la Science par l’agnosticisme’ (the possible
reconciliation of Religion with Science through agnosticism), and this,
he says, is precisely because religion’s object is the ‘Inconnaissable’ (the
Unknowable).85 If Spencer’s First Principles are referred to, Soury may also
be seen as a probable source. This seems all the more likely when we note
that, in Études et portraits, Bourget proclaims:
je suis persuadé qu’il y a une unité absolue dans l’action de la nature, mais que cette
unité ne peut être saisie par l’esprit que métaphysiquement. Elle rentre dans cette
catégorie de l’Inconnaissable dont aucun savant de bonne foi ne nie l’existence. Puis,
quand il s’agit pour eux de conclure, ils ne veulent jamais prononcer cet ignoramus
et ignorabimus que Dubois-Reymond a eu le courage de proclamer en Allemagne,
et M. Jules Soury en France.86
(I am convinced that there is a total unity in nature’s action, but that this unity can
only be grasped metaphysically. It belongs to this category of the Unknowable, of
which no honest scholar denies the existence. Then, when they have to conclude,
they never wish to pronounce this ignoramus et ignorabimus that Dubois-Reymond
was brave enough to claim in Germany, and Mr Jules Soury in France.)
And in L’Étape, Victor Ferrand cites the name of Jules Soury, saying that
he is a ‘savant qui n’est pas encore chrétien, lui, mais qui comprend la croy-
ance’ (a scholar who is not yet a Christian, but who understands faith) and
‘distingue les certitudes du laboratoire et celles de l’oratoire’87 (distinguishes
‘Jusqu’à ce manifeste religieux [Der Monismus], j’ai été votre disciple, votre admira-
teur enthousiaste. Mais ici je m’arrête, je ne vous suis plus, je refuse énergiquement
d’entrer dans l’Église nouvelle que vous dédiez à la Trinité du monisme!’ (Until this
religious manifesto, I was your disciple, your enthusiastic admirer. But I must stop
here, I cannot follow you, I refuse to enter into the new Church that you dedicate
to the monist Trilogy!).
85 Bourget, Outre-Mer, II, p. 323.

86 Paul Bourget, Études et portraits: Sociologie et littérature, Paris 1906, p. 19.

87 Bourget, L’Étape, p. 35.


between the certainties of the laboratory and those of the oratory), obvi-
ously quoting Soury’s formula too.
Toby Gelfand reminds us that ‘Soury’s historical significance […] lies
[…] in his remarkable appeal to his contemporaries and his stature among
intellectuals of the 1890s’.88 Paul Bourget’s novels and essays are one source
of evidence among many others of this stature. But how can we explain this
influence of Soury and, through him, of Haeckelian biology, on fin-de-siècle
novels, such as Bourget’s? On the one hand, there is the remarkable qual-
ity of his writing. According to André Rouveyre, Remy de Gourmont said
of Campagne nationaliste that it was perfect in character and in writing.89
Maurice Barrès praised his ‘sublime poetry’ and Charles Maurras referred
to his writing as the ‘grande prose française’.90 Even Anatole France spoke
highly of Soury’s literary skills: ‘[…] ce savant est un écrivain admirable. On
ne sait pas assez que son style, moulé sur la pensée, est souple, vigoureux,
coloré et parfois d’une splendeur étrange’ (this scholar is an admirable writer.
It is not recognized enough that his style, which is modelled on thought, is
supple, vigorous, colourful, and sometimes of a strange splendour).91 It is not
surprising, then, that his works found such an echo in literary production.
On the other hand, Soury’s view of biology, just like Haeckel’s monism,
proposed a seductive totalizing Weltanschauung where heredity and race
could explain all individual actions or thoughts. It also had the consider-
able advantage of offering space for an alliance between faith and science,
a problem of major importance for Bourget, who wished to reconcile his
new Catholic beliefs and his education, and thus enthusiastically embraced
this means to be ‘scientifically a Catholic’ – ‘catholique scientifiquement’.92
It cannot be emphasized enough, again, that Bourget was at that time
a best-selling author. In that light, the analysis of these influences gives us
88 Gelfand, ‘From Religious to Bio-Medical Anti-Semitism’, p. 263.

89 André Rouveyre, Souvenirs de mon commerce, Gourmont, Apollinaire, Moréas, Soury,

Paris 1921, p. 233.
90 Quoted by Gelfand, ‘From Religious to Bio-Medical Anti-Semitism’, trans. Gelfand,

p. 264 and p. 276.
91 Anatole France, ‘M. Jules Soury’, Le Temps, 8 November 1891, p. 2.



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Part I
Legacies of Evolution
Introduced by Staffan Müller-Wille
112 Godela Weiss-Sussex

on free-thinkers and German culture: ‘Und als [Meisel-Hess] sich dann mit
[…] dem Zeitroman Die Intellektuellen in die damalige Berliner Literatur-
und Wissenschaftsszene einmischte, stand sie endgültig im Rampenlicht
als Verfechterin weiblichen Aufbegehrens’ (And when Meisel-Hess inter-
vened in the contemporary Berlin literary and scientific circles with her
social novel Die Intellektuellen, she secured her place in the spotlight as a
champion of female protest). 3
In fact, Meisel-Hess had already established a name for herself as a
pugnacious, astute speaker and writer for the feminist cause. Even in 1901,
aged only twenty-two, she had already been hailed as one of the ‘trefflichsten
geistigen Vorkämpferinnen der modernen Frauenbewegung’ (best intellec-
tual leaders of the modern women’s movement).4 In 1904, she published
her polemic repudiation of Otto Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter
(Sex and Character, 1903) under the title Weiberhass und Weiberverachtung
(The Hatred and Disdain of Women), according to Agatha Schwartz one
of the most effective attacks on Weininger’s misogynist writings5 – and in
1909, she attracted further attention with her study Die sexuelle Krise (The
Sexual Crisis), a widely read critique of contemporary sexual morality. It is
not surprising, then, that Meisel-Hess’s novel Die Intellektuellen, which, in
the words of a contemporary reviewer, tackles ‘die großen Fragen unserer
Zeit’ (the big questions of our time), made quite an impact.6
It will not be possible here to discuss Die Intellektuellen in its entirety,
but this chapter aims to show how, in the wake of Wilhelm Bölsche’s literary
programme, the novel mediates a world-view based on monist philosophy
3 Horst Groschopp, Dissidenten: Freidenkerei und Kultur in Deutschland, Berlin 1997,

p. 239.
4 Anon., [review of Meisel-Hess’s lecture] ‘Die moderne Weltanschauung’, Wiener

Bilder, 22 May 1901.
5 See Agatha Schwartz, ‘Austrian Fin-de-Siècle Gender Heteroglossia: The Dialogism of

Misogyny, Feminism, and Viriphobia’, German Studies Review 28 (2005), pp. 347–66.
6 By 1912, Meisel-Hess even attained a certain celebrity status, as a postcard printed

on the occasion of the 1912 conference of the Monistenbund in Magdeburg proves,
which shows her as one of five prominent members of the organization. See post-
card in the Deutsche Literaturarchiv Marbach, manuscript section; A: Diederichs,
HS.1995.0002.
The Monist Novel as Site of Female Agency 113

and biological science, and to ask to what extent the biologistic background
allows Meisel-Hess to present an emancipatory, progressive model of female
agency. Monism was propagated in Germany primarily by post-Darwinist
thinkers such as Ernst Haeckel, Wilhelm Bölsche, and Auguste Forel, who
opposed the distinction between body and mind and declared the bal-
ance of intellect and instinct the goal for human development.7 If, as the
monists posited, the separation of a person’s psychological and physical
constitution is invalid, the rules that govern the functioning of the human
body should also be applicable to the regulation of social life and sexual
morality. Consequently, the Deutsche Monistenbund (German League of
Monists), founded in 1906, campaigned for the promotion of ‘eine in sich
einheitliche, auf Naturerkenntnis gegründete Welt- und Lebensanschauung’
(an integral view of the world and of human life that is based on the under-
standing of the laws of nature).8 Science, in other words, should replace
religion as the principle on which all moral standards be based. Auguste
Forel, to cite one example, declared the aim of his influential study Die
sexuelle Frage (The Problem of Sexuality) of 1905 to be that of constructing
‘eine Ethik auf Grundlage des erblichen ethischen Gefühls oder Instinktes’
(ethics based on the innate ethical feeling or instinct).9
Instinct, indeed, is a key concept in monist thought, as, according to
Darwin, it is the principle underlying the evolutionary ‘advancement of
7 See, for example, Ernst Haeckel, Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte: Gemeinverständliche

wissenschaftliche Vorträge über die Entwicklungslehre im Allgemeinen und diejenige
von Darwin, Goethe und Lamarck im Besonderen [1868], Berlin 1873; Wilhelm
Bölsche, Die naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen der Poesie: Prolegomena einer real-
istischen Ästhetik, ed. Johannes Braakenburg [1887], Tübingen 1976; Auguste Forel,
Kulturbestrebungen der Gegenwart, Munich 1910.
8 Taken from paragraph 1 of the founding document of the German League of

Monists, quoted in Andreas Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert:
Bürgerliche Kultur, naturwissenschaftliche Bildung und die deutsche Öffentlichkeit
1848–1914, Munich 1998, p. 217.
9 Forel, Kulturbestrebungen der Gegenwart, quoted in Heiko Weber, ‘Der Monismus

als Theorie einer einheitlichen Weltanschauung am Beispiel der Positionen von Ernst
Haeckel und August Forel’, in Paul Ziche (ed.), Monismus um 1900: Wissenschaftskultur
und Weltanschauung, Berlin 2000, pp. 81–127: p. 95.
Darwin, as literary scholars such as Gillian Beer or George Levine have
argued, was not only a naturalist; he was also a skilled author who tailored
his many books to the sensibilities and tastes of Victorian reading pub-
lics.1 On the Origin of Species (1859) sold impressively well and went into
several editions and translations; but the same is also true for Darwin’s
many other books that dealt with such varied topics as climbing and insec-
tivorous plants, orchid contraptions to trick insects into pollination, the
intricacies of self- and cross-fertilizing, expressions of emotion in humans
and animals, and the descent of man and sexual selection. Darwin’s last
book – a fable on the evolutionary meaning of work, leisure, and death,
which used earthworms as its protagonists – was also his best-selling: 6,000
copies had been sold, with translations into French, German, Italian, and
Russian at the ready, little more than a year after its publication in 1881.2
And Darwin was not at all alone among biologists enjoying literary suc-
cess. Ernst Haeckel and August Weismann, to name only two German
examples, were likewise best-selling authors. Biology, one can state with-
out exaggeration, was just as popular a genre in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries as it is today.
This has caused problems for commentators, from Sir Karl Popper to
the American creationist Richard Weickart, who have sought to construct
lines of influence connecting Darwin and nineteenth-century Darwinians
with right-wing ideologies of the twentieth century, especially Nazism.3
First, biological literature in the nineteenth century on the subjects of
inheritance, development, and evolution was just too varied to be reduc-
ible to just one fatal idea. A good indicator of this richness is a slim book
1 See Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and

Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 3rd edn, Cambridge 2009; and George Levine, Darwin
the Writer, Oxford 2011.
2 Charles R. Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms,

London 1881. On the publication history and various editions of this book, see R. B.
Freeman, The Works of Charles Darwin: An Annotated Bibliographical Handlist, 2nd
edn, Hamden, CT 1977, pp. 164–8.
3 See Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, London 1957, Chapter 4; and Richard

Weickart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in
Germany, Basingstoke 2004.

für Rassenhygiene’, such as Alexander Tille and Alfred Ploetz, argued for
the selection of the best genetic material, and rejected any ‘protection
of the weak’ as hindering evolution. Their ideas were incompatible with
socialist and feminist thought: as their main aim was to increase the birth
rate, women were seen as instruments of their policies and their interests
in individuation were disregarded.14
In contrast, the reformist wing of the eugenicists’ movement, who
based their thinking on ideas of the progressive social reformer Havelock
Ellis, among others, went hand in hand with socialist as well as with feminist
demands. They did not reduce their interpretation of Darwin’s theories
to a simple and anti-humanist ideology of the ‘survival of the fittest’, but
complemented biological arguments with a campaign for innovative social
policies.15 One of the main proponents of this reformist branch of eugenic
thinking was the ‘Bund für Mutterschutz’ (League for the Protection of
Mothers), of which Meisel-Hess was an active and vociferous member. The
Bund, founded in Berlin in 1905, brought together socialists, feminists,
and sexual scientists and campaigned, under the leadership of Helene
Stöcker, for the state-organized provision of care for unmarried mothers
and their children. They combined this social and political work with
the demand to free questions of sexual morality from the constraints of
Christian ethics and social convention and to consider them instead in the
context of Darwinian evolutionary theory and monist thought. One of
the main emphases of their endeavours was on providing the best possible
conditions for the production of healthy offspring – a cause they saw as
related to achieving women’s free choice of sexual and reproductive partner.
14 See Alexander Tille, Von Darwin bis Nietzsche, Leipzig 1895, p. 231. Heide Schlüpmann

summarizes the controversy between Tille and Helene Stöcker, the leader of the Bund
für Mutterschutz, on this subject. See Heide Schlüpmann, ‘Nietzsche-Rezeption in
der alten Frauenbewegung: Die sexualpolitische Konzeption Helene Stöckers’, in
Walter Gebhard (ed.), Friedrich Nietzsche: Strukturen der Negativität, Frankfurt am
Main 1982, pp. 129–56: p. 136.
15 See Ann Taylor Allen, ‘German Radical Feminism and Eugenics’, German Studies

Review 11:1 (1988), pp. 31–56.

Recognizing that reproductive agency is contingent on economic independ-
ence, they supported women’s aspirations to work outside the home.16
Meisel-Hess’s novel Die Intellektuellen reflects this reformist back-
ground. Configuring the early twentieth century as a time of transition,
the author focuses on progressive social circles who have left outdated tra-
ditions behind in the quest for a higher stage of development, ein ‘ganzes
Menschtum’ (state of wholeness).17 She discusses various avant-garde move-
ments, includes debates on social and ethical issues, on the role and future
of women and the position of the Jewish intellectual. Meisel-Hess guides
the reader through this panorama of modernity by focusing on the per-
sonal and intellectual development of her young Jewish protagonist, Olga
Diamant, a character based on autobiographical experience. Born in the
Silesian provinces, Olga follows her brother Stanislaus to Berlin, where she
enters a short and unhappy relationship with the ‘zerrissene’ (torn) intel-
lectual Werner Hoffmann (I 149), gains access to circles of neo-Romantics
and Symbolists and finds fulfilment in her work for a thinly veiled fictional
equivalent of the Bund für Mutterschutz. When the Bund’s leader, the
charismatic Manfred Wallentin, dies, Olga dedicates her life to continuing
his work of reformist campaigning.
Meisel-Hess made no bones about the didactic intention behind the
novel. In an article in the progressive journal Die Aktion, published in the
same year as Die Intellektuellen, she describes the literary writer’s duty to
promote ‘[d]ie aus [dem] Trieb zur Arterhaltung kommenden, altruistischen
Gebote und sittlichen Richtungslinien’ (the altruistic laws and moral guide-
lines that follow from the drive to the preservation of the species).18 She
thus places her writing in the context of the ‘Weltanschauungsliteratur’
(literature promoting a world-view) called for in monist circles: a literature
whose role it is to communicate the ethics derived from monist thought.
The Viennese philosopher Friedrich Jodl, for instance, had claimed in
16 See Grete Meisel-Hess, Die sexuelle Krise, Jena 1909, pp. 14–17.

17 Grete Meisel-Hess, Die Intellektuellen, Berlin 1911, p. 225. From here on, references

to the novel appear in brackets in the text, abbreviated as I, followed by the page
number. All translations are my own.
18 Grete Meisel-Hess, ‘Reisesplitter’, Die Aktion 1 (1911), cols 874–8: 876.


1892: ‘Was uns fehlt und unsere möglichen Erfolge hemmt, ist, wie mir oft
scheint, eine freidenkerische Literatur in Deutschland, welche Kühnheit
und Klarheit des Gedankens mit Schwung und Idealität der Gesinnung
verbindet’ (What is hampering our success, it seems to me, is the lack of a
free-thinkers’ literature in Germany, which would combine boldness and
clarity of thought with energy and idealism of conviction).19 And Auguste
Forel, in many ways Meisel-Hess’s mentor, defined art and literature as a
‘Produkt des Gehirns im evolutionären Prozeß’ (product of the brain in
the evolutionary process), whose task it was to move the human soul and
make it receptive to the teaching of ethical values.20
A similar reference to the principles of Aristotelian poetics is discern-
ible in Meisel-Hess’s own literary aesthetics. On the basis of the Aristotelian
concept of mimesis – and the premise that true art imitates and approxi-
mates nature – she argues: ‘Die Natur hat keinerlei moralische Absichten
[…], [d]arum muß alle echte Kunst […] in diesem Sinne unmoralisch sein’
(Nature has no moral intentions […], therefore all true art has to be immoral
in this sense). Art, she adds, should portray the laws of causality that govern
nature as the only authoritative moral guidelines.21
In Die Intellektuellen, this ambition is realized primarily through
the emphasis on reproductive responsibility in the service of an evolu-
tionary philosophy of progress. Meisel-Hess frees her representations
of love and sexuality from romantic conventions22 – thus following the
approach that Wilhelm Bölsche had suggested in his ‘Prolegomena einer
realistischen Ästhetik’ (prolegomena to a realist aesthetics), published
19 Friedrich Jodl, letter to Bartholomäus von Carneri, 29 March 1892, quoted in

Werner Michler, Darwinismus und Literatur: Naturwissenschaftliche und literari-
sche Intelligenz in Österreich, 1859–1914, Vienna 1999, p. 401.
20 Auguste Forel, Kulturbestrebungen der Gegenwart (1910), quoted in Weber, ‘Der

Monismus als Theorie einer einheitlichen Weltanschauung’, p. 96. See also Auguste
Forel, ‘Zum Begriff des Monismus’, Der Monismus 3 (1908), 10–14.
21 Meisel-Hess, ‘Reisesplitter’, p. 876.

22 See I, 334: ‘Man kann sich die Liebe von niemandem erobern oder verscherzen. Denn

die Zellen lieben sich und nicht die Willen, die Zellen ziehen sich an oder stossen
sich ab!’ (You can neither win nor lose anyone’s love, it’s the cells that attract or repel
each other!).

in Die naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen der Poesie (The Scientific
Basis of Literature) in 1887. Rather than perpetuating the ‘widerwärtige
Sentimentalität’ (repugnant sentimentality) of traditional representations
of love, writers should demonstrate, Bölsche continues, ‘dass die Liebe auf
natürlichen Gesetzen und Functionen basirt, die ihre feste und geordnete
Stellung im Zellenstaate des menschlichen Organismus einnehmen’ (that
love is determined by natural laws and functions, which take their fixed
and proper position in the state of cells of the human organism).23
But how best to realize this didactic programme in a work of fiction?
Bölsche recommends a technique that Meisel-Hess employs to great effect
in Die Intellektuellen: the foregrounding of positive model characters and
their actions. ‘Ich fordere neben vollkommen scharfer Beobachtung eine
bestimmte Tendenz’ (alongside the very keenest observation I demand a
certain bias), Bölsche writes in Die naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen
der Poesie, and he defines this bias as ‘die Richtung auf das Normale, das
Natürliche, das bewusst Gesetzmässige’ (the tendency towards the normal,
the natural, to that which is in compliance with [natural] laws).24 Thus dis-
tinguishing his aesthetic programme decisively from Émile Zola’s ‘Neigung
für das Pathologische’ (predilection for the pathological), he advocates
instead the representation of an optimistic philosophy of progress. And
inscribing a utopian element into this concept of realism, he proclaims:
‘Realismus ist in Wahrheit der höchste, der vollkommene Idealismus’ (In
truth, realism is the highest, the perfect idealism).25
It is precisely in this sense that Meisel-Hess constructs Die Intellektuellen
as an ‘optimistic’ novel – as contemporary critics repeatedly remarked. Victor
Noack, for instance, writing in the journal of the Bund für Mutterschutz,
Die Neue Generation, declares the optimism of Meisel-Hess’s novel to be
the true expression of the author’s ‘wirklich bewusste[] Weltanschauung’
(truly aware world-view);26 similarly, the reviewer for the Teplitzer Zeitung
23 Bölsche, Die naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen, p. 59.

24 Ibid. p. 66.

25 Ibid. pp. 66 and 92.

26 Victor Noack, ‘Grete Meisel Hess, Die Intellektuellen’, Die Neue Generation 7 (1911),

pp. 487–8: p. 487. A similar view is expressed by the reviewer for Die Wage (Vienna),

‘monist philosophy and biological science […] allows Meisel-Hess to pre-
sent an emancipatory, progressive model of female agency’. And her short
answer is: it does. Die Intellektuellen is a piece of Weltanschauungsliteratur,
parading protagonists who, unhampered by the constraints of traditional
society, follow their instincts and act in accordance with biological princi-
ples, thus realizing the monist ideal of a union of instinct and intellect, and
in that sense, a eugenic future. Instinct here is anything but deterministic.
It spurs subjects on to act, but what shape those actions take depends on
rational deliberation.
The final chapter in this part, by William J. Dodd, takes us into the
1930s, hence into a period when Darwinism found itself increasingly
associated with natural selection and right-wing totalitarian ideologies.
Analysing Dolf Sternberger’s Panorama oder Ansichten vom 19. Jahrhundert
(Panorama of the Nineteenth Century, 1938), a remarkable product of the
‘inner emigration’ of a cultural philosopher, Dodd takes us back to the
origins of the grand narrative that it was the ‘rise of a scientific world view
and its challenges to democratic, enlightened, and religious (Christian)
values’ that led to the catastrophes of the twentieth century. Dodd reveals
the misrepresentations of Darwinian theory on which this grand narra-
tive was constructed, especially the idea that Darwin brought ‘the whole
mass of organic forms and millennia under the sway of a single power’. But
he also draws attention to the fact that Sternberger’s work instrumental-
izes tropes and genres shared between scientific and political discourse
‘to challenge the primacy of the biological and re-focus attention on the
ethics of being human’.
What all five chapters thus reveal is the subversive power of biological
discourses. It is true that biology is sometimes invoked to cement prejudice
and insulate traditional institutions from critique. But a ‘science of life’ deals
by definition with the restless, the temporary, and the Unconscious. Biology,
and especially evolutionary biology, is the quintessentially modern science.

these traditions. Her single mother Lore no longer has the status of a social
outsider – she is neither a shunned victim nor a bohemian spirit intent
on self-fulfilment. Rather, she is depicted as a role model, who follows
her instinct and determines the right time for motherhood according to
biological principles.
Rather than submitting herself to the long wait for ‘Mr Right’, a social
convention she condemns as ‘Torheit, überlieferte Lüge, verhängnisvolle[n]
Betrug!’ (stupidity, a lie passed down the generations, disastrous deceit)
(I 251), Lore follows ‘der auffordernden Mahnung der Natur’ (nature’s
warning call) and decides to mother an illegitimate child when the time
is right. Not waiting for marriage, which, as Meisel-Hess points out else-
where, is often only entered into at a point when men have squandered
their best energies in life’s struggles,30 is presented here as the right course
of action for the good of society – although it means breaking this very
society’s moral code.
‘Die Unehelichen sind oft biologisch das wertvollste Material’ (ille-
gitimate children are often biologically the best material), Meisel-Hess
declares (I 392), and although this biologistic wording may have a wor-
rying ring for the twenty-first-century reader, it is nothing short of rev-
olutionary when considered in the context of early twentieth-century
discourses on illegitimacy. Meisel-Hess here intervenes in the dominant
discourse of the time, which defined reproduction out of wedlock as degen-
eration – and turns this definition on its head. The conservative sociolo-
gist Othmar Spann, for instance, had defined illegitimate reproduction as
‘eine Erscheinungsform der Bevölkerungs-Erneuerung, welche außerhalb
des normalen Organs hierfür, der Familie, sich vollzieht und gemäß den
abnormalen Bedingungen, unter denen sie steht, in vieler Hinsicht als
soziale Degenerations-Erscheinung sich darstellt’ (a form of population
renewal, which occurs outside the normal organ dedicated to this (the
family), and according to the abnormal conditions in which it occurs must
and Frank Krause (eds), Zwischen Demontage und Sakralisierung: Revisionen des
Familienmodells in der europäischen Moderne (1880–1945), Würzburg 2015, pp. 151–68.
30 Meisel-Hess, Die sexuelle Krise, p. 11.


be seen in many respects to be a manifestation of social degeneration).31
Degeneration is here understood as a form of moral deviancy.32 On the
basis of eugenic – or biologistic – thinking, by contrast, Meisel-Hess can
argue that it is precisely the children who are born out of wedlock (i.e.
before marriage becomes economically possible) who promise to bring an
end to the degenerative diseases associated with older parents. And the fact
that Meisel-Hess can refer to the scientific nature of eugenic discourse and
frame her argument by embedding it in the widespread concern for the
health of the nation, invests Lore with an energy that makes the utopian
project of female self-determination of sexuality and reproduction appear
within easy grasp. ‘Und wenn die Dichter wirklich “die Spiegel sind, die uns
die Strahlen kommender Zeiten zuwerfen”’, Adele Schreiber comments,
‘so sind die Tage der erstrebten Gerechtigkeit nicht mehr fern’ (and if the
writers of fiction really are ‘the mirrors which show us the rays of times to
come’, the days of justice we long for are no longer far off ).33
Elsewhere, Meisel-Hess uses the technique of contrasting her model
characters with a negative figure in order to emphasize their exemplarity.
This is the case with the well-balanced, idealized Geneviève, who is pitted
against the one-sided intellectual Lucinda. Meisel-Hess particularly con-
demns Lucinda’s ‘Unvermögen zur Produktion der stärksten weiblichen
Gefühle’ (inability to produce the strongest feminine feelings) (I 435) and
her teleological, deterministic world-view, which stands in opposition to
the author’s trust in a natural law that is non-teleological but rests firmly
on the principles of congruence and ‘eherne Folgerichtigkeit’ (iron logic)
(I 435), principles that characterize the history of evolutionary develop-
ment according to Darwin.
The inability to combine her strong intellect with feminine emotion
marks Lucinda out as an ‘Übergangsgeschöpf [auf dem Weg zu] einer
31 Othmar Spann, Die Stiefvaterfamilie unehelichen Ursprungs, Berlin 1904, p. 3.

32 In the early 1900s, the term ‘degeneration’ is often used in collocation with notions of

deracination, alienation, and corruption of social norms. See Sybille Buske, Fräulein
Mutter und ihr Bastard: Eine Geschichte der Unehelichkeit in Deutschland 1900–70,
Göttingen 2004, p. 83.
33 Schreiber, ‘Ansätze’, p. 185.


höheren Lebensform’ (creature of transition [on the way to] a higher form
of life) (I 196). In Meisel-Hess’s definition of the ‘Übergangsgeschöpfe’ – a
term that significantly also appears in Haeckel’s description of the process
of evolution34 – as individuals whose intellect has not yet fused with their
instincts to form a harmonious ‘Ganze[s]’ (whole) (I 31), we find a reference
to the monist ideal of the marriage between rational thought and instinct.
Like Haeckel and Bölsche before her, Meisel-Hess cites Goethe as a crucial
authority for this ideal of ‘wholeness’. The novel is bursting with quota-
tions from Goethe and, crucially, the author quotes from Faust II when
characterizing the purely intellect-driven creatures of the ‘Zwischenstufe’
(intermediary stage) as ‘schlotternde Lemuren, […] aus Bändern, Sehnen
und Gebein geflickte Halbnaturen’ (wambling, shambling creatures! […]
makeshift things of skin and bone, Poor patched up, half-made natures!)35
(I 32).
In opposition to this negative image of decadence, personified in
Lucinda, stands the figure of Geneviève, conceived as feminine ideal, a
woman without ‘Riß’ (rift) or ‘Bruch’ (fissure) (I 30), ‘eine Ganze unter
Zerrissenen, […] eine naturhaft Starke unter Verbogenen und Beschädigten’
(a whole person among the broken, […] a naturally strong person among
the bent and damaged) (I 108). Significantly, her name is mostly used in its
shortened form ‘Eva’; and further underlining the idea of the natural femi-
nine principle, Meisel-Hess adds: ‘Wenn Mutter Natur sprechen könnte,
so würde sie so [wie Geneviève] sprechen’ (If Mother Nature could speak
she would speak [like Geneviève]) (I 114).
In her concept of the idealized feminine principle as personified
nature, Meisel-Hess not only invokes the instinctual and caring nature of
women – a widespread cliché at the time – but emphasizes the close con-
nection between healthy instinct and ‘Vernunft’ (reason) (I 127). Geneviève
trains as a language teacher so as to be able to leave a loveless marriage –
and ultimately finds a perfectly matched partner in the reformist leader
Manfred Wallentin, who fathers her child. The rational preparation of her
34 See Haeckel, Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, p. 243.

35 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, A Tragedy, Parts One and Two, Fully Revised,

trans. Martin Greenberg, New Haven, CT 2014, ll. 11870–3.

independence is based on her ‘instinktstarke[s] Vertrauen in den logis-
chen Sinn des eigenen Seins’ (instinctive trust in the logical essence of
her own being) (I 128), a trust which guarantees that she recognizes the
right moment for the step into a self-directed life. Geneviève’s decision is
not based on intellect but, rather, is ‘tiefste Vernunft der Natur, die, ohne
zweckhaft zu sein, mit unberechenbarem Drang den Weg der Erhaltung
der tauglichen Arten sucht’ (the most fundamental reason of nature, seek-
ing, with unpredictable drive and without being bound to a predefined
outcome, the conservation of viable species) (I 128–9). This description
approximates – almost synonymously – the definition of instinct given
by Darwin in his Origin of Species (1859) as an action performed ‘without
any experience, and when performed by many individuals in the same
way, without their knowing for what purpose’, ‘as small consequences of
one general law leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely,
multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die’.36
The notion of instinct, the key concept in Die Intellektuellen, acts as
guiding principle, too, for the main protagonist Olga’s development towards
maturity. And whereas Meisel-Hess’s characters discussed so far may be of
great interest as models for female agency but have remained somewhat
one-dimensional in literary terms, the narrative strand that focuses on the
author’s alter ego Olga shows a far more complex treatment of character.
Olga’s progress forms the backbone of the novel’s plot. Building on Goethe’s
and Hedwig Dohm’s models of the Bildungs- and Entwicklungsroman,37
Meisel-Hess constructs her main protagonist’s journey to maturity as a
struggle between various psychological and mental variables, which eventu-
ally synthesize to form an harmoniously integrated organic unity, a ‘whole’
personality. Established literary genre characteristics, originally focused –
in Goethe’s and Dohm’s hands – on depicting an individual’s struggle to
establish a balance between their own desires and the demands society
places upon them, are here appropriated to mediate monist discourses of
36 Darwin, The Origin of Species, pp. 207 and 244.

37 For a discussion of Meisel-Hess’s adaptation of these traditions, see Godela Weiss-

Sussex, Jüdin und Moderne: Literarisierungen der Lebenswelt deutsch-jüdischer
Autorinnen in Berlin, 1900–18, Berlin 2016, Chapter 4.

personality development. For first and foremost, Olga’s development con-
sists in the successful regulation of the sexual drive through the application
of reason and the trust in instinct, a process that reflects the constitution
of personality as defined by monist philosophy.38
Though obeying a didactic general principle, the narrative does not
lack a certain sophistication, as the author takes the psychological moti-
vation of character and plot very seriously. Indeed, in 1912, she claimed:
‘Das Epos unserer Zeit, der moderne Gesellschaftsroman, kann seinem
innersten Wesen nach die Begründung der Geschehnisse durch seelische
Notwendigkeiten nicht entbehren’ (By its very nature the epic poem of our
time, the modern social novel, cannot dispense with psychological necessi-
ties as motivation for the plot).39 Instead of the ‘wirre Tatsachenhäufung’
(confused cumulation of facts) offered by the lowbrow fiction of family
magazines, the quality novelist must develop the plot according to ‘inneren
Nötigungen’ (inner necessities), which are to manifest themselves ‘in
äußeren Schicksalen’ (in observable destinies).40
Olga, thus, is a rounded individual with psychological depth, but she
is a model character as well. Having won her internal battles, she emerges as
a leading figure in the movement for ethical and social reform, an emanci-
pated, independent woman. And yet, one doubt remains: for a writer who
emphasizes the link between emancipation, individuation, and motherhood
as strongly as Meisel-Hess does, it is striking that her main protagonist, and
the voice of her social and political convictions, remains childless. Meisel-
Hess is silent on the subject. She simply underlines Olga’s great talent for
‘feurige Lehre’ (fiery teaching) (I 459), implying that the commitment
38 In an essay that provides provides the psychological explanation and template for

the depiction of Olga’s development, Meisel-Hess defines ‘jene[n] Schnittpunkt, an
dem der betreffende Mensch sich über sein Triebleben klar wird’ (the point of inter-
section at which the person concerned gains clarity regarding their sexual drive) as
the crucial point at which the individual becomes a ‘Persönlichkeit’ (personality).
Grete Meisel-Hess, ‘Die Persönlichkeit’, Die Aktion 1 (1911), cols 295–8.
39 Grete Meisel-Hess, ‘Vom Psychologischen’, Der Weg 4 (1912), cols 132–4: col. 132.

40 Meisel-Hess, ‘Vom Psychologischen’, 134.


to wider social issues supplants the wish for motherhood. Yet, Olga is
described as
Wegebahnerin der Kommenden, jener Frauen, die mit instinktstarkem Willen

ein ganzes Menschtum forderten, die nicht mehr satt wurden in generativer
Beschränkung, die es aber auch nicht ertragen mochten, aus dem Zauberkreis der
Gattung ausgeschlossen zu bleiben
(a pathbreaker for those who will come, for those women, who – with their will
guided by instinct – demand to be full, whole human beings; who are no longer
satisfied living within the limitations of propagation, but who cannot bear, either,
to be excluded from the magic circle of the species) (I 225)
This wording stresses the dual claim made by the Bund für Mutterschutz
regarding women’s sphere of activity and influence. On the one hand there
is the call for opportunities for individuation and social agency outside
the circle of activities recognized as ‘feminine’. On the other, however,
the invocation of the ‘Zauberkreis der Gattung’ refers to the simultane-
ous insistence on the right to motherhood.41 The reader is tempted to look
for a reason why Olga is only accorded the role of the ‘Wegebahnerin’,
why she remains partner- and childless rather than playing her own part
in the ‘“Hinaufpflanzung” der Menschheit’ (genetic improvement of
mankind) promoted by the Bund für Mutterschutz42 – and whether her
childlessness might in fact be part of the character’s model function in a
eugenic sense. Is there an anti-Semitic undertone to be detected? It seems
unlikely, as Meisel-Hess, though a highly acculturated member of the Berlin
Bildungsbürgertum, stood proudly by her Jewishness. Still, the thought
does present itself, since Olga’s brother Stanislaus, too, remains childless.
41 It is this dual claim that defines one of the main faultlines between the radical femi-

nists of the Bund für Mutterschutz and the mainstream bourgeois women’s move-
ment (Bund deutscher Frauenvereine) led by Gertrud Bäumer, Helene Lange, and
others. See Ute Gerhard, Unerhört: Die Geschichte der deutschen Frauenbewegung,
Reinbek 1990.
42 Max Rosenthal, lecture given on the occasion of the First International Congress for

the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform in Dresden, 28–30 September 1911,
quoted in Groschopp, Dissidenten, p. 241.

Indeed, he lives a deliberately celibate life, and the reason for this is set out
in no uncertain terms:
Die Erkenntnis, die ihm Vernunft und Gewissen mit unbarmherziger Nüchternheit
diktierten, sprach zu ihm, – daß er selbst verzichten müßte, die ewige Substanz des
Lebens weiter zu bauen. Er durfte nicht […] einen Menschen erwachsen lassen, der
die Lasten seiner eigenen, beladenen Körperlichkeit mitbekam; er war streng und
unerbittlich in diesem Punkt.
(The realization dictated to him by reason and conscience with merciless clarity was
that he had to withhold from contributing to the propagation of the eternal substance
of life. He was not […] to beget a human being who would be carrying the burden
of his own, encumbered body; he was strict and inexorable on this point.) (I 126–7)
Stanislaus’s renunciation of fatherhood is cast as a tribute to reason and

conscience, in other words as an ethical decision. This understanding of
ethics goes back to the principle of a moral code validated by natural laws,
which include an accountability towards the evolutionary development of
the human species. But what exactly are the ‘Lasten seiner […] beladenen
Körperlichkeit’ that he resolves not to pass on to the following generation?
Meisel-Hess describes them in some detail: ‘mit schlechter, vorgebeugter
Haltung, breitem, gewölbten Rücken, wirkte [Stanislaus] engbrüstig. Die
Beine schienen zu schwach für den massigen Rumpf. Der große Kopf hing
der Brust zu […]’ (with his bad, hunched posture and his broad, rounded
back, [Stanislaus] appeared narrow-chested. The legs seemed too weak
for the massive body. The big head hung down towards the chest […])
(I 20). Furthermore, we are told that he has blueish-black hair and a mas-
sive, protruding forehead, that his ears have bat-like incisions, his head
sits on too short a neck and his long and narrow nose bends downward
towards the thin, straight line of his mouth (see I 20). This description
carries traits that are stereotypically associated with the Jewish body, as
a comparison with Edouard Drumont’s portrait of a ‘typical’ Jew in La
France juive of 1887 reveals, which Ritchie Robertson has characterized
as the best compilation of core stereotypes. In Robertson’s translation of
the French original we read: ‘The principal signs by which one can recog-
nize the Jew are the notorious hooked nose, […] protruding ears, […], an

a half, as both Lancelot Law Whyte and Henri Ellenberger have shown.6
The thinkers who postulated a hidden dimension within the human mind
mostly drew attention to unconscious processes such as ‘instinct’, ‘vitality’,
‘will’, ‘imagination’, ‘dissociation’, ‘dream’, and ‘mental pathologies’, among
others.7 Freud, on the other hand, expounded the connection between
instincts and the structure of human mind: ‘To the oldest of these mental
provinces or agencies we give the name of id. It contains everything that
is inherited […] above all, therefore, the instincts, which originate in the
somatic organization and which find their first mental expression in the
id in forms unknown to us.’8
The Darwinian model of evolution, within which desire is chastised as
the ‘beast within’, both encountered and interacted with the philosophical
currents of late nineteenth-century pessimism, most notably Schopenhauer’s
and Hartmann’s respective works. Both texts, which became very influential
in fin-de-siècle Europe, discuss desire: the former prescribes the annihila-
tion of desire, and the latter ‘the clarification of instinct into rational will’,
and ‘the deepening and magnifying of the sphere of consciousness at the
expenses of the Unconscious’.9 According to Hartmann, civilization pro-
ceeds towards the enlightenment of the Unconscious into consciousness,
and towards the complete revelation of all unconscious motives behind
people’s actions.10 The idea of the progressive purification of instinct, along
with late nineteenth-century anthropological speculations on the evolu-
tion of mankind towards perfect rationality, foregrounds the proto-futurist
and futurist fantasy of the body-machine: that is, a body without desire,
or, in other words, a body that has cut its ties with the animalistic roots of
the human species.
6 See previous footnote; see also Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious:

The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry, New York 1970.
7 Law Whyte, The Unconscious before Freud, p. 67.

8 Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey, New York 1949,

p. 2.
9 Hartmann, XI, p. 39.

10 Hartmann, I, p. 133.


For crucially, she characterizes Stanislaus’s negative physical attributes as
‘beladen’ (encumbered) and as a burden, but precisely not as ‘Jewish’, and
she individualizes the description rather than making a generic statement.
The discursive context in which her assessment must be read is that of the
striving for the ‘planmäßige Hervorbringen des schönen Menschen […]
durch Begünstigung aller jener Momente, von denen sein Erscheinen und
Bestehen abhängt’ (planned generation of beautiful human beings […]
through the support of all the factors on which their creation depends).46
This aim is not intrinsically racist; and yet it is highly problematic for the
reason that there are no objective, that is, universally valid criteria of human
beauty. Meisel-Hess bases her assessment on the contemporary idealization
of the ‘Nordic’ or the ‘Arian’ body, as propagated by Arthur de Gobineau,
Stuart Houston Chamberlain, and others; but the construction of these
ideals included a contrastive positing of stereotypical aspects of the Semitic
body as the ‘ugly’ Other.
It is important to stress that Meisel-Hess does not conceive of
Stanislaus’s ‘ugliness’ as inextricably linked with his Jewishness; she strictly
separates the physical attributes from any concept of race as well as from her
characters’ mental and ethical qualities – and shows them as surmountable
in the evolutionary process.47 In fact, subscribing to another contempo-
rary stereoptypical belief, she stresses the outstanding intellectual capacity
of her Jewish characters.48 When Stanislaus eventually marries the single
mother Lore, therefore, this is, according to the author’s thinking, a perfect
association between ‘Jewish’ intelligence and the clarity of instinct that is
exemplified in Lore’s biologically motivated decision to carry an illegitimate
46 Grete Meisel-Hess, ‘Typus und Original’, Die Aktion 1 (1911), cols 395–6: col. 396.

47 In her essay ‘Reisesplitter’, mentioned previously in this chapter, Meisel-Hess describes

a beautiful, fair-haired girl from Moscow ‘mit einem süßen, veritablen Engelsköpfchen’
(with a sweet, veritable angel’s head), who declares: ‘Ich bin nicht Russin, verstehen
Sie – ich bin Hebräerin’. (I am not Russian, you know – I am Hebrew.) Where the
physical attributes ascribed to the Semitic body do not manifest themselves, Meisel-
Hess shows a thoroughly positive attitude to Jewishness; in this case, she extols the
pride, courage, and self-confidence of the girl. Meisel-Hess, ‘Reisesplitter’, p. 878.
48 For the linkage between intellectuality and Jewishness, see Sander Gilman, The Smart

Jew: The Construction of Jewish Superior Intelligence, Lincoln, NE 1996.

child. Via the concept of the ‘Stiefvaterfamilie’ (stepfather family), which
she also propagated in various other publications,49 Meisel-Hess thus on
the one hand excludes a ‘beladene Körperlichkeit’ from the evolutionary
process and, on the other, binds ‘Jewish’ intellectuality into the process of
educating the next generation.
There is no such happy outcome for Olga, and given the negative ver-
dict on her brother’s physical traits, it might be surmised that Meisel-Hess
also had reservations regarding her female protagonist’s genetic ‘aptitude’.
Indeed, she tells us that with her ‘herben, fast eckigen Zügen’ (austere,
almost angular face) and her ‘rostrote Haarbusch’ (rusty-red bush of hair),
with her anaemia and her flawed complexion, Olga has continually suffered
under her ‘besondere[] Häßlichkeit’ (exceptional ugliness) (I 22 and 88),
especially as a young girl. As in the case of Stanislaus, this ‘Häßlichkeit’ also
carries connotations of Jewish stereotypes: like him, Olga has a ‘gedrun-
genen […] Körper’ (stocky […] body) and a ‘stark gebogene[], vorsprin-
gende[] Nase’ (strongly bent protruding nose) (I 22). In the mature woman,
these features are less noticeable – Olga’s sparkly eyes and her ‘frauen-
hafte[] Blüte’ (feminine blossoming) reflect her newly acquired inner
strength (I 453–4) – but the hereditary disposition to bodily features that
Meisel-Hess might have described as ‘belastet’ (burdened) is unquestion-
ably there. It is not too far-fetched, therefore, to consider this disposition
a factor in the exclusion of her main protagonist from the ‘Zauberkreis der
Gattung’. Following this train of argument, Olga’s abstention from parent-
hood might well be seen as a further aspect contributing to the character’s
model function.
The misguided aspect of eugenic thinking is brought home rather
poignantly in this literary figure’s destiny. The biologistic thinking here
denies agency rather than affording it. Overall, then, the analysis of the
main female protagonists of Meisel-Hess’s novel has revealed an ambivalent
picture. While the ethical principles derived from monist philosophy and
the recourse to the biology of evolution allowed Meisel-Hess to cast figures
49 See, for instance, Grete Meisel-Hess, ‘Mutterschutz als soziale Weltanschauung’, Die

Neue Generation 7 (1911), pp. 150–9; and Grete Meisel-Hess, ‘Vater eins und Vater
zwei’ in Geister. Novellen, Leipzig 1912, pp. 137–48.

like Lore and Geneviève as model characters leading the way towards a
future that accords women an extraordinary degree of social and sexual
agency, her Jewish protagonists are denied parenthood by the very same
ethical tenets. Yet, it is worth stressing that the concern for the greater good
that underlies their celibacy allows Meisel-Hess to cement their position
as role models at the heart of German society – a very shrewd move at a
time when anti-Semitic sentiments were running high. Meisel-Hess’s influ-
ence as provocative promoter of change should not be underestimated,
even today; for even if, to our twenty-first-century minds, she may have
overplayed the importance of the reproductive process and the physical
dimension of motherhood, she was right to point out the importance of
sexual and economic liberation in any movement of women’s political
emancipation. She was one of the radical feminists, Ute Gerhard writes,
who already in the early twentieth century had touched upon the con-
troversies that still bedevil the feminist movement today: ‘Aus heutiger
Sicht verblüfft die Erkenntnis, dass im Grunde in den von den Radikalen
thematisierten Streitfragen bereits alle gegenwärtigen, noch immer nicht
gelösten Probleme der Frauenbefreiung angesprochen und öffentlich dis-
kutiert wurden’ (What is striking, from today’s point of view, is that the
radical feminists already addressed and publicly discussed all the current
problems of women’s liberation that we still haven’t solved today).50
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Meisel-Hess, Grete, Die Intellektuellen, Berlin 1911.
‘Die Judenfrage in romantischer Behandlung’, Der Weg 3 (1911), cols 801–5.
‘Mutterschutz als soziale Weltanschauung’, Die Neue Generation 7 (1911),
pp. 150–9.
‘Die Persönlichkeit’, Die Aktion 1 (1911), cols 295–8.
‘Reisesplitter’, Die Aktion 1 (1911), cols 874–8.
Die sexuelle Krise, Jena 1909.
‘Typus und Original’, Die Aktion 1 (1911), cols 395–6.
44 Elena Borelli

Italian parliament even observed that the names Darwin and Spencer
were so popular that simply mentioning them in conversation was hardly
a marker of intellectual sophistication.15 This huge success, however, did
not betoken a thorough knowledge of Darwin’s theory, as very few of the
politicians, academics, and intellectual figures responsible for the diffusion
of evolutionism in Italy had actually read Darwin’s books. His ideas were
shrewdly used as a means of imparting a positivistic belief in progress to the
Italian population, and educating the new nation, where before only the
Catholic Church had maintained a monopoly of instruction. Furthermore,
although in The Origin of Species Darwin makes no mention of humans, in
Italy evolutionism became a theory of descent: a new vision of the human
race was created on the basis of semi-scientific speculations. These specu-
lations can be grouped together under the name of ‘social Darwinism’, a
Weltanschauung in which the circulation of ideas such as natural selection
and evolution formed an anthropological model, as well as a social theory,
in which man was seen as evolving towards an increasingly perfect version
of the race. One need only look at the titles of books that appeared in
Europe in the years immediately following the publication of The Origin
of Species: Thomas Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature (1863); Charles Lyell’s
The Antiquity of Man (1863); Carl Vogt’s Vorlesungen über den Menschen
(Lectures on Man) (1863); and, in Italy, Giovanni Canestrini’s Origine
dell’Uomo (The Origin of Man) (1866). Canestrini, the first Italian transla-
tor of The Origin of Species, contributed to the perception of evolutionism
not as a hypothesis but as a proven theory and focused on the idea of a
progressive betterment of the human race, which in turn helped to shape
the concept of desire.
It is only in The Descent of Man, of 1871, that Darwin directly tackles
the question of human beings. This book was immensely successful in Italy,
mainly because it found fertile ground in a myriad of pre-Darwinian theo-
ries on the evolution of mankind, and in the widespread faith in progress
and civilization. As early as the 1850s, the writings of Cesare Lombroso, a
prominent criminologist better known for his theory of atavism, show the


Archive materials
Advertisement Oesterheld & Co. (1911), Archiv Bibliographia Judaica, University of

Frankfurt am Main; provenance unknown.
Order form for Die Intellektuellen issued by the publisher Oesterheld & Co., Archiv
Bibliographia Judaica, University of Frankfurt am Main; provenance and year
unknown.
Postcard of prominent members of the Deutsche Monistenbund (1912), Deutsches
Literaturarchiv Marbach, manuscript section; A: Diederichs, HS.1995.0002.
William J. Dodd

Panorama oder Ansichten vom 19. Jahrhundert
(1938) as Cultural History in the Shadow of
National Socialism
abstract
This chapter presents a reading of Dolf Sternberger’s Panorama, and specifically the dis-
cussion of Darwin in Chapter 5 of that work. My reading seeks to adopt the position of
Sternberger’s implied reader, a fellow inner exile in Germany in 1938, to explore the con-
temporary resonances of his critique. I argue that this attack on the historical Darwin, as
an apologist for empire, monopoly capitalism, and racial superiority, is also guided by the
impulse to critique the regime, leading to some perhaps wilful misreadings of Darwin’s
ethical position. In critiquing the overlaps between biological, political, and everyday
discourses, Sternberger re-instumentalizes these same overlaps to argue for the primacy
of the ethical in our understanding of what it is to be human. This counter-critique is
made possible by the fluidity of the boundaries between science, literature, and everyday
discourse as discursive sources of information and knowledge.
a note on the text

Unless otherwise indicated, English translations (prefaced by E and page number) are
from Dolf Sternberger, Panorama of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Joachim Neugroschel,
introduced by Erich Heller, Oxford 1977. The illustrations in the English translation are
not found in the original text. References to the German text (prefaced by P and page
number) are to Panorama oder Ansichten vom 19. Jahrhundert, Hamburg 1938. For com-
parison (with very minor alterations), see also Volume V of Sternberger’s collected works
(Schriften, Frankfurt am Main 1981).
136 William J. Dodd

The historical context
In scholarship and popular discourse, the question has long been debated
of whether, and to what extent, National Socialism can be seen as a legacy
of Darwin’s work in the social, economic, and political fields. The present
chapter focuses on a neglected contribution to this debate, published in
Germany in 1938 and, crucially, part of an ‘inner exile’ coded oppositional
discourse on Nazism.1 Its author, Dolf Sternberger (1907–89), is perhaps
best remembered today as the influential political scientist in the forma-
tive first decades of the Federal Republic who in 1979 coined the term
Verfassungspatriotismus (constitutional patriotism), which was taken up by
Jürgen Habermas in his writings on how German political identity should
be reshaped in the wake of National Socialism. Until 1945, however, he was
a cultural philosopher and commentator. He studied philosophy under Karl
Jaspers and Martin Heidegger, was briefly close to Adorno and the Institute
for Social Research in Frankfurt before its closure by the Nazis in 1933, and
joined the editorial team of the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1934, remaining
until shortly before its closure in August 1943, despite having a Jewish wife
(Ilse, née Rothschild). By 1938, Sternberger was viewed with disdain by
Adorno and Walter Benjamin, both of whom were in territorial exile. On
the publication of Panorama, Benjamin wrote a damning (and in my view
misjudged) review for Adorno (unpublished until 1972), and complained
that the book was an opportunist plagiarism and accommodating dilution
1 See W. J. Dodd, ‘Dolf Sternberger’s Panorama: Approaches to a work of (inner) exile

in the National Socialist period’, Modern Language Review 108:1 (2013), pp. 180–201.
A useful introductory text in English to the literature of coded meaning is Gert
Reifarth and Philip Morrissey (eds), Aesopic Voices: Re-framing the Truth through
Concealed Ways of Presentation in the 20th and 21st Centuries, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
2011.

a fervent Catholic, he was also a supporter of the modernist reform of the
Church, to the extent that one of his novels, Il Santo (The Saint) (1905),
was included in the index of forbidden books by the Catholic Church. In
particular, throughout his life Fogazzaro strove to reconcile the Christian
belief in creationism with the Darwinian theory of evolution, which he
had enthusiastically adopted. Fogazzaro found in Saint Augustine’s theory
of an original matter, which develops independently in accordance with
God’s will, an important precedent for the notion of an imperfect brutish
body, which changes over time to become more refined. Man evolves from
being a brute, blindly prone to succumb to his most primeval instincts, to
becoming a fully rational and moral being. The evolution of fleshly instinct
into a noble and spiritual inclination represents the core concept of his col-
lection of essays Ascensioni umane (Human Ascensions) (1842–1911), in
which he attempts to find various points of contact between Darwinism
and the Christian faith. Indeed, desire, as embodying the full spectrum of
human tendencies, from blind instinct to rational volition, is the central
concern of Fogazzaro’s concept of the evolution of mankind, in its devel-
opment ‘from innocence to virtue’,23 through a progressive detachment
from the natural world. In particular, sexual desire is the quintessential
manifestation of instinct, and the drive that, even more than others, will
have to be purified through the process of evolution:
Ma se una legge d’infinito progresso davvero governa l’universo, anche dalla specie
umana uscirà, poco importa come, una specie superiore; e se l’istinto sessuale, che
salì sempre più vivace per la scala degli organismi ha preparato l’amore umano, anche
l’amore umano prepara una ignota forma futura di sentimento, e l’evoluzione sua
continua nella vita tenuta sin qua che conduce ad un raffinamento sempre maggiore
della materia, ad una potenza sempre maggiore dello spirito.24
(But provided that a law of indefinite progress really rules the universe, a superior
species will emerge even from the human race, no matter how and when; and if
sexual instinct, which has so quickly ascended the ladder of organisms, has given
birth to human love, then certainly it will be transformed into an unknown future
23 Antonio Fogazzaro, Ascensioni umane, Milan 1899, p. 44.

24 Ibid. p. 113.

138 William J. Dodd

(Rundgemälde) in a specially constructed building, with a viewing platform
at the centre from which the observer could see the entire scene in perfect
perspective. In Sternberger’s text, the Sedan Panorama serves as a metaphor
for all carefully constructed viewing platforms offering viewers this illusion
of centrality at the focal point of a vista which is in fact carefully arranged
for them. Sternberger is at pains to stress that this is, of course, an illusion,
and that the fascination of the spectator lies in the knowledge that it is an
illusion (E 11, P 16). In a lengthy footnote, the rise and demise of the pano-
rama as a popular entertainment form is shown to coincide almost exactly
with the beginning and end of the century (E 185–9, P 213–16). ‘Genre’ is
understood not in the sense of a special branch of art or learning,3 but as a
way of viewing, and as a ‘need’ in the spectator for ‘an arranged, expectant
scene’ (E 53, ‘Bedürfnis nach arrangierter, erwartungsvoller Szene’, P 77).
‘Genre’ responses in literature, painting, and popular discourses on science,
are the theme of Panorama.
A ‘dual perspective’ reading suggests that at various points twentieth-
century analogues are latently available to the implied reader in the account
of nineteenth-century phenomena. For example, the panorama as a palace of
illusions has a correlate in the cinema, and the use of the Sedan Panorama for
nationalistic and military propaganda has an analogue in the Wochenschau
newsreels. The most obvious analogue of all, however, is that between
the theory of Natural Selection and National Socialist racist ideology
and legislation in the Nuremberg Race Laws of September 1935, an event
which could not fail to exercise Sternberger and his Jewish wife. Indeed,
in defiance of a secret instruction from the Propaganda Ministry that the
Race Laws were to be printed in newspapers without any commentary,4
the Frankfurter Zeitung published Sternberger’s article ‘A noteworthy
3 On the position of genre painting as the third of five categories established by the

Académie Royale at the Louvre in the seventeenth century, and to ‘moral painting’
in Diderot’s sense, cf. Michelle Facos, An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Art,
New York and London 2011, p. 9.
4 Gabriele Toepser-Ziegert, NS-Presseanweisungen der Vorkriegszeit: Edition und

Dokumentation, vol. III.2 [1935], Munich 1987, p. 586 (ZSg. 101/6/109/Nr. 1645,
16.9.1935).
Darwin’s Imperialist Canvas 139

anniversary’ (‘Ein merkwürdiges Jubiläum’) on 17 September 1935, on page
three, facing the texts of the new laws.5 In that article Sternberger noted the
remarkable coincidence that on this day exactly one hundred years before,
Darwin had set foot on the Galápagos Islands, to change human history
and civilization for all time, and not for the better.
It should perhaps be stressed at this point that Sternberger explic-
itly disavowed a narrowly teleological view of history, a methodological
issue which has dogged the reception, to take a prominent example, of
Richard Weikart’s study From Darwin to Hitler.6 Sternberger is arguably
less immune, however, to another criticism levelled at Weikart, namely
that of misreading or misrepresenting Darwin’s moral and philosophical
position. This raises important questions about the general validity of
Sternberger’s reading of Darwin beyond its immediate historical context,
questions which, I would suggest, apply to all cultural-historical accounts
irrespective of their scientific competence in the field of evolutionary devel-
opmental biology. In the present case, it is worth noting the significance of
the fluid boundary between science and literature as vehicles of knowledge.
Panorama, whilst critiquing the overlap between the biological, the socio-
political, and everyday discourse, also exploits this overlap to re-instrumen-
talize key tropes of (social) Darwinism and their popular ‘genre’ function
in the service of a counter-discourse designed to challenge the primacy of
the biological and re-focus attention on the ethics of being human.
5 Dolf Sternberger, ‘Ein merkwürdiges Jubiläum’, Frankfurter Zeitung, 17 September

1935, p. 3.
6 Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism

in Germany, New York and Basingstoke 2004. Weikart’s study has also been criticized
for advancing a theological agenda (‘Intelligent Design’). See, for example, Peter
Bowler’s charge of a ‘simple “blame game”’ in the cause of a creationist vision of his-
tory: ‘Do we need a non-Darwinian industry?’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society
(20 December 2009) <http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/63/4/393>
[accessed 8 May 2016].
140 William J. Dodd

‘The magic word “Evolution”’
Darwin’s theory – ‘without exaggeration the most potent, popular, and

effective ideological novelty of the nineteenth century’ (E 79, ‘ohne
Übertreibung die mächtigste, populärste und einflußreichste ideologische
Neuerung des 19. Jahrhunderts’, P 92) – is presented as a panorama which,
like Werner’s Sedan Panorama, shows the victor’s view of the battlefield and
serves similar ideological purposes: nationalism, imperialism, capitalism
(in the variant of English mercantilism), and finally racial superiority. It
was Darwin, to stay with Sternberger’s analogy, who constructed the most
influential viewing platform of the century. But Sternberger is intent on
showing what has been excluded from this painting, what has been pushed
off the edge of the canvas, or is concealed on its reverse. In the course of the
Darwin chapter and the book as a whole the following charges are brought
against Darwin and his theory:
• Natural Selection is a panorama justifying the existing hierarchy of

individuals and peoples and the economic and political ideologies
underpinning this hierarchy (class, capitalism, nationalism, imperial-
ism, race).
• It is a celebration of (human) survivors by survivors, obliterating the

memory of exterminated individuals and species.
• What is presented as a narrative of progress towards ever more perfect

forms is in fact the result of chance, the ability to accommodate to
new environments.
• The insistence on eliminating intermediate species from the panorama

is a gesture of imperialism and control.
• Natural Selection leads to ‘dispensed monopolies’ (as with the giraffe),

at which point it ceases to operate. Mankind has acquired the power
to opt out of Natural Selection.
• Darwin introduces a secular worldview which displaces religion and

ethics: geological time replaces the concept of eternity.
• ‘Civilized’ mankind has found comfort in this new conceptual habi-

tat, which situates us within natural history whilst confirming our

centrality and primacy, but ‘civilized’ peoples are the most barbarous,
and are exterminating ‘barbaric’ peoples.
• As a panorama, Natural Selection satisfies a need for ‘genre’ responses

(as in the trope of the Noble Ape and the Crude Barbarian).
• The materialism underlying Natural Selection is transfigured by

Darwin’s disciple Bölsche into a new metaphysics of ‘the higher’
(E 111–29, P 130–50).
• Darwin’s intention is to overthrow the theory of separate creations;

his method is not one of disinterested scientific inquiry.
These arguments are distributed over the chapter’s eight main sections:
A Long Haul; Darwin’s Intentions; Man and Natural Selection; The Return
of Chance; The Monopoly of the Giraffe; The Suppressed Transitions;7
Replacement of Eternity; The Noble Ape and the Crude Barbarian.
In the introductory section (E 79, P 92), Sternberger stresses the theo-
retical nature of Darwin’s thesis and particularly its legacy in the ‘struggle
for survival’ (‘Kampf ums Dasein’, in quotation marks in the original) in
the era of free capitalism (‘Zeitalter des freien Kapitalismus’), with its
‘continual extinction of inferior and less powerful enterprises (and people)’
(‘fortwährende Vernichtung der geringwertigeren und weniger mächtigen
Unternehmen (und Personen)’). Natural history, Sternberger observes,
appears as ‘an enormous confirmation and justification of competitiveness’
(‘ungeheuere Bestätigung und Rechtfertigung des Konkurrenzkampfes’).
The social and political correlates which have attached to Darwin’s theory
since its publication are thus immediately brought into view. It would be
a mistake, however, to see Darwin as a mere proxy: the attack on him is
real in its own terms and Sternberger makes no attempt to rescue Darwin
from the legacy of Darwinism (nor did he in subsequent editions).8 With
supporting evidence from Malthus, Darwin paints ‘an imposing picture of
7 ‘Die verdrängten Übergänge’, rendered in the English translation as ‘The Exterminated

Transitions’ (E 94).
8 See the 1955 and 1981 Forewords (in German) in Schriften, V (1981), and the retro-

spective essay ‘Sternberger über Sternberger: “Panorama oder Ansichten vom 19.
Jahrhundert”’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 11 May 1988.
50 Elena Borelli

(I’m not the one who’s imbued my own nature with so many bestial cries, and I cannot
blame my parents for it, either; nor can they blame their parents, but that does not
mean that I do not hear their noise, which reaches me from our remote origins, and
encompasses all the animalistic cries, from the croaking of the frog to the squeal of
the ape, and from the grunting of the hog to the roaring of the lion and the howling
of the wolf. We flee from this …)
The ascent to contemplation, which constitutes the main theme of the

Divine Comedy, can be read, in Pascoli’s interpretation, as an allegory of
the human evolution towards the progressive transformation of instinct
into rational will. The ‘beast within’, of Darwinian derivation, will be pro-
gressively tamed and transformed into the homo humanus, the endpoint of
evolution. In the preface to La Mirabile Visione (The Marvellous Vision)
(1902), Pascoli acknowledges his debt to Darwin, and points out the simi-
larities between the message of the Divine Comedy and evolutionism:
Dante credeva in una Grazia misteriosa, pari ad una luna che fosse piena nella nostra
notte, e pur non fosse veduta, la quale faceva usci l’uomo dal suo fatale aggroviglia-
mento vegetativo, risvegliandone nel suo torpor di piant la volontà. Ora, la scienza
non ci dichiara come l’uomo sia diventato uomo se non con una parola, ‘evoluzione,’
che ripete la domanda e non le risponde; con una parola misteriosa quanto la Grazia
[…] Dante spiegava la nostra ascensione come la spieghiamo noi, ossia non la spiegava,
ossia non la dichiarava spiegabile.30
(Dante believed in a mysterious Grace, similar to a moon in the night sky, full though
invisible, which makes men grow out of their vegetal entanglement, waking the will
in them from their plant-like sleep. Now, science does not explain how men became
men, but it uses a word, ‘evolution’, which repeats the question without answering it;
with a word as mysterious as ‘grace’, […] Dante explained our ascension the way we do;
in other words, he did not explain it, but neither did he claim that it was explicable.)
Pascoli was very much aligned with late nineteenth-century evolutionism

and the model of the split subject derived from it. The advent of the homo
humanus requires not only that we purge ourselves of the brute within us,
but that we also remove ourselves from the life of engagement, the vita
activa, where worldly ambitions and individual desires prevail. Thus, Pascoli
30 Pascoli, Prose, ed. Augusto Vicinelli, Milan 1952, III, p. 770.


number of offspring’ (E 81, cf. P 94).10 But, Sternberger objects, Darwin’s
‘should’ properly has no place in the theory of Natural Selection. The
paradox of Darwin’s dalliance with legislation to protect the fittest and
best adapted is seen to subvert the premise on which that natural order is
supposed to rest. The contemporary analogue, in the Nuremberg legisla-
tion, needed no elaboration in 1938.
It is geological time which underlies the vista of ever more perfect
forms arrayed next to each other in the ‘more pleasant front view’ (E 84,
‘die angenehmere Vorderansicht’, P 99) of Darwin’s panorama. Sternberger,
however, is intent on putting back on display the ‘back view’ (‘die rückwär-
tige Seite der Darwinschen Theorie’), the concealed element of ‘annihilat-
ing competition’ (‘vernichtende Konkurrenz’). Having shifted the focus
from the vanquished to the victors, Darwin’s panorama concentrates our
attention on ‘an unbroken chain of animal forms, in which every new
species points back to an earlier one; in which no individual remains iso-
lated; in which everything, on the contrary, has an origin and a genesis, a
link backwards and (except for man) also forwards’ (E 82, ‘Anblick einer
lückenlosen Folge von Formen tierischen Lebens, in der jede neue Spezies
auf andere ältere zurückweist, in der nichts Einzelnes isoliert bleibt, alles
vielmehr Abkunft und Genesis hat, Verbindung nach rückwärts und (vom
Menschen abgesehen) auch nach vorwärts’, P 96). In thrall to this magnifi-
cent façade, we are encouraged to be forgetful of the piles of corpses left
behind on the battlefield:
Only on rare occasions does a tiny, barely perceptible aperture permit a furtive glance
at what Natural Selection (quite properly capitalized) leaves behind on its battlefield
during its both ruthless and solicitous advances. (E 83)
(Nur bei seltenen Gelegenheiten noch erlaubt eine kleine, kaum merkliche Öffnung
den verstohlenen Durchblick auf das, was die Natürliche Zuchtwahl – mit Fug wird
sie groß geschrieben – bei ihrem ebenso unerbittlichen als sorgsamen Fortschreiten
hinter sich läßt, auf ihr Schlachtfeld.) (P 96)
10 Cf. Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, with an Introduction

by James Moore and Adrian Desmond, London 2004, p. 688. The English transla-
tion of Panorama wrongly attributes this passage to The Origin of Species.
144 William J. Dodd

In some respects, this image strikingly anticipates Walter Benjamin’s now
famous reading, in 1940, of Klee’s Angelus Novus as the Angel of History,
driven by the storm ‘into the future, to which his back is turned, while the
pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this
storm’ (‘Dieser Sturm treibt ihn unaufhaltsam in die Zukunft, der er den
Rücken kehrt, während der Trümmerhaufen vor ihm zum Himmel wächst.
Das, was wir den Fortschritt nennen, ist dieser Sturm’).11 Like Benjamin’s
angel, we find ourselves looking back in Sternberger’s presentation at the
debris of Natural Selection, piles of corpses which have been air-brushed
out of the panorama.
Darwin’s declared intention to overthrow the dogma of separate crea-
tions12 reveals not only the pre-determined outcome of his project but
also its ‘imperialistic gesture’ (E 86, ‘imperialistische Geste’, P 101) that
necessitates ‘getting the whole mass of organic forms and millennia under
the sway of a single power’ – Natural Selection (E 86,13 ‘die ganze Masse
der organischen Gestalten und der Jahrtausende unter die Botmäßigkeit
einer einzigen Macht’, P 101). Ostensibly impelled by the search for greater
explanatory power, Darwin’s theory is, Sternberger insists, an ‘unsurpass-
able instrument of mastering’ (E 86, ‘ein unübertreffliches Instrument der
Bewältigung’, P 101). Darwin is here presented as the representative and
apologist of the dominant imperial power of the nineteenth century, his
theory as an ‘imperialistic gesture’ and an ideological tool for justifying
the Empire, a mix of objective law and hermeneutic principle, demanding
11 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. IV [1938–40], ed. Howard Eiland and

Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge, MA 2003, p. 392. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I.2:
Abhandlungen, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt am
Main 1980, p. 697f.
12 The Descent of Man, op. cit., p. 82. Against Sternberger’s reading, see Bowler’s obser-

vation that ‘Darwin’s appeal to the model of common descent was intended to
checkmate a theory of racial inequality based on the idea of separate creation for
the different races’ (‘Do we need a non-Darwinian industry?’, op. cit.).
13 Unlike the English translation, ‘Natural Selection’ is rendered here and elsewhere with

initial capitals, as it appears throughout in the German. See the above quotation (E 83,
P 96). An abstruse contribution to the ‘dual perspective’ is an intriguing possibility
here, connecting Natürliche Zuchtwahl, Natural Selection, and Nationalsozialismus.

admiration but above all ‘submission’ (E 87, ‘Unterwerfung’, P 101). Natural
Selection, by joining together the previously separated forms of organic
nature into an ‘unbroken gliding sequence of changing images’ (‘zur bruch-
los fortgleitenden Reihe wechselnder Bilder’, P 101), offers this imperialistic
construct ‘to the scientist, a further traveller on the railroad’ (E 87, ‘dem
Forscher als einem anderen Reisenden auf der Eisenbahn’, P 101).
This last reference is to the new tourists introduced in a previous chap-
ter who frame their ‘genre’ image of exotic lands through the window of the
passing railway carriage. The view thus framed is comforting, Sternberger
suggests. Mankind finds ‘shelter’ (E 87, ‘Schutz’, P 102) in this new identity
as a gradual emergence from within nature rather than (invoking the bibli-
cal account) as the ‘free outcast’ (E 87, ‘des frei Ausgesetzten’, P 102) from
creation. But man nevertheless remains detached, ‘twofold’ (‘doppelt’):
‘He is the product of Natural Selection, and it is also his tool’ (E 87, ‘Er
ist Produkt der Natürlichen Zuchtwahl, und diese ist doch zugleich sein
Werkzeug’, P 102).
The presentation of agency is curiously confused, Sternberger points
out, in Darwin’s account, as when Natural Selection takes on properties of
an agent in the passage on the formation of the eye in The Origin of Species.
There, this ‘power’ (‘Kraft’) assumes the identity of a ‘being’ (‘Wesen’), yet
it is denoted not by an agentive term such as ‘breeder’ (‘Züchter’), but by
‘the more colourless name of “selection”’ (‘den blasseren der Zuchtwahl’).
This force carries ‘the name of a constant action rather than of an actor. It
is virtually a neuter’ (E 88, ‘nicht den eines Handelnden, sondern den einer
beständigen Handlung. Er ist gleichsam ein Neutrum’, P 103).
Furthermore, Sternberger insists, Natural Selection ‘does not so much
create as choose among already created things to foster new ones that seem
worth fostering and have proven themselves’ (E 89, ‘nicht sowohl schafft
als unter schon Geschaffenem auswählt und fördert, was fördernswert
erscheint und sich bewährt hat’, P 104). Thus Natural Selection is at best
a secondary power, the primary question of creation remaining beyond
the theory’s grasp. It can only act on chance variations in creation. But for
Sternberger it is the relatively dominant role given to Natural Selection,
and the accordingly minor role accorded to chance, that fascinates. The
evolutionary panorama seeks to impose order, but cannot quite conceal,
146 William J. Dodd

at its lower edge, the ‘scraps of unconquered chance – a chaos of irritating
aspect’ (E 89, ‘Brocken des unbewältigten Zufalls […], ein Wirrsal von
irritierendem Anblick’, P 104). Here, Sternberger homes in on a criticism
of Darwin’s theory voiced by many of his contemporaries, including St
George Jackson Mivart and Friedrich Albert Lange, namely that it failed
to explain the ‘incipient stages in a line of evolution’ (E 89, ‘die jeweiligen
Anfangsstufen einer Entwicklungsreihe’, P 104). These, Sternberger argues,
raise the question of the relationship between accident and expedience,
between ‘useless’ forms randomly generated and ‘useful’ forms which appear
in Darwin’s theory as well-defined species. In answer to Mivart’s question
why other hoofed quadrupeds had not, like the giraffe, developed elon-
gated necks, Darwin clarifies that, in Sternberger’s words, ‘only the field of
a possible immediate competition can also be the field of Natural Selection’
(E 92, ‘daß nur das Feld einer möglichen unmittelbaren Konkurrenz auch
das Feld der Natürlichen Zuchtwahl sein kann’, P 108). This limitation of
the theory is, Sternberger contends, remarkable,14 particularly since Darwin
appears to assume that during the time it took for this development to
evolve, the giraffe had no competitors in other species. Indeed, the other
species in Darwin’s presentation appear to be already fully evolved, so that
competition is ‘between giraffe and giraffe’. The answer to this conundrum,
Sternberger finds, reveals the essence of competition in Darwin’s model:
‘Sooner or later the racing stops, namely at the point when a monopoly is
reached’ (E 93, ‘Einmal kommt der Wettlauf zum Stillstand. Dann nämlich,
wenn ein Monopol erreicht ist’, P 110). Notwithstanding chance variation,
competition, and Natural Selection, a stage of development is eventu-
ally arrived at in which the process comes to rest in ‘a state of dispensed
monopolies’ (E 94, ‘Zustand der verteilten Monopole’, P 110).
The critical point here, and one which has resonances for the ‘dual
perspective’ of the work, is that acquired power (monopoly) halts the pro-
cess that produced it, in Natural Selection, in economics, and by extension
in politics. The example of the giraffe demonstrates this, against Darwin’s
intention, and reveals ‘the “national-economic” framework’ (E 94, ‘das
14 Cf. Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, ed. with an

Introduction by J. W. Burrow, London 1985, pp. 206–11.

universe: modern is the dissection of every whim, every sigh, every scruple).
In other words, D’Annunzio portrays a man equipped with a hypertrophic
brain, prone to analyse every experience, and feeding on art and culture;
at the same time, this man is haunted by desire, specifically erotic desire,
which exerts a tyrannical power on him, tearing up the unity of his soul.
This desire, as a force that is antithetical to the sophisticated intellect of
the modern man, is seen as the mark of the brute, and the remnant of our
animalistic ancestors.
The Child of Pleasure rightfully belongs to the canon of decadent litera-
ture. It is the story of a wealthy Italian young gentleman, Andrea Sperelli,
who has a talent for art and literature, but lacks a clear direction in life,
and is completely dominated by his erotic desire. In fact, the novel revolves
around Sperelli’s conquest of two women, who embody two antithetical
aspects of femininity, the voluptuous Elena Muti and the chaste Maria
Ferres. Indeed, the novel can be read as a parable of the dangers of desire.
Desire, the forza sensitiva,35 is a force that is alien to the complex, educated,
and sophisticated nature of the modern man, and as such, it threatens to
precipitate the disintegration of his self. Interestingly, Andrea Sperelli,
along with many of the male protagonists in D’Annunzio’s novels, attempt
to recompose the rupture in the self created by their double nature through
the temporary wholeness that comes with the possession of a woman.
However, this attempt invariably fails, and carnal desire always triumphs.
The opposition portrayed here is between desire in its most animalistic
form, sexual drive, and the harmonious unity of rationality and action that
is the trait of the evolved man. Here D’Annunzio is much indebted to late
nineteenth-century evolutionism, and to the fantasy of the fully rational
man constituting the endpoint of evolution. On the contrary, desire is, in
the words of Maria Ferres, ‘something obscure and burning – a something
35 Gabriele D’Annunzio, Il Piacere, in Prose di romanzi, ed. Annamaria Andreoli and

Niva Lorenzini, Milan 1998, I, p. 37. English translation: Georgina Harding (trans.),
The Child of Pleasure, New York 1990, p. 24.
148 William J. Dodd

focus on completed species to ask what role the transitional varieties play
in the Darwinian panorama.
The section titled ‘The Suppressed Transitions’ (‘Die verdrängten
Übergänge’) focuses on Darwin’s theorizing, in The Origin of Species, on
the mechanisms by which these intermediate species are eliminated from
natural history. It concludes with Sternberger pointing to a paradox which
lies ‘concealed’ (E 98, ‘verborgen’, P 115) in Darwin’s theory of transitions,
namely that the ‘civilized races’, which have gained the upper hand in this
history, ‘are really for this reason more savage than the savages’ (E 98, ‘eben
aus diesem Grunde wilder als die wilden’, P 115). The argument proceeds
incrementally. Evolution as a frozen panorama, Sternberger observes, pre-
sents us with clear delineations between species, ignoring process and
transition, suppressing the fact that the figures of this panorama were in
constant flux (E 95, P 111). Yet it is process that is at issue here, and it is
process with which Darwin engages. Sternberger follows Darwin’s own
attempts in Chapter 6 of Origin of Species (‘Difficulties of the Theory’) to
address the problem of why there are clearly differentiated species rather
than a number of intermediate forms. This aspect of the theory, Sternberger
notes, is ‘the strange, defiant thing requiring justification and “explanation”
more urgently than anything else’ (E 95, ‘das Merkwürdige, Anstößige,
Widerständige, welches der Rechtfertigung und “Erklärung” dringender
bedarf als irgend etwas sonst’, P 112). Darwin’s initial explanation, relying
solely on the theory of Natural Selection, observes that since extinction
is integral to the process, when we look at an example of a species, ‘both
the parent and all the transitional varieties will generally have been exter-
minated by the very process of the formation and perfection of the new
form’ (E 95, ‘so werden Urstamm und Übergangsformen gewöhnlich schon
durch den Bildungs- und Vervollkommnungsprocess der neuen Form selbst
zum Aussterben gebracht worden sein’, P 112).15 Sternberger recognizes in
these words ‘the phenomenon of advanced competition’ (‘Phänomen der
fortgeschrittenen Konkurrenz’), thus glossing Darwin, once again, with a
discourse of capitalist commerce in which the poorly adapted enterprises
15 Cf. The Origin of Species, op. cit., p. 206.


are ‘in economic jargon that seems quite fitting here – “swallowed up”’
(E 96, ‘um einen nationalökonomischen Slangausdruck zu gebrauchen,
der hier durchaus zuständig erscheint – “geschluckt” werden’, P 112). The
economic analogy, in which the geographical habitat is explicitly equated
to ‘the market’, is developed further in the somewhat cryptic observation:
The annihilation of transitional varieties can all the more aptly be described as an
absorbing or ‘swallowing up’ in that their trend is preserved and realized in the
organization with the greatest usefulness, with which the individual evolution always
terminates. (cf. E 96)16
(Die Vernichtung der Übergangsformen kann um so zutreffender als ein Aufzehren

oder ‘Schlucken’ bezeichnet werden, als deren Tendenz ja in der Tat in der Organisation
von höchster Nützlichkeit, mit der die Entwicklungsreihe jeweils endigt, aufbewahrt
und zum Ziel gebracht ist.) (P 112)
Thus, it is the inherent value of these enterprises (their trend) which is

absorbed, swallowed up – and not destroyed – by the historical victor, the
better-adapted enterprise of highest utility in each evolutionary sequence.
This is rather different from an interpretation of history as the survival of
the fittest, for here, the ‘weaker’ enterprises are simply incorporated by the
historically privileged enterprises. The explicitly drawn parallel with the
macro-economic jargon of ‘swallowing’ the competition is a minor tour de
force, subtly revealing the biological discourse as a source of metaphor in
socio-economic and political discourses and invoking the nation state as a
Darwinian organization of greatest utility. On this reading, the National
Socialist state, in legislating to ‘Aryanize’ Jewish enterprises, is appropriating
value, not creating it. This also applies to its expansionist territorial claims.
The absence of transitional forms particularly exercises Sternberger.
Darwin’s explanation uses an imagined scenario: from three varieties of
sheep, through intensive breeding, two distinct species evolve.17 Those
grazing on the uplands and those grazing on the plain eventually invade
16 The English translation translates ‘deren’ as ‘its [annihilation’s] trend’. I read it, how-

ever, as ‘their [the transitional varieties’] trend’.
17 Cf. ibid. p. 210.

150 William J. Dodd

the grazing area of the intermediate variety grazing on the transitional
tract, whilst remaining distinct varieties. Sternberger’s commentary on
this scenario is that the occupation ‘could be called unlawful if the best
adaptation provided rights and not merely power’ (E97, ‘könnte man eine
widerrechtliche nennen, wenn anders die bestmögliche Anpassung ein
Recht, und nicht bloß eine Macht verliehe’, P 114).
In terms of contemporary international relations, it is not difficult to
transfer this image to the struggle between nation states for possession of
disputed territories with ‘mixed’ populations, and specifically to the expan-
sive territorial ambitions of Nazi Germany, for example, in the ensuing
observation that close examination of Darwin’s theory exposes ‘the last,
feeble legitimation of power – its selection of the fittest; he who has the
power uses it even beyond the borders of his fitness. And the struggle for
survival is forthwith decided’ (E 97f., ‘die letzte, schwache Legitimation
der Macht, die der Auslese der Geeignetsten; wer die Macht einmal hat,
gebraucht sie auch über die Grenzen seiner Eignung hinaus. Alsobald ist
auch der Kampf ums Dasein schon entschieden’, P 115). Thus, the unfor-
tunate intermediate varieties, though they may be perfectly adapted to
their environment, are shown to be consigned to the concealed burial
ground of Darwin’s panorama by ‘the sheer mass, the dense weight of sheer
number (accumulated capital)’ (‘die bloße Masse, das stupide Übergewicht
der bloßen Zahl (des angesammelten Kapitals)’). Here, and throughout
Panorama, the dual aspect of Sternberger’s language and choice of topics
creates an allusive field of potential analogy for the implied reader to trav-
erse. In this case, more than one analogue may spring to mind: the treat-
ment of Jews (of which more below), or the coup de grâce delivered to the
SA and the ‘socialist’ wing of the party in the ‘Night of Long Knives’ on
30 June 1934.
A passage from The Descent of Man is then quoted in which Darwin
predicts a future in which ‘the savage races’ will have been exterminated
(‘ausgerottet’, P 115) by ‘the civilized races’, and envisages the eradication
of the anthropomorphous apes, thus removing further intermediate layers
from the panorama:

The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene
between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian,
and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian
and the gorilla.18 (E 98)
(Der Abstand zwischen dem Menschen und seinen nächsten Verwandten wird
dann noch weiter sein; denn er tritt dann zwischen dem Menschen in einem noch
civilisierteren Zustande als dem kaukasischen, wie wir hoffen können, und irgend
einem so tief in der Reihe stehenden Affen wie einem Pavian auf, statt daß er sich
gegenwärtig zwischen dem Neger oder Australier und dem Gorilla findet.) (P 115)
For Sternberger, this passage clearly situates Darwin’s theory in a hierar-

chical discourse on race, with ‘Caucasians’ at the summit, and a focus on
the proximity of ‘lower’ races to anthropomorphous apes. Jews are not
mentioned, but occupied an analogous position to apes in Nazi discourse,
and it is difficult to imagine that they were not invoked in such passages for
many contemporary readers. Indeed, a more specific, though characteris-
tically loose analogy may suggest itself in the matter of Darwin’s scenario
of the three varieties of sheep. The Nuremberg Race Laws were designed
to put people into one of two categories, ‘Aryan’ and ‘non-Aryan’ – the
discriminatory nichtarisch was a key word in the contemporary political
and social discourse. In this particular context, ‘mixed race’ marriages (in
1930s Germany, the dominant meaning of the term Mischehe (mixed mar-
riage)) and especially the various intermediate categories of Mischling to
which the offspring of these marriages were assigned, created a subset of
the population analogous to Darwin’s intermediate variety. The analogy
breaks down, of course, or breaks off, at the point where the question of
co-existence or competition between the two ‘distinct’ varieties (‘Aryans’
and ‘non-Aryans’) arises.
The final section of Sternberger’s chapter focuses on the ‘genre’ func-
tion of Natural Selection, specifically in Darwin’s use of the tropes of the
‘Noble Ape’ and the ‘Crude Barbarian’ (constructs as sentimental, and as
suspect, the reader infers, as the noble, ‘Christian’ death of Uncle Tom in
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, discussed in the chapter titled ‘Genre’, cf.
18 Cf. The Descent of Man, op. cit., p. 183f.

56 Elena Borelli

The horror and morbid fascination Giorgio feels towards his father reveals
his awareness that the same brutish nature is in himself, manifest in his
obsession with Ippolita’s body: ‘Egli portava nel suo organismo i germi
ereditati dal padre- Egli, l’essere d’intelligenza e sentimento, portava nella
carne la fatale eredità di quell’essere bruto’40 (At the profoundest depths of
his substance he bore the germs inherited from his father. He, the creature
of thought and sentiment, had in his flesh the fatal heredity of that brut-
ish being).41 The only solution to the problem of the demons of desire in
D’Annunzio’s novels is for the male protagonist to push desire onto the
woman, who is usually his lover. He either kills her, or transposes onto her
the torment of desire by using her, and then abandoning her. However,
in his last novel Forse che si forse che no (Maybe Yes Maybe No) (1910),
D’Annunzio inaugurates a new solution to the problem of desire. Not only
is the woman cast away, but the protagonist transforms his own desiring
body into a body without desires thanks to his interaction with the machine.
Paolo Tarsis is a pilot of planes and cars, the new technological wonders of
the time. The story narrates his tormented love for the enigmatic Isabella,
as well as his flying and racing adventures. The relationship with Isabella
is torturous because he cannot completely possess the woman’s ambigu-
ous and mysterious personality. When his love story ends, as Isabella goes
mad and ends up in a mental asylum, Paolo finds solace in his passion for
the new machines. Paolo’s lustful love for Isabella is portrayed in the novel
as an imbestiamento, the victory of the bestial side of human nature that
traps the man into his fleshly body. The prison of lust is described in almost
Gnostic tones, by employing the semantic opposition between the earth
and the sky, low and high: the body, with its brutish needs, chains man
to this earth. This idea finds a counterweight in the near-divine freedom
with which the man is invested when he experiences the flight. The novel
ends not only with the expulsion of the woman from the narrative, but
also with the mystical experience of Paolo’s flight on a plane over the seas,
in which he finally feels at one with the universe. Free at last of his love for
Isabella, he compares his body to the machine he is piloting:
40 D’Annunzio, Prose, I, p. 788.

41 D’Annunzio, The Triumph, p. 170.


unrolled painting, virtually punch holes in it or open unexpected issues
from the tempered interior of the natural time-space […]’ (‘würden […]
alsbald auch schon die schöne Gleichförmigkeit des entrollten Gemäldes
zerstören, gleichsam Löcher dahineinstoßen oder unerwartete Ausgänge
aus dem abgedämpften Inneren des natürlichen Zeit-Raums eröffnen’). The
illusory space fostered by the panorama is likened here to an intellectual
and spiritual padded cell.
In Chapter 3 of The Descent of Man Darwin speculates on the relative
distance separating man from the lower species, and from his closest rela-
tives, the higher apes, ‘even if we compare the mind of one of the lowest
savages […] with that of the most highly organised ape’.19 The interval from
the lowest fishes to the higher apes, he finds, is much greater than that from
ape to man, and also marked by more gradations. Sternberger reads these
deliberations against Darwin’s ostensible elevation of humankind, stressing
instead the picture it paints of our animal provenance, a picture he regards
as grossly foreshortened: ‘A shove from behind makes the tableaux squeeze
together’ (E 104, ‘Schon macht hier ein Schub von rückwärts die Bilder
eng zusammenrücken’, P 122). What may prompt this hostile response is
Darwin’s reflection in the quoted passage on the three Fuegians who had
been brought to England by James Cook, and were returned on The Beagle
to their homeland. Darwin records being struck by how these savages
(although the Fuegians ‘rank amongst the lowest barbarians’) could ‘talk a
little English, resembled us in disposition and in most of our mental facul-
ties’. Without the existence of the higher apes, and their mental faculties,
Darwin observes, we might have difficulty in convincing ourselves ‘that
our high faculties had been gradually developed’. Sternberger is incensed
at the ‘civilized Englishman’s’ surprise at discovering that these savages ‘are
also human beings’, a sentiment which entirely reflects this English gen-
tleman’s privileged place in his self-constructed panorama (E 104, P 123).
The combative ferocity of Sternberger’s argument is striking here. Out of
ostensible common ground, he generates opposition. The reason for this
hostility may lie in the subsequent passage, as Darwin continues:
19 The Descent of Man, p. 86. Cf. E 103, P 121.

154 William J. Dodd

Nor is the difference slight in moral disposition between a barbarian, such as the
man described by the old navigator Byron, who dashed his child on the rocks for
dropping a basket of sea-urchins, and a Howard or a Clarkson; and in intellect,
between a savage who uses hardly any abstract terms, and a Newton or a Shakespeare.
Differences of this kind between the highest men of the highest races and the lowest
savages, are connected by the finest gradations. Therefore it is possible that they
might pass and be developed into each other. My object in this chapter is to show
that there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in
their mental faculties.20
Here, Sternberger objects, there can be no evolutionary linkage of gradation

between the murderer and the philanthropist, ‘but only a weighing judg-
ment’ (E 105, ‘nur wägendes Urteil’, P 123). In Darwin’s deliberations on the
development of ‘moral disposition’, good and evil, virtue and vice appear as
correlates of the evolutionary phases of human development, represented by
the ‘low’ barbarian and the ‘higher’ civilized man. Moreover, the distribu-
tion of vice and virtue in Darwin’s examples is conveniently Anglocentric:
‘evil is chained to its place (very remote, incidentally) and good is chained
to the other place (close by and ogled with satisfied pride)’ (E 105, ‘das Böse
ist an seinem, übrigens sehr fernen, das Gute an dem anderen, nahen und
mit wohlgefälligem Stolze betrachteten Orte an die Kette gelegt’, P 124).
It is the particulars of this ‘anecdotal genre picture’ that rankle, its conveni-
ent, evaluating distribution of the humane and inhumane, its attempt to
monopolize the ‘civilized’ in the here and now of the English gentleman,
as if child murder were impossible in Darwin’s England and gestures of
altruism unthinkable in ‘barbarian’ cultures:
Howard is nobler than the barbarian who kills the child, Newton or Shakespeare
nobler than the three Fuegians who shipped along on the Beagle, and they, in turn,
are a wee bit nobler than their stay-at-home fellow tribesmen – because of their
experience and education in London. (E 107)
20 The Descent of Man, p. 66. Cf. E 104f., P 123. The references are to John Howard

(1726–90), English penal reformer, and Thomas Clarkson (1760–1846), anti-slavery
campaigner.

(Howard ist edler als der Barbar, der sein Kind totschlägt, Newton oder Shakespeare
edler als die drei Feuerländer, die auf dem ‘Beagle’ mitfuhren, diese wiederum schon
um einiges edler – infolge der zu London genossenen Erfahrung und Erziehung – als
ihre daheim gebliebenen Stammesgenossen.) (P 126)
Precisely this kind of ‘genre’ picture is the manifestation and the motor, in
Sternberger’s view, of our ‘envelopment (of both morality and intelligence)
in the development’ (E 106,21 ‘Einwicklung (der Moral wie der Intelligenz)
in die Entwicklung’, P 125). Here Sternberger invokes Darwin’s pathetic
reference to the dog facing its vivisector, and another passage from The
Descent of Man in which Darwin cites evidence from Whewell and Rengger
of maternal affection in monkeys and hylobates,22 even though Darwin
is at pains to deprive them of any emotive significance, stressing instead
that amongst social animals, including man, such instincts can very easily
be imagined as developing into moral sense, and even conscience. Any
resemblance between Darwin’s image of civilized man’s moral sensibility
and Kant’s understanding of culture and humanitas as distinguishing fea-
tures of humankind, Sternberger insists, is deceptive. On the contrary, with
Darwin ‘the essence was lost’ (E 107, ‘das Wesentliche hierin ging verloren’,
P 127) in an empiricist understanding of culture in which the nobler and
higher moral senses have been ‘transformed into a mobile scene, an admi-
rable monument to Howard or Newton […]’ (‘zur beweglichen Szene, zum
bewunderungswürdigen Denkmal eben Howards oder Newtons verwan-
delt’). This panorama has no place for the doctrines of Enlightenment and
of Christianity, which impose ‘demand and consequence’ (E 108, ‘Forderung
und Konsequenz’, P 127) on human beings. But Darwin, whilst acknowledg-
ing in The Descent of Man that ‘with the more civilized races, the conviction
of the existence of an all-seeing Deity has had a potent influence on the
advance of morality’, insists that ‘the first foundation of the moral sense
lies in the social instincts’ gained through Natural Selection.23 Darwin’s
‘thoughtless justification for the real imperialism of perfect civilization’
21 Translation emended (‘in’ for ‘is’).

22 The Descent of Man, op. cit., p. 70.

23 Ibid. p. 626f. Cf. E 108, P 127f.

156 William J. Dodd

(E 108, ‘unbedenkliche[n] Rechtfertigung des wirklichen Imperialismus
der vollendeten Zivilisation’, P 127), Sternberger insists, is encapsulated in
The Descent of Man in Darwin’s subsequent observation: ‘[a]t some future
period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man
will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout
the world’. To Sternberger, whose article in the Frankfurter Zeitung on
17 September 1935 had noted the ‘remarkable centenary’ linking Darwin’s
arrival on the Galápagos Islands and the publication of the Nuremberg
Race Laws, Darwin’s prognosis must have appeared far too conservative,
and shocking in its contemplation of the annihilation of individuals and
species as a necessary consequence of all natural history in its progression
towards ever greater perfection. How, Sternberger asks, does the civiliza-
tion of the civilized differ from the savagery of the savages? – a question
that does not even arise in the Darwinian panorama. The adjacency of Nazi
discourse is almost tangible here, as Darwin is chided for making civiliza-
tion the property of certain ‘higher’ races. In this concept of civilization,
Sternberger remarks, ‘we have before us its palpable transformation in
language into an attribute of the race’ (E 108,24 ‘und hier haben wir ihre
Verwandlung zum Attribut der Rasse sprachlich greifbar vor uns’, P 128).
A further illustration of ‘genre’ nationalism and racism is detected
in the conclusion of The Descent of Man, in the passage in which Darwin
recalls his amazement at first encountering the natives of Tierra del Fuego
and reflecting, somewhat uncomfortably, that ‘such were our ancestors’ –
although he cannot suppress his distaste at this thought, and remarks that he
would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded
enemy in order to save the life of his keeper, or from that old baboon, who descend-
ing from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd
of astonished dogs – as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up
bloody sacrifices, practises infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves,
knows no decency, and is haunted by the greatest superstitions.25
24 Translation emended to include ‘sprachlich greifbar’. Sternberger’s focus is unrelent-

ingly on discourse.
25 The Descent of Man, op. cit., p. 689. Cf. E 109, P 128f.


Morasso foresees a new generation of people for whom the interaction
with the machine has become the way to overcome the strength of desire,
as we read in the following passage:
E così è: il giovane moderno che è a contatto con questa forza bruta e gigantesca, che
la soggioga e la guida, che ha acquistato l’esperienza di questi impeti formidabili di
corsa e che inmezzo a tale follia dello spazio e delle cose mantiene la sua via dritta
fermamente, ha avuto una scuola di volontà e di energia più efficace di qualsiasi altra;
tale via egli non smarrirà e la meta raggiungerà anche in altre corse pazze, quelle della
passione, o in mezzo agli odi e agli amori, dove altri periscono. Un po’ del suo cuore
egli ha dato al mostro di metallo e fuoco, ma il mostro lo ha ricambiato con un po’
della sua possa e durezza.46
(And so it is the modern young man, who is in touch with this brutal and gigantic
force, who subdues it and guides it, who has acquired the experience of this formida-
ble running impetus, and who amidst the madness of space and things firmly sticks
to his course, and has received the most effective training for his will and energy:
he will not lose his way, and he will reach his goal even in other mad competitions,
those of passions, amongst love and hate, where other men perish. A bit of his heart
he has given to the monster of metal and fire, but in exchange the monster has given
him some of his power and force.)
The dream of the body-machine, as portrayed by both D’Annunzio and

Morasso, anticipates and parallels one of the most important ethical facets
of futurism: the machine as the realm in which humankind experiences
a rebirth that will lead to a new understanding of humankind itself.47
D’Annunzio and Morasso represent an important link between the late
nineteenth-century speculation on the origin and evolution of mankind
and the early twentieth-century discussion of the post-human. The bestial
origins of mankind surface in the consciousness of the modern man through
his most uncontrollable desires. The goal of evolution is to purge desire;
and Pascoli’s and Fogazzaro’s homo humanus, or the senseless machine,
represent the necessary outcomes of this process.
46 Morasso, La nuova arma, p. 38.

47 Ernesto Livorni, ‘The Machine as the Rebirth of Humankind: Marinetti and First

NY 2011, pp. 110–16: p. 100.
158 William J. Dodd

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mentation, vol. III.2 [1935], Munich 1987.
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Part II
Constructions of Desire
A defining, yet often overlooked, feature of nineteenth-century biologi-
cal discourses is their concern with sexual matters. In the 1850s and 1860s
the rise of evolutionary theory gave centre stage to issues of reproduction,
which, bolstered by developments such as the advances in germ theory and
the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s work and attendant formation of genet-
ics around 1900, prompted new debates about heredity that soon spilled
out of the scientific laboratory and into the realm of the social.1 If Darwin
and his scientific colleagues were concerned with sexual matters primarily
for the role they played in the evolution of species, evolutionary thinking
affected much broader discursive transformations, which were soon applied
to social debates about gender, morality, and society. It is perhaps no sur-
prise that at a time of imperial expansion and modern European nation-
building efforts, it was especially the potential consequences of real and
perceived sexual transgressions that came under scrutiny.2 In England, for
example, it was the campaigns to control the spreading of venereal diseases,
which prompted some of the earliest public debates about sexual conduct.3
Targeting garrison towns, they especially focused on women who sold, or
1 A key text for understanding the nineteenth-century reach of evolutionary thinking

remains Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot,
and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, London 1983. For more specific discussions of the
interlinked scientific and social debates about ‘sex’ and heredity, see, for example,
Kimberly A. Hamlin, From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights
in Gilded Age America, Chicago, IL 2014; and Angelique Richardson, Love and
Eugenics in the Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman,
Oxford 2003.
2 For a critique of the interlinked histories of sexuality and colonialism, see, for example,

Anjali Arondekar, ‘Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive’, Journal
of the History of Sexuality 14:1/2 (2005), pp. 10–27; and Ann Laura Stoler, Race and
the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of
Things, Durham, NC 2005.
3 For an overview of the debates, see Emma Liggins, ‘Prostitution and Social Purity

in the 1880s and 1890s’, Critical Survey 15:3 (2003), pp. 39–55. Ann Heilmann and
Stephanie Forward have gathered an impressive collection of texts that indicate the
intricacies of these debates in their (eds) Sex, Social Purity and Sarah Grand, 4 vols,
London 2000. Anne R. Hanley presents a detailed study of ‘how medical profes-
sionals acquired, developed and applied their knowledge of venereal diseases’ in her
Part II: Constructions of Desire 163

‘heterosexuality’, and introduced new sexual classifications such as ‘sadism’
and ‘masochism’. This vocabulary shifted the focus of attention away from
reproduction and onto a catalogue of sexual desires and practices, which
indexes the emergence of a modern concept of sexuality, understood
as a form of identity and identification gathered around sexual desires
and object choice. The new vocabulary of sex was primarily associated
with deviancy from an implicit, yet largely untheorized ‘heterosexuality’
(itself a product of the nineteenth century when the term was first coined
if little used). Not long after the publication of Psychopathia Sexualis,
Krafft-Ebing took up a prestigious chair in psychiatry at the University
of Vienna where he came into contact with the young Sigmund Freud,
who would become another hugely influential figure in the conceptu-
alization of modern sexuality. In contrast to Krafft-Ebing, whose work
exemplifies the scientific investment in classifying sex including for use
in the courtroom to aid the establishment of culpability of the accused,
Freud’s psychoanalysis turned attention to relationship between taboos,
unconscious desires, and subjectivity.
Sexology and psychoanalysis both made extensive use of the so-called
‘case study’, an analytical method based on patient accounts.6 While Freud’s
case studies gave precedence to his own interpretation of the dreams and
other stories told to him by the people who came to his consulting room,
Krafft-Ebing enlarged the different editions of Psychopathia Sexualis by
including a growing number of autobiographical and biographical life
narratives, which were derived from his clinical encounters as well as from
the letters he received by readers who felt inspired to send him their own
accounts of their intimate desires and sexual practices. These ‘case studies’,
which were anonymized and typically included information about the
person’s age, sexual development, and health of their parents, constitute
an overlooked link between the emerging sexual sciences and the older
discipline of biology. For around 1900, ‘biology’ still retained some of its
Stryker, Transgender History, Berkley, CA 2008; Robert Deam Tobin, Peripheral

Desires: The German Invention of Sex, Philadelphia, PA 2015.
6 Joy Damousi, Birgit Lang, and Katie Sutton (eds), Case Studies and the Dissemination

of Knowledge, New York 2015.
164 Heike Bauer

associations with ‘biography’, as biology could be used to describe the ‘study
of human life, character, or society’ broadly, even as it increasingly came to
mean specifically the scientific study of living organisms.7
The conceptual overlaps between sexual and biological discourses,
and their loose formal links to life writing, indicate that the conception of
desire was a dynamic process. Despite the measurable influence of sexologi-
cal terminologies and psychoanalytical conceptions of subjectivity on the
emergence of modern sexual subjects, it would be reductive to conceptualize
the way in which humans came to think of themselves as sexual beings as a
sterile product of the clinic. Individual and collective articulations of the
visceral and emotional aspects of desire emerged not merely in response to
pathologizing discourses or the legal and political contexts that governed
intimacy, but as part of long cultural histories. Literature, for example,
played a role in the emergence of concepts such as ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’,
which were coined by Krafft-Ebing after reading the works of the Marquis
de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Krafft-Ebing was quick to read
fiction back onto everyday life, scientifically framing – and claiming – sexual
practices that would in turn be reclaimed by subjects who saw their own
desires reflected or attacked by the sexological discourses.8 The complexity
of this process exceeds Foucault’s notion of ‘reverse discourse’, according to
which sexual discourse was produced within the scientia sexualis and then
adapted by the subjects whose desires fit the sexological classifications.9
7 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘biology’.

8 See for instance Katie Sutton’s discussion of this complex process in ‘Representing the

“Third Sex”: Cultural Translations of the Sexological Encounter in Early Twentieth-
Century Germany’, in Heike Bauer (ed.), Sexology and Translation: Cultural and
Scientific Encounters Across the Modern World, Philadelphia, PA 2015, pp. 53–71. For
nuanced analyses of the complex links between discourse, narrative, and subjectiv-
ity see also Jana Funke, ‘The Case of Karl M.[artha] Baer: Narrating “Uncertain
Sex”’, in Ben Davies and Jana Funke (eds), Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and
Culture, Basingstoke 2009, pp. 132–53; and Ina Linge, ‘Gender and Agency Between
“Sexualwissenschaft” and Autobiography: The Case of N. O. Body’s Aus eines Mannes
Mädchenjahren’, German Life and Letters 68:3 (2015), pp. 387–404.
9 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert

Hurley, London 1990, p. 101.
64 Anahita Rouyan

renewed golden age of socialism and sentimentality’.2 Wells’s text offered
a ‘severer and more scientific form of prophecy’.3 The reviewer did, how-
ever, detect two elements compromising the value he ascribed to the text.
One of them was the characterization of its protagonist and narrator, the
Time Traveller. Despite appearing ‘a cool scientific thinker’, the character
‘behaves exactly like the hero of a commonplace sensational novel, with
his frenzies of despair and his appeals to fate […]’.4 Zangwill interpreted
the dissonance between the cultural expectations of scientific behaviour
and the Time Traveller’s demeanour as a shortcoming undermining Wells’s
sober vision of humanity’s future. In this chapter I shall argue that the dis-
ruptive characterization of the Traveller served as part of Wells’s strategy
for criticizing late Victorian modalities of science popularization, reveal-
ing the author’s anxiety about potential risks involved in communicating
expert scientific knowledge to non-specialist audiences.
Wells’s representation of the Time Traveller as a potential communi-
cator of scientific knowledge is apparent in different versions of The Time
Machine, a text with an unusually complex bibliographical history.5 The
classic edition published by William Heinemann in Great Britain merely
implied the Traveller’s combination of wit and charming personality. The
principal source for this chapter is a preceding version printed in New York
by Henry Holt. The American edition of The Time Machine depicted the
2 Israel Zangwill, ‘Without Prejudice’, in Patrick Parrinder (ed.), H. G. Wells: The

Critical Heritage, London 2002, pp. 40–2: p. 40. For examples of Victorian utopian
fiction to which Zangwill might have been referring, see Edward Bulwer-Lytton,
The Coming Race, London 1871; Samuel Butler, Erewhon, London 1872; Richard
Jefferies, After London, London 1885; William H. Hudson, A Crystal Age, London
1887; Walter Besant, Inner House, London 1888; William Morris, News from Nowhere,
London 1890.
3 Zangwill, ‘Without Prejudice’, p. 40.

4 Ibid.

5 For a comprehensive analysis of the complicated publication history of The Time

Machine, see Bernard Bergonzi, ‘The Publication of The Time Machine 1894–5’,
The Review of English Studies 11:41 (1960), 42–51; Robert M. Philmus and David Y.
Hughes (eds), H. G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction, Berkeley,
CA 1975, pp. 47–56.
166 Heike Bauer

Bibliography
Arondekar, Anjali, ‘Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive’, Journal of
the History of Sexuality 14:1/2 (2005), pp. 10–27.
Bauer, Heike, English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion 1860–1930, Basing-
stoke 2009.
Beer, Gillian, Darwin’s Plot: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and
Nineteenth-Century Fiction, London 1983.
Bland, Lucy, and Laura Doan (eds), Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires,
Cambridge 1998.
Damousi, Joy, Birgit Lang, and Katie Sutton (eds), Case Studies and the Dissemination
of Knowledge, New York 2015.
Doan, Laura, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experiences of
Modern War, Chicago, IL 2013.
Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley, London 1990.
Funke, Jana, ‘The Case of Karl M.[artha] Baer: Narrating “Uncertain Sex”’, in Ben
Davies and Jana Funke (eds), Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture,
Basingstoke 2009, pp. 132–53.
Hall, Lesley, ‘Hauling Down the Double Standard: Feminism, Social Purity and
Sexual Science in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Gender & History 16:1
(2004), pp. 36–56.
Hamlin, Kimberly A., From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights
in Gilded Age America, Chicago, IL 2014.
Hanley, Anne R., Medicine, Knowledge and Venereal Diseases in England, 1886–1916,
Basingstoke 2016.
Heilmann, Ann, and Stephanie Forward (eds), Sex, Social Purity and Sarah Grand,
4 vols, London 2000.
Liggins, Emma, ‘Prostitution and Social Purity in the 1880s and 1890s’, Critical Survey
15:3 (2003), pp. 39–55.
Linge, Ina, ‘Gender and Agency Between “Sexualwissenschaft” and Autobiography:
The Case of N. O. Body’s Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren’, German Life and
Letters 68:3 (2015), pp. 387–404.
Richardson, Angelique, Love and Eugenics in the Nineteenth Century: Rational Repro-
duction and the New Woman, Oxford 2003.
Schaffner, Anna Katharina, Modernism and Perversion, Basingstoke 2013.
Somerville, Siobhan, ‘Scientific Racism and the Emergence of the Homosexual Body’,
Journal for the History of Sexuality 5:2 (1994), pp. 243–66.

Stoler, Ann Laura, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality
and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham 2005.
Stryker, Susan, Transgender History, Berkley, CA 2008.
Sutton, Katie, ‘Representing the “Third Sex”: Cultural Translations of the Sexological
Encounter in Early Twentieth-Century Germany’, in Heike Bauer (ed.), Sexology
and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters Across the Modern World,
Tobin, Robert Deam, Peripheral Desires: The German Invention of Sex, Philadelphia,
PA 2015.
Michael Eggers
6 Cryptogamic Kissing: Adalbert Stifter’s Novella

Der Kuss von Sentze (1866) and the Reproduction
of Mosses
abstract
As late as 1851, the German botanist Wilhelm Hofmeister discovered that the recreational
pattern of an alternation of generations, which had first been observed in lower animals
like jellyfish, also applies to mosses and ferns. Organisms that procreate according to this
pattern alternate between asexual and sexual generations. Hofmeister’s discovery facili-
tated the scientific reception of Darwin’s theory to a large degree. This chapter shows that
this botanical law is a scientific subtext of Adalbert Stifter’s novella Der Kuss von Sentze
(The Kiss of Sentze, 1866). The social structure of the noble Austrian family of Sentze
and its kissing rituals are analogous to the reproductive techniques of the mosses that the
protagonists study and collect.
The tales and novels of Adalbert Stifter, one of the most prominent German-
speaking authors of the nineteenth century, deal with generations. As has
been noted recently, ‘the works of Stifter constantly reconstruct familial
prehistories that lead up to the present events of the narration, which in
turn aim at the production of new generations, resulting in a never-ending
chain of generations’.1 Many, if not most of Stifter’s narratives would serve
as examples to illustrate his concern with the relation of parents to their
1 ‘Stifters Werk arbeitet immerfort an der Rekonstruktion familialer Vorgeschichten

für das gegenwärtige Geschehen, das wiederum auf die Schaffung neuer Generationen
und auf das Nichtabreißen der Generationenkette zielt’: Ohad Parnes, Ulrike
Vedder, and Stefan Willer, Das Konzept der Generation: Eine Wissenschafts- und
Kulturgeschichte, Frankfurt am Main 2008, p. 164.

Nature.13 Through his incorporation of the Time Traveller’s narrative, Wells
introduced a distance between readers and the text, providing a space for
critical reflection about the problem of cultural authority for communicat-
ing scientific knowledge ascribed to expert scientists, represented by the
figure of the Time Traveller.
Science popularization in late Victorian England
Coming of age at the height of the Victorian era, Wells witnessed sci-
ence becoming professionalized and highly specialized, breaking out of
the ‘common intellectual context’ shared with other areas of culture and
developing a register inaccessible to non-expert audiences.14 The profes-
sionalization of science generated a need for popularization among a
Victorian public interested in the broader significance of new discoveries
and technologies appearing on the intellectual landscape.15 Wells launched
13 Charlotte Sleigh, ‘This Questionable Little Book: Narrative Ambiguity in Nineteenth

Century Literature of Science’, in Anne-Julia Zwierlein (ed.), Unmapped Countries:
Biological Visions in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture, London 2005,
pp. 15–26: p. 24.
14 The notion comes from a series of essays by Robert M. Young. See ‘Natural Theology,

Victorian Periodicals, and the Fragmentation of Common Context’, in Darwin’s
Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture, Cambridge 1985, pp. 126–63. A classic
study exploring this common context is Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary
Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 3rd edn,
Cambridge 2009. For recent examinations, see James Moore, ‘Wallace’s Malthusian
Moment: The Common Context Revisited’, in Bernard Lightman (ed.), Victorian
Science in Context, Chicago, IL 1997, pp. 290–311; Jonathan R. Topham, ‘Beyond
the “Common Context”: The Production and Reading of the Bridgewater Treatises’,
Isis 89:2 (1998), 233–62.
15 For a selection of the immense scholarship examining science popularization during the

Victorian era, see Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology
and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Cambridge 1984;
Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, Chicago, IL 1998;
Cryptogamic Kissing 171

water, the growing of grain, the surge of the sea, the turning of the seasons,
the blazing of the sky, the shimmer of the stars with the ‘Kräfte, die nach
dem Bestehen der gesamten Menschheit hinwirken’ (powers that help to
secure the existence of humanity), that is, social qualities like love, affection,
reliability, and responsibility.2 In the interaction of individual characters
with their natural environment, Stifter’s main topics meet quite obviously
on the level of the storyline. I would like to show, referring to Stifter’s The
Kiss of Sentze, that this close diegetic involvement with nature may also
surpass analogies of the more obvious kind, creating a very fundamental
equivalence of the human and the botanical sphere and a scientific bio-
logical subtext, or, as Christian Begemann puts it, ‘that Stifter’s narrative
techniques – primarily, but not exclusively within the realm of nature – are
themselves determined by scientific knowledge and techniques’.3
The main section of The Kiss of Sentze consists of the last part of the
family chronicle of the aristocratic lineage of Sentze, written by Rupert,
the last male descendant of the family. The family of Sentze, whose his-
tory dates back to the Middle Ages, resides in three houses in the forest
of Lower Austria. In the course of time, the members of the family have
invented certain rituals to secure their existence as a hereditary commu-
nity. According to these rituals, which have also been written down as
rules for the generations to come, conflicts between family members are
settled by the decision of the quarrelling parties to kiss each other, thus
signalling their mutual consent to live peacefully afterwards. As the brief
frame narrative tells us, from such peaceful coexistence there emerges at
times not only harmony and friendship but, when it so happens that a male
and a female descendant kiss each other according to the rule, even love
2 ‘Vorrede’ to Bunte Steine, in Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe,

ed. Alfred Doppler and Hartmut Laufhütte, Stuttgart 1978ff., II.2, p. 10. It is Stifter’s
typographic idiosyncrasy to sometimes leave out commas in enumerations.
3 ‘[…] daß Stifters literarische Darstellungsverfahren – vor allem, aber nicht allein

im Bereich der Natur – selbst weithin von Erkenntnissen und Verfahren der
Naturwissenschaft bestimmt sind’. Christian Begemann, ‘Metaphysik und Empirie:
Konkurrierende Naturkonzepte im Werk Adalbert Stifters’, in Lutz Danneberg and
Friedrich Vollhardt (eds), Wissen in Literatur im 19. Jahrhundert, Tübingen 2002,
pp. 92–126: p. 92.
172 Michael Eggers

and marriage, so that eventually a new generation will follow in the family
line. Consequently, the first, pacifying kind of kiss came to be called ‘kiss of
peace’ and the second kind, from which originated marriage, ‘kiss of love’.
Rupert’s account is the final passage in the family chronicle and
covers the recent past, beginning in 1846 and ending in November 1849.
Stifter’s story itself was published in the year 1866 in the first issue of Die
Gartenlaube für Österreich, the Austrian version of the immensely success-
ful German magazine of the same title (I mention these dates because they
will become important for the following argument). Having come of age at
twenty-five, Rupert fulfils the wish of his father to pay a visit to his cousin
Hiltiburg who lives with her mother and sisters in Vienna. Hiltiburg is his
female counterpart, being, just like him, the last descendant of the Sentze.
It is Rupert’s and Hiltiburg’s mission to get to know each other better and
to consider carefully whether they want to kiss each other just peacefully,
sealing a friendship that their fathers held on to before, or lovingly, thus
securing the future existence of their family. After having met a few times,
however, it turns out that they rather dislike each other. Rupert criticizes
her pride, her magnificent and expensive dresses. He even begins to despise
her.4 Turning his back on Hiltiburg and on the prospect of becoming her
husband, he diverts his passions to patriotism instead and decides to join
Radetzky’s campaign against the Italian insurrection.5 He declares that
he wants to set out on this journey at nighttime and without farewell, to
avoid ‘circumstances or trouble and emotions’.6 Just before he leaves the
house in complete darkness, he unexpectedly feels a female embrace and
receives a very passionate kiss on his lips. Unable to recognize the person
who kissed him, he keeps the memory of this extraordinary moment during
4 Adalbert Stifter, Der Kuß von Sentze, in Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische

Gesamtausgabe, ed. Alfred Doppler and Hartmut Laufhütte, Stuttgart 1978ff., III.2,
pp. 143–74: p. 153 (hereafter referred to as KS). All translations of this text are my
own.
5 For the historical background of the story see Frühwald’s important essay: Wolfgang

Frühwald, ‘“Tu felix Austria …”. Zur Deutung von Adalbert Stifters Erzählung Der
Kuß von Sentze’, VASILO 36 (1987), pp. 31–41.
6 KS, p. 155.


his military mission. The description of the kiss is one of the few passages
where the otherwise extremely sober and unemotional style of Rupert’s
account gives way to a much more agitated language, where the paratactic
narration that the reader has already become used to at this point of the
story is replaced by hypotaxis.
Dieser Kuß war so süß und glühend, daß mein ganzes Leben dadurch erschüttert
wurde. Die Gestalt wich in die Finsternis zurück, ich wußte nicht, wie mir war, und
eilte auf dem Gange fort, über die Treppe hinab, durch das geöffnete Pförtchen
hinaus, auf dem Wagen zur Post, auf dem Postwagen in der Richtung nach meinem
Reiseziele dahin, und konnte den Kuß nicht aus dem Haupte bringen. Ich bin später
bei Wachtfeuern gewesen, auf der Vorwacht in der Finsternis der Nacht, auf wüsten
Lagerplätzen, in Regensturm und Sonnenbrand, in schlechten Hütten und in schö-
nen Schlössern, und immer erinnerte ich mich des Kusses und dachte, welches der
Mädchen mußte das Ungewöhnliche getan haben. Das erkannte ich, daß der Kuß
ein tiefes Geheimnis sein sollte, ich forschte nicht und sagte keinem Menschen ein
Wort davon. 7
(This kiss was so sweet and burning that it unsettled my whole life. The figure retreated
into darkness, I was confused and rushed through the hallway, downstairs, through
the little gate that I found open, with the carriage to the post office, with the post
coach onward in the direction of my destination, and couldn’t get the kiss out of
my head. Later I kept watch, close to the fire, I was the outpost in the darkness of
night, I was at desolate camps, in rainstorms and in glowing heat, in poor huts and
in beautiful castles, and always I remembered the kiss and wondered which of the
girls would have done this extraordinary thing. I realized that the kiss was meant to
be a profound secret. I didn’t make any inquiries and didn’t say a word to anybody.)
After his return home, Rupert seeks out Hiltiburg’s father Walchon who
lives reclusively in the woods and pursues his ‘Lieblingswissenschaft’
(favourite science), the study of mosses.8 Walchon represents a typical
Stifter character: he lives a solitary life according to rules and regularity,
embedded in a natural environment. He spends much of his time collect-
ing and classifying the various species of mosses that can be found in the
mountain forest.
7 KS, pp. 155–6.

8 KS, p. 147.

174 Michael Eggers

It has already been noted that there is a close analogy between the
family system of the Sentze and the biological concept of classification.
Birgit Ehlbeck states that there is a link between bryology and genealogy,
that is, between the science of mosses and the kinship system of the Sentze
family. She identifies the double meaning of the term ‘family’ as one of the
points of convergence and indicates more narrative details.9 Furthermore,
Rupert’s father uses figurative language taken from botany to describe
the family history, for example, when he says: ‘[S]o sind nun unsere zwei
Kinder die letzten des Stammes; wenn es doch wieder würde wie damals,
und noch einmal eine Blüte emporkeimte’ (Now our two children are the
last ones of our family tree. If only things would be as they were then and
a new bloom might bud.).10 Of course, figurative vocabulary referring to
plants is widespread in narrative prose, especially during the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, but the parallel between human family geneal-
ogy and botanical classification that informs the text turns such a word
choice into much more than mere poetical illustration. During his stay in
the house of Walchon, Rupert also tries his hand at collecting mosses and
his awakened interest in bryology brings him closer to his host. ‘So war
nun ein Band zwischen uns gefunden’ (now a tie between us had been
found),11 he informs the reader, emphasizing the importance of the activity
of botanizing for the cohesion of the family. When Hiltiburg arrives and,
in contrast to her former conduct in Vienna, adopts the simple and modest
lifestyle of the two men, he begins to teach her what he has learned. The
preoccupation with mosses thus becomes a symbol for a frugal life and for
a commitment to the family. It is an initiation into the necessity, felt by
the Sentze fathers, to show loyalty to their own kind.12
The final part of the story builds up to the act of kissing. Because
their acquaintance did not prove as promising as their fathers had hoped,
9 Birgit Ehlbeck, Denken wie der Wald: Zur poetologischen Funktionalisierung des

Empirismus in den Romanen und Erzählungen Adalbert Stifters und Wilhelm Raabes,
Bodenheim 1998, p. 142.
10 KS, p. 147.

11 KS, p. 166.

12 See Ehlbeck, Denken wie der Wald, p. 143.

70 Anahita Rouyan

issue and did not shy away from expressing his dissatisfaction with ‘a funda-
mentally faulty system of scientific education’ in other formats, for instance
in a lecture entitled ‘Science Teaching – an Ideal, and some Realities’ deliv-
ered before the Royal College of Preceptors at the end of 1894.22 Wells
found disseminating scientific knowledge to non-specialist audiences just
as challenging as had his mentor, Thomas Henry Huxley, almost forty
years previously. Contrary to Huxley, Wells did not need to negotiate the
social boundary between scientific practitioner and mere popularizer, but
he shared with his mentor a preoccupation with controlling public percep-
tions of science.23 In an article entitled ‘Popularising Science’ published
in an 1894 edition of Nature, Wells presented a critique of contemporary
modalities of science popularization, stating how ‘a considerable propor-
tion of the science of our magazines, school text-books, and books for the
general reader, is the mere obvious tinctured by inaccurate compilation’.24
Wells condemned as inadequate what he believed to be two prevailing
popularization models followed by professional scientists, proposing a novel
strategy based on inductive reasoning. ‘Intelligent common people’, argued
Wells, ‘come to scientific books neither for humour, subtlety of style, nor
for vulgar wonders of the “millions and millions and millions” type, but
for problems to exercise their minds upon’.25 Pointing to detective fiction
authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, Wells suggested
that the popularity of their works demonstrated that ‘the public delights
in the ingenious unravelling of evidence’.26
in Philmus and Hughes, H. G. Wells, and John S. Partington (ed.), H. G. Wells in
Nature, 1893–1946: A Reception Reader, Frankfurt am Main 2008.
22 Herbert George Wells, ‘The Sequence of Studies’, in Partington, H. G. Wells in Nature,

pp. 59–62: p. 59. The lecture was later printed as ‘Science Teaching – an Ideal, and
some Realities’, Educational Times, 1 January 1895, pp. 23–9.
23 For Huxley’s approach to science popularization, see Lightman, Victorian Popularizers,

pp. 353–97.
24 Herbert George Wells, ‘Popularising Science’, in Partington, H. G. Wells in Nature,

pp. 21–6: p. 21.
25 Ibid. p. 24.

26 Ibid.

176 Michael Eggers

wir grüßten uns stumm. Dann blieben wir einen Augenblick stehen, dann trat ich
in der Mitte des Saales zu ihr, und sagte: ‘Hiltiburg, hast du die Schriften gelesen?’
‘Ich habe sie gelesen’, antwortete sie.
‘Ich habe sie auch gelesen’, sagte ich.
Dann sprach ich wieder: ‘Weißt du das Wort?’
‘Ich weiß es’, antwortete sie.
‘Ich weiß es auch’, sagte ich.
Dann fragte ich: ‘Soll ich das Wort sprechen?’
‘Sprich es’, antwortete sie.
Sie stand da, da sie dieses sagte, vor mir und hatte ihre beiden Arme an den
Körper nieder hängen. Ich legte meine Hände auf ihre Schultern und sagte leise:
‘Hiltiburg, mit Gott.’
‘Rupert, mit Gott’, antwortete sie noch leiser.
Darauf neigte ich mein Angesicht gegen das ihrige, sie neigte das ihrige gegen
mich, und wir drückten die Lippen aneinander.
Da es geschehen war, rief ich: ‘Hiltiburg, ich kenne den Kuß’.
Sie wendete sich plötzlich ab, ging gegen das Fenster, und blieb dort mit dem
Rücken gegen mich stehen, als wollte sie in die grauen Steine hinaussehen.
Ich ging hinter ihrem Rücken gegen sie, dann ging ich gegen die Tür, dann ging
ich wieder gegen sie.
Dann sagte ich: ‘Hiltiburg, ist das nur ein Kuß des Friedens gewesen?’
Ich hörte, daß meine Stimme zitterte, als ich die Worte sprach.
Sie wendete sich um, auf den rosenroten Wangen war die Glut des Himmels, und
die wundervollen Augen leuchteten wie das Licht der Sonne.
‘Rupert!’ rief sie.
‘Hiltiburg!’ rief ich.
Und mit eins hatten wir uns in den Armen und faßten uns und drückten die
Lippen wieder aneinander, so fest und innig, als sollten wir sie immer und ewig
nicht mehr von einander trennen. Sie begann zu schluchzen, ich fühlte mein Wesen
erbeben, und schluchzte auch wie in tiefster Reue.15
(On the morning of the fourth day I put on festive clothes and went into the hall.
It was still empty. Not much later, Hiltiburg arrived. As before, she wore linen, this
time in white, but she didn’t have a hat. I approached her and we greeted silently.
Then we stood for a moment, then I stepped towards her in the middle of the hall
and said: ‘Hiltiburg, have you read the scriptures?’
‘I have read them’, she replied.
‘I have read them, too’, I said.
15 KS, pp. 170–1.


Then I said: ‘Do you know the word?’
‘I know it’, she said.
‘I know it, too’, I said.
Then I asked: ‘Shall I speak the word?’
‘Speak’, she said.
As she said that, she stood before me with her arms hanging down at the sides of
her body. I laid my hands on her shoulders and said quietly: ‘Hiltiburg, with God’.
‘Rupert, with God’, she replied, even more quietly.
So I bent my face towards hers, she bent hers against mine and we pressed our
lips together.
As it was done, I cried: ‘Hiltiburg, I know that kiss’.
Suddenly she turned away, went towards the window and stood there with her
back towards me as if she wanted to gaze at the grey rock outside. I approached her,
then went towards the door and then again towards her.
Then I said: ‘Hiltiburg, was that only a kiss of peace?’
I heard my voice shaking when I said these words.
She turned around, her rosy cheeks had the redness of the sky and her wonderful
eyes glowed like sunlight.
‘Rupert!’, she cried.
‘Hiltiburg!’, I cried.
At once we were in each other’s arms and held each other, and again we pressed
our lips together, so tightly and intensely, as if we would never divide them anymore.
She began to sob, I felt a shiver deep inside and sobbed as well, in deep remorse.)
A kiss is not just a kiss. It is a contractual act that obliges the two parties
to behave in a certain manner. In a recent article, Marcus Twellmann has
shown that there is a long tradition of such ritualized kissing, dating back
to early Christianity. Within the first three centuries, the osculum pacis
was integrated into Eucharistic liturgy as a ‘Zeichen der Versöhnung und
Einheit’ (sign of reconciliation and unity). In the Middle Ages it was trans-
ferred into secular jurisdiction, came to be called osculum reconciliatorum
and was performed ‘zur Beilegung von Streitigkeiten und Absicherung von
Friedensabkommen’ (to settle disputes and to secure peace agreements).16
In practice and theory, regulated kisses were differentiated from sinful
16 Marcus Twellmann, ‘Literarische Osculologie nach Adalbert Stifter: Der Kuß von

Sentze’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 128 (2010), pp. 531–44: p. 531 and p. 533.
178 Michael Eggers

kissing and were limited to men only.17 With the portrait of the Sentze,
whose old German first names he takes from historiography, embedding the
family genealogy in real Austrian history,18 Stifter extends the tradition of
regulated kissing into the nineteenth century. The ambivalence he creates
in the final kissing scene has been described before in medieval literature,19
so the story does not only sketch a long generational history but resumes
a literary history of the motif of the kiss between ceremony and passion.
In its ambiguity, it indicates a subtextual incest that seems to lurk behind
the sexual liaisons within the Sentze family.20 As I want to show in what
follows, what might be perceived as an ambiguous, incestual form of pas-
sion has a botanical equivalent. Hence, the novella also presents, alongside
the classification of mosses, a classification of kisses and bryology as related
to osculology, that is, the science of kisses. Stifter’s narrative presentation
of generational, familial, and erotic relations represents his conviction of
the inseparability of the human and the natural sphere as well as his belief
that steadiness and regularity are at the heart of things and have to be rated
higher than singular events such as the overwhelming experience of a kiss.
Taking into consideration also the historical facts about bryology and
plant classification, it is noteworthy that, as Martin Selge puts it, from the
second half of the eighteenth century onwards the remarkable diversity of
moss species was considered as one of the most difficult problems to solve
for botanical systematics and taxonomy of Stifter’s time’.21 Walchon’s and
17 Twellmann, ‘Literarische Osculologie’, p. 532.

18 See Twellmann, ‘Literarische Osculologie’, p. 533, n.11. Twellmann refers to the

sources mentioned in Moriz Enzinger, ‘Zu Stifters Erzählung Der Kuß von Sentze’,
in Gesammelte Aufsätze zu Adalbert Stifter, Vienna 1967, pp. 255–66. More infor-
mation about the provenance of the name Sentze and the family forefathers Huoch
and Roudpret (see KS, p. 145) can be found in Wolfgang Beck, Huoch, Beiträge zur
Namenforschung, N. F. 43 (2008), pp. 179–80.

20 Evi Fountoulakis, Die Unruhe des Gastes: Zu einer Schwellenfigur in der Moderne,

Freiburg im Breisgau 2014, p. 81.
21 Martin Selge, Adalbert Stifter: Poesie aus dem Geist der Naturwissenschaft, Stuttgart

1976, p. 113. See also Ilse Jahn, ‘Biologische Fragestellungen in der Epoche der
Aufklärung (18. Jahrhundert)’, in Ilse Jahn (ed.), Geschichte der Biologie: Theorien,

Rupert’s efforts to collect these plants and put them in the right order is an
example of the widespread general interest in natural history that, as early
as the eighteenth century, extended way beyond the academic sphere. The
philosophical, literary, and scientific (re)discovery of nature brought about
a popular movement to observe, classify, and collect natural objects.22 While
the two protagonists’ activities still follow this trend, they also correspond
to the scientific endeavours of their time. For mosses posed a problem for
natural history’s belief in systems, not only because there were so many
species of them but also because they had no flowers and thus it seemed
doubtful whether they had any sexual organs at all. Johannes Hedwig, who
is seen as the founder of modern bryology, describes the problem that he
sets out to solve as follows: because Carl Linnaeus ‘had based his whole
system on copulation and its instruments’, it was necessary, in order to
carry out a more detailed classification of mosses, to discover ‘their geni-
tals, their seeds and, as in all other plants, the reproduction process to be
Methoden, Institutionen, Kurzbiographien, Jena 1982, pp. 231–73: pp. 243–4;

and Twellmann: ‘Wohl nie sind so viel Veröffentlichungen zur Moosflora und
Moosvegetation erschienen wie in dem Jahrzehnt von 1860 bis 1870’: Twellmann,
‘Literarische Osculologie’, p. 540.
22 Nicholas Jardine, The Scenes of Inquiry: On the Reality of Questions in the Sciences,

Oxford 1991, p. 16. Referring to the article ‘histoire naturelle’ in Diderot’s and
d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, Jardine mentions the striking ‘extent of popular interest
in natural history. Throughout the century, not only Paris, but the whole of Europe,
was swept by a series of collectors’ crazes – for “formed stones”, for pickled mon-
strosities, for stuffed birds, for pinned insects, for shells, for aquatint miniatures and
spectacular folios illustrating natural curiosities. There was an extensive market in
exotic specimens, complete with regular auctions, professional collectors, dealers
and speculators and spectacular booms and slumps. In its emphasis on study in the
wild and on the benefits to body and mind of natural history, the article also reflects
the new responsiveness of the period to the sights, sounds and odours of untrained
nature’. See also Michler, ‘Adalbert Stifter und die Ordnungen der Gattung’, p. 195:
‘[E]s wird selten so enthusiastisch botanisiert, gesammelt, geordnet, klassifiziert wie
in dieser Epoche; Stifters Sammel-, Identifikations- und Züchtungsleidenschaft hin-
sichtlich Rosen, Kakteen und anderem mehr wird vor diesem Hintergrund weniger
idiosynkratisch erscheinen’.

the Christian doctrine and translated into an ascending scale of animal
kingdom in Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s doctrine of transformism.36 He drama-
tized this perspective in a short narrative written while still a student at
South Kensington for Science Schools Journal in 1887. ‘Vision of the Past’
depicts a narrator dreaming of a distant past where he encounters a tribe
of ‘strange beasts’ characterized by ‘grotesque features’, who nevertheless
consider themselves representatives of the peak of evolutionary progress.
One of the tribe members expresses this view in the following speech:
[L]ook at the wondrous world around, and think that it is for our use that this world
has been formed […] and the facts which record of the past history of this earth
during the many ages in which it has slowly been preparing itself for the reception
of us, the culminating point of all existence, the noblest of all beings who have ever
existed or ever will exist.37
A similar viewpoint informs the narrative of The Time Machine, where the
Traveller, motivated by an anthropocentric ‘curiosity concerning human
destiny’, builds a machine which allows him to visit the future and witness
what he expects to be the results of a progressive biological, social, and
technological evolution of humankind.38 Instead of hope and fascination,
the Traveller’s first moments in the new world are marked by uncertainty
and fear. Upon encountering the figure of the White Sphinx, the scientist
instantly articulates a common Victorian fear of degeneration: ‘What if
in this interval the race had lost its manliness, and had developed into
something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful?’39
This concern intermingles with the Traveller’s strong belief in humanity’s
continuous progress, in particular when he represents himself in contrast
36 For a classic examination of the concept of the Great Chain of Being, see Arthur O.

Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea, Cambridge,
MA 1936. Lamarck postulated that species changed in response to environmental
alterations in a progressive manner: see Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an
Idea, Berkeley, CA 2003, pp. 82–9.
37 Herbert George Wells, ‘Vision of the Past’, in Philmus and Hughes, H. G. Wells,

pp. 153–7: pp. 154–6.

39 Ibid. p. 48.


a true follower of Linnaeus, was the first to discover the sexual organs of
mosses. In 1779 he sketched his discovery in a short essay and announced
a more detailed and reliable description that followed three years later in
a monograph.27 When, in The Kiss of Sentze, Walchon mentions books
about moss classification that he owns and makes use of,28 we can imagine
that he refers to books like these.
The analogy between the human and the botanical family system in
Stifter’s tale turns out to be a structure that informs the text, including
the central kissing plot. It is not by chance that Walchon chooses to col-
lect and study mosses, of all plants. It is a long time before Rupert knows
who kissed him in the dark and it seems that he and Hiltiburg need a long
time to find out about their passionate feelings towards each other. Their
‘cryptogamic’ passion, too, remains latent for some time and when Rupert
recognizes the kiss it becomes the solution to the generational problem of
the Sentze family, just as it took a long time for the sexuality of mosses to
be discovered which, in its turn, turned out to be the key to the problem
of moss classification.
There is, however, another correspondence between bryology and
Stifter’s text. Many biologists had doubts about the sexual reproduction
of plants until the mid-nineteenth century.29 There were competing theo-
ries claiming that they propagate either asexually or sexually, and despite
Hedwig’s discoveries moss belonged to those plants which were persistently
regarded as asexual.30 It took another discovery that decided this issue
in a seemingly diplomatic way: German botanist Wilhelm Hofmeister
managed to compare the reproduction of ferns and mosses in much more
detail than had been possible before and demonstrated the law that gov-
erns the whole process: the alternation of generations. According to this
law, generations that reproduce sexually and those that do not alternate at
27 Johannes Hedwig, Fundamentum historiae naturalis muscorum frondosorum, Leipzig

1782. See Hedwig, ‘Vorläufige Anzeige’, p. 1.
28 KS, p. 165.

29 Vera Eisnerova, ‘Botanische Disziplinen’, in Ilse Jahn (ed.), Geschichte der Biologie,

pp. 314–15.
30 Eisnerova, ‘Botanische Disziplinen’, p. 305.

182 Michael Eggers

regular intervals. The article about Hofmeister in the Allgemeine Deutsche
Biographie summarizes the discovery in 1880 as follows:
The development process of a great number of incidentally very different plant organ-
isms […] is governed by a common basic law: that of the alternation of generations.
Everywhere we can see two quite different generations, an asexual and a sexual one,
following each other, while despite all analogies there is a difference in appearance
to be seen that separates the above mentioned groups of plants into just as many
individual types.31
The law itself was not new to the scientific community. It was known to
apply to organisms that were considered as lower animals, like algae or
jellyfish, but had not been observed in plants before. Interestingly, it was
a literary author who first discovered the alternation of generations: the
Romantic poet Adelbert von Chamisso, author of the famous novella Peter
Schlemihl and at the same time a successful botanist, observed alternating
generational patterns in salps, small gelatinous marine animals, in 1815.32
His explanations, published in a monograph in 1819, were much contested
and controversies ensued as to how his findings were to be interpreted.33 As
such, the phenomenon itself was already known when Hofmeister success-
fully traced it in moss and fern in his landmark publication of 1851.34 This
31 ‘Den Entwickelungsprozeß einer großen Reihe im übrigen höchst verschiedener

pflanzlicher Organismen […] beherrscht ein gemeinsames Grundgesetz: das des
Generationswechsels. Ueberall sehen wir zwei durchaus verschiedene Generationen,
eine ungeschlechtliche und eine geschlechtliche, im Wechsel mit einander auftreten,
während doch zugleich, trotz aller Analogien unter einander, eine Verschiedenheit
der Ausbildung sich hierbei offenbart, welche die oben genannten Formenkreise
von Gewächsen als ebensoviele individuelle Typen von einander scheidet’. Ernst
Wunschmann, ‘Hofmeister, Wilhelm’, in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, ed.
Historische Commission bei der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Leipzig
 
1875–1912, XII, pp. 644–8: p. 646.
32 Adelbert von Chamisso, De Salpa, Berlin 1819.

33 Armin Geus, ‘Zoologische Disziplinen’, in Ilse Jahn (ed.), Geschichte der Biologie,

pp. 340–2; Armin Geus, ‘Der Generationswechsel: Die Geschichte eines biologis-
chen Problems’, Medizinhistorisches Journal 7 (1972), pp. 159–73.
34 Wilhelm Hofmeister, Vergleichende Untersuchung der Keimung, Entfaltung und

Fruchtbildung höherer Kryptogamen (Moose, Farn, Equisetaceen, Rhizocarpeen und

verification was of immense biological significance, because it paved the way
for a theory of evolution: suddenly, looking at the reproduction process, a
transition could be made from water to land and it was possible to see an
ontogenetic connection between algae, lower land plants like moss or fern,
and seed plants like conifers. Botanist Julius Sachs, who was mentored by
Hofmeister, described the importance of the discovery in 1875 as follows:
Alternation of generations, lately shown to exist though in quite different forms

in the animal kingdom, proved to be the highest law of development, and to reign
according to a simple scheme throughout the whole long series of these extremely
different plants. […] The reader of Hofmeister’s Vergleichende Untersuchungen was
presented with a picture of genetic affinity between Cryptogams and Phanerogams,
which could not be reconciled with the then reigning belief in the constancy of
species. […] That which Häckel, after the appearance of Darwin’s book, called the
phylogenetic method, Hofmeister had long before actually carried out, and with
magnificent success. When Darwin’s theory was given to the world eight years after
Hofmeister’s investigations, the relations of affinity between the great divisions of
the vegetable kingdom were so well established and so patent that the theory of
descent had only to accept what genetic morphology had actually brought to view.35
The correspondence between the social and the biological, or rather, bryo-
logical sphere that I have tried to demonstrate is apparent with regard to
the kissing act, too. The alternation of asexual and sexual generations is the
biological pattern that matches the two kinds of kisses of Sentze, ‘die zwei
Arten’ (‘Art’ can be translated as species here),36 the kiss of peace and the
kiss of love. Walchon’s semi-scientific study of mosses is an obvious link
of the two spheres in the storyline. Taking into consideration pertinent
biological knowledge of the time of the publication of the text helps to
Lycopodiaceen) und der Samenbildung der Coniferen, Leipzig 1851. For a detailed sci-
entific history of the alternation of generations, see John Farley, Gametes and Spores:
Ideas about Sexual Reproduction 1750–1914, Baltimore, MD 1982, pp. 82–109. Farley
ranks Hofmeister’s book ‘among the world’s greatest scientific masterpieces’.
35 Julius Sachs, History of Botany (1530–1860), trans. Henry E. F. Garnsey, 2nd impres-

sion, Oxford 1906, pp. 200–2. German: Geschichte der Botanik vom 16. Jahrhundert
bis 1860, Munich 1875, p. 217. A condensed explanation is presented in Paul A. Keddy,
Plants and Vegetation: Origins, Processes, Consequences, Cambridge 2007, pp. 415–18.
36 KS, p. 144f.

184 Michael Eggers

identify Stifter’s generation story as being modelled on methods of botanical
reproduction, or at least as telling a tale that assimilates human generational
patterns to those of plants.37 We can only speculate whether Stifter, who,
as a teacher of natural history, had profound biological knowledge,38 knew
of the recent scientific findings concerning the alteration of generations.
Even if he had written his story in complete ignorance of Chamisso’s and
Hofmeister’s discoveries, the analogy of moss reproduction and the kissing
regulations of the Sentze is nonetheless apparent. In the text, human history,
exemplified by the house of Sentze, is deeply integrated into nature. Stifter’s
social genealogy follows the laws of organic reproduction in plants as they
were discovered in science shortly before. It would be wrong, therefore,
to describe the use of botanical vocabulary and knowledge in the tale as
merely metaphorical. In this case, the natural and the social sphere simply
cannot be separated. At the same time, well-ordered relations between
generations are literally of vital importance both for the maintenance of
the patrilineal heritage of the Sentze and for the natural reproduction of
mosses. The close association between the social and the biological sphere
inscribed in the story also correlates with the history of the concept of gen-
erations which, according to Parnes, enters biological and social scientific
thinking simultaneously in the first decades of the nineteenth century.39
Stifter’s tale demonstrates how literature can amalgamate scientific and nar-
rative discourses without letting one determine the other. Biology may be
something like a ‘deep structure’ of fictional narrative here, but it remains
implicit, will only be noticed by readers with the respective knowledge
and – most importantly – never actually causes the events of the story.
At the end of the text, ‘evolution’ seems to run its course. Hiltiburg
and Rupert happily marry and ‘es scheint auch von ihnen die Folge aus-
gehen zu wollen’ (a succession seems set to proceed from them [or from
37 See Fountoulakis, Die Unruhe des Gastes, p. 82.

38 See Begemann, ‘Metaphysik und Empirie’, pp. 93–106, for Stifter’s education and

reading in natural history, which was substantial if outdated in some respects.
39 Ohad Parnes, ‘Generationswechsel – eine Figur zwischen Literatur und Mikroskopie’, in

Bernhard J. Dotzler and Sigrid Weigel (eds), ‘fülle der combination’: Literaturforschung
und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Munich 2005, pp. 127–42: p. 128.
76 Anahita Rouyan

Time Traveller returns to describing himself as ‘a strange animal in an
unknown world’, problematizing his own status on the ascending scale
of the animal kingdom.51
During the course of his narrative, the Traveller offers a number
of hypotheses explaining the biological and social order governing the
society of the Eloi and Morlocks. His inferences are, however, products
of hasty judgements founded on limited evidence. Despite assuming that
the Eloi serve as a ‘more convenient breed of cattle’ to Morlocks,52 he
proposes a predator-prey relationship, ignoring the mutual interdepend-
ence of the two humanoid species. Wells problematized the logic of the
evolutionary scale by destabilizing gender traits exhibited by the Eloi and
Morlocks, which the scientist imagines to underpin the system govern-
ing the species.53 In his final musings about the future of humanity, the
Time Traveller desperately attempts to stabilize the rank of the two spe-
cies on the evolutionary scale by granting the feature of humanity to the
Eloi and animalizing Morlocks. He suggests that the Eloi ‘had forgotten
their high ancestry’, and Morlocks are nothing else than ‘white animals’,
‘scarcely to be counted as human beings’.54 It is only by reconstructing
the familiar socio-biological order that the Traveller can rehabilitate
his superior position on the evolutionary scale. Situating his narrative
in a widespread Victorian imagination of the ascending scale of animal
kingdom and placing himself on the very top of it, the Traveller clearly
embodies the progressive interpretation of the evolutionary theory criti-
cized by Wells in his early journalism.
51 Ibid. p. 83.

52 Ibid. p. 71.

53 For a detailed examination of gender representations in The Time Machine, see Hume,

‘Eat or Be Eaten’, pp. 38–42.
54 Wells, The Time Machine, pp. 145–7.

186 Michael Eggers

Geus, Armin, ‘Der Generationswechsel: Die Geschichte eines biologischen Problems’,
Medizinhistorisches Journal 7 (1972), pp. 159–173.
‘Zoologische Disziplinen’, in Ilse Jahn (ed.), Geschichte der Biologie: Theorien,
Methoden, Institutionen, Kurzbiographien, Jena 1982, pp. 324–55.
Hedwig, Johannes, Fundamentum historiae naturalis muscorum frondosorum, Leipzig
1782.
‘Vorläufige Anzeige meiner Beobachtungen von den wahren Geschlechtstheilen
der Moose und ihrer Fortpflanzung durch Samen’, in Sammlung seiner zerstreu-
ten Abhandlungen und Beobachtungen über botanisch-ökonomische Gegenstände:
Erstes Bändchen mit fünf illuminirten Kupfertafeln, Leipzig 1793 [1779], pp. 1–23.
Hofmeister, Wilhelm, Vergleichende Untersuchung der Keimung, Entfaltung und
Fruchtbildung höherer Kryptogamen (Moose, Farn, Equisetaceen, Rhizocarpeen
und Lycopodiaceen) und der Samenbildung der Coniferen, Leipzig 1851.
Jahn, Ilse, ‘Biologische Fragestellungen in der Epoche der Aufklärung (18. Jahrhun-
dert)’, in Ilse Jahn (ed.), Geschichte der Biologie: Theorien, Methoden, Institutionen,
Kurzbiographien, Jena 1982, pp. 231–73.
Jardine, Nicholas, The Scenes of Inquiry: On the Reality of Questions in the Sciences,
Oxford 1991.
Keddy, Paul A., Plants and Vegetation: Origins, Processes, Consequences, Cambridge
2007.
Kelley, Theresa M., Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture, Baltimore,
MD 2012.
Linnaeus, Carl, Caroli Linnaei Genera Plantarum Eorumque Characteres Naturales
Secundum, Numerum, Figuram, Situm, et Proportionem Omnium fructificationis
Partium, Leiden 1737.
Michler, Werner, ‘Adalbert Stifter und die Ordnungen der Gattung: Generische
“Veredelung” als Arbeit am Habitus’, in Alfred Doppler, Hartmut Laufhütte,
Johannes John, and Johann Lachinger (eds), Stifter und Stifterforschung im 21.
Jahrhundert: Biographie – Wissenschaft – Poetik, Berlin 2007, pp. 183–99.
Mitchell, Robert, Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature,
Baltimore, MD 2013.
Parnes, Ohad, ‘Generationswechsel – eine Figur zwischen Literatur und Mikroskopie’,
in Bernhard J. Dotzler and Sigrid Weigel (eds), ‘fülle der combination’: Literatur-
forschung und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Munich 2005, pp. 127–42.
Ulrike Vedder, and Stefan Willer, Das Konzept der Generation: Eine Wissen-
schafts- und Kulturgeschichte, Frankfurt am Main 2008.
Sachs, Julius, Geschichte der Botanik vom 16. Jahrhundert bis 1860, Munich 1875.
History of Botany (1530–1860), trans. Henry E. F. Garnsey, 2nd impression,
Oxford 1906.

Selge, Martin, Adalbert Stifter: Poesie aus dem Geist der Naturwissenschaft, Stuttgart
1976.
Stifter, Adalbert, Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Alfred
Doppler and Hartmut Laufhütte, Stuttgart 1978ff.
Twellmann, Marcus, ‘Literarische Osculologie nach Adalbert Stifter: Der Kuß von
Sentze’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 128 (2010), pp. 531–44.
Wunschmann, Ernst, ‘Hofmeister, Wilhelm’, in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, ed.
Historische Commission bei der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften,
Leipzig 1875–1912, XII, pp. 644–8.
Charlotte Woodford

Andreas-Salomé’s Novel Das Haus (1921) and
Her Essay ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’
(1900)
abstract
The essay ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’ (Thoughts on the Problem of Love, 1900)
by the prominent German intellectual, Lou Andreas-Salomé, draws on ideas on the evolu-
tion of sexual reproduction from Wilhelm Bölsche’s Love-Life in Nature. The question of
gender identity, for Andreas-Salomé, is thus grounded in the biological, yet her writings
nevertheless show the effect of the biological on the psyche to be far from straightfor-
ward. Andreas-Salomé’s essay conceptualizes feminine subjectivity as firmly connected
to corporeality and she places a particular emphasis on women’s maternal role. Here, the
essay will be read against her novel Das Haus (The House, 1921), which also explores the
psychic power of sexual desire. In Das Haus, Andreas-Salomé engages from a psychoana-
lytic perspective with the role of the feminine as representative of the Heimat, and draws
attention to the ambivalent relationship between the erotic power of the foreign and a
primal longing for homecoming.
It is small wonder that the title of Lou Andreas-Salomé’s essay ‘Gedanken

über das Liebesproblem’ (Thoughts on the Problem of Love, 1900) alludes
to erotic desire as a problem, given the taboos on the expression of female
sexuality around 1900.1 But for Andreas-Salomé, sexuality is also a problem
in the sense of an enigma, a complex combination of the body’s psychic
1 Lou Andreas-Salomé, ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’, in Die Erotik: Vier

Aufsätze, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer, Munich 1979, pp. 47–73. All page references are taken
from this edition. First publ. in Neue deutsche Rundschau 11 (1900), pp. 1009–27.

rejected Lankester’s model of socio-biological degeneration in favour of
Huxley’s interpretation of the process.
In The Time Machine, Wells created a protagonist and narrator whose
entire reasoning is founded on the tension between the dream of evolu-
tionary perfection and the nightmare of degeneration, captured in the
entropic metaphor of ‘the sunset of mankind’.63 The Time Traveller states
that absence of environmental limitation produces ‘[a]n animal perfectly
in harmony with its environment […] a perfect mechanism’, almost quot-
ing verbatim another Victorian cultural appropriation of the evolutionary
theory, the view of degeneration articulated by Samuel Butler in his uto-
pian novel of 1872, Erewhon.64 The Traveller’s narrative of degeneration is
shaped by his readings of texts ranging from 1870s utopian fiction and the
social investigations of Charles Booth to the discourse of the ‘Population
Question’.65 He initially presents the social organism of the future as struck
with degeneration deriving from the ‘subjugation of Nature’66 and the
consequent security granted by human civilization, represented as ‘an odd

64 Ibid. p. 187. I am referring to the following fragment from Samuel Butler’s Erewhon:

‘[The writer] feared that the removal of the present pressure might cause a degeneracy
of the human race, and indeed that the whole body might become purely rudimentary,
the man himself being nothing but soul and mechanism [the later edition reads: an
intelligent but passionless principle of mechanical action]’ (Samuel Butler, Erewhon,
pp. 221–2).
65 The Population Question was a late Victorian current of thought advertising

modern methods of birth control as the answer to social ills, initiated by Annie
Besant and Charles Bradlaugh’s provocative reprint of a birth control handbook,
Charles Knowlton’s Fruits of Philosophy (1832). Early in the text, the Time Traveller
presents a Malthusian vision of a world ‘where population is balanced and abundant,
[where] much childbearing becomes an evil rather than a blessing to the State’ and
‘the specialization of the sexes’ is no longer required for the development of society
(Wells, The Time Machine, p. 67). In a later reflection, he again brings up a Malthusian
theme when examining the future society of the Eloi and Morlocks: ‘Possibly the
checks they had devised for the increase of population had succeeded too well, and
their numbers had rather diminished than kept stationary’ (ibid. pp. 76–7).

Biology, Desire, and a Longing for Heimat 191

questions what the era framed as ‘“objective accounts” of sexual scripts’.6
Andreas-Salomé’s essay ‘Die Erotik’ (1910), drafted in 1904, bears wit-
ness to the extensive engagement with psychoanalysis which preceded her
training in 1912 with Freud, after which she practised professionally in her
home town of Göttingen.7
An engagement with the psyche and with sexual identity is central to
Andreas-Salomé’s fiction too. Her novel, Das Haus: Eine Familiengeschichte
vom Ende des vorigen Jahrhunderts (The House: A Family Story from the
End of the Last Century, 1921), also mostly written around 1904, explores
not only the structures of desire between husband and wife, but also between
mother and son.8 Her essay ‘Die Erotik’ suggests that these two relationships
are symbolically linked. Andreas-Salomé suggests that a woman arouses
in her lover the feeling ‘als ob er wieder vom Allmütterlichen umfangen
würde, das ihn umfing, ehe er war’ (as if he were once again embraced by
the universal motherliness which surrounded him before he existed).9
Erotic desire, as conceptualized in ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’,
too, is closely connected to ‘eine geheime Grundsehnsucht’ (a secret basic
desire) to rediscover a lost unity with the world (‘Gedanken’, 48). Das
6 Brinker-Gabler, Image in Outline, p. 20. Lou Andreas-Salomé, ‘Der Mensch als Weib:

Ein Bild im Umriß’, Neue deutsche Rundschau 10 (1899), pp. 225–43, repr. in Die
Erotik, pp. 7–44. See also Nicholas Saul, ‘“Das normale Weib gehört der Zukunft”:
Evolutionism and the New Woman in Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Frieda von
Bülow and Lou Andreas-Salomé’, German Life and Letters 67 (2014), pp. 555–73.
7 Lou Andreas-Salomé, ‘Die Erotik’, first published in Die Gesellschaft: Sammlung

sozialpsychologischer Monographien 33, ed. Martin Buber, Frankfurt am Main 1910.
All quotations taken from ‘Die Erotik’, in Die Erotik, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer, pp. 85–145.
See also In der Schule bei Freud: Tagebuch eines Jahres 1912/13, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer,
Zurich 1958; Andreas-Salomé also published an influential study of the German poet
Rainer Maria Rilke, her former lover, with whom she enjoyed a life-long friendship.
Lou Andreas-Salomé, Rainer Maria Rilke, Leipzig 1928.
8 Lou Andreas-Salomé, Das Haus: Eine Familiengeschichte vom Ende des vorigen

Jahrhunderts, first published 1921, Bremen 2011, p. 16. Serialized in the Vossische
Zeitung in fifty-nine parts, 22 March–2 June 1921, nos 135–254.
9 Andreas-Salomé, ‘Die Erotik’, p. 119. All translations my own. An English translation

of ‘Die Erotik’ is also available: Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Erotic, trans. John Crisp,
New Brunswick, NJ 2012.
192 Charlotte Woodford

Haus, like Andreas-Salomé’s early novel Ma (1901), reveals her fascination
with the idealized maternal feminine, embodied here in the mother figure,
Anneliese.10 Through the figure of the self-sacrificing Anneliese and the
psychological significance of the maternal bond to her adult son, Balduin,
Andreas-Salomé explores not just familial ties but also longing for the
home and homeland (Heimat) as a further manifestation of this longing
for lost unity. The concept of Heimat grew in significance in Germany in
the early twentieth century, as a point of stability in the face of rapid social
change.11 Motherly figures often have a representative function in literature
engaged with Heimat, and the concept of Heimat is itself strongly gen-
dered. According to the Staatslexikon from 1927, ‘Heimat ist mütterlich,
ist Lebenschoß’ (Heimat is motherly, is the womb).12 In the equivalence
made in that quotation between longing for the mother and for the home,
the image of the womb is a telling one: the concept of Heimat expresses
longing for lost unity through the desire for a home which can no longer
be recaptured: ‘Man kann sie Heimat nennen, leben aber kann man nicht
mehr darin’ (you can call it your home, but you can no longer live there,
Das Haus, 85). Similarly, in the maternal bond is an unconscious longing
to recreate the lost union with the mother. As Lou Andreas-Salomé sug-
gests: ‘Unser erstes Erlebnis ist, bemerkenswerter Weise, ein Entschwund’
(our first experience, remarkably, is of irrevocable disappearance).13 Desire
thus derives an unconscious component from a bodily memory of unity.
In Andreas-Salomé’s theoretical writings, a focus on the emancipatory
nature of the erotic draws, among other sources, on Nietzsche’s polemical
10 See Muriel Cormican, Women in the Works of Lou Andreas-Salomé: Negotiating

Identity, Rochester, NY 2009, pp. 45–68; and Muriel Cormican, ‘Authority and
Resistance: Women in Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Das Haus’, Women in German Yearbook
14 (1998), pp. 127–42.
11 See Elizabeth Boa and Rachel Palfreyman, Heimat — A German Dream: Regional

Loyalties and National Identity in German Culture 1890–1990, Oxford 2000, p. 2.
12 ‘Heimat’, Staatslexikon, 5th edn, ed. Görres-Gesellschaft, Freiburg 1926–32, 5 vols,

2, 57, cited by Gisela Ecker (ed.), Kein Land in Sicht: Heimat — weiblich?, Munich
1997, p. 14.
13 Lou Andreas-Salomé, Lebensrückblick: Grundriß einiger Lebenserinnerungen, 2nd

rev. edn., ed. Ernst Pfeiffer, Frankfurt am Main 1968, p. 9.

overturning of conventional morality and society’s repression of the sexual.
Around 1900, other women intellectuals, for example, Ellen Key and Helene
Stöcker, formulated critiques of conventional morality with regard to
women’s maternal role, emphasizing the vitality which accompanied sexual
desire and using this to call for a new sexual ethic, including challenging
social taboos on extra-marital pregnancy.14 Andreas-Salomé’s celebration
of the transformative power of the erotic in her essays ‘Gedanken über
das Liebesproblem’ and ‘Die Erotik’ has a latent political dimension, yet
she does not seek primarily to politicize desire so much as to conceptual-
ize it. Andreas-Salomé emphasizes the productive role of sexual desire in
overcoming the dualism of mind and body and affecting a rejuvenating
wholeness of self; she writes that the sexual act is one ‘in dem der Liebende
Körper und Seele in inniger Umschlingung in sich eins fühlt und daher
jenes Gesunden, jene kraftvolle Erneuerung verspürt wie nach einem göt-
tlichen Wunderbad’ (in which the lover feels at one with himself, with
body and soul intimately entwined, and so senses a powerful renewal as if
from being immersed in divine miracle waters‚ ‘Gedanken’, 57–8). While
the reproductive potential of sexuality shows it to be a vital physical force,
its productive potential on a psychic level is important as a source of new
energy and creativity (‘Gedanken’, 52). A relationship based on erotic desire,
she asserts, should by no means be seen as a meaner or lower form of rela-
tionship to one based on spiritual or intellectual closeness. There is also
a covert political potential, especially for the woman reader, in her praise
of the abundant power and vitality of a sexual relationship that is intense
but short-lived. Much later, reflecting on the end of her sexual relationship
with Rainer Maria Rilke, she included in her memoirs a sentence she had
found in an old diary: ‘Ich bin Erinnerungen treu für immer; Menschen
werde ich es niemals sein’ (I am faithful to memories for ever, but I will
never be faithful to people).15
14 For example, Ellen Key, ‘Weibliche Sittlichkeit’, Dokumente der Frau 1:7 (1899),

pp. 171–84; Key, Das Jahrhundert des Kindes, Berlin 1902; and Helene Stöcker, ‘Zur
Reform der sexuellen Ethik’, Mutterschutz 1 (1905), pp. 3–12.
15 Andreas-Salomé, Lebensrückblick, p. 147.


In her essays on the erotic, biological images that act as a stimulus for
Andreas-Salomé’s thought are drawn from the evolutionary narrative Das
Liebesleben in der Natur: Eine Entwicklungsgeschichte der Liebe (Love-Life
in Nature: The Story of the Evolution of Love, 1898–1902) by her friend
Wilhelm Bölsche, an important member of the Friedrichshagen poets’
circle in Berlin, whose science writing for the general reader reached a wide
public.16 The three-volume work, indebted to the evolutionary biologist
Ernst Haeckel, is a hybrid of science writing and literature, a fin-de-siècle
work of social emancipation which emphasizes the erotic as a universal
principle in nature and suggests that human erotic desire replicates the
same behaviour as the single-cell organisms from which all life originat-
ed.17 In 1898, Andreas-Salomé enthusiastically reviewed the first volume
of Bölsche’s Liebesleben.18 She highlights the equivalence Bölsche makes
between human sexuality and the behaviour of the micro-organisms whose
discovery in the late nineteenth century added new impetus to the evolu-
tionary narrative: ‘Im Liebesaufruhr des Menschen […] läuft es etwa noch
analog dem ab, was sich im uralten Reich der kleinen Einzeller begiebt,
wenn diese ohne Weiteres ganz zu verschmelzen streben’ (In the commo-
tion of human love […] what happens is analogous to that which takes
place in the primal realm of single-cell organisms when these readily seek
to fuse completely with another).19 Moreover, in Das Liebesleben in der
Natur, Bölsche evokes an emotive link between the protozoa of the earli-
est life forms and the readers in the present: ‘mit allen diesen Wesen, die
du waren und doch nicht du vor Äonen der Zeit, hängst du zusammen
16 Wilhelm Bölsche, Das Liebesleben in der Natur: Eine Entwicklungsgeschichte der

Liebe, 3 vols, Florence and Leipzig 1898–1902, I, p. 6. See Nicholas Saul, ‘Darwin in
German Literary Culture, 1890–1914’, in Thomas F. Glick and Elinor Shaffer (eds),
The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe, London 2014,
pp. 46–77.
17 On Bölsche and the bacillus imagery, see Martina King, ‘Anarchist and Aphrodite:

On the Literary History of Germs’, in Thomas Rütten and Martina King (eds),
Contagionism and Contagious Diseases: Medicine and Literature 1880–1933, Berlin
2013, pp. 101–30, see especially pp. 112–14 (and Liebesleben, I, pp. 130–40).
18 Lou Andreas-Salomé, ‘Physische Liebe’, Die Zukunft 25 (1898), pp. 218–22: p. 218.

19 Andreas-Salomé, ‘Physische Liebe’, p. 221.

82 Anahita Rouyan

present a view of the future’.75 During the last decade of the nineteenth
century, Wells had been just as concerned with the future of humanity
as with its present, in particular the contemporary modalities of science
popularization and education. At an early stage in his career, Wells placed
an emphasis on communication in scientific training, viewing it as ‘a train-
ing in babbling, in blurting things out, in telling just as plainly as possible
and as soon as possible what it is [that the scientist] has found’.76 Wells’s
concern about the scientific education of the general public, evident in his
early journalistic and literary work, would gradually lead him to assume the
role of Britain’s primary public educator at the dawn of the new century.
Interestingly, Wells’s protagonist and narrator does not concern himself
exclusively with the future, either. The Time Traveller seems to be well
aware of the conventions governing the genre of his story. He first criticizes
the unrealistic tendency of Victorian utopian fiction to provide detailed
descriptions of utopian realities, but more importantly, he reflects on his
own tendency to project Victorian social and cultural norms onto the future
reality: ‘And it was natural to assume that it was in the underworld that
the necessary work of the overworld was performed. This was so plausible
that I accepted it unhesitatingly.’77 Wells’s pessimistic outlook on the state
of public knowledge about science and his constant effort to educate non-
specialist audiences suggest that what he held responsible for limiting the
imagination of the Victorians was the circulation of inaccurate scientific
interpretations: a dissemination of discourses which fuelled the tension
between the progressive view of human evolution and its potential degen-
eration. The conflict rendered alternative futures invisible to a society where
cultural authority for communicating scientific knowledge belonged to
figures who did not shy away from adding a ring of sensationalism to their
accounts of science, consequently perpetuating scientific misinformation
in the style of The Time Machine’s narrator.
75 Richard Gregory, ‘Science in Fiction’, in Parrinder, H. G. Wells in Nature, pp. 179–81:

p. 179.
76 Herbert George Wells, New Worlds for Old, in W. Warren Wagar (ed.), H. G. Wells:

Journalism and Prophecy 1893–1946, Boston, MA 1964.
77 Wells, The Time Machine, pp. 95–6, 113.


philosophical tradition.23 An emphasis on the materiality of the evolution
of the psyche reinforces Andreas-Salomé’s argument for the interconnect-
edness of mind and body. In her review of Das Liebesleben in der Natur,
Andreas-Salomé points out: ‘Der Geist ist nur ein kleiner, armer Schuljunge
an der Hand seines großen, sehr weisen Lehrers, des Körperlichen. Erst
kürzlich, erst gestern, ward er geboren’ (the mind is but a poor little school
boy holding the hand of his great and very wise teacher, the body. He was
born but a short time ago, only yesterday).24 Moreover, in ‘Gedanken über
das Liebesproblem’, Andreas-Salomé describes the birth of the psychic
‘aus dem großen, allumfassenden Mutterleibe des Physischen’ (out of the
great, all-encompassing body of the mother which is the physical self ).
Nevertheless, this imagery shows the pervasive nature of the traditional
gendering of the mind as masculine and the body as feminine, a metaphor
which arguably informs the image of the mind as a small schoolboy, too.
For modern feminist critics these gendered associations need to be over-
come as a prerequisite for any emancipatory re-evaluation of feminine
bodily processes.25
Andreas-Salomé suggests that a desire for fusion with the Other acts
out in the erotic an unconscious desire for homecoming or Heimat, a
manifestation of a longing for the primal union with the mother, and
symbolic of a longing for transcendent wholeness. For Andreas-Salomé
the physiological mother-child relationship represents psychoanalytically a
primal community of subject and world, resembling the oceanic harmony
offered by a monist oneness with all organic nature.26 In ‘Gedanken über
23 Saul, ‘Darwin in German Literary Culture’, pp. 46–9; Monika Fick, Sinnenwelt

und Weltseele: Der psychophysiche Monismus in der Literatur der Jahrhundertwende,
Tübingen 1993, pp. 130–3; Riedel, ‘Homo Natura’, pp. 279–80; see also Peter Sprengel,
Geschichte der deutschsprachigen Literatur 1870–1900, IX: Von der Reichsgründung
bis zur Jahrhundertwende, Munich 1998, I, p. 83.
24 Andreas-Salomé, ‘Physische Liebe’, p. 222.

25 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington, IN

1994, pp. 3–4. See also Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life,
Politics, and Art, Durham, NC and London 2011.
26 Wolfgang Riedel, ‘Homo Natura’: Literarische Anthropologie um 1900, Berlin 1996,

pp. 280–1.

das Liebesproblem’ and the novel Das Haus, Andreas-Salomé suggests
that this symbiotic closeness with the mother forms the archetype for the
subject’s future relationships with the world. Andreas-Salomé sensitively
explores the Oedipal dimensions of the close relationship which ensues
between mother and son in Das Haus; Anneliese’s love for her son Balduin
engenders an emotional estrangement from her husband, while Balduin’s
love for her takes on a quasi-erotic dimension, as indicated, for example,
by the emotional intensity of the language of the following passage:
‘Meine liebe Mutter!’, sagte er sich selber vor, fast rein worthaft, bis das Wort ihn
fasste, sich ihm vertiefte zu einer unendlichen Süße und Bedeutung – bis es wie
brausende Dichtung, die er noch nie ausgeschöpft, ihm wieder und wieder kam:
‘Meine liebe Mutter!’ (124)
(‘My dear mother!’, he whispered to himself, almost clearly worded, until the phrase
took hold of him, engrossed him with an infinite sweetness and meaning – until it
came back to him again and again like a thundering poetry, such that he had never
brought forth before: ‘My dear mother!’)
His mother, the source of his Oedipal longing, represents the Heimat for
him, and stimulates his poetic creativity by providing the stable point from
which he can explore the world.27 Andreas-Salomé is also drawing on the
rodina or motherland discourse of her own birthplace, Russia, in which,
as Peter Blickle points out, the mother figure carries mythic associations
which are ‘powerfully eroticised and incestuous’.28 In Andreas-Salomé’s
novel, the libidinal longing for this primal harmony is a psychic source of
Balduin’s creativity as an artist.
For Andreas-Salomé, tracing the origins of consciousness back to
primal, microbiological forms also offers evolutionary evidence to under-
mine the Kantian dualism of analysis and intuition.29 In ‘Gedanken über
27 See Boa and Palfreyman, Heimat, pp. 2–3.

28 Peter Blickle, A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland, Rochester, NY

2002, p. 2. See also Andreas-Salomé’s later novel Ródinka: Russische Erinnerung,
Jena 1923.
29 Paul Guyer, ‘Absolute Idealism and the rejection of Kantian dualism’, in Karl Ameriks

(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Idealism, Cambridge 2000, pp. 37–56.

das Liebesproblem’, Andreas-Salomé uses the term ‘Überschwang’ to
describe a psychic response to desire, a form of intuitive experience which
transcends rational analysis. The mother’s love of the child, like the lover’s
attraction to a sexual partner, generates ‘reiche Überschwänglichkeiten’, a
rich exuberance, through which the Other, the object, is perceived in a trans-
figured form, as a delightful illusion (‘liebliches Blendwerk’, ‘Gedanken’, 58).
Andreas-Salomé also uses the language of the uncanny to describe the
relationship between mind and body:
Die Liebe ist eben sowohl das physischeste wie auch das scheinbar spiritualistischeste,
geistesgläubigste, was in uns spukt; sie hält sich ganz und gar an den Körper, aber an
ihn ganz und gar als Symbol, als Gleichnis für den Gesamtmenschen und für alles,
was sich durch die Pforte der Sinne in unsere verborgenste Seele einschleicht, um
sie zu wecken. (‘Gedanken’, 81)
(Love is thus not only the most physical but also the most obviously spiritualistic
quality which haunts us, the most superstitious, it adheres well and truly to the body,
but to the body entirely as a symbol, as a parable for the whole person and for eve-
rything which creeps into the most hidden places in the soul through the gateway
of the senses in order to arouse the soul.)
This imagery of haunting emphasizes the hidden psychological dimension

to the ostensibly physical experience of erotic love, reiterating the idea
that the erotic is a synthesis of physical and psychic urges, the analysis of
which necessitates the use of a new kind of language, in which literary
symbolism can facilitate the expression of unconscious ideas and associa-
tions. In ‘Die Erotik’, this passage, repeated with only minor rephrasing
(‘Die Erotik’, 106–7), is followed by the idea that in the erotic we find not
merely the expression of desire for the love object but also of a longing for
something which transcends the everyday: ‘allem Hohen noch, dem wir
darin entgegenträumen’ (for every higher object towards which we direct
our dreams, ‘Die Erotik’, 107).
In Andreas-Salomé’s novel Das Haus, the capacity for intuitive experi-
ence is feminized, though it is not the sole preserve of female protagonists.
The rational, scientific mindset of Frank Branhardt, the husband and doctor
who dismisses the poetic imagination as ‘krankhaft’ (pathological), is con-
trasted with his wife, artistic son, and daughter, who have a tendency towards

sentiment or ‘Überschwenglichkeiten’ (effusiveness). The poet Balduin’s sensi-
bilities perhaps bear traces of Andreas-Salomé’s relationship with Rilke, since,
when addressing him in her memoirs, she also writes of the ‘Überschwang
Deiner Lyrik’ (the exuberance of your poetry) and ‘die Überschwenglichkeit
in Deinen tagtäglich mir folgenden Briefen’ (the effusiveness of the letters
which you send me every single day).30 In her novel, ‘Überschwang’, or effusive
sentiment, is often the expression of a form of intuitive knowledge which
serves as an attempt to break down the barriers to the Other and enter into
their experience. This emphasis on the truth of intuitive knowledge, and the
search for a new form of linguistic or poetic expression for it, is reminiscent
of Henri Bergson’s concept of intuition, expressed in the translation from
1912 of his essay of 1903, Introduction à la métaphysique as ‘the kind of intel-
lectual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to
coincide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible’.31 As David
Midgley points out, inherent in this idea is also that intuition leads ‘towards
knowledge of the absolute’.32 Andrew Bowie suggests that ‘intuition […] stands
for a ground of truth which is “immediate” and therefore not susceptible to
further explanatory analysis of the kind which is applicable to determinate
objects in the world’.33 Bergson’s writings were immensely popular in German
translation.34 According to her biographer, Andreas-Salomé engaged exten-
sively with his work in its original French during a stay in Paris in 1911.35
30 Andreas-Salomé, Lebensrückblick, p. 140.

31 Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme, New York 1912,

p. 7.
32 David Midgley, ‘After Materialism – Reflections of Idealism in Lebensphilosophie:

Dilthey, Bergson and Simmel’, in John Walker (ed.), The Impact of Idealism, II,
Historical, Social and Political Thought, Cambridge 2013, pp. 161–85: p. 172.
33 Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German

Literary Theory, London 1997, p. 155. See also Leonard Lawlor, ‘Intuition and
Duration: An Introduction to Bergson’s “Introduction to Metaphysics”’, in Michael
R. Kelly (ed.), Bergson and Phenomenology, Basingstoke 2010, pp. 25–41.
34 See Irmgard Heidler, Der Verleger Eugen Diederichs und seine Welt (1896–1930),

Wiesbaden 1998, pp. 339–46.
35 Stéphane Michaud, Lou Andreas-Salomé: L’Alliée de la vie, Paris 2000, p. 218.

Andreas-Salomé also loaned Rilke Bergson’s Matière et mémoire and L’Evolution

Jensen, J. Vernon, Thomas Henry Huxley: Communicating for Science, London 1991.
Lankester, Edwin Ray, Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism, London 1880.
Lightman, Bernard, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audi-
ences, Chicago, IL 2007.
Lovejoy, Arthur O., The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea,
Cambridge, MA 1936.
McLean, Steven, The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells: Fantasies of Science, Basingstoke 2009.
Manlove, Colin, ‘Charles Kingsley, H. G. Wells, and the Machine in Victorian Fiction’,
in Harold Bloom (ed.), H. G. Wells, Philadelphia, PA 2005, pp. 11–33.
Moore, James, ‘Wallace’s Malthusian Moment: The Common Context Revisited’,
in Bernard Lightman (ed.), Victorian Science in Context, Chicago, IL 1997,
pp. 290–311.
Morris, William, News from Nowhere, London 1890.
Page, Michael R., The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H. G. Wells: Sci-
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Parrinder, Patrick, Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy,
Syracuse, NY 1995.
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2000.
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tries: Biological Visions in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture, London
2005, pp. 15–26.
Stover, Leon, ‘Applied Natural History: Wells vs. Huxley’, in Patrick Parrinder and
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also turn to questions of heredity to try to understand the artistic Balduin,
on the point of abandoning his studies in order to write poetry, since he
resembles so little his successful father. The parents ask themselves about
their son: ‘von wem hatte er etwas krankhaftes?’ (From whom did he
get his sickly nature?, Das Haus, 16). Anneliese is haunted by ‘schwarze
Vererbungsschatten’ (the dark ghosts of inheritance) when she considers her
son’s temperament and searches in her own family papers for more informa-
tion on a grandfather who suffered a mental decline (32). But letters from
her grandmother reassure her in an unexpected way. Detailed diary entries,
which chronicle the grandmother’s life, turn out to be written with ‘eine
Einfalt und Macht, wie beabsichtigt von einem großen Dichter’ (a simplic-
ity and a power, such as a great poet might have deliberately crafted, 32).
Anneliese concludes: ‘Von Dichterblut gewesen war die Frau’ (The woman
had a poet’s blood, ibid.). Delving into the secrets of family history appears
to provide a forbear who shared the son’s artistic ambitions. In the light of
this genetic explanation for her son’s disposition, Anneliese appears to feel
that there is genealogical legitimacy for Balduin’s artistic temperament.
Sigrid Weigel interprets the expression of hope for the future success
of genetic heirs as a coping strategy for a secular age, a desire to overcome
individual mortality through redemption in the form of successors who
take forward a part of the self. She emphasizes the importance of the phan-
tasma, or imaginary construct, of living on through a biological line,41 and
points out: ‘Das Erbe ist also die herausragende Technik der Sorge um das
Fort- und Nachleben des Eigenen nach dem Tode in einer säkularen Kultur’
(In a secular culture, the heir is thus the mechanism par excellence for the
survival and continuation after death of what belongs to the self ).42 Yet,
in Das Haus, in the light of Balduin’s surprising reluctance to continue in
the rational scientific tradition of his father, Branhardt comments pessi-
mistically on the uncontrollability of the genetic legacy, for all that parents
attempt to shape the next generation with care:
41 Sigrid Weigel, Genea-Logik: Generation, Tradition und Evolution zwischen Kultur-

und Naturwissenschaften, Munich 2006, pp. 9–10.
42 Weigel, Genea-Logik, pp. 62–3.


In jedem neuen Menschenkind ist eben so viel Neues, Fremdes, davon unser Fleisch
und Blut nicht weiß – und was doch wir selber weitergeben, mit blinden Händen,
schuldlos, letzten Endes verantwortungslos. – Da ist ein Unberechenbares uns unzu-
gänglich. Eine Schranke, errichtet zwischen den Generationen. (Das Haus, 17)
(In every new human child there is so much that is new, strange, which our flesh and
blood did not know – and which we nonetheless pass on ourselves, with blind hands,
guilt-free, in the end without responsibility. – Inaccessible to us there is something
incalculable. A barrier, set up across the generations.)
In her essay ‘Die Erotik’ (1908), Andreas-Salomé also reflects on how the
idea of living on through an heir is undermined by the realization that
acquired characteristics cannot be passed on, although they contribute
immeasurably to human individuality:
im Kinde [findet] lediglich eine Übertragung dessen [statt], was die Liebenden selber
schon von den Voreltern übernommen. Der schwerste und kostbarste Erwerb, der per-
sönlich errungene, bleibt außerhalb des Vorgangs stehen, und damit die Individualität
in ihrer unwiederholbaren Ganzheit, des Lebens Lebendigstem: Verwalterin ist sie
nur, eine bessere oder schlechtere, dem geschlechtlichen Erbstück.43
(Lovers only transmit to the child what they themselves have received from their
ancestors. That which has been acquired at greatest cost, the personal achievements,
remain outside of the process and with that individuality in its unrepeatable entirety,
that which animates life to the full: it is only the custodian, for better or worse, of
the genetic inheritance.)
Although Andreas-Salomé notes the continuity of the genetic material

from one generation to the next, she attributes more significance for human
individuality to the aspects of the self which have been shaped by experi-
ence, something which cannot be straightforwardly inherited by future
generations.
If desire is on the one hand an unconscious longing for the homely,
it is also provoked, argues Andreas-Salomé, by the exotic or foreign,
by ‘[der] Reiz der Neuheit’ (the attraction of the new, ‘Gedanken’, 50).
She suggests ‘daß unsere Nerven einer fremden Welt entgegenzitterten,
43 Andreas-Salomé, ‘Die Erotik’, p. 121.


in der wir nie so heimisch werden können wie im eigenen, bequemen,
gewohnten Alltag’ (that our nerves tremble towards a foreign world in
which we can never become so at home as in the comfortable everyday
world of our own which we inhabit, ‘Gedanken’, 51). She links this idea to
the same biological discourse on microorganisms, writing in ‘Gedanken
über das Liebesproblem’ that just as the sexual act brings together differ-
ent microorganisms to form a new life (‘das Zusammenkommen mögli-
chst differenter Protoplasmakörperchen’, 50), so the body, too, is attracted
by those who appear exotic, ‘fremd’, a principle which, she emphasizes,
is shared by ‘das ganze Tierreich’ (the whole of the animal kingdom).44
Through the relationship in Das Haus between Gitta and the Jewish doctor
Markus Mandelstein, Andreas-Salomé confronts the ambivalent relation-
ship between the erotic intoxication aroused by the foreign, and the longing
for closeness or fusion with the Other sought in homecoming. In this she
also shows desire to have a haunting or uncanny effect, which cuts across
ideas of rational choice of partner and defies the possibility of controlling
genetic heritage.
Markus Mandelstein in Das Haus is an eastern Jew, from Romania,
and, before meeting his future wife, Gitta, he is known to her father for
his experimentation on great apes (Das Haus, 134), a practice which the
historian Paul Weindling identifies as particularly associated with Jewish
doctors in the early twentieth century.45 Female apes were used in research
on the syphilis bacillus, among other experiments.46 The reputed Jewishness
of vivisection and animal experimentation was connected to an association
made between fears of modern, experimental medicine and fears of the
racial Other. From the vantage point of monism, whose ideas on the one-
ness of all living things spoke strongly to Andreas-Salomé, animal experi-
mentation had strong negative connotations; it was seen as the epitome
44 Andreas-Salomé, ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’, p. 50, cf. Bölsche, Liebesleben,

I, pp. 158–9.
45 Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics, p. 170, who points out that by the

1890s, ‘scientific medicine became stigmatized as inhumane’, p. 169.
46 Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics, p. 169.


of instrumental rationality.47 In the novel, Gitta has a strong aversion to
the experiments conducted by male doctors on female apes, and Markus’s
involvement with experimental science seems intended to emphasize his
Jewishness and connect him with scientific, rational discourses, in contrast
to the intuitive spontaneity demonstrated by Gitta.
Attracted by the exotic, Gitta falls in love with barely any knowledge
of Markus’s character or origins. Her attraction to him on a physical level
has a profound psychic effect, making her prone to weeping and other
spontaneous unconsciously motivated reactions. Her love is powerful
and instinctive. She describes it as overpowering her ‘mit großen Glocken,
oder wie Sturm oder Gesang. – Man fühlt es – man fühlt es!’ (with the
sound of great bells or like a storm or a song. – I just feel it – I just feel
it!, Das Haus, 55). Markus’s racial origins are the source of tension within
Gitta’s family. Thus her mother, Anneliese, asks her father: ‘Du erwähnst
sein Judentum. Bist du denn dagegen – ich meine, zum Beispiel, würde
dir denn eine Mischung mit jüdischem Blut – immer und in allen Fällen
unerwünscht scheinen?’ (You mentioned his Jewishness. Are you against
it, then – I mean, would you for example regard a union with Jewish blood
– as undesirable, always and in every case?, Das Haus, 70). His Jewishness
is treated as a eugenic question, the father anxious for the future blood-
line of the family. The doctor Frank Branhardt needs little time to reflect
before answering in the affirmative: ‘Fremdestes, ja Gegensätzliches erregt
bekanntlich die tollsten Leidenschaften. Nur – die Frage bleibt: ob es auch
zu verschwistern vermag.’ (It is well known that opposites attract, that what
is foreign arouses the most violent passion. But – the question remains:
should it be allowed to form a close union, ibid.). The narrative voice com-
ments of Gitta’s brother Balduin: ‘Am Judentum von Gittas Auserkorenem
nahm er nicht den mindesten Anstoß’ (he did not take the slightest offence
at the Jewishness of Gitta’s chosen one, 80). Yet Balduin does go so far as to
tease Gitta, reminding her of her preference for Aryan rather than Jewish
girls at school, and he asks her maliciously (‘böse’) how she likes the sound
47 Gauri Viswanathan, ‘Monism and Suffering: A Theosophical Perspective’, in Todd

H. Weir (ed.), Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview,
New York 2012, pp. 91–106: p. 97.

Jules-Auguste Soury
In his recent bibliography of the political right in France, Alain de Benoist

writes that, to date, no detailed research has been dedicated to Jules Soury’s
work.1 De Benoist does cite articles by Toby Gelfand and Pierre Huard,2
and valuable analyses have also been contributed by Pierre-André Taguieff,
Sandrine Schiano-Bennis, and Daniel Gasman,3 but his claim remains to
some extent justified: the reception of Soury by French literary circles, in
particular, has not been thoroughly studied.4 It also shows how forgotten
this figure has now become.
Soury’s social climbing is a legend of its own and one which he never
hesitated to cultivate.5 Born in May 1842 to a poor Parisian family – his
1 Alain de Benoist, ‘Jules Soury’, in Bibliographie générale des droites françaises, IV, Paris

2005, p. 401. Unless otherwise stated, all translations in this chapter are mine. I am
indebted to Julia C. Hartley for her kind help in reviewing my English.
2 Toby Gelfand, ‘From Religious to Bio-Medical Anti-Semitism: The Career of Jules

Soury’, in Ann La Berge and Mordechai Feingold (eds), French Medical Culture in the
Nineteenth Century, Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA 1994, pp. 248–79; Pierre Huard
and M.-J. Imbault-Huard, ‘Jules Soury 1842–1915’, Revue d’histoire des sciences et de
leurs applications 23:2 (1970), pp. 155–64.
3 Pierre-André Taguieff, ‘Soury, Jules, 1842–1915’, in Pierre-André Taguieff (ed.),

Dictionnaire historique et critique du racisme, Paris 2013, pp. 1715–30; Pierre-André
Taguieff, La Couleur et le Sang: Doctrines racistes à la française, new edn, Paris 2002,
pp. 150–97; Sandrine Schiano-Bennis, ‘Jules Soury: Le drame moderne de la connais-
sance’, in Jean-Claude Pont, Laurent Freland, Flavia Padovani, and Lilia Slavinskaia
(eds), Pour comprendre le xixe siècle: Histoire et philosophie des sciences à la fin du siècle,
Florence 2007, pp. 511–29; Daniel Gasman, Haeckel’s Monism and the Birth of Fascist
Ideology, New York 1998.
4 Zeev Sternhell has examined the links between Soury and Barrès, a point to which

I shall return later.
5 See the autobiographical text Ma Vie (My Life) in Jules Soury, Campagne nationaliste,

Paris 1902, pp. 17–71; and the article ‘Soury, Jules-Auguste’ in Claude Augé (ed.),
Le Nouveau Larousse illustré, Paris 1897–1904, VII, p. 770. In a letter to Anatole
France, Soury claims that all facts and dates from this small biography were provided
by himself (letter from 27 October 1891, BnF, Paris, Département des Manuscrits,
NAF 15438, fo 575). In this same private letter, he again tells the story of his life, with

on transporting from Romania (116). His sense of homesickness forms a
barrier to his intimacy with Gitta, metaphorically expressed through the
mosquito nets which Gitta complains formed a barrier between them in
their separate beds in their honeymoon (‘dafür wurden wir freilich auch
nicht gebissen!’ – Well, it meant of course that we didn’t get bitten!, 115).
Yet this barrier proves permeable. Gitta is reconciled with Markus after a
separation by listening to him tell stories of his family, and through these
stories his father and other family members suddenly cease being distant
figures and instead become ‘wie Tiefvertraute’ (deeply familiar, 208). Gitta
restores his Heimat to him through her intimate emotional engagement
with his blood relatives; this leads to a psychic closeness previously lack-
ing in their relationship and enables a new physical closeness, whereby
she herself becomes the embodiment of Heimat. Gitta is presented as
no less than the source of his redemption, with the concept of Heimat
shown clearly to be a secularization of religious longing (‘sie brächte […]
die Heimat, das ewige Leben zurück’ – she brought back his homeland,
his eternal life, 210). Sexual union brings about psychic wholeness and also
mystical transcendence. As Andreas-Salomé suggests in ‘Gedanken über
das Liebesproblem’, it is ‘als sei die Geliebte nicht nur sie selbst, sondern
auch noch die ganze Welt, auch noch das gesamte All. – ’ (as if the beloved
were not just herself but also the whole world, also the whole universe. –,
‘Gedanken’, 69).
In ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’, Andreas-Salomé is indebted
to a biological narrative of human origins. The conceptual framework for
that narrative draws on discourses of gender and racial difference which,
around 1900, seemed to be newly affirmed by the biological sciences, and
which show starkly how scientific concepts themselves are embedded in
the social and political framework of their era. This biological narrative
is far from a ‘post-metaphysical story of the origin and evolution of life’.49
Rather, her essays and the discourse of Heimat in Das Haus show how
such a post-metaphysical narrative fell short of meeting the contemporary
search for meaning in human existence. Andreas-Salomé supplements a
49 Saul, ‘Das normale Weib’, 555.


psychoanalytic exploration of the human libido with a vitalist affirmation
of the transcendence made possible through the erotic. Reading Das Haus
alongside ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’ shows the symbolic con-
nection between erotic love and an unconscious desire to recapture lost
memories of wholeness, explored in the novel through the Heimat imagery.
Central to desire, Andreas-Salomé contends, is a longing for a harmonious
union with creation which cannot be captured through rational discourse
but rather only through imagery and linguistic innovation, and whose
expression thus falls first and foremost to the poet, rather than the scientist.
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‘Der Mensch als Weib’, pp. 7–44; ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’, pp. 47–73;
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Brinker-Gabler, Gisela, Image in Outline: Reading Lou Andreas-Salomé, London 2012.
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Michaud, Stéphane, Lou Andreas-Salomé: l’Alliée de la vie, Paris 2000.
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Furthermore, Soury claimed to be a ‘clérical athée de tradition catholique’
(an atheist clericalist in the Catholic tradition).15 Although he believed only
in science, he did indeed see himself as the heir of a French Catholic tradition.
But beyond tradition, the source of this paradoxical position can be found in
his adherence to Emil du Bois-Reymond’s ignoramus et ignorabimus (we do
not know and will not know),16 a motto which Soury would keep on repeating
throughout his works, and which he probably came across while translating
Haeckel’s response to the criticisms of Rudolf Virchow, which appeared in
French under the title Les Preuves du transformisme in 1878, and in English
as Freedom in Science and Teaching (1879). Ironically enough, in this book,
Haeckel opposes the ignoramus doctrine because, he explains, professing the
limits of scientific knowledge leaves too much room for a renewed religious
faith.17 And yet it is precisely this contradictory marriage of ‘the oratory and
the laboratory’ which took place in Soury’s thought.18
Promoting German biology in France
Soury translated works by several German biologists: Eduard Oscar

Schmidt (1823–86),19 William Thierry Preyer (1841–97),20 and above
all, Ernst Haeckel. He also wrote a foreword for the translation of Hugo

16 Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Über die Grenzen des Naturerkennens: Die sieben Welträthsel:

Zwei Vorträge [1872], Leipzig 1898, p. 51.
17 Ernst Haeckel, Les Preuves du transformisme: Réponse à Virchow, trans. Jules Soury,

Paris 1878, pp. 119–20.
18 This is an expression taken from Soury’s text entitled ‘Oratoire et laboratoire’, in

Campagne nationaliste, pp. 233–94.
19 Eduard Oscar Schmidt, Les sciences naturelles et la philosophie de l’inconscient, trans.

20 Although Preyer was an Englishman, he worked in Germany most of his life – even-

tually holding a chair at Jena. He also wrote in German. William Thierry Preyer,
Éléments de physiologie générale, trans. Jules Soury, Paris 1884.
Linda Leskau
8 Botanical Perversions: On the Depathologization

of Perversions in Texts by Alfred Döblin and
Hanns Heinz Ewers
abstract
The following chapter offers a reading of Alfred Döblin’s novel Der schwarze Vorhang
(1912), his short story Die Ermordung einer Butterblume (1910), and Hanns Heinz Ewers’s
novel Alraune (1911).1 All three texts were published at the beginning of the twentieth
century, a period which was characterized by mutual exchanges of knowledge between
literature and science, such as sexual science, which became an important topic during
this time. Therefore, the chapter’s principal focus is on the various interrelations between
sexual science – as it is portrayed in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis – and
these literary texts. Döblin’s as well as Ewers’s works directly address these intertwining
relations between literary writing and sexuality by using different approaches to articulate
sexual ‘abnormality’ through botanical imagery. The chapter closes by investigating the
extent to which these texts’ botanical imagery reflects the depathologization of sadism
and masochism as perversions within sexual-scientific discourses in the German-speaking
world of the early twentieth century.
‘One might say that the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a
power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.’2 With this famous
quotation Michel Foucault marks the emergence of a new strategy of power
that has progressively taken the place of the negative power symbolized by
sovereign rule and the sword. This so-called power over life or biopower is
1 I would like to thank Petra Gatzsch and Louise Huber-Fennell for their help in

translating this chapter.
2 Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge: History of Sexuality I, London 1998, p. 138.

212 Linda Leskau

a positive power aimed at productivity. It evolved in two basic forms, the
first of which is to be attributed to the seventeenth century and the latter
to the second half of the eighteenth century. The first form of the power
over life is discipline, centred on the individuals and their bodies; the second
form is regulation in which, for the first time, the population shifts into
a political and economic focus.3 Sexuality lies at the heart of the efforts
directed towards power over life and connects the two poles of disciplining
and regulatory control. The centring of sexuality in the wake of the new
techniques of power gave rise to a dispositive of sexuality in the nineteenth
century, to which four strategic unities can be assigned: 1) a hysterization
of women’s bodies; 2) a pedagogization of children’s sex; 3) a socialization of
procreative behaviour; and 4) a psychiatrization of perverse pleasure.4 This
last point comprises the extensive analysis, management, and regulatory
control of perverted lust or of the sexually abnormal individual:
Through the various discourses, legal sanctions against minor perversions were
multiplied; sexual irregularity was annexed to mental illness; from childhood to old
age, a norm of sexual development was defined and all the possible deviations were
carefully described; pedagogical controls and medical treatments were organized;
around the least fantasies, moralists, but especially doctors, brandished the whole
emphatic vocabulary of abomination.5
As the quotation illustrates, biopower is organized around the concept of

normality as opposed to abnormality. This is why Foucault refers to the
emergence of a ‘normalizing society’.6 The centring on the dichotomy of
normal/abnormal can also be observed in another important change: the
transformation of medical knowledge.7 Until the end of the eighteenth
century, on Foucault’s account, medicine is centred around the dichotomy
of health and illness, focusing on the illness itself rather than the patient.
3 See ibid. pp. 139–40.

4 Ibid. pp. 104–5.

5 Ibid. p. 36.

6 Ibid. p. 144.

7 See Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception,

London and New York 2003, pp. 40–1.
Botanical Perversions 213

In the nineteenth century medical interest then shifts to the opposing
concepts of normal versus pathological or normal versus abnormal. It is
this reference to the abnormal – which not only extends to medicine but
also, in particular, to psychiatry and the area of justice – that, in connection
with the formation of the biopolitical power, brings about the creation of
the group of (sexually) abnormal individuals over the course of the nine-
teenth century. Against the background of the dispositive of sexuality, the
category of abnormality is occupied with sexuality in two ways:
First of all, the problem or at least the identification of phenomena of heredity and
degeneration is immediately applied to the general field of abnormality as an ana-
lytic grid by which the field is codified and subdivided. […] To that extent, medical
and psychiatric analysis of the functions of reproduction becomes involved in the
methods for analyzing abnormality. Then, within the domain constituted by this
abnormality, the characteristic disorders of sexual abnormality are, of course, identi-
fied. Sexual abnormality initially appears as a series of particular cases of abnormality
and then, soon after, around 1880–90, it emerges as the root, foundation, and general
etiological principle of most other forms of abnormality.8
Abnormality thus becomes sexual abnormality and therefore perversion.

Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s well-known study Psychopathia Sexualis is an
important part of this development. This highly successful clinical study on
sexual psychopathy was first published in 1886 and reproduced in subsequent
editions in later years, earning Krafft-Ebing the reputation as the founder of
sexual science or sexual pathology. In his Psychopathia Sexualis, Krafft-Ebing
classifies deviations from so-called normal sexuality, that is, procreative sexu-
ality, into disorders, illnesses, and perversions. In doing so, he establishes a
comprehensive systematic catalogue of sexual abnormalities. This is in line
with the approach taken by the German-language science of sexuality around
1900, which dedicated itself to the general categorization of human sexuality,
thus not only focusing on normal sexuality, but particularly on those forms
of sexuality stigmatized as being abnormal. Krafft-Ebing, as a representative
of this pathologizing approach to sexual science, is convinced that literature,
8 Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–75, New York

2003, pp. 167–8.
214 Linda Leskau

unlike science, neglects the aspect of abnormality: ‘He [the poet] cannot
discern deep shadows, because he is dazed by the blazing light and overcome
by the benign heat of the subject.’9 According to Krafft-Ebing, it is the task
of science to deal with the so-called dark sides of sexual life: ‘The scientific
study of the psychopathology of sexual life necessarily deals with the miseries
of man and the dark sides of his existence, the shadow of which contorts the
sublime image of the deity into horrid caricatures, and leads astray aestheti-
cism and morality.’10 But German literature at the turn of the century paints
a completely different picture. Above all, Expressionist literature is marked
by an interest in taboos: disease, crime, sexuality, and insanity are just some
of the topics which are drawn upon repeatedly.11
However, it is important to note that the exchanges of knowledge
between literature and sexual science are by no means unilateral, but rather
reciprocal.12 For it is not only literature that makes reference to sexologi-
cal topics. Sexual science, too, often refers to and draws upon literature:
‘Not only do the early sexologists adopt terms and concepts from fictional
sources […], but literary texts frequently serve as evidence in their works,
and fictional representations are treated as case studies which are deemed
just as valid as empirical observations.’13 Despite the differentiation between
9 Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: With special reference to the Antipathic

Sexual Instinct: A Medico-forensic Study, trans. F. J. Rebman from the 12th German edn,
New York, undated, p. V <https://archive.org/details/psychopathiasexu00krafuoft>
[accessed 18 March 2016]. For a comparison of the German original with the English
translation provided by F. J. Rebman, see Heike Bauer, English Literary Sexology:
Translations of Inversion, 1860–1930, London 2009, pp. 34–42.
10 Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, p. vii.

11 In this context, Michael Cowan goes so far as to speak of an ‘obsession with modern

pathologies’, which manifests itself in Expressionism: see Cowan, ‘Die Tücke des
Körpers: Taming the Nervous Body in Alfred Döblin’s “Die Ermordung einer
Butterblume” and “Die Tänzerin und der Leib”’, in Seminar: A Journal of Germanic
Studies 43:4 (2007), pp. 482–98: p. 482.
12 See Heike Bauer, ‘Literary Sexualities’, in David Hillman and Ulrika Maude (eds),

The Cambridge Companion to The Body in Literature, Cambridge 2015, pp. 101–15:
p. 108.
13 Anna Katharina Schaffner, ‘Sexology and Literature: On the Uses and Abuses of

Fiction’, in Oliver Böni and Japhet Johnstone (eds), Crimes of Passion: Repräsentationen

Such a close intellectual relationship would, unsurprisingly, rub off
on Soury, as Gasman has already shown.31 Just like Haeckel, Soury saw
the field of psychology as ancillary to physiology: ‘Jamais je n’ai rien pu
entendre à une proposition quelconque de psychologie sous laquelle il
m’est impossible de voir une structure et une texture d’éléments anatom-
iques’ (I have never been able to understand any psychological proposition
under which I have not been able to see a structure and a texture made of
anatomical elements).32 But it is mainly Soury’s racial, anti-Semitic view
of biology that retains the influence of Haeckelian Darwinism. This does
not necessarily imply that Haeckel’s theories were anti-Semitic,33 but that
Soury used his understanding of Haeckel to sustain his own views. As
Linda L. Clark reminds us, Soury’s anti-Semitic views were profoundly
different from Édouard Drumont’s – the journalist and writer who wrote
La France juive ( Jewish France, a best-selling anti-Semitic pamphlet of
1886): as opposed to Drumont, ‘Soury’s anti-Dreyfusard polemics explic-
itly enlisted Darwinism to buttress racial theories’.34 For Soury, the world
is a ‘war of races’,35 and in the following correspondence with Haeckel in
1881, we can clearly see the alliance between a version of Darwinism and
racial anti-Semitism:
J’applaudis au mouvement antisémitique de votre nation. Mais il faut bien qu’on sache
que le judaïsme n’est pas un fait religieux, mais un fait de race, qu’un juif baptisé, ger-
manisé, francisé, italianisé, etc. n’en reste pas moins toujours un juif, un sémite, dont
la patrie véritable est dans la vallée du Jourdain. Les Sémites et les Indo-européens
constituent deux races humaines absolument hétérogènes, et, dans la lutte, pour
l’existence civile, sociale, économique, les Sémites, plus souples, plus capables de
s’adapter aux conditions extérieures, l’emporteront à la fin, si l’on n’y prend garde, sur
31 Gasman, Haeckel’s Monism, pp. 101–33.


33 This is, again, a controversial point. Robert J. Richards argues that Haeckel was not

anti-Semitic, since he placed Semites ‘at the pinnacle of his tree of human progress’
(The Tragic Sense of Life, p. 274), whereas Gasman claims that Haeckelian monism
held the Jews accountable for the invention of a monotheistic God (Haeckel’s Monism,
pp. 25–6).
34 Linda L. Clark, Social Darwinism in France, Tuscaloosa, AL 1984, p. 97.


216 Linda Leskau

ultimately murders his girlfriend, Irene, in a fit of lust.16 Against the back-
ground of sexual science, several passages in the text reveal that Johannes
and Irene have a sadomasochistic relationship, as we can see in the following
quotation: ‘Die Friedgewohnte [Irene] aber liebte in seiner Nähe die Angst,
die ihr in den Knieen [sic] prickelte, und die leichte Wolke von Grauen, die
seine Gegenwart ihr über die Haut, die Arme und Schultern jagte’17 (In his
presence, she [Irene], so accustomed to peace, loved the fear that triggered
prickling sensations in her knees and the light cloud of horror that raced
over her skin, her arms and her shoulders). If it is not clear enough from
this passage that Irene has already wholeheartedly embraced the submis-
sive role in this relationship, her masochism is made more explicit in the
following passage:
O in welche Schmach wirft es mich, daß ich ein Weib bin. Genug duldete ich in mir
und nun wälzt es mich vor deine Füße hin. Komm zu mir, du Entsetzlicher. Ich bin
ganz von mir abgedrängt, das Stumme in mir hast du sprechen machen; nun bette
mich auch und laß mich büßen, daß ich Weib bin. Schlürftest nie an meiner Seele
so bang und durstig. Meine Hände wollen in deinen zucken, wie Efeu wollen dich
meine Glieder bedrängen. Du darfst mich ganz vernichten, denn nur für dich bin
ich aufgegrünt; für dich verfinsterte und hellte sich mein Mädchenblut und immer
wieder weinte es quellend um dich, Johannes. (SV 132)
16 On the topic of sadism and masochism in Döblin’s Der schwarze Vorhang, see Roland

Dollinger, ‘Sadomasochismus in Alfred Döblins Der schwarze Vorhang’, in Ira Lorf
and Gabriele Sander (eds), Internationales Alfred-Döblin-Kolloquium: Leipzig 1997,
Bern 1999, pp. 51–65; Petra Porto, Sexuelle Norm und Abweichung: Aspekte des lit-
erarischen und des theoretischen Diskurses der Frühen Moderne (1890–1930), Munich
2011, pp. 191–217; and Linda Leskau, ‘Sadismus/Masochismus in Alfred Döblins
Der schwarze Vorhang: Eine Analyse der reziproken Wissenswanderungen zwischen
Literatur und Wissenschaft’, in Oliver Böni and Japhet Johnstone (eds), Crimes of
Passion, pp. 139–56.
17 Alfred Döblin: ‘Der schwarze Vorhang: Roman von den Worten und Zufällen’,

in Alfred Döblin, Jagende Rosse, Der schwarze Vorhang, Frankfurt am Main 2014,
pp. 67–167: p. 111. Further quotations from this edition will be indicated in the text
by the abbreviation SV. All quotations from Döblin’s texts are translated by Petra
Gatzsch and Louise Huber-Fennell.

(Oh how humiliated I feel to be a woman. I have tolerated enough inside of me and
now it throws me at your feet. Come to me, you dreadful one. I have been utterly
forced away from myself; you made the silence in me talk; now bed me and let me
atone for being a woman. Never before have you slurped my soul with such fear and
such thirst. My hands want to flinch in yours; my limbs want to beset you like ivy.
You may destroy me entirely, as it was only for you that I have flourished; for you
my maiden blood darkened and became light again and repeatedly shed tears for
you, Johannes.)
Irene physically longs to experience the fear that Johannes evokes in her. The
desire she feels when being humiliated and repressed, when experiencing
cruelty and violence, is unambiguously spelled out. It is also remarkable
that Irene in fact calls Johannes by his name at one point, yet never reveals
her own name, using woman as a collective singular noun instead. She is
the one woman who wants to suffer for all other women. In doing so, she
assumes the role assigned to her by Johannes; namely, to atone for the entire
female race. The sadomasochistic bond thus appears as a holistic concept:
Johannes’s sadism is entirely complemented by Irene’s masochism. The
relationship finally ends when Irene is sadistically murdered by Johannes,18
as both of them have longed for:
Dann ergriffen seine Hände ihre Arme, sie blühte ihm mit Gelächter, steil wie er,
entgegen. Schrie gell auf. Denn wie er sie umschlang, hatten seine Zähne tief in den
weißen Hals und die Kehle geschlagen, das Gesicht in den Blutstrom gedrückt,
schlürfte er an ihrem Halse, die mit leisem Keuchen gegen seine Umklammerung
anrang. Er seufzte mit gepreßten Kiefern und zitterte: wie warm, wie warm. Es
quoll wie ein Bad über sein Gesicht, lag wie ein [sic] rote Binde über seinen Augen.
Den bittern Blutdunst atmeten sie: sie kannten sich beide nicht. Durch das Weib
rauchte weiß und immer dichter die tödliche Lust; rührte ihr Stirn, Auge und Knie.
Sie wuchs in die Umarmung hinein, in die Schwere seiner mörderischen Hände, den
erstickenden Druck seines Leibes. Aus seinen Armen, die sich lösten, glitt sie seufzend
18 Lindner points out that Döblin’s novel Der schwarze Vorhang is the only text of

its time to elaborate on the act of lust murder in literary form: see Lindner, ‘Der
Mythos “Lustmord”: Serienmörder in der deutschen Literatur, dem Film und der
bildenden Kunst zwischen 1892 und 1932’, in Joachim Lindner and Claus-Michael
Ort (eds), Verbrechen – Justiz – Medien: Konstellationen in Deutschland von 1900
bis zur Gegenwart, Tübingen 1999, pp. 273–305: p. 287.
218 Linda Leskau

an ihm herunter, er stand über ihr gebückt, deren Mund offen war, deren Adern an
den Schläfen stärker blauten. […] Sie spritzte ihr Blut nach ihm, mit tiefen Schauern,
träumend. Ihre Finger kratzten den Waldboden; sie zuckte, als er sie aufhob. Noch
als sie erkaltete, suchten ihre Lippen nach seinem Munde. (SV 162–3)
(His hands then grabbed her arms; she flourished towards him, laughing, just as
upright as he was. She let out a piercing scream. Because in his embrace he had sunk
his teeth deep into her white neck and throat. With his face pressed into the stream
of blood, he slurped at her throat while she wrestled against his embrace with a quiet
gasp. He sighed, his jaws pressed together: how warm it was, how warm. It washed
over him, covered his eyes like a red ribbon. Both breathed in the bitter fume of
blood; both out of their minds. The deadly lust rushed through the woman’s body,
like white smoke getting thicker and thicker. She grew into the embrace, into the
gravity of his murderous hand, the suffocating weight of his body. From his loosening
arms she slid down, sighing, he was standing above her, she whose mouth was open,
whose veins were turning a darker blue at the temples. […] She sprayed her blood
on him, shivering violently, dreaming. Her fingers scratched at the forest floor; she
twitched when he took her up in his arms. Even as she went cold her lips were still
searching for his mouth.)
This scene can clearly be interpreted as a lust murder as defined by Krafft-

Ebing, for whom lust murders represent the most extreme form of sadism.
Krafft-Ebing defines sadism, the active combination of cruelty and lust,
as follows: ‘Sadism is thus nothing else than an excessive and monstrous
pathological intensification of phenomena, […] which accompany the
psychical vita sexualis, particularly in males.’19 The quotation illustrates
that Krafft-Ebing understands sadism as a male perversion corresponding
to the male sexual character. According to this view, it is in man’s nature to
play the active, aggressive part, manifesting a strong sexual desire, while the
woman is passive by nature, and her libido weak. It is for this very reason
that the masochistic role is assigned to the woman, a passive combination
of cruelty and desire: ‘Thus it is easy to regard masochism in general as a
pathological growth of specific feminine mental elements, – as an abnor-
mal intensification of certain features of the psycho-sexual character of
19 Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, p. 86.


women, – and to seek its primary origin in that sex […].’20 Döblin’s text
supports the view of gender binarism as presented by Krafft-Ebing, under
which even perversions are subordinated to enforced gender binarism, as
it is, after all, the sadistic man, Johannes, who carries out the lust murder
on his masochistic girlfriend Irene.
The murder scene in Döblin’s Der schwarze Vorhang can be clearly
identified as a lust murder. Döblin’s second narrative, however, is per-
haps a less obvious candidate. Döblin’s short story Die Ermordung
einer Butterblume (The Murder of a Buttercup) was written between
1904 and 1905 and first published in 1910. This is the story of a small
businessman named Michael Fischer who beheads a buttercup with his
walking stick during a stroll in the forest and subsequently tries to com-
pensate for his feelings of guilt with a number of different actions.21 At
the beginning of the story Fischer is taking a walk in the forest when the
following incident happens:
Es [das dünne Spazierstöckchen] blieb, als der Herr immer ruhig und achtlos seines
Weges zog, an dem spärlichen Unkraut hängen. Da hielt der ernste Herr nicht inne,
sondern ruckte, weiter schlendernd, nur leicht am Griff, schaute sich dann am Arm
festgehalten verletzt um, riß erst vergebens, dann erfolgreich mit beiden Fäusten
das Stöckchen los und trat atemlos mit zwei raschen Blicken auf den Stock und den
Rasen zurück, so daß die Goldkette auf der schwarzen Weste hochsprang. Außer
sich stand der Dicke einen Augenblick da. Der steife Hut saß ihm im Nacken. Er
fixierte die verwachsenen Blumen, um dann mit erhobenem Stock auf sie zu stürzen
und blutroten Gesichts auf das stumme Gewächs loszuschlagen. Die Hiebe sausten
rechts und links. Über den Weg flogen Stiele und Blätter.22
20 Ibid. p. 196.

21 On the topic of sadism and masochism in Döblin’s Die Ermordung einer Butterblume,

see Linda Leskau, ‘Die Ermordung einer Butterblume als literarische AbFallgeschichte
gelesen’, in Lucia Aschauer, Horst Gruner, and Tobias Gutmann (eds), Fallgeschichten:
Text- und Wissensformen exemplarischer Narrative in der Kultur der Moderne,
Würzburg 2015, pp. 153–78.
22 Alfred Döblin, ‘Die Ermordung einer Butterblume’, in Alfred Döblin, Die Ermordung

einer Butterblume: Gesammelte Erzählungen, ed. Christina Althen, Frankfurt am
Main 2013, pp. 59–71: p. 59. Further quotations from this edition will be indicated
in the text by the abbreviation EB.

The case of Paul Bourget
Un point d’histoire littéraire incontestable et que les critiques et les historiens litté-
raires ne veulent pas connaître (il leur serait évidemment pénible de lire et de suivre
les x–1870 grandes pages du Système Nerveux Central de Jules Soury) est celui-ci:
[…] Maurice Barrès a emprunté toutes ses théories, toutes ses idées générales à Jules
Soury […].46
(An unquestionable fact of literary history, and which critics and historians do not
wish to acknowledge (it would clearly be unpleasant for them to read and understand
the x–1870 great pages of Jules Soury’s Central Nervous System), is the following:
[…] Maurice Barrès has borrowed all his theories, all his general ideas, from Jules
Soury […].)
This is how Camille Vettard, a French literary scholar of the early twenti-
eth century, sums up the intellectual relationship between the well-known
French writer Maurice Barrès and Jules Soury, a connection that has been
further developed by Zeev Sternhell in his studies of French fascism and
other far-right movements.47 In similar vein, I want to suggest that Paul
Bourget’s novels and essays transmit aspects of Soury’s thoughts and,
through Soury, aspects of Haeckel’s take on biology – and we should bear
in mind that Bourget was one of the most prolific and famous writers of
the turn of the century. In a short opuscule published in 1904, Joseph
Grasset, a medical doctor, demonstrated that biology in Paul Bourget’s
novels is ‘la charpente de fer qui soutient l’édifice’ (the iron framework
46 Camille Vettard, ‘Le fournisseur d’idées de Barrès: Jules Soury’, in Du côté de chez …

Valéry, Péguy et Romain Rolland, Proust, Gide, Barrès et Soury, Sartre, Benda,
Nietzsche, Albi 1946, p. 61. Vettard’s emphasis.
47 Zeev Sternhell, Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français, Paris 1972; ‘Le détermin-

isme physiologique et racial à la base du nationalisme de Maurice Barrès et de Jules
Soury’, in Pierre Guiral and Émile Temime (eds), L’Idée de race dans la politique
française contemporaine, Paris 1977, pp. 117–38; La Droite révolutionnaire 1885–1914:
Les origines françaises du fascisme, Paris 1978.

Mordes mit dem Tode bestraft’23 (Whosoever kills a person intentionally
shall be punished by death for murder if the killing was done with delibera-
tion). This means that only people can be murdered, but not buttercups.
Yet I plead for using the term murder, since there are several passages in
the text which illustrate that the buttercup takes the role of a woman: it is
constantly anthropomorphized by Fischer. On several separate occasions he
talks about murdering the flower (see EB 61–3), and about a ‘Pflanzenleiche’
(EB 62) (plant corpse), and he gives the buttercup the female Christian
name Ellen (see EB 64).
Even if it is possible to call this a murder on the basis of anthropo-
morphism, it remains to be determined whether it can be described as a
lust murder, in which the killing is coupled with sexual desire. To answer
this question, we need to subject the text’s gendered characters to a simi-
lar analysis to that undertaken with Döblin’s Der schwarze Vorhang. For
it is just as much the case that the gendered characters in the story Die
Ermordung einer Butterblume are used as signifiers for the gender charac-
teristics that define the essential being of men and women. The narrative
style used to describe the incident in the forest makes it clear early on that
Herr Fischer, as the male, takes on the active role: he jerks, tears, attacks,
and hits, whereas the flowers with their female connotations endure his
aggression and violence silently and passively. And it is finally the man,
Herr Fischer, who murders the anthropomorphized, female buttercup. It is
noteworthy that Fischer is sexually aroused after the murder: ‘Wild schlug
das Herz des Kaufmanns’ (EB 60) (The businessman’s heart beat wildly).
If this physical excitement is interpreted as sexual arousal, the murder hap-
pens as a combination of active violence and lust, and can therefore also
be characterized as a sadistic lust murder.
Finally, I wish to discuss the novel Alraune written by Hanns Heinz
Ewers, which was first published in 1911. It tells the story of the human
creature Alraune (German for mandragora or mandrake), who was cre-
ated as a kind of experiment to verify the truth about the myth of the
23 Strafgesetzbuch (German Criminal Code) <http://lexetius.com/StGB/211,6>

[accessed 5 May 2016]. Translation of the German Criminal Code provided by Prof.
Dr Michael Bohlander.
222 Linda Leskau

mandrake root.24 During a soirée, Attorney Manasse tells his guests the
legend of the Alraune:
Im frühen Mittelalter, im Anschluss an die Kreuzzüge, entwickelte sich dann die

deutsche Alraunsage. Der Verbrecher, splinternackt am Kreuzwege gehenkt, verliert
in dem Augenblicke, in dem das Genick bricht, seinen letzten Samen. Dieser Samen
fällt zur Erde und befruchtet sie: Aus ihm entsteht das Alräunchen, ein Männlein
oder Weiblein. Nachts zog man aus, es zu graben; wenn es zwölf Uhr schlug, musste
man die Schaufel unter dem Galgen einsetzen. Aber man tat wohl, sich die Ohren
fest zu verstopfen, mit Watte und gutem Wachs, denn wenn man das Männlein
ausriss, schrie es so entsetzlich, dass man niederfiel vor Schreck – noch Shakespeare
erzählt das. Dann trug man das Wurzelwesen nach Hause, verwahrte es wohl, brachte
ihm von jeder Mahlzeit ein wenig zu essen und wusch es in Wein am Sabbattage.
Es brachte Glück in Prozessen und im Kriege, war ein Amulett gegen Hexerei und
zog viel Geld ins Haus. […] Aber bei alledem schuf es doch Leid und Qualen, wo
immer es war. Die übrigen Hausbewohner wurden verfolgt vom Unglück, und es
trieb seinen Besitzer zu Geiz, Unzucht und allen Verbrechen. Ließ ihn schließlich
zugrunde gehen und zur Hölle fahren.25
(The German alraune story began in the early Middle Ages in connection with the
crusades. Known criminals were hung stark naked from a gallows at a crossroads.
At the moment their neck was broken they lost their semen and it fell to the earth
fertilizing it and creating a male or female alraune. It had to be dug out of the ground
beneath the gallows when the clock struck midnight and you needed to plug your
ears with cotton and wax or its dreadful screams would make you fall down in terror.
Even Shakespeare tells of this. After it is dug up and carried back home you keep
it healthy by bringing it a little to eat at every meal and bathing it in wine on the
Sabbath. It brings luck in peace and in war, is a protection against witchcraft and
brings lots of money into the house. […] Yet it also brings sorrow and pain where
ever [sic] it is. The house where it stays will be pursued by bad luck and it will drive
its owner to greed, fornication and other crimes before leading him at last to death
and then to hell.)26
24 On the topic of sadism and masochism in Ewers’s Alraune, see Porto, Sexuelle Norm

und Abweichung, pp. 265–91.
25 Hanns Heinz Ewers, Alraune: Die Geschichte eines lebenden Wesens, Berlin 2014,

p. 30. Further quotations from this edition will be indicated in the text by the
abbreviation A.
26 Hanns Heinz Ewers, Alraune, trans. Joe E. Bandel <https://ewersalraune.wordpress.

com/> [accessed 16 November 2015], Ch2C – ‘The Alraune’.

Against the background of this legend, the Privy Councilor Jakob ten
Brinken and his nephew, the student Frank Braun, decide to create a human
mandrake (see A 31). They choose the convicted lust murderer Weinand
Noerrissen as the father. During his execution they take possession of some
of his semen, just as the legend has it, and use it to inseminate the pros-
titute Alma Raune. The pairing of Alraune’s father, a lust murderer, and
her mother, a prostitute, already suggests a union of cruelty and lust, the
foundation for the perversions of sadism and masochism. As I shall argue
below, Alraune herself also unites violence and lust.
In and of itself, Alraune’s birth reflects some aspects of the myth:
she is born around midnight with a terrible shrieking, her mother dies an
agonizing death and her thighs have grown together as with a mandrake
root (see A 90–1). In what follows, the reader is told about a number
of phenomena and incidents alluding to the myth. Yet it never becomes
clear whether these are just fortunate or unfortunate coincidences or
whether Alraune is really the cause of all these incidents. Let us begin
with the luck she brings. From the time Alraune comes into the house of
ten Brinken, her foster father becomes successful even when embarking
on the most risky and hopeless transactions, as long as they have some-
thing to do with earth (see A 99), and he amasses a considerable fortune.
But at the same time, Alraune for the most part brings great sorrow to
the people around her. Even when very young, she forces other children
to torture animals:
Er [Wölfchen] kniete auf der Erde, vor ihm saß auf einem Stein ein großer Frosch.
Der Junge hatte ihm eine brennende Zigarette in das breite Maul gesteckt, tief
hinein in den Rachen. Und der Frosch rauchte in Todesangst. Er verschluckte
den Rauch, sog ihn in den Magen, mehr und immer mehr; aber er stieß ihn
nicht wieder aus – so wurde er dicker und dicker. Wölfchen starrte ihn an, dicke
Tränen liefen ihm über die Wangen. Aber er zündete doch, als die Zigarette
heruntergebrannt war, eine zweite an, nahm den Stummel dem Frosch aus dem
Hals, steckte ihm mit zitternden Fingern die frische ins Maul. Und der Frosch
schwoll unförmig an, dick quollen ihm die großen Augen aus den Höhlen. Es
war ein starkes Tier: Zwei und eine halbe Zigarette konnte es vertragen, ehe es
zerplatzte. (A 110)
224 Linda Leskau

(He [Wölfchen] was kneeling on the ground. In front of him sat a large frog on a
stone. The youth had lit a cigarette and shoved it in the wide mouth and deep down
its throat. The frog smoked in deathly fear, swallowing the smoke, pulling it down
into its belly. It inhaled more and more but couldn’t push it back out so it became
larger and larger. Wölfchen stared at it, fat tears running down his cheeks. But he lit
another cigarette when the first one burned down, removed the stub from the frog’s
throat and with shaking fingers pushed the fresh one back into its mouth. The frog
swelled up monstrously, quivering in agony, its eyes popping out of their sockets.
It was a strong animal and endured two and a half cigarettes before it exploded.)27
Although it is Wölfchen who tortures the frog, this and other scenes of
animal torture reveal that the children are forced to act in this way and do
not perform the cruelties of their own free will. The joy in cruelty must be
assigned merely to Alraune.
Krafft-Ebing points out that sadistic acts perpetrated on animals are
often a substitute for sadistic acts on humans.28 In fact, Alraune finds
pleasure in extending her cruel games to people. Two of her lovers, who are
best friends, are subjected to her sadistic desire to such an extent that they
engage in a duel. The duel, having been settled on a single exchange of bul-
lets at twenty paces, is only supposed to have symbolic value. Nonetheless,
the Count of Geroldingen dies:
Die Kugel war in den Unterleib gedrungen, hatte alle Eingeweide durchschlagen
und war dann im Rückgrat steckengeblieben. Aber es war, als ob es dahin gelockt
worden sei mit geheimer Kraft: Gerade durch die Westentasche war sie gedrungen,
durch das Brieflein Alraunens, hatte das vierblättrige Kleeblatt durchschlagen und
das liebe Wörtlein: ‘Mascotte’ – (A 146)
(The bullet was in the abdomen; it had penetrated through all the intestines and
impacted against the spine where it was now lodged. It was as if it had been drawn
there by a mysterious force, straight through Alraune’s letter, through the four-leaf
clover and the beloved word, ‘Mascot’.)29
27 Ibid. Chapter 7 – A: ‘She Never Tortures Animals’.

28 See Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, p. 125.

29 Ewers, Alraune, Chapter 9 – C: ‘The Duel’.


Physical characteristics also indicate a link between Soury and Sixte. In
his in memoriam, Bourget describes Soury as a ‘tout petit homme, entière-
ment rasé, de mine chétive et qui vivait dans un ascétisme sans conces-
sions. On n’en trouverait l’équivalent de nos jours que chez les religieux’
(very small man, entirely shaved, of puny appearance, and who lived in an
uncompromising asceticism. Nowadays, only among clergymen would we
find anything equivalent).60 Likewise, Sixte shows a ‘visage rasé […], un teint
bilieux […] – voilà sous quelles apparences se présentait ce savant, dont
toutes les actions furent dès le premier mois aussi méticuleusement réglées
que celles d’un ecclésiastique’ (a shaved face […], a bilious complexion […]
– thus were the scientist’s looks, whose actions were all from the very first
month as meticulously organized as those of a clergyman).61 Last but not
least, Bourget is alleged to have said privately that Adrien Sixte was indeed
Soury, although he had not yet met him by the time he wrote Le Disciple.62
Soury’s influence on Le Disciple is paradoxical, since, as its plot shows
clearly enough, this novel is a stark denunciation of how – in Bourget’s
conservative opinion – evolutionary science can destroy traditional soci-
ety, embodied by Charlotte. In this regard, the description of a personal
tragedy through the alternation of a third-person and a first-person narra-
tive (Greslou’s diary) creates a captivating and lively text, one that manages
to be critical without being too overtly moralizing. But at the same time,
the first-person narrative, as a textual construction, also makes Greslou’s
character more endearing to the reader. And after all, Greslou is not guilty
of any crime; he really was in love with Charlotte, his death is dignified
(he refuses to run away);63 and the very last page shows Greslou’s mother,
in the attitude of the Virgin Mary, keeping a vigil over her son’s mortal
remains, while Sixte is silently crying. I want to suggest, then, that the lit-
erary ‘discourse’ that was supposed to undermine the biological discourse
may even ultimately reinforce it.
60 Junius, ‘Le billet de Junius’, L’Écho de Paris, 16 August 1915, p. 1.


62 Camille Vettard, ‘Le drame de Jules Soury’, p. 259.


226 Linda Leskau

The representation of sadomasochistic perversion by means
of botanical and floral imagery
All three narratives are conspicuous for their use of floral and botanical
imagery for the literary treatment of the sadistic and masochistic perver-
sions. In Der schwarze Vorhang, Irene is ever more completely botanized
in the context of the sadomasochistic relationship and her lust murder.
In several places, we are told that ‘wie Efeu wollen dich meine Glieder
bedrängen’ (SV 132) (my limbs want to beset you like ivy); ‘nur für dich
bin ich aufgegrünt’ (SV 132) (it was only for you that I have flourished);
‘sie blühte ihm mit Gelächter, steil wie er, entgegen’ (SV 162) (she flour-
ished towards him, laughing, just as upright as he was); and ‘[s]ie wuchs
in die Umarmung hinein’ (SV 163) (she grew into the embrace).31 Irene
ultimately dies in the forest and Johannes scatters ‘[d]ürres Holz, Laub
und Moos’ (SV 163) (dry wood, leaves, and moss) over her corpse, so that
at the end of her life she is almost unidentifiable as a person, lying on the
forest floor covered in plants, coalescing with nature. The passages quoted
above illustrate the extent to which Irene is progressively and irreversibly
botanized as the narrative proceeds, to the point that we can even speak
of a botanical metamorphosis.
In Die Ermordung einer Butterblume, the metamorphosis proceeds in
the opposite direction. The murdered buttercup, as previously discussed,
is bestowed with an increasingly female form by Fischer’s anthropomor-
phisms. Shortly after the hallucinatory murder of the buttercup, he chris-
tens the flower with the female name Ellen and hopes that, by assuming
the role of her doctor, he may still be able to save her:
Er wußte nicht einmal, wie sie hieß. Ellen? Sie hieß vielleicht Ellen, gewiß Ellen. Er
flüsterte ins Gras, bückte sich, um die Blumen mit der Hand anzustoßen. ‘Ist Ellen
hier? Wo liegt Ellen? Ihr, nun? Sie ist verwundet, am Kopf, etwas unterhalb des
Kopfes. Ihr wißt es vielleicht noch nicht. Ich will ihr helfen: ich bin Arzt, Samariter.
Nun, wo liegt sie? Ihr könnt es mir ruhig anvertrauen, sag ich euch.’ Aber wie sollte
31 The emphases are my own.


er, die er zerbrochen hatte, erkennen? Vielleicht faßte er sie gerade mit der Hand,
vielleicht seufzte sie dicht neben ihm den letzten Atemzug aus. Das durfte nicht
sein. (EB 64–5)
(He did not even know her name. Was it Ellen? Maybe her name was Ellen, definitely
Ellen. He whispered to the grass, bending down so that he could stroke the flower
with his hand. ‘Is Ellen here? Where is Ellen? You, now? She is injured, with a wound
on her head, or just below her head. Maybe you don’t know it yet. I want to help her:
I am a doctor, a Samaritan. Now, where is she? You can trust me, don’t you worry.’
But how should he identify the one he had broken? Perhaps he was just touching
her, perhaps she was just exhaling her final breath close to him. That would not do.)
The humanization, or rather the feminization, of the buttercup, does not

cease even after Fischer has left the forest and returned home. Instead, the
process assumes ever more grotesque traits:
Am Nachmittag legte er selbst das Geld in einen besonderen Kasten mit stummer
Kälte; er wurde sogar veranlaßt, ein eigenes Konto für sie [Ellen] anzulegen; er war
müde geworden, wollte seine Ruhe haben. Bald drängte es ihn, ihr von Speise und
Trank zu opfern. Ein kleines Näpfchen wurde jeden Tag für sie neben Herrn Michaels
Platz gestellt. (EB 68)
(That afternoon, Fischer dropped the money into a special box with cold indiffer-
ence; he even considered opening a separate account for her [Ellen]; he was tired of
all this, he just wanted to be left alone. He was soon overcome by the desire to offer
her something to eat and drink. He would set a small bowl out for her every day,
right next to Herr Michael’s place at the table.)
Just like a loved one lost to death’s cold embrace, the buttercup retains a
firm place in Fischer’s life. Right up to the end of the narrative, he treats
the dead buttercup as if it were a woman, suggesting that we should view
this process as another metamorphosis, but this time involving the trans-
formation of a flower into a woman.
The third text, Ewers’s Alraune, is more complex, particularly as it does
not portray a unidirectional metamorphosis, as is the case in Döblin’s texts.
Rather, an overwhelming ambiguity regarding the distinction between the
human and the botanical dominates from the very beginning. The name
of the protagonist, Alraune, refers to a plant, and the plant, that is, the
mandrake, is described as human-like, as its roots resemble the shape of
228 Linda Leskau

a human being. In Ewers’s Alraune, the protagonist’s legs are described as
having grown into one another at the time of her birth, creating a striking
resemblance to the mandrake root:
Die Hebamme habe beim Baden sofort bei dem überhaupt sehr zarten und dürftigen
Kinde eine außergewöhnlich stark entwickelte Atresia vaginalis [Fehlbildung, bei der
die Vagina verschlossen ist, L. L.] festgestellt, so zwar, dass auch die Haut beider Beine,
bis oberhalb der Knie, zusammengewachsen sei. Diese merkwürdige Erscheinung
sei aber nach eingehender Untersuchung nur eine oberflächliche Verbindung der
Epidermis, die durch eine baldige Operation leicht behoben werden könne. (A 91)
(The midwife while bathing the delicate and thin child immediately noticed an unu-
sually developed atresia Vaginalis [a condition in which the vagina is closed, L. L.]
where the legs halfway down to the knees had grown together. After further inves-
tigation it was found to be only the external skin that was binding the legs together
and could be corrected later through a quick operation.)32
Both the name itself, Alraune, and Alraune’s appearance as a newborn

signify the symbiosis of the human and the botanical. In summary, we can
observe that Döblin’s texts present firstly a metamorphosis from woman
to plant (Der schwarze Vorhang) and secondly from flower to woman (Die
Ermordung einer Butterblume), while in Ewers’s novel the character of
Alraune is representative, both in terms of her name and her appearance,
of the synthesis of the human and the botanical.
The depathologization of sadomasochist perversion
It is revealing that it is the woman who undergoes botanical metamorphosis

in all three texts. The narratives hereby evoke the analogy between woman
and nature, in contrast to male culture, as was typical for the time around
32 Ewers, Alraune, Chapter 5 – B: ‘Alraune’s Conception’. Original set in italics.


1900:33 ‘Geschlechterbinarität und die Unterscheidung von Natur und
Kultur sind reziprok verschränkt: Dabei dominiert insbesondere die Frau
als Repräsentantin der “Natur” in ästhetischen Entwürfen des beginnen-
den 20. Jahrhunderts […]’34 (Gender binary and the distinction between
nature and culture are reciprocally interlaced, with the woman, in particular,
dominating as the representative of ‘nature’ in aesthetic drafts of the early
twentieth century […]). At first glance, the narratives seem to support and
reproduce the gender binary by naturalizing the woman. However, it can
be shown that the female protagonists in the narratives are by no means
consistently modelled on the female gender character.
One of the key divisions of gender binary is the dichotomy of activity/
passivity, with the passive role assigned to women. However, it is precisely
this role assignment that is broken by the lust murder scenes in Döblin’s
narratives. Although it is Irene who, being a masochist, is murdered, she
plays the active role in many passages: ‘sie blühte ihm mit Gelächter, steil
wie er, entgegen’ (she flourished towards him, laughing, just as upright as
he was); ‘[s]ie wuchs in die Umarmung hinein’ (she grew into the embrace);
‘[s]ie spritzte ihr Blut nach ihm’ (she sprayed her blood on him); and in the
end ‘suchten ihre Lippen nach seinem Munde’ (her lips were still searching
for his mouth) (SV 162–3). The quotations ‘steil wie er’ and ‘spritzte […]
nach ihm’ also leave room for another interpretation: Irene not only has
the active part. In fact, the quoted phallic symbolism, implying an erec-
tion, also gives her a male coding. And unlike the incident in the forest,
in which the flowers passively endure Fischer’s violence, the female but-
tercup assumes the active role in the lust murder scene. Herr Fischer can
do nothing more than react:
33 See here Sherry B. Ortner, ‘Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?’, in Michelle

Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (eds), Women, Culture, and Society,
Stanford, CA 1974, pp. 67–87.
34 Stephanie Catani, ‘Kultur in der Krise: Zur Konstruktion von Männlichkeit bei Alfred

Döblin und Robert Musil’, in Sarah Colvin and Peter J. Davies (eds), Masculinities
in German Culture, trans. Petra Gatzsch and Louise Huber-Fennell. Rochester, NY
2008, pp. 149–69: pp. 150–1.

reproduit exactement l’univers physique et que le premier n’est que la conscience
douloureuse ou extatique du second.74
(Thanks to his considerable learning and a meticulous knowledge of the Natural

Sciences, he was able to attempt, for the genesis of forms of thought, the same work
that Darwin has undertaken for the genesis of forms of life. By applying the laws of
evolution to all of the facts that constitute the human heart, he strived to show that
our most refined sensations, our most subtle moral delicacies, as well as our most
shameful degradations, are the final outcome, the supreme metamorphosis of very
simple instincts, which themselves are transformations of the primary cell’s properties;
in such a way that the moral universe is an exact replication of the physical universe,
and the former is nothing more than the painful or ecstatic awareness of the latter.)
It is apparent here that Sixte’s ideas stand for Haeckel’s work in France.
Many passages from Les Preuves du transformisme, Haeckel’s text as trans-
lated by Soury, can help to substantiate this connection, not least this one:
[L]a nature de l’homme, comme celle de tout autre organisme, ne doit être conçue
que comme un tout unique, que le corps et l’esprit sont inséparables et que, comme
tous les autres phénomènes de la vie, les phénomènes de la vie psychique reposent
sur des mouvements matériels, sur les changements mécaniques (physico-chimiques)
des cellules.75
([M]an’s nature, like that of any other organism, must be conceived of only as a
unique whole, where body and mind cannot be separated and where, as with all other
phenomena in life, the phenomena of psychic life are based on material movements,
on the mechanical changes (physical and chemical) of cells.)
I also maintain that Haeckel’s biogenetic law was known to Bourget via
Soury. Revealingly, these are the exact terms in which Haeckel expressed
the idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: ‘die individuelle
Entwicklungsgeschichte [ist] eine schnelle, durch die Gesetze der Vererbung
und Anpassung bedingte Wiederholung der langsamen paläontologis-
chen Entwicklungsgeschichte’ (the history of individual development is
a rapid recapitulation of the slow history of paleontological development,

75 Haeckel, Les Preuves du transformisme, p. 70.


it corresponds with the ‘masculine sexual character’,36 thus being opposed
to the female character. In characterizing Alraune as sadistic, Ewers is char-
acterizing her as male. This gender confusion is further underlined by the
fact that Alraune, from the beginning, is described both as a boy and a
girl: ‘Die da, Alraune, war ein Mädel und ein Bub zugleich’ (A 121) (She,
Alraune, was both a boy and a girl).37 It is this androgyny in particular
which excites the passion of her creator, ten Brinken and the reason why
he often asks her to present herself to him dressed as a boy (see A 162–3).
In conclusion, we can see that none of the three female characters
(Irene, Ellen, and Alraune) is described as unambiguously female. Their
gender remains vague and eludes a precise gender categorization, leading to
ambiguity, or even to the dissolution or neutralization of the gender binary.
Moreover, through the very process of the protagonist’s de-gendering, the
close intertwining of femininity and nature ultimately breaks down.38
However, in addition to the intertwining of nature and femininity, we can
point to another link with nature around 1900:
Wer um 1900 – sei’s biologisch, philosophisch (lebensphilosophisch) oder litera-

risch – von Natur reden will, muß von der Sexualität reden. Hierin gründet eines
der augenfälligsten und gleichwohl am wenigsten bedachten Charakteristika der
modernen Dichtung, der Dichtung im technischen Zeitalter, nämlich daß sie, ziem-
lich genau ab 1900, zu einem Diskurs über die Sexualität geworden ist.39
(Anyone who wants to speak of nature around 1900 – whether on a biological, philo-
sophical (the philosophy of life) or literary level – has to speak of sexuality. This is
the foundation of one of the most conspicuous, yet the least considered characteristic

37 Ewers, Alraune, Chapter 8 – A: ‘Mistress of the House of Brinken’.

38 With regard to Alraune, it is also her unnatural creation – by way of artificial insem-

ination – that evokes a disturbed intertwining between women and nature: see
Tanja Nusser, ‘Es war einmal: Der Mörder, die Dirne, der Arzt und die künstliche
Befruchtung. Hanns Heinz Ewers Alraune’, in Tanja Nusser and Elisabeth Strowick
(eds), Krankheit und Geschlecht: Diskursive Affären zwischen Literatur und Medizin,
Würzburg 2000, pp. 179–93.
39 Wolfgang Riedel, Homo Natura: Literarische Anthropologie um 1900, trans. Petra

Gatzsch and Louise Huber-Fennell, Würzburg 2011, pp. 13–14.
232 Linda Leskau

of modern poetry, the poetry in the age of technology, namely the fact that it has
evolved into a discourse on sexuality, since quite precisely 1900.)
As we can see here, the convergence of nature and sexuality is not only
restricted to literature around 1900. This relationship also becomes evi-
dent in the sexual science of that period – which again shows how closely
literature and sexual science are intertwined. In his Psychopathia Sexualis,
Krafft-Ebing, for instance, states that only sexuality serving the purpose
of propagation can be seen as natural and thus normal: ‘every expression
of it [the sexual instinct] that does not correspond with the purpose of
nature – i.e., propagation – must be regarded as perverse.’40 According to
this, sexual science uses the term ‘propagation’ to refer to natural sexual-
ity, around 1900. The German word for propagation is Fortpflanzung.41
It contains the word Pflanze (plant), so the name itself already implies a
connection to plants and nature. In the early sexual science, this natural
procreation is contrasted with unnatural perversions, because, as clearly
stated in Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, every form of sexuality not
serving the purpose of procreation is seen as perverse.
Our readings of Döblin’s and Ewers’s works have, however, illustrated
the ways in which precisely these perverse sadistic or masochistic sexualities
are in fact deeply intertwined with the forms and processes of nature. For
these perversions, presented in the texts in terms of botanical and floral
metaphors, are thereby inextricably interwoven with what is construed
as normal and natural propagation (Fortpflanzung). In other words, this
metaphoric representation brings supposedly anomalous and perverse
sexual desire into proximity with natural sexuality. Consequently, the liter-
ary use of botanical or floral imagery in Döblin’s and Ewers’s texts serves to

41 Jacobs, too, points to this link between reproduction and plant life in the German

word ‘Fortpflanzung’, setting it against the background of a general move to human
sexuality at the end of the nineteenth century: see Joela Jacobs, Speaking the Non-
Human: Plants, Animals, and Marginalized Humans in Literary Grotesques from
Oskar Panizza to Franz Kafka, Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Division of
the Humanities, Department of Germanic Studies, University of Chicago, December
2014, p. 55, n.16.

challenge and elicit a subversive reflection on sexual science’s definition of,
and differentiation between, natural and perverse sexuality. This leads – at
least rudimentarily – to a depathologization of perversions at precisely those
points where a clear distinguishing line can no longer be drawn between
natural and abnormal sexuality, or between normality and sexual deviation,
as viewed by the early sexual science so profoundly shaped by Krafft-Ebing.
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oratory and the laboratory, faith and science, can live together. Is this not
exactly what we read in Bourget’s discourses on the American educational
system? His essay Outre-Mer (Overseas, 1895) demonstrates ‘la réconcilia-
tion possible de la Religion et de la Science par l’agnosticisme’ (the possible
reconciliation of Religion with Science through agnosticism), and this,
he says, is precisely because religion’s object is the ‘Inconnaissable’ (the
Unknowable).85 If Spencer’s First Principles are referred to, Soury may also
be seen as a probable source. This seems all the more likely when we note
that, in Études et portraits, Bourget proclaims:
je suis persuadé qu’il y a une unité absolue dans l’action de la nature, mais que cette
unité ne peut être saisie par l’esprit que métaphysiquement. Elle rentre dans cette
catégorie de l’Inconnaissable dont aucun savant de bonne foi ne nie l’existence. Puis,
quand il s’agit pour eux de conclure, ils ne veulent jamais prononcer cet ignoramus
et ignorabimus que Dubois-Reymond a eu le courage de proclamer en Allemagne,
et M. Jules Soury en France.86
(I am convinced that there is a total unity in nature’s action, but that this unity can
only be grasped metaphysically. It belongs to this category of the Unknowable, of
which no honest scholar denies the existence. Then, when they have to conclude,
they never wish to pronounce this ignoramus et ignorabimus that Dubois-Reymond
was brave enough to claim in Germany, and Mr Jules Soury in France.)
And in L’Étape, Victor Ferrand cites the name of Jules Soury, saying that
he is a ‘savant qui n’est pas encore chrétien, lui, mais qui comprend la croy-
ance’ (a scholar who is not yet a Christian, but who understands faith) and
‘distingue les certitudes du laboratoire et celles de l’oratoire’87 (distinguishes
‘Jusqu’à ce manifeste religieux [Der Monismus], j’ai été votre disciple, votre admira-
teur enthousiaste. Mais ici je m’arrête, je ne vous suis plus, je refuse énergiquement
d’entrer dans l’Église nouvelle que vous dédiez à la Trinité du monisme!’ (Until this
religious manifesto, I was your disciple, your enthusiastic admirer. But I must stop
here, I cannot follow you, I refuse to enter into the new Church that you dedicate
to the monist Trilogy!).
85 Bourget, Outre-Mer, II, p. 323.

86 Paul Bourget, Études et portraits: Sociologie et littérature, Paris 1906, p. 19.


236 Cyd Sturgess

offshoot of the complex interaction between reader and text.1 In the early
twentieth century, fictional texts, in conjunction with contemporary
medico-legal discourses, played a fundamental role in the self-reflexive
understanding of female same-sex desires and identities. Indeed, in the
autobiographical collection De homosexueelen (The Homosexuals, 1939),
collated by Dutch lawyer and activist Benno Stokvis prior to the German
invasion, for example, it is possible to detect a direct correlation between
literature, sexological research, and women’s realizations of their own sexual
difference: ‘Toen ik ongeveer 29 jaar was, las ik “De bron van eenzaamheid”.
[…] En met groote blijdschap, ik zou haast zeggen: dankbaarheid, ontdekte
ik dat liefde tusschen twee vrouwen mogelijk is’ (When I was about twenty
years old, I read The Well of Loneliness. […] And with great joy, I would
even go so far as to say: gratitude, I realized that love between two women
is possible).2 Presenting at once a model of identification and the promise
of possibility, the synthesis of contemporary sexological research with the
literary imagination provided an essential platform for the exploration of
same-sex desires and the specificity of women’s struggles with sexual labels
and sexological categories.
Against the backdrop of a growing interest in sexual behaviours and
preference, queer desires became an increasingly popular subject in lit-
erature at the fin de siècle. Drawing on scientific models of ‘inversion’, a
theory that posited same-sex desire as the result of an inborn reversal of
psychic and somatic gendered traits, the masculine homosexual woman
became a familiar figure on the literary landscape. Self-identified invert
1 The use of the category ‘lesbian narrative’ carries with it certain implications and

definitional issues. Throughout this chapter the term ‘lesbian narrative’ will be used
in order to denote texts exploring feelings of same-sex female desire, female homo-
sexual identification, or those that are open to subtextual readings of either of these
stipulations. For further reading on the complexities of defining lesbian narratives,
see Marylin Farwell, Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives, New York 1996;
Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety, New York
1992; Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love
Between Women from Renaissance to Present, New York 1981.
2 Benno Stokvis, De homosexueelen: 35 autobiographieën, Lochem 1939, p. 163. Unless

otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
(Re-)Constructing the Boundaries of Desire 237

Stephen Gordon, heroine of Radclyffe Hall’s ground-breaking novel The
Well of Loneliness (1928), is one such example. As a novel that was incred-
ibly popular in Dutch lesbian circles, Hall’s publication, later banned as
an ‘obscene libel’, offered one of the first affirmations of lesbian identity
and, as can be seen in the abovementioned quote, a protagonist that gave
gender non-conformists and women-who-desired-women ‘a name and an
image’.3 In a country characterized by the moral crusade of its religious
government, literary depictions such as Hall’s established an arena like no
other for the exploration of female same-sex desires in Dutch society.4 Yet,
although the archetypal mannish lesbian presented in The Well propelled
the discussion of lesbian desire into the Dutch social and cultural sphere,
Hall’s safeguarding of the binary that positioned female homosexual desires
as ‘abnormal’ and ‘masculine’ was deemed by some authors and activists as
detrimental to the wider interests of social progress and emancipation.5
In a bold attempt to challenge the arbitrary designations developed
by sexologists – and further perpetuated by the conceptual transfer taking
place between imaginary and scientific narratives – Dutch author Josine
Reuling’s Terug naar het eiland (Back to the Island, 1937) stands in stark
contrast to Hall’s earlier publication.6 After Reuling published her debut
novel in 1927, she found critical acclaim in the Dutch press for her authentic
3 ‘The Banned Book’, Hull Daily Mail, 16 November 1928; Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics

and Society: The Regulations of Sexuality Since 1800, London 2014, p. 146.
4 For further reading on sexuality and morality in the Netherlands, see Regulating

Morality: A Comparison of the Role of the State in Mastering the Mores in the
Netherlands and the United States, ed. Hans Krabbendam and Hans-Martien Ten
Napel, Antwerp 2000; Hans Boutellier, Crime and Morality: The Significance of
Criminal Justice in Post-modern Culture, London 2000.
5 In her work The Lesbian Menace: Ideology, Identity, and the Representation of Lesbian

Life, Amherst, MA 1997, Sherrie Inness discusses the lesbians and gay men who were
critical of The Well of Loneliness. While some critics read the novel’s unhappy ending
as ‘anti-homosexual propaganda’, others, like writer and socialite Violet Trefusis,
believed Stephen Gordon to be a ‘loathsome example’ of lesbianism that confirmed
rather than challenged the heterosexual ‘norm’. See pp. 13–16.
6 Anna Katharina Schaffner, Modernism and Perversion: Sexual Deviance in Sexology

and Literature 1850–1930, Basingstoke 2013, p. 23.
238 Cyd Sturgess

and original depictions of modern life and became known for her popu-
lar psychological novels. Focusing increasingly on more marginal figures
as her career progressed, Reuling’s novel Terug naar het eiland counters
the image of the lesbian as an easily recognizable ‘Other’ by presenting a
lesbian protagonist who is a ‘normal’ feminine woman. Reuling’s decision
to have a feminine lesbian protagonist who has neither been seduced into
homosexuality nor fallen victim to substance abuse, confronts the contem-
porary medical models that presented ‘authentic’ lesbian desire in terms
of gendered inversion and, according to some sexological theories, linked
it to the great evil of the turn of the twentieth century, degeneration. Yet,
despite the subversive potential of Reuling’s writing, scholarly attention to
her work has been limited only to a few notable discussions of the histori-
cal developments of Dutch lesbian literature.7 Reading Reuling’s text as a
challenge to the socio-cultural and medico-legal binaries that constituted
that which is not heterosexual as ‘non-normative’ opens the text up to far
more radical interpretations of its content as a form of resistance to the
discourses that posited lesbian desire as ‘abnormal’ and ‘sick’.
Following a discussion of the development of theories on female
homosexuality in the Netherlands, this chapter will explore the extent to
which Reuling’s novel subverts the rigidity of contemporary sexological
paradigms and will demonstrate the ways in which biological discourses
were not simply used as systems of knowledge to inform literary texts,
but were also criticized, rejected, and revised in a popular form. It will be
suggested throughout this chapter that while Reuling’s writing appears to
inscribe a new regime of gendered norms and boundaries on her protago-
nist, her novel can also be read as an entirely unique document of its time,
7 Judith Schuyf does suggest in her study Een stilzwijgende samenzwering: lesbische

vrouwen in Nederland 1920–70, Utrecht 1994, that Reuling’s protagonist offers
an alternative image to that of the ‘Third Sex’. However, the radical potential of
Reuling’s feminine lesbian character is not discussed in her exploration. See also
Myriam Everard ‘Galerij der vrouwenliefde: “Sex Variant Women” in de Nederlandse
literatuur, 1880–1940’, in Homojaarboek 2: Artikelen over emancipatie en homosek-
sualiteit, Amsterdam 1983; Xandra Schutte, Damesliefde: de beste lesbische verhalen
uit de Nederlandse literatuur, Amsterdam 1995.

challenging both the social discourses that classed homosexual desires as
‘abnormal’ and the sexological theories that suggested lesbian desires must
be coded masculine in order to be perceived as ‘authentic’.
An ‘age of masks’: Sexology and sexuality in the Netherlands
The inspiration for protagonists such as Hall’s Stephen Gordon can be

found in the scientific studies that began to emerge during the late eight-
eenth century, a time at which moral panics about ‘onanism’ and sexual
excess were informing many of the initial theories on human sexual behav-
iour.8 Aside from a sustained interest in masturbation and madness, how-
ever, early sex research also paid close attention to the nature of ‘Socratic
love’ and the social implications of ‘sodomy’. As early nineteenth-century
‘sodomites’ were not believed to be fundamentally different from any other
citizen, however, sodomy was seen as more sinful and socially danger-
ous than other sexual vices, with many people fearing the possibility that
any (male) individual could fall foul of such urges.9 It was only with the
advent of a scientia sexualis during the mid-nineteenth century that the
homosexual, as Foucault has most famously stated, became ‘a personage, a
8 See, for example, Samuel Auguste Tissot’s L’Onanisme, Lausanne 1760; Jean Jacques

Rousseau’s The Confessions, Geneva 1782–9.
9 Although crimes of sodomy had become more closely associated to sexual acts

between men by the early nineteenth century, sodomy was used as a broad referent
to describe a diverse range of vices ‘against nature’ and was not reserved exclusively
for the description of male same-sex intercourse. For further reading on the linguistic
development of the terms sodomy and sodomite, see Arthur Gilbert, ‘Conceptions
of Homosexuality and Sodomy in Western History’, Journal of Homosexuality 6:1/2
(1981), pp. 57–68; Gert Hekma, ‘A History of Sexology: Social and Historical Aspects
of Sexuality’, in Jan Bremmer (ed.), From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History
of Sexuality, New York 1991.

Bourget, Paul, Le Disciple, Paris 1889.
L’Étape, Paris 1902.
Études et portraits: Sociologie et littérature, Paris 1906.
Outre-Mer, Paris 1895.
Clark, Linda L., Social Darwinism in France, Tuscaloosa, AL 1984.
‘Discours de M. Haeckel: L’évolution et le transformisme’, Le Temps, 30 August 1878,
p. 3.
Fougère, Marie-Ange, and Daniel Sangsue (eds), Avez-vous lu Paul Bourget?, Dijon
2007.
France, Anatole, ‘M. Jules Soury’, Le Temps, 8 November 1891, p. 2.
Gasman, Daniel, Haeckel’s Monism and the Birth of Fascist Ideology, New York 1998.
Gelfand, Toby, ‘From religious to Bio-Medical Anti-Semitism: The Career of Jules
Soury’, in Ann La Berge and Mordechai Feingold (eds), French Medical Culture
in the Nineteenth Century, Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA 1994.
Grasset, Joseph, L’Idée médicale dans les romans de Paul Bourget, Montpellier 1904.
Haeckel, Ernst, Essais de psychologie cellulaire, Paris 1880.
Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte [1868], 8th edn, Berlin 1889.
Les Preuves du transformisme: Réponse à Virchow, trans. Jules Soury, Paris 1878.
Le Règne des protistes, Paris 1879.
The Riddle of the Universe [1899], trans. Joseph McCabe, London 1929 (3rd
impression, 1934).
Huard, Pierre, and M.-J. Imbault-Huard, ‘Jules Soury 1842–1915’, Revue d’histoire des
sciences et de leurs applications 23:2 (1970), pp. 155–64.
Jouanna, Arlette, L’Idée de race en France au xvie siècle et au début du xviie siècle, revised
edn, Montpellier 1981.
Junius, ‘Le billet de Junius’, L’Écho de Paris, 16 August 1915, p. 1.
Lélut, Louis-Francisque, Du démon de Socrate: spécimen d’une application de la science
psychologique à celle de l’histoire, Paris 1836.
Magnus, Hugo Friedrich, Histoire de l’évolution du sens des couleurs, foreword by Jules
Soury, Paris 1878.
Mathias, Yehoshua, ‘Paul Bourget, écrivain engagé’, Vingtième siècle, revue d’histoire
45:1 (1995), pp. 14–29.
Moreau de Tours, Jacques, La Psychologie morbide dans ses rapports avec la philosophie de
l’histoire, ou de l’influence des névropathies sur le dynamisme intellectuel, Paris 1859.
Mousson-Lanauze, Jean-Baptiste, ‘Jules Soury’, Paris médical: La semaine du clinicien
66 (1927), pp. 30–5.
Preyer, William Thierry, Éléments de physiologie générale, trans. Jules Soury, Paris 1884.

by a series of ‘anatomical modifications’, which might include a ‘decidedly
masculine type of larynx’, the ‘arrested development and infantilism’ of
the sexual organs, and the atrophy of the ‘natural’ feminine form. Even the
work of pioneering and progressive sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who
dismissed the existence of ‘true’ forms of femininity and masculinity as
‘constructed abstractions’, frequently paired the desires of female inverts
with masculinity.13 Indeed, in his discussions on the gender presentation of
homosexual women, Hirschfeld asserted that although ‘the most feminine’
female invert was ‘essentially more feminine than the virile homosexual
woman’, she could not be considered to be as feminine ‘as a woman’.14
Although this suggestion conforms to Hirschfeld’s much broader sexuelle
Zwischenstufenlehre (theory of sexually intermediate stages), his belief that
the femininity of a ‘feminine’ invert was somehow lesser than that of a
‘normal’ woman still served to conflate the homosexual desires of feminine
women with a degree of gender non-conformity.15
The sexological conflation of anatomy and psychology, and with it
gender role reversal and homosexual desire, fundamentally shaped the
discussion of ‘feminine’ lesbian desires at this time. Although masculinist
theories concerning the impulses of ‘manly’ men towards their own sex
had achieved an increased sense of credibility towards the 1930s with the
support for organizations such as Adolf Brand’s Gemeinschaft der Eigenen
13 Although Hirschfeld did agree that ‘true’ congenital inversion was marked by a

pronounced effeminacy of the male and a strong virilization of the female, with
the publication of his ground-breaking Die Transvestiten (The Transvestites, 1910),
Hirschfeld moved away from the notion of a distinct ‘third sex’ and instead professed
the existence of an infinite range of intermediary forms between the poles of the
idealized ‘true’ male-bodied masculinity and ‘true’ female-bodied femininity. Given
the nature of this spectrum, the feminine female invert could not assume the same
location on the scale as the feminine heterosexual woman, which means, however,
that the outcome of Hirschfeld’s theory remains problematic.
14 Magnus Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes, Berlin 1920,

p. 109.
15 Ibid.

242 Cyd Sturgess

(Community of the Special),16 the homosexual desires of feminine women
remained firmly within the remit of ‘pseudo’ or ‘acquired’ homosexuality. In
Auguste Forel’s The Sexual Question (1908), a publication that enjoyed great
success in the Netherlands,17 the existence of a strict distinction between
‘acquired’ and ‘congenital’ homosexual drives is challenged by its author,
who suggests that the origins of both ‘temporal’ and ‘fixed’ homosexual-
ity lie in the correspondingly ‘weak’ or ‘developed’ hereditary predispo-
sition of the subject. Yet, in his judgement of the ‘normal’ feminine girl,
Forel argues that any desires for the same sex are the temporary result of
the ‘voluptuous sensations’ stimulated by the advances of a virile female
invert. The ‘diagnosis’ of pseudo-homosexuality, Forel suggested, presented
a ‘relatively favourable case’ that offered an optimistic chance for treat-
ment. Many sexologists believed that the maternal instincts of the femi-
nine woman would eventually override the degenerate sexual drive, which
was perceived to be ‘circumstantial rather than innate’.18 Furthermore, the
16 Brand’s Gemeinschaft der Eigenen was a literary and cultural circle of homosexual men

who separated themselves from Magnus Hirschfeld’s Wissenschaftlich-Humanitäres
Komitee (Scientific Humanitarian Committee) and the ‘Third Sex’ theory in 1903.
The name of Brand’s organization has inspired various translations into English.
While the most popular translation appears to be the ‘Community of the Special’, the
Gemeinschaft der Eigenen has also been translated as the ‘Community of Self-Owners/
the Self-Determined’, and also as the ‘Community of Free Spirits’, foregrounding
the separatist (and elitist) nature of the organization. The term ‘Eigen’, in both the
name of Brand’s organization and his publication Der Eigene (The Self-Owner),
was inspired by Max Stirner’s philosophy put forth in his seminal Der Einzige und
sein Eigentum (The Ego and Its Own, 1844). For more on Stirner’s influence on
early homosexual theorizing, see Robert Beachy, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern
Identity, New York 2014.
17 For further insights on the popularity of Forel’s work in the Netherlands, see Schuyf,

Een stilzwijgende samenzwering; Anja van Kooten Niekerk and Sacha Wijmer,
Verkeerde vriendschap: Lesbisch leven in de jaren 1920–60, Amsterdam 1985. Here:
Auguste Forel, The Sexual Question: A Scientific, Psychological, Hygienic, and
Sociological Study for the Cultured Classes, trans. C. F. Marshall, New York 1908.
18 Karla Tonine Huebner, Eroticism, Identity, and Cultural Context: Toyen and the

Prague Avant-garde, Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2008,
p. 160.

inherently passive nature of the feminine woman was evidence enough for
many sexologists that, through marriage, there was a distinct possibility
for the eventual return to a normative sex impulse.
Despite the veritable explosion of scientific discourses on sexual behav-
iour in Central Europe at the fin de siècle, original Dutch research on
the subject of sexuality did not appear in the Netherlands until the late
1920s, although German and British studies were already popular and
existed in translation.19 Prior to the publication of Benno Stokvis’s De
homosexueelen in 1939, Dutch women-who-desired-women received scant
attention in scientific literature in the Netherlands. Stokvis’s study, men-
tioned briefly in the introduction to this chapter, comprised a collection
of autobiographies commissioned by the Dutch homosexual rights move-
ment, the Nederlandsch Wetenschappelijk Humanitair Komitee (NWHK,
Dutch Scientific Humanitarian Committee), which included a lengthy
introduction in which the author attempts to make a case for the rights
of homosexuals who were ‘by nature’ inverted.20 In the earlier publica-
tions produced and disseminated by the NWHK, little interest had been
shown in representing the needs and concerns of female inverts. Joannes
Henri François’ Open brief aan hen die anders zijn dan anderen; Door
een hunner (Open Letter to Those who are Different from the Others;
By One of Them, 1916), for example, is one of the first Dutch pamphlets
19 One of the first original studies to appear on the subject of sex and sexuality in the

Netherlands was Theodoor Hendrik van de Velde’s Het volkomen huwelijk: Een studie
omtrent zijn physiologie en zijn techniek (Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique,
Leiden 1926). As Maurice van Lieshout has noted, the impact of German research
on Dutch sexological developments means that the history of sexological research in
the Netherlands cannot easily be separated from that of its German neighbour. Yet,
as Pieter Koenders has discussed further, despite a growing interest in the subject at
the fin de siècle, the Netherlands played no significant role in the development of
sexology and made no serious contributions to the disciplinary field. See Maurice
van Lieshout, ‘Lustvijandig, wetenschappelijk, voorzichtig en volhardend; de neder-
landse homobeweging in het begin van de 20e eeuw’ <http://groniek.eldoc.ub.rug.
nl/FILES/root/1980/I_80/LusWetvooen_9/article.pdf> [accessed 27 July 2015],
p. 59; Pieter Koenders, Homoseksualiteit in bezet Nederland, The Hague 1983, p. 23.
20 Benno Stokvis, De Homosexueelen: 35 autobiographieën, Lochem 1939, p. 14.

244 Cyd Sturgess

to demand the social recognition of the invert’s ‘right to love’.21 Much
like Ulrichs, however, François does not speak at length on the subject of
female same-sex desire as he claims that the conditions of female experi-
ence were ‘less well known’ to him. Despite his self-professed ignorance
on the subject, François nevertheless argues that life is much easier for the
‘zoo-aangelegde vrouw’ (woman of this disposition) than her male coun-
terpart because ‘intimate social intercourse’ between two women was given
‘much less attention’ than that between two men. Although a more tradi-
tional homosocial structuring of society still characterized Dutch culture
in the early twentieth century, arguably making the intimate interactions
of female lovers less conspicuous than those between men, homosexual
acts between women were nevertheless subject to the same law as those of
their male counterparts.22
The emergence of a religious political hegemony in the Netherlands
in 1906, which brought the liberal rule following the 1848 revolution to an
end, saw the beginning of a state regulation of morality.23 As the religious
majority attempted to consolidate its power after the turn of the century,
it enacted a number of laws to regulate behaviours that were considered
onzedelijk (immoral). Introduced as part of this moral legislation was
‘Article 248bis’, an act that made homosexual contact with an individual
under the age of twenty-one illegal for both women and men.24 Combined
21 Joannes Henri François’ Open brief aan hen die anders zijn dan anderen; Door een

hunner, The Hague 1916, was originally published under the pseudonym Charley
van Heezen. François further published two popular homosexual novels under this
name, Anders (1918) and Het Masker (1922). Here: p. 36.
22 For a more developed discussion on the impact of the homosocial structuring of

Dutch society on the lives of lesbian women, see Cyd Sturgess, ‘Subtle Shifts, Sapphic
Silences: Queer Approaches to Female Same-Sex Desire in the Netherlands (1914–
40)’, Journal of Dutch Literature 6:2 (2015), pp. 21–36.
23 Joyce Outshoorn, ‘The Struggle for Bodily Integrity in the Netherlands’, in Outshoorn

(ed.), European Women’s Movements and Body Politics: The Struggle for Autonomy,
London 2015, p. 144.
24 Although Article 248bis was peculiar because it targeted both male and female

homosexuals (in many other European countries such as Germany and France only
male homosexual acts were prohibited), it signalled a break in the systematic silencing

on free-thinkers and German culture: ‘Und als [Meisel-Hess] sich dann mit
[…] dem Zeitroman Die Intellektuellen in die damalige Berliner Literatur-
und Wissenschaftsszene einmischte, stand sie endgültig im Rampenlicht
als Verfechterin weiblichen Aufbegehrens’ (And when Meisel-Hess inter-
vened in the contemporary Berlin literary and scientific circles with her
social novel Die Intellektuellen, she secured her place in the spotlight as a
champion of female protest). 3
In fact, Meisel-Hess had already established a name for herself as a
pugnacious, astute speaker and writer for the feminist cause. Even in 1901,
aged only twenty-two, she had already been hailed as one of the ‘trefflichsten
geistigen Vorkämpferinnen der modernen Frauenbewegung’ (best intellec-
tual leaders of the modern women’s movement).4 In 1904, she published
her polemic repudiation of Otto Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter
(Sex and Character, 1903) under the title Weiberhass und Weiberverachtung
(The Hatred and Disdain of Women), according to Agatha Schwartz one
of the most effective attacks on Weininger’s misogynist writings5 – and in
1909, she attracted further attention with her study Die sexuelle Krise (The
Sexual Crisis), a widely read critique of contemporary sexual morality. It is
not surprising, then, that Meisel-Hess’s novel Die Intellektuellen, which, in
the words of a contemporary reviewer, tackles ‘die großen Fragen unserer
Zeit’ (the big questions of our time), made quite an impact.6
It will not be possible here to discuss Die Intellektuellen in its entirety,
but this chapter aims to show how, in the wake of Wilhelm Bölsche’s literary
programme, the novel mediates a world-view based on monist philosophy
3 Horst Groschopp, Dissidenten: Freidenkerei und Kultur in Deutschland, Berlin 1997,

p. 239.
4 Anon., [review of Meisel-Hess’s lecture] ‘Die moderne Weltanschauung’, Wiener

Bilder, 22 May 1901.
5 See Agatha Schwartz, ‘Austrian Fin-de-Siècle Gender Heteroglossia: The Dialogism of

Misogyny, Feminism, and Viriphobia’, German Studies Review 28 (2005), pp. 347–66.
6 By 1912, Meisel-Hess even attained a certain celebrity status, as a postcard printed

on the occasion of the 1912 conference of the Monistenbund in Magdeburg proves,
which shows her as one of five prominent members of the organization. See post-
card in the Deutsche Literaturarchiv Marbach, manuscript section; A: Diederichs,
HS.1995.0002.
246 Cyd Sturgess

Prior to the introduction of Article 248bis, however, there had existed
a relatively relaxed approach to the censorship of texts on the subject of
homosexuality. Jacob Israël de Haan’s explicit novel Pijpelijntjes (Scenes
from the Pijp) published in 1904, for example, was one of the first literary
texts to appear in the Netherlands in which a homosexual relationship
was explicitly thematized.26 Linking same-sex desire to sadism, the novel
caused controversy at the time of its publication and lost de Haan his job
as a children’s writer at the national newspaper Het Volk.27 That the novel
could be published at all, however, highlights the relatively low level of
censorship prior to the introduction of the morality laws. Indeed, as Gert
Hekma has noted, the introduction of the Article 248bis forced the subject
of homosexuality in Dutch literature, and in society more generally, into
an ‘era of masks’.28 Reflecting the difficult social and political context in
which it emerged, Josine Reuling’s novel Terug naar het eiland highlights
the complexity of articulating lesbian desire in an increasingly conserva-
tive climate. By exploring the ways in which Reuling’s writing dually chal-
lenges the social and religious rhetoric that positioned homosexuality as
an ‘immoral’ and ‘abnormal’ vice and the sexological discourses that denied
femininity a place within ‘true’ lesbian experience, the following section
of this chapter will examine how Reuling’s novel can be read as an attempt
to redefine the boundaries of ‘non-normative’ desire in Dutch literature.
26 The homosexual relationship portrayed in the novel between protagonists Sam

and Joop was said to have been a thinly veiled account of de Haan’s own alleged
relationship with author and criminal anthropologist Arnold Aletrino. The initial
publication of the text included a dedication to Aletrino who, along with de Haan’s
fiancée Johanna van Maarseveen, bought almost the entire print run of the text to
try, unsuccessfully, to prevent a scandal. For more on de Haan, see Gert Hekma,
Homoseksualiteit, een medische reputatie: de uitdoktering van de homoseksueel in
negentieende-eeuws Nederland, Amsterdam 1987; Robert Deam Tobin, Peripheral
Desires: The German Discovery of Sex, Philadelphia, PA 2015.
27 Tobin, Peripheral Desires, p. 214.

28 Gert Hekma, Homoseksualiteit, een medische reputatie: de uitdoktering van de homo-

seksueel in negentieende-eeuws Nederland, Amsterdam 1987, p. 47.

Sapphic self-fashioning in Terug naar het eiland
Born in Amsterdam in 1899, Gerardina Anna Reuling spent much of

her youth travelling in Russia with her family before returning to the
Netherlands as a young adolescent. Characterized by the Bohemian life-
style of her opera-singing parents, Reuling’s upbringing in Eastern Europe
inspired many of her early publications, which appeared under her child-
hood nickname ‘Josine’. After the publication of her debut novel Siempie
(Siempie, 1927), Reuling was praised widely for producing a ‘wonderful
fragment of humanity’, and her subsequent Sara Vierhout (Sara Vierhout,
1932) found further acclaim in the press for its authentic and original depic-
tions, cementing Reuling’s place in the Dutch-speaking literary world.
With the release of her novel Intermezzo met Ernst (Intermezzo with Ernst,
1934), however, the first in a series of more psychological publications,
there appears to have been a shift in the critical reception of Reuling’s
work. Challenging the increasingly conservative social attitudes towards
sexuality and gender, Reuling’s detailed depictions of figures on the mar-
gins of society were received negatively by the religious press as portrayals
of ‘abnormal’ lifestyles.29 Religious newspaper De Tijd (The Times), for
example, believed there was ‘no place in Catholic libraries’ for Reuling’s
independent female characters, particularly Intermezzo’s modern protag-
onist Bep, whose lifestyle and behaviours, according to the newspaper,
showed ‘unforgivable weaknesses’.30 Yet, none of Reuling’s chosen subject
matters incited as much discussion and criticism as her portrayal of the
‘afwijkende genegenheid voor de eigen sekse’ (abnormal affection for one’s
own sex), which formed the premise of her fourth novel Terug naar het
eiland (1937).31 Denounced by the Sumatra Post as a ‘meesterwerk der
29 ‘Boek en Blad: Intermezzo met Ernst’, in De Tijd, 11 October 1934, p. 2.

30 Ibid.

31 At this juncture it should be noted that there was a difference in the receptions of the

novel between the colonial and ‘native’ Dutch press. In the Netherlands, Terug naar
het eiland received relatively mixed reviews; while the liberal and socialist newspapers
remained generally indifferent to the release of the novel, religious newspapers were
248 Cyd Sturgess

nederlandse pornographie’ (masterpiece of Dutch pornography), Terug
naar het eiland was the first novel originally published in the Dutch lan-
guage to explicitly thematize the nature of love between women.32 Although
Reuling’s text does not make explicit use of terms such as ‘homosexual’ or
‘invert’, love – and lust – between female characters is the fulcrum upon
which the narrative turns.
Charting the life of a young woman from a rich Swedish family, Terug
naar het eiland explores the early childhood experiences of writer Brita
Salin before chronicling the consequences of the protagonist’s Bohemian
lifestyle in Paris. Through detailed descriptions of Brita’s development into
a much-desired debutante, Reuling’s writing initially explores the societal
inarticulability of feminine lesbian desire. After Brita’s mother curtly, and
apparently ignorantly, dismisses her daughter’s claims that she ‘does not
love men’ and ‘is not suitable for marriage’, the protagonist’s inability to
confess to her desires and to articulate them into anything more than
‘incomplete phrases’ tragically sets the scene for her later love affair with
the young artist Renée. Despite the initial difficulties of broaching the
subject of same-sex desire, however, the topic is tackled with increasing
commitment by the protagonist after her parents receive a poison pen letter
from one of Brita’s scorned female lovers. Outlining the nature of Brita’s
‘perverse’ sexual inclinations, the letter serves as a stimulus for the gradual
dismantling of the boundaries that define normative and non-normative
far more negative in their descriptions of the text. The press in the Dutch colo-
nies, however, was united in its dismissal of the novel and openly attacked the lit-
erary merit of the author and her chosen subject matter. For a more comprehen-
sive discussion of the reception of the novel, see Cyd Sturgess, ‘“Anders dan de
anderen”: Articulating female homosexual desire in queer Dutch narratives (1930–9)’,
Internationale Neerlandistiek 53:3 (2015), pp. 193–211. Here: ‘Het nieuwe boek: Terug
naar het eiland, door Josine Reuling’, in De Sumatra Post, 16 October 1937, p. 12.
32 As Myriam Everard has noted, forty-seven literary works containing references to

female same-sex desire were published in the Dutch language between the years 1880
and 1940, of which thirty-six were written originally in Dutch. Over half of the total
number were written by female authors. Yet, it was not until Reuling’s publication
that love between women became visible as a central theme in Dutch literature. See
Everard, ‘Galerij der vrouwenliefde’.

desires, and allows Reuling to challenge the sexological paradigms of her
era. Although Brita is disinherited by her family after the revelation, and,
in the typical tradition of the lesbian romance novel, she is killed in a car
crash on her way to reunite with Renée, Reuling’s writing is suggestive
of a search for more positive models of representation that resist read-
ings of feminine lesbian desire as ‘pseudo-homosexual’ or ‘degenerate’.
Furthermore, Reuling’s reluctance to promote the congenital invert as a
paradigm for female same-sex desire and her persistent representation of
lesbian desire as ‘normal’ radically subverts the rigid sexological parameters
that coded lesbian desire as ‘non-normative’.
Throughout the novel it becomes clear that Brita exhibits an unwaver-
ing sense of the normalcy of her desires. However, in a series of flashbacks
depicting Brita’s affairs with women in France, the reader is offered insights
into the more complex conflict between society and self, and the negative
views of wider society on the subject of homosexual desire. Recalling a
brief liaison with a young woman in Paris, for example, Brita recounts an
incident in which the girl’s mother discovers the pair together in a bar. In
a fervent tirade, the woman declares that Brita’s ‘type’ should be ‘burned
alive’, denouncing her behaviour as ‘vulgar’ and claiming that the protago-
nist should be put ‘on the funeral pyre’.33 The verbal conflict takes a physi-
cal turn and the daughter is beaten ‘black and blue’ once she returns home
with her mother. Despite the abuse, however, the girl returns to the bar
unable to deny her true feelings. While the affair is of little consequence
to the main narrative trajectory, the inclusion of such episodes serve to
highlight the implications of making visible a desire that was socially unac-
ceptable, making Brita’s claim regarding the normalcy of her inclinations
appear even more radical and surprising. Reuling does not only highlight
the brunt of moral outrage experienced by minor characters, however, but
she also explores more fully the sexological and psychoanalytic discourses
that portrayed homosexual desires of feminine women as ‘false’ and ‘cur-
able’. One of Brita’s closest friends, ‘doctor of psychology’ Hans Thorstadt,
is shown to make regular attempts to persuade the protagonist to undergo
33 Josine Reuling, Terug naar het eiland, Amsterdam 1937, p. 139.


für Rassenhygiene’, such as Alexander Tille and Alfred Ploetz, argued for
the selection of the best genetic material, and rejected any ‘protection
of the weak’ as hindering evolution. Their ideas were incompatible with
socialist and feminist thought: as their main aim was to increase the birth
rate, women were seen as instruments of their policies and their interests
in individuation were disregarded.14
In contrast, the reformist wing of the eugenicists’ movement, who
based their thinking on ideas of the progressive social reformer Havelock
Ellis, among others, went hand in hand with socialist as well as with feminist
demands. They did not reduce their interpretation of Darwin’s theories
to a simple and anti-humanist ideology of the ‘survival of the fittest’, but
complemented biological arguments with a campaign for innovative social
policies.15 One of the main proponents of this reformist branch of eugenic
thinking was the ‘Bund für Mutterschutz’ (League for the Protection of
Mothers), of which Meisel-Hess was an active and vociferous member. The
Bund, founded in Berlin in 1905, brought together socialists, feminists,
and sexual scientists and campaigned, under the leadership of Helene
Stöcker, for the state-organized provision of care for unmarried mothers
and their children. They combined this social and political work with
the demand to free questions of sexual morality from the constraints of
Christian ethics and social convention and to consider them instead in the
context of Darwinian evolutionary theory and monist thought. One of
the main emphases of their endeavours was on providing the best possible
conditions for the production of healthy offspring – a cause they saw as
related to achieving women’s free choice of sexual and reproductive partner.
14 See Alexander Tille, Von Darwin bis Nietzsche, Leipzig 1895, p. 231. Heide Schlüpmann

summarizes the controversy between Tille and Helene Stöcker, the leader of the Bund
für Mutterschutz, on this subject. See Heide Schlüpmann, ‘Nietzsche-Rezeption in
der alten Frauenbewegung: Die sexualpolitische Konzeption Helene Stöckers’, in
Walter Gebhard (ed.), Friedrich Nietzsche: Strukturen der Negativität, Frankfurt am
Main 1982, pp. 129–56: p. 136.
15 See Ann Taylor Allen, ‘German Radical Feminism and Eugenics’, German Studies

Review 11:1 (1988), pp. 31–56.

konden meisjes zo overdriven doen! Gelukkig, dat zij spoedig beter werd’
(Then Vera became sick and did nothing but weep and call out for Brita –
well, at fourteen years of age girls can behave so excessively! Fortunately,
she was soon better).36 Vera’s inappropriate and ‘excessive’ passions thus
become associated by Brita with sickness and a temporal deviation from
the norm – Vera ‘recovers’ from her ‘illness’ after she moves to Switzerland
and breaks off contact with Brita – while the protagonist considers her own
controlled passions to be healthy and normal. In spite of the deep-seated
social antipathy towards homosexuality and Hans’ desperate attempts to
cure her of her ‘abnormal sympathies’, Brita forcefully rejects the idea that
her desires deviate from what should be considered ‘normal’. In a radical
claim that it is she who is normal and women who desire men who are not,
Brita subverts the contemporary dyad that pitted ‘normative’ heterosexual
desires against ‘non-normative’ homosexual inclinations:
Nu zij, Brita Salin, verklaarde, dat zij zichzelf normaal vond en alle anderen, die
niet waren zoals zij: abnormaal. Voor haar was elke vrouw, die ernaar verlangde,
een man te omhelzen, die in staat was haar liefde, haar hartstocht te geven aan een
man, een wonder, een haar volkomen onbegrijpelijk wezen, dat zij met verbazing
en heimelijke afkeer bekeek.
(And now she, Brita Salin, declared that she found herself to be normal, and all the
others, who were not like her: abnormal. For her every woman who desired to hold
a man, who was capable of giving her love, her passion, to a man, was a wonder, an
entirely incomprehensible figure, that she scrutinized with astonishment and con-
cealed aversion.)37
36 The use of free indirect speech makes it difficult to distinguish between the voice of

the narrator and the views of ‘wider society’. It could also be argued, therefore, that
Brita is ironically mocking society’s perception of girlhood ‘crushes’. Ibid. pp. 164–5.
37 While activists such as Anna Rüling, who presented the first political speech on the

issues faced by homosexual women (1904), argued that homosexual women were
‘normal’ and, indeed, often superior to heterosexual women, it is Reuling’s decision
to position Brita as a feminine homosexual woman that makes this example so novel
and radical. Femininity is not anchored to heterosexuality but, nonetheless, is used
to reinforce a sense of normality. Ibid. p. 138.
252 Cyd Sturgess

Brita’s contempt for women who desire the opposite sex appears as part
of an attempt to establish an alternative hierarchy of desire in which het-
erosexual instincts are perceived to be base and objectionable. While Brita
claims that she is simply doing ‘exactly the same thing to [heterosexuals]
as [they] were doing to her’, her rejection of the heterosexual sex instinct
serves, in a way, to legitimate the nature of her own homosexual desires
as ‘natural’ and ‘normal’. Ultimately, then, the existence of a ‘normative’
and ‘non-normative’ binary does not appear to be challenged in Reuling’s
writing, rather it is inverted. Reuling’s subversion of an existing framework
enables her to position homosexual desires as something that is ‘normal’,
but only at the cost of heterosexuality’s hegemonic position as the norm.
Brita’s contrary sense of what is ‘gewoon’ (normal) is further indicated by
examples of the ‘naturalness’ of her contrary instincts. When Hans sug-
gests that the power of his love could cure her, for example, the reader is
told that Brita is overwhelmed by a ‘wee gevoel van walging’ (sick feel-
ing of disgust) when he embraces her, the kind ‘dat je maag samenkneep
en in je neus omhoogsteeg’ (that knots your stomach and rises into your
nose).38 The intuitiveness of Brita’s reaction to Hans’s embrace is used to
suggest that the protagonist’s aversion to the opposite sex originates from
an inherently physical and biological impulse.
Yet despite a brief recourse to biological discourses, Reuling makes no
attempt to present love between women in terms of gendered inversion,
choosing instead to challenge the medical models that coded desire for
women as a masculine drive. During one of the flashbacks to Brita’s past,
the reader is told that the protagonist avoids ‘special bars’ in her search for
a love interest because she finds the patrons distasteful and unfathomable:
Waarom imiteerden die vrouwen een sexe, waar zij een afkeer van hadden? Waarom
kleedden zij zich als mannen, met overhemden en dassen en kortgeknipte haren en
hadden bruuske mannelijke bewegingen? […] Zij had het nooit begrepen.
38 Ibid. p. 143.


(Why did those women imitate a sex to which they had an aversion? Why did they
dress as men, with shirts and ties, closely cropped hair, and brusque masculine move-
ments? […] She had never understood it).39
Furthermore, in the images offered of Brita’s childhood there is noth-

ing to be seen of the ‘masculine’ congenital invert that was visible in the
works of Hirschfeld, Ellis, and Stokvis. Reuling neither attempts to con-
firm the inherent nature of Brita’s desires with lengthy accounts of child-
hood tomboyism, nor does she claim that the protagonist’s development
into adolescence brings with it any notable markers of gendered deviance.
Throughout her childhood Brita is consistently referred to as a ‘sweet’ and
‘amiable’ girl and, as she reaches the point of womanhood and is ready to
be ‘presented’ to society, she is described by her father as an ‘exceptionally
pretty girl, extremely sporty yet so feminine, so charming’.40 The frequent
descriptions of Brita’s beauty and charm stand in contrast to the depic-
tions of the feminine homosexual in sexological literature. Described by
Havelock Ellis as ‘the pick of the women whom the average man would
pass by’, the feminine homosexual woman was said to turn to her own sex
because of a lack of attention from male suitors.41 Brita, however, has a
seemingly endless line of male admirers, including the undeterrable Hans,
and Reuling positions her as a highly desirable feminine figure for both men
and women. Indiscernible as a queer ‘Other’, then, Brita’s overt femininity
is critical to her own underlying sense of herself as ‘normal’. Although her
desires deviate from the socially accepted norm, Brita remains fully com-
mitted to the idea of traditional femininity claiming that ‘zij was blij dat
zijn een vrouw was, zij wilde niets anders zijn dan vrouw’ (she was happy
that she was a woman, she wanted nothing other than to be a woman).42
The protagonist’s distaste for the masculine and virile element can also
be seen in the choice of her female partners, all of whom are presented
as being feminine. Even Brita’s ultimate partner Renée, who is given an
39 Ibid. p. 140.

40 Ibid. p. 32.

41 Havelock Ellis, ‘Sexual Inversion in Women’, Alienist and Neurologist 16 (1895),

pp. 141–58: pp. 147–8.
42 Reuling, Terug, p. 140.

254 Cyd Sturgess

androgynous name and described by Hans as ‘mischievous’ and ‘boy-like’,
is ultimately prescribed traditionally feminine qualities. In her role as nurse
for her sick neighbour, for example, Renée is shown to have a caring and
nurturing nature, which is continually foregrounded over her tomboyish
brazenness. When Renée later adopts a stray kitten and nurses it back
to health, Reuling emphasizes the inherently maternal nature of Renée’s
character. Yet, although Brita champions the figure of the feminine lesbian,
there appear to be certain limits and boundaries as to what can be deemed
acceptable and appropriate desires.
In the protagonist’s relationship with the Hungarian socialite Marja
Woustowskja, the woman responsible for the poison pen letter to her par-
ents in the beginning of the novel, the reader is presented with an example
of what the protagonist perceives to be an unacceptable form of queer
feminine desire. When Brita refuses to take Marja home with her to visit
her parents and friends, Marja’s determination to climb the social ladder
drives her to a desperate and unforgivable act. Seeing no other alternative
to achieve her goals, Marja resorts to positioning herself as a femme fatale
and the reader is confronted with an excessive and exaggerated perfor-
mance of femininity in her flirtatious encounters with the Swedish consul,
a man who she believes will ensure her entrance into the upper echelons
of Swedish society. After Marja arranges a secret meeting with the consul,
however, telling Brita that she is going to a lecture, the protagonist breaks
off all contact with her once she discovers Marja’s deception, and denounces
her as a ‘vergissing’ (mistake). Brita’s previous condemnation of the hetero-
sexual impulse in conjunction with Marja’s display of excessive femininity
leads the protagonist to reject her partner and distinguish her own desires
clearly from those of her ex-lover: ‘zij was niet zoals ik – ik heb mij in haar
vergist’ (she was not like me, I was mistaken).43 Brita’s dedication to more
traditional forms of femininity thus sees her arguably create her own rigid
gendered and sexual orthodoxy. The protagonist not only renounces the
idea of inversion and with it the presumably ‘third sex’ patrons of the ‘spe-
cial bars’ in Paris, but she further rejects the image of the bisexual femme
43 Ibid. p. 49.


in Die naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen der Poesie (The Scientific
Basis of Literature) in 1887. Rather than perpetuating the ‘widerwärtige
Sentimentalität’ (repugnant sentimentality) of traditional representations
of love, writers should demonstrate, Bölsche continues, ‘dass die Liebe auf
natürlichen Gesetzen und Functionen basirt, die ihre feste und geordnete
Stellung im Zellenstaate des menschlichen Organismus einnehmen’ (that
love is determined by natural laws and functions, which take their fixed
and proper position in the state of cells of the human organism).23
But how best to realize this didactic programme in a work of fiction?
Bölsche recommends a technique that Meisel-Hess employs to great effect
in Die Intellektuellen: the foregrounding of positive model characters and
their actions. ‘Ich fordere neben vollkommen scharfer Beobachtung eine
bestimmte Tendenz’ (alongside the very keenest observation I demand a
certain bias), Bölsche writes in Die naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen
der Poesie, and he defines this bias as ‘die Richtung auf das Normale, das
Natürliche, das bewusst Gesetzmässige’ (the tendency towards the normal,
the natural, to that which is in compliance with [natural] laws).24 Thus dis-
tinguishing his aesthetic programme decisively from Émile Zola’s ‘Neigung
für das Pathologische’ (predilection for the pathological), he advocates
instead the representation of an optimistic philosophy of progress. And
inscribing a utopian element into this concept of realism, he proclaims:
‘Realismus ist in Wahrheit der höchste, der vollkommene Idealismus’ (In
truth, realism is the highest, the perfect idealism).25
It is precisely in this sense that Meisel-Hess constructs Die Intellektuellen
as an ‘optimistic’ novel – as contemporary critics repeatedly remarked. Victor
Noack, for instance, writing in the journal of the Bund für Mutterschutz,
Die Neue Generation, declares the optimism of Meisel-Hess’s novel to be
the true expression of the author’s ‘wirklich bewusste[] Weltanschauung’
(truly aware world-view);26 similarly, the reviewer for the Teplitzer Zeitung
23 Bölsche, Die naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen, p. 59.

24 Ibid. p. 66.

25 Ibid. pp. 66 and 92.

26 Victor Noack, ‘Grete Meisel Hess, Die Intellektuellen’, Die Neue Generation 7 (1911),

pp. 487–8: p. 487. A similar view is expressed by the reviewer for Die Wage (Vienna),
256 Cyd Sturgess

sex instinct in spite of her position as a feminine woman. Furthermore,
Brita’s relationships with other feminine women serve to disrupt the binary
opposition of masculinity and femininity, placing feminine lesbian desire
outside the dominant active-passive dichotomy. As Heike Bauer has noted
of the imbrications between sexology and literature more generally at
this time, Reuling’s attempt to create new paradigms for the expression
of lesbian desires serves ‘as a reminder of the fact that the relationship
between desire and identity is not necessarily negotiated through a set of
commonly used labels’.44 Although it would be problematic to perceive
Reuling as a champion for the freedom of lesbian expression in all of its
various forms, her work is indicative of the complexity of the dialogue that
existed between medico-legal discourses on (homo)sexuality and literature
at this time. Further explorations of Dutch women’s writing on the subject
of female sexuality in light of the conservative socio-cultural climates in
which they emerged will make it possible to garner more comprehensive
understandings of the ways in which authors challenged dominant bio-
logical discourses in their writings in an attempt to adequately reflect the
complexity of their desires.
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44 Heike Bauer, ‘Literary Sexualities’, in David Hillman and Ulrika Maude (eds), The

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Part III
Projections of Otherness
Introduced by David Midgley

be seen in many respects to be a manifestation of social degeneration).31
Degeneration is here understood as a form of moral deviancy.32 On the
basis of eugenic – or biologistic – thinking, by contrast, Meisel-Hess can
argue that it is precisely the children who are born out of wedlock (i.e.
before marriage becomes economically possible) who promise to bring an
end to the degenerative diseases associated with older parents. And the fact
that Meisel-Hess can refer to the scientific nature of eugenic discourse and
frame her argument by embedding it in the widespread concern for the
health of the nation, invests Lore with an energy that makes the utopian
project of female self-determination of sexuality and reproduction appear
within easy grasp. ‘Und wenn die Dichter wirklich “die Spiegel sind, die uns
die Strahlen kommender Zeiten zuwerfen”’, Adele Schreiber comments,
‘so sind die Tage der erstrebten Gerechtigkeit nicht mehr fern’ (and if the
writers of fiction really are ‘the mirrors which show us the rays of times to
come’, the days of justice we long for are no longer far off ).33
Elsewhere, Meisel-Hess uses the technique of contrasting her model
characters with a negative figure in order to emphasize their exemplarity.
This is the case with the well-balanced, idealized Geneviève, who is pitted
against the one-sided intellectual Lucinda. Meisel-Hess particularly con-
demns Lucinda’s ‘Unvermögen zur Produktion der stärksten weiblichen
Gefühle’ (inability to produce the strongest feminine feelings) (I 435) and
her teleological, deterministic world-view, which stands in opposition to
the author’s trust in a natural law that is non-teleological but rests firmly
on the principles of congruence and ‘eherne Folgerichtigkeit’ (iron logic)
(I 435), principles that characterize the history of evolutionary develop-
ment according to Darwin.
The inability to combine her strong intellect with feminine emotion
marks Lucinda out as an ‘Übergangsgeschöpf [auf dem Weg zu] einer
31 Othmar Spann, Die Stiefvaterfamilie unehelichen Ursprungs, Berlin 1904, p. 3.

32 In the early 1900s, the term ‘degeneration’ is often used in collocation with notions of

deracination, alienation, and corruption of social norms. See Sybille Buske, Fräulein
Mutter und ihr Bastard: Eine Geschichte der Unehelichkeit in Deutschland 1900–70,
Göttingen 2004, p. 83.
33 Schreiber, ‘Ansätze’, p. 185.

Students of cultural theory will be familiar with the human tendency to
stylize other individuals, and groups of individuals, according to sets of
attributes that they are presumed to possess. Feminist theory, for exam-
ple, speaks of the stylization of women on the basis of their biological
classification as ‘essentialism’ and has become skilled in negotiating the
tension between the assertion of sexual difference on the one hand and
the need to combat preconceived notions of sexual identity on the other.1
The categorization of people in racial terms has been similarly recognized
as ‘a form of cultural self-definition’ which served, particularly in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries, to maintain a ‘hierarchy of values through
which European culture defined itself by placing itself at the top of a scale
against which all other societies, or groups within society, were judged’.2
The self-serving nature of such racial stereotyping in the age of colonialism
was neatly illustrated by Aimé Césaire in his essay Discourse on Colonialism
(1950) with a quotation from Ernest Renan’s book La Réforme intellectuelle
et morale (Intellectual and Moral Reform, 1871), in which Renan had sought
to underpin his views on how the future well-being of nations should be
secured, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War and the experience of
the Paris Commune, with the observation that the Chinese were natural
workers, the Negroes contented tillers of the soil, and the Europeans born
masters and soldiers.3
Students of cultural theory will probably also be familiar with the
concept of ‘abjection’, as used in Aisha Nazeer’s chapter in Part III that
follows. It was devised by Julia Kristeva and applied, in her book Powers
of Horror, to the powerful sense of revulsion that arises in the face of an
experience which endangers our sense of distinction between subject and
object, self and Other.4 Kristeva’s argument builds on a key idea of Freud’s
1 See Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion, New York 1995, pp. 47–54.

2 Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race, London

1995, pp. 93–4.
3 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, New York 2000, p. 38; the relevant passage

is reproduced in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and
Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, Hemel Hempstead 1993, p. 175.
4 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York 1982, p. 1.

262 David Midgley

about the process by which the ego is initially constituted and by which it
defines itself in relation to that which is external to it. Freud’s description of
an aspect of that process in his essay ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’ (1915)
gives the notion of ‘projection’ a more specific meaning than the broad sense
of one person’s mental image being applied to another person or object,
which the term often conveys in general psychological usage.5 (The title
of Part III is itself intended to invoke both the narrower psychoanalytic
meaning and the broader connotation.) Freud argues that an organism
can defend itself relatively easily against unpleasant sensory stimuli from
the outside world, but that defending itself against unpleasant stimuli that
arise from within, through the operation of the instincts, requires a more
complex technique, which takes the form of mentally expelling or project-
ing outwards the source of the displeasure.6 As Freud puts it in his essay
‘The Unconscious’, which also dates from 1915, ‘[t]he ego behaves as if the
danger of a development of anxiety threatened it not from the direction
of an instinctual impulse but from the direction of perception’.7 By 1933,
this conception of ‘projection’ was being put to work in the analysis of the
psychology of fascism: impulses – particularly sexual impulses – that were
negatively connoted within the society to which the fascist belonged were
‘projected’ outwards onto other ethnic groups who were held in contempt.8
The public culture of Western Europe in the period around 1900 shows
plentiful evidence of stereotyping based on long-standing preconceptions
about race and sexuality, and also on new ideas about ‘degeneracy’ and
madness. Sander Gilman’s 1985 book Difference and Pathology remains a
valuable guide to the way those stereotypes presented themselves in various
European countries. But the late nineteenth century was also a time when
a variety of developments in the scientific investigation of biological phe-
nomena and the workings of the human mind were creating the basis on
5 Cf. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis,

London 1973, pp. 349–56.
6 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. XIV,

London 1957, pp. 134–6.
7 Ibid. p. 184.

8 Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, London 1972, p. 100f.

Part III: Projections of Otherness 263

which the critical reappraisal of the human imagination and the thought
structures with which it operates became possible. Before Freud, Darwin
and Nietzsche had also made important contributions to that process of
reappraisal – albeit not without occasional endorsements of the limiting
preconceptions about women that were prevalent in their lifetimes.
In his major publications (The Origin of Species, 1859; and The Descent
of Man, 1871), Darwin can be seen to have engaged with a wide range of
nineteenth-century discourses about the relationship between human
beings and the animal kingdom. In his chapter ‘On the Races of Man’
in The Descent of Man, for example, he lists the attempts of thirteen dif-
ferent authors to enumerate the various ‘species’ of mankind, coming up
with numbers that range from one to sixty-three.9 For his part, he had
reviewed the available descriptions of physiological differences and con-
cluded in that chapter that, since the evidence of variety within particular
‘races’ was so strong, and the evidence of significant differences between
them so unstable, it was on the whole more meaningful to think in terms of
gradations in characteristics (or ‘characters’, in the technical sense in which
biologists use the term) than of clear-cut differences between the ‘races’. In
The Descent of Man he went on to explore in depth the role of sexual selec-
tion in the development of those gradations.10 It was not until the early
decades of the twentieth century, however, that a combination of lines of
scientific inquiry, including the study of the structure and replication of
cells, embryology, and the observation of inherited features in particular
species, led eventually to an understanding of the function and chemical
nature of genes: precisely the understanding on which the modern concep-
tion of genetics is based.11
9 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, ed. James

Moore and Adrian Desmond, London 2004, p. 203.
10 For the strength of Darwin’s commitment to the notion of the descent of all ‘races’

from a common ancestor, see Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s Sacred
Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins, London 2009, especially
pp. 348–76.
11 See Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution and Inheritance,

Cambridge, MA 1982, pp. 727–807.
264 David Midgley

A factor that delayed the integration of scientific findings into the
overarching schemes of evolutionary biology as we now know them was
the division of inquiry in the late nineteenth century into specialisms that
focused on the structures and functions of organisms on the one hand,
and the investigation of organic development on the other.12 A remark-
able feature of the philosophical inquiry that Nietzsche developed in the
1870s and 1880s was that, in its pursuit of a critical understanding of how
human beings work, it took account not only of the latest findings in such
areas as physiology, experimental psychology, and experimental physics, as
well as zoology, but also of the methodological thinking by which scientists
reached their findings. As Christian Emden has shown in his latest book
on Nietzsche, the famous inquiry into the origins of moral values that
Nietzsche conducted in Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On the Genealogy
of Morality (1887) self-consciously adopts techniques of examination, inter-
rogation, dissection, and vivisection (as Nietzsche puts it) that parallel the
practices of biological and medical science.13 Emden is alluding here to
the opening section of Part V of Beyond Good and Evil, which is entitled
‘On the natural history of morals’.14 There Nietzsche speaks, in an exact
analogy of the zoologist’s work, of the need to collect material, formulate
concepts, and put into order ‘the tremendous realm of tender value feel-
ings and value distinctions that live, grow, reproduce, and are destroyed’,
with a view to achieving a ‘typology of morals’.15 Nietzsche’s purpose, as
he describes it at a later point, was to strip away the illusions and precon-
ceptions with which we are given to concealing our natural selves from
ourselves in order to enable the human being to ‘stand before the human
12 See ibid. pp. 112–20. For an account of the various non-Darwinian ways of thinking

about evolution that were prevalent in the period around 1900, see Peter J. Bowler,
The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around
1900, Baltimore, MD 1983.
13 Christian Emden, Nietzsche’s Naturalism: Philosophy and the Life Sciences in the

Nineteenth Century, Cambridge 2014, p. 7; cf. also p. 58.
14 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann, trans. Judith

Norman, Cambridge 2002, p. 76 (§186).
15 Ibid. p. 75 (§186).


personality development. For first and foremost, Olga’s development con-
sists in the successful regulation of the sexual drive through the application
of reason and the trust in instinct, a process that reflects the constitution
of personality as defined by monist philosophy.38
Though obeying a didactic general principle, the narrative does not
lack a certain sophistication, as the author takes the psychological moti-
vation of character and plot very seriously. Indeed, in 1912, she claimed:
‘Das Epos unserer Zeit, der moderne Gesellschaftsroman, kann seinem
innersten Wesen nach die Begründung der Geschehnisse durch seelische
Notwendigkeiten nicht entbehren’ (By its very nature the epic poem of our
time, the modern social novel, cannot dispense with psychological necessi-
ties as motivation for the plot).39 Instead of the ‘wirre Tatsachenhäufung’
(confused cumulation of facts) offered by the lowbrow fiction of family
magazines, the quality novelist must develop the plot according to ‘inneren
Nötigungen’ (inner necessities), which are to manifest themselves ‘in
äußeren Schicksalen’ (in observable destinies).40
Olga, thus, is a rounded individual with psychological depth, but she
is a model character as well. Having won her internal battles, she emerges as
a leading figure in the movement for ethical and social reform, an emanci-
pated, independent woman. And yet, one doubt remains: for a writer who
emphasizes the link between emancipation, individuation, and motherhood
as strongly as Meisel-Hess does, it is striking that her main protagonist, and
the voice of her social and political convictions, remains childless. Meisel-
Hess is silent on the subject. She simply underlines Olga’s great talent for
‘feurige Lehre’ (fiery teaching) (I 459), implying that the commitment
38 In an essay that provides provides the psychological explanation and template for

the depiction of Olga’s development, Meisel-Hess defines ‘jene[n] Schnittpunkt, an
dem der betreffende Mensch sich über sein Triebleben klar wird’ (the point of inter-
section at which the person concerned gains clarity regarding their sexual drive) as
the crucial point at which the individual becomes a ‘Persönlichkeit’ (personality).
Grete Meisel-Hess, ‘Die Persönlichkeit’, Die Aktion 1 (1911), cols 295–8.
39 Grete Meisel-Hess, ‘Vom Psychologischen’, Der Weg 4 (1912), cols 132–4: col. 132.

40 Meisel-Hess, ‘Vom Psychologischen’, 134.

266 David Midgley

and in his play An Enemy of the People (1882) he presents the situation of
a scientist who discovers bacilli in the waters of a spa town and thereby
focuses upon himself the suspicion of the populace and the ire of the local
dignitaries who find their businesses threatened as a result. And as we move
forward from the 1880s to the 1930s, of course, metaphors of ‘germs’ and
pathogenic ‘parasites’ notoriously assume virulent forms in the context of
political rhetoric.21
The symptomatic display of stereotypes, preconceptions, and instinc-
tual revulsions, together with the theoretical means to interpret them –
such is the legacy of the period around 1900 that we find discussed in the
chapters that follow with regard to novels by Rider Haggard, Florence
Marryat, Bram Stoker, Joseph Conrad, and the Austrian Robert Müller.
Bibliography
Bowler, Peter J., The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the
Decades around 1900, Baltimore, MD 1983.
Césaire, Aimé, Discourse on Colonialism, New York 2000.
Darwin, Charles, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, ed. James Moore
and Adrian Desmond, London 2004.
Desmond, Adrian, and James Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the
Quest for Human Origins, London 2009.
Emden, Christian J., Nietzsche’s Naturalism: Philosophy and the Life Sciences in the
Nineteenth Century, Cambridge 2014.
Freud, Sigmund, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. XIV,
London 1957.
Gilman, Sander, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Mad-
ness, Ithaca, NY 1985.
Grosz, Elizabeth, Space, Time, and Perversion, New York 1995.
21 See, for example, Paul J. Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe,

1890–1945, Oxford 2000.
Part III: Projections of Otherness 267

King, Martina, ‘Staatsfeind und Sch nheitsg ttin: Bakteriologisches Wissen in Wil-
ö
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helm B lsches popul rdarwinistischen Schriften’, in Gerd-Hermann Susen and
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Edith Wack (eds), ‘Was wir im Verstande ausjäten, kommt im Traume wieder’:
Wilhelm Bölsche 1861–1939, Würzburg 2012, pp. 287–319.
Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York 1982.
Laplanche, Jean, and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, London
1973.
Mayr, Ernst, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution and Inheritance,
Cambridge, MA 1982.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann, trans. Judith
Norman, Cambridge 2002.
Reich, Wilhelm, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, London 1972.
Weindling, Paul J., Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890–1945, Oxford 2000.
Williams, Patrick, and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial
Theory: A Reader, Hemel Hempstead 1993.
Yong, Ed, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life,
London 2016.
Young, Robert J. C., Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race, London
1995.
Zwierlein, Anne-Julia, ‘From Parasitology to Parapsychology: Parasites in Nineteenth-
Century Science and Literature’, in Anne-Julia Zwierlein (ed.), Unmapped Coun-
tries: Biological Visions in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, London
2005, pp. 155–72.
Aisha Nazeer
10 Scientific and Gothic Constructions of the

Degenerate, Racial ‘Other’: Reading the Abject
in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire
(1897) and H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887)
abstract
Through examination of two late Victorian novels, read alongside nineteenth-century
medical and anthropological writings, this chapter seeks to scrutinize the role of the
relationship between literature and science in the perception and construction of racial
difference. By investigating how both discourses draw upon a Gothic lexicon, fin-de-siècle
depictions of the feminized racial ‘Other’ will be analysed in view of Victorian fears of
miscegenation, new gender and sexual identities, and degeneration. Both Florence Marryat’s
novel The Blood of the Vampire (1897) and H. Rider Haggard’s novel She (1887) are read in
this chapter as typical examples of late Victorian Gothic texts which incorporate medico-
scientific theory in order to diagnose and pathologize the destabilizing threat of racial
difference. This threat will be explored in light of Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject, to
reveal the essential role of the Gothic in defining the strict boundaries between normal
and abnormal, healthy and diseased, White and ‘Other’.
The Victorian period was an age of obsessive taxonomical and classifi-

catory activity. Male-dominated medical and anthropological sciences
sought to organize human life into discrete groups, frequently stratifying
gender, race, and sexuality, by dividing society into two major camps: the
dominant group being healthy, normal, and moral, and the constructed
‘Other’ being pathological, abnormal, and depraved. This scientifically
informed binary often served to uphold a status quo which distanced the
White, heterosexual male from the threat of the female, racial degener-
ate. The nineteenth-century anxiety concerning otherness is never more

excessively long torso, flat feet, bow legs, and the soft, greasy hand of the
hypocrite and the traitor’.43
With her suggestion that physical features stereotypically associated
with Jewishness should be removed from the gene pool, Meisel-Hess seems
indeed to reveal an anti-Semitic attitude. The matter is more complicated,
however, for it has to be borne in mind that – in contrast to our under-
standing of eugenic ideology today – the link between eugenic thought
and anti-Semitism was not a matter of course in the early twentieth century.
In his study of the eugenic movement in socialist and social-democratic
circles Michael Schwartz summarizes:
Gegenüber dem Rassismus war die […] Eugenik in weiten Teilen vor 1933 sogar klar
ablehnend eingestellt. Darum war es nicht zuletzt den Sozialisten jüdischer Herkunft
möglich, einerseits Rassismus und Antisemitismus entschieden abzulehnen, ande-
rerseits eugenikpolitische Initiativen engagiert zu befürworten.
(Largely, the eugenic movement before 1933 dissociated itself from racism. This is
why it was possible for socialists of Jewish descent among others to decisively repu-
diate racism and anti-Semitism while at the same time wholeheartedly supporting
eugenic policies.)44
Indeed, it is clear from a series of articles Meisel-Hess wrote in response to

Werner Sombart’s theses on the ‘Zukunft der Juden’ (future of the Jews)
that she rejected the concept of race, insisting that any physical manifesta-
tion is but a transient state in the larger context of evolution.45
I would like to argue, therefore, that Meisel-Hess’s endorsement of
Stanislaus’s celibacy is not based on anti-Semitism as a racial concept, but,
rather, on an internalization of the predominant ideal of beauty of her time.
43 Ritchie Robertson, The ‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature 1749–1939:

Emancipation and its Discontents, Oxford 1999, p. 187. Original text quoted here:
Edouard Drumont, La France juive, 1887, I, p. 35.
44 Michael Schwartz, Sozialistische Eugenik: Eugenische Sozialtechnologien in Debatten

und Politik der deutschen Sozialdemokratie, Bonn 1995, p. 16.
45 See Grete Meisel-Hess, ‘Die Zukunft der Juden’, Der Weg 3 (1911), cols 768–71; Grete

Meisel-Hess, ‘Die Judenfrage in romantischer Behandlung’, Der Weg 3 (1911), cols
801–5.
Scientific and Gothic Constructions of the Degenerate, Racial ‘Other’ 271

different geographical locations.1 Similarly, in the numerous editions of
Systema Naturae published multiple times between 1735 and 1793, Linnaeus
records distinctions between people living in different geographical sites.
Linnaeus supplements Buffon’s work by classifying human beings into four
distinct types. While Linnaeus does not explicitly place the types into a
hierarchy, the characteristics assigned to each race suggest a Eurocentric bias.
For example, while he refers to the Europeanus’s physical and mental advan-
tages, the Africanus is described as ‘sly, lazy, [and] careless’.2 Interestingly,
in contrast to the four types of homo sapiens, Linnaeus also discussed a
category he named homo monstrosus, which included numerous people
whom Linnaeus considered to be abnormal. Amongst this group which
resembled Victorian conceptualizations of the Gothic, were several racial
‘Others’, including the ‘Hottentots, […] as they were supposed to only have
one testicle’.3 In 1775, Blumenbach adapted Linnaeus’s four main racial
types (ignoring the monstrosus group), suggesting instead five groups of
man in his medical dissertation titled De generis humani varietate nativa.
Blumenbach’s work represents two important shifts in scientific perceptions
of race. Firstly, Blumenbach cited physical characteristics as the grounds
for classification; he described the skeletal variations of skulls of the five
varieties of man. Secondly, as Stephen Jay Gould argues, Blumenbach’s
addition of a fifth race ‘radically changed the geometry of human order
from a geographically based model without explicit ranking to a hierarchy
of worth based upon perceived beauty, and fanning out in two directions
from a Caucasian ideal’.4
Blumenbach’s emphasis upon both anatomical difference and the
hierarchical classification of race formed the backbone of nineteenth-
century physical anthropology. One of the most significant examples of the
1 Ashley Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, Oxford 1997,

p. 100.
2 Margareta Nisser-Dalman, ‘What’s more important, a good story or a true story? The

merging of facts and fiction at Linnaeus’ houses in Uppsala’, The Linnaean Legacy:
Three Centuries after his Birth 8 (2008), pp. 20–7: p. 25.
3 Ibid.

4 Stephen Jay Gould, ‘The Geometer of Race’, Discover 15 (1994), pp. 65–9: p. 67.

272 Aisha Nazeer

hierarchical classification of the races by anatomical measurements is Arthur
de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853–5). Gobineau
looked at skeletal difference in order to taxonomically group the races into
three broad kinds. He states, ‘I find these races naturally divided into three,
and three only – the white, the black, and the yellow’.5 The term ‘natu-
rally’ encapsulates the coercive tone employed by Gobineau throughout his
work, whereby anthropological measurements were wielded to naturalize
a racial hierarchy in which the ‘negroid variety is the lowest, and stands
at the foot of the ladder’.6 The contrived inferiority of Black people was
based upon two strands of evidence: behavioural traits and physical char-
acteristics. The most prominent behavioural trait was an animalistic and at
times a mechanical inhumanity. Gobineau draws upon the Gothic lexicon
to describe ‘this human machine, in whom it is so easy to arouse emotion,
[and who] shows, in the face of suffering, either a monstrous indifference
or a cowardice that seeks a voluntary refuge in death’.7 Black people’s
physicality was described as having an ‘animal character’ which Gobineau
explains ‘appears in the shape of the pelvis’.8 In Leçons sur l’homme: sa
place dans la creation et dans l’histoire de la terre (1864), Karl Vogt advanced
this concept, describing Black people as noticeably simian. In his Lectures
on man, having listed their supposed inferior physical traits, he positions
Black people as distinctly ‘Other’ by aligning them with animals, stating
that ‘these external characteristics remind us irresistibly of the ape: the
short neck, the long lean limbs, the projecting pendulous belly – all this
affords a glimmer of the ape beneath the human envelope’.9
While naturalists recorded their classifications of race for over a cen-
tury, it was not until the fin de siècle that racial difference became infused
with a language of disease. Those same traits which allowed naturalists to
5 Arthur de Gobineau, An Essay on the Inequality of the Races, trans. Adrian Collins,

London 1915, p. 146.
6 Ibid. p. 205.

7 Ibid. p. 206.

8 Ibid. p. 205.

9 Karl Vogt, Lectures on Man: His Place in Creation, and in the History of the Earth,

ed. James Hunt, London 1864, p. 12.

define a hierarchy of race now existed within a medical discourse, licens-
ing clinicians to diagnose racial difference. One of the main scientists to
bridge the gap between anthropology and medicine was William Flower.
Initially a zoologist, Flower was also a medical doctor. Through his abil-
ity to diagnose racial variations, Flower is representative of a movement
at the end of the nineteenth century to pathologize the racial ‘Other’. An
example of one of his lectures exposes the degree to which anatomical vari-
ations were used to authorize the racial hierarchy. In the ‘Abstract Report
of Lectures on the Comparative Anatomy of Man’, we are told that Flower
foregrounds ‘the relative length of toes as a characteristic which might mark
a difference between Europeans and Negroes’.10
These discourses on race held great authority, transforming social
attitudes; perhaps never more so than the influence of Gobineau, who is
known to be ‘one of the spiritual progenitors of Hitler’s Mein Kampf’.11
Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) can elucidate how science influenced
race relations at the fin de siècle. Said’s discussion of how the Orient or the
racial ‘Other’ was constructed by European discourses, sought to expose the
artificiality of the seemingly natural hierarchy between the Occident and
the Orient. Said describes this constructed hegemonic discourse, which he
terms Orientalism, as ‘a library or archive of information commonly, and
in some of its aspects, unanimously held’.12 The ideas within this archive
‘explained the behaviour of Orientals; they supplied Orientals with a men-
tality, a genealogy, an atmosphere, […] to see Orientals as a phenomenon
possessing regular characteristics’.13 A considerable share of this ideologi-
cal archive was founded upon scientific classifications such as Gobineau’s,
Vogt’s, and Flower’s anatomical measurements. Said explains that one
important ‘element preparing the way for modern Orientalist structures
was the whole impulse to classify nature and man into types’.14
10 William Flower, ‘Abstract Report on the Comparative Anatomy of Man’, British

Medical Journal 6:1 (1880), p. 687.
11 Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, p. 79.

12 Edward Said, Orientalism, London 1985, p. 42.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid. p. 119.

274 Aisha Nazeer

This Orientalist classification can be read in Marryat’s and Haggard’s
novels. Both texts incorporate medico-scientific discourses to authorize
the oppression of the racial ‘Other’. In The Blood of the Vampire, Marryat’s
characterization of Dr Phillips, a clinician with an in-depth knowledge
of Harriet’s lineage, represents the amalgamation of Linnaean-style clas-
sification with medicine. His role as doctor authorizes his diagnosis and
subsequent control of the Gothic character, Harriet. In a similar style
to Flower’s concern with minute physical indicators of racial difference,
Dr Phillips draws attention to Harriet’s ethnicity through scientific observa-
tion of her physical features. He notes her ‘long-shaped eyes […], her wide
mouth and her blood red lips’ (Vampire, 77), and as a result of these signs,
Dr Phillips declares his findings that Harriet ‘comes from terrible parentage’
(Vampire, 67), referring to her Jamaican grandmother.15 Being a medical
clinician, Dr Phillips’s classification of Harriet’s miscegenated ancestry is
also a diagnosis. He asserts that because of her heritage, ‘an acquaintance
with her is dangerous’ (Vampire, 70), warning others of a risk of contagion.
In Powers of Horror (1980), Julia Kristeva examines the relationship between
the abject and the self, exploring the role of society’s monsters in the repro-
duction of cultural hierarchies. She describes the abject as ‘that which does
not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the
composite’.16 Similarly, contagion transgresses borders, breaking down the
boundaries between self and ‘Other’, thus disintegrating order. Dr Phillips’s
diagnosis of Harriet as contagious positions her as the abject and therefore
as threatening to the Caucasian self and social order.
Like Dr Phillips, Ludwig Horace Holly, the main narrator of Haggard’s
novel, seizes the authoritative position of scientist through his classification
of nature and man. Seemingly inspired by the Linnaean theory of nulla spe-
cies nova, a theory which dictates that no new species will come into exist-
ence and thus nature can be catalogued in its entirety, Holly and his adoptive
son Leo seek to kill and collect as many species of plant and animal as they
can during their exploration of the African Kor. Alongside the mission to
15 All quotations from The Blood of the Vampire in this chapter are taken from Florence

Marryat, The Blood of the Vampire, Brighton 2010.
16 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York 1982, p. 4.


like Lore and Geneviève as model characters leading the way towards a
future that accords women an extraordinary degree of social and sexual
agency, her Jewish protagonists are denied parenthood by the very same
ethical tenets. Yet, it is worth stressing that the concern for the greater good
that underlies their celibacy allows Meisel-Hess to cement their position
as role models at the heart of German society – a very shrewd move at a
time when anti-Semitic sentiments were running high. Meisel-Hess’s influ-
ence as provocative promoter of change should not be underestimated,
even today; for even if, to our twenty-first-century minds, she may have
overplayed the importance of the reproductive process and the physical
dimension of motherhood, she was right to point out the importance of
sexual and economic liberation in any movement of women’s political
emancipation. She was one of the radical feminists, Ute Gerhard writes,
who already in the early twentieth century had touched upon the con-
troversies that still bedevil the feminist movement today: ‘Aus heutiger
Sicht verblüfft die Erkenntnis, dass im Grunde in den von den Radikalen
thematisierten Streitfragen bereits alle gegenwärtigen, noch immer nicht
gelösten Probleme der Frauenbefreiung angesprochen und öffentlich dis-
kutiert wurden’ (What is striking, from today’s point of view, is that the
radical feminists already addressed and publicly discussed all the current
problems of women’s liberation that we still haven’t solved today).50
Bibliography
Allen, Ann Taylor, ‘German Radical Feminism and Eugenics’, German Studies Review
11:1 (1988), pp. 31–56.
Anon. [review of Meisel-Hess’s lecture] ‘Die moderne Weltanschauung’, Wiener Bilder,
22 May 1901.
50 Gerhard, Unerhört, p. 276.

276 Aisha Nazeer

Scientific discourses concerning race not only catalogued physical dif-
ference, but also attributed generalized behavioural traits to the ‘Other’.
One characteristic of the constructed Orient was their perverse sexuality.
H. L. Malchow, in his study of Gothic representations of race, states that ‘the
racial fiend is often a sexual threat and a sexual pervert’.20 The diagnosis of
sexual perversity is one of many points of convergence between nineteenth-
century representations of the racial ‘Other’ and similar depictions of the
female body. While science constructed strict racial taxonomies, scientific
theories such as those of Patrick Geddes and John Arthur Thomson per-
petuated ideologies of gender difference which reinforced the mental and
physical inferiority of women. These theories of gender difference were not
just descriptive, but prescriptive, advising ideal feminine behaviour. Any
variation upon this ideal, posed a threat to the gender hierarchy, and was
thus deemed pathological, much in the same way as the non-Caucasian.
The transgressive female body therefore became a potential site of disease.
It was also cast as the monstrous, aligning it with the abject, which Kristeva
explains, ‘disturbs identity, system, order’, in the same way as the transgres-
sive female threatens the status quo.21 Never was this more evident than
in scientific and literary depictions of the New Woman. Reacting to her
disruption of gender classifications and her prioritization of female relation-
ships, which signalled her threat to heteronormativity, the New Woman
was portrayed as aberrantly masculine and hyper-sexed. Similarly, the ethnic
‘Other’ also came to embody those elements of human behaviour which
the hegemony could not admit as its own. Said explains, ‘European culture
gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a
sort of surrogate’.22 Haggard explores this distinction between the White
male and the female, racial ‘Other’, through the male explorer’s reaction to
the aggressive sexuality of the female Amahaggar. Holly describes the court-
ship of his adopted son Leo by an Amahaggar woman, explaining how she
‘deliberately advanced to him, and, in a way that would have been winning
20 Howard Le Roy Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain,

Stanford, CA 1996, p. 148.
21 Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, p. 4.

22 Said, Orientalism, p. 3.


had it not been so determined, […] kissed him on the lips’ (She, 78). It is
the aggressive nature of the Amahaggar’s lust that revolts Holly, since it
departed from the European construction of the sexually passive woman.
Moreover, similar to the New Woman’s perceived rejection of heteronorma-
tive paradigms which aligned her with lesbianism, people from non-White
racial origins were often diagnosed with an indiscriminate sexual perver-
sity. There was a widespread social fear that the New Woman’s regard for
non-heterosexual relationships would spread amongst women, rendering
men redundant. Sian Macfie argues that the tradition of describing the
body in pathological terms was ‘linked with the notion of moral contagion
and especially with the “contamination” of lesbianism’.23 This portrayal of
contagious female sexuality once again aligns the New Woman with the
abject. Both Harriet Brandt and Queen Ayesha epitomize the intercon-
nected Gothic and disease-ridden descriptions of the female, racial, pervert.
Marryat endows her racial ‘Other’, Harriet, with a ferocious bisexual-
ity. Harriet’s initial attack against heteronormativity is her sexual interac-
tion with the traditional mother-figure, Margaret Pullen. Harriet quickly
initiates an intimate relationship with Mrs Pullen. While speaking to her,
Harriet ‘crept closer and closer […], and now encircled her waist with
her arm and leaned her head upon her shoulder’ (Vampire, 17). In casting
Margaret as the ideal paragon of heteronormative femininity, Marryat
shows Margaret Pullen rebuffing Harriet’s sexual advances. Despite resist-
ing the contagion of lesbianism, after her ‘sexual’ encounter with Harriet,
Margaret is not left unscathed. She admits feeling ‘so strange, so light-
headed […], as if [she] had been scooped hollow’ (Vampire, 18). Octavia
Davis discusses the scientific theory of the gendered usages of energy, dis-
tinguishing between ‘the male katabolic expenditure of energy and the
female anabolic absorption of energy’.24 Davis’s research focused on John
23 Sian Macfie, ‘“They Suck Us Dry”: A Study of Late Nineteenth-Century Projections

of Vampiric Women’, in Philip Shaw and Peter Stockwell (eds), Subjectivity and
Literature from the Romantics to the Present Day, London 1991, pp. 58–67: p. 60.
24 Octavia Davis, ‘Morbid Mothers: Gothic Heredity in Florence Marryat’s The Blood

of the Vampire’, in Ruth Bienstock Anolik (ed.), Horrifying Sex: Essays on Sexual
Difference in Gothic Literature, Jefferson, NC 2007, pp. 40–54: p. 45.
278 Aisha Nazeer

Arthur Thomson and Patrick Geddes’s The Evolution of Sex (1889), which
examined the biological differences between males and females. Thomson
and Geddes argued that the one feature distinguishing the sexes is ‘that
the female is the outcome and expression of preponderant anabolism,
and in contrast the male of preponderant katabolism’.25 Pre-empting cur-
rent scientific definitions of anabolism as a series of metabolic processes
whereby energy is used to build larger molecules from smaller base units,
and catabolism which involves the breakdown of molecules, thus releasing
energy, Thomson and Geddes discuss anabolism as the female storage and
containment of energy, while katabolism comprises the male release and
active use of energy. Outside of heteronormative marriage, in which female
anabolism is stabilized by male katabolism, the woman’s anabolic potential
drains her environment. Harriet’s unnatural fixation upon Margaret results
in her anabolic depletion of the traditional mother-figure’s energy. To fur-
ther highlight the danger of the racialized sexuality of the New Woman,
Marryat depicts Harriet’s anabolic capabilities as Gothic. It is her vampire
blood, inherited from her Jamaican grandmother who was bitten by a vam-
pire bat, again aligning the non-Caucasian with the animal, which allows
her to drain people. Marryat continues to interweave the Gothic with the
medical by selecting Dr Phillips to be the one to diagnose Harriet, who
explained to her that because of the vampire blood, ‘you will always exert
a weakening and debilitating effect upon [your friends]’ (Vampire, 161).
While Harriet’s bisexuality is suggestive of the perversity of the racial
fiend, it is Marryat’s characterization of Harriet’s mother which empha-
sizes the links between the female body, the racial ‘Other’, and perverse
sexuality. Through the classificatory authority of Dr Phillips’s medical
observations, Harriet’s mother comes to embody all the negative stereo-
types of the oversexed, racial reprobate. Described as ‘an epitome of lust’
(Vampire, 71), and a ‘revolting creature’ with ‘sensual lips’ (Vampire, 76),
the Creole woman is distinguished from the Victorian conception of femi-
ninity by Dr Phillips’s conclusion that ‘she was not a woman, she was a
fiend’ (Vampire, 68). Marryat’s treatment of Harriet’s mother is reminiscent
25 Patrick Geddes and John Arthur Thomson, The Evolution of Sex, London 1889, p. 132.


of the nineteenth-century exploitation of a Khoisan woman, objection-
ably renamed the Hottentot Venus. With no record of her birthname,
records call her Saartjie Baartman; ‘Saartjie’ being an Afrikaans diminutive
of ‘Sarah’, and a highly derogatory designation of non-white women and
girls. In an account of Baartman’s life, Rachel Holmes explains how the
woman was exhibited in London and Paris, turning the racial body into
a hypersexualized spectacle.26 Studied by numerous scientists, Baartman
was reduced to a specimen whose individual anatomical curiosities were
catalogued by men of science. One set of observations, made by the zoolo-
gist Henri de Blainville, epitomizes the degrading nature of Baartman’s
treatment. Blainville catalogues Baartman’s ‘extraordinary enlargement
of the buttocks and the prolongation of the labia minora’.27 The image of
the feminine, hypersexualized racial body permeated nineteenth-century
race discourses, and Darwin’s assertion that Khoisan women’s bottoms pro-
vided ‘a somewhat comic sign of the primitive, grotesque nature of black,
female sexuality’, typified the European opinion concerning the racial,
sexual ‘Other’.28 Marryat draws upon this discourse, allowing Dr Phillips
to sexualize Harriet’s mother.
Exaggerating her uncontrollable sexuality, Harriet’s mother is described
as having a ‘sensual mouth’ and ‘greedy eyes’ (Vampire, 68). The relationship
between sexuality and food is one of the most curious ways through which
Marryat characterizes Harriet and her mother. Interestingly, Gobineau
claimed to have observed an increased appetite in ‘the negro’, theorizing
that ‘All food is good in his eyes, nothing disgusts or repels him. What he
desires is to eat, to eat furiously, and to excess’.29 We witness this conflation
of appetite, sexuality, and racial difference when Dr Phillips diagnoses
Harriet’s racial background in part ‘by the way she eats her food’, stating
that ‘she had inherited her half-caste mother’s greedy and sensual dispo-
sition’ (Vampire, 77). Similarly, Haggard’s African tribe, the Amahaggar,
are described as cannibals, signalling the threatening perversity of their
26 Rachel Holmes, The Hottentot Venus, London 2007, p. 1.

27 Ibid. p. 144.

28 Ibid. p. 166.

29 Gobineau, An Essay on the Inequality of the Races, p. 205.


Archive materials
Advertisement Oesterheld & Co. (1911), Archiv Bibliographia Judaica, University of

Frankfurt am Main; provenance unknown.
Order form for Die Intellektuellen issued by the publisher Oesterheld & Co., Archiv
Bibliographia Judaica, University of Frankfurt am Main; provenance and year
unknown.
Postcard of prominent members of the Deutsche Monistenbund (1912), Deutsches
Literaturarchiv Marbach, manuscript section; A: Diederichs, HS.1995.0002.

in response to men’s advances is suggestive of a transgressive female power.
Indeed, certain feminist movements at the fin de siècle prescribed celibacy
to women as a form of protection against syphilis as well as a rebellious
appropriation of sexual control. Despite nineteenth-century cultural and
scientific discourses which sought to categorize women’s sexual desires as
either non-existent or unquenchable, Ayesha is both aware and in control
of her sexuality, and this is part of what makes her and the New Woman
so threatening to masculinity.
Once again drawing upon the comingled nineteenth-century depic-
tions of the grotesque female body and the ethnic ‘Other’, there is some
suggestion in each novel that the European woman is not distinctly dif-
ferent from the hypersexualized ‘savage’ feminine. Karl Vogt was one of a
number of scientists to posit that women and non-Caucasians were at a
similar point on the evolutionary scale, stating that ‘the child, the female
and the senile white all have the intellect of the grown up negro’.32 In other
words, the woman and the non-White were considered less evolved than the
Caucasian male. Therefore, we can read in Marryat’s and Haggard’s works
the insinuation that the European woman was not totally dissimilar from
the Oriental female. The racialized characteristics which Marryat attributes
to Harriet and her mother are also present in other women in the novel.
Baroness Gobelli, a domineering and unattractive woman who befriends
Harriet, sexually leers at her husband, eats her food greedily like Harriet,
and is described as ‘an enormous woman of the elephant build, with a
large, flat face and clumsy hands and feet’ (Vampire, 5). She is European,
and yet her ‘savage’ sexuality and ‘degenerate’ physicality link her with
the constructed racial ‘Other’. Similarly, in Haggard’s She, Holly, about
to meet Ayesha for the first time, asks who will appear before him, ‘some
naked savage queen, a languishing oriental beauty, or a nineteenth-century
young lady drinking afternoon tea?’ (She, 131). Ardel Haefele-Thomas
notes that ‘the nineteenth-century young lady ready to have her tea and
the savage queen can and do exist within one body’.33 The scientific dis-
courses surrounding gender and race allowed for this conflation, merging
32 Vogt, Lectures on Man, p. 192.

33 Ardel Haefele-Thomas, Queer Others in Victorian Gothic, Cardiff 2012, p. 89.

282 Aisha Nazeer

the threat of the feminized, racialized ‘Other’ into one singular opposition
to the White male.
This conflation of the racial and female bodies in Marryat’s and
Haggard’s novels highlights the tendency to feminize the racial ‘Other’. As
Said states, the Orient was constructed around ‘its feminine penetrability’.34
Orientalism itself, like medico-scientific discourses of race, ‘encouraged
a peculiarly male conception of the world’.35 In fact, Orientalism can be
read as part of a wider ideological effort to reassert traditional masculin-
ity at the fin de siècle. The ideological fiction of Orientalism connected
African and Asian landscapes with the passive, disordered, pathological
female body in order to justify imperialism; the White, male hero coming
to save the diseased, weak, and wild feminine Orient from itself. Included
in the discourse of Orientalism was imperial Gothic fiction. In her analy-
sis of Haggard’s novel, Sondra Archimedes argues that imperial Gothic
novels like She were responding ‘to a perceived crisis of masculinity, relat-
ing to changes occurring in the social and economic structure of Britain
in the latter decades of the century’.36 Haggard clearly sets up the gender
binary in She by beginning his novel in the homosocial environment of
the University of Cambridge and moving into the threatening, feminized
surroundings of the African Kor. The homosocial environment is exagger-
ated by Holly’s self-proclaimed misogyny. Called upon to raise his only
friend’s son Leo, Holly insists that ‘I would have no woman to lord it over
me about the child, and steal his affections from me’ (She, 26). So, Holly
hires the equally misogynistic male assistant Job to help raise Leo in this
distinctly homosocial rewriting of the family unit. As Showalter comically
infers, ‘Holly thus miraculously achieves virgin fatherhood, paternity with-
out the need for contaminating intercourse with women’.37 Showalter goes
on to argue that in novels such as She, the Oriental or African landscapes
provide an ‘anarchic space’ in which ‘men can be freed from the constraints
34 Said, Orientalism, p. 206.

35 Ibid. p. 207.

36 Archimedes, Gendered Pathologies, p. 92.

37 Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, London

1992, p. 84.
William J. Dodd

Panorama oder Ansichten vom 19. Jahrhundert
(1938) as Cultural History in the Shadow of
National Socialism
abstract
This chapter presents a reading of Dolf Sternberger’s Panorama, and specifically the dis-
cussion of Darwin in Chapter 5 of that work. My reading seeks to adopt the position of
Sternberger’s implied reader, a fellow inner exile in Germany in 1938, to explore the con-
temporary resonances of his critique. I argue that this attack on the historical Darwin, as
an apologist for empire, monopoly capitalism, and racial superiority, is also guided by the
impulse to critique the regime, leading to some perhaps wilful misreadings of Darwin’s
ethical position. In critiquing the overlaps between biological, political, and everyday
discourses, Sternberger re-instumentalizes these same overlaps to argue for the primacy
of the ethical in our understanding of what it is to be human. This counter-critique is
made possible by the fluidity of the boundaries between science, literature, and everyday
discourse as discursive sources of information and knowledge.
a note on the text

Unless otherwise indicated, English translations (prefaced by E and page number) are
from Dolf Sternberger, Panorama of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Joachim Neugroschel,
introduced by Erich Heller, Oxford 1977. The illustrations in the English translation are
not found in the original text. References to the German text (prefaced by P and page
number) are to Panorama oder Ansichten vom 19. Jahrhundert, Hamburg 1938. For com-
parison (with very minor alterations), see also Volume V of Sternberger’s collected works
(Schriften, Frankfurt am Main 1981).
284 Aisha Nazeer

form of Ayesha’s status as ‘phallic female’. The New Woman threatened
masculinity through her ability to break down the boundaries of the ‘sepa-
rate spheres’ ideology and to encroach upon male social territory. Ayesha’s
gender liminality disgusts Holly, as he calls upon the Burkean gendered
opposition of the sublime and the beautiful to cast Ayesha as the abject,
stating ‘beauty made sublime […], with all its loveliness and purity, was evil’
(She, 143). Moreover, Ayesha usurps the traditionally masculine character-
istic of physical strength as she strikes Leo, causing him to relate to Holly
that he felt ‘as if all the manhood had been taken out of him’ (She, 203).
Perhaps the most interesting subversion of the gender hierarchy
involves Haggard’s deployment of allusions reminiscent of the catego-
ries constructed by Victorian evolutionary theory. Throughout the novel,
Holly is described as a ‘gorilla’ (She, 11) and later as a ‘long-armed old
baboon’ (She, 101). As well as being reminded of Vogt’s spurious corre-
lations between Black people’s appearances and simians’ physical traits,
the incongruity between Holly’s unattractive physical appearance and
his intellect is suggestive of miscegenation. Gobineau argued that ‘the
white race originally possessed the monopoly of beauty, intelligence and
strength. By its union with other varieties, hybrids were created, which were
beautiful without strength, strong without intelligence, or if intelligent,
both weak and ugly’.39 Despite the suggestion of miscegenation, Haggard
elevates the White, male Holly over Ayesha’s otherness. On his way to
meet Ayesha for the first time, one of the Amahaggar insists that Holly
get down on his hands and knees to meet her. Holly’s response is to try to
correct the gender and racial hierarchies which Ayesha has upturned. He
says to himself, ‘I was an Englishman, and why […] should I creep into the
presence of some savage woman as though I were a monkey’ (She, 130).
He is resisting the racial and gender inversion which Ayesha has created.
Rebecca Stott relates that ‘from this point his investigations are directed
towards reversing this humiliating defeat, directed towards proving her
inferiority by demonstrating her barbarism’.40 However, it is not until the
39 Gobineau, An Essay on the Inequality of the Races, p. 209.

40 Rebecca Stott, The Fabrication of the Late-Victorian Femme Fatale, Basingstoke 1992,

p. 106.

final scene that the hierarchies are re-established. Entering the flame which
she thought would extend her life, Ayesha begins to degenerate, becom-
ing the racialized troglodyte of anthropological discourse. The three men
watch as ‘her skin changed colour, [turning] a dirty brown and yellow’
(She, 257). She begins to shrink ‘till she was no larger than a baboon’
(She, 257). Highlighting the scientific claims that the racial ‘Other’ and
the woman were less evolved, this final scene corrects the hierarchy, recu-
perating masculinity by removing the woman from the pinnacle of power
and reminding the reader of her racial and gender inferiority.
Both Holly and Dr Phillips demonstrate how Orientalism with its
authorization rooted in medico-scientific discourses, was able to contain the
threat of the racial ‘Other’. As an ideological discourse, Orientalism sets up
a ‘them and us’ scenario, identifying both the Occident and the Orient in
opposition to one another, thus maintaining clear and impassable bounda-
ries between the two. However, Harriet Brandt and Queen Ayesha’s racial
otherness is not contained so easily. In fact, both women further threaten the
clear boundaries set by Linnaeus, Gobineau, and others, due to their racial
liminality. Harriet’s skin is described as ‘colourless but clear’ (Vampire, 4),
while Ayesha’s hand is as ‘white as snow’ (She, 131). Octavia Davis examines
the role of racial liminality, stating that ‘the surface of Harriet’s body exhib-
its conventional white middle class feminine delicacy that belies […] the
racial and social origins of the “primitive” other’.41 In an age when heredity
became subsumed with frightening rhetoric about degeneration and latent
hereditary deformities, the concept of hidden genealogy and miscegena-
tion was a topic of great concern. The miscegenated ‘half-caste’ defied the
authority of scientific classifications. The inability to class them not only
threatened the stability of the scientists’ definition of the Orient, but in
conjunction, the stability of their own identity as the Occident came under
attack. Representative of the threat which the ‘half-caste’ bore social order,
racial liminality was located as monstrous, diseased, the abject.
There are two main interconnected facets to Kristeva’s discussion of
abjection which illuminate the treatment of miscegenation at the fin de
41 Davis, ‘Morbid Mothers: Gothic Heredity in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the

Vampire’, p. 44.
286 Aisha Nazeer

siècle: the ambiguity and anarchy of the abject, and its ability to stabilize
and destabilize society and the individual. Kristeva describes the abject as
‘that which does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between’.42
The refusal of the mixed-race person to be classified into a type with defi-
nite, predictable physical and behavioural traits, links the miscegenated
to the abject, and their joint disrespect for the hierarchical taxonomies at
the basis of Victorian society. In Haggard’s She and Marryat’s The Blood
of the Vampire, the miscegenated are made abject through their link with
infection. Contagion, like the abject, ignores boundaries and borders.
At the fin de siècle, miscegenation was discussed in pathological terms.
While many believed that racial miscegenation would lead to degenera-
tion, demonstrated by Ayesha’s violent degeneration at the end of She, a
more popular theory was that the ‘half-caste’ was the bearer of contagion.
Malchow asserts that this might well have stemmed from the fact that ‘the
close and unsanitary quarters of immigrant ships were often associated
with both excrement and promiscuity’, therefore conflating racial mixing
with disease.43 Thus, Harriet’s life-draining capabilities can be understood
as representative of the disease which miscegenation would bring into
society, while the sickly bodies of the racially impure Amahaggar and the
infecting of the European Leo by the African landscape exemplify the risk
which racial liminality bore Victorian society.
Furthermore, in much the same way as the New Woman’s rejection
of heteronormativity threatened the status quo, the racially miscegenated
‘Other’ disrupts the Victorian classificatory systems of order which were
at the basis of society and identity. In this sense, the resulting monstrous
manifestations of phallic females and racial fiends in Gothic fiction can
be interpreted as society’s attempt to acknowledge, classify, and contain
the threat of these ever-evolving roles within a monstrous, abject category.
Just as Linnaeus contained the unexplainable and incongruent within the
gruesome group monstrosus, Haggard and Marryat characterize liminality
as Gothic. In doing so, both authors acknowledge the racially miscegenated
as that which threatens both the status quo and the identity of the White

43 Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain, p. 163.


male. At the same time, however, by containing it within the category of
the Gothic, they are separating it from themselves, making it ‘Other’. Thus,
the identity of the White male is stabilized in the face of all that he is not.
Haefele-Thomas argues that ‘Ayesha’s […] monstrosity lies in Holly’s (as well
as the late Victorian reader’s) inability to categorize her. She is not com-
pletely human, nor completely female’.44 Indeed, Ayesha’s indeterminable
race is one of several Victorian binary oppositions which are transgressed
or confused by Ayesha. Consequently, Haggard depicts Ayesha in Gothic
terms in order to transform her threatening existence into the abject. He
does this by expanding Ayesha’s disregard for boundaries to include her
disrespect for the distinction between life and death. In Powers of Horror,
Kristeva cites the corpse as the ‘utmost abject’.45 The image of the corpse
destroys the barrier between life and death, and Kristeva explains that
‘it is death infecting life’.46 Ayesha is herself clothed in ‘soft, white gauzy
material in such a way as at first sight to remind [one] most forcibly of a
corpse’ (She, 132). She sleeps in caves which Holly explains ‘were noth-
ing more or less than vast catacombs’ (She, 126) and she goes as far as to
declare her disregard for the distinction, stating ‘there is no such thing as
death, though there be a thing called change’ (She, 138). In The Blood of the
Vampire Harriet’s mixed racial origins are made monstrous, thus enhancing
the threat of miscegenation. Dr Phillips exposes her lineage, revealing the
dangerous liminality which Harriet had previously hidden. He discloses
that Harriet’s grandmother, a Black Jamaican slave ‘was bitten by a vam-
pire bat when pregnant with Harriet’s mother’ (Vampire, 69). However,
the vampiric blood does not seem to terrify the other characters nearly so
much as the fact that she is a ‘quadroon’ (Vampire, 77). Dr Phillips is not
warning people against a vampire, but against the threat of miscegenation,
stating ‘When the cat is black, the kitten is black too’ (Vampire, 77).
Victorian anthropological and medical discourses on race sought to
classify humans into types, frequently endorsing a sustained subjugation of
the feminized, racial ‘Other’. While numerous nineteenth-century Gothic
44 Haefele-Thomas, Queer Others in Victorian Gothic, p. 90.


46 Ibid.

138 William J. Dodd

(Rundgemälde) in a specially constructed building, with a viewing platform
at the centre from which the observer could see the entire scene in perfect
perspective. In Sternberger’s text, the Sedan Panorama serves as a metaphor
for all carefully constructed viewing platforms offering viewers this illusion
of centrality at the focal point of a vista which is in fact carefully arranged
for them. Sternberger is at pains to stress that this is, of course, an illusion,
and that the fascination of the spectator lies in the knowledge that it is an
illusion (E 11, P 16). In a lengthy footnote, the rise and demise of the pano-
rama as a popular entertainment form is shown to coincide almost exactly
with the beginning and end of the century (E 185–9, P 213–16). ‘Genre’ is
understood not in the sense of a special branch of art or learning,3 but as a
way of viewing, and as a ‘need’ in the spectator for ‘an arranged, expectant
scene’ (E 53, ‘Bedürfnis nach arrangierter, erwartungsvoller Szene’, P 77).
‘Genre’ responses in literature, painting, and popular discourses on science,
are the theme of Panorama.
A ‘dual perspective’ reading suggests that at various points twentieth-
century analogues are latently available to the implied reader in the account
of nineteenth-century phenomena. For example, the panorama as a palace of
illusions has a correlate in the cinema, and the use of the Sedan Panorama for
nationalistic and military propaganda has an analogue in the Wochenschau
newsreels. The most obvious analogue of all, however, is that between
the theory of Natural Selection and National Socialist racist ideology
and legislation in the Nuremberg Race Laws of September 1935, an event
which could not fail to exercise Sternberger and his Jewish wife. Indeed,
in defiance of a secret instruction from the Propaganda Ministry that the
Race Laws were to be printed in newspapers without any commentary,4
the Frankfurter Zeitung published Sternberger’s article ‘A noteworthy
3 On the position of genre painting as the third of five categories established by the

Académie Royale at the Louvre in the seventeenth century, and to ‘moral painting’
in Diderot’s sense, cf. Michelle Facos, An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Art,
New York and London 2011, p. 9.
4 Gabriele Toepser-Ziegert, NS-Presseanweisungen der Vorkriegszeit: Edition und

Dokumentation, vol. III.2 [1935], Munich 1987, p. 586 (ZSg. 101/6/109/Nr. 1645,
16.9.1935).

Haefele-Thomas, Ardel, Queer Others in Victorian Gothic, Cardiff 2012.
Haggard, H. Rider, She, Oxford 1991.
Heller, Tamar, ‘The Unbearable Hybridity of Female Sexuality: Racial Ambiguity
and the Gothic in Rider Haggard’s She’, in Ruth Bienstock Anolik (ed.), Hor-
rifying Sex: Essays on Sexual Difference in Gothic Literature, Jefferson, NC 2007,
pp. 55–66.
Holmes, Rachel, The Hottentot Venus, London 2007.
Hurley, Kelly, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin
Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York 1982.
Macfie, Sian, ‘“They Suck Us Dry”: A Study of Late Nineteenth-Century Projections
of Vampiric Women’, in Philip Shaw and Peter Stockwell (eds), Subjectivity and
Literature from the Romantics to the Present Day, London 1991, pp. 58–67.
Malchow, Howard Le Roy, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain,
Stanford, CA 1996.
Marryat, Florence, The Blood of the Vampire, Brighton 2010.
Montagu, Ashley, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, Oxford 1997.
Nisser-Dalman, Margareta, ‘What’s more important, a good story or a true story?
The merging of facts and fiction at Linnaeus’ houses in Uppsala’, The Linnaean
Legacy: Three Centuries after his Birth 8 (2008), pp. 20–7.
Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturalism, London 1992.
Said, Edward, Orientalism, London 1985.
Showalter, Elaine, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, London
1992.
Stott, Rebecca, The Fabrication of the Late-Victorian Femme Fatale, Basingstoke 1992.
Vogt, Karl, Lectures on Man: His Place in Creation, and in the History of the Earth,
ed. James Hunt, London 1864.
Michael Wainwright
11 Narratives of Helminthology: Thomas Spencer

Cobbold, Bram Stoker, and The Lair of the White
Worm (1911)
abstract
In 1862, at British Association for the Advancement of Science, Thomas Spencer Cobbold
argued ‘in favour of a more extended prosecution of experimental research in the depart-
ment of human helminthology’. Thanks to Cobbold’s exhortation, the subject started to
flourish in Britain, and within two years, he could report that ‘no department of Natural
History science has attracted more attention than that of the study of internal parasites’.
Yet, one of the gatekeepers to the lay community, a discursive controller from the arts,
John Ruskin, fought to maintain the British taboo on parasitology; in consequence, human
invermination remained a taboo in the wider discursive community. This chapter breaks
that silence in drawing on the discursive history of parasitology to unmask hidden but
telling literary delineations of helminthic infestation in the works of an author environed
by and alerted to the parasitic, the discourses and practices of medicine, and parasitol-
ogy: Bram Stoker.
This chapter, which devotes its opening pages to a discursive phenom-

enon that plagued nineteenth-century British science until the early 1860s,
speculates on the parasitological embedment of Bram Stoker (1847–1912).
This speculation, which draws on Thomas Spencer Cobbold’s (1828–86)
explicit challenge to a taboo on parasitology, John Ruskin’s (1819–1900)
wish to maintain that silence, and the Stoker family’s intriguing reticence
concerning Bram’s blighted infancy, unearths figurations of the parasitic
across Stoker’s canon from The Primrose Path (1875) to The Lair of the
White Worm (1911). That lair, to take Zoonomia; Or, the Laws of Organic
292 Michael Wainwright

Life (1794) colloquially, is located in ‘the intestines’.1 The immediate
discussion, therefore, concerns helminths (or entozoa) rather than ter-
restrial annelids (or earthworms), Erasmus Darwin (1732–1802) rather
than Charles Darwin (1809–82), and eighteenth- rather than nineteenth-
century parasitological discourse. Zoonomia emphasizes that helminths,
as a parasitic class that includes the threadworm (white in colour), the
roundworm (white or light brown in colour), and the tapeworm (white
in colour), have deleterious effects on their hosts, and within ten years of
Darwin’s publication, Italian physician Valeriano Luigi Brera (1772–1840)
implicitly endorsed this opinion in Lezioni medico-pratiche sopra i principali
vermi dell’organismo vivente e le così dette malattie verminose (1802) and
Traité des maladies vermineuses, précédé de l’histoire naturelle des vers et de
leur origine dans le corps humain (1804). Brera’s expositions were the first
major nineteenth-century works devoted to the subject of helminths, and
within fifteen years, the Swedish-born naturalist Karl Asmund Rudolphi
(1771–1832) published two fundamentally important treatises of related
interest: Enterozoorum, Sive Vermium Intestinalium: Historia Naturalis
(volume I [1808]; volume II [1810]) and Entozoorum Synopsis: Cui Accedunt
Mantissa Duplex et Indices Locupletissimi (1819). Rudolphi, as ‘the fore-
most parasitologist of his day’, as G. C. Cook chronicles, ‘contributed the
most important parasitological work[s] of the early nineteenth century’.2
‘By far the most important parasitological works of the early nineteenth
century’, concurs William Derek Foster, ‘were those of K. A. Rudolphi’.3
Rudolphi’s natural history of intestinal worms posited its author as the
undisputed father of helminthology; his entozoic synopsis consolidated
that status. Indeed, as Fatik Baran Mandal documents, ‘Rudolphi coined
the word, “Entozoa” to describe parasitic worms living inside the bodies
of other animals’.4 Yet, as Foster observes, ‘of parasitological literature in
1 Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; Or, the Laws of Organic Life, 1794, 2nd edn, 2 vols,

London 1796, I, p. 53, p. 63, p. 66, p. 431.
2 G. C. Cook, ‘History of Parasitology’, in Stephen Gillespie and Richard D. Pearson

(eds), Principles and Practice of Clinical Parasitology, Chichester 2003, pp. 1–20: p. 2.
3 William Derek Foster, A History of Parasitology, Edinburgh 1965, p. 17.

4 Fatik Baran Mandal, Human Parasitology, New Delhi 2011, p. 139.

Narratives of Helminthology 293

English there was at this period virtually nothing’, excepting A Treatise on
the Nature and Cure of Intestinal Worms in the Human Body (1829), a slim
volume by a surgeon named William Rhind (1797–1874).5
This void resulted from a contextually specific form of discursive
demarcation. A discourse is a transpersonal language system that embod-
ies the ideas, values, and vocabulary of a discipline (or community of
knowledge) and that operates according to particular constraints.6 These
restrictions make their presence felt in facilitating a specific set of users.
Scientific discourses, in particular, are demarcated; ‘that is’, as Michel Serres
expounds, boundary markers indicate where scientists ‘reign supreme as
the owner[s]’ of those discourses.7 This well-defined possession protects
against unchecked access and unchecked intervention. The twofold demar-
cation of British parasitology at the beginning of the nineteenth century, for
example, was exceptionally restrictive. On the one hand, Erasmus Darwin
had seemingly left no habitable space, or ‘wiggle room’, for further discur-
sive consideration. On the other hand, the subject of parasites remained a
taboo among the British scientific community.
The internal, structural necessities of language make external, interre-
lational communication possible, but this potential facilitates contagion as
well as communication – and taboo attempts to pre-empt discursive infec-
tion. ‘Taboo’, as Mary Douglas explains, ‘protects the local consensus on how
the world is organized’.8 The attendant safeguards, which threaten dan-
gers if disrespected, apply to both physical and discursive bodies. Douglas
argues that ‘some of the dangers which follow on taboo-breaking spread
harm indiscriminately on contact. Feared contagion extends the danger of
a broken taboo to the whole community’. Taboo fragments the discursively
unpalatable, and where possible, imposes silence, withholding discursive
5 Foster, A History of Parasitology, p. 19.

6 For a discussion of this Foucauldian understanding of discourse, see Paul H. Fry,

Theory of Literature, New Haven, CT 2012, pp. 16–17.
7 Michel Serres, Malfeasance: Appropriation through Pollution? [2008], trans. Anne-

Marie Feenberg-Dibon, Stanford, CA 2011, p. 64. Emphasis in the original.
8 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo,

London 2002, p. xi.

centrality and primacy, but ‘civilized’ peoples are the most barbarous,
and are exterminating ‘barbaric’ peoples.
• As a panorama, Natural Selection satisfies a need for ‘genre’ responses

(as in the trope of the Noble Ape and the Crude Barbarian).
• The materialism underlying Natural Selection is transfigured by

Darwin’s disciple Bölsche into a new metaphysics of ‘the higher’
(E 111–29, P 130–50).
• Darwin’s intention is to overthrow the theory of separate creations;

his method is not one of disinterested scientific inquiry.
These arguments are distributed over the chapter’s eight main sections:
A Long Haul; Darwin’s Intentions; Man and Natural Selection; The Return
of Chance; The Monopoly of the Giraffe; The Suppressed Transitions;7
Replacement of Eternity; The Noble Ape and the Crude Barbarian.
In the introductory section (E 79, P 92), Sternberger stresses the theo-
retical nature of Darwin’s thesis and particularly its legacy in the ‘struggle
for survival’ (‘Kampf ums Dasein’, in quotation marks in the original) in
the era of free capitalism (‘Zeitalter des freien Kapitalismus’), with its
‘continual extinction of inferior and less powerful enterprises (and people)’
(‘fortwährende Vernichtung der geringwertigeren und weniger mächtigen
Unternehmen (und Personen)’). Natural history, Sternberger observes,
appears as ‘an enormous confirmation and justification of competitiveness’
(‘ungeheuere Bestätigung und Rechtfertigung des Konkurrenzkampfes’).
The social and political correlates which have attached to Darwin’s theory
since its publication are thus immediately brought into view. It would be
a mistake, however, to see Darwin as a mere proxy: the attack on him is
real in its own terms and Sternberger makes no attempt to rescue Darwin
from the legacy of Darwinism (nor did he in subsequent editions).8 With
supporting evidence from Malthus, Darwin paints ‘an imposing picture of
7 ‘Die verdrängten Übergänge’, rendered in the English translation as ‘The Exterminated

Transitions’ (E 94).
8 See the 1955 and 1981 Forewords (in German) in Schriften, V (1981), and the retro-

spective essay ‘Sternberger über Sternberger: “Panorama oder Ansichten vom 19.
Jahrhundert”’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 11 May 1988.

leads to that community’s concern with a particular set of access points and
interstitial spaces (at both individual and communal levels). The British
Empire of the first half of the nineteenth century remained anxious about
foreign pressure on its colonial boundaries, on the one hand, and the aliens
encountered and absorbed into the expanding imperial body, on the other
hand; the vestigial belief in helminthic benefits among the foreigners of
the European continent amplified this response; and this taboo, like the
Empire itself, remained largely unchallenged until 1857, the year of the First
Indian Rebellion (or Sepoy Mutiny).
In Britain, that year witnessed the publication in English by the
Sydenham Society of Friedrich Küchenmeister’s (1821–90) Manual of
Animal and Vegetable Parasites and Karl Theodor Ernst von Siebold’s On
Tape and Cystic Worms. Although treatises on parasitology were now avail-
able in English, these were transitive discourses, translations that shifted
meaning from its original site to a neighbouring or para-site; as such, their
ability to convince remained vulnerable to intercultural disparagement. In
fine, the discursive taboo remained resistant to British science. A multidi-
rectional attack on the scientific mainstream analogous to that of helminths
within their hosts was required. This need potentialized the discourse
of scientific gentlemen, who formed a marginal force of notable social
standing, one at the periphery of current discursive governance. Unlike
their European counterparts, who belonged to their respective discursive
communities, the scientific gentlemen of Britain were marginal players.
Whereas Rudolphi and von Siebold held university chairs, Charles Darwin
and Thomas Spencer Cobbold were independent scientists without aca-
demic tenures.
Charles Darwin had considered the parasites of birds at some length in
A Naturalist’s Voyage (1839), and in the definitive sixth edition of The Origin
of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured
Races in the Struggle for Life (1861), he again cites the parasitic alongside
the avian when discussing the phenomenon of co-adaptation – but the
parasites of humans, it seems, were less to his taste. Nonetheless, along with
the widespread dissemination of his work, developments in the sectioning
and staining of anatomical specimens, on the one hand, and the effects of
Thomas Carlyle’s Germanizing mission, on the other hand, encouraged a

positive re-evaluation of continental science in England, promoted non-
sectarian education, and connected, as Gisela Argyle states, ‘the scientific
enterprise with notions of German rigour, industry, and professionalism’.12
Disciplines emergent in English academia, therefore, received unprec-
edented support, scientific research benefited from strong ties with foreign
institutions, and important European treatises in the natural sciences were
translated into English.
Cobbold, as he chronicles in Entozoa: An Introduction to the Study of
Helminthology (1864), responded to this discursive development, appearing
at the Cambridge Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement
of Science of 1862, where he argued strongly ‘in favour of a more extended
prosecution of experimental research in the department of human hel-
minthology’. His exhortation met with success, the discourse of parasitology
started to flourish in Britain, and within two years Cobbold could report
that ‘no department of Natural History science has attracted more atten-
tion than that of the study of internal parasites, and it may also be affirmed
that no separate branch of biological inquiry has in recent times advanced
more rapidly’.13 The marginal players of British science had won discursive
acceptance; and Cobbold’s publication of Entozoa marked this victory.
His introduction to this volume, which immediately and explicitly
breaks the discursive taboo on helminths, displays the parasitical transgres-
sion of boundaries so redolent of parasitic worms. Put succinctly, Cobbold
aims at lay readers (from the bottom up) and science readers (from the top
down), and does so wholeheartedly. ‘Without any customary apology, either
to the general public or to the members of the medical profession’, he states,
‘I introduce this elementary treatise’.14 Cobbold compiled his volume with
recourse not only to translations, but also to discursive fragments dispersed
over the preceding sixty years by the English taboo on parasitology: ‘the
12 Gisela Argyle, Germany as Model and Monster: Allusions in English Fiction,

1830s–1930s, London 2002, p. 106.
13 Thomas Spencer Cobbold, Entozoa: An Introduction to the Study of Helminthology,

with Reference, More Particularly, to the Internal Parasites of Man, London 1864,
p. 145, p. 3.
14 Ibid. p. vii.


void’, he explains, ‘has been more or less completely occupied by several
able translations’ and ‘a laborious search after entozoological facts, scattered
through upwards of twelve hundred British and American volumes’.15
Entozoa promoted Cobbold to foremost among the gentlemen pioneers
who fought and won over the sentinels of a particular scientific discourse
in Britain. ‘The taboo-maintained rules will be as repressive as the lead-
ing members of the society want them to be’, but ‘when the controllers
of opinion want a different way of life’, as Douglas notes, ‘the taboos will
lose credibility and their selected view of the universe will be revised’.16
Not everybody of renown, however, welcomed Cobbold’s revisionary
success. One of the gatekeepers to the lay community, a discursive control-
ler from the arts, John Ruskin, wished to maintain the British taboo on
parasitology. Ruskin, as if anticipating the era of decadence that would
shortly follow, found the parasitological sciences deplorable. ‘The instinct
for the study of parasites, modes of disease, the lower forms of undeveloped
creatures, and the instinctive processes of digestion and generation, rather
than the varied and noble habit of life, – which shows itself so grotesquely
in modern science’, he lamented in 1875, ‘is the precise counterpart of the
forms of idolatry (as of beetle and serpent, rather than of clean or innocent
creatures,) which were in great part the cause of final corruption in ancient
mythology and morals’.17
Ruskin recognized, but decried, what poststructuralists would call
the deconstructive potential of parasitology. ‘Earlier writings on primi-
tive religion found taboos alien and irrational’, as Douglas maintains. ‘The
concept of dirt makes a bridge between our own contemporary culture and
those other cultures where behaviour that blurs the great classifications of
the universe is tabooed. We denounce it by calling it dirty and dangerous;
they taboo it’.18 For Ruskin, parasitological discourse was at once dirty and
dangerous because it held social boundaries in little hierarchical regard; he
15 Ibid. p. viii.

16 Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. viii, p. xiii.

17 John Ruskin, ‘Letter LI’, May 1875, Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and

Labourers of Great Britain, New York 1894, pp. 395–411: p. 410n.
18 Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. xi.


wanted to maintain a taboo that supported present societal structures; he
sought to demarcate the social proprieties; in short, he wished to maintain
the seam between seemliness and unseemliness. Science had to be an elevat-
ing influence, not a degrading investigation into the physiological causes
of orificial restlessness. The focus on parasitological discourse was going
beyond obsession and becoming biologically ingrained; the ‘memes’ of para-
sitology – to retrospectively apply a neologism from Richard Dawkins’s The
Selfish Gene (1976) for the structural carriers of cultural inheritance – were
colonizing the British scientific mind in a culturally parasitic manner.19
In Ruskinian effect, parasitologists were in danger of either recidivism or
insanity; and criminals and the hereditarily insane, according to Ruskin’s
attestation of 1872, were ‘partly men, partly vermin; what is human in them
you must punish – what is vermicular, abolish’.20 To be fair, Ruskin was
aware of social parasitism not only in the criminal form, but also in the
capitalist form of worker exploitation, yet he could not help but value a
purified society above an egalitarian one. Paradoxically, then, Ruskin’s own
discourse was self-defeating on the issue, with parasitologists presented as
a contaminating rather than a cleansing social force: their work infested
the higher social echelons.
Some scientific support – a sort of old-guard reactionism – remained
for Ruskin’s attitude. ‘The notion that species could actually adapt to wors-
ening physical and moral conditions’, as Jenny Bourne Taylor relates, was
‘elaborated in England by the eminent zoologist E. Ray Lankester, whose
Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism appeared in 1880’.21 For Lankester,
as Carl Zimmer traces, ‘some species not only stopped rising but actually
surrendered some of their accomplishments. They degenerated’. Parasites
were archetypically degenerate, and ‘since there was no divide between the
ascent of life and the history of civilization, Lankester saw in parasites a
19 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene [1976], 3rd edn, Oxford 2006, p. 192.

20 John Ruskin, ‘Madness and Crime: To the Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette’, November

1872, Fors Clavigera, pp. 318–19: p. 319.
21 Jenny Bourne Taylor, ‘Psychology at the Fin de Siècle’, in Gail Marshall (ed.), The

Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, Cambridge 2007, pp. 13–30: p. 15.
144 William J. Dodd

In some respects, this image strikingly anticipates Walter Benjamin’s now
famous reading, in 1940, of Klee’s Angelus Novus as the Angel of History,
driven by the storm ‘into the future, to which his back is turned, while the
pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this
storm’ (‘Dieser Sturm treibt ihn unaufhaltsam in die Zukunft, der er den
Rücken kehrt, während der Trümmerhaufen vor ihm zum Himmel wächst.
Das, was wir den Fortschritt nennen, ist dieser Sturm’).11 Like Benjamin’s
angel, we find ourselves looking back in Sternberger’s presentation at the
debris of Natural Selection, piles of corpses which have been air-brushed
out of the panorama.
Darwin’s declared intention to overthrow the dogma of separate crea-
tions12 reveals not only the pre-determined outcome of his project but
also its ‘imperialistic gesture’ (E 86, ‘imperialistische Geste’, P 101) that
necessitates ‘getting the whole mass of organic forms and millennia under
the sway of a single power’ – Natural Selection (E 86,13 ‘die ganze Masse
der organischen Gestalten und der Jahrtausende unter die Botmäßigkeit
einer einzigen Macht’, P 101). Ostensibly impelled by the search for greater
explanatory power, Darwin’s theory is, Sternberger insists, an ‘unsurpass-
able instrument of mastering’ (E 86, ‘ein unübertreffliches Instrument der
Bewältigung’, P 101). Darwin is here presented as the representative and
apologist of the dominant imperial power of the nineteenth century, his
theory as an ‘imperialistic gesture’ and an ideological tool for justifying
the Empire, a mix of objective law and hermeneutic principle, demanding
11 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. IV [1938–40], ed. Howard Eiland and

Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge, MA 2003, p. 392. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I.2:
Abhandlungen, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt am
Main 1980, p. 697f.
12 The Descent of Man, op. cit., p. 82. Against Sternberger’s reading, see Bowler’s obser-

vation that ‘Darwin’s appeal to the model of common descent was intended to
checkmate a theory of racial inequality based on the idea of separate creation for
the different races’ (‘Do we need a non-Darwinian industry?’, op. cit.).
13 Unlike the English translation, ‘Natural Selection’ is rendered here and elsewhere with

initial capitals, as it appears throughout in the German. See the above quotation (E 83,
P 96). An abstruse contribution to the ‘dual perspective’ is an intriguing possibility
here, connecting Natürliche Zuchtwahl, Natural Selection, and Nationalsozialismus.

physically or morally lax. ‘Most people, not excluding even the votaries of
the healing art, following tradition’, declares Cobbold, ‘regard the internal
parasites or entozoa as creatures either directly resulting from certain dis-
eased conditions of their hosts or as organisms which would not have existed
if their bearers had been perfectly healthy. Nothing’, he asserts, ‘can be more
absurd’. Cobbold effectively identified degenerationism as a parasitizing
set of delusional memes. ‘The biologist may say what he lists’, he laments,
but he knows perfectly well that the superstitious mind will continue to ignore the
precious and elevating results of scientific research, and that it will perseveringly
continue to persuade itself that internal worms, parasites, and entozoa, of whatever
kind, belong to the category of ‘plagues’ liable to be distributed as special punish-
ments for human wrong-doing.26
The case of Bram Stoker
Applied retrospectively, degenerationism would have singled out the young

Bram Stoker – who ‘from the moment of his arrival’, as Harry Ludlam
records, ‘was expected to die; for the third born of Abraham [1799–1876]
and Charlotte Stoker [1818–1901] was a sick and feeble child, prone to
every ailment’ – as a case of special punishment.27 Parasitology, however,
would have posited an alternative diagnosis, one that indicted environing
conditions. Stoker was born in Clontarf, Dublin, on 8 November 1847,
during the Great Famine (1845–51) caused by the parasitic Phytophthora
infestans (or potato blight). This devastating infestation overshadowed a
second, less-documented, but equally widespread and parasitically related
problem, which came under scrutiny in 1848, when the first serious attempt
26 Thomas Spencer Cobbold, Parasites: A Treatise on the Entozoa of Man and Animals,

including Some Account of the Ectozoa, London 1879, p. 2, p. 1 (emphasis in the origi-
nal), p. 2.
27 Harry Ludlam, A Biography of Dracula: The Life Story of Bram Stoker, London 1962,

p. 11.

to assess the effects of invermination on the health of humans as well as
domesticated animals in Britain was conducted. That assessment revealed a
second Irish blight. O’Bryen Bellingham (1805–57), a doctor and surgeon at
St Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin, investigated this additional human scourge,
not only diagnosing symptoms of helminthic infestation in patients, but also
recording the occurrence of intestinal worms in fresh cadavers. ‘Bellingham
affirms’, states his Anglo-American contemporary Robley Dunglison, that
the threadworm ‘is very common in Ireland, or at least in Dublin’, where,
according to Bellingham himself, this type of helminth is ‘found in one-
fifth of the individuals examined between the ages of three and ten’.28 Was
Bram Stoker one of these sufferers?
The silence on human invermination that the degenerationists were
so keen to preserve volubly responds to this question. The young Bram’s
ill health was a continuous condition that the Stokers, as a family over-
loaded with physicians, tabooed; as a result, the cause of his illness remains
a mystery. ‘In spite of the preponderance of medical doctors in the Stoker
family’, remark Elizabeth Miller and Dacre Stoker, ‘no explanation for
this mysterious illness has ever been provided’.29 William Stoker, the boy’s
grandfather, was a well-known physician both within and beyond the medi-
cal profession, as was his son, Edward. ‘Throughout his illness’, as Barbara
Belford states, ‘Stoker was cared for by [his] uncle, who was associated with
Dublin’s Fever Hospital and House of Recovery’, but neither Edward nor
William Stoker – each a published author in his lifetime – is quotable on
the subject of Bram’s health, and their loyalty to this interdiscursive injunc-
tion seems to have infected Bram himself.30 For, Bram’s adult discourse in
his Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906) recalls the early phase
28 Robley Dunglison, The Practice of Medicine, A Treatise on Special Pathology and

Therapeutics, 3rd edn, 2 vols, Philadelphia, PA 1848, I, 188; O’Bryen Bellingham,
‘Dr. O’Bryen Bellingham on Irish Entozoa’, The Annals and Magazine of Natural
History, Zoology, Botany and Geology, XIII (1844), pp. 167–74: p. 168.
29 Elizabeth Miller and Dacre Stoker (eds), The Lost Journal of Bram Stoker: The Dublin

Years, by Bram Stoker, London 2012, p. 120.
30 Barbara Belford, Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula, London 1996,

p. 19.

of his life in a detached, impersonal, and succinct manner that presents
neither a diagnosis nor diagnostic suppositions. ‘In my babyhood I used,
I understand to be, often at the point of death’, he writes. ‘Certainly till
I was about seven years old I never knew what it was to stand upright’.31
Could invermination account for this condition, one that suddenly
and completely disappeared, and one that Stoker seemingly left so far
behind that, as Joseph S. Bierman reports, he would ‘become the Athletic
Champion of Dublin University’?32 The threadworm that infested Dublin’s
children, according to Dunglison, was of the long ‘white’ variety; Rudolphi,
also according to Dunglison, notes that ‘more than one thousand’ have
been found in the human intestines; and ‘large numbers occur in children,
in whom’, as Cobbold relates in Entozoa, ‘they are particularly frequent’.33
When intestinal parasites ‘are present in great numbers or size, in the intes-
tinal canal, it is owing to a particular condition’, adds Dunglison, which
is termed ‘Worm Disease’, and some doctors during the period of Stoker’s
childhood illness still deferred to the ‘worm fever’ of Erasmus Darwin’s
discourse.34
Unequivocal signs of worm disease are rare, concedes Dunglison, but
ascribable symptoms include a ‘tumid, pale, or livid face’, ‘epistaxis’ (bleeding
from the nose), ‘moroseness; stubbornness; frightful dreams’, ‘chorea; risus
sardonicus; vertigo; delirium, and stupor’.35 The treatment for invermination
at this time exhibited various degrees of unpleasantness. Without recourse
to anthelminthic pharmaceuticals, doctors used emetics, enemas, com-
plementary anthelminthics, such as santonine (wormwood) or ascaridole
(wormseed), and panaceas. The available treatment had somewhat evolved
over the preceding century, but the practical options remained the same.
Threadworms ‘are said to be weakened by twenty grains of cinnabar and
31 Bram Stoker, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving [1906], 2 vols, London 1907, I,

p. 31.
32 Joseph S. Bierman, ‘Dracula: Prolonged Childhood Illness, and the Oral Triad’,

American Imago 29:2 (1972), pp. 186–98: p. 186.
33 Dunglison, The Practice of Medicine, I, p. 193, p. 188; Cobbold, Entozoa, p. 309.

34 Dunglison, The Practice of Medicine, I, p. 187; Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, II, p. 104.

35 Dunglison, The Practice of Medicine, I, p. 190.


five of rhubarb taken every night’, documents Erasmus Darwin. ‘Clysters
of Harrowgate water are recommended’, but ‘might not a piece of candle,
about an inch long […] smeared with mercurial ointment, and introduced
into the anus at night’, he suggests, ‘be effectual?’36
Although helminthic infestation is unlikely to have caused an illness of
seven years’ duration, Bram Stoker may well have suffered from helminths
as an occasional supplement to the underlying cause of his childhood con-
dition; and, as a bedridden patient, he would have been susceptible to
re-infestation, with the ingestion of helminthic eggs a constant danger.
Almost certainly, given the scientific discourse concerning the prevalence
and symptoms of invermination in Dublin, Stoker would have been treated
on several occasions and in various ways for helminths. Indeed, Edward
Stoker administered emetics to hospital patients, and these cases presumably
included sufferers of worm disease. Put succinctly, a young child subjected
to anthelminthic treatments, especially of the procedurally invasive kind,
was bound to suffer thereafter from the most frightful dreams.
Freud might struggle to explain the cultural specificity of taboo, but
his dream-work concept helps to interpret nightmares as a type of eidetic
discourse. The dream-work displaces, condenses, and symbolizes tabooed
subjects. Such transformations enable monstrous helminths to pass through
the barrier of conscious censorship; they openly lodge in the mind in other
guises; most notably as snakes: the displacement from worms to snakes is
easily negotiable, the condensation of small worms into larger snakes is simi-
larly navigable, and the symbolism of snakes becomes significant beyond
the standard phallic connotation. Hence, an argument about discursive
evolution supplied by Stoker’s The Lair of the White Worm, which points
to a psychological displacement by natural (or savage) man of his suffer-
ings from invermination, marks a discursive path for the feverish thoughts
that articulate the Stokerian oeuvre. ‘In the dawn of the language’, remarks
Stoker’s fount of etymological reasoning, Sir Nathaniel de Salis, ‘the word
“worm” had a somewhat different meaning from that in use to-day. It was
an adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon “wyrm”, meaning a dragon or snake; or
36 Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, II, pp. 55–6.


“nationalökonomische” Gerüst’, P 110) of this natural history, which is
at the same time ‘the machinery, so to speak, of the mobile panorama of
evolution’ (‘gleichsam die Maschinerie des beweglichen Panoramas der
Entwicklung’). It is not a coincidence, Sternberger continues, that Darwin’s
account seems ‘prophetic’ of the age of free capitalism as it surges towards
an age of stable monopolies. These deliberations on the justification of
monopoly in nineteenth-century theorizing on natural history foreground
the links to socio-economic theories justifying the development of free
market capitalism into monopoly capitalism, and invoke political analogues
justifying empire and territorial expansionism. In Darwin, too, Sternberger
argues, we are presented with a picture of settled monopolies in which the
simultaneity of ‘completed’ species, viewed against the geographical area
they populate, is not justified by some law of nature, but is a product of
chance, a mirage produced by the arrival of monopolies:
But when this stop-signal resounds, and what peculiar frozen ensemble of completed
shapes we get to see at that point (and only at that point, since previously, after all,
during the ‘journey’, everything was steadily involved in modifications and transi-
tions), are again a matter of chance. Chance is the beginning, chance is the end of
evolution. (E 94)
(Wenn aber dies Haltesignal ertönt, und welches sonderbaren erstarrten Ensembles
fertiger Gestalten wir in diesem Augenblick ansichtig werden – und in diesem
Augenblick zuerst, da denn zuvor, während der ‘Fahrt’, alles beständig im Wechsel
und Übergang war: dies ist wiederum Zufall. Zufall ist der Anfang, Zufall das Ende
der Entwicklung.) (P 111)
It is evident that Sternberger’s commentary has immediate application to

human societies. The thrust of this critique is that mankind can step out of
this man-made panorama of natural history and paint a different picture of
our place in the natural world. Sternberger’s commentary on the giraffe’s
monopoly must have resonated with readers in National Socialist Germany,
a society now frozen in its development by the current monopoly hold-
ers, who have gained their monopoly not by an ineluctable law of nature,
but by chance, and are held in place by the exercise of power in a (for the
moment) stable (international) ecology of dispensed monopolies. These
resonances are even more marked when Sternberger turns away from the

demonstrate the autarky of parasitism: this recurrent theme confronting
the forces arraigned against it with reactions that displace, reinforce, and
increase the embodied points of resistance. The censorship imposed by
Stoker’s conscious mind, his inculcated obedience to the interdiscursive
injunction on the parasitic, produced a deluge of signs.
Stoker’s discursive obsession with the ophidian usefully filters this
deluge. In Stoker’s first novel, The Primrose Path, the Mephistophelean
innkeeper, Grinnell, whose skeletal features suggest dissipation from within,
is the titular snake of Chapter 9, ‘The Trail of the Serpent’, that brings
low the protagonist Jerry O’Sullivan. In ‘The Rose Prince’ from Under
the Sunset (1881), which reworks the story of David and Goliath, Prince
Zaphir kills the giant around whose prostrate body ‘snakes crawled’, but
W. Fitzgerald and W. V. Cockburn’s accompanying illustration, which
seemingly conforms to Stoker’s nightmarish discourse, shows a creature
that looks more like a worm than a snake.41 Nor is the giant’s death the
end of the kingdom’s vulnerability. For a ‘plague […] was coming upon’ a
moral dissolute people, as the title of the next story in Under the Sunset
implies, in the form of ‘The Invisible Giant’.42 Only the chaste Zaya, and
the hermit Knoal, anticipate the coming blight, preparing ‘herbs and sim-
ples’ to administer to its victims.43 In short, Under the Sunset conflates
three contagions: the cholera epidemic of Charlotte Stoker’s youth; the
potato blight of the Great Famine into which she delivered Bram; and the
widespread invermination that environed Irish life.
Charlotte claimed to have seen the cholera epidemic, ‘which swept
through Western Europe, and across Ireland in 1832’, as Stoker’s great-
nephew Daniel Farson relates, looming over her hometown of Sligo.44 A
disease from abroad (or an alien infection) exposed the territorial vulner-
abilities of the lands it crossed. In response, taboos sprang up forbidding
association with outsiders and prohibiting particular practices. ‘Taboo
41 Bram Stoker, Under the Sunset [1881], London 1882, p. 42.

42 Ibid. p. 56.

43 Ibid. p. 55.

44 Daniel Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker, London

1975, pp. 13–14.

is a spontaneous coding practice’, as Douglas explains, ‘which sets up a
vocabulary of spatial limits and physical and verbal signals to hedge around
vulnerable relations’.45 Like the bodies of their inhabitants, houses were
especially vulnerable at their orifices, as were settlements at their crossing
points or boundaries. ‘Trenches were […] cut across the roads in the direc-
tion in which the cholera was said to come’, recalled Charlotte, ‘concisely
for the purpose of stopping all intercourse with the infected districts’. To
Charlotte’s superstitious mind, however, Sligo’s allotted punishment was
especially but deservedly severe; the outer limits of spatial protection were
breached; they were ‘no use, no use’, so after the epidemic reached the town,
‘we stayed pretty much in the house’. Now ‘there was a constant fumigation
kept up. Plates of salt on which vitriolic acid was poured from time to time
were placed outside all the windows and doors’.46 A terrifying silence, or
discursive void, isolated the individual living spaces of the town.
Charlotte would pass the frightening but necessary sense of this taboo
on to her children. It appears that Bram, owing to the reticence surrounding
his childhood illness, was particularly sensitive to this inheritance, which
he later transformed into a form of cleansing mission. Thus, in The Snake’s
Pass (1890), Stoker’s interdiscursive approach, which sets up intertextual
relays with the Old Testament, on the one hand, and with the Irish envi-
roning of his eidetic nightmare, on the other hand, ultimately concerns
the discourse of parasitology. ‘It has been suggested’, as Foster notes, ‘that
the Mosaic prohibition on certain animals as food for the Israelites was
based on a knowledge that they were infested with parasites and that the
plague of fiery serpents that afflicted them during their wanderings was an
outbreak of guinea-worm infestation’ – and Stoker’s novel recalls St Patrick
driving all but the King of the Snakes out of Ireland, driving them through
the pass, or stratigraphic orifice, to which they give their name, and into
the cleansing sea.47
In ‘Old Hoggen: A Mystery’ (1893), the narrator rescues the decaying
body of Old Hoggen from the sea. ‘I had hardly taken a step’, he recalls,
45 Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. xiii.

46 Charlotte Stoker quoted in Ludlam, A Biography of Dracula, p. 26.

47 Foster, A History of Parasitology, pp. 1–2.


‘when, with an impulse which I could not restrain, I let it slip – or, rather,
threw it – to the ground. It had seemed to me to be alive’. ‘I grew ashamed
of my impulse’, however, ‘and, with another, effort, took it up and started
again. Again there was the same impulse, with the same cause – the body
seemed alive’. The narrator tries for a third time, but on this occasion, Old
Hoggen ‘parted in the middle’, and ‘on a survey of the wreck I saw, to my
intense astonishment, some large crabs walking out of the body’.48 Are these
crabs, with the signified of lice that cling to this signifier in addition to
that of crustaceans, another dream-work displacement of parasitic worms?
Stoker employs another means of accommodating yet breaking the
interdiscursive injunction on parasitical discourse in Dracula (1897) with
Professor Abraham van Helsing as a doctor of two cultures – his qualifica-
tions are ‘M.D., D.Ph., D.Lit., etc., etc.’.49 Count Dracula, as diagnosed by
this unconventional professor, is a parasite. Although Stoker’s novel does
not contain the word ‘parasite’, or its derivatives or extensions, ‘van Helsing’,
as Athena Vrettos states, ‘applies Lombroso’s theories to Dracula’, and these
hypotheses deny the notions of degenerationism.50 The physician Cesare
Lombroso (1835–1909), who founded the Italian school of criminology,
echoed Cobbold’s belief (from Parasites) in the ‘precious and elevating
results of scientific research’.51 Unlike Ruskin, Lankester, and Drummond,
Lombroso ‘insisted that science was not a symptom of degeneration, but’,
as Daniel Pick reports, ‘a means of regeneration’.52 Parasites are deleteri-
ous, but parasitologists are not, and Dracula presents informed yet open-
minded medical men in Professor van Helsing and Dr John Seward who
are willing to learn about these intimate invaders.
48 Bram Stoker, ‘Old Hoggen: A Mystery’ [1893], in John Edgar Browning (ed.), The

Forgotten Writings of Bram Stoker, New York 2012, pp. 25–55: p. 37.
49 Bram Stoker, Dracula [1897], Mineola, NY 2000, p. 97.

50 Athena Vrettos, Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture, Stanford,

CA 1995, p. 172.
51 Cobbold, Parasites, p. 2.

52 Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–1918, Cambridge

1989, p. 116.

While resistance and manipulation respectively relate host and parasite
physiologically, the linguistic body maintains this relationship discursively,
and speaking from the scarred memory of his physical body, the helminth
in Stoker’s canon is a slippery agent of constant motion, a flagellating sig-
nifier that puts polysemy into play. The lair of the white worm, to repeat
the colloquial reference to Zoonomia that opens the present chapter, is
located in ‘the intestines’, but the helminthic lifecycle involves transit-
ing to and from the anus for the laying of eggs. This middle passage finds
its discursive complement in what Carol A. Senf calls Stoker’s general
‘interest in geology’, and in Count Dracula’s relocation from the bowels of
Europe, in Transylvania, to just beyond the continental edge, in Britain.53
The geometric demarcations imposed by the encompassing geographical
body constitute what can be termed a ‘parasitic phase space’. The parasite,
Stoker’s Count Dracula in this instance, leaves the now barren spaces of
Transylvania for the prospectively reinvigorating spaces of England.
The count, as Stoker’s parasitic agent, socially pollutes. Property pur-
chases, rather than a formal invitation, facilitate his settling in England; he
bypasses border security, entering the country in the form of a monstrous
and uncatchable hound; and although he is a nobleman, his origins are
foreign. Both the count’s mesmerism (as a form of parapsychology) and his
vampirism conflate such transgressions. Count Dracula, as his effects on
Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker evince, gets inside his victims. Like the
parasitic worms of which Erasmus Darwin writes, and as the cases of Lucy
and Mina attest, the count ‘is very tenacious of life’, and almost impossible
to unseat.54 Indeed, Freud’s acolyte Ernest Jones would have made much
of the ‘helmin’ that infiltrates Mina’s full Christian name of Wilhelmina,
and this discursive intimacy prefigures the parasitic infiltration identified
by present-day genetics in which ‘plasmids and other fragments of DNA’,
53 Carol A. Senf, Science and Social Science in Bram Stoker’s Fiction, Westport, CT 2002,

p. 116.
54 Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia, II, p. 55.

150 William J. Dodd

the grazing area of the intermediate variety grazing on the transitional
tract, whilst remaining distinct varieties. Sternberger’s commentary on
this scenario is that the occupation ‘could be called unlawful if the best
adaptation provided rights and not merely power’ (E97, ‘könnte man eine
widerrechtliche nennen, wenn anders die bestmögliche Anpassung ein
Recht, und nicht bloß eine Macht verliehe’, P 114).
In terms of contemporary international relations, it is not difficult to
transfer this image to the struggle between nation states for possession of
disputed territories with ‘mixed’ populations, and specifically to the expan-
sive territorial ambitions of Nazi Germany, for example, in the ensuing
observation that close examination of Darwin’s theory exposes ‘the last,
feeble legitimation of power – its selection of the fittest; he who has the
power uses it even beyond the borders of his fitness. And the struggle for
survival is forthwith decided’ (E 97f., ‘die letzte, schwache Legitimation
der Macht, die der Auslese der Geeignetsten; wer die Macht einmal hat,
gebraucht sie auch über die Grenzen seiner Eignung hinaus. Alsobald ist
auch der Kampf ums Dasein schon entschieden’, P 115). Thus, the unfor-
tunate intermediate varieties, though they may be perfectly adapted to
their environment, are shown to be consigned to the concealed burial
ground of Darwin’s panorama by ‘the sheer mass, the dense weight of sheer
number (accumulated capital)’ (‘die bloße Masse, das stupide Übergewicht
der bloßen Zahl (des angesammelten Kapitals)’). Here, and throughout
Panorama, the dual aspect of Sternberger’s language and choice of topics
creates an allusive field of potential analogy for the implied reader to trav-
erse. In this case, more than one analogue may spring to mind: the treat-
ment of Jews (of which more below), or the coup de grâce delivered to the
SA and the ‘socialist’ wing of the party in the ‘Night of Long Knives’ on
30 June 1934.
A passage from The Descent of Man is then quoted in which Darwin
predicts a future in which ‘the savage races’ will have been exterminated
(‘ausgerottet’, P 115) by ‘the civilized races’, and envisages the eradication
of the anthropomorphous apes, thus removing further intermediate layers
from the panorama:

of Paris’), but also the invermination of names, with the Egyptian goddess
Tera’s ultimate power over Margaret Trelawny prefigured in the plasmid ‘t’,
‘e’, ‘r’, ‘a’ that battens in reverse onto ‘Marg’, its linguistic hostess.59
Seven years after the publication of The Jewel of Seven Stars, helmin-
thic discourse continued to play in the interstices of Stoker’s mind, as his
praise for Paracelsus in the nonfiction work Famous Impostors evinces. ‘His
intellectual attitude’, asserts Stoker, ‘was that of a true scientist – denying
nothing prima facie but investigating all’, and in this role, as the Encyclopedic
Reference of Parasitology relates, Paracelsus ‘introduced inorganic salts (e.g.
zinc salts) as anthelminthica’.60 This aspect of the Paracelsian found its
fictional counterpart in Stoker’s canon a few months after the appearance
of The Jewel of Seven Stars, and a year before Stoker died, with the publica-
tion of the disconcertingly restless and disorientingly anthelminthic Lair
of the White Worm.
An end to invermination
When considering this novel in a parasitic context, one must take account
of Stoker’s death and the medical controversy that provides the comple-
mentary bookend to his life. Stoker died on 20 April 1912. ‘The death cer-
tificate’, as Belford reports, ‘gave three causes: “Locomotor Ataxy 6 Months,
Granular Contracted Kidney, Exhaustion”’. Farson, ‘curious about whether
the drugs Stoker took for gout had stimulated’ the authorial ‘disorienta-
tion’ that characterizes The Lair of the White Worm, as Belford relates,
‘consulted the family physician, who examined the death certificate’ and
interpreted ‘locomotor ataxy’ as a ‘euphemism’ for tertiary syphilis.61 ‘One
59 Bram Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars [1903], London 2008, p. 80.

60 Bram Stoker, Famous Impostors, London 1910, p. 73; Heinz Mehlhorn and Philip M.

Armstrong (eds), Encyclopedic Reference of Parasitology: Biology, Structure, Function,
Berlin 2001, p. 289.
61 Belford, Bram Stoker, pp. 319–20, p. 320.


of the prevalent diseases of the nineteenth century’, as Belford observes,
‘syphilis, like tuberculosis, was frequently overdiagnosed’.62 In fact, the
first symptom on Bram’s death certificate can also be correlated with the
effects of worm-disease listed by Dunglison. Accurately adduced, while
locomotor ataxia is the inability to control one’s body with precision,
chorea is a characterized by jerky involuntary movements that especially
affect the hips, shoulders, and face. If the rapidly declining Stoker felt that
his body was beyond his control, owing to an affliction from within that
body, then his final months may well have recapitulated and recalled his
childhood sufferings.
Read with this diagnosis in mind, The Lair of the White Worm, with
parasitological protagonist Adam Salton as a figuration of a robust, fit, and
determined Stoker, is a literal projection of Stoker’s helminthic nightmare.
That Stoker wrote his novel while propped up in bed ‘evinced’, as Farson
maintains, ‘his bitter struggle against a wretched disease and failing powers’.
This battle produced the ‘jerky’ writing that critics find so perturbing.
Farson’s ‘overall feeling’ on first reading the novel, for example, ‘was one
of some deep mystery between the lines – the mystery of the mind of the
man who wrote it’.63 That deep mystery is almost certainly helminthic in
character. The Lair of the White Worm, as the incubation and condensation
of a recurring incubus, which combines white threadworms into a gigantic
white tapeworm, not only breaks the interdiscursive taboo on helminthic
infestation, but also speaks narratologically of that invermination with its
elliptical comments, interruptive, independent clauses set off by em dashes,
and breakdowns in narrative continuity. These discursive events, which
various editorial interventions, or deinfestments, have tried to round off,
smooth out, excise, or eradicate, betray authorial confusion, disruption, and
interruption. Indeed, W. Foulsham and Company republished an abridged
and partly rewritten version of the novel, which contained twenty-eight
rather than the original forty chapters, as early as 1925.
The Lair of the White Worm was Stoker’s last chance to solve the hel-
minthic dilemma for good. Just as Stoker was constantly composing out of
62 Ibid. p. 320.

63 Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula, p. 148.


forces that he wished to expunge, so Salton dedicates himself to eradicating
the creature that is, in turns, Lady Arabella March (or the parasitic spinster
in search of a wealthy husband) and the great white worm (or the antedilu-
vian helminth of gigantic proportions that plagues the people among whom
it dwells). Intriguingly, the ghostwriter of the 1925 edition appears to invoke
aspects of Stoker’s childhood malaise and sudden recovery in detailing an
ophidian crisis during Lady Arabella’s early years. ‘When still a young girl’,
De Salis tells Salton, ‘Lady Arabella wandered into a small wood near her
home, and did not return. She was found unconscious and in a high fever’.
The family ‘doctor said that she had received a poisonous bite, and the girl
being at a delicate and critical age, the result was serious – so much so that
she was not expected to recover’. Even ‘a great London physician […] could
do nothing’, and all hope seemed lost, ‘when, to everyone’s surprise, Lady
Arabella made a sudden and startling recovery’. Unlike Stoker, however,
‘she developed a terrible craving for cruelty’. She revealed this new trait in
‘maiming and injuring birds and small animals – even killing them’.64 Lady
Arabella’s cruelty, which extends to humans, epitomizes the nightmare of
invermination; Salton must act as an authorial cleansing agent; and, in
titularly recalling Charlotte Stoker’s witnessing of ‘plates of salt on which
vitriolic acid was poured’ during the cholera epidemic of 1832, he puts salt
(one might say Glauber’s salt [or sodium sulphate] – a key ingredient in
complementary anthelminthics such as ‘Holloway’s Pills’) onto the mon-
strous Lady Arabella.
In addition, The Lair of the White Worm revives the theme of parapsy-
chology from Dracula with Edgar Caswall’s mesmeric attempt to overcome
Lilla Watford, on the one hand, and Mimi Watford’s similar ability to
thwart Caswall, on the other hand. It is only when Caswall, the parapsy-
chologist, and Lady Arabella, the parasite, combine that Lilla is defeated:
she and Mimi believe they have seen off their antagonists, but authorial
irony soon strikes home when Lilla collapses and dies: ‘Lady Arabella […]
did for Lilla’ who had ‘felt as though a new life had suddenly developed
within her’.65 Mimi’s failure at parapsychology leaves Adam, administering
64 Bram Stoker, The Lair of the White Worm [1925], London 1945, p. 87.

65 Stoker, The Lair of the White Worm [1911], p. 193.


the physiological standard of the enema, to overcome the parasitic worm.
Salton, as with Stoker himself, ‘wanted to know and to feel that he had
seen the last of the White Worm’.66 He discovers that Lady Arabella’s house
encloses a shaft. This wormhole sends ‘up such a stench’ that it can lead only
to the bowels of the earth.67 Adam’s cure is to pack this offensive orifice
with a suppository of sand and dynamite. When detonated, this explosive
cure – which evacuates and macerates simultaneously – not only destroys
the helminthic Lady Arabella and the parapsychological Caswall, but also
lays to rest the frightful dream that had haunted Bram Stoker since his
childhood. This necessarily unpleasant yet necessary expulsion for good of
Stoker’s lifetime obsession with parasitic worms – Salton’s post-operative
inspection reveals a ‘horrid mass of blood and slime, of torn, evil-smelling
flesh and the sickening remnants of violent death’; ‘is there anything more
disgusting than what has no name in any language’, asks Serres, ‘the stench
emanating from a mass grave?’68 – left him free to accept the ultimate of
discursive boundaries: the restful silence of death.
Bibliography
Argyle, Gisela, Germany as Model and Monster: Allusions in English Fiction, 1830s–1930s,
London 2002.
Belford, Barbara, Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula, London 1996.
Bellingham, O’Bryen, ‘Dr. O’Bryen Bellingham on Irish Entozoa’, The Annals and Mag-
azine of Natural History, Zoology, Botany and Geology XIII (1844), pp. 167–74.
Bierman, Joseph S., ‘Dracula: Prolonged Childhood Illness, and the Oral Triad’, Ameri-
can Imago 29:2 (1972), pp. 186–98.
Cobbold, Thomas Spencer, Entozoa: An Introduction to the Study of Helminthology,
with Reference, More Particularly, to the Internal Parasites of Man, London 1864.
66 Ibid. p. 311.

67 Ibid. p. 123.

68 Ibid. p. 231; Serres, Malfeasance, p. 6.


unrolled painting, virtually punch holes in it or open unexpected issues
from the tempered interior of the natural time-space […]’ (‘würden […]
alsbald auch schon die schöne Gleichförmigkeit des entrollten Gemäldes
zerstören, gleichsam Löcher dahineinstoßen oder unerwartete Ausgänge
aus dem abgedämpften Inneren des natürlichen Zeit-Raums eröffnen’). The
illusory space fostered by the panorama is likened here to an intellectual
and spiritual padded cell.
In Chapter 3 of The Descent of Man Darwin speculates on the relative
distance separating man from the lower species, and from his closest rela-
tives, the higher apes, ‘even if we compare the mind of one of the lowest
savages […] with that of the most highly organised ape’.19 The interval from
the lowest fishes to the higher apes, he finds, is much greater than that from
ape to man, and also marked by more gradations. Sternberger reads these
deliberations against Darwin’s ostensible elevation of humankind, stressing
instead the picture it paints of our animal provenance, a picture he regards
as grossly foreshortened: ‘A shove from behind makes the tableaux squeeze
together’ (E 104, ‘Schon macht hier ein Schub von rückwärts die Bilder
eng zusammenrücken’, P 122). What may prompt this hostile response is
Darwin’s reflection in the quoted passage on the three Fuegians who had
been brought to England by James Cook, and were returned on The Beagle
to their homeland. Darwin records being struck by how these savages
(although the Fuegians ‘rank amongst the lowest barbarians’) could ‘talk a
little English, resembled us in disposition and in most of our mental facul-
ties’. Without the existence of the higher apes, and their mental faculties,
Darwin observes, we might have difficulty in convincing ourselves ‘that
our high faculties had been gradually developed’. Sternberger is incensed
at the ‘civilized Englishman’s’ surprise at discovering that these savages ‘are
also human beings’, a sentiment which entirely reflects this English gen-
tleman’s privileged place in his self-constructed panorama (E 104, P 123).
The combative ferocity of Sternberger’s argument is striking here. Out of
ostensible common ground, he generates opposition. The reason for this
hostility may lie in the subsequent passage, as Darwin continues:
19 The Descent of Man, p. 86. Cf. E 103, P 121.


The Lair of the White Worm [1911], London 2008.
The Lair of the White Worm [1925], London 1945.
‘Old Hoggen: A Mystery’ [1893], in John Edgar Browning (ed.), The Forgotten
Writings of Bram Stoker, New York 2012, pp. 25–55.
Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving [1906], 2 vols, London 1907.
Under the Sunset [1881], London 1882.
Taylor, Jenny Bourne, ‘Psychology at the Fin de Siècle’, in Gail Marshall (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, Cambridge 2007, pp. 13–30.
Visser, Benjamin Jelle, ‘Dracunculiasis Eradication – Finishing the Job Before Sur-
prises Arise’, Asian Pacific Journal of Tropical Medicine 5:7 (2012), pp. 505–10.
Vrettos, Athena, Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture, Stanford,
CA 1995.
Zimmer, Carl, Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous
Creatures, London 2003.
David Midgley
12 A Journey into the Interior: The Self as Other in

Robert Müller’s Novel Tropen (1915)
Nur die Seele hat noch seltsame Kontinente.

(It is only the psyche that still contains strange continents).1
abstract
Robert Müller’s Tropen has excited a lot of interest in the German-speaking world in recent
years, but appears to be virtually unknown outside it. The title carries two meanings –
‘tropics’ and ‘tropes’ – and literary scholars have been fascinated by the way the narrative
self-consciously plays on the artificiality of language and of fiction, as well as the way it
develops themes associated with colonialism and the exoticism prevalent in European cul-
ture around 1900. This chapter focuses on the prominence the work gives to the issues of
biological origin, sexual desire, and racial distinction, and how the device of a first-person
narrator is used to allude to aspects of human thought processes and behavioural impulses
that appear to remain obscure even to the person experiencing them.
Tropen (Tropics), by the Austrian author Robert Müller (1887–1924),

appears to be virtually unknown outside the German-speaking world. But
it was held in high regard by better-known novelists of the early twentieth
century such as Alfred Döblin and Robert Musil,2 and since the 1990s it
has attracted very substantial interest among literary scholars within the
1 Robert Müller, ‘Der Kolonialmensch als Romantiker und Sozialist’ (1919), in Ernst

Fischer (ed.), Kritische Schriften II, Paderborn 1995, pp. 338–44: p. 339. All transla-
tions are my own.
2 See Helmut Kreuzer and Günter Helmes (eds), Expressionismus – Aktivismus –

Exotismus: Studien zum literarischen Werk Robert Müllers (1887–1924), Göttingen
1981, pp. 289–320.
318 David Midgley

German-speaking world. The reasons for that explosion of interest are
intimately connected with the development of intercultural studies and
inquiries into German colonial writing, and with the emergence of ‘liter-
ary anthropology’ as a distinct sub-discipline.3 In this chapter I shall not
attempt to make reference to all the critical perspectives that have been
brought to bear on Müller’s fiction to date, but I have aimed to provide
enough information to enable others to take the investigation further if
they wish. What makes Müller’s novel, which dates from 1915, a suitable
case for treatment in this volume is the prominence within the narrative
of such issues as biological origin, sexual desire, and racial distinction, and
the particular roles that these issues play in the process of self-scrutiny that
is also a prominent feature of the text.
In Tropen Müller adopts one of the stock devices of nineteenth-century
realist fiction: the frame narrative. The text we are about to read is presented to
us as a posthumous manuscript and described on the title page as ‘Urkunden’
(i.e. documentation of the life) of a German engineer, published with a
preface by an editor called Robert Müller. The work also has a subtitle, ‘Der
Mythos der Reise’ (the myth of travel), which adumbrates the sense in which
the main narrative debunks the fashionable interest in journeys to ‘exotic’
places, and also anticipates a theme that becomes explicit around the mid-
point of the narrative, where it is said that people travel ‘um den Menschen
in sich zu erreisen’ (to explore the person inside them) (118).4 It also becomes
clear as the narrative progresses that the deliberate ambiguity of the main
title – the German word ‘Tropen’ can mean either ‘tropics’ or ‘tropes’ – itself
signals a theme on which the text self-consciously plays. But ostensibly, the
main story is the account of a journey into the Amazonian jungle narrated
in the first person by Hans Brandlberger, a young German engineer who,
we are told in the preface, later perished as a member of an expedition to
3 See Christian Liederer, Der Mensch und seine Realität: Anthropologie und Wirklichkeit

im poetischen Werk des Expressionisten Robert Müller, Würzburg 2004; Nicola
Gess, Primitives Denken, Munich 2013; Wolfgang Riedel, Nach der Achsendrehung:
Literarische Anthropologie im 20. Jahrhundert, Würzburg 2014.
4 Page references shown in the main text relate to Robert Müller, Tropen. Der Mythos

der Reise: Urkunden eines deutschen Ingenieurs, ed. Günter Helmes, Paderborn 1990.
156 William J. Dodd

(E 108, ‘unbedenkliche[n] Rechtfertigung des wirklichen Imperialismus
der vollendeten Zivilisation’, P 127), Sternberger insists, is encapsulated in
The Descent of Man in Darwin’s subsequent observation: ‘[a]t some future
period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man
will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout
the world’. To Sternberger, whose article in the Frankfurter Zeitung on
17 September 1935 had noted the ‘remarkable centenary’ linking Darwin’s
arrival on the Galápagos Islands and the publication of the Nuremberg
Race Laws, Darwin’s prognosis must have appeared far too conservative,
and shocking in its contemplation of the annihilation of individuals and
species as a necessary consequence of all natural history in its progression
towards ever greater perfection. How, Sternberger asks, does the civiliza-
tion of the civilized differ from the savagery of the savages? – a question
that does not even arise in the Darwinian panorama. The adjacency of Nazi
discourse is almost tangible here, as Darwin is chided for making civiliza-
tion the property of certain ‘higher’ races. In this concept of civilization,
Sternberger remarks, ‘we have before us its palpable transformation in
language into an attribute of the race’ (E 108,24 ‘und hier haben wir ihre
Verwandlung zum Attribut der Rasse sprachlich greifbar vor uns’, P 128).
A further illustration of ‘genre’ nationalism and racism is detected
in the conclusion of The Descent of Man, in the passage in which Darwin
recalls his amazement at first encountering the natives of Tierra del Fuego
and reflecting, somewhat uncomfortably, that ‘such were our ancestors’ –
although he cannot suppress his distaste at this thought, and remarks that he
would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded
enemy in order to save the life of his keeper, or from that old baboon, who descend-
ing from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd
of astonished dogs – as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up
bloody sacrifices, practises infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves,
knows no decency, and is haunted by the greatest superstitions.25
24 Translation emended to include ‘sprachlich greifbar’. Sternberger’s focus is unrelent-

ingly on discourse.
25 The Descent of Man, op. cit., p. 689. Cf. E 109, P 128f.

320 David Midgley

suggestive of human sacrifice or ritualized execution. The only female figure
he sees there – it may be inferred from what we are told about her that
she is Kurtz’s former lover – is elaborately adorned, described as ‘wild and
gorgeous’, with an air of ‘brooding over an inscrutable purpose’, and given
to raising her arms heavenwards in what might pass for a hieratic gesture,
although it is also described by Marlow as ‘tragic’.7 The men are warriors
who melt into the jungle, from which they pose the threat of unforeseen
attack on Marlow’s party both before and after their arrival at the ‘Inner
Station’. In its build-up to this encounter, Marlow’s narrative frequently
alludes to the commonplace notion that life in the jungle can play havoc
with a man’s mind and his nerves; he has likened the journey up-river to
‘travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world’;8 and for all that he
recognizes his own ‘remote kinship’ with the natives at the ‘Inner Station’,9
he describes them, too, as ‘prehistoric’ and belonging to ‘the beginnings
of time’.10 Marlow’s narrative is clear in its expressions of disgust towards
the commercial exploitation and degradation of the natives by colonial
enterprise, and particularly by the Belgians in the Congo, but his generic
term for native Africans is ‘cannibals’.
It was the sense that Africa and its inhabitants were being presented
as ‘the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization’ that gave rise to
Chinua Achebe’s famous denunciation of Heart of Darkness, in 1975, as a
racist text.11 At the same time, Conrad’s text contains plentiful signs that
the regression to the ‘primitive’ – in both a psychological and a cultural
sense – that appears to be epitomized in the figure of Kurtz and in his jungle
7 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough, 3rd edn, New York and

London 1988, pp. 60, 67.
8 Ibid. p. 35. For the intellectual context of this thinking in Victorian England, see

Paul Goetsch, ‘The Savage Within: Evolutionary Theory, Anthropology and the
Unconscious in Fin-de-siècle Literature’, in Anne-Julia Zwierlein (ed.), Unmapped
Countries: Biological Visions in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, London
2005, pp. 95–106.
9 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 38.

10 Ibid. p. 42.

11 Chinua Achebe, ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’, in

Conrad, Heart of Darkness, pp. 251–62 (here pp. 252 and 257).
A Journey into the Interior 321

regime is also a possibility that lives on within ostensibly civilized minds
as well. Marlow’s recurrent evocation of the ‘darkness’ to which Kurtz is
said to have succumbed is even prefaced with an intimation of the ‘utter
savagery’ that lurks equally in the world of his listeners – as it had done
on the wild shores of the Thames at the time when the Romans arrived.12
When it comes to specifying the nature of those savage impulses within
the human mind and their potential effects, however, Heart of Darkness is
bound to appear vague and abstract by comparison with the techniques for
depicting the life of the mind that were developed by the major European
literary modernists in the decades after 1900. Conrad’s intimations of what
has actually happened to Kurtz, or what Marlow has experienced, are lim-
ited to invocations of ‘darkness’, ‘menace’, and – in Kurtz’s much-quoted
iteration – ‘the horror’.
In Müller’s novel we find a similar constellation of elements. In the
jungle village that Brandlberger and his party use as a base camp, there is a
priestess, Zana, with whom the leader of the expedition, Slim, establishes
a sexual relationship. Brandlberger explicitly records the manifestations
of his jealousy towards Slim and his contempt for the personality and
attitudes of the only other European in the party (a Dutch former colo-
nial officer and merchant called van den Dusen), as well as his own fervid
erotic interest in other females in the village. His diary-style notes indicate
clearly that ‘jungle fever’ is one of the effects that he expects to manifest
itself as the party moves deeper into the interior, but also that he recognizes
a deep affinity between his own physical and mental being and the natural
surroundings in which he now finds himself. In other words, Müller uses
the jungle setting as a means of articulating perceptions of the biological
foundations of human thoughts and impulses, and Brandlberger’s narrative
is notable both for its explicit reflections on ideas associated with those
perceptions and for what it reveals about the mentality of a young modern
European male encountering a ‘primitive’ world. But not only is Müller’s
text considerably more direct and explicit than Conrad’s in its discussion
of personalities and relationships, it also develops, as a theme in its own
12 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, pp. 9–10.

322 David Midgley

right, the issue of how the communication of human experience is neces-
sarily conditioned by the self-interest of the communicator – in this case,
the first-person narrator Brandlberger.
A little biographical information about Müller will help to supply a
sense of the historical context for what the novel depicts.13 He was born
on 29 October 1887 into a middle-class Viennese family and was edu-
cated at one of the oldest and most prestigious schools in Vienna, the
Piaristengymnasium in the Josefstadt. He was an unruly pupil, however, and
was obliged to transfer to another school in order to complete his prepara-
tion for university entrance; having done so, he began to study philology
at Vienna University in 1907, but left two years later in order to travel to
America. His exact movements during the next few years are unclear. It
has been established that he spent the period from December 1909 to
summer 1910 in New York, working for a German-language newspaper,
and subsequently travelled further; but there is no clear evidence that he
ever travelled in the Caribbean or further afield, as has sometimes been
claimed.14 Müller returned to Vienna in 1911 and published essays there
that characterize New York as a ‘jungle’ which displays ‘tropical’ growth, and
the sense of affinity between modern urban culture and life in the jungle is
also a recurrent theme in his novel. In 1912 he hosted what turned out to be
the last public appearance of Karl May, whose style of popular adventure
novel provides certain of the plot elements with which Tropen begins.15
When the First World War broke out, Müller leapt at the opportunity to
enlist, and he served on the Isonzo front, where he suffered shell shock in
1915. That experience appears to have blunted his enthusiasm for warfare,
but not his engagement as a writer on behalf of German imperialism.
Müller prided himself on the fact that his mother was Scandinavian,
and when he attempted to establish his own publishing house in 1924
he called it ‘Atlantic’ and gave it the emblem of a Viking ship. His early
13 For a fuller account, see Schwarz, Robert Müllers Tropen, pp. 35–8 and 194–219.

14 For the background to this controversy, see ibid. p. 35.

15 See Florian Krobb, ‘“Bis zum Horizonte dieser kleinen Welt”: Travel Writing,

Utopianism and Karl May. Robert Müller’s Tropen’, Modern Language Review 110
(2015), pp. 1067–85: pp. 1070–6.

writings also display a fascination with the role of the barbarian in pro-
cesses of cultural change – evidently inspired by the writings of Nietzsche
and the Viennese essayist Hermann Bahr.16 He became a prolific writer,
and his early essays contain open and explicit displays of the racial preju-
dices and stereotyping that were prevalent at the time.17 He wrote with
particular enthusiasm for the colonization of Africa, treating the aspect
of brutal subjugation (of which Müller, like Conrad, presents the Congo
as the prime example) as an acceptable side-effect;18 and his commitment
to an imperialist role for the German nation remained strong through all
the political vicissitudes of the war and the post-war years. It was a notion
that he could easily transfer from the nationalism of 1914 to the radical
socialism he came to identify with by the end of the war, because he had
already integrated the intellectual traditions of socialism and anarchism
into his general conception of the German spirit in what is probably his
most significant political statement, the pamphlet Macht (Power), which
he published in 1915.19 The model of the German character that he invokes
there is recognizably modelled on Nietzsche’s descriptions of the process
by which old moral systems are challenged and broken, and new ones are
established in their place,20 and is summed up in the words, ‘Lösend –
setzend: anarchisch – konservativ: dies, nie eins allein ist unser deutsches
16 Cf. Schwarz, Robert Müllers Tropen, p. 33f.

17 See especially the essay ‘Was erwartet Österreich von seinem jungen Thronfolger?’

[1914], in Robert Müller, Gesammelte Essays, ed. Michael M. Schardt, Hamburg 2011,
pp. 5–81.
18 Robert Müller, ‘Der Roman des Afrikanismus’, in Kritische Schriften I, ed. Günter

Helmes and Jürgen Berners, Paderborn 1993, pp. 203–5. This is a review of the book
Afrikanische Köpfe (1915) by the notorious German colonialist Carl Peters. See also
Schwarz, Robert Müllers Tropen, p. 66.
19 Robert Müller, Macht: psychopolitische Grundlagen des gegenwärtigen atlantischen

Krieges, Munich 1915; reprinted in Müller, Gesammelte Essays, pp. 83–140. See espe-
cially pp. 94 and 106.
20 See especially Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None,

ed. Robert B. Pippin, trans. Adrian Del Caro, Cambridge 2006, pp. 156–73 (‘On Old
and New Tablets’); Beyond Good and Evil, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann, trans. Judith
Norman, Cambridge 2002, pp. 30–1 (§30) and 105–6 (§211).
Part II
Constructions of Desire

The scenario that Müller develops in Tropen is clearly related in some
senses to his passionate advocacy of an imperial role for Germany, but it is
also a highly complex exploration of issues that might at first appear to be
only tenuously connected with that interest. For all the elaborate pretence
of an authentic historical background to the narrative we read, the setting
is easily recognizable as an imaginary one: while the initial explanation of
relations within the native village in terms of the defeat and subjugation of
Arawaks by Caribs (61) might be said to echo historical accounts of rela-
tions between the native peoples of Central America, both the name that
is subsequently used for the tribe – Dumara28 – and the location – the Rio
Taquado – are evidently invented. As for the narrator figure, the German
engineer Brandlberger, the memory of him is linked, at the very start of the
preface, to an ostensibly genuine colonial enterprise, but one that came to
grief in 1907. Moreover, we are explicitly warned in the preface about the
nature of both Brandlberger’s personality and his manuscript. He has the
German virtue of thoroughness, but he is neither particularly gifted, nor
does he have a distinctive character, and he is over-inclined to indiscriminate
brooding over particular issues – the image that is applied to his mental
activity is that of a burrowing animal, a ‘Wühltier’ (7), and it is an image
that may well have a calculated resonance within the text because the verb
‘wühlen’ (to burrow) carries a commonplace association in German with the
undermining of authority. His manuscript is similarly acknowledged to be
marred by extravagant elaborations and ‘monstrous’ philosophical digres-
sions (6); it aspires to be honest about what it records, but about certain
things it is also manifestly less than honest (10). What the fictitious editor
is wryly preparing us for, then, is the fact that Brandlberger’s account of his
journey is not just about the encounter of a trained European mind with
the Amazonian world it hopes to subjugate, but also an exploration of that
mind’s perceptions of human cultures, of the biological factors at work in
28 The name may be modelled on that of a Bantu tribe – Duruma – which is mentioned

in Theodor Hertzka’s book Freiland (1890): see Schwarz, Robert Müllers Tropen,
p. 86. There is also an area of Namibia that was known to the German reading public
around 1900 as ‘Damaraland’: see Kleiner Deutscher Kolonialatlas, Berlin 1899 (reprint
Augsburg 2002), map 5: ‘Deutsch-Südwest-Afrika’.
326 David Midgley

human instincts and thought processes, and of the capacity of the human
imagination to determine the future course of history – all in terms of the
thinking that Brandlberger has brought with him from Central Europe,
and always open to the suspicion of self-delusion.
Brandlberger’s first experience of the jungle is in fact evoked as a
moment of self-recognition; but it is a self-recognition imbued with a
developed sense of evolutionary descent and organic inter-connectedness.
This world of abundant and irrepressible growth is somehow familiar to
him. As the initial canoe journey up-river proceeds, the vines and blos-
soms around him come to resemble fingers, tongues, human heads – and
foetuses (16f.). What Brandlberger claims to have recognized is the stir-
ring within him of the memory of his time in the womb, which is simul-
taneously an evolutionary memory, ‘eine Stimmung aus der Vorzeit von
Millionen Wesen’ (a state of mind from the pre-history of a million crea-
tures) (17). The sense of relation between self and the natural world that is
elaborately evoked here echoes the ‘biogenetic law’ propounded by Ernst
Haeckel – the notion that every embryo, as it develops, recapitulates the
evolutionary development of its kind – which is explicitly mentioned later
in the narrative (115f., 118). Brandlberger’s sense of identification with his
natural surroundings is also expressed as a sense of the ultimate oneness
of all being and explicitly linked with a motif from European intellectual
history that was popularized by Schopenhauer in the form of the Sanskrit
formulation tat tvam asi (thou art that),29 but with the added sense that
this unity takes a physical form: Brandlberger comes to think of himself
as a ‘naschhaftes Zellenbündel’ (sweet-toothed bundle of cells) and of his
own physiological system as ‘eine vielfach verbesserte Tropenlandschaft’
(a much improved tropical landscape) (18–19). Having arrived at this radi-
cal conclusion about his own path to individuality, however, he goes on
to exhibit a common male prejudice of his time by associating the realm
29 Cf. Riedel, Nach der Achsendrehung, p. 123f. Both Brandlberger (33–4) and Slim (60,

68) invoke the cultures of Asia when imagining a mystical transcendence of the age
in which they perceive themselves to be living; see also Müller, Tropen, pp. 83 and
115f.
A defining, yet often overlooked, feature of nineteenth-century biologi-
cal discourses is their concern with sexual matters. In the 1850s and 1860s
the rise of evolutionary theory gave centre stage to issues of reproduction,
which, bolstered by developments such as the advances in germ theory and
the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s work and attendant formation of genet-
ics around 1900, prompted new debates about heredity that soon spilled
out of the scientific laboratory and into the realm of the social.1 If Darwin
and his scientific colleagues were concerned with sexual matters primarily
for the role they played in the evolution of species, evolutionary thinking
affected much broader discursive transformations, which were soon applied
to social debates about gender, morality, and society. It is perhaps no sur-
prise that at a time of imperial expansion and modern European nation-
building efforts, it was especially the potential consequences of real and
perceived sexual transgressions that came under scrutiny.2 In England, for
example, it was the campaigns to control the spreading of venereal diseases,
which prompted some of the earliest public debates about sexual conduct.3
Targeting garrison towns, they especially focused on women who sold, or
1 A key text for understanding the nineteenth-century reach of evolutionary thinking

remains Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot,
and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, London 1983. For more specific discussions of the
interlinked scientific and social debates about ‘sex’ and heredity, see, for example,
Kimberly A. Hamlin, From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights
in Gilded Age America, Chicago, IL 2014; and Angelique Richardson, Love and
Eugenics in the Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman,
Oxford 2003.
2 For a critique of the interlinked histories of sexuality and colonialism, see, for example,

Anjali Arondekar, ‘Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive’, Journal
of the History of Sexuality 14:1/2 (2005), pp. 10–27; and Ann Laura Stoler, Race and
the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of
Things, Durham, NC 2005.
3 For an overview of the debates, see Emma Liggins, ‘Prostitution and Social Purity

in the 1880s and 1890s’, Critical Survey 15:3 (2003), pp. 39–55. Ann Heilmann and
Stephanie Forward have gathered an impressive collection of texts that indicate the
intricacies of these debates in their (eds) Sex, Social Purity and Sarah Grand, 4 vols,
London 2000. Anne R. Hanley presents a detailed study of ‘how medical profes-
sionals acquired, developed and applied their knowledge of venereal diseases’ in her
328 David Midgley

and the awareness that the landscape can appear to be moving past the
traveller as much as the traveller through the landscape,31 he has arrived at
a conception of historical progress as a rhythmic shifting of emphasis from
one cultural norm to its opposite, which he calls its ‘paradox’ (33–4; cf.
116). This, it appears, is the insight that prompts him to describe the book
he now sees himself writing as a ‘catechistic’ one (35), designed to provide
instruction in a new faith, the faith in a new age. He also hits on a colourful
neologism with which to characterize the sort of idea that will bring the
new age about: he calls it a ‘phantoplasm’ (118). Possibly by analogy with
Haeckel’s conception of ‘protoplasm’ as the substance out of which all life
forms on Earth subsequently developed, but also in association with ele-
ments of the physiologically orientated psychology of the time,32 Müller
allows his first-person narrator to conceive the ‘phantoplasm’ as the form
in which a product of the human imagination materializes, or in which,
as he initially defines it, a whole system of logical explanations coalesces
into an image (109). His own phantoplasm, Brandlberger later muses, will
distinguish itself from its precursors by incorporating the idea of progress
(125). He has already imagined himself as the progenitor of a new breed,
here in Brazil (83f.); now he conceives the ‘phantoplasm’ of the future age
to be that new human type, characterized as the hunter-observer (118); and
he already has a model for this ‘new humanity’ before him in the figure
of Slim, the epitome of human universality, who appears to be as much at
home in the Amazonian jungle as in the capital of European intellectual
refinement, Paris (69f.).
Within the constellation of European figures in the novel, the easiest
one to characterize is the Dutchman van den Dusen. Brandlberger describes
him, at a point where he catches sight of him emerging from his sleeping
quarters incongruously dressed in striped bathing trunks, as an ‘average
European’ (113). In contrast to the sinewy athleticism of the native males,
31 On the significance of this motif in the intellectual culture of the time around 1900,

see Jutta Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung: Zur Denkfigur der Projektion in
Psychophysiologie, Kulturtheorie, Ästhetik und Literatur der frühen Moderne, Freiburg
im Breisgau 2005, pp. 363–5.
32 Cf. Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung, pp. 368–75.


the portly and ungainly van den Dusen can scarcely avoid appearing as a
decadent figure; but his implacable sense of the innate superiority of the
European is repeatedly made apparent through the contemptuous remarks
he makes about the customs and the physical appearance of the natives, both
male and female (57, 80). The highly colourful characterization of Slim, on
the other hand, draws on a richer palette of racial stereotypes. The edito-
rial preface has told us that he is an international celebrity and, moreover,
that the basis of his fame bears comparison with that of the eighteenth-
century Italian adventurer Cagliostro (7). He owes his surname to his Arab
grandfather Selim Bukabra (again, the grandfather’s surname appears to
be invented, or is perhaps of Indonesian or Australian aboriginal origin),
who was an officer of the Ottoman Empire at the time when the Prussian
Count Helmuth Moltke was serving in Turkey, had married the daughter
of a German army officer, and had emigrated with her to the United States,
where he served in the Navy. Their son Jack, also a sailor, had opted to base
himself in Peru, where he forged a relationship with a native woman. The
offspring of that liaison is the Jack Slim of Müller’s novel, of whom it is
given out that he was on intimate terms with Gauguin and Tolstoy, as well
as frequenting Viennese literary circles; that he had grandiose plans for re-
orientating German unity in the direction of Catholicism and establishing
a German world empire extending far into Arabia; and that it was he who
had persuaded Kaiser Wilhelm II to send his notorious telegram (in 1896)
congratulating the Boers on warding off the imperialist encroachment of
the British (8). To that extent, Slim comes across as the perfect imaginary
idol of Müller’s political dream – in which connection it is worth noting
that it is a dream sustained by the imagined potential of interbreeding
rather than racial purity. But it is the tangled relationship between Slim
and the narrator Brandlberger that is central to the brainteaser that Müller
has constructed in this novel, and it may be that we should note the close
resemblance between the names Brandlberger and Brandenburg as one of
the hidden jokes of Müller’s text and an allusion to the traditional rivalry
between Catholic Austria and Protestant Prussia.
In the early stages of the main narrative, Slim is described in terms
that suggest that Brandlberger goes in awe of him: he is referred to as ‘a
late descendent of a family of conquistadors’ (11) and as a modern Pizarro
330 David Midgley

(30). It also soon becomes apparent that Slim is better adapted to the
environment, both natural and human, in which they find themselves
because – whether by innate ability, which the text tends to attribute to
racial character, or by experience – he is more in tune with it (28, 63) than
Brandlberger, whose habit of showing off his prowess with fire-arms –
using butterflies for target practice (74–6, 82f.) – manifestly fails to meet
with the approval of the natives and leaves him with a sense of his own
inadequacy (83). Brandlberger would like to think of himself as the agent
of a cultural transformation that will combine the unleashing of instinctive
urges with the application of advanced technology, and for a while he can
imagine himself to be Slim’s equal in that project: they are both, as he puts
it, modern types in whom the aptitude for analysis has become energized
(71). But it is Slim – the ‘Weltmensch’, that is, someone who is perfectly
at home in the world and enjoys its pleasures (77) – who is more adept at
articulating the ideas that we see Brandlberger groping his way towards, such
as the notion that thought is merely ‘a secretion of the gland called feeling’
(66) or that what we call consciousness is ‘eine Lustmaschine’ (a desiring
machine) (68). Brandlberger also recognizes that Slim has led the way in
shaking off the fashionable European fascination with ‘moonshine’ exoti-
cism, for which Pierre Loti serves as the emblematic example (71, 86); and
he comes to endorse Slim’s manifest indifference to specific geographical
location as ‘die erlösende Haltung’ (the attitude that brings release) (115).
Slim, in other words, is the sort of person that Brandlberger would like to
become (77), but the limits to his ability to emulate Slim become more
insistently apparent when the conclusions of his own laboured conjectures
are reflected back at him in Slim’s more elegant aperçus.
In a real sense, Brandlberger’s notion of the ‘phantoplasm’ – as an
image in which a whole system of logical explanations is condensed (109)
– is an arduously constructed description of the intuitive mode in which
Slim naturally functions. When Brandlberger tells him that he has invented
this concept, Slim is impressed; but he turns out to have already had much
the same idea himself, even if he gives it a slightly different name (137), and
once again, Brandlberger is left with a sense of his own inadequacy (138f.).
Slim also appears to have anticipated Brandlberger’s notion of every reality
containing within it the potential for its own antithesis (203; cf. 33–4); and

in what is perhaps the most elegantly executed sequence of the whole text,
Slim tells Brandlberger about his own ideas for a novel that would depict
the nature of the new breed as the agent of cultural transformation and
inaugurator of a new historical epoch (202f.). Not only does the plan he
describes closely resemble the one that Brandlberger has already shared with
the reader (184f.); the very title Slim has in mind for it is also identical with
Brandlberger’s. He wants to call it Tropen, or more precisely Die Tropen
– and the insight on which that choice of title is based, in Slim’s case as in
Brandlberger’s, is the recognition that the human capacity to conceive of
and communicate about the world is inescapably constrained within the
medium of figures of speech. For both of them, then, ‘Tropen’ implies tropes
as much as tropics, and in Slim’s version, there will be an added twist to
the narrative in that it will be told by someone – a Nordic type – who has
never actually been to the tropics, but who, as Brandlberger has discovered
in his own way, has the tropics inside him (184, 202). In Slim’s conception,
moreover, the novel is to be a ‘comedy of ideas’ (210) – ideas that we have
seen Brandlberger treating with deadly earnest. Brandlberger has conceived
his novel in a moment of feverish self-doubt and near-despair, as an expres-
sion of the passion that he imagines to be uniquely his (185). Slim describes
his novel shortly before a fishing expedition that will lead to his death in
circumstances that the eye-witness Brandlberger only sketches in vague
and evasive terms, and which involve a ‘projectile’ (a paddle?) descending
on Slim’s head after he has lost his balance and fallen into the river (213).
The secondary literature has noted many allusions to Nietzsche’s writ-
ings in this novel.33 On the one hand, the fascination that Müller’s charac-
ters display for the possibility of a new human type that will transcend the
cultural condition of the present undoubtedly carries echoes of the idea of
the ‘Übermensch’ and of associated motifs from Thus Spoke Zarathustra
which also occur in Müller’s political writings. On the other hand, the
33 A good sense of the range of the allusions to Nietzsche is provided by Müller-Tamm,

Abstraktion als Einfühlung, pp. 360–78. There are also recognizable echoes of the views
of such well-known popularizers of Nietzsche as Julius Langbehn, who promoted the
notion, in Rembrandt als Erzieher (Leipzig 1890), that the age of scientific analysis
was about to be superseded by an age of cultural synthesis; cf. Müller, Tropen, p. 201.
332 David Midgley

overall conception of Tropen is strongly related to the notion of ‘translat-
ing humanity back into nature’, as Nietzsche expresses it in §230 of Beyond
Good and Evil.34 But in the context of the present chapter I would want
to highlight the connection between two motifs that are also echoed in
Tropen, and which occur in close proximity in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy
of Morality. One is an allusion to Nietzsche’s notorious evocation of the
‘blond beast’ at work in all cultural innovators, which occurs when van
den Dusen describes the Goths of late antiquity as ‘blond Indians’ (221);
the other is the notion of a ‘slave mentality’, which Slim attributes to the
Germans in general, and by implication also to Brandlberger (142f.); and
together they seem to me to provide a significant clue to the characteriza-
tion of Brandlberger that does not appear to have been previously discussed
in the secondary literature.
It is in the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, Section XI, that
Nietzsche describes the behaviour of people who have ordinarily been ‘held
in check by custom, respect, habit, gratitude and even more through spying
on one another and through peer-group jealousy’ when those constraints
are removed:
[I]n the wilderness they compensate for the tension which is caused by being closed
in and fenced in by the peace of the community for so long, they return to the inno-
cent conscience of the wild beast, as exultant monsters, who perhaps go away having
committed a hideous succession of murder, arson, rape and torture, in a mood of
bravado and spiritual equilibrium as though they had simply played a student’s
prank, convinced that poets will now have something to sing about and celebrate
for quite some time. At the centre of all these noble races we cannot fail to see the
beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast avidly prowling round for spoil and vic-
tory; this hidden centre needs release from time to time, the beast must out again,
34 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 123. A particular impetus for Müller’s novel may

have been provided by the imagery in §197 of Beyond Good and Evil, where Nietzsche
argues against the tendency of European moralists to regard the predatory behaviour
of tropical beasts and such ruthless historical individuals as Cesare Borgia as a form
of sickness: ibid. p. 84f.
164 Heike Bauer

associations with ‘biography’, as biology could be used to describe the ‘study
of human life, character, or society’ broadly, even as it increasingly came to
mean specifically the scientific study of living organisms.7
The conceptual overlaps between sexual and biological discourses,
and their loose formal links to life writing, indicate that the conception of
desire was a dynamic process. Despite the measurable influence of sexologi-
cal terminologies and psychoanalytical conceptions of subjectivity on the
emergence of modern sexual subjects, it would be reductive to conceptualize
the way in which humans came to think of themselves as sexual beings as a
sterile product of the clinic. Individual and collective articulations of the
visceral and emotional aspects of desire emerged not merely in response to
pathologizing discourses or the legal and political contexts that governed
intimacy, but as part of long cultural histories. Literature, for example,
played a role in the emergence of concepts such as ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’,
which were coined by Krafft-Ebing after reading the works of the Marquis
de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Krafft-Ebing was quick to read
fiction back onto everyday life, scientifically framing – and claiming – sexual
practices that would in turn be reclaimed by subjects who saw their own
desires reflected or attacked by the sexological discourses.8 The complexity
of this process exceeds Foucault’s notion of ‘reverse discourse’, according to
which sexual discourse was produced within the scientia sexualis and then
adapted by the subjects whose desires fit the sexological classifications.9
7 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘biology’.

8 See for instance Katie Sutton’s discussion of this complex process in ‘Representing the

“Third Sex”: Cultural Translations of the Sexological Encounter in Early Twentieth-
Century Germany’, in Heike Bauer (ed.), Sexology and Translation: Cultural and
Scientific Encounters Across the Modern World, Philadelphia, PA 2015, pp. 53–71. For
nuanced analyses of the complex links between discourse, narrative, and subjectiv-
ity see also Jana Funke, ‘The Case of Karl M.[artha] Baer: Narrating “Uncertain
Sex”’, in Ben Davies and Jana Funke (eds), Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and
Culture, Basingstoke 2009, pp. 132–53; and Ina Linge, ‘Gender and Agency Between
“Sexualwissenschaft” and Autobiography: The Case of N. O. Body’s Aus eines Mannes
Mädchenjahren’, German Life and Letters 68:3 (2015), pp. 387–404.
9 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert

Hurley, London 1990, p. 101.
334 David Midgley

conceptual framework within which the relationship between Brandlberger
and Slim should be understood. Slim, with his spontaneous apprehension
of the world and the behaviour of others, and his straightforward sense of
‘good’ and ‘bad’, is characterized broadly in line with Nietzsche’s ‘noble’
type. Brandlberger may aspire to be such a type himself, and on the last
page of the novel we find him imagining that, like the historical examples
of ‘nobility’ that Nietzsche describes, he will have given the poets ‘some-
thing to sing about’.39 But the evidence of his apparent behaviour, as it
comes through the text, is more clearly aligned with the model of the ‘man
of ressentiment’, whose ‘unassuaged hatred’ asserts itself with disastrous
consequences for the expedition and for his two European companions
in particular. The storyline of the novel, we might conclude, need not be
thought of as challenging or undermining the sense of imperial mission to
which the author, Robert Müller, evidently remained committed; but in
the figure of Brandlberger it portrays a human type that is unfit to sustain
such a mission.
Nietzsche’s psychology is clearly one recognizable reference point for
the representation of Brandlberger’s mental processes; another is Freud’s
interpretation of dreams. On this issue, too, it is Slim who achieves the
simplest and most cogent formulation, after Brandlberger has previously
reached his own conclusions about the potency of dreamlike experience
(113): the dream contains nothing that is there by chance or without cause,
Slim avers, and therefore it alone is rational (195). His words are again
loaded with menace for Brandlberger, because Slim goes on to recall the
discovery of the corpse of one of the Indian women as the party left the
village, evidently killed by two knife wounds, one below the breast and a
larger one in the groin (152–6): had Brandlberger had no contact with the
woman on the night in question (197)? Brandlberger is unable to answer
with certainty because, as his narrative has told us in explicit detail, he had
39 ‘Es ist auch möglich, daß ich wie Slim den allerlächerlichsten Tod finde. Dann springt

der Dichter ein, dann ist es Zeit für den Dichter, die Tragikomödie liegt fix und fertig
vor ihm da’ (244). (It is also possible that, like Slim, I shall meet my death in the
most ridiculous way. Then the poet will have to intervene, then the poet’s moment
will have come, the tragicomedy is all set out before him.)

dreamed that night of an erotic encounter with that very woman (150). He
had also gone on to dream of a scene heavily laden with phallic symbol-
ism and the threat of castration, in which the priestess Zana was conjur-
ing up snakes that Slim promptly cut down with his machete (151); and a
machete that fits the description of the likely murder weapon had featured
at an earlier point in the dream, held by van den Dusen (148). Müller, it
seems, has laid a rich trail for those conversant with Freud’s dream theory
to follow: is the attribution of the machete to van den Dusen merely a
displacement,40 and did Brandlberger’s sexual fantasy, imbued with preda-
tory and lethal overtones as it patently is (148), lead in reality to the death
of the woman? A further implication of Brandlberger’s dream is clearly
that the intellectual rivalry between him and Slim is also energized by a
basic sexual rivalry focused on the figure of Zana. Issues such as these lend
the text the aspect of an elusive detective novel and make Brandlberger’s
narrative look increasingly like the documentation of a psychopathological
case; indeed the text itself, on its closing pages, archly draws attention to
the possibility of viewing it in these ways (240–2). And since the reliabil-
ity of Brandlberger’s testimony has been so heavily called into question,
we are bound to wonder whether the killing of van den Dusen in turn
– during a phase of the action where fever and starvation have induced a
delirious condition in the narrator (236–9) – is not also a consequence of
Brandlberger’s vengefulness.41
On the closing pages of Brandlberger’s narrative we find him fantasiz-
ing various ways of realizing his ambition of taking Slim’s place and achiev-
ing sexual union with the ‘Urweib’ (primal woman) Zana – fantasies that
remain heavily imbued with images of the predatory life, and of looking
death in the face, but through which he can persuade himself that he is
40 For the significance of this notion, see in particular Chapter 6 of Freud’s The

Interpretation of Dreams (1899).
41 See Florian Krobb, ‘“Vertuschungsversuche”. Robert Müllers Tropen: Kriminalroman

und Tragikomödie’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 89 (2015), pp. 2, 235–64: pp. 255 and
258f., for more detailed discussion of the indications that Brandlberger is the mur-
derer; also p. 249 for the relevance of contemporary criminal psychology, notably the
writings of Erich Wulffen and Eugen Bleuler, to the characterization of Brandlberger.
336 David Midgley

‘the’ new human type and has achieved the heightened sensual awareness
of the ‘primitive peoples’ (237–8) – before she apparently succeeds in con-
veying him, via the Amazon, back to the world of the reading public. For
that public he can rationalize his experiences and present himself as the
‘inheritor’ of Slim’s ideas (241). In Rio de Janeiro, Paris, and Berlin he can
proclaim that whatever human beings seek to discover they will find within
themselves; that the tropics are the foundation of the human organism, and
the human race merely ‘a trope of the tropics’; and that the human being
of the future will be able to say, in a phrase that could be taken as much as
an assertion of dominion as of self-knowledge, ‘die Tropen bin ich’ (I am
the tropics) (243–4).
The complexities and convolutions of Müller’s novel have attracted
a number of different lines of critical investigation. Some of these have
focused on its significance as a challenge to the fashionable exoticism of
the period around 1900,42 while others have concentrated on the relation-
ship in which it stands to the colonial ambitions and the anthropological
assumptions that were equally characteristic of that time.43 Yet others
have argued, in the light of the elaborate ways in which the text of Tropen
draws attention to the artificiality of its own construction as a fiction, that
its self-reflective character is the basis of its unique contribution to the
development of literary modernism.44 The line of argument I have devel-
oped here does not, I think, invalidate any of those approaches. But it does
highlight an additional reason for regarding Müller’s novel as a landmark
42 See Stephanie Heckner, ‘Das Exotische als utopisches Potential: Zur Neubestimmung

des Exotismus bei Robert Müller’, Sprachkunst 17 (1986), pp. 206–23; Zenk, Innere
Forschungsreisen; Michael Mayer, ‘Tropen gibt es nicht’: Dekonstruktionen des
Exotismus, Bielefeld 2010, pp. 144–78. See also Michaela Holdenried, Künstliche
Horizonte: Alterität in literarischen Repräsentationen Südamerikas, Berlin 2004,
pp. 263–76, with further references.
43 See Schwarz, Robert Müllers Tropen; Gess, Primitives Denken, pp. 195–212; Riedel,

Nach der Achsendrehung, pp. 110–25.
44 See Thomas Köster, Bilderschrift Großstadt: Studien zum Werk Robert Müllers,

Paderborn 1995; Stefan Dietrich, Poetik der Paradoxie: zu Robert Müllers fiktionaler
Prosa, Siegen 1997; Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung. See also Holdenried,
Künstliche Horizonte, pp. 276–95, with further references.

literary text for its time, namely as a radical representation of the senses
in which humanity, in the very endeavour to transcend its actual cultural
condition, remains a prey to the physiological and psychological impulses
that constitute its fundamental biological nature.
Bibliography
Bittner, Rüdiger, ‘Ressentiment’, in Richard Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche, Genealogy, Moral-

ity: Essays on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, Berkeley, CA 1994, pp. 127–38.
Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough, 3rd edn, New York and
London 1988.
Dietrich, Stefan, Poetik der Paradoxie: Zu Robert Müllers fiktionaler Prosa, Siegen 1997.
Gess, Nicola, Primitives Denken, Munich 2013.
Heckner, Stephanie, ‘Das Exotische als utopisches Potential: Zur Neubestimmung
des Exotismus bei Robert Müller’, Sprachkunst 17 (1986), pp. 206–23.
Holdenried, Michaela, Künstliche Horizonte: Alterität in literarischen Repräsentationen
Südamerikas, Berlin 2004.
Köster, Thomas, Bilderschrift Großstadt: Studien zum Werk Robert Müllers, Pader-
born 1995.
Kreuzer, Helmut, and Günter Helmes (eds), Expressionismus – Aktivismus – Exotis-
mus: Studien zum literarischen Werk Robert Müllers (1887–1924), Göttingen 1981.
Krobb, Florian, ‘“Bis zum Horizonte dieser kleinen Welt”: Travel Writing, Utopian-
ism and Karl May. Robert Müller’s Tropen’, Modern Language Review 110 (2015),
pp. 1067–85.
‘“Vertuschungsversuche”. Robert Müllers Tropen: Kriminalroman und
Tragikomödie’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 89 (2015), p. 2, pp. 235–64.
Liederer, Christian, Der Mensch und seine Realität: Anthropologie und Wirklichkeit im
poetischen Werk des Expressionisten Robert Müller, Würzburg 2004.
Mayer, Michael, ‘Tropen gibt es nicht’: Dekonstruktionen des Exotismus, Bielefeld 2010.
Müller, Robert, Gesammelte Essays, ed. Michael M. Schardt, Hamburg 2011.
Kritische Schriften I, ed. Günter Helmes and Jürgen Berners, Paderborn 1993.
Kritische Schriften II, ed. Ernst Fischer, Paderborn 1995.
Tropen. Der Mythos der Reise: Urkunden eines deutschen Ingenieurs, ed. Günter
Helmes, Paderborn 1990.
338 David Midgley

Müller-Tamm, Jutta, Abstraktion als Einfühlung: Zur Denkfigur der Projektion in
Psychophysiologie, Kulturtheorie, Ästhetik und Literatur der frühen Moderne,
Freiburg im Breisgau 2005.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann, trans. Judith
Norman, Cambridge 2002.
On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe,
Cambridge 1994.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, ed. Adrian Del Caro and
Robert B. Pippin, trans. Adrian Del Caro, Cambridge 2006.
Schwarz, Thomas, Robert Müllers Tropen: Ein Reiseführer in den imperialen Exotis-
mus, Heidelberg 2006.
Zenk, Volker, Innere Forschungsreisen: Literarischer Exotismus in Deutschland zu
Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts, Oldenburg 2003.
Zwierlein, Anne-Julia (ed.), Unmapped Countries: Biological Visions in Nineteenth-
Century Literature and Culture, London 2005.

Stoler, Ann Laura, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality
and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham 2005.
Stryker, Susan, Transgender History, Berkley, CA 2008.
Sutton, Katie, ‘Representing the “Third Sex”: Cultural Translations of the Sexological
Encounter in Early Twentieth-Century Germany’, in Heike Bauer (ed.), Sexology
and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters Across the Modern World,
Tobin, Robert Deam, Peripheral Desires: The German Invention of Sex, Philadelphia,
PA 2015.
Within the proliferation of new specialisms that we noted in the intro-
duction to Part III, the study of biological phenomena in the second half
of the nineteenth century faced a fundamental methodological dilemma:
should living organisms be conceived in terms of the familiar principles
of physics and chemistry, or was some other explanation needed for their
behaviour? It was a question that divided scientists in their efforts to under-
stand the mutation of species, the development of organisms from embryo
to maturity, and the physiological operation of individual organisms. It
also presented an acute challenge to traditional philosophical assumptions
about the relationship between body and mind.
The earlier part of the century had seen the dominance of positiv-
ism in France (Auguste Comte) and of scientific materialism in Germany
(Karl Vogt and Ludwig Büchner), and the application of quasi-mechanical
thinking in the domain of biology was carried through to the end of the
century, notably in the representation of the evolutionary process by Ernst
Haeckel in Germany and by Herbert Spencer in England. But mechanistic
assumptions were challenged by embryological experimentation between
the 1890s and the 1920s which prompted speculation about the internal
impulses that might account for the development and organization of the
organism. In its strongest form, this alternative thinking was known as vital-
ism, and while its propositions faded out of serious biological discourse
within a few decades, it was highly prominent in the first decade of the
twentieth century, when it also prompted the philosophical speculation
about the distinctive qualities of life processes and the trajectory of evolu-
tion that is commonly referred to as Lebensphilosophie and epitomized in
Henri Bergson’s popular book Creative Evolution, first published in 1907.1
1 See David Midgley, ‘After Materialism: Reflections of Idealism in Lebensphilosophie:

Dilthey, Bergson and Simmel’, in John Walker (ed.), The Impact of Idealism: The
Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought, vol. II: Historical, Social and Political
Thought, Cambridge 2013, pp. 161–85; and ‘“Creative Evolution”: Bergson’s Critique
of Science and its Reception in the German-Speaking World’, in Simon J. James and
Nicholas Saul (eds), Evolution of Literature, Legacies of Darwin in European Cultures,
Amsterdam 2011, pp. 283–97. For a still readable account of the divergent currents
in biological thinking from the perspective of 1909, see Emanuel Rádl, History of
Biological Theories, trans. and adapted by E. J. Hatfield, London 1930. For a more
342 David Midgley

In that historical context, the development of psychology as an empiri-
cal science was strongly associated with laboratory experiments designed
to measure the relation between a controlled sensory stimulus and the per-
ception or sensation experienced by a human subject. Pioneered in Leipzig
by Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–87) and continued by Wilhelm Wundt
(1832–1920), this work established the notion of a clear correlation between
physical and mental processes (psychophysical parallelism) and refrained
from inferring any causal relation between the two.2 Wundt in particu-
lar championed the experimental approach against the intuitive route to
self-knowledge (which was promoted around 1900 by William James, for
example), asserting that experimental methods alone could establish an
objective basis for understanding ‘inner experiences’.3 The legacy of this
approach to psychology was one that Freud inevitably had to counter when
seeking to establish the scientific respectability of psychoanalysis in the
early decades of the twentieth century, but traces of Fechner’s mechanistic
understanding of processes in the mind and nervous system persisted in
Freud’s thinking, too, notably in his ‘metapsychological’ writings, Beyond
the Pleasure Principle (1920) and The Ego and the Id (1923).4
An important later development of the experimental approach was
Gestalt psychology, which provided insights into the way the brain rec-
ognizes physical shapes from the visual information reaching it through
recent analysis of the terms in which organic phenomena were discussed in the early
twentieth century, see Donna J. Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of
Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology, New Haven, CT 1976. For
fuller theoretical analysis, see T. J. Horder, J. A. Witkowski and C. C. Wylie (eds),
A History of Embryology, Cambridge 1986.
2 See Jean Piaget, Paul Fraisse, and Maurice Reuchlin (eds), Experimental Psychology:

Its Scope and Method, vol. 1: History and Method, London 1968, pp. 15–69; Thomas
Hardy Leahey, A History of Psychology: Main Currents in Psychological Thought,
London 2004, pp. 210–11 and 233–43.
3 Wilhelm Wundt, ‘Selbstbeobachtung und innere Wahrnehmung’ [1888], Kleine

Schriften, vol. 3, Stuttgart 1921, pp. 423–40: p. 437f.
4 See Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol.

XVIII, London 1955, p. 8f., and vol. XIX, London 1961, p. 47.
Michael Eggers
6 Cryptogamic Kissing: Adalbert Stifter’s Novella

Der Kuss von Sentze (1866) and the Reproduction
of Mosses
abstract
As late as 1851, the German botanist Wilhelm Hofmeister discovered that the recreational
pattern of an alternation of generations, which had first been observed in lower animals
like jellyfish, also applies to mosses and ferns. Organisms that procreate according to this
pattern alternate between asexual and sexual generations. Hofmeister’s discovery facili-
tated the scientific reception of Darwin’s theory to a large degree. This chapter shows that
this botanical law is a scientific subtext of Adalbert Stifter’s novella Der Kuss von Sentze
(The Kiss of Sentze, 1866). The social structure of the noble Austrian family of Sentze
and its kissing rituals are analogous to the reproductive techniques of the mosses that the
protagonists study and collect.
The tales and novels of Adalbert Stifter, one of the most prominent German-
speaking authors of the nineteenth century, deal with generations. As has
been noted recently, ‘the works of Stifter constantly reconstruct familial
prehistories that lead up to the present events of the narration, which in
turn aim at the production of new generations, resulting in a never-ending
chain of generations’.1 Many, if not most of Stifter’s narratives would serve
as examples to illustrate his concern with the relation of parents to their
1 ‘Stifters Werk arbeitet immerfort an der Rekonstruktion familialer Vorgeschichten

für das gegenwärtige Geschehen, das wiederum auf die Schaffung neuer Generationen
und auf das Nichtabreißen der Generationenkette zielt’: Ohad Parnes, Ulrike
Vedder, and Stefan Willer, Das Konzept der Generation: Eine Wissenschafts- und
Kulturgeschichte, Frankfurt am Main 2008, p. 164.
344 David Midgley

of thinking. Whereas Münsterberg promoted a strongly mechanistic and
quantitative approach to assessing physiological and mental performance,
Uexküll emphasized the need to understand physiological phenomena
in terms that went beyond the physico-chemical, and to take a holistic
approach to interpreting the behaviour of organisms. His speciality was
the spatial awareness of animals, more particularly the sense in which each
organism constructs its own conception of the world it inhabits; and the
conceptual model he used in the explanation of what he observed was that
of an inherent ‘building-plan’ (Bauplan) that determined the organism’s
perception of its world and its behaviour within it.9 Uexküll’s thinking
was controversial because it appeared to imply an individualistic model
for understanding biological phenomena, as David Wachter shows in the
opening paragraph of his chapter. Indeed, while the German term Uexküll
uses to denote an organism’s sense of world is ‘Umwelt’, which would ordi-
narily be translated as ‘environment’, he was also content to have his key
concept glossed as ‘Eigenwelt’, that is, ‘own-world’.10 Precisely that emphasis
on a subjective relationship with the world seems to have chimed in well
with early twentieth-century literary writers, however, and a strong affinity
with Uexküll’s notion of a species-specific world-view has been detected
in Kafka’s ‘Investigations of a Dog’ (1922), for example,11 as well as in the
poetry of Rilke, who knew Uexküll personally.
It was at the end of the 1920s that German philosophers started to
show interest in Uexküll. Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), who knew him as
a colleague at Hamburg University drew attention to his thinking in a
presentation he gave in March 1929, and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976),
who was in the audience on that occasion, went on to develop his own
thoughts about Uexküll’s biological discoveries in the lectures he gave the
9 See Carlo Brentari, Jakob von Uexküll: The Discovery of the Umwelt between Biosemiotics

and Theoretical Biology, Dordrecht 2015, pp. 57–63.
10 See Florian Mildenberger and Bernd Herrmann, ‘Zur ersten Orientierung’, in Jakob

von Uexküll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere [1909], Berlin 2014, pp. 1–12: p. 9f.
11 See Kristina Jobst, ‘Pawlow, Uexküll, Kafka: Forschungen mit Hunden’, in Harald

Neumeyer and Wilko Steffens (eds), Kafkas Betrachtung / Kafka interkulturell, and
Kafkas narrative Verfahren / Kafkas Tiere, Würzburg 2015, pp. 307–33.
Part IV: The Poet, the Senses, and the Sense of a World 345

following winter.12 Heidegger had published Being and Time in 1927, and
one line of thinking he pursued in the lectures was concerned with the
question of what distinguishes the relation that human beings have to the
world from that of animals. The physiological evidence that Uexküll had
collected interested Heidegger because it seemed to show that, by com-
parison with humans, the perception of the world that animals in general
have was strictly circumscribed or, in a sense, depleted: as Heidegger puts
it, animals are ‘weltarm’ (poor in world)13 and remain ‘captivated’ by their
sense of an environment that is generated by their functional relation to
it.14 As the nature of Heidegger’s inquiry required, the remainder of the
lectures took the form of a long and elaborate investigation of the senses in
which animals inhabit a depleted world, while human beings were capable
of forming theirs (they are ‘weltbildend’).
At the end of the section of his lectures that was devoted specifi-
cally to the nature of the animal’s awareness of world, Heidegger made
an allusion to the passage in St Paul’s epistle to the Romans (8:18–22)
which evokes the ‘earnest expectation of the creature’ awaiting revelation
and redemption,15 and this allusion was taken up and developed by the
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in his book The Open (L’Aperto) in
2002. (Agamben’s title alludes to a motif in Rilke’s evocation of the way
animals relate to the world in the Eighth Duino Elegy, an evocation that
Heidegger had criticized elsewhere as an idealization of the animal.)16
Agamben reviews the arguments of both Heidegger and Uexküll, draw-
ing out their implications, and concludes that the human condition can
be represented in terms of a transition out of the animal state: ‘This
awakening of the living being to its own being-captivated, this anxious
12 Cf. Brentari, Jakob von Uexküll, pp. 188–94 and 198–204.

13 Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude,

Solitude (winter semester 1929/30), trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker,
Bloomington, IN 1995, pp. 176–273.
14 Ibid. p. 238f.

15 Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, p. 273.

16 Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz, Bloomington,

IN 1998, pp. 152–8.
346 David Midgley

and resolute opening to a not-open, is the human.’17 It is by achieving
conscious and critical awareness of its underlying animal condition, in
other words, that humanity can rise above it. Agamben’s investigation
provided Eric Santner in turn with the conceptual frame of reference
for his inquiry, in his book On Creaturely Life (2006), into the thematic
concerns that characterized a prominent tradition in twentieth-century
German – and notably German-Jewish – writing. For Santner, the notion
of ‘creatureliness’, while related both to the possibility of subsiding into
creaturely existence in the mode of melancholy and to the possibility
of transcending it, signifies ‘a specifically human way of finding oneself
caught in the midst of antagonisms in and of the political field’.18
There are, then, several steps in the transition that takes us from the
scientific investigation of the mysteries of the organism around 1900 to
the terms in which we find philosophers and literary critics exploring the
dilemmas of humanity in our own time. But these developments show how
the conceptual language of contemporary critical thought is organically
related to the biological and psychological experimentation that was taking
place around 1900 and why the various strands of that relationship war-
rant further investigation. Any apparent similarities between the themes
of Alfred Döblin’s famous city novel of 1929 and the subject matter of
Heidegger’s lectures of the following winter are probably a reflection of
the broad intellectual atmosphere of the time rather than any more direct
connection, but as Robert Craig shows in his chapter on Döblin, by viewing
that novel in the terms of contemporary critical discourse we can hope to
refine our sense of what an awareness of our animal natures can contribute
to our understanding of the existential position of humanity in industrial
– and post-industrial – society.
17 Giorgio Agamben, The Open, Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell, Stanford, CA

2004, p. 70.
18 Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life, Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald, Chicago, IL 2006, p. xix.

Part IV: The Poet, the Senses, and the Sense of a World 347

Bibliography
Agamben, Giorgio, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell, Stanford, CA
2004.
Bergson, Henri, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell, London 1911.
Brentari, Carlo, Jakob von Uexküll: The Discovery of the Umwelt between Biosemiotics
and Theoretical Biology, Dordrecht 2015.
Freud, Sigmund, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. XVIII,
London 1955.
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. XIX, London 1961.
Haraway, Donna J., Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-
Century Developmental Biology, New Haven, CT 1976.
Heidegger, Martin, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Soli-
tude (winter semester 1929/30), trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker,
Bloomington, IN 1995.
Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz, Bloomington, IN
1998.
Twentieth-century Literature’, in Semiotica 134 (2001), pp. 553–92.
Horder, T. J., J. A. Witkowski and C. C. Wylie (eds), A History of Embryology, Cam-
bridge 1986.
Hothersall, David, History of Psychology, New York 1995.
Jobst, Kristina, ‘Pawlow, Uexküll, Kafka: Forschungen mit Hunden’, in Harald Neu-
meyer and Wilko Steffens (eds), Kafkas Betrachtung / Kafka interkulturell, and
Kafkas narrative Verfahren / Kafkas Tiere, Würzburg 2015, pp. 307–33.
Köhler, Wolfgang, Gestalt Psychology, London 1930.
Leahey, Thomas Hardy, A History of Psychology: Main Currents in Psychological
Thought, London 2004.
Midgley, David, ‘After Materialism: Reflections of Idealism in Lebensphilosophie:
Dilthey, Bergson and Simmel’, in John Walker (ed.), The Impact of Idealism: The
Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought, vol. II: Historical, Social and Political
Thought, Cambridge 2013, pp. 161–85.
‘“Creative Evolution”: Bergson’s Critique of Science and its Reception in the
German-Speaking World’, in Simon J. James and Nicholas Saul (eds), Evolution of
Literature, Legacies of Darwin in European Cultures, Amsterdam 2011, pp. 283–97.
Mildenberger, Florian, and Bernd Herrmann, ‘Zur ersten Orientierung’, in Jakob von
Uexküll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere [1909], Berlin 2014, pp. 1–12.
Münsterberg, Hugo, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, London 1913.
172 Michael Eggers

and marriage, so that eventually a new generation will follow in the family
line. Consequently, the first, pacifying kind of kiss came to be called ‘kiss of
peace’ and the second kind, from which originated marriage, ‘kiss of love’.
Rupert’s account is the final passage in the family chronicle and
covers the recent past, beginning in 1846 and ending in November 1849.
Stifter’s story itself was published in the year 1866 in the first issue of Die
Gartenlaube für Österreich, the Austrian version of the immensely success-
ful German magazine of the same title (I mention these dates because they
will become important for the following argument). Having come of age at
twenty-five, Rupert fulfils the wish of his father to pay a visit to his cousin
Hiltiburg who lives with her mother and sisters in Vienna. Hiltiburg is his
female counterpart, being, just like him, the last descendant of the Sentze.
It is Rupert’s and Hiltiburg’s mission to get to know each other better and
to consider carefully whether they want to kiss each other just peacefully,
sealing a friendship that their fathers held on to before, or lovingly, thus
securing the future existence of their family. After having met a few times,
however, it turns out that they rather dislike each other. Rupert criticizes
her pride, her magnificent and expensive dresses. He even begins to despise
her.4 Turning his back on Hiltiburg and on the prospect of becoming her
husband, he diverts his passions to patriotism instead and decides to join
Radetzky’s campaign against the Italian insurrection.5 He declares that
he wants to set out on this journey at nighttime and without farewell, to
avoid ‘circumstances or trouble and emotions’.6 Just before he leaves the
house in complete darkness, he unexpectedly feels a female embrace and
receives a very passionate kiss on his lips. Unable to recognize the person
who kissed him, he keeps the memory of this extraordinary moment during
4 Adalbert Stifter, Der Kuß von Sentze, in Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische

Gesamtausgabe, ed. Alfred Doppler and Hartmut Laufhütte, Stuttgart 1978ff., III.2,
pp. 143–74: p. 153 (hereafter referred to as KS). All translations of this text are my
own.
5 For the historical background of the story see Frühwald’s important essay: Wolfgang

Frühwald, ‘“Tu felix Austria …”. Zur Deutung von Adalbert Stifters Erzählung Der
Kuß von Sentze’, VASILO 36 (1987), pp. 31–41.
6 KS, p. 155.

Sarah Cain
13 Attention and Efficiency: The Experimental

Psychology of Modernism
abstract
The German psychologist Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916) occupies a unique yet under-
examined position in relation to the history of modernist literature: as director of the
Harvard Psychological Laboratory at the turn of the twentieth century, he taught psy-
chology and philosophy of mind to both T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein. More widely,
his role in the history of American thought has often been obscured by the opprobrium
he received after refusing to relinquish his German citizenship during World War I. This
chapter seeks to recover the neglected link between the psychological and physiological
discourses of Münsterberg’s experimental work, and literary modernism’s intense preoccu-
pation with discourses of human energy, attention, monotony, and efficiency. It examines
how Münsterberg’s thinking inflected and shaped modernist concerns about the biological
response to modernity, tracing his influence on Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), and Stein’s
experiments in prose form and the attentional processes of literary reading.
At the turn of the twentieth century, experimental psychology started

to take shape as an academic discipline out of an unusual conjunction
between Germanic science and Anglo-American thought. In the America
of the late nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth century, the
new experimental psychology saw itself as having more in common with
the research methods of the hard sciences than the curative, medical, or
therapeutic praxis of psychoanalysis. Despite an aversion to psychoana-
lytic models, this American psychology turned out to be influenced by a
different kind of Germanic connection: the borrowing of new laboratory
techniques from German research institutes of experimental psychology,
and their vocabularies of biological determinism, physiology, and econom-
ics, rather than the therapeutic discourses of neurosis and dream-logic.
350 Sarah Cain

Here, I explore a curious, and until now neglected, conjunction
between German experimental psychology and American transatlantic
literary modernism. This unusual relationship between turn-of-the-century
Germanic biological discourses and literary works came about through
the interdisciplinary work of the expatriate philosopher and psychologist
Hugo Münsterberg. Münsterberg taught psychology and philosophy of
mind to Gertrude Stein and T. S. Eliot, amongst many others, at Harvard,
and was also the founder, amongst other fields, of a new subfield of applied
psychology that he called ‘psychotechnics’. Well known and influential
in the scientific community and popular press in the first decades of the
twentieth century, Münsterberg was subsequently effectively airbrushed
out of American intellectual history, and shunned by his Harvard col-
leagues, after his refusal to renounce his German citizenship during the
First World War. As a German national who would not compromise his
neutral political stance in support of the allied forces, he was even suspected
by his university colleagues of being a spy. Though he still continued to
perform his job despite being ostracized by his American colleagues, he
eventually collapsed and died whilst giving a lecture in 1916; most prob-
ably from a brain haemorrhage, but one which his family believed was due
to the stress and emotional devastation of the way he had been treated
both by his former friends and by the university.1 Largely because of this,
Münsterberg’s status in early twentieth-century experimental science and
intellectual history has been significantly undervalued. This chapter traces
the connections between the physiological and psychological discourses
of his experimental work, and transatlantic literary modernists’ aesthetic
preoccupations with discourses of human energy, attention, monotony,
1 Münsterberg, who had styled himself as a German psychologist of ‘American Traits’,

had already fallen out of good relationships with his colleagues over his outspoken
criticism of what he saw as a ‘feminized’ American intellectual culture, as opposed to
a more ‘vigorous’ and masculine Teutonic one. See Phyllis Keller, States of Belonging:
German-American Intellectuals and the First World War, Cambridge, MA 1979; Frank
J. Landy, ‘Hugo Münsterberg: Victim or Visionary?’, Journal of Applied Psychology
77:6 (1992), pp. 787–802; and the 1922 biography of Münsterberg by his daughter:
Margaret Münsterberg, Hugo Münsterberg: His Life and Work, New York 1922.
Attention and Efficiency 351

and efficiency. I suggest that aspects of Münsterberg’s research inflected
or helped shape early modernist concerns about the biological response to
modernity: this influence most notably appears in Eliot’s early poems of
the 1910s and 1920s, but also makes itself felt in other modernist American
literary texts, such as Stein’s experimental writing.
Hugo Münsterberg was born in Danzig, Germany, on 1 June 1863:
his father, Moritz Münsterberg, was a Jewish lumber merchant, and Hugo
was his son by his second wife, Anna. Anna died in 1875, tragically, when
the young Hugo was only twelve years old; his father also died six years
later, in 1881. Münsterberg threw himself into academic study: as well as
achieving academic success in his Abitur, he studied in Leipzig for both
his undergraduate and doctoral degrees under the psychologist Wilhelm
Wundt, who in the 1880s founded the first laboratory for psychological
research at the University of Leipzig.2 Together with William James at
Harvard, Wundt is now regarded as the founder of the modern disci-
pline of experimental psychology; and Münsterberg’s early work built on
Wundt’s interest in the observable and measurable connections between
physiological and mental processes of consciousness and sense-perception.
Hired to teach at the University of Freiburg (though initially without a
salary), Münsterberg fitted out two rooms in his own house to set up a
laboratory for experimental psychological research that was similar to
Wundt’s at Leipzig, along with a research programme investigating sensory
and motor reactions and attention spans in school children and university
students. The publication of three major books on the methodology of
experimental psychology between 1889 and 1891 won him an established
professorship: this drew him to the attention of William James, who in 1892
invited Münsterberg to spend a five-term sabbatical at Harvard, awarded
2 See William Stern, ‘Hugo Münsterberg: In Memoriam’, Journal of Applied Psychology

1 (1917), pp. 186–8; Matthew Hale, Jr, Human Science and Social Order: Hugo
Münsterberg and the Origins of Applied Psychology, Philadelphia, PA 1980; Jutta
Spillman and Lothar Spillmann, ‘The Rise and Fall of Hugo Münsterberg’, Journal
of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 29 (1993), pp. 322–38.
352 Sarah Cain

specifically so that Münsterberg might set up and direct a laboratory for
physiological psychology modelled on his own laboratory in Freiburg.3
William James, who saw himself first and foremost as a philosopher
and disliked laboratory work, was happy to give over direction of the new
Harvard Psychological Laboratory to Münsterberg; and by 1895 it was
described by one contemporary account as:
the most unique, the richest, and the most complete in any country; and in witness
of the fame and genius of its present director, and of the rapidly spreading interest
in experimental psychology, particularly in America, there are already gathered here,
under Professor Münsterberg’s administration, a larger number of students specially
devoted to mental science than ever previously studied together in any one place.4
One of those students, notably, was Gertrude Stein, who studied experi-
mental psychology with Münsterberg at Radcliffe College (at that time
a coordinate institution of Harvard) from 1894 to 1895. Donald Gallup
records Münsterberg as having written to Stein in 1895 to congratulate her
on having been his ‘ideal student’: ‘I thank you above all for the model-work
you have done in the laboratory and the other courses wherever I met you
[…] if in later years you look into printed discussions which I have in mind
to publish about students in America, I hope you will then pardon me if
you recognize some features of my ideal student picture as your own.’5
Stein, as Michael Hoffman and Steven Meyer have noted, was deeply
influenced by her time working at the Harvard Psychological Laboratory
under first Münsterberg, and then William James; after her undergraduate
degree she became a research assistant in the Laboratory, publishing aca-
demic papers on ‘motor automatism’ and the human physiology of attention
3 See Hugo Münsterberg, ‘Studies from the Harvard Psychological Laboratory, Part

I’, Psychological Review 1 (1894), pp. 34–60.
4 H. Nichols, ‘The Psychological Laboratory at Harvard’, McClure’s Magazine 1 (1895),

pp. 399–409.
5 Quoted in The Flowers of Friendship: Letters Written to Gertrude Stein, ed. Donald

Gallup, New York 1953; repr. 1979, p. 4.

Walchon begs Hiltiburg and Rupert to give each other the kiss of peace
as the sign of their consent not to do any harm to one another. They agree
and begin to do what the family tradition requires at this point. They
spend three days praying, reading, and contemplating the oath of the kiss
of Sentze, separated from each other. On the morning of the fourth day,
they carry out the ritual ‘ohne einen einzigen Zeugen, als Gott’ (with no
witness other than God).13 The passage describing the kiss is remarkable
because it is syntactically extremely reduced. It is an extreme example of
Stifter’s late prose style in which short, simple, and repetitive sentences
abound and which is largely free from psychological introspection. Such
paratactical language must surely be interpreted as matching the fictional
purpose of the text, the bulk of which forms part of the family chronicle of
the Sentze. As such, it is nothing more than a written and factual record of
the past. With regard to the affective and psychological content of the story,
however, the stylistic sobriety may also be Rupert’s narrative and linguistic
antidote to the memory of Hiltiburg’s glamorous outfits and narcissistic
behaviour that he creates with his report.14 In the case of the decisive kissing
scene, this stylistic minimalism creates a tension that perfectly captures the
ambivalence of the two kinds of kiss, with an erotic passion always lurking
behind the family politics of the mere ritual:
Am Morgen des vierten kleidete ich mich festlich und ging in den Saal. Er war
noch leer. Gleich darauf trat Hiltiburg herein. Sie war wieder in Linnen gekleidet,
aber in weißes, und hatte keinen Hut auf dem Haupte. Ich ging ihr entgegen, und
13 KS, p. 169.

14 An analogous line of argument leads to Frühwald’s convincing hypotheses that Stifter’s

late and well-ordered style, as displayed paradigmatically in Der Kuß von Sentze, is a
reaction to an Austrian society in political and cultural disorder after the revolutions
and at the outset of the conflict between Prussia and Austria in the Austro-Prussian
War of 1866. See Frühwald, ‘Tu felix Austria …’. See also Werner Michler, ‘Adalbert
Stifter und die Ordnungen der Gattung: Generische “Veredelung” als Arbeit am
Habitus’, in Alfred Doppler et al. (eds), Stifter und Stifterforschung im 21. Jahrhundert:
Biographie – Wissenschaft – Poetik, Berlin 2007, pp. 183–99. Michler suggests that
not only Stifter’s style but also his preoccupation with biological classifications is a
sign of his deep dissatisfaction with the political upheavals that he witnessed.
354 Sarah Cain

other individual before or since, he shaped the scope and future directions
of experimental psychology throughout the twentieth century.
As well as his shaping influence on psychology as an academic disci-
pline, Münsterberg’s work of the 1910s and 1920s also had an extraordi-
narily wide popular reach and historical longevity in American culture,
and within Western cultural history more widely. Across the range of
his work he was consciously and explicitly multi- and interdisciplinary,
founding subfields of experimental psychology such as forensic and crime
psychology – in, for example, On the Witness Stand and The Psychology
of Crime (both 1908), which evaluated the impact of unreliable human
attention and memory recall in witnesses’ evidence, and in the trial by jury
legal system. In 1907 he had attracted sensational newspaper publicity
for having used a system of experimental lie-detector tests in the trial of
Harry Orchard, the mass-murderer and government witness responsible
for the assassination of a former Governor of Idaho: having concluded
that Orchard was telling the truth on the stand, this use of measuring
physiological responses inaugurated the idea and widespread use of the
lie-detector in American courts. On this, as on other aspects of public
life such as the role of women, Münsterberg frequently attracted critical
or negative public attention. His belief that the increasingly equal status
of women was a sign of the effeminization of America (and contrasted
unfavourably with a more vigorously masculine Germanic culture), was
a widely shared reactionary opinion of the time, with even President
Roosevelt writing to him to agree.7 However, Münsterberg’s penchant for
making unflattering pronouncements on the negative aspects of American
national culture lent him a dubious popular notoriety, including being
lampooned in newspaper cartoons and referred to as ‘Professor Hugo
7 Hale, Human Science, p. 63. Münsterberg’s opinions on this are elaborated at some

length in the chapter on ‘Women’ in his American Traits from the German Point
of View (1901); for a wider analysis of his attitudes to women, see Rena Sanderson,
‘Gender and Modernity in Transnational Perspective: Hugo Münsterberg and the
American Woman’, Prospects 23 (1998), pp. 285–313.

Monsterwork’.8 He also founded another subfield of psychology that
made a lasting impact on wider American culture: educational psychol-
ogy. Most notably, in Psychology and the Teacher (1919) and The Principles
of Art Education (1904), he inaugurated the use of scholastic and voca-
tional aptitude tests; anyone who has ever taken a SAT or an aptitude
test for an American graduate school has Münsterberg to thank. In the
following decade he branched out into aesthetics in The Eternal Values
(1909); and, at the end of his career, early forms of film and media studies.
His 1916 monograph The Photoplay: A Psychological Study has a claim to
being the first study of the psychology of film, in which he argued that
film is constructed through the ‘subjective play of attention’ with which
the mind understands the world.9
As well as all of these areas with practical or aesthetic impact, in the
arena of professional academic science and philosophy Münsterberg had
been a founder of the interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, Psychology
and Scientific Methods and an organizer and speaker at the International
Congress of Arts and Sciences at the St Louis World’s Fair of 1904, which
featured papers from internationally renowned American and European cul-
tural and scientific figures. As well as Henri Bergson, John Dewey, and Josiah
Royce, the Congress also included contributions from thinkers as diverse as
Max Weber, Woodrow Wilson, and Frederick Jackson Turner.10 T. S. Eliot,
who grew up in St Louis, Missouri, had also attended the 1904 World’s
Fair as a child. The event, which later, famously, became the setting for the
musical and the 1944 Judy Garland film Meet Me in St. Louis, made a big
impact on the popular as well as the academic imagination.11 Münsterberg
8 See Allan Langdale, ‘S(t)imulation of Mind: The Film Theory of Hugo Münsterberg’,

in Langdale (ed.), Hugo Münsterberg on Film: ‘The Photoplay: A Psychological Study’
and Other Writings, New York 2002, pp. 1–41: p. 32, n.35.
9 Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, New York 1916, p. 91.

10 Recounted in Hugo Münsterberg, ‘The International Congress of Arts and Science’,

Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 1:1 (1904), pp. 1–8. See also
James Rowland Angell, ‘Psychology at the St. Louis Congress’, Journal of Philosophy,
Psychology, and Scientific Methods 2 (1905), pp. 533–46.
11 See, for example, Robert Crawford, Young Eliot: From St Louis to ‘The Waste Land’,

London 2015, p. 59.
356 Sarah Cain

always explicitly sought to situate his work at conjunctions of disciplinary
forces or interests, combining psychology with philosophy, physiology,
aesthetics, and economics. The aims of the International Congress, as he
described them, were to replace what he called ‘detached specialization’
and the ‘heaping up of disconnected, unshaped facts’, with ‘a new syn-
thesis’ of interdisciplinary interaction and collaboration, which would
‘bring together the sciences, psychology and philosophy, to emphasize the
philosophic nature of science and the true scientific value of philosophy’.12
In his major work of the 1910s, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (1913),
Münsterberg developed this interdisciplinary impulse into a new practical
science of what he termed ‘psychotechnics’: the study of the connections
between work, efficiency, psychology, physiology, and business. This new
science would aim to study and promote the conservation of mental energy
and of human physical and mental aptitudes, reformulating a Taylorist model
of industrial efficiency in the biological and mechanical terms newly provided
by early twentieth-century physiology of the nervous system and behavioural
science. In Psychology and Industrial Efficiency he argued that:
[o]ur aim is to sketch the outlines of a new science which is to intermediate between
the modern laboratory psychology and the problems of economics: the psychological
experiment is systematically to be placed at the service of commerce and industry. So
far we have only scattered beginnings of the new doctrine, only tentative efforts and
disconnected attempts which have started, sometimes in economic, and sometimes
in psychological, quarters.13
Psychotechnics thus represented the technical application of applied psy-

chology as it might intervene in social and cultural life, and particularly
in ‘commerce and industry, of business and the market in the widest sense
of the word’.14 Münsterberg envisaged psychotechnics as an applied sci-
ence which would interweave existing fields of behavioural psychology,
economics, business studies, sociology, and philosophy, potentially being
12 Münsterberg, ‘The International Congress’, pp. 1–2.

13 Hugo Münsterberg, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, London and New York

1913, pp. 3–4.
14 Ibid. pp. 15–16.


applicable to every place where the human subject interacts as a physi-
cal entity with ‘will and feeling, perception and thought, attention and
emotion’, including ‘mental states of attention, memory, feeling, and so
on’, which transect the realities of economic and cultural existence.15 The
purpose of psychotechnics as a discipline would be:
to ask how we can find the men whose mental qualities make them best fitted for
the work which they have to do; secondly, under what psychological conditions we
can secure the greatest and most satisfactory output of work from every man; and
finally, how we can produce most completely the influences on human minds which
are desired in the interest of business. In other words, we ask how to find the best
possible man, how to produce the best possible work, and how to secure the best
possible effects.16
To this end, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency deals not only with ‘the best
possible man’ (and how to guard against ‘[i]llusory ideas as to the prospect
of a career’, and ‘wandering from calling to calling’, which is ‘more frequent
in America than anywhere else’; in order to find ‘deeper satisfaction and
more harmonious unfolding of the personality’ in life and work);17 but
also with the ‘scientific management’ of particular workforces according
to the methods of experimental psychology, with case studies in the elec-
tric railway service, the telephone service, and shipping; the differences
between individual and group psychology, learning in the educational
system; efficiency in motor movement in the workplace and the processes
of attention, concentration, and fatigue in factory workers and students;
the effects of advertisements; the effect of shop displays; and the psychol-
ogy of buying and selling, amongst other aspects of commerce.
One of the most revealing sections of the book is the following passage
reflecting on the methods used to conduct his own experiments (worth
quoting at length, since here Münsterberg describes in detail his experi-
mental method):
15 Ibid. pp. 21, 28.

16 Ibid. pp. 23–4.

17 Ibid. pp. 34, 36, 37.

178 Michael Eggers

kissing and were limited to men only.17 With the portrait of the Sentze,
whose old German first names he takes from historiography, embedding the
family genealogy in real Austrian history,18 Stifter extends the tradition of
regulated kissing into the nineteenth century. The ambivalence he creates
in the final kissing scene has been described before in medieval literature,19
so the story does not only sketch a long generational history but resumes
a literary history of the motif of the kiss between ceremony and passion.
In its ambiguity, it indicates a subtextual incest that seems to lurk behind
the sexual liaisons within the Sentze family.20 As I want to show in what
follows, what might be perceived as an ambiguous, incestual form of pas-
sion has a botanical equivalent. Hence, the novella also presents, alongside
the classification of mosses, a classification of kisses and bryology as related
to osculology, that is, the science of kisses. Stifter’s narrative presentation
of generational, familial, and erotic relations represents his conviction of
the inseparability of the human and the natural sphere as well as his belief
that steadiness and regularity are at the heart of things and have to be rated
higher than singular events such as the overwhelming experience of a kiss.
Taking into consideration also the historical facts about bryology and
plant classification, it is noteworthy that, as Martin Selge puts it, from the
second half of the eighteenth century onwards the remarkable diversity of
moss species was considered as one of the most difficult problems to solve
for botanical systematics and taxonomy of Stifter’s time’.21 Walchon’s and

18 See Twellmann, ‘Literarische Osculologie’, p. 533, n.11. Twellmann refers to the

sources mentioned in Moriz Enzinger, ‘Zu Stifters Erzählung Der Kuß von Sentze’,
in Gesammelte Aufsätze zu Adalbert Stifter, Vienna 1967, pp. 255–66. More infor-
mation about the provenance of the name Sentze and the family forefathers Huoch
and Roudpret (see KS, p. 145) can be found in Wolfgang Beck, Huoch, Beiträge zur
Namenforschung, N. F. 43 (2008), pp. 179–80.

20 Evi Fountoulakis, Die Unruhe des Gastes: Zu einer Schwellenfigur in der Moderne,

Freiburg im Breisgau 2014, p. 81.
21 Martin Selge, Adalbert Stifter: Poesie aus dem Geist der Naturwissenschaft, Stuttgart

1976, p. 113. See also Ilse Jahn, ‘Biologische Fragestellungen in der Epoche der
Aufklärung (18. Jahrhundert)’, in Ilse Jahn (ed.), Geschichte der Biologie: Theorien,

attended while a graduate student at Harvard, Eliot had attended the full
course in ‘Philosophy 206: Seminary in Psychology’ given by Professor
Hugo Münsterberg.19 The seminar’s subject for the year was ‘Mind and
Body’, and included attending Münsterberg’s introductory undergraduate
lectures in psychology as part of the course. It might be reasonable, then,
to speculate that Eliot himself was among the ‘four hundred young men
students in psychology’ who were Münsterberg’s experimental subjects
in the passage above. In taking both the ‘Seminary in Psychology’ and
attending the compulsory lecture series, Eliot would surely have been, in
any case, aware of the research interests which would become Psychology
and Industrial Efficiency, since Münsterberg had a habit of testing out his
current ideas on his students whilst he was writing a new volume. Certainly,
Münsterberg’s preoccupations with the conjunctions between human
attention, work, fatigue, and the efficiency of economic production seem
to dovetail with Eliot’s own personal and literary preoccupations with
waste, attention, monotony, energy, and the limits of the human subject
in modernity. In his essay on the critic Gilbert Murray, written for the
periodical Art & Letters and collected the same year in his first volume of
literary criticism, The Sacred Wood (1920), Eliot suggests that ‘[a] number of
sciences have sprung up in an almost tropical exuberance which undoubt-
edly excites our imagination, and the garden, not unnaturally, has come to
resemble a jungle […] Wilhelm Wundt, who early fertilized the soil, would
hardly recognize the resulting vegetation’.20 Within this tropical profusion
of discourses, Eliot, too, was continually engaged, throughout the late teens
and early twenties, in anxiety about the production of his work (academic,
literary, and vocational); his own sense of vocation, and the relationship
between stimulation, fatigue, and monotony – and, of course, in ‘how to
produce the best possible work’.
19 Copies of Eliot’s own list of his graduate courses are reproduced in both the Hayward

Bequest at King’s College, Cambridge, and in the Houghton Library at Harvard.
20 T. S. Eliot, ‘Euripides and Professor Murray’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The

Critical Edition, ed. Ronald Schuchard, London and Baltimore, MD 2014–present,
II, pp. 195–201: p. 198.
360 Sarah Cain

After the war, as he continually juggled his everyday work as a clerk at
Lloyds Bank with critical writing and editing, Eliot began to fear that he
would never again be able to produce poetic work of the same standard as
Prufrock and Other Observations. Eliot’s parents had worried that he had
ruined his academic career and missed his vocation, and Eliot himself
confided in his brother, Henry, his fear that ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock’ might be a ‘swan song’, and that he might never equal it.21 Writing
to Henry two months later, he worried that he was wasting his literary
talents, admitting that ‘I have not had time to pursue my literary con-
nections, and overwork is telling on the quality of my production’.22 His
letters from the late teens and twenties, after he left Harvard to work in
London, betray a constant concern with the possibility of not being able
to work; of not fulfilling his vocation; of not being able to conserve and
best use his own mental and physical energy. His work at the bank was
not as insignificant as we would understand today by the term ‘clerk’: it
resembled a junior investment banking role, and Eliot found it stressful and
anxiety-inducing, not least because he really wanted to use his mental and
physical resources on intellectual work and the labour of writing, rather
than quotidian commuting and the financial life of the City. He had had
a long history of physical and nervous health difficulties, from having to
wear a truss for a hernia as a child; to his later famous retreat to Margate
and Lausanne, during the composition of The Waste Land, to be treated
for neurasthenia by the Swiss nerve specialist Roger Vittoz.23
What is more marked following his experience of his courses in Harvard
psychology and philosophy, however, is how his understanding of mental
and physical strain became increasingly couched in Münsterberg’s language
of the relationship between bodily attention and economic efficiency.
Though some Eliot scholars have noted, largely in passing, the graduate
courses he took at Harvard, few so much as mention Münsterberg. None
have appreciated his significance as a cultural and intellectual figure in his
21 Eliot to Henry Eliot, 6 September 1916, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, ed. John Haffenden,

20 vols, London 2009–present, I, p. 165.
22 Eliot to Henry Eliot, 5 November 1916, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, I, p. 173.

23 See The Letters of T. S. Eliot, I, passim.


own right, nor have delved into his writings enough in order to realize that
Eliot was amongst the cohort of students on which he would test out some
of the experimental observations of his major psychological research.24 The
very few critics who have noted Eliot’s interest in Münsterberg’s psychol-
ogy courses have considered him as merely part of the general background
of Harvard intellectual history of the teens and twenties. Manju Jain, for
example, classes Münsterberg, somewhat erroneously, as a proponent of a
philosophical idealism whose primary interest is within ‘the idealist con-
sensus at Harvard’; and mentions him only glancingly throughout what is
otherwise a reasonably comprehensive account of Eliot’s early intellectual
interests.25
Instead, however, I suggest that Münsterberg’s influence on Eliot is
more significant than has previously been assumed; and that while Eliot
was undertaking his graduate work in philosophy at Harvard during the
early teens, and beginning to draft the work that would become Prufrock
and Other Observations and The Waste Land, his writing and thinking about
the mind, the body, work, and ‘monotony’ became charged with these new
psychological vocabularies of measurement, energy and industrial efficiency,
and of the physiology of the nervous system as a site of both mental and
economic production and exhaustion. This is most explicit in some of
Eliot’s letters which date from the period of working on The Waste Land,
in which his neurasthenic worries about his physical and mental health are
inflected by anxieties about work, energy, waste, and concentration: ‘[t]he
great thing I am trying to learn is how to use all my energy without waste,
to be calm when there is nothing to be gained by worry, and to concentrate
24 Scholars of Eliot’s early intellectual influences have largely overlooked the connec-

tion with early Harvard experimental psychology: M. A. R. Habib, for example,
in The Early T. S. Eliot and Western Philosophy, Cambridge 1999, near-completely
ignores the American context of Harvard’s indigenous philosopher-psychologists
such as William James, Josiah Royce, and Münsterberg. Even Robert Crawford, in
his recent and very full biography of Eliot’s life up until 1922, makes only a couple
of very brief references to Münsterberg throughout his lengthy description of Eliot’s
Harvard years: see Crawford, Young Eliot, p. 113, pp. 172–3.
25 Manju Jain, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy: The Harvard Years, Cambridge and

New York 1992, pp. 69–71.
362 Sarah Cain

without effort […] I realise that our family was never taught mental, any
more than physical hygiene, and as a result we are a seedy lot.’26 And, again
in relation to his anxieties about literary production: ‘I was aware that the
principal trouble was that I have been losing power of concentration and
attention, as well as becoming a prey to habitual worry and dread of the
future: consequently, wasting far more energy than I used, and wearing
myself out continually.’27 Here, Eliot’s letters inflect existing discourses of
nervous illness or neurasthenia with physiological vocabularies of atten-
tion, production, and energy that specifically recall Münsterberg’s psycho-
technics, with its stress on the optimum mental and physical reserves of
the human subject and its key concerns with attention and concentration.
Chiming with wider modernist literary anxieties about the intersec-
tions between the human subject and modernity – especially the demands
of modernity that human subjects be unceasingly economically productive,
efficient, or mechanistic – Münsterberg’s discourse of the physiology of
monotony and repetition seems to haunt not only Eliot’s letters but also
his poetry. The Waste Land’s morbid interest in the deadening effects of
modern life is particularly evident in its representation of wasted energy
and the monotony of working life. In the first section of the poem, ‘The
Burial of the Dead’, an urban crowd commutes to the living death of work:
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.28
26 Eliot to Henry Eliot, 13 December 1921, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, I, p. 641. Emphasis

in the original.
27 Eliot to Sidney Waterlow, 19 December 1921, Letters of T. S. Eliot, I, p. 617.

28 T. S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’, in The Complete Poems and Plays, London 1969,

pp. 59–80: p. 62 (lines 60–8).

a true follower of Linnaeus, was the first to discover the sexual organs of
mosses. In 1779 he sketched his discovery in a short essay and announced
a more detailed and reliable description that followed three years later in
a monograph.27 When, in The Kiss of Sentze, Walchon mentions books
about moss classification that he owns and makes use of,28 we can imagine
that he refers to books like these.
The analogy between the human and the botanical family system in
Stifter’s tale turns out to be a structure that informs the text, including
the central kissing plot. It is not by chance that Walchon chooses to col-
lect and study mosses, of all plants. It is a long time before Rupert knows
who kissed him in the dark and it seems that he and Hiltiburg need a long
time to find out about their passionate feelings towards each other. Their
‘cryptogamic’ passion, too, remains latent for some time and when Rupert
recognizes the kiss it becomes the solution to the generational problem of
the Sentze family, just as it took a long time for the sexuality of mosses to
be discovered which, in its turn, turned out to be the key to the problem
of moss classification.
There is, however, another correspondence between bryology and
Stifter’s text. Many biologists had doubts about the sexual reproduction
of plants until the mid-nineteenth century.29 There were competing theo-
ries claiming that they propagate either asexually or sexually, and despite
Hedwig’s discoveries moss belonged to those plants which were persistently
regarded as asexual.30 It took another discovery that decided this issue
in a seemingly diplomatic way: German botanist Wilhelm Hofmeister
managed to compare the reproduction of ferns and mosses in much more
detail than had been possible before and demonstrated the law that gov-
erns the whole process: the alternation of generations. According to this
law, generations that reproduce sexually and those that do not alternate at
27 Johannes Hedwig, Fundamentum historiae naturalis muscorum frondosorum, Leipzig

1782. See Hedwig, ‘Vorläufige Anzeige’, p. 1.
28 KS, p. 165.

29 Vera Eisnerova, ‘Botanische Disziplinen’, in Ilse Jahn (ed.), Geschichte der Biologie,

pp. 314–15.
30 Eisnerova, ‘Botanische Disziplinen’, p. 305.

364 Sarah Cain

In this evening scene, the mirror image of the morning commute of the
city workers in ‘The Burial of the Dead’, the ‘typist’, an emblem of the effi-
ciency of the modern business economy, is defined by her relationship to
her work: the machine of the typewriter. The moment of departure from
economic work into the routine of ‘home […] time’ is one in which, like a
‘taxi throbbing waiting’, the body waits to be occupied once more by some
kind of psychic agency. The deadening effect of the modern economy of
work is echoed in the unfinished and cancelled lines that form part of this
section in the drafts of The Waste Land:
population
(London! your { pop / people is bound upon the wheel!)
pavement
jerky motions poor cheap

Record the movements of these huddled toys
tarnished 32
The ‘jerky motions’ of the people imagined as ‘toys’ follow on from the
‘throbbing’ of the taxi, and the absent-minded, mechanical actions of the
inattentive typist, who later ‘smoothes her hair with automatic hand, /
And puts a record on the gramophone’ (lines 255–6). Their nervous energy
continually exhausted and refilled, London’s ‘pavement toys’ occupy some
kind of mechanistic universe in which the demands of work and production
have emptied out their capacity for productive attention. The ‘throbbing’
of the imagined taxi in ‘The Fire Sermon’ is then transferred, in the fol-
lowing line, to the speaker Tiresias; the repetition of ‘throbbing’ overlays
his suspension ‘between two lives’ with the mechanical idling of the car,
and a consequent image of the car’s emptiness.
Repetition, in fact, is a key feature of The Waste Land; and of Eliot’s
writing more generally. In the short section above on London’s morning
commuters, there are multiple repetitions: ‘so many’ repeated at the end
of two following lines; ‘flowed’ repeated five lines apart, in relation to the
crowd; and a near-repetition of ‘death’ and ‘dead’ six lines apart. Similarly,
32 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including

the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot, London 1971, p. 37.

in the second extract above, not just the word ‘violet’ but the phrase ‘At the
violet hour’ is repeated verbatim, and followed soon after by the variation
‘evening hour’; ‘throbbing’ is repeated in two adjacent lines; there is a near
repetition (with variation) of ‘waits’ and ‘waiting’; and the word ‘home’ is
sounded out three times within the lines ‘Homeward, and brings the sailor
home from sea / The typist home at teatime’. These subtle repetitions and
variations of words and short phrases are typical of the poem: through-
out, snatches of repeated dialogue and phrase echo within and between
the poem’s sections, from the repetition of the Shakespearean ‘Those are
pearls that were his eyes’ (lines 48, 125), which appears in both of the first
and second sections of the poem, to the incantatory repetitions which close
the final lines of the poem: ‘Shantih shantih shantih’ (line 433). The repeti-
tion of key words that resound throughout – rock, dead, eyes, water, noise,
city, nothing, spring, mountains, thunder, amongst others – often recurs,
in slightly different contexts, in different parts of the text: for example,
‘violet light’ appears in the final section, ‘What The Thunder Said’, draw-
ing the reader’s attention to the echo of the earlier ‘violet hour’, in a tech-
nique Eliot employs throughout the text. The repetitions sometimes break
down into performative representations of sound, such as in the imitation
of birdsong (‘Twit twit twit / Jug jug jug jug jug jug’: lines 203–4); noise
(‘Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop’: line 358); or lines suggestive both
of madness and of religious fervour (‘Burning burning burning burning /
O Lord Thou pluckest me out / O Lord Thou pluckest // burning’: lines
308–11). Monotone repetition here serves to reinforce the monotony of
the tolling bells and the poem’s waiting, throbbing, unseeing inhabitants;
it also lends the text itself a sonorous quality of fatigue and foreboding.
Within short spaces of the text, repetitions such as these may catch and
hold the reader’s attention; or, conversely, serve, like the incantations of
‘burning’, to disperse it, scattering the focus of the reader’s eye and mental
concentration and disintegrating into apparently meaningless noise.
This use of repetition and variation is similar to Stein’s experiments
with the sound and visual patterning of repetition: ‘It is easy to change mar-
guerites pointedly. Ever and even ever mainly. Every little Arthur. The dears
with accusation of drawing up. Make it a repetition and find them. In sewn
grammar’, she suggests, in her characteristically charming, and infuriatingly
366 Sarah Cain

resistant, prose.33 Stein’s sound patterning, as in her famous line ‘Rose is a
rose is a rose is a rose’, which first appears in the poem ‘Sacred Emily’ in 1913,
makes a virtue of repetition: each time the same word or phrase is repeated,
the interplay of repetition and variation both looks backwards and drives
the text forwards at the same time.34 This movement both produces and
tracks the processes of readerly attention, with the repeated words echoing
within and between sentences. (Indeed, the relationship between individual
words and the grammar of sentences is often the focus of Stein’s specific
interest in such essays as ‘Sentences’, ‘Saving the Sentence’, ‘Sentences and
Paragraphs’, ‘A Grammarian’, and ‘Arthur A Grammar’, all written between
1927 and 1931 and collected in How to Write.) ‘Grammar is resemblance’,
Stein announces in one of her repetitive grammatical essays:
Resemblance to charging charging up hill but if there is plenty of time they will
coarsen. There is no need of a hill in a flat country a city is a flat country there is no
need of a hill in a city a city is a habit a habit of hyacinths wild hyacinths and a city
all wild hyacinths have the same color and cannot have the same odor. To be disap-
pointed in whatever is said although a great deal of it pleases.35
Here, Stein’s flower references form a curious echo of Eliot’s own ‘O city,
city’, and the repetitions of ‘hyacinths’ in The Waste Land, in which one
voice replies to another:
‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;

‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’
– Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed (lines 35–9)
In her work of the late 1890s in Münsterberg’s Harvard Laboratory, Stein,

along with her fellow student Leon Solomons, had worked on a series of
projects designed to measure the limits of her subjects’ conscious attention,
33 Gertrude Stein, ‘Arthur A Grammar’, in How To Write, Paris 1931, pp. 37–101: p. 48.

34 Gertrude Stein, ‘Sacred Emily’, in Writings 1903–32, ed. Catharine R. Stimpson and

Harriet Chessman, New York 1998, pp. 387–96: p. 395.
35 Stein, ‘Arthur’, p. 59.


including experiments on ‘The Place of Repetition in Memory’, ‘Fluctuation
of Attention’, and ‘The Saturation of Colors’, some of which became part
of her published papers on ‘Motor Automatism’.36 These experiments, in
which subjects were asked to write down repeated words whilst listening
to other texts, or the converse, anticipated Münsterberg’s experiment on
his class of Harvard students: it turned out for Stein, too, that perceived
repetition persisted in disrupting her subjects’ conscious attention to what-
ever else they were listening to or writing.37 Gradually, the repeated words
her subjects heard began to insert themselves, often unconsciously, into the
other stories or tasks they were writing, apparently signalling small break-
downs in conscious attentiveness. The use of repetition and variation in
her own prose might be thought of as not only reflecting the connections
between the Harvard laboratory’s experimental psychology of attention
and concentration, but itself producing a psychic exploration of repeti-
tion and variation in reading and writing. For both Stein and Eliot, in the
effects of repeated words, themes, and grammatical structures, repetition
itself produces moments of focusing or slackening of the reader’s atten-
tion: what Münsterberg might have termed a psychotechnics of reading.
Psychotechnics, literally translated, might be understood as a form
of practical art of the self. This techne of attention and mental efficiency
seems to haunt Eliot’s post-Harvard literary works. Even at the most literal
level, the form of Münsterberg’s experiment on the Harvard psychology
students, quoted at length above, seems to be reproduced in unnerving
form within The Waste Land (and Eliot’s early poems more generally),
in repeated words or phrases which re-occur, sometimes in subtly varied
forms, throughout the texts, but with no clear links between the repeti-
tions other than the simple fact of repetition itself. Münsterberg’s list of
similar or dissimilar ‘names of flowers, or cities, or poets, or parts of the
36 See Gertrude Stein, ‘Cultivated Motor Automatism; a Study of Character in its

Relation to Attention’, Psychological Review 5 (1898), pp. 295–306; John Malcolm
Brinnin, The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World, Boston, MA 1959, p. 29;
Hoffmann, pp. 127–8.
37 See Leon M. Solomons and Gertrude Stein, ‘Normal Motor Automatism’, Psychological

Review 3 (1896), pp. 492–512.
184 Michael Eggers

identify Stifter’s generation story as being modelled on methods of botanical
reproduction, or at least as telling a tale that assimilates human generational
patterns to those of plants.37 We can only speculate whether Stifter, who,
as a teacher of natural history, had profound biological knowledge,38 knew
of the recent scientific findings concerning the alteration of generations.
Even if he had written his story in complete ignorance of Chamisso’s and
Hofmeister’s discoveries, the analogy of moss reproduction and the kissing
regulations of the Sentze is nonetheless apparent. In the text, human history,
exemplified by the house of Sentze, is deeply integrated into nature. Stifter’s
social genealogy follows the laws of organic reproduction in plants as they
were discovered in science shortly before. It would be wrong, therefore,
to describe the use of botanical vocabulary and knowledge in the tale as
merely metaphorical. In this case, the natural and the social sphere simply
cannot be separated. At the same time, well-ordered relations between
generations are literally of vital importance both for the maintenance of
the patrilineal heritage of the Sentze and for the natural reproduction of
mosses. The close association between the social and the biological sphere
inscribed in the story also correlates with the history of the concept of gen-
erations which, according to Parnes, enters biological and social scientific
thinking simultaneously in the first decades of the nineteenth century.39
Stifter’s tale demonstrates how literature can amalgamate scientific and nar-
rative discourses without letting one determine the other. Biology may be
something like a ‘deep structure’ of fictional narrative here, but it remains
implicit, will only be noticed by readers with the respective knowledge
and – most importantly – never actually causes the events of the story.
At the end of the text, ‘evolution’ seems to run its course. Hiltiburg
and Rupert happily marry and ‘es scheint auch von ihnen die Folge aus-
gehen zu wollen’ (a succession seems set to proceed from them [or from
37 See Fountoulakis, Die Unruhe des Gastes, p. 82.

38 See Begemann, ‘Metaphysik und Empirie’, pp. 93–106, for Stifter’s education and

reading in natural history, which was substantial if outdated in some respects.
39 Ohad Parnes, ‘Generationswechsel – eine Figur zwischen Literatur und Mikroskopie’, in

Bernhard J. Dotzler and Sigrid Weigel (eds), ‘fülle der combination’: Literaturforschung
und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Munich 2005, pp. 127–42: p. 128.

Brinnin, John Malcolm, The Third Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World, Boston, MA
1959.
Crawford, Robert, Young Eliot: From St Louis to ‘The Waste Land’, London 2015.
Eliot, T. S., The Complete Poems and Plays, London 1969.
‘Euripides and Professor Murray’, in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical
Edition, ed. Ronald Schuchard, London and Baltimore, MD 2014–present, II,
pp. 195–201.
The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the
Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot, London 1971.
Flowers of Friendship: Letters Written to Gertrude Stein, The, ed. Donald Gallup,
New York 1953.
Habib, M. A. R., The Early T. S. Eliot and Western Philosophy, Cambridge 1999.
Hale, Matthew, Jr, Human Science and Social Order: Hugo Münsterberg and the Origins
of Applied Psychology, Philadelphia, PA 1980.
Hoffman, Michael J., ‘Gertrude Stein in the Psychology Laboratory’, American Quar-
terly 17:1 (1965), pp. 127–32.
Jain, Manju, T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy: The Harvard Years, Cambridge and
New York 1992.
Keller, Phyllis, States of Belonging: German-American Intellectuals and the First World
War, Cambridge, MA 1979.
Landy, Frank J., ‘Hugo Münsterberg: Victim or Visionary?’, Journal of Applied Psy-
chology 77:6 (1992), pp. 787–802.
Langdale, Allan, ‘S(t)imulation of Mind: The Film Theory of Hugo Münsterberg’,
in Langdale (ed.), Hugo Münsterberg on Film: ‘The Photoplay: A Psychological
Study’ and Other Writings, New York 2002, pp. 1–41.
Letters of T. S. Eliot, The, ed. John Haffenden, 20 vols, London 2009–present.
Meyer, Steven, Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing
and Science, Stanford, CA 2001.
Münsterberg, Hugo, ‘The International Congress of Arts and Science’, Journal of
Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 1:1 (1904), pp. 1–8.
The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, New York 1916.
Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, London and New York 1913.
‘Studies from the Harvard Psychological Laboratory, Part I’, Psychological Review
1 (1894), pp. 34–60.
Münsterberg, Margaret, Hugo Münsterberg: His Life and Work, New York 1922.
Nichols, H., ‘The Psychological Laboratory at Harvard’, McClure’s Magazine 1 (1895),
pp. 399–409.
Solomons, Leon M., and Gertrude Stein, ‘Normal Motor Automatism’, Psychological
Review 3 (1896), pp. 492–512.
370 Sarah Cain

Spillman, Jutta, and Lothar Spillmann, ‘The Rise and Fall of Hugo Münsterberg’,
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 29 (1993), pp. 322–38.
Stein, Gertrude, ‘Cultivated Motor Automatism; a Study of Character in its Relation
to Attention’, Psychological Review 5 (1898), pp. 295–306.
How To Write, Paris 1931.
Writings 1903–32, ed. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman, New
York 1998.
Stern, William, ‘Hugo Münsterberg: In Memoriam’, Journal of Applied Psychology 1
(1917), pp. 186–8.
David Wachter
14 Amoeba, Dragonfly, Gazelle: Animal Poetics

Around 1908
abstract
The present chapter analyses the representation of animals in early twentieth-century literary
and scientific texts. Drawing on a constellation of works published around 1908 by Rainer
Maria Rilke, Jakob von Uexküll, and Karl Möbius, I am interested in the notion of animals as
beautiful objects as well as perceiving subjects with genuine forms of agency. The argument
begins with an overview of Karl Möbius’s approach to nature’s beauty in The Aesthetics of
Animal Life and moves on, via Jakob von Uexküll’s Environment and Inner World of Animals,
to selected works from Rilke’s New Poems. In these series of readings I wish to test the assump-
tion that Möbius, Uexküll, and Rilke, respectively, but to a different degree, negotiate a
potential departure from anthropocentrism in an encounter with the non-human. Three
comparable, yet distinctive types of ‘animal poetics’ thus become apparent.
‘Da oben wird das Bild von einer Welt / aus Blicken immerfort erneut und
gilt’ (Up there, the image of a world composed of looking is forever renewed
and remains valid)1 – such is the animal’s perspective on the human world
at the beginning of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem Der Hund (The Dog), writ-
ten and published in 1907 as part of Der Neuen Gedichte anderer Teil (New
Poems, Part II).2 While the dog initially seems to be inferior to its master, it
acquires remarkable agency in the course of the poem: ‘nicht ausgestoßen und
nicht eingereiht’ (not cast out, and not assigned a place either), it establishes
itself as a perceiving, feeling, and acting subject, negotiating its position in a
1 I am most grateful to David Midgley for his valuable assistance with the translation

of quotations from Rilke.
2 Rainer Maria Rilke, Der Hund, in Gedichte 1895 bis 1910, Werke vol. 1, ed. Manfred

Engel and Ulrich Fülleborn, Frankfurt am Main 1996, p. 585.
372 David Wachter

conflict-riddled interaction with the human world into which it finds itself
awkwardly thrown. A few months after this poem was published, the zoologist
Jakob von Uexküll wrote in his seminal study Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere
(Environment and Inner World of Animals): ‘Each varying individual is adapted
to its environment in a different but equally perfect way according to the way
it is constructed, for the way it is constructed largely and actively determines
the animal’s environment.’3 These juxtaposed quotations may already indicate
to what extent the cultural perspective on non-human life underwent decisive
changes at the beginning of the twentieth century.4 Animals in particular were
no longer treated as a passive object of study; rather, their agency came to the
fore in intersected fields of knowledge and artistic production. While Rilke’s
poems on dogs, cats, or gazelles lyrically explore the life of animals as a site of
non-human activity,5 Uexküll’s neo-Kantian biology considers such diverse
species as the amoeba, sea urchin, or dragonfly as constructive producers of
their own perceptive environment. At the same time, the aesthetics of animal
life came to attract academic interest: Karl Möbius, the famous biologist of
sea life, published his Ästhetik der Tierwelt (Aesthetics of Animal Life) in
1908.6 Drawing both on Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms
of Nature, 1899–1904) with its metaphysics of animal beauty and on psycho-
logical aesthetics by Lipps and others, Möbius reflects on the reasons for forms
and shapes to render certain animals beautiful (and others not).
Focusing on the intersection between these approaches to animal life,
this chapter examines a specific constellation of scientific and literary texts.
3 ‘Jedes variierende Individuum ist entsprechend seinem veränderten Bauplan anders,

aber gleich vollkommen seiner Umwelt angepaßt. Denn der Bauplan schafft in weiten
Grenzen selbsttätig die Umwelt des Tieres.’ Jakob von Uexküll, Umwelt und Innenwelt
der Tiere, Berlin 1909, p. 5.
4 These changes recently caught the attention of the Italian philosopher Giorgio

Agamben, whose study Das Offene in turn has played a formative role for the advance-
ment of literary and cultural animal studies.
5 As Karl-Heinz Fingerhut emphasized in his early study, Rilke is probably the first

German-language poet to deal with animals in a more than cursory, superficial
way. See Karl-Heinz Fingerhut, Das Kreatürliche im Werk Rainer Maria Rilkes:
Untersuchungen zur Figur des Tieres, Bonn 1970, pp. 106–14.
6 Karl Möbius, Die Ästhetik der Tierwelt, Jena 1908.


Selge, Martin, Adalbert Stifter: Poesie aus dem Geist der Naturwissenschaft, Stuttgart
1976.
Stifter, Adalbert, Werke und Briefe: Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Alfred
Doppler and Hartmut Laufhütte, Stuttgart 1978ff.
Twellmann, Marcus, ‘Literarische Osculologie nach Adalbert Stifter: Der Kuß von
Sentze’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 128 (2010), pp. 531–44.
Wunschmann, Ernst, ‘Hofmeister, Wilhelm’, in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, ed.
Historische Commission bei der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften,
Leipzig 1875–1912, XII, pp. 644–8.
374 David Wachter

ways in which science and literature textually organize their reflections on
animal perception and its inherent beauty.
My chapter begins with an overview of Karl Möbius’s approach to
nature’s beauty in Die Ästhetik der Tierwelt (The Aesthetics of Animal
Life) and moves on, via Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt und Innenwelt der
Tiere (Environment and Inner World of Animals), to a close analysis of a
selection of poems from Rilke’s Neue Gedichte (New Poems). It finishes
with a brief reflection on the methodological shape of an animal poetics
as it emerges in the course of the argument. My guiding assumption will
be that Möbius, Uexküll, and Rilke, respectively, but to a different degree,
negotiate a potential departure from anthropocentrism in an encounter
with the non-human.10
Nature’s beauty and the limits of aesthetic anthropocentrism:

Karl Möbius
The biologist Karl Möbius is generally considered a founding father of

zoological aesthetics around 1900.11 Unlike his predecessor Ernst Haeckel’s
Art Forms of Nature, which is based on a metaphysical monism, his study
von Uexküll’s Theory of Umwelt and Twentieth-Century Literature’, Semiotica 134

(2001), pp. 553–92; Ralph Köhnen, ‘Wahrnehmung wahrnehmen: Die Poetik der
Neuen Gedichte zwischen Biologie und Phänomenologie: von Uexküll, Husserl und
Rilke’, in Erich Unglaub (ed.), Rilkes Paris 1920 · 1925: Neue Gedichte (Blätter der
Rilke-Gesellschaft 30), Göttingen 2010, pp. 196–211.
10 This consideration became heavily contested during the course of the twentieth cen-

tury, stimulating responses by authors such as Heidegger and Agamben. See Martin
Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt – Endlichkeit – Einsamkeit, in
Gesamtausgabe, vol. 39, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Frankfurt am Main
1983; Giorgio Agamben, Das Offene: Der Mensch und das Tier, trans. Davide Giuriato,
11 On the general importance of Möbius for modern biology, see Lynn K. Nyhart,

Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany, Chicago,
Amoeba, Dragonfly, Gazelle: Animal Poetics Around 1908 375

The Aesthetics of Animal Life claims to rely on empirical research. Drawing
on various species of animals, Möbius seeks to re-introduce nature’s beauty
into aesthetics. He accordingly distances himself from nineteenth-century
philosophers from Hegel to Vischer who had come to focus on the beauty
of artworks, anthropocentrically excluding nature from the field of aesthet-
ics. Möbius’s argument is rooted in psychological aesthetics, mainly Lipps’s
theory of ‘Einfühlung’ (empathy), combined with a scholarly expertise
gained in many years of zoological work. The influence of Lipps, who
had published his seminal study Psychologie der Kunst und des Schönen
(Psychology of Art and the Beautiful) just two years before The Aesthetics
of Animal Life appeared, becomes most apparent in Möbius’s assumption
that beauty is less a feature of the object than a psychological state of the
perceiving subject. While Haeckel had considered the art forms of nature
as structural components of the object itself,12 Möbius explicitly states:
An animal is considered beautiful if the sheer sight of its shape, colour and movement
captivates and pleases the beholder’s attention. Without this influence exerted by
its qualities on the beholder’s emotional state, the animal is not yet beautiful. Only
by pleasing do these qualities assume a beautiful character. One zoologist may be
enthralled by the sight of a jellyfish swimming in clear seawater. Another observer,
having been covered with slime and burned as if by nettles by jellyfish while bathing,
may despise them as ugly beings.13
IL 2009, especially Chapter 4: ‘From Practice to Theory: Karl Möbius and the
Lebensgemeinschaft’, pp. 125–60; for Möbius’s position within an aesthetics of natu-
ral life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Christoph Kockerbeck,
Die Schönheit des Lebendigen: Ästhetische Naturwahrnehmung im 19. Jahrhundert,
Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar 1997.
12 On the basic differences between Haeckel’s objectivism and Möbius’s subjectivism,

see Kockerbeck, Die Schönheit des Lebendigen, pp. 135–8.
13 ‘Ein Tier gilt für schön, wenn der bloße Anblick seiner Gestalt und Farbe und

seiner Bewegungen die Aufmerksamkeit eines Anschauenden fesselt und ihn
erfreut. Ohne diese Einwirkung seiner Eigenschaften auf den Gemütszustand eines
Wahrnehmenden ist das Tier noch nicht schön. Erst dadurch, daß sie gefallen, erh-
alten diese Eigenschaften ihren Schönheitswert. Einen Zoologen entzückt der Anblick
einer im klaren Meerwasser schwimmenden Qualle. Ein Anderer, den Quallen beim
Baden mit Schleim überzogen und wie Nesseln gebrannt haben, verabscheut sie als
häßliche Tiere.’ Möbius, Die Ästhetik der Tierwelt, p. 2.
Charlotte Woodford

Andreas-Salomé’s Novel Das Haus (1921) and
Her Essay ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’
(1900)
abstract
The essay ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’ (Thoughts on the Problem of Love, 1900)
by the prominent German intellectual, Lou Andreas-Salomé, draws on ideas on the evolu-
tion of sexual reproduction from Wilhelm Bölsche’s Love-Life in Nature. The question of
gender identity, for Andreas-Salomé, is thus grounded in the biological, yet her writings
nevertheless show the effect of the biological on the psyche to be far from straightfor-
ward. Andreas-Salomé’s essay conceptualizes feminine subjectivity as firmly connected
to corporeality and she places a particular emphasis on women’s maternal role. Here, the
essay will be read against her novel Das Haus (The House, 1921), which also explores the
psychic power of sexual desire. In Das Haus, Andreas-Salomé engages from a psychoana-
lytic perspective with the role of the feminine as representative of the Heimat, and draws
attention to the ambivalent relationship between the erotic power of the foreign and a
primal longing for homecoming.
It is small wonder that the title of Lou Andreas-Salomé’s essay ‘Gedanken

über das Liebesproblem’ (Thoughts on the Problem of Love, 1900) alludes
to erotic desire as a problem, given the taboos on the expression of female
sexuality around 1900.1 But for Andreas-Salomé, sexuality is also a problem
in the sense of an enigma, a complex combination of the body’s psychic
1 Lou Andreas-Salomé, ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’, in Die Erotik: Vier

Aufsätze, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer, Munich 1979, pp. 47–73. All page references are taken
from this edition. First publ. in Neue deutsche Rundschau 11 (1900), pp. 1009–27.

due to their ‘regularly curved and curled horns directing the gaze towards
the head with its large and friendly eyes’,15 the hippopotamus’s disadvanta-
geous shape is strongly emphasized: ‘The neck is short and as thick as the
trunk, the head large and heavy, the ears small, the stupidly goggling eyes
protrude from each side of the face.’16 Judgements of this kind reveal that
Möbius’s aesthetics remains closely tied to a human ideal. His anthropo-
centric orientation is explicitly reflected: ‘Among all animals, mammals are
aesthetically most comprehensible to us, because they are physically and
emotionally closer to us than any other species.’17 While Möbius seems
to raise awareness of the aesthetic wonders of animal life, he exclusively
focuses on the psyche of human observers, whose sovereign gaze is thus
required for nature’s beauty to emerge. In The Aesthetics of Animal Life,
animals nowhere enter the scene as perceiving – let alone aesthetically
sensitive – subjects.18
Poetics of non-human perception: Jakob von Uexküll
Compared to Möbius’s Aesthetics of Animal Life, Uexküll’s Environment

and Inner World of Animals establishes a fundamentally different kind
of animal poetics. Uexküll seeks to understand the sensory apparatus of
animals in relation to their environment. Hence it is an aesthetics in the
Greek sense of aiesthesis, meaning perception. What follows from this
15 ‘gesetzmäßig gebogene und geringelte Hörner, die den Blick auf den Kopf und große

freundliche Augen hinlenken’. Ibid. p. 91.
16 ‘Der Hals ist kurz, ebenso dick wie der Rumpf, der Kopf groß und schwer, die Ohren

klein, die Augen treten dummglotzend aus der Gesichtshälfte hervor.’ Ibid. p. 93.
17 ‘Unter allen Tieren sind uns die Säugetiere ästhetisch am besten verständlich, weil

sie uns leiblich und seelisch näher stehen als alle anderen Tierklassen.’ Ibid. p. 89.
18 The case could potentially be different for Möbius’s article ‘Können die Tiere

Schönheit wahrnehmen und empfinden?’, Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preußischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 22 June 1906, 301–9.
378 David Wachter

perspective is a much more radical displacement of anthropocentrism than
Möbius’s sensualist, yet secretly idealistic emphasis on harmonious forms
and their appeal to the human beholder. Uexküll’s theory could even be
considered theriocentric (in the sense of being centred on animals) in so
far as it emphasizes the constructive agency exercised by animals, which
perceive their surroundings and act within them. This move towards an
understanding of animals as perceptual agents depends on a neo-Kantian
epistemology.19 Uexküll strongly relies on Kant’s understanding of percep-
tion and cognition as a transcendental activity by which subjects, rather
than approaching an independent sphere of objective things, constitute
the world in which they live. This procedure, understood by Kant as spe-
cifically human, is generalized by Uexküll to the entirety of animal life. In
order for the perception of diverse species to be understood, our human
perspective on the world needs to be methodically excluded from scientific
research: ‘Our anthropocentric perspective must progressively retreat into
the background and the animal’s view must be allowed to become the deci-
sive factor.’20 The idealist biologist accordingly rejects popular Darwinism,
particularly in the guise of Haeckel, whose supposedly materialist monism
he acidly despises as pernicious to cultural life.21
As the title of Uexküll’s study suggests, the terms Umwelt and Innenwelt
are crucial to his understanding of the interaction between an animal and
its surroundings. While the alternative term Umgebung means human
environment (or surroundings), Umwelt designates the specific world
seen through the eyes of each species. Uniting a Kantian epistemology
19 This philosophical orientation is convincingly addressed in Aldona Pobojewska,

‘New Biology – Jakob von Uexküll’s Umweltlehre’, Semiotica 134 (2001), pp. 323–39.
20 ‘Unsere anthropozentrische Betrachtungsweise muß immer mehr zurücktreten und

der Standpunkt des Tieres der allein ausschlaggebende werden.’ Uexküll, Umwelt
und Innenwelt der Tiere, p. 6.
21 This rejection remains somewhat latent in Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere. It moves to

the centre of the argument, however, in Uexküll’s cultural criticism formulated around
the same time. See Jakob von Uexküll, ‘Die Umrisse der kommenden Weltanschauung’,
Die neue Rundschau 18:1 (1907), pp. 641–61, where he fervently rejects the ‘zersetzende
Einfluß des Haeckelismus auf das geistige Leben der Massen’ (corrosive influence of
Haeckelianism on the spiritual life of the masses, p. 646).

with a physiological approach to sensory perception, Uexküll ascribes to
each species a specific manner of construction which organizes the world
according to that animal’s physiological set-up. Each animal thus forms
a specific Umwelt according to its needs. Uexküll considers this interac-
tion between the animal and its world as a physiological Funktionskreis
(functional circle) between Merkwelt (perceptive environment), Innenwelt
and Wirkwelt (the environment with which the animal interacts).22 The
animal selects particular impulses from its surroundings. Having entered
the Innenwelt through sensory receptors, these impulses are transformed
into stimuli and transmitted either directly between nerves and muscles (as
in simple organisms) or via a central nervous system (as in more complex
organisms). The muscular activity, that is to say the animal’s behaviour in
reaction to incoming stimuli, is transmitted via the effectors towards the
external world, which thus becomes the animal’s specific Wirkwelt.
In his later work Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und
Menschen (A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Men),23 Uexküll illus-
trates this functional understanding of perception with the famous example
of the tick’s simple yet fascinating life.24 Having reached a twig on a tree by
use of a vague sense of light, the tick is able to wait for years until its two
selective features can come into play: its sense for butyric acid enables it
to perceive the approach of a mammal, and having dropped on its victim’s
skin, its sense for body temperature allows it to drink blood, whereupon it
deposits its eggs and dies quickly. As simple as it may appear, the tick’s sen-
sory apparatus is seen by Uexküll as a selective mechanism in its own right.
In Environment and Inner World of Animals, Uexküll focuses on inver-
tebrates such as the amoeba and sea urchin, as well as the dragonfly, and
scrutinizes their physiological set-up. With constructive activities present
22 For a concise outline of this functional circle see Thure von Uexküll, ‘Die

Umweltforschung als subjekt- und objektumgreifende Naturforschung’, in Jakob von
Uexküll and Georg Kriszat, Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen:
Bedeutungslehre, Frankfurt am Main 1970, pp. XXIII–XLVIII, especially p. XXXVf.
23 Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Men, trans. Joseph D.

O’Neil, Minneapolis, MN 2010.
24 See Uexküll and Kriszat, Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen.

380 David Wachter

everywhere, Uexküll distinguishes between complex animals with a cen-
tral nervous system and primitive animals without one. Drawing again on
Kant, who had developed the notion of a Schema in order to indicate an
intermediary faculty between concepts given a priori and the empirical
world, Uexküll interprets the central nervous system as a Gegenwelt (coun-
terworld) mirroring the spatial structures of the animal’s environment and
allowing it to distinguish between different types of object. In particular
the faculty of vision – with the stages of moto-, icono- and chronorecep-
tion – enables more complex animals to construct precise objects out of
undifferentiated impulses.
While Uexküll generally departs from anthropocentrism, he frequently
describes physiological processes as mechanisms. Together with metaphors
such as ‘Getriebe’25 (gearing), the term ‘functional circle’ suggests that
Uexküll’s transcendental view on the organization of life as an ‘übermasch-
inelle Tätigkeit’ (more than mechanical activity) strangely contrasts with his
analysis of predetermined procedures of the senses.26 His notion of a func-
tional circle correspondingly oscillates between mechanistic formulations
such as ‘all animals are machines answering to effects from the outer world’,27
and a strong emphasis on animals as autonomously selecting subjects, such
as the claim that ‘the way the receptors are constructed alone determines
which effects from the outer world an animal should interact with’.28 This
tension between active and passive may be due to Uexküll’s physiological
methodology based on empirical observation. Even when he uses the term
‘Innenwelt’, he nowhere suggests a psychological understanding of animals
as emotional subjects. Neither does he extend his approach in the direc-
tion of a theory of beauty, be it an interest in the aesthetic sensitivity of
animals or an account of the impression they make on a human beholder.
His theory of Umwelt seems to develop an animal poetics only in so far as
it emphasizes the poietic, the constructive aspect inherent in each species’
25 Uexküll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere, p. 54.

26 Ibid. p. 26.

27 ‘[A]lle Tiere sind Antwortmaschinen auf Wirkungen der Außenwelt’. Ibid. p. 55.

28 ‘daß die Bauart der Rezeptoren eines jeden Tiers souverän darüber entscheidet, mit

welchen Wirkungen der Außenwelt das Tier Beziehungen eingehen soll’. Ibid. p. 55.

Haus, like Andreas-Salomé’s early novel Ma (1901), reveals her fascination
with the idealized maternal feminine, embodied here in the mother figure,
Anneliese.10 Through the figure of the self-sacrificing Anneliese and the
psychological significance of the maternal bond to her adult son, Balduin,
Andreas-Salomé explores not just familial ties but also longing for the
home and homeland (Heimat) as a further manifestation of this longing
for lost unity. The concept of Heimat grew in significance in Germany in
the early twentieth century, as a point of stability in the face of rapid social
change.11 Motherly figures often have a representative function in literature
engaged with Heimat, and the concept of Heimat is itself strongly gen-
dered. According to the Staatslexikon from 1927, ‘Heimat ist mütterlich,
ist Lebenschoß’ (Heimat is motherly, is the womb).12 In the equivalence
made in that quotation between longing for the mother and for the home,
the image of the womb is a telling one: the concept of Heimat expresses
longing for lost unity through the desire for a home which can no longer
be recaptured: ‘Man kann sie Heimat nennen, leben aber kann man nicht
mehr darin’ (you can call it your home, but you can no longer live there,
Das Haus, 85). Similarly, in the maternal bond is an unconscious longing
to recreate the lost union with the mother. As Lou Andreas-Salomé sug-
gests: ‘Unser erstes Erlebnis ist, bemerkenswerter Weise, ein Entschwund’
(our first experience, remarkably, is of irrevocable disappearance).13 Desire
thus derives an unconscious component from a bodily memory of unity.
In Andreas-Salomé’s theoretical writings, a focus on the emancipatory
nature of the erotic draws, among other sources, on Nietzsche’s polemical
10 See Muriel Cormican, Women in the Works of Lou Andreas-Salomé: Negotiating

Identity, Rochester, NY 2009, pp. 45–68; and Muriel Cormican, ‘Authority and
Resistance: Women in Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Das Haus’, Women in German Yearbook
14 (1998), pp. 127–42.
11 See Elizabeth Boa and Rachel Palfreyman, Heimat — A German Dream: Regional

Loyalties and National Identity in German Culture 1890–1990, Oxford 2000, p. 2.
12 ‘Heimat’, Staatslexikon, 5th edn, ed. Görres-Gesellschaft, Freiburg 1926–32, 5 vols,

2, 57, cited by Gisela Ecker (ed.), Kein Land in Sicht: Heimat — weiblich?, Munich
1997, p. 14.
13 Lou Andreas-Salomé, Lebensrückblick: Grundriß einiger Lebenserinnerungen, 2nd

rev. edn., ed. Ernst Pfeiffer, Frankfurt am Main 1968, p. 9.
382 David Wachter

charming work of art. Within a foreign world it seems to have created its
own world, where it quietly hangs, like a door from secure hinges.’31
In the chapter on amoeba terricola it thus seems that Uexküll, while not
specifically interested in animal beauty, uses aesthetic images strategically
in order to render his view on the animal’s genuine activity more persua-
sive. Comparable strategies re-appear in his final chapter on the dragon-
fly, a complex organism endowed with a counterworld based on a central
nervous system. This chapter counterbalances mechanical physiology with
metaphors of autonomous agency, and it combines an acute physiological
description with repeated analogies to art. The dragonfly appears here as an
artist whose painting creates a landscape of its own.32 As I shall mention
only briefly here, this strategy employs metaphors for a more vivid depic-
tion of animals as autonomous agents, but it also entails an increasing use
of political images: ‘Thus its existence by no means resembles a servitude
forced upon it by the so-called struggle for life, but rather the life of a free
individual in its own house.’33
Animal gazes in lyrical form: Rainer Maria Rilke
Moving on to Rilke’s animal poems, we face the question of how his lyri-
cal work fits into the constellation of issues mapped out in the preceding
argument. To what extent do his poems on gazelles, cats, flamingos, or the
famous panther explore animal agency? Are they devoted to physiological
perception, the beauty of natural life, or a combination of both perspectives?
31 ‘Betrachten wir jetzt rückblickend Amoeba terricola, so gewinnen wir den Eindruck

eines allerliebsten Kunstwerks, das in einer fremden Welt sich seine eigene Welt
geschaffen, in der sie sich ruhig, wie in sicheren Angeln schwebend, hält.’ Ibid. p. 39.
32 See ibid. p. 243.

33 ‘So gleicht ihr Dasein durchaus nicht einer Knechtschaft, welche ihr der sogenannte

Kampf ums Dasein aufzwingt, sondern vielmehr dem freien Wohnen im eigenen
Haus.’ Ibid. p. 247.

From a biographical point of view, Rilke’s general interest in natural sciences
is beyond doubt.34 As early as 1903, when the first poems that were to be
collected as New Poems in 1907 were written, he contemplated studying
life sciences. In a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, the poet confessed his
longing for a personal guide who might introduce him to an as yet unfa-
miliar field of knowledge: ‘Denn: sich an jemanden Wissenden von Fall
zu Fall direct und fragend wenden dürfen, wäre unendlich viel für mich,
unendlich lebendiger Zufluß und große Ermuthigung’ (For the chance to
approach a knowledgeable person directly with my questions from time to
time would be infinitely important for me, an infinitely lively influx and
great encouragement).35 Following an encounter in 1905 with Countess
Luise von Schwerin, Uexküll’s mother-in-law, Rilke regarded Uexküll as
a potential ‘Rater und Helfer’ (counsellor and supporter) and initiated a
correspondence in letters as well as a visit to Schloß Friedelhausen, where
they discussed Kant.36 Throughout his life, Rilke remained interested in
the scientist’s work and studied his publications, mainly the popular books
Bausteine zu einer biologischen Weltanschauung (Elements of a Biological
Weltanschauung, 1913) and Biologische Briefe an eine Dame (Biological
Letters to a Lady, 1920), where Uexküll presents his theory of Umwelt in
a simplified format and continues his idealist attacks against Darwinism.
Uexküll, in turn, commented on Rilke’s poetry, occasionally criticized the
New Poems, but enthusiastically praised the panther poem for its accuracy of
biological observation.37 The two writers fundamentally share an emphasis
34 For Rilke’s biographical contact to Uexküll, see Herwig, ‘The Unwitting Muse’,

pp. 555–60.
35 Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Briefwechsel, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer,

Frankfurt 1975, p. 168 (letter of 13 May 1904).
36 Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe aus den Jahren 1904–7, ed. Ruth Sieber-Rilke and Carl

Sieber, Leipzig 1939, p. 71 (letter of 4 May 1905, to Countess Schwerin).
37 ‘[…] daß Sie ein hervorragendes Talent für Biologie und für die vergleichende

Psychologie besitzen, haben Sie in Ihrem Gedicht ‘Der Panther’ bewiesen. Die
Beobachtung, die Sie dort entwickeln, ist meisterhaft’ ([…] in your poem The Panther
you have demonstrated your extraordinary talent for biology and comparative psy-
chology. The observation developed there is masterful). See Gudrun von Uexküll,
Jakob von Uexküll: Seine Welt und seine Umwelt: Eine Biographie, Hamburg 1964,
384 David Wachter

on observation (‘Betrachtung des Lebendigen’ – observation of life)38
summed up by Gudrun von Uexküll in her biography of her husband: ‘The
gift of observation and pictorial vision united Rilke and Jakob.’39
With a closer look at a few of the New Poems, we shall now consider
how this attitude of precise observation informs Rilke’s poetic account
of animals. In a series of brief readings from Die Gazelle (The Gazelle)
Der Panther (The Panther) and Die Fensterrose (The Rose Window), I shall
examine the assumption that Rilke’s poems remain sensitive to natural
beauty (The Gazelle), while at the same time exploring animal agency,
particularly with regard to non-human perception (The Panther, The Rose
Window). Can these poems be read as a departure from anthropocen-
trism? How are they related either to Möbius’s aesthetics or to Uexküll’s
physiology?
Die Gazelle
Gazella Dorcas
Verzauberte: wie kann der Einklang zweier

erwählter Worte je den Reim erreichen,
der in dir kommt und geht, wie auf ein Zeichen.
Aus deiner Stirne steigen Laub und Leier,
und alles Deine geht schon im Vergleich

durch Liebeslieder, deren Worte, weich,
wie Rosenblätter, dem, der nicht mehr liest,
sich auf die Augen legen, die er schließt:
pp. 126–32: p. 132. This observation is shared by the zoologist Hans Mislin, a disciple
of Uexküll, in ‘Rilkes Partnerschaft mit der Natur’, Blätter der Rilke-Gesellschaft 3
(1974), pp. 39–48.
38 Uexküll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere, p. 1.

39 ‘Rilke und Jakob verband die Gabe der Beobachtung und des bildhaften Sehens.’

G. von Uexküll, Jakob von Uexküll, p. 129. The issue of a new kind of poetic visual-
ity in the New Poems has been emphasized repeatedly in Rilke scholarship. For an
introduction to this issue, see Manfred Engel and Ulrich Fülleborn, ‘Neue Gedichte
und der Neuen Gedichte anderer Teil: Kommentar’, in Rainer Maria Rilke, Gedichte
1895 bis 1910, Werke, vol. 1, ed. Manfred Engel and Ulrich Fülleborn, Frankfurt am
Main 1996, pp. 898–1005: pp. 906–8.

um dich zu sehen, hingetragen, als
wäre mit Sprüngen jeder Lauf geladen
und schösse nur nicht ab, solang der Hals
das Haupt ins Horchen hält: wie wenn beim Baden

im Wald die Badende sich unterbricht:
den Waldsee im gewendeten Gesicht.40
(Enchanted one: how can the harmony of two selected words ever match the rhyme
that comes and goes in you, as at a given sign. From your brow leaves and lyre rise,
and everything about you passes through the similes of love songs, the words of
which settle, soft as rose petals, on the eyes of someone no longer reading, and he
shuts them – in order to see you, carried along as if each leg were loaded with leaps
but not discharged as long as your neck holds your head in a listening position, like
a woman bathing in a forest pool who stops, the pool reflected in her turned face.)
Referring to the gazelle’s scientific classification, the subheading explicitly

connects this sonnet to zoological knowledge. It addresses a beautiful
animal, whose aesthetic appeal is evoked by an articulate use of sound effects
such as the repetitive assonance ‘ei’ and various alliterations such as ‘Stirne
steigen’ or ‘Laub und Leier’ in line 4. The first two quatrains reflect on the
relationship between art and the gazelle’s natural beauty, negotiating unity
and difference in a complex way. For while the gazelle is characterized in line
2 by ‘rhyme’, an unspecific sound figure which metonymically evokes the
animal’s poetic nature a priori, human art depends on constructing poetic
beauty a posteriori, in an ‘Einklang zweier / erwählter Worte’ (harmony of
two selected words). The consonance thus achieved is caught in the tension
between ‘ein’ and ‘zwei’, and characterized by an intrinsic break at the verse’s
end, which is somewhat insecurely bridged by enjambment. While poetry’s
potential to encompass the animal’s beauty is interrogated in the phrase
‘wie kann […] erreichen’ (how can […] ever match), which questions the
40 Rilke, Gedichte 1895 bis 1910, pp. 469–70. There is a published translation of Rilke’s

poems discussed here: The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen
Mitchell, London 1987, p. 27 (The Gazelle) and p. 25 (The Panther). But unless oth-
erwise stated, all translations here are my own.

durch die ungeheure Weltenkraft der Liebe, der Zeugung, des ewigen
Gebärens und Werdens’ (you are connected with all these beings who
were you and yet not you before all the ages of time, through the enor-
mous strength of the world’s love, of generation, of eternal reproduction
and becoming).20 Bölsche’s Liebesleben offers a way of making sense of the
human through a world-view which emphasizes the natural world and the
human mind as one and as comprised of the same matter.21 In ‘Gedanken
über das Liebesproblem’, and ‘Die Erotik’, Andreas-Salomé takes up some
of Bölsche’s imagery, in particular the theme of the ‘Liebesleben der Tiere’
(love life of animals) as analogous to human sexuality (‘Gedanken’, 56). She
suggests that the human experience of sexual desire replicates unconsciously
the longing to recreate the complete physical fusion of the micro-organisms
which form our primitive ancestors:
Blicken wir in das Reich niederster Lebewesen hinab, so finden wir, daß die kleinen
Amöben sich begatten und fortpflanzen, indem sie sich paarweise ineinanderdrücken,
absolut zu einem Lebewesen verschmelzen und dieses wiederum in Kinder-Amöben
zerfallen lassen. (‘Gedanken’, 75–6)
(When we look down on the realm of the lowest organisms we find that the small
amoebae unite and reproduce by pressing themselves against each other in pairs
and fusing absolutely to make a single life form before allowing this to split up into
children-amoebae.)
She emphasizes that human consciousness and the human libido are
descended from a consciousness that is attributed to the most primitive life
forms and imprinted with a physiological memory of a primal harmony.22
As Monika Fick and Wolfgang Riedel have noted, Andreas-Salomé,
like Bölsche, argues that body and psyche are formed of the same sub-
stance, a monist position which undermines the dualism of the Kantian
20 Bölsche, Liebesleben, I, p. 6.

21 See Nicholas Saul, ‘Foundations and Oceans: Monistic Religion and Literature in

Haeckel and Bölsche’, in Ritchie Robertson and Manfred Engel (eds), Kafka, Religion
and Modernity, Würzburg 2014, pp. 55–70.
22 Brinker-Gabler refers to such a memory as ‘bio-psychic’, in Image in Outline, p. 70.


The final tercet gives the sonnet’s movement a new turn. Virtually an
ideal realization of Rilke’s poetics of Verwandlung (transformation),46 this
surprising turn takes up the issue of borders that appears to be contested
throughout Rilke’s poem.47 Here the border between inside and outside
is destabilized; the motif of interruption implies an inward turn by which
the gazelle perceives its surroundings as part of its interior world. It would
certainly be possible to read this as an early instance of what Rilke later
came to call, in a famous phrase more often cited than read in its context,
a ‘Weltinnenraum’ (inner world space).48 However, in the present context
it can be related to Uexküll’s functional circle. If this biological concept
entails a notion of balanced interconnection between an animal’s external
Umwelt and its internal Innenwelt, which the animal does not perceive
as separate from each other, the poet seems to experiment with this con-
junction.49 This perspective on the poem’s ending sheds new light on its
beginning as well. The ‘Einklang’ (harmony) may then connote Uexküll’s
assumption that animals are adapted into their Umwelt, and ‘in dir’ (in
you) connotes an Innenwelt that is influenced by signs, that is, by impulses
that are interpreted as stimuli by the animals’ specific senses.
46 For this poetic figure, see Judith Ryan, Umschlag und Verwandlung: Poetische Struktur

und Dichtungstheorie in R. M. Rilkes Lyrik der mittleren Periode (1907–14), Munich
1972; and Wolfgang G. Müller, ‘Neue Gedichte/Der Neuen Gedichte anderer Teil’, in
Manfred Engel (ed.), Rilke-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung, Darmstadt 2004,
pp. 297–318.
47 It once again connotes the sphere of myths, here embodied in the allusion to the

Greek goddess Artemis bathing in a secret pond.
48 The term, often cited as a keyword in Rilke’s late poetology, is part of the poem Es

winkt zur Frühlung fast aus allen Dingen (1914): ‘Durch alle Wesen reicht der eine
Raum: / Weltinnenraum’ (One space extends through all creatures: inner world
space). See Rainer Maria Rilke, Gedichte 1910 bis 1926, Werke, vol. 2, ed. Manfred
Engel and Ulrich Fülleborn, Frankfurt am Main 1996, p. 113.
49 Until his very late writings, Rilke remained fascinated by the idea that a clear dis-

tinction between inside and outside, which is at the centre of man’s predicament, is
absent in the animals’ perception of the world. The famous Eigth Duino Elegy most
influentially testifies to this fascination. See Erich Unglaub, ‘Zu Rilkes Konzepten
von Welt und Umwelt’, in Andrea Hübener (ed.), Rilkes Welt: Festschrift für August
Stahl zum 75. Geburtstag, Frankfurt am Main 2009, pp. 65–75: p. 68.
388 David Wachter

However, this assimilation to a scientific context should not ignore
fundamental differences between Uexküll and Rilke as they become appar-
ent in the present context. The poem should not simply be read as a lyrical
equivalent of Uexküll’s theory, written two years in advance of Environment
and Inner World of Animals. Rather, The Gazelle differs from its scientific
context precisely by developing a similar, yet autonomous imagery. The result
is a striking change of perspective. For while Rilke’s poem certainly relies on
observing the animal’s movements, it departs from the premises of natural-
istic description by focusing its attention on a quasi-mystical transgression
of spatial borders between inside and outside world in the poem’s final verse.
Rilke’s poem The Gazelle thus artfully evokes the beauty of the animal as
it transcends the limits of human art. While his praise of the gazelle’s delicate
movements apparently conforms to Möbius’s aesthetics of nature, Rilke’s poem
strikingly surpasses an anthropocentric aesthetics by exploring a conjunction
between the animal and its environment. In the movement of a ‘gewendete[s]
Gesicht’ (turned face) at the very end, metaphors that bring Uexküll’s Umwelt
theory to mind are poetically transformed, evoking an encounter with the non-
human that exceeds Uexküll’s physiological constructivism. It would certainly
be productive to extend this approach to other lyrical descriptions of beautiful
animals such as Der Schwan (The Swan) or Die Flamingos (The Flamingos).
Rather than following these links, however, I want to consider the aesthetics
of animal perception in The Panther, for it is Rilke’s most famous poem from
the New Poems, written as early as 1902, that provides us with the most detailed
description of an animal’s perception to be found in this collection.50
Der Panther
Im Jardin des Plantes, Paris
Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehn der Stäbe

So müd geworden, daß er nichts mehr hält.
Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe
Und hinter tausend Stäben keine Welt.
50 It is therefore not surprise to note that Der Panther has repeatedly been read in the

light of Uexküll. See Herwig, ‘The Unwitting Muse’, pp. 561–3; and most recently
Fischer, The Poet as Phenomenologist, pp. 236–42.

Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte,
Der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht,
Ist wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte,
In der betäubt ein großer Wille steht.
Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille

Sich lautlos auf –. Dann geht ein Bild hinein
Geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille
Und hört im Herzen auf zu sein.
(His vision has grown so weary from the passing of the bars before him that it no
longer fastens on anything. It seems to him that there must be a thousand bars and
no world beyond them. The soft progress of strong and supple strides, turning in
the tightest of circles, is like a dance of energy around a centre in which a powerful
will stands numbed. Only occasionally does the curtain before his pupil silently lift.
Then an image enters, passes through the tense stillness of his limbs, and reaches his
heart, where it ceases to exist.)
Beginning with the panther’s gaze, a visual activity which features promi-
nently in Rilke’s animal poems,51 this text adopts the encaged predator’s
perspective.52 The panther’s situation is portrayed in remarkable distinc-
tion to the life of the gazelle. Whereas the previous poem entirely oblit-
erated the animal’s imprisonment in a zoological garden, thus presenting
it as if in a natural environment, both the subtitle and the reference to the
cage’s bars now indicate that the panther finds himself dislocated from his
natural abode. He may feature as a perceiving subject registering external
impressions and reacting to them, but he is entirely at odds with an arti-
ficial ambience, which allows him no orientation.53 Confined to the zoo,
his senses are no longer confronted with external impressions appropriate
51 For a comparative approach to lyrical scenarios of animal vision in Rilke, see Laermann,

‘Oder daß ein Tier, / ein stummes, aufschaut, ruhig durch uns durch’.
52 See Unglaub, Panther und Aschanti, p. 81.

53 This disorientation is visible even in the minutest details, such as the linguistic ambi-

guity of ‘Vorübergehn’ (passing) in the first line: while the word would normally
be taken to refer to the panther’s paces, it is grammatically constructed here as if
the bars themselves were moving. Due to its confinement in the Jardin des Plantes,
which severs it from its natural environment, the panther takes up an ambivalent
390 David Wachter

for his physiological set-up. Interpreted from an Uexküllian perspective, a
natural balance between the animal and its environment, perfectly estab-
lished in the gazelle’s harmony, is disturbed in The Panther. The predator’s
tired gaze only perceives meaningless bars in endless repetition, lyrically
evoked by the insisting ‘ä’ assonance, which leaves the panther with virtually
no Umwelt at all. This displaced interaction seems to occasion the animal’s
closed-off isolation, its erratic movements around a paralysed, as it were an-
aesthetic centre (‘betäubt’ – literally: numbed). While occasional contacts
with his surroundings occur (‘manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille /
sich lautlos auf ’ – occasionally the curtain before his pupil silently lifts),
the stimuli thus provided remain alien, do not leave permanent marks on
the organism and cause no reactions (‘hört im Herzen auf zu sein’ – in his
heart it ceases to exist).54
Hence Rilke’s famous poem seems to provide us with accurate observa-
tions reminiscent of Uexküll’s zoology. It has accordingly been praised for
its naturalism by scientists and literary scholars alike.55 However, its poetic
approach differs from Uexküll’s scientific explanations by more than the
obvious fact that, as a lyrical text, it relies on a more complex form and
imagery.56 Throughout the poem, Rilke’s physiological accuracy is enriched
by a vision of sovereignty that contrasts sharply with the panther’s displace-
ment. This becomes most apparent in the second stanza. The encaged ani-
mal’s movements are here represented in an ambiguous image governed by
contrasting forces. While ‘der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht’ (literally:
turning in the tightest of circles) could easily denote nervous confusion,
this very image of erratic paces around a numbed centre is framed by two
lines which entirely change its character. The phrase ‘Der weiche Gang
position between active subject and passive object, which eventually influences the
lyrical representation of his movements.
54 For this Uexküllian interpretation of The Panther, see also Herwig, ‘The Unwitting

Muse’, p. 567.
55 See Mislin, ‘Rilkes Partnerschaft mit der Natur’, p. 48; Herwig, ‘The Unwitting Muse’,

p. 562.
56 A remarkable example worthy of closer attention is the metaphor of ‘Vorhang’ (cur-

tain) used in the third stanza, which gives the setting a theatrical character.

das Liebesproblem’, Andreas-Salomé uses the term ‘Überschwang’ to
describe a psychic response to desire, a form of intuitive experience which
transcends rational analysis. The mother’s love of the child, like the lover’s
attraction to a sexual partner, generates ‘reiche Überschwänglichkeiten’, a
rich exuberance, through which the Other, the object, is perceived in a trans-
figured form, as a delightful illusion (‘liebliches Blendwerk’, ‘Gedanken’, 58).
Andreas-Salomé also uses the language of the uncanny to describe the
relationship between mind and body:
Die Liebe ist eben sowohl das physischeste wie auch das scheinbar spiritualistischeste,
geistesgläubigste, was in uns spukt; sie hält sich ganz und gar an den Körper, aber an
ihn ganz und gar als Symbol, als Gleichnis für den Gesamtmenschen und für alles,
was sich durch die Pforte der Sinne in unsere verborgenste Seele einschleicht, um
sie zu wecken. (‘Gedanken’, 81)
(Love is thus not only the most physical but also the most obviously spiritualistic
quality which haunts us, the most superstitious, it adheres well and truly to the body,
but to the body entirely as a symbol, as a parable for the whole person and for eve-
rything which creeps into the most hidden places in the soul through the gateway
of the senses in order to arouse the soul.)
This imagery of haunting emphasizes the hidden psychological dimension

to the ostensibly physical experience of erotic love, reiterating the idea
that the erotic is a synthesis of physical and psychic urges, the analysis of
which necessitates the use of a new kind of language, in which literary
symbolism can facilitate the expression of unconscious ideas and associa-
tions. In ‘Die Erotik’, this passage, repeated with only minor rephrasing
(‘Die Erotik’, 106–7), is followed by the idea that in the erotic we find not
merely the expression of desire for the love object but also of a longing for
something which transcends the everyday: ‘allem Hohen noch, dem wir
darin entgegenträumen’ (for every higher object towards which we direct
our dreams, ‘Die Erotik’, 107).
In Andreas-Salomé’s novel Das Haus, the capacity for intuitive experi-
ence is feminized, though it is not the sole preserve of female protagonists.
The rational, scientific mindset of Frank Branhardt, the husband and doctor
who dismisses the poetic imagination as ‘krankhaft’ (pathological), is con-
trasted with his wife, artistic son, and daughter, who have a tendency towards
392 David Wachter

develop a perspective of its own. However, this gaze toward the human is
kept at bay in a visual regime: an entire ‘Welt / aus Blicken’ (world composed
of looking) subordinates the dog to a continuous struggle between subser-
vience and self-assertion. While the dog’s owner remains a full master, the
human superiority is more radically questioned in Schwarze Katze (Black
Cat).59 Here, the interaction with the sleeping cat is awkwardly compared
to raving madness that disperses when encountering the animal’s fur (‘an
diesem schwarzen Felle / wird dein stärkstes Schauen aufgelöst’ – on this
black fur your most searching look is dispelled). The decisive transforma-
tion, however, occurs when the cat awakens. Looking back, it arrests the
human gaze, freezes it in its own eyes, leaves it ‘eingeschlossen / wie ein
ausgestorbenes Insekt’ (encased like an extinct insect), and thus facilitates
a psychic loss of self even more disconcerting than the previously evoked
dissolution.
While the destabilization of boundaries between the human and the
non-human leads to a destruction of the self in Black Cat, it acquires a reli-
gious sense in The Rose Window, the final poem to be considered here.60
Despite its title, which refers to an architectural ornament in Gothic cathe-
drals, the poem is essentially about visual encounters between humans and
cats. Addressing an unspecific human ‘you’, the poem evokes an equally
unspecific animal interior (‘da drin’ – in there), accompanied by a ‘träge[s]
Treten ihrer Tatzen’ (lazy pacing of their paws), a lulling and vaguely confus-
ing movement (‘die dich fast verwirrt’ – that almost confuses you). In the
course of the poem, the human observer is forcefully grasped (‘ergriffen’)
by the animal’s gaze. In the subsequent dynamics of power, this observer
loses himself in oblivion and is put down to an archaic life force. Thus far,
the poem appears to parallel Black Cat in its description of the human’s
traumatic effacement in the encounter with the non-human. However,
after a linguistic rupture visualized by an orthographic break ‘– :’, the poem
performs its final Umschlag in a turn toward the rose window invoked by
its title. The forceful self-loss through the eyes of the cats is surprisingly
equated with a primeval religious experience: ‘So griffen einstmals aus
59 Ibid. p. 545.

60 Ibid. pp. 465–6.


dem Dunkelsein / der Kathedralen große Fensterrosen / ein Herz und
rissen es in Gott hinein’61 (thus, in past ages, from the dark / the great rose
windows of cathedrals seized / a heart and swept it headlong into God).62
In this astonishing constellation, psychic loss is inseparably confounded
with religious transcendence. The crossing of human borders toward a non-
human space therefore remains ambiguous, caught in a double tendency
of reduction and enhancement.
Conclusion
At the beginning of the twentieth century, animals began to inhabit the

intersection between natural sciences and literature as subjects of percep-
tion and as agents in an aesthetics of nature. In the constellation formed by
Möbius, Uexküll, and Rilke around 1908, they serve as figures allowing an
animal poetics to negotiate the limits of anthropocentrism. Rilke in particu-
lar is deeply fascinated by the otherness of animals and acutely interested
in the ambiguity between their haunting proximity and their irreducible
distance to the human world. The dog’s, panther’s, or cat’s gazes serve as
media of an awkward contact between human and animal spheres, but
equally as instances of a non-human subjectivity recorded in its full opacity.
Due to this contact, the borders between the human and the non-human
are destabilized in the New Poems. A longing for an unknown openness
thereby emerges, which oscillates between promising religious experience
(The Rose Window) and dangerous loss of self in madness (Black Cat).
What remains to be briefly addressed are the methodological conse-
quences that follow from these observations for an understanding of the
relations between literature and biology around 1900, if not for a poetics
of knowledge in general. Evidently, the relationship between literature and
61 See Unglaub, Panther und Aschanti, pp. 91–2.

62 The English translation here is taken from The Rilke of Ruth Speirs, ed. John Pilling

and Peter Robinson, Reading 2015, p. 19.
394 David Wachter

science cannot reasonably be conceived as a unidirectional transfer. Neither
does literature simply adopt issues that were previously discussed in the
empirical sciences alone, nor does it always prefigure emerging ideas still
excluded from the restricted field of official knowledge. Rather, science and
literature coexist as different approaches to common problems, for example,
as in the present context, the negotiation of anthropocentrism in biologi-
cal discourses on animals. By juxtaposing Rilke to Möbius and Uexküll, I
hope to have shown that there are good reasons to understand literature
as a medium of alternative spaces for the possibility of knowledge.63 One
could tentatively call this literature’s potential for explorations into as yet
unknown or unfamiliar areas, articulating possible experiences that for
methodological reasons have to escape a scientific perspective. Accentuating
such a difference between literature and science, however, does not imply
a preference for either of the two fields of knowledge. Rather, it requires
us to acknowledge a plurality of accesses to common issues which, neces-
sarily, have to go hand in hand with a plurality of analytical methods. In
the present case, argumentative reconstructions thus have to be combined
with a philological approach to literary texts, which takes their figurative
use of language seriously.
Bibliography
Agamben, Giorgio, Das Offene: Der Mensch und das Tier, trans. Davide Giuriato,
Engel, Manfred, and Ulrich Fülleborn, ‘Neue Gedichte und der Neuen Gedichte
anderer Teil: Kommentar’, in Rainer Maria Rilke, Gedichte 1895 bis 1910, Werke,
vol. 1, ed. Manfred Engel and Ulrich Fülleborn, Frankfurt am Main 1996,
pp. 898–1005.
Fingerhut, Karl-Heinz, Das Kreatürliche im Werk Rainer Maria Rilkes: Untersuchun-
gen zur Figur des Tieres, Bonn 1970.
63 See Pethes, ‘Poetik / Wissen’, p. 359.


Fischer, Luke, The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the New Poems, New York 2015.
Heidegger, Martin, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt – Endlichkeit – Einsam-
keit, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 39, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Frankfurt
am Main 1983.
Twentieth-Century Literature’, Semiotica 134 (2001), pp. 553–92.
Kockerbeck, Christoph, Die Schönheit des Lebendigen: Ästhetische Naturwahrnehmung
im 19. Jahrhundert, Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar 1997.
Köhnen, Ralph, ‘Wahrnehmung wahrnehmen: Die Poetik der Neuen Gedichte zwis-
chen Biologie und Phänomenologie: von Uexküll, Husserl und Rilke’, in Erich
Unglaub (ed.), Rilkes Paris 1920 · 1925: Neue Gedichte (Blätter der Rilke-Gesellschaft
30), Göttingen 2010, pp. 196–211.
Laermann, Klaus, ‘“Oder daß ein Tier, / ein stummes, aufschaut, ruhig durch uns
durch.” Überlegungen zum Blick der Tiere in einigen Gedichten Rilkes’, in
Hans Richard Brittnacher, Stephan Porombka, and Fabian Störmer (eds), Poetik
der Krise: Rilkes Rettung der Dinge in den ‘Weltinnenraum’, Würzburg 2000,
pp. 124–39.
Mislin, Hans, ‘Rilkes Partnerschaft mit der Natur’, Blätter der Rilke-Gesellschaft 3
(1974), pp. 39–48.
Mitchell, Stephen (ed. and trans.), The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, London
1987.
Möbius, Karl, Die Ästhetik der Tierwelt, Jena 1908.
Müller, Wolfgang G., ‘Neue Gedichte/Der Neuen Gedichte anderer Teil’, in Man-
fred Engel (ed.), Rilke-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung, Darmstadt 2004,
pp. 297–318.
Nyhart, Lynn K., Modern Nature: The Rise of the Biological Perspective in Germany,
Chicago, IL 2009.
Pethes, Nicolas, ‘Poetik / Wissen: Konzeptionen eines problematischen Transfers’, in
Gabriele Brandstetter and Gerhard Neumann (eds), Romantische Wissenspoetik:
Die Künste und die Wissenschaften um 1800, Würzburg 2004, pp. 341–72.
Pobojewska, Aldona, ‘New Biology – Jakob von Uexküll’s Umweltlehre’, Semiotica
134 (2001), pp. 323–39.
Rilke, Rainer Maria, Gedichte 1895 bis 1910, Werke, vol. 1, ed. Manfred Engel and Ulrich
Fülleborn, Frankfurt am Main 1996.
Gedichte 1910 bis 1926, Werke, vol. 2, ed. Manfred Engel and Ulrich Fülleborn,
Ryan, Judith, Umschlag und Verwandlung: Poetische Struktur und Dichtungstheorie in
R. M. Rilkes Lyrik der mittleren Periode (1907–14), Munich 1972.

also turn to questions of heredity to try to understand the artistic Balduin,
on the point of abandoning his studies in order to write poetry, since he
resembles so little his successful father. The parents ask themselves about
their son: ‘von wem hatte er etwas krankhaftes?’ (From whom did he
get his sickly nature?, Das Haus, 16). Anneliese is haunted by ‘schwarze
Vererbungsschatten’ (the dark ghosts of inheritance) when she considers her
son’s temperament and searches in her own family papers for more informa-
tion on a grandfather who suffered a mental decline (32). But letters from
her grandmother reassure her in an unexpected way. Detailed diary entries,
which chronicle the grandmother’s life, turn out to be written with ‘eine
Einfalt und Macht, wie beabsichtigt von einem großen Dichter’ (a simplic-
ity and a power, such as a great poet might have deliberately crafted, 32).
Anneliese concludes: ‘Von Dichterblut gewesen war die Frau’ (The woman
had a poet’s blood, ibid.). Delving into the secrets of family history appears
to provide a forbear who shared the son’s artistic ambitions. In the light of
this genetic explanation for her son’s disposition, Anneliese appears to feel
that there is genealogical legitimacy for Balduin’s artistic temperament.
Sigrid Weigel interprets the expression of hope for the future success
of genetic heirs as a coping strategy for a secular age, a desire to overcome
individual mortality through redemption in the form of successors who
take forward a part of the self. She emphasizes the importance of the phan-
tasma, or imaginary construct, of living on through a biological line,41 and
points out: ‘Das Erbe ist also die herausragende Technik der Sorge um das
Fort- und Nachleben des Eigenen nach dem Tode in einer säkularen Kultur’
(In a secular culture, the heir is thus the mechanism par excellence for the
survival and continuation after death of what belongs to the self ).42 Yet,
in Das Haus, in the light of Balduin’s surprising reluctance to continue in
the rational scientific tradition of his father, Branhardt comments pessi-
mistically on the uncontrollability of the genetic legacy, for all that parents
attempt to shape the next generation with care:
41 Sigrid Weigel, Genea-Logik: Generation, Tradition und Evolution zwischen Kultur-

und Naturwissenschaften, Munich 2006, pp. 9–10.
42 Weigel, Genea-Logik, pp. 62–3.

Robert Craig
15 The City as Creature: Reconfiguring the

Creaturely Self in Alfred Döblin’s Berlin
Alexanderplatz (1929)
abstract
Alfred Döblin’s epic novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) is widely considered to be one of
the twentieth century’s greatest city narratives. This pseudo-religious story of a disturbed
ex-con’s epiphany and redemption has been hailed in recent years as a proto-postmodern
tribute to Weimar Berlin. But my chapter aims to show that we can only do full justice to
Döblin’s masterpiece by reading it against the backdrop of his biologically inflected aesthet-
ics and anthropology. The first part examines the inexorable collapse of Franz Biberkopf ’s
attempts to restore some kind of sovereign control over his life in the city: both his body
and his environment. But in the face of his repeated defeats, I then turn to read the traces
of ‘creaturely life’ within the text. These relate to uncanny points of crossover and hybrid-
ity between man and animal, which may, in turn, shine unexpected new light on the very
‘nature’ of human identity at the heart of the modern city.
Berlin Alexanderplatz is a true landmark of German modernism, a subver-

sive masterpiece about which it might seem difficult to say anything new.
Comparisons with James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), perhaps the most obvious
‘hook’ for English-speaking readers, have also provided the basis for a subtler
appreciation of this unique achievement of epic writing,1 and the texture
1 See, for example, Werner Stauffacher, ‘Nachwort des Herausgebers’, in Alfred Döblin,

Berlin Alexanderplatz, ed. Stauffacher, pp. 837–75: pp. 840–2. I shall use the follow-
ing set of in-text abbreviations for Döblin’s works: BA (Berlin Alexanderplatz: Die
Geschichte vom Franz Biberkopf, ed. Werner Stauffacher, Zurich 1996); IN (Das Ich
über der Natur, Berlin 1927); KS I (Kleine Schriften I, ed. Anthony W. Riley, Olten
1985); SÄPL (Schriften zu Ästhetik, Poetik und Literatur, ed. Erich Kleinschmidt,
398 Robert Craig

of the work continues to fascinate readers as an outstanding example of a
city noisily narrating itself. In its denial of a protagonist-centred perspec-
tive and its polyphonic embrace of Berlin’s sights, sounds, and discourses,
it is a uniquely successful confluence of ‘the political, the avant-garde, and
the urban’: a monument to the febrile social and political climate of the
Berlin of the late Weimar Republic.2
However, this epic novel is preoccupied not simply with the steam
rams, tramlines, and product lines of the Alex (as the Alexanderplatz is
colloquially known). In a retrospective essay of 1932, Döblin claimed that
the second part of the title, ‘Die Geschichte vom Franz Biberkopf ’ (The
Story of Franz Biberkopf ), was appended to the book’s main title at the
insistence of his publisher (SLW 312); and irrespective of its verifiability,
the anecdote has been taken to suggest the sense of two books folded into
one. It is the narrated and the narrating city, but also the story of a former
Berlin cement and transport worker released from a stint in prison for
manslaughter. Biberkopf ’s story sees him move from selling neckties to
hawking Nazi papers, through an involvement with a gang of petty crimi-
nals, to losing his arm after being pushed from a getaway car, and finally
becoming a pimp, only to have his new girlfriend, Mieze, murdered by his
sinister fellow-criminal Reinhold. What follows is a nervous and existential
breakdown; his admittance to the insane asylum out at Berlin-Buch; and
the life-changing revelation – dispensed by an ironized figuration of the
Grim Reaper – that he has been engaged in a hubristic and self-destructive
process of self-preservation (BA 430). I wish to show that the intertwining
of these two aspects (Biberkopf ’s story and that of Berlin) calls for a fresh
interpretation: one which refuses either to reduce it to the epiphanic tale
of a violent everyman, or to read it in essence as an epistemological and
Olten 1989); SLW (Schriften zu Leben und Werk, ed. Erich Kleinschmidt, Olten
1986); UD (Unser Dasein, ed. Walter Muschg, Olten 1964). There is a published
translation of Döblin’s novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf,
trans. Eugene Jolas, New York 1983; but unless otherwise stated, all translations here
are my own.
2 Andreas Huyssen, Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and

Film, Cambridge, MA 2015, p. 156.
The City as Creature: Reconfiguring the Creaturely Self 399

aesthetic playground of urban texts and discourses.3 My suggestion is
that a ‘creaturely’ reading might best do justice to this intertwining, and
by briefly revisiting the novel’s background, I shall demonstrate its deep
significance for our topic.
From 1919 onwards, Alfred Döblin (1878–1957) had run a clinic as
a public service doctor in working-class Lichtenberg. His portrayal of
Biberkopf, a manifestly traumatized Front veteran, unquestionably drew
upon his professional treatment of the psychological and social effects of
industrialized warfare – compounded by the sensory onslaught of urban
modernity – among his working-class patients.4 But alongside his day
job and his literary writing, Döblin sustained an interest in the interface
between medicine, biology, and philosophy. David Midgley has highlighted
his commitment, from his studies of philosophy as a medical student in
Berlin and Freiburg onwards, to retaining ‘the unifying power of meta-
physical thought in compensation for the disintegrative effects of empirical
[natural scientific] inquiry’;5 and this attunement is evident from a diverse
trickle of treatises which ranged from polemical attacks on the biological
3 See, most notably, Otto Keller, Döblins Montageroman als Epos der Moderne, Munich

1980, pp. 155–6; cf., for example, Eva Horn, ‘Literary Research: Narration and the
Epistemology of the Human Sciences in Alfred Döblin’, Modern Language Notes 118
(2003), pp. 719–39.
4 See Veronika Fuechtner, ‘“Arzt und Dichter”: Döblin’s Medical, Psychiatric, and

Psychoanalytic Work’, in Roland Dollinger et al. (eds), A Companion to the Works
of Alfred Döblin, Rochester, NY 2004, pp. 111–40: pp. 118, 123. A brief conversation
between Biberkopf and the polisher Georg Dreske in Book II, concerning his recent
involvement with the Nazis, suggests that he served at Arras (BA 84).
5 David Midgley, ‘Metaphysical Speculation and the Fascination of the Real: On

the Connections between Döblin’s Philosophical Writings and his Fiction before
Berlin Alexanderplatz’, in Steffan Davies and Ernest Schonfield (eds), Alfred Döblin:
Paradigms of Modernism, Berlin 2009, pp. 7–27: p. 13. In a retrospective essay of 1938,
Döblin tellingly admitted that what had interested him as a medical student between
1900 and 1905 had not been bones, joints, or intestines, but rather what holds the
world together ‘im Innersten’ (in its innermost being, SLW, 239–40). This admis-
sion should be set within the broader context of a search for a sense of metaphysical
‘wholeness’ in German intellectual culture around 1900, at the turn of a century that
had witnessed the growing prestige of the natural sciences in the wake of (avowedly
400 Robert Craig

underpinnings of Nietzsche’s epistemology and ethics (1902 and 1903,
KS I, 13–54), to essayistic works of nature philosophy and anthropology
(Das Ich über der Natur – The I above Nature, 1927; and Unser Dasein
– Our Existence, 1933). Berlin Alexanderplatz’s relevance to ‘biological
discourses’ lies in the ways in which it both grew out of this intellectual
hinterland and richly fed back into it. In his own overview of the novel
in 1932, Döblin revealed how profoundly its framework was shaped by an
interaction between form and formlessness, and creation and dissolution,
more generally characteristic of the early twentieth-century movement
of Lebensphilosophie (life-philosophy) of such post-Nietzschean think-
ers as Henri Bergson (1859–1941) and Georg Simmel (1858–1918).6 The
beleaguered Biberkopf ’s urban environment is, Döblin suggests, marked
by a vitalistic dynamic of ‘Aufbau und Zerfall zugleich’ (building up and
disintegrating), through which figurations of ordering and forming are
predicated on energies of destruction and disintegration (SLW 216).
As I shall discuss in the first section of my chapter, this damaged war
veteran proves repeatedly – and violently – unable to subsume his experi-
ences to a socially acceptable role in the city. But in amidst the rubble of his
failures and the anodyne nature of his urban re-integration, I then turn to
the idea of creatureliness. Eric Santner’s concept of the ‘creature’ in literary
modernism captures man’s hybrid existence at the ambiguous ‘jointure of
nature and culture, the inscription of biological life into historical forms of
life’.7 In Unser Dasein, a sprawling work that Döblin was putting together
at the same time as he was writing Berlin Alexanderplatz, he argues that the
idiosyncrasy of ‘being human’ lies in the fact that we are at once ‘Stück der
Natur und ihr Gegenstück’ (part of nature and its counterpart) (UD 49,
291). As an organism, I am a structured organization symbiotic with the
natural world through a constant process of nourishment and metabolic
anti-metaphysical) movements of positivism. See Wolfgang Riedel, ‘Homo Natura’:

Literarische Anthropologie um 1900, Berlin 1996, pp. 47, 52–3.
6 See Ursula Elm, Literatur als Lebensanschauung: Zum ideengeschichtlichen

Hintergrund von Alfred Döblins Berlin Alexanderplatz, Bielefeld 1991, pp. 10–23.
7 Eric Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of

Sovereignty, Chicago, IL 2011, p. 13.

of instrumental rationality.47 In the novel, Gitta has a strong aversion to
the experiments conducted by male doctors on female apes, and Markus’s
involvement with experimental science seems intended to emphasize his
Jewishness and connect him with scientific, rational discourses, in contrast
to the intuitive spontaneity demonstrated by Gitta.
Attracted by the exotic, Gitta falls in love with barely any knowledge
of Markus’s character or origins. Her attraction to him on a physical level
has a profound psychic effect, making her prone to weeping and other
spontaneous unconsciously motivated reactions. Her love is powerful
and instinctive. She describes it as overpowering her ‘mit großen Glocken,
oder wie Sturm oder Gesang. – Man fühlt es – man fühlt es!’ (with the
sound of great bells or like a storm or a song. – I just feel it – I just feel
it!, Das Haus, 55). Markus’s racial origins are the source of tension within
Gitta’s family. Thus her mother, Anneliese, asks her father: ‘Du erwähnst
sein Judentum. Bist du denn dagegen – ich meine, zum Beispiel, würde
dir denn eine Mischung mit jüdischem Blut – immer und in allen Fällen
unerwünscht scheinen?’ (You mentioned his Jewishness. Are you against
it, then – I mean, would you for example regard a union with Jewish blood
– as undesirable, always and in every case?, Das Haus, 70). His Jewishness
is treated as a eugenic question, the father anxious for the future blood-
line of the family. The doctor Frank Branhardt needs little time to reflect
before answering in the affirmative: ‘Fremdestes, ja Gegensätzliches erregt
bekanntlich die tollsten Leidenschaften. Nur – die Frage bleibt: ob es auch
zu verschwistern vermag.’ (It is well known that opposites attract, that what
is foreign arouses the most violent passion. But – the question remains:
should it be allowed to form a close union, ibid.). The narrative voice com-
ments of Gitta’s brother Balduin: ‘Am Judentum von Gittas Auserkorenem
nahm er nicht den mindesten Anstoß’ (he did not take the slightest offence
at the Jewishness of Gitta’s chosen one, 80). Yet Balduin does go so far as to
tease Gitta, reminding her of her preference for Aryan rather than Jewish
girls at school, and he asks her maliciously (‘böse’) how she likes the sound
47 Gauri Viswanathan, ‘Monism and Suffering: A Theosophical Perspective’, in Todd

H. Weir (ed.), Monism: Science, Philosophy, Religion, and the History of a Worldview,
New York 2012, pp. 91–106: p. 97.
402 Robert Craig

The work accordingly figures, in strikingly Kantian terms, as a ‘Ganzes ohne
zwecklichen Bezug der Welt gegenüber’ (a whole without any particular
purpose in the world) (UD 249): an expression of our peculiar existence
between being both part and counterpart.
In sum, art is humanly meaningful, and it draws its forms and energies
from the organic processes of disintegration, decay, but also regeneration,
to which its creators are subject. But if these are the theoretical underpin-
nings of artistic production, what is their relevance to a novel set in the
working-class neighbourhoods of 1928 Berlin? Can his city masterpiece
really be described as ‘creaturely’? And if so, what does that mean for the
creature at its very heart, Franz Biberkopf ?
Delusions of sovereignty
What is clear from the outset is that the onslaught of the modern metropolis
had dealt a body blow to the unitary subject, as well as to any stable sense
of linear narrative. As Georg Simmel had argued in his seminal sociological
essay ‘Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben’ (The Metropolis and Mental
Life, 1903), the urban self must reckon with an unprecedented intensification
of nervous stimulation, resulting from the ‘swift and uninterrupted change
of outer and inner stimuli’.10 Simmel’s idea speaks to the barrage of sensory
information pervading modern city life, but when mixed in with the on-
going traumas of Döblin’s protagonist, the theory’s human implications are
thrown into messy literary relief. The urban narrative opens with a sharp
sense of depersonalization, but it also reflects a traumatic decentredness
within the embodied subject:
10 Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, trans. H. H. Gerth, in Richard

Sennett (ed.), Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1969,
pp. 47–60: p. 48. Emphasis in the original.

Lebhafte Straßen tauchten auf, die Seestraße, Leute stiegen ein und aus. In ihm
schrie es entsetzt: Achtung, Achtung, es geht los. Seine Nasenspitze vereiste, über
seine Backe schwirrte es. ‘Zwölf Uhr Mittagszeitung’, ‘B. Z.’, ‘Die neuste Illustrirte’
[sic], ‘Die Funkstunde neu.’ ‘Noch jemand zugestiegen?’ Die Schupos haben jetzt
blaue Uniformen. Er stieg unbeachtet aus dem Wagen, war unter Menschen. Was
war denn? Nichts. Haltung, ausgehungertes Schwein, reiß dich zusammen, kriegst
meine Faust zu riechen. Gewimmel, welch Gewimmel. Wie sich das bewegte. (BA 15)
(Busy streets appeared, Seestraße, people got on and off. Something inside him
screamed, terrified: look out, look out, it’s kicking off. The tip of his nose froze, a
twanging and buzzing across his cheek. ‘Zwölf Uhr Mittagszeitung!’, ‘B. Z.!’, ‘Berliner
Illustrierte!’, ‘Funkstunde!’. ‘Any more fares please?’ The coppers wear blue now. He
got off the tram, unnoticed, and was back among people. What now what now?
Head up you scrawny little shit, get it together mate, I’ll thump you. Swarms, all
these swarms. Look at them move.)
We are constantly distracted and disoriented by the narrative’s jerky side-

steps into snippets of thought, speech, and discourse. An hallucination of
sliding roofs in turn puts paid to any sense of centred agency in an image
of mental disorder and imbalance which recurs throughout the text (BA
17); and even as Franz manages superficially to stabilize himself and walk
through Berlin without the attendant hallucinations at the start of Book
IV, the chaos of his first entrance into the city is never far from the surface.
‘Zu schwanken können sie anfangen, zu schaukeln, zu schütteln. Rutschen
können die Dächer, wie Sand schräg herunter, wie ein Hut vom Kopf ’
(those roofs can start swaying, swinging, shaking, sliding like sand they
are, just like that, gone, like a hat from a head) (131, my emphases). This
sibilant image of roofs sliding from houses, and hats from heads, with its
slippage through swaying, swinging, and shaking, welds the protagonist’s
psyche into his cityscape, turning a symbol of sliding self-control into its
very symptom.
Beleaguered metropolitan man – no longer even master in his own
house, as Sigmund Freud had described the modern ego’s predicament in
191711 – is unable to absorb and master the sensory shocks of the city, and
11 Sigmund Freud, ‘A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis’, in The Standard Edition

of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. XVII, London 1955, pp. 137–44: p. 143.
404 Robert Craig

to retain a sense of masculine sovereignty.12 The panic at a loss of personal
control is only narrowly averted in the reminder that the roofs are nailed on,
an illusion of psychical security which shades over into a fleeting yearning
for the lost contours of wartime manhood (‘[f ]est steht und treu die Wacht,
die Wacht am Rhein’ – firm and true stands the Watch, the Watch on the
Rhine!, 131). The narrative, then, restlessly shifts into different psychical
and discursive spaces – and these militaristic invocations repeatedly hint
at the traumatic collective memory of warfare, not to mention the (now)
historically freighted hints at what might be to come.13
Against this overlap between the urban and the psychical, Berlin
Alexanderplatz’s queasily sliding roofs embody and enact a textual ten-
dency towards instability; and they enter into an allegorical association with
other fusions of psyche and city, most prominently the Alexanderplatz’s
resident steam ram, which hammers away at the ‘heads’ of steel piles, thus
providing a markedly physical symbol of the city’s psychical barrage (165). I
shall return to the steam ram’s uncanny embodiment of psychical instabil-
ity right at the end of the chapter. What is important here, though, is that
in mediating the violence of the city and its protagonist through a play of
motifs and discourses, Berlin Alexanderplatz exposes the precariousness
of the very idea of a sovereign subject.
Original German title: ‘Eine Schwierigkeit der Psychoanalyse’ (1917). The emphasis
is in the original.
12 Simmel’s strikingly biological figuration of the modern subject’s consciousness as

an ‘organ protecting him against the threatening currents and discrepancies of his
external environment which would uproot him’ (‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’,
p. 48) influenced Walter Benjamin’s conception of ‘shock’: in Benjamin’s analysis of
1939, ‘Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire’ (On Some Motifs in Baudelaire), the con-
sciousness must parry modern life’s sensory bombardment in the manner of a physical
defence mechanism, thus reducing its after-effects on the psyche. See Benjamin, ‘On
Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn,
London 1999, pp. 152–90: pp. 159–62. On the traces of Simmel’s essay in Benjamin’s
study, see Kathrin Yacavone, Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography,
New York 2012, pp. 96–7.
13 In a number of medical essays published in the early 1920s, Döblin the clinician had

acknowledge the traumatic psychical aftereffects of trench warfare throughout Berlin
society. See Fuechtner, ‘Arzt und Dichter’, pp. 118, 123.

Franz’s repeated yearning for a settled ‘da sein’, a reintegrated ‘being
there’ in the city, certainly seems a reasonable enough demand; and when
he re-emerges in Berlin after his ‘violent cure’ at the hands of Death in
the asylum at Buch, the celebratory ‘[j]etzt ist Biberkopf wieder da’ (now
Biberkopf ’s back), with its suggestion of both physical and mental return,
finds its urban complement in the statement that the Alex, too, is still ‘there’
(BA 447, 448). But the flip-side of this persistent refrain of ‘da sein’ is that
his book-length search for self-presence and narrative control is character-
ized by a repeated desire to violently eliminate what is alien and incom-
mensurable, what always escapes control. In this vein, Franz’s compulsive
physical and sexual violence has rightly been criticized as one of the novel’s
most problematic aspects – even if it is ironized time and again through
such references to mock-military motifs as the chapter title of the rape of
Minna, the sister of his violently murdered former girlfriend Ida: ‘Sieg auf
der ganzen Linie! Franz Biberkopf kauft ein Kalbsfilet’ (Victory all down
the line! Franz Biberkopf buys a veal cutlet!) (37).14 Crucially, though,
messy remainders of the body and the bodily persistently force their way
to the surface of the text. Franz’s rediscovery of his virility in the sexual
assault is accompanied by the comically overblown collapse of the laws of
nature, gravitational and centrifugal forces being cancelled out as Minna
simply ‘zerfließt wie Wasser’ (melts away like water) (BA 39–40) in the
moment of orgasm. This is echoed in the description of how her sister’s
decaying corpse ‘zerfließt in Jauche’ (melts into slurry) (BA 102) after her
manslaughter. Prima facie this is a gratuitously corporeal depiction that
bears an uncanny resemblance to Döblin’s descriptions of the continua
between organic and inorganic forms in his nature philosophy (e.g. IN
14 Maria Tatar has justifiably taken strong exception to Döblin’s apparently cavalier por-

trayals of violent misogyny (Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany,
Princeton, NJ 1995, pp. 145, 151–2). However, as Roger Kingerlee has perspicuously
remarked, there is an unmistakable irony to the text’s disturbing switches between
Franz as violent perpetrator, and Franz as a victim of a figuratively female ‘Other’ of
formlessness, chaos and – in the recurrent figure of the Whore of Babylon – mythic
violence (BA 116, 342). See his Psychological Models of Masculinity in Döblin, Musil,
and Jahnn: Männliches, Allzumännliches, Lewiston, NY 2001, pp. 78–80.

psychoanalytic exploration of the human libido with a vitalist affirmation
of the transcendence made possible through the erotic. Reading Das Haus
alongside ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’ shows the symbolic con-
nection between erotic love and an unconscious desire to recapture lost
memories of wholeness, explored in the novel through the Heimat imagery.
Central to desire, Andreas-Salomé contends, is a longing for a harmonious
union with creation which cannot be captured through rational discourse
but rather only through imagery and linguistic innovation, and whose
expression thus falls first and foremost to the poet, rather than the scientist.
Bibliography
Andreas-Salomé, Lou, Die Erotik: Vier Aufsätze, Munich 1979, containing the essays
‘Der Mensch als Weib’, pp. 7–44; ‘Gedanken über das Liebesproblem’, pp. 47–73;
and ‘Die Erotik’, pp. 85–145.
Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken, Dresden 1894.
Das Haus: Eine Familiengeschichte vom Ende des vorigen Jahrhunderts, first
published 1921, Bremen 2011.
In der Schule bei Freud: Tagebuch eines Jahres 1912/13, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer, Zurich
1958.
Lebensrückblick: Grundriß einiger Lebenserinnerungen, 2nd rev. edn, ed. Ernst
Pfeiffer, Frankfurt am Main 1968.
‘Physische Liebe’, Die Zukunft 25 (1898), pp. 218–22 [review of Wilhelm Bölsche’s
Das Liebesleben in der Natur].
Rainer Maria Rilke, Leipzig 1928.
stoke 2009.
Bergson, Henri, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme, New York 1912.
Blickle, Peter, A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland, Rochester, NY 2002.
Boa, Elizabeth, and Rachel Palfreyman, Heimat – A German Dream: Regional Loyal-
ties and National Identity in German Culture 1890–1990, Oxford 2000.
Bölsche, Wilhelm, Das Liebesleben in der Natur: Eine Entwicklungsgeschichte der
Liebe, 3 vols, Florence and Leipzig 1898–1902.

at the heart of the modern city. Things are not quite as they seem, though, as
the preservation of metropolitan individuality depends on a barely suppressed
interpersonal antagonism, a defensiveness that threatens to break out into
violence at a moment of closer contact.16 Psychical stability is underwrit-
ten by the threat of physical violence, social control by a barely internalized
bodily force. Indeed, a distinctly militaristic entreaty to stay awake, keep your
eyes open and look out (BA 454), tips over into a reprise of one of the text’s
cacophonous marching songs (455). The roll of drums recalls the rhythmic
figurations of ‘[n]atural history and urban technology’ that Andrew Webber
cogently identifies throughout the novel,17 not least as the deathly reverbera-
tions of ‘krumm […] fällt um […] stumm, widebum, widebum’ directly echo
the interminable rumbling of the Alex’s steam ram (455).
It is in this onomatopoeic overlap between the linguistic and the mate-
rial – between the psychical and the physical, and the city and the emergent
forces of nature – that we can identify the urban subject’s vulnerability.
This precariousness is the mark of what I want to call the ‘urban creature’,
and through an exploration of the text’s myriad facets of creatureliness, I
suggest that we might view Franz’s final metropolitan rebirth in a radically
different light.
Of men and other creatures
As a description of the human being caught in the overlapping spaces of

self, city, and nature, the urban creature anticipates Santner’s articulations
of creaturely life. One of his focal points is the vulnerable, embodied yet
16 Dollenmayer reads in Berlin Alexanderplatz a ‘textbook example’ of this type of

freedom (‘Narration and the City’, in David E. Wellbery (ed.), A New History of
German Literature, Cambridge, MA 2004, pp. 764–9: p. 767). See also Simmel,
‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, pp. 48–9, 53–4.
17 Andrew J. Webber, Berlin in the Twentieth Century: A Cultural Topography,

Cambridge 2008, p. 215.
408 Robert Craig

decentred reality of being human in modernity: as he puts it, creatureliness
emerges from our ontological exposure to our underlying contingency, and
to the ‘ultimate lack of foundation’ for our social configurations.18 Being
human means being non-conterminous with that biological being and
painfully aware of the sub-linguistic ‘abyss’ in our organic existence,19 a gap
which sparks meaning and language, but which we only ever fragmentarily
and provisionally paper over with language and meaning.
Santner invokes Rilke as the modernist poet most explicitly com-
mitted to the representation of human subjects as always somehow set
over against a supposedly ‘objective’ natural world.20 In the eighth of his
Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies, written between 1912 and 1922), he
laments that we are always fatefully ‘gegenüber […] / und nichts als das
und immer gegenüber’ (opposite […] / and nothing but that, forever oppo-
site) (DE VIII).21 Our hybrid existence as nature’s ‘Stück’ (part) and its
utterly inseparable ‘Gegenstück’ (counterpart) (UD 49) situates us in an
embedded-yet-detached dialectic with our world. We hear by contrast that
‘[m]it allen Augen sieht die Kreatur / das Offene’ (with all its eyes, the
natural world sees / the Open) (DE VIII), as Rilke strives to poetize the
animals’ dwelling in what Santner, tracing out a ‘biological metaphysics’
after Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, calls the ‘unimaginable enjoyment of
self-being in otherness’.22
In Chapter 14 David Wachter probed a fascinating constellation
between Möbius, Uexküll, and Rilke, revealing the proximity and dis-
tance of aesthetic and more strictly ‘scientific’ approaches to descriptions
of the physiological forms and behaviour of animals in the early twentieth
century. Uexküll’s description of the Umwelten of animals in his work of
18 See Eric Santner, The Royal Remains, p. 5; cf. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin,

Sebald, Chicago, IL 2006, pp. 22–4.
19 Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not what They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor,

London 1991, p. 201.
20 Santner, On Creaturely Life, pp. 1–2.

21 Translations of Rilke’s Duineser Elegien are my own.

22 Rilke, Sämtliche Werke, 6 vols, Frankfurt am Main 1955, vol. I, pp. 714–15; Santner,

On Creaturely Life, p. 2; cf. p. 6.

1909, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere (Environment and Inner World of
Animals) found resonance not only with Rilke, but also with the path-
breaking philosopher Martin Heidegger. In a lecture cycle of 1930, Die
Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics),
Heidegger praised Uexküll’s insistence on the organism’s semiotic inextrica-
bility from its Umwelt, but also stressed the qualitative difference between
the animal’s relatively impoverished perceptual existence on the one hand,
and the openness of human Dasein to what he terms ‘Welt’ (world) on the
other.23 In short, a biological discourse was intersecting with a philosophi-
cal one. Uexküll was configuring his own biology, in distinction from the
positivist and materialist underpinnings of chemistry and physics around
the turn of the nineteenth century, as an aesthetically and subjectively
oriented science with an intuitive connection to its studied world.24 In a
different but related direction, German-speaking intellectual and literary
cultures of the century’s first three decades were marked – in the wake of
Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud – by a growing need to do anthropological
justice to the underlying ‘instinctual’ and ‘animal’ nature of humanness.25
Human beings are riveted to their animal condition, and that rivet-
edness deeply informs the sense of hybridity central to Unser Dasein; but
it also finds striking symbolic expression in Biberkopf ’s own proximity
23 See Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude,

Solitude (winter semester 1929/30), trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker,
Bloomington, IN 1995, pp. 263–4. In an elision of Heidegger’s qualitative distinction,
Uexküll would claim in his work of 1934, Steifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren
und Menschen: Ein Bilderbuch unsichtbarer Welten (A Stroll through the Worlds
of Animals and Men), that all animal Umwelten constitute their own ‘subjektive
Wirklichkeiten’ (subjective realities): see Uexküll and Georg Kriszat, Streifzüge,
Berlin 1934, p. 91.
24 See Malte Herwig, ‘The Unwitting Muse: Jakob von Uexküll’s Theory of Umwelt

and Twentieth-Century Literature’, Semiotica 134:1 (2001), pp. 553–92: pp. 570–1.
25 See Wolfgang Riedel, Nach der Achsendrehung: Literarische Anthropologie im 20.

Jahrhundert, Würzburg 2014, pp. ix–x. As Riedel shows, this sense of man’s deep-
rootedness in his natural environment fed into the growth of the German movement
of ‘philosophical anthropology’ in the 1920s. Under its pioneers, Helmuth Plessner
and Arnold Gehlen, it represented a philosophical approach to the unique hybridity
of embodied human identity (see Nach der Achsendrehung, pp. x, 149).
410 Robert Craig

to animality. After hearing the picaresque tale of the conman Stefan
Zannowich, as told by the marginalized Jews, Nachum and Eliser, whom
he encounters after leaving Tegel prison at the start of the novel, he laments
that he is little more than ‘verfluchtes Mistvieh’ (a bloody animal), to be
driven out of his corner of the shed for disposal by the ‘Schweinekerl mit
dem Hundewagen’ (filthy swine with the dog wagon), despite not even
being completely dead (BA 30): in short, an abject creature released back
into society, but excluded from meaningful civic participation.26 In further
development of the paradox, the intercalation of Abraham’s near-sacrifice
of Isaac in Genesis, complete with a preposterously jubilant Yahweh, is
followed by the narrator’s rueful comment that man (Franz) has his eyes,
that ‘in dem steckt viel drin und alles durcheinander’ (there’s lots of stuff
in him, and it’s all topsy-turvy), and that he is burdened with a dreadful
brain: an altogether sorry state of affairs in contrast to the humble sow,
who is happy to consist of flesh and fat (286). And as Franz later lies in a
state of deep unconsciousness in the asylum at Buch, he laments that it is
better to cower under the earth than to live in a human body. In contrast
to that unreachable but idealized state of otherness – akin to Rilke’s ‘Open’
– Franz emerges, in the hallucinated goading by the field mice around the
asylum, as ‘das widrigste Geschöpf ’ (the most repugnant creature), pain-
fully conscious of being set apart from nature and yet desperate to re-join
nature’s cycles (428–9). This desire to sink back into organic cycles pain-
fully recalls Rilke’s lament that we are never quite in tune like the migratory
birds, even though ‘[b]lühn und verdorrn ist uns zugleich bewußt’ (we are
conscious of blooming and withering at one and the same time) (DE IV).27
These senses of an in-between space suggest that Franz is irreducible
both to sovereign agency over his environs on the one hand, and to the
cycles of nature on the other. It is through the topos of the slaughterhouse
itself, with its premonitions of sacrifice and regeneration, that this sense of
contingency and violence might nonetheless lay an unexpected ground for
a new set of perspectives on humanness in the fabric of the city. The chapter
title ‘Denn es geht dem Menschen wie dem Vieh; wie dies stirbt, so stirbt er
26 See Santner, On Creaturely Life, p. 22.

27 Rilke, Sämtliche Werke, p. 697.

412 Robert Craig

Leben röchelt sich nun aus’ (life leaves with a death rattle) falls among other
instances of the visceral but ironically medical death rattle, which jostle
alongside sounds that characteristically blur the divide between animal and
man, nature and city (138; cf. 142, 178). In modernist affinity with Mikhail
Bakhtin’s Renaissance conception of the carnival, thought as a figurative
site of endlessly ‘degrading and simultaneously regenerating functions’, or
rather of disintegrating and redeveloping meanings,30 the messiness of the
abattoir continually feeds into myriad resonances with myths of slaughter,
death, and renewal throughout the narrative fabric.
Indeed, echoes of animal killing can be heard time and again as the
novel progresses. Mieze’s brutal murder at the hands of Reinhold at the
close of Book VII is intercut with flashbacks to the knives and the arteries
of the abattoir (139–40) as well as being overshadowed by the burlesque
figure of the ‘Schnitter Tod’ (Grim Reaper) (352, cf. 185). And the image
of the swinging ‘Beil’ (hatchet), crashing down on the heads of slaugh-
terhouse swine and Franz alike, sees the site of food production, right at
the seam between man and his ‘natural’ others, resonating with the site of
his ritual sacrifice at the hands of the axe-wielding Death in the asylum
at Berlin-Buch (139, 431).31 Ritchie Robertson has justly argued that as
Gretchen redeems Faust, ‘so the pure-hearted prostitute Mieze seems to
redeem Biberkopf by her violent death’;32 but when read in the shadow
of the abattoir, the novel’s troubling sacrificial economy – through which
he is supposedly redeemed and then re-socialized – is far more prone to
slippage and irony than this reading might suggest.33 Franz’s recognition
of the need to accept responsibility for Mieze’s violent death through his
30 See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Krystyna Pomorska,

Bloomington, IN 1984, p. 23.
31 Cf. the figure of ‘homo sacer’. In its original (classical Roman) significance, as Agamben

expounds it, ‘homo sacer’ was excluded from the sacrificial economy of the polis,
his life and death thus divested of all potential sacrificial and symbolic weight. See
Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 71–3.
32 Ritchie Robertson, ‘From Naturalism to National Socialism (1890–1945)’, in Helen

Watanabe-O’Kelly (ed.), The Cambridge History of German Literature, Cambridge
1997, pp. 327–92: p. 363.
33 Cf. also Tatar, Lustmord, pp. 141, 145.


own hubristic bluff and bluster, is of a piece with the collapse of sense of
sovereignty in the face of his own mortality and the radical uncontrol-
lability of his environment. However, what is interesting is that this new
openness to otherness, embodied in the refrain of ‘herankommen lassen’
(letting things come) (435–6), is itself carnivalized and subverted by being
made bluntly explicit. Death casts himself as a bizarre hybrid of messianism,
baroque figuration, and low-cultural Volkslied, complete with a bemusing
Berlin accent and such self-ironizing claims as the parody of John 14.6 in
‘[i]ch bin das Leben und die wahrste Kraft’ (I am life and the truest power)
(431). And when Franz finally emerges from the asylum after much hacking,
chopping, screaming, and clinical disagreement over whether he needs a
physiological or psychotherapeutic cure,34 metaphoric catharsis gives way
to a strikingly humdrum reincorporation into Berlin society. He is now
Franz Karl Biberkopf, after his maternal grandfather, but he has the same
papers and the same appearance (442, 447).
Against that shifting backdrop, I suggest that instead of being the tale
of a violent ex-con’s moral epiphany, the novel acts out an aesthetic through
which symbolic meanings are repeatedly subverted, chopped up like so
much organic matter, and reassembled in new forms. We read that beyond
the tiny pieces into which it is being carnivalized, Franz’s unconscious body
is certainly not dead, but rather ‘[es] lebt alles weiter’ (everything lives on)
(432); and this vitalistic economy of renewal elicits an amusing biological
parallel in the image of Franz’s broken soul containing many plant germs
and drifting, in a dream state, out of the asylum on a daily basis to scatter
more over the wintery ground (429). These organic metaphors become, I
argue, a symbolic correlate to a figuratively vitalistic aesthetic that redeems
fragmentation through fragmentation. What I mean by this is that the
novel’s symbols of violence, sacrifice, and degeneration continually shade
into their opposites of regeneration: concrescences or constellations of
very different notes or themes that set in motion a dynamic of interaction
and interpenetration.
34 BA 424–8. On the parody of Freudian voguishness in the reference to the ‘Protokoll

vom letzten Kongreß in Baden-Baden’ (the minutes of the [third] Congress for
Psychotherapy in Baden-Baden, BA 426), see Stauffaucher, in BA 549.
212 Linda Leskau

a positive power aimed at productivity. It evolved in two basic forms, the
first of which is to be attributed to the seventeenth century and the latter
to the second half of the eighteenth century. The first form of the power
over life is discipline, centred on the individuals and their bodies; the second
form is regulation in which, for the first time, the population shifts into
a political and economic focus.3 Sexuality lies at the heart of the efforts
directed towards power over life and connects the two poles of disciplining
and regulatory control. The centring of sexuality in the wake of the new
techniques of power gave rise to a dispositive of sexuality in the nineteenth
century, to which four strategic unities can be assigned: 1) a hysterization
of women’s bodies; 2) a pedagogization of children’s sex; 3) a socialization of
procreative behaviour; and 4) a psychiatrization of perverse pleasure.4 This
last point comprises the extensive analysis, management, and regulatory
control of perverted lust or of the sexually abnormal individual:
Through the various discourses, legal sanctions against minor perversions were
multiplied; sexual irregularity was annexed to mental illness; from childhood to old
age, a norm of sexual development was defined and all the possible deviations were
carefully described; pedagogical controls and medical treatments were organized;
around the least fantasies, moralists, but especially doctors, brandished the whole
emphatic vocabulary of abomination.5
As the quotation illustrates, biopower is organized around the concept of

normality as opposed to abnormality. This is why Foucault refers to the
emergence of a ‘normalizing society’.6 The centring on the dichotomy of
normal/abnormal can also be observed in another important change: the
transformation of medical knowledge.7 Until the end of the eighteenth
century, on Foucault’s account, medicine is centred around the dichotomy
of health and illness, focusing on the illness itself rather than the patient.
3 See ibid. pp. 139–40.

4 Ibid. pp. 104–5.

5 Ibid. p. 36.

6 Ibid. p. 144.

7 See Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception,

London and New York 2003, pp. 40–1.

Carnivals and cityscapes
By homing in on two final set-pieces from the cityscape of Berlin itself, I

suggest that this sense of reinvested meaning speaks to a creaturely anthro-
pology that unfurls not simply within the protagonist’s journey towards
epiphany, but also on the level of the street itself. Despite his reservations
about the novel’s end, Benjamin admired the way in which the narrative’s
dissipation among bible verses, snippets from hit songs, and statistics – in
short, its ‘montage’-like quality – fed into new, ‘epic’ possibilities.36 And
it is in this light that the two halves of the novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz
and Franz Biberkopf, disclose their symbiotic relationship.
By 1928, the Alex had become synonymous with urban reconstruction,
and Döblin’s montage sequences bring to presence a cityscape that is in
the midst of constant regeneration.37 The laying of the new U-Bahn line,
which would be opened in December 1930, finds its way into the narra-
tive at the start of the urban panoramas of Books IV and V (BA 123, 165).
The mentions seem properly coincidental, and simply another example
of Döblin’s desire to give a vivid account of a real contemporary time and
space. And yet what strikes us is the way in which this street-level descrip-
tion of the city somehow moves marginally beyond itself, and shades over
into something of symbolic significance. The riffing invocation of security
and protection companies near the start of the fourth book, for exam-
ple, playfully invokes the panoptical quality of the novel’s own textual
strategies (106). In a dynamic of seemingly free association, the narrative
shifts from the ‘Wach- und Schutzdienst für Groß-Berlin und außerhalb’
(Watch and Safeguard Service for Greater Berlin), through the tellingly
named ‘Wachbereitschaft Deutschland’ (Germania Protective Agency),
to a nonsensical play on ‘Wachsmann als Erzieher’ and ‘Flachsmann als
Erzieher’, before ending up rather ridiculously in the contiguous and entirely
random ‘Wäscherei Adler’ (Adler’s Laundrette) with its speciality in ‘feine
36 Benjamin, GS, vol. III, p. 232.

37 See Peter Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar

Culture, Berkeley, CA 2006, pp. 3–8.
416 Robert Craig

Herren- und Damenwäsche’ (fine gents’ and ladies’ underwear) (124, my
emphases).
In an extensive discussion of Joyce in The Modes of Modern Writing,
David Lodge pointed to a high-modernist proclivity for scattering words
from seemingly incommensurable realms of signification through the
fabric of a mundane, metonymic narrative reality.38 Döblin’s use of textual
montage is particularly interesting in this connection because of the way
in which the contingent details of the city’s furniture and infrastructure
interplay with the narrative’s central thrust. Against repeated rumbles of
the notorious post-war Dolchstoßlegende (123),39 the verbiage brings echoes
of the motifs of ‘Wacht am Rhein’ and ‘wach sein’ into dialogue with the
hardware of the city (cf. BA 131, 454, my emphases), before ironizing both
in a moment of textual play. Biberkopf ’s story is hybridized into Berlin’s
spatiality and temporality, and his persistent desire for a self-controlled
and militaristic watchfulness repeatedly carnivalized. As if in delight at the
sheer plasticity of its own language, the narrative acts out its own proximity
to contingency and nonsense. Yet at the same time it points beyond itself
as a mimesis of a mode of urban life that is open to unmasterable differ-
ence and otherness in the city’s frenetic here and now, as Döblin expressly
describes modernity in Unser Dasein (UD 213). The cityscape’s figurative
proximity to disintegration becomes a seedbed for new perspectives and
reinvestments.
Once again, at the heart of the breaking down, we discover an inex-
haustible drive to build back up, as the carnivalization of meanings feeds
into transient reconfigurations, and fragmentation lays the ground for
endless re-creations. Appropriately enough, this brings us back to the
Alex’s steam ram, whose pounding has echoed throughout our discussions.
Book V’s negotiations with building work open with an onomatopoeic
38 See David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the

Typology of Modern Literature, London 1977, pp. 134–5.
39 The text makes a number of direct references to the persistent ‘stab in the back myth’,

which blamed Germany’s defeat in World War I on an eclectic group of internal
enemies, from seditious ‘red’ workers to Jewish financiers (cf. BA 84–5; cf. Eberhard
Kolb, The Weimar Republic, trans. P. S. Falda and R. J. Park, London 2004, p. 140).

description of how the steam ram ‘wuchtet’ (slams away) at the Alex (165).
Midgley has highlighted the narrative significance of this scene, setting this
biological portrayal of collective animal activity – ‘[w]ie die Bienen sind sie
über den Boden her’ (people swarm over the ground like bees) – in con-
trast to Biberkopf ’s own bluster at his ability to rise above the city, to be a
masculine conqueror of all.40 The narrator tells us to shed no tears over the
condemned Hahn department store, as it is simply part of a natural cycle
of rejuvenation, to be cannibalized into something new, just as the former
statue of the Berolina might be recast into medals. As Döblin had argued
with an unmistakably Darwinian flourish in an essay on technological
modernity in 1924, cities were themselves natural histories, the products
of our species’ evolutionary tendency towards collaborative forms of exist-
ence (SÄPL 177–8). The modern city is a collective creature.
But the personification of the piles for the U-Bahn exceeds even these
natural cycles, motioning to a creaturely meaning that is always marginally
in excess of the biological reality of ‘being human’. There is a miniature
process of subjective association on the part of passers-by who have time
outside of the circulation of texts to linger and watch the steam ram ham-
mering piles into the ground. In their witnessing of the piles’ battered ‘heads’,
we glimpse a playful allegory of the modern epic novel itself. And in the
observation of how slickly it all passes off, there is an ironic suggestion of
the readers’ shared aesthetic experience in following Biberkopf ’s trials and
tribulations, not to mention an oblique nod to the ethical ideal of a shared
public space and a collective encounter with the artwork:
Rumm rumm haut die Dampframme auf dem Alexanderplatz.

Viele Menschen haben Zeit und gucken sich an, wie die Ramme haut. Ein Mann oben
zieht immer eine Kette, dann pafft es oben, und ratz hat die Stange eins auf den Kopf.
Da stehen die Männer und Frauen und besonders die Jungens und freuen sich, wie
das geschmiert geht: ratz kriegt die Stange eins auf den Kopf. Nachher ist sie klein
wie eine Fingerspitze, dann kriegt sie aber noch immer eins, da kann sie machen,
40 David Midgley, ‘“Wie die Bienen sind sie über den Boden her.” Zu den biologischen

Bezügen der Massendarstellungen in Döblins Romanen’, in Stefan Keppler-Tasaki
(ed.), Internationales Alfred-Döblin-Kolloquium, Berlin 2011: Massen und Medien
bei Alfred Döblin, Bern 2014, pp. 51–65: p. 64.
418 Robert Craig

was sie will. Zuletzt ist sie weg, Donnerwetter, die haben sie fein eingepökelt, man
zieht befriedigt ab. (165)
(Boom boom, the steam pounds away on the Alex. Many people have time spare,
and have a gander at the steam ram pounding away. Up top there’s a man pulling at
a chain, then a puff of steam, and bang! The pole gets it right on the noggin. There
are men and women standing around and lots of youngsters as well and they love
how slick it all is: bang! the pole gets it right on the noggin. It gets smaller, smaller,
as small as a fingertip, then it gets it again, there, they can do like with that one. Holy
cow, they’ve given that a good old whack.)
In my introduction to this chapter, I suggested that art for Döblin elicits

the strangely persistent promise of human purposiveness in the face of
the brute fact that, as finite physiological entities, we are nothing but the
contingent outgrowths of ever-repeating organic cycles (UD 241–2). As
the mirror image of its human creators, the work of art, or the epic novel,
mimics organic processes, complete with their secretions, outgrowths, and
intricate interconnections. But it also hints at an inimitably human mean-
ingfulness that sits ever so slightly askew of those processes – in short, it
speaks to our shared creatureliness.
Although this might seem an odd passage with which to end, we see
crystallized in these shared moments on the Alex a filmic portrayal of this
completeness in the midst of corporeal and psychical violence, as the pile
is satisfyingly driven into the ground like a disappearing fingertip. This is
a return to the earth and, in the repeated pounding to the head, a cathartic
glimpse of Biberkopf ’s ravaged body and mind. But as one of Berlin’s con-
tingent carnival pleasures, it is also a moment that refracts a fleeting promise
of human ‘Vollendung’ (completeness) into the novel’s many random and
nondescript Berlin vignettes (BA 126–7; cf. UD 237–8). And out on the
Alex, that’s more than enough to let these nameless fellow Berliners move
off and go about their intersecting business, satisfied, with the sense that
at least something has been finished, something is done. Holy cow, they’ve
given that a good old whack.
Berlin Alexanderplatz’s enduring achievement is certainly not to
redeem its troubled – and troubling – protagonist in a culminating econ-
omy of re-socialization, to the drumbeat of the marching masses. Instead,
the novel brings to expression countless, fleeting promises of creaturely

meaning and interconnection beyond its protagonist, leaving Franz’s future
as one of the little guys unnervingly open as the novel’s myriad voices and
noises finally fade to silence (BA 454–5). Döblin’s novel moves at a complex
intersection between recent configurations of biology and philosophi-
cal anthropology, and the creaturely motifs of literary modernism. That
interface opens up spaces for reflection on the subject’s uncanny, even ter-
rifying, proximity to its underlying ‘naturalness’; but our messy proximity
highlights the irreducibility to biological explanation that marks out the
modern human being as human. Through its creative portrayals of that
in-between space, Berlin Alexanderplatz suggests that this vulnerability,
this existence at the precarious suture of biology and society, might even
provoke an ethical rethinking of metropolitan humanness itself. Franz is
by no means the only creature in town.
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between literature and sexual science around 1900.14 Of special note in
this context is that Krafft-Ebing draws on the literary works of Marquis
de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch when coining the terms sadism
and masochism for the two types of perversion.15
In the course of this chapter, I shall offer a reading of texts published
in the twentieth century by Alfred Döblin and Hanns Heinz Ewers, writers
who took different approaches to articulating the taboo subject of sexual
abnormality in literary form. The primary focus will be on the various inter-
twinings between sexual science and the literary texts, and the question as
to what extent the use of botanical and floral imagery in these texts reflects
the depathologization of sadism and masochism as perversions within the
sexual-scientific discourse in the German-speaking world. In considering
this question, I will first highlight those passages in each of the texts that
deal with perversions, and then proceed to reveal their similarities at a
metaphorical level.
Sadomasochistic perversions in literature
Döblin’s novel Der schwarze Vorhang (The Black Curtain) was written
between 1902 and 1903 and first published in 1912. It tells of the trans-
formation of the protagonist Johannes, who evolves from having sadistic
and masochistic fantasies to behaving sadistically towards animals, and
der Sexualpathologie im frühen 20. Jahrhundert, Berlin and Boston, MA 2015,

pp. 37–48: p. 37.
14 Thus, in his preface to Psychopathia Sexualis, Krafft-Ebing speaks quite positively

of literary writers when he writes: ‘The poet is the better psychologist […].’ Krafft-
Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, p. V.
15 See ibid. pp. 80 and 132.


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Notes on Contributors
HEIKE BAUER is Senior Lecturer in English and Gender Studies at Birkbeck

College, University of London. She has published widely on literature and
the history of sexuality, including two monographs, The Hirschfeld Archives:
Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture (Philadelphia, PA 2017) and
English Literary Sexology (Basingstoke 2009); a three-volume anthology of
texts, Women and Cross-Dressing 1800–1930 (London 2006); and two edited
collections, Queer 1950s: Rethinking Sexuality in the Postwar Years (co-
edited with Matt Cook, Basingstoke 2012) and Sexology and Translation:
Cultural and Scientific Encounters Across the Modern World (Philadelphia
2015). She also works on contemporary queer, lesbian, and feminist writing
and graphic memoirs. She has edited special journal issues on ‘Transnational
Lesbian Culture’ (with Churnjeet Mahn), Journal of Lesbian Studies 18:3
(2014), and ‘Contemporary Comics by Jewish Women’ (with Andrea
Greenbaum and Sarah Lightman), Studies in Comics 6:2 (2015).
ELENA BORELLI holds a PhD in Italian Literature from Rutgers University,

USA, and specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian litera-
ture, with a focus on Giovanni Pascoli, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and the theme
of desire in the Italian fin de siècle. Her book, Giovanni Pascoli, Gabriele
D’Annunzio, and the Ethics of Desire: Between Action and Contemplation,
was published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press in 2017. She was
formerly Assistant Professor of Italian at the City University of New York,
and currently she is working in Italy as a translator and a teacher at a pri-
vate institution.
SARAH CAIN is College Lecturer and Director of Studies in English at

Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. She is currently completing a doc-
toral thesis on American modernist poetry and early twentieth-century
philosophies of language, including works by T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore,
and William Carlos Williams. She teaches English and American literature
424 Notes on Contributors

post-1830, critical theory and aesthetics, and has research interests in global
modernism, the modern history of the book and intellectual history, and in
twentieth-century histories of illness and psychoanalysis and their impact
on literary writing.
ROBERT CRAIG is Postdoctoral Teaching and Research Fellow in the

Department of British Culture at the University of Bamberg, Germany.
He holds a PhD in German from the University of Cambridge. His
doctoral thesis examined the dialectic of nature and self in the work
of the modernist author Alfred Döblin (2016), and reflects a broader
interest in the intersections of science, philosophy, and aesthetics in
literary modernism. His main publications include ‘“Ist die Schwarze
Köchin da? Jajaja …”: Mimesis and Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel’
(Monatshefte 2016) and ‘Dilthey, Gadamer, and Facebook: Towards a
New Hermeneutics of the Social Network’ (Modern Language Review
2015); and he has co-authored a paper on intercultural corporate com-
munications (Miami, FL 2012).
WILLIAM J. DODD is Professor Emeritus of Modern German Studies at the

University of Birmingham. He has published extensively on Franz Kafka,
German language and discourse in the twentieth century, and the literature
of inner exile in the National Socialist period. His publications in this area
include Jedes Wort wandelt die Welt: Dolf Sternbergers politische Sprachkritik
(Göttingen 2007) and ‘Der Mensch hat das Wort’: Der Sprachdiskurs in der
Frankfurter Zeitung 1933–43 (editor, Berlin 2013). He is currently working
on two monographs: a study of critical language commentaries on National
Socialism, and a contextual study of Sternberger’s Panorama and its recep-
tion by Walter Benjamin.
MICHAEL EGGERS is Akademischer Rat at the Institute for German Language

and Literature of the University of Cologne, Germany. His main research
interests are the history and theory of comparative literature; the history of
knowledge and literature; the human voice in literature and cultural theory;
and contemporary drama. His recent publications include the volumes
Vergleichendes Erkennen: Zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Epistemologie
218 Linda Leskau

an ihm herunter, er stand über ihr gebückt, deren Mund offen war, deren Adern an
den Schläfen stärker blauten. […] Sie spritzte ihr Blut nach ihm, mit tiefen Schauern,
träumend. Ihre Finger kratzten den Waldboden; sie zuckte, als er sie aufhob. Noch
als sie erkaltete, suchten ihre Lippen nach seinem Munde. (SV 162–3)
(His hands then grabbed her arms; she flourished towards him, laughing, just as
upright as he was. She let out a piercing scream. Because in his embrace he had sunk
his teeth deep into her white neck and throat. With his face pressed into the stream
of blood, he slurped at her throat while she wrestled against his embrace with a quiet
gasp. He sighed, his jaws pressed together: how warm it was, how warm. It washed
over him, covered his eyes like a red ribbon. Both breathed in the bitter fume of
blood; both out of their minds. The deadly lust rushed through the woman’s body,
like white smoke getting thicker and thicker. She grew into the embrace, into the
gravity of his murderous hand, the suffocating weight of his body. From his loosening
arms she slid down, sighing, he was standing above her, she whose mouth was open,
whose veins were turning a darker blue at the temples. […] She sprayed her blood
on him, shivering violently, dreaming. Her fingers scratched at the forest floor; she
twitched when he took her up in his arms. Even as she went cold her lips were still
searching for his mouth.)
This scene can clearly be interpreted as a lust murder as defined by Krafft-

Ebing, for whom lust murders represent the most extreme form of sadism.
Krafft-Ebing defines sadism, the active combination of cruelty and lust,
as follows: ‘Sadism is thus nothing else than an excessive and monstrous
pathological intensification of phenomena, […] which accompany the
psychical vita sexualis, particularly in males.’19 The quotation illustrates
that Krafft-Ebing understands sadism as a male perversion corresponding
to the male sexual character. According to this view, it is in man’s nature to
play the active, aggressive part, manifesting a strong sexual desire, while the
woman is passive by nature, and her libido weak. It is for this very reason
that the masochistic role is assigned to the woman, a passive combination
of cruelty and desire: ‘Thus it is easy to regard masochism in general as a
pathological growth of specific feminine mental elements, – as an abnor-
mal intensification of certain features of the psycho-sexual character of


DAVID MIDGLEY is Professor Emeritus of German Literature and
Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of
St John’s College. His major publications include Arnold Zweig: Zu
Werk und Wandlung 1927–48 (Frankfurt 1980); Writing Weimar:
Critical Realism in German Literature, 1918–33 (Oxford 2000); and
‘“Schöpferische Entwicklung”: Zur Bergsonrezeption in der deutschspra-
chigen Welt um 1910’ (Scientia poetica, 2012). He has published many
essays on German modernist writers and is currently focusing particularly
on the works of Alfred Döblin.
PAULINE MORET-JANKUS is a lecturer (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) at

the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. She holds a PhD in French Studies
from Durham University and a Master’s in French Literature from Paris-
Sorbonne. Her current research project focuses on the concepts of biologi-
cal race in French literature, and her first monograph is entitled Race et
imaginaire biologique chez Proust (Paris 2016).
STAFFAN müller-WILLE is Associate Professor in the History and

Philosophy of the Life Sciences and Co-director of Egenis, the Centre
for the Study of the Life Sciences, at the University of Exeter and he also
holds an Honorary Chair at the Institute for History of Medicine and
Science Studies of the University of Lübeck. His research is interdiscipli-
nary and international and covers the history of the life sciences from the
early modern period to the early twentieth century, with a focus on the
history of natural history, anthropology, and genetics. Among more recent
publications is a book co-authored with Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, A Cultural
History of Heredity (Chicago 2012), and a co-edited collection, Heredity
Explored: Between Public Domain and Experimental Science, 1850–1930
(Cambridge, MA 2016).
AISHA NAZEER is a PhD researcher at the University of St Andrews.

Building upon an interest in the intersectional relationship between nine-
teenth-century Gothic literature and late Victorian medical and anthro-
pological discourses on race, gender, and sexuality, her current research
examines how nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary depictions of
Notes on Contributors 427

natural science explore the gender hierarchy contrived by the masculine,
scientific gaze. She is particularly interested in the feminization of the
specimen in scientific discourses, and how literary characterizations of
the naturalist and his specimen reflect changing societal attitudes towards
gender relations.
ANAHITA ROUYAN is a PhD candidate at the International Centre for the

History of Universities and Science at the University of Bologna, Italy.
Her main research interests include public discourses of experimental life
sciences and evolution in the United States, media and literary representa-
tions of science, the history of science popularization, and ecocriticism. Her
work has been published in the journals Utopian Studies, Partial Answers,
and Orbit: Writing Around Pynchon.
CYD STURGESS is a PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield. She is

currently finishing her thesis ‘Different to the Others: Discourses of Queer
Female Identity and Desire in Berlin and Amsterdam (1918–40)’ and has
published on queer Dutch literature and history, queer femininities, and
female masculinity. She has also published several articles for DIVA maga-
zine on lesbian history in Europe and has worked on several short film
projects about LGBT+ issues.
DAVID WACHTER is an independent researcher based in Berlin and affili-

ated with the German Department at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität
Jena. He is currently working on a postdoctoral project about angels
in literary modernism. Research interests include figures of the sacred,
aesthetics of the sublime, and literary ethnography. His main publica-
tions include Konstruktionen im Übergang: Krise und Utopie bei Musil,
Kracauer und Benn (Freiburg 2013); ‘Fenster, Orgel, Partitur: Cäcilies
Dinge bei Kleist und Mallarmé’ (Kleist-Jahrbuch 2015); and ‘“Spruch,
Tanz und Gesang”: Kafkas EthnoGraphie der Musik’ (Würzburg 2015).
MICHAEL WAINWRIGHT lectures at Royal Holloway, University of

London. His research focuses on literature and science. Darwin and
Faulkner’s Novels: Evolution and Southern Fiction (New York 2008), his

first monograph, was a Choice Review of Books Outstanding Academic Title
for 2009. His latest monograph, published by Palgrave Macmillan, is Game
Theory and Postwar American Literature (Basingstoke 2016).
GODELA WEISS-SUSSEX is Reader in Modern German Literature at the

Institute of Modern Languages Research (IMLR) of the University of
London. She is also Fellow in German at King’s College, Cambridge. Her
main research interests lie in the culture and literature of the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries in the following areas: women’s writing, the works
of German-Jewish writers produced in Germany and in exile, biology and
literature, the city in literature, and the visual arts. Recent publications
include Jüdin und Moderne: Literarisierungen der Lebenswelt deutsch-
jüdischer Autorinnen in Berlin, 1900–18 (Berlin 2016); Tales of Commerce
and Imagination: Department Stores and Modernity in Film and Literature
(co-edited with Ulrike Zitzlsperger, Frankfurt am Main 2015); and Protest
and Reform in German Literature and Visual Culture, 1871–1918 (co-edited
with Charlotte Woodford, Munich 2015).
CHARLOTTE WOODFORD is Fellow in German at Selwyn College,

Cambridge. Her recent publications include Women, Emancipation and
the German Novel: Protest Fiction in its Cultural Context 1871–1910 (Oxford
2014), and Protest and Reform in German Literature and Visual Culture,
1871–1918 (co-edited with Godela Weiss-Sussex, Munich 2015).
Index
abjection 16, 261, 274, 276–7, 285–7 Bölsche, Wilhelm 21, 112–13, 117–18, 141

Achebe, Chinua 320 Love-Life in Nature 194–5

aesthetics 9, 10–11, 18, 25–6, 117–18, 152, botany 171, 174, 181–4, 211, 215, 226–8,

165, 214, 229, 350–1, 353, 355–6, 232
358, 368, 372, 374–7, 381–2, 385–6, Bourget, Paul 18, 20, 35, 52, 87, 97–108

388–91, 409, 413, 417 Brera, Valeriano Luigi 292

Agamben, Giorgio Buffon, Georges 270–1

Homo Sacer 411, 412

Open, The 345, 346 Cassirer, Ernst 344

Andreas-Salomé, Lou 18, 21–2, 189–207, Césaire, Aimé 261

383 classification 16–17, 23, 96, 163–4,

animal agency 4–5 173–4, 178–81, 213, 261, 269–76,

animality 15, 17, 19, 24, 26, 39, 40–1, 50–1, 285–8

53, 60, 75–6, 153, 155, 165, 263, 272, Cobbold, Thomas Spencer 24, 291,

346, 407–14, 417–19 296–7, 299, 300, 302
anthropocentrism 72–5, 80, 378, 393–4 colonialism 15, 17, 24, 74, 261, 275, 295,

anthropomorphism 5, 150–1, 221, 226, 318–19, 320, 321, 323, 325, 336

265 Comte, Auguste 6, 341

anti-Semitism 20, 87, 90, 94–5, 102, 127 Conrad, Joseph

Arnold, Matthew 5, 7 Heart of Darkness 319–21

contagion 10, 23, 274, 286, 305

Baartman, Saartjie (the ‘Hottentot
Venus’) 279 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 19, 42–3, 52–7,

Bakhtin, Mikhail 412 59–60

Bauer, Heike 14, 256 Darwin, Charles 1, 2, 8–10, 15, 33–4, 36,

Beer, Gillian 39–60, 63, 65–6, 71, 78, 90, 92,
Darwin’s Plots 8–10, 33 94–6, 98, 103, 112–15, 121, 135–57,

Bellingham, O’Bryen 301 161, 183, 279, 295

Benjamin, Walter 136–7, 144, 406, 415 Descent of Man, The 44–5, 142–3,

Bergson, Henri 150–1, 153–7, 263
Creative Evolution 341 On the Origin of Species 1, 33, 43, 44,

biogenetic law 6, 35, 49, 92, 101, 103, 326 123, 145, 148, 263

biopower 22, 211–13 Darwin, Erasmus 292–3, 302–3

Blainville, Henri de 279 Darwinism 3–5, 36, 43–5, 94–5, 139, 141,

Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich 270–1 378, 383


Mordes mit dem Tode bestraft’23 (Whosoever kills a person intentionally
shall be punished by death for murder if the killing was done with delibera-
tion). This means that only people can be murdered, but not buttercups.
Yet I plead for using the term murder, since there are several passages in
the text which illustrate that the buttercup takes the role of a woman: it is
constantly anthropomorphized by Fischer. On several separate occasions he
talks about murdering the flower (see EB 61–3), and about a ‘Pflanzenleiche’
(EB 62) (plant corpse), and he gives the buttercup the female Christian
name Ellen (see EB 64).
Even if it is possible to call this a murder on the basis of anthropo-
morphism, it remains to be determined whether it can be described as a
lust murder, in which the killing is coupled with sexual desire. To answer
this question, we need to subject the text’s gendered characters to a simi-
lar analysis to that undertaken with Döblin’s Der schwarze Vorhang. For
it is just as much the case that the gendered characters in the story Die
Ermordung einer Butterblume are used as signifiers for the gender charac-
teristics that define the essential being of men and women. The narrative
style used to describe the incident in the forest makes it clear early on that
Herr Fischer, as the male, takes on the active role: he jerks, tears, attacks,
and hits, whereas the flowers with their female connotations endure his
aggression and violence silently and passively. And it is finally the man,
Herr Fischer, who murders the anthropomorphized, female buttercup. It is
noteworthy that Fischer is sexually aroused after the murder: ‘Wild schlug
das Herz des Kaufmanns’ (EB 60) (The businessman’s heart beat wildly).
If this physical excitement is interpreted as sexual arousal, the murder hap-
pens as a combination of active violence and lust, and can therefore also
be characterized as a sadistic lust murder.
Finally, I wish to discuss the novel Alraune written by Hanns Heinz
Ewers, which was first published in 1911. It tells the story of the human
creature Alraune (German for mandragora or mandrake), who was cre-
ated as a kind of experiment to verify the truth about the myth of the
23 Strafgesetzbuch (German Criminal Code) <http://lexetius.com/StGB/211,6>

[accessed 5 May 2016]. Translation of the German Criminal Code provided by Prof.
Dr Michael Bohlander.
Index 431

Gobineau, Arthur de 17, 128, 272–3, 279, Jewish stereotype(s) 126–7, 129

284–5 Jewishness 116, 125, 128, 130, 203–5

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 122, 123 Johannsen, Wilhelm 34

Gothic novel 16–17, 23, 270, 276, 278,

282, 286–8 Kafka, Franz
Gould, Stephen Jay 271 ‘Investigations of a Dog’ 344

Key, Ellen 193

Habermas, Jürgen 7, 136 Koch, Robert 265

Haeckel, Ernst 5, 18, 20, 33, 35, 87, 90–7, Krafft-Ebing, Richard von 280

101–8, 114, 122, 194, 326, 341, 376, Psychopathia Sexualis 13, 162–4,

378, 401 213–15, 218–19, 224, 231, 232–3
Art Forms of Nature 372, 374–5 Kristeva, Julia 16

Natural History of Creation, The 3, 96 Powers of Horror 261, 274, 276,

Riddle of the Universe, The 3 285–7

Haggard, H. Rider Küchenmeister, Friedrich 295

She 23, 270, 274–5, 277, 280,

281–8 Lacan, Jacques 304
Hartmann, Eduard von 4, 15, 40–1 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 73

Hedwig, Johannes 21, 179–81 Lamarckism 2

Heidegger, Martin 344–5, 409 Lankester, Edwin Ray 78–9, 298–9

heredity 2, 10, 18, 21–2, 33–4, 41, 45, 56, Lebensphilosophie 42, 341, 400

96, 101–2, 104, 107, 114, 129, 161, Levine, George 33

200–1, 202, 213, 242, 263, 278–9, Lewes, George Henry 265

285 Linnaeus, Carl 21, 179–81, 270–1,

heterosexuality 163, 251, 252, 255, 269 285–6

Hirschfeld, Magnus 23, 240–1, 253, 255 Lipps, Theodor 375

Hitler, Adolf 157, 273 Lombroso, Cesare 44–5, 307

Hofmeister, Wilhelm 21, 181–4

homosexuality 162, 235–6, 277 Marryat, Florence 288

Huxley, Thomas Henry 5, 7, 44, 65, Blood of the Vampire, The 23, 270,

68–70, 79–80 274, 277–9, 281–2, 285–7
materialism 2, 90, 103, 141, 196, 341, 378,

Ibsen, Henrik 265 409

Enemy of the People, An 266 Meisel-Hess, Grete 18, 20, 35–6, 111–30

imperialism 140, 144, 147, 157, 161–2, Mendel, Gregor 2–3, 161

282, 324–5 mesmerism 308, 312

inheritance see heredity miscegenation 17, 23, 270, 274, 275,

inversion see homosexuality 284–7
Mittelstraß, Jürgen 8

James, William 342–3, 351–2 Möbius, Karl 25, 372, 381, 386, 388

Jensen, Johannes Vilhelm 319 Aesthetics of Animal Life, The 374–7

432 Index

monism 3, 18, 20, 35–6, 90, 92, 105, 107,

psychology 40, 46, 87, 89, 92, 94, 99, 102,

111–16, 122–4, 129, 195–6, 203, 124, 165, 328, 333–4, 376
374, 378, 401 psychotechnics 5, 343, 350, 356–7, 362,

motherhood 100–1, 115, 119–20, 124–5, 367

130, 190–3, 196–8, 242
Müller, Robert 322–4 race 16–18, 23, 87, 90, 94–6, 101–2, 104,

Macht 323 107–8, 138, 140, 151, 156, 162,

Tropen 24, 317–18, 321, 325–37 204–6, 263, 270–9, 281–5, 287

Münsterberg, Hugo 25, 343–4, 350–5, racial stereotype(s) 261–2, 280, 323,

359, 361–2, 367–8 329–30
Psychology and Industrial regeneration 307, 402, 410, 413–15

Efficiency 356–8 Renan, Ernest 261

reproduction 13, 14–15, 21, 115–17, 120–1,

National Socialism 18, 33, 136–8, 147, 149, 130, 161–3, 165, 169, 179–81, 184,

150, 157 190, 193, 195, 200, 213
natural selection 1–4, 10, 15, 18, 21, 34, 36, Reuling, Josine 22–3, 237–8, 246–56

44, 65, 80, 138, 140–1, 143–6, 148, Rhind, William 293

151–2, 155, 157, 401 Rilke, Rainer Maria 25, 193, 199, 382–3,

natural theology 9 393–4, 408

Nazism see National Socialism Black Cat 392

Nietzsche, Friedrich 4, 190–1, 263, 265, Dog, The 371–2, 391–2

323, 331, 400 Gazelle, The 384–8

Beyond Good and Evil 264, 332 Panther, The 388–91

On the Genealogy of Morality 264, Rose Window, The 392–3

332–4 Rudolphi, Karl Asmund 292, 302

Thus Spoke Zarathustra 331 Ruskin, John 265, 291, 297–8

Will to Power, The 39–40

Nordau, Max Said, Edward
Degeneration 45–6, 77 Orientalism 273, 282

Santner, Eric 400

parasitology 10, 24, 265, 291–300, 306–13 On Creaturely Life 346, 407–8

Pascoli, Giovanni 19, 42, 48–51, 57, 59–60 Schaffner, Anna Katharina 13–14

pathology 16, 22–3, 118, 164, 198, 211, Schopenhauer, Arthur 4, 15, 39–40, 42,

213–14, 215, 218, 228, 233, 269–70, 54, 55, 326
273, 27–77, 286 science popularization 34, 67–71

Popper, Karl 33 Serres, Michel 293, 313

positivism 44–5, 105 sexology 13–14, 22–3, 162–4, 165, 190,

projection(s) 262 213–16, 230, 232–3, 236–46, 249,

psychoanalysis 13–14, 18, 24, 39, 48, 255–6

163–4, 190–1, 196, 207, 249–50, sexual selection 33, 263

334–5, 342 Shaffer, Elinor 8

Index 433

Shapin, Steven 1 Snake’s Pass, The 306

Showalter, Elaine Under the Sunset 305

Sexual Anarchy 282

Siebold, Karl Theodor Ernst von 295 Taylor, Frederick Winslow 343, 356

Simmel, Georg Thomson, John Arthur 278

‘Metropolis and Mental Life,
The’ 402 Uexküll, Jakob von 4, 25, 343–5, 383,

Snow, Charles Percy 5, 7–8 387–8, 409

Two Cultures, The 5 Environment and Inner World of

social Darwinism 18, 44, 90, 114, 139 Animals 372, 377–82, 388, 391

Soury, Jules 20, 35, 87–100, 102–8 Unconscious, the 4, 34, 36, 39–42,

Spencer, Herbert 6, 44, 99, 105, 106, 341 60, 163, 192, 195–6, 198, 207, 262

Stein, Gertrude 25, 350–3, 365–8

Sternberger, Dolf 20–1, 36, 135–57 vitalism 206–7, 341, 400, 413

Stifter, Adalbert 21, 169–85 vivisection 17, 155, 203

Stöcker, Helene 115, 193 Vogt, Karl 17, 272, 281, 284

Stoker, Bram 23–24, 291, 300–6,

309–11 Weickart, Richard 33
Dracula 307–8 Weininger, Otto

Famous Impostors 310 Sex and Character 35, 112

Jewel of Seven Stars, The 309–10 Wells, H. G. 15

Lair of the White Worm, The 24, 303, Time Machine, The 19–20, 35, 63–83

310–13 Wundt, Wilhelm 342–3, 351, 359

‘Old Hoggen: A Mystery’ 306–7

Primrose Path, The 305 Zwierlein, Anne-Julia 6, 265

CULTURAL HISTORY AND LITERARY IMAGINATION
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Biological Discourses

The Language of Science

ROBERT CRAIG AND

The relationship between biological thought and literature, and

Robert Craig is Postdoctoral Teaching and Research Fellow at the

Robert Craig and Ina Linge (eds)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017007741

Cover Image: ‘Chordaria Flagelliformis’ by Anna Atkins. From Photographs of British

Cover design: Peter Lang Ltd.

© Peter Lang AG 2017

Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers,

All rights reserved.

This publication has been peer reviewed.

Part III: Projections of Otherness

Introduction: Can Science and Literature Share

Perceptions of the relation between literature and biology in the English-

This volume is certainly not only concerned with Darwin or

3 For a seminal intervention in the modern ‘sociology of scientific knowledge’, see

lrb.co.uk/v38/n17/steven-rose/how-to-get-another-thorax> [accessed 13 December

Haeckelian appropriations fed into radically different literary attempts to

conversation, between philosopher Jürgen Mittelstraß and literary critic

Circulations and exchanges: A common language?

40 Anna Katharina Schaffner, Modernism and Perversion: Sexual Deviance in Sexology

44 Peter Morton, The Vital Science, p. 224.

Ajouri, Philip, ‘Darwinism in German-Speaking Literature (1859–c. 1890)’, in Thomas

1 The Beast Within: Darwinism and Desire in the

In the posthumous collection of aphorisms published under the title The

11 See Robertson, ‘Modernism and the Self 1890–1924’, p. 151.

is no longer a source of slavery and suffering: ‘Schopenhauer’s basic misunderstand-

15 Pancaldi, Darwin in Italy, p. 152.

16 Cesare Lombroso, Influenza della Civiltà su la Pazzia e della Pazzia su la Civiltà,

19 Max Nordau, Degeneration, London 1895, p. 25.

23 Antonio Fogazzaro, Ascensioni umane, Milan 1899, p. 44.

Echoing Lombroso’s notion of regression, Fogazzaro acknowledges the

A similar view of desire informs the Weltanschauung of Giovanni Pascoli,

The ascent to contemplation, which constitutes the main theme of the

Pascoli was very much aligned with late nineteenth-century evolutionism

30 Pascoli, Prose, ed. Augusto Vicinelli, Milan 1952, III, p. 770.

31 Pascoli, L’Era Nuova, p. 157.

The ‘third crown’ of fin-de-siècle Italy, Gabriele D’Annunzio, was one of

35 Gabriele D’Annunzio, Il Piacere, in Prose di romanzi, ed. Annamaria Andreoli and

thank Christian J. Emden for supporting the publication of this volume;

40 D’Annunzio, Prose, I, p. 788.

In D’Annunzio’s last novel the liberation of the ‘beast within’ is obtained by

42 D’Annunzio, Prose, II, pp. 865–6.

The dream of the body-machine, as portrayed by both D’Annunzio and

46 Morasso, La nuova arma, p. 38.

Baldi, Guido, Le ambiguità della ‘decadenza’: D’Annunzio romanziere, Naples 2008.

48 See Pascoli’s discussion on the impact of technology on the evolution of humans in

2 Resisting Excelsior Biology: H. G. Wells’s

Haeckelian appropriations fed into radically different literary attempts to

James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and

18 Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, p. 161.

The Time Traveller’s evolutionary imagination

30 W. Warren Wagar, ‘Wells’s Scientific Imagination’, in Harold Bloom, H. G. Wells,

63 Wells, The Time Machine, p. 70.

75 Richard Gregory, ‘Science in Fiction’, in Parrinder, H. G. Wells in Nature, pp. 179–81:

3 Jules Soury and Paul Bourget, or the Influence

This chapter proposes to analyse the biological theories of Jules Soury

In his recent bibliography of the political right in France, Alain de Benoist

A strong advocate of Darwin’s theories, Soury was France’s propagator of

Promoting German biology in France

Soury translated works by several German biologists: Eduard Oscar

15 Soury, Campagne nationaliste, p. 52.