Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T03:21:35.978Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

BEAUTIFUL SOULS MIXED UP WITH HOOKED NOSES: ART, DEGENERATION, AND ANTI-SEMITISM IN THE MASTER AND TRILBY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2012

Michèle Mendelssohn
Michèle Mendelssohn*
Affiliation:
Oxford University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The diagnosis made by Dr P. C. Remondino, M.D. was unambiguous. “Trilby is a masterpiece when viewed in the light of a study in heredity,” he announced in the pages of Practical Medicine in 1895. “Du Maurier has given us . . . the well digested results of a careful as well as discriminating study. . . . Neither Darwin, [nor] Galton, . . . could have given us a more comprehensive or more lucid study of the subject. Neither could Maudsley” (380–81). Despite the good doctor's critical insight, Trilby's deployment of degenerationist discourse has often gone unnoticed. On the rare occasions it has been touched upon, it has most often been subsumed under the banner of fin-de-siècle anti-Semitism or connected to Du Maurier's anti-Aestheticism. Yet what this essay reveals is that art, degeneration, and anti-Semitism were, in fact, intimately connected in the late nineteenth century, and that this not only influenced literature, it also shaped its reception. This essay examines Trilby (1894) in conjunction with The Master (1894), a novel by the most important British Zionist of the late nineteenth century, Israel Zangwill. Since Zangwill's death in 1926, literary critics have paid him scant attention. His contributions to degenerationism have been wholly overlooked even though his notion of the “melting pot” was almost certainly the theory of ethnicity with the most traction in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , March 2012 , pp. 179 - 197
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Baron, Wendy. Sickert: Paintings and Drawings. New Haven: Yale UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Bernasconi, Robert, and Lott, Tommy Lee, eds. The Idea of Race. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000.Google Scholar
Bernheimer, Charles. Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture of the Fin De Siècle in Europe. Ed. Kline, T. Jefferson and Schor, Naomi. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002.Google Scholar
Booth, William. In Darkest England, and the Way Out. London: International Headquarters of The Salvation Army, 1890.Google Scholar
Carlson, Eric T. “Medicine and Degeneration: Theory and Praxis.” Chamberlin and Gilman, eds. 121–144.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chamberlin, J. Edward, and Gilman, Sander L.. “Degeneration: Conclusion.” Chamberlin and Gilman, eds. 290–94.Google Scholar
Chamberlin, J. Edward, and Gilman, Sander L., eds. Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cheyette, Bryan. Constructions of “The Jew” in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. London: J. Murray, 1859.Google Scholar
Davies, Norman. Europe: a History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Dawson, Gowan. Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Denisoff, Dennis. Aestheticism and Sexual Parody, 1840–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.Google Scholar
Denisoff, Dennis. “‘Men of My Own Sex’: Genius, Sexuality, and George Du Maurier's Artists.” Victorian Sexual Dissidence. Ed. Dellamora, Richard. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. 147–70.Google Scholar
Du Maurier, George. Trilby. Ed. Showalter, Elaine. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Falk, Lilian. “The Master: Reclaiming Zangwill's Only Künstlerroman.” English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 44.3 (2001): 275–96. Gale Literature Resource Center, University of Utah. Web. 10 September 2009.Google Scholar
Feldman, David. “The Importance of Being English: Jewish Immigration and the Decay of Liberal England.” Metropolis - London: Histories and Representations since 1800. Ed. Feldman, David and Jones, Gareth Stedman. London: Routledge, 1989. 56–84.Google Scholar
Freedman, Jonathan. The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilman, Sander L.The Jew's Body. New York: Routledge, 1991.Google Scholar
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust. Trans. Kaufmann, Walter. New York: Random House, 1990.Google Scholar
Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: Norton, 1996.Google Scholar
Gracombe, Sarah. “Converting Trilby: Du Maurier on Englishness, Jewishness, and Culture.” Nineteenth Century Literature 58.1 (2003): 75–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greenslade, William. Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel, 1880–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.Google Scholar
Grossman, Jonathan H. “The Mythic Svengali: Anti-Aestheticism in Trilby.” Studies in the Novel 28.4 (1996): 525–42.Google Scholar
Heusinger, Karl Friedrich von. Recherches de pathologie comparée. Cassel en Hesse-Electorale: Henri Hotop, 1853. Vol. 1.Google Scholar
Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Against Nature. Ed. Baldick, Robert and McGuinness, Patrick. London: Penguin, 2003.Google Scholar
Jackson, Holbrook. “Israel Zangwill.” The Bookman 46.272 (1914): 67–73. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Poupard, Dennis. Vol. 16. Detroit: Gale Research, 1985. Gale Literature Resource Center, University of Utah. Web. 10 September 2009.Google Scholar
Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion. London: Methuen, 1981.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
James, Henry. Novels, 1871–1880: Watch and Ward, Roderick Hudson, the American, the Europeans, Confidence. Ed. Stafford, William T. New York: Library of America, 1983. Vol. 1.Google Scholar
Kelly, Richard. The Art of George Du Maurier. Aldershot: Scolar, 1996.Google Scholar
Kelly, Richard. George Du Maurier. Boston: Twayne, 1983.Google Scholar
Koval, Anne. “The ‘Artists’ Have Come out and the ‘British’ Remain: The Whistler Faction at the Society of British Artists.” After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England. Ed. Prettejohn, Elizabeth. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1999. 90–114.Google Scholar
Koven, Seth. Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leftwich, Joseph. Israel Zangwill. New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1957.Google Scholar
Lombroso, Cesare. Criminal Man. Ed. Gibson, Mary and Rafter, Nicole Hahn. Durham: Duke UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Margolis, Stacey. The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Durham: Duke UP, 2005.Google Scholar
Maudsley, Henry. Body and Mind: an Inquiry into Their Connection and Mutual Influence, Specially in Reference to Mental Disorders. London: Macmillan, 1870.Google Scholar
McLaughlin, Joseph. Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2000.Google Scholar
Mendelssohn, Michèle. Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Michaels, Walter Benn. Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morel, Bénédict Auguste. Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l'espèce humaine. Paris: J. B. Baillière, 1857.Google Scholar
Nordau, Max. Degeneration. New York: D. Appleton, 1895.Google Scholar
Ormond, Leonee. George Du Maurier. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1969.Google Scholar
Pearson, Karl. National Life from the Standpoint of Science, an Address Delivered at Newcastle November 19, 1900. London: A & C Black, 1901.Google Scholar
Pick, Daniel. Svengali's Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Remondino, Peter Charles. “The Psychology of Trilby.” Practical Medicine 5.9 (April 1895): 379–85. Google Books. Web. 10 September 2009.Google Scholar
Richler, Mordecai. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Modern Classics. Ed. MacDonald, Ann-Marie. Toronto: Penguin, 2005.Google Scholar
Rochelson, Meri-Jane. “Israel Zangwill.” British Short-Fiction Writers, 1880–1914: The Realist Tradition. Ed. Thesing, William B.. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 135. Detroit: Gale Research, 1994. Gale Literature Resource Center, University of Utah. Web. 10 September 2009.Google Scholar
Rochelson, Meri-Jane. A Jew in the Public Arena: The Career of Israel Zangwill. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2008.Google Scholar
Russell, Charles. The Jew in London, a Study of Racial Character and Present-Day Conditions. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1900.Google Scholar
Schmitt, Cannon. “‘The Sun and the Moon Were Never Made to Give Them Light’: Empire in the Victorian Novel.” A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel. Ed. O'Gorman, Francis. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 4–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stepan, Nancy. “Biology and Degeneration: Races and Proper Places.” Chamberlin and Gilman, eds. 97–120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Ed. Hindle, Maurice. London: Penguin, 2003.Google Scholar
Taylor, George. “Svengali: Mesmerist and Aesthete.” British Theatre in the 1890s: Essays on Drama and the Stage. Ed. Foulkes, Richard. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. 93–110.Google Scholar
Udelson, Joseph H.Dreamer of the Ghetto: The Life and Works of Israel Zangwill. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1990.Google Scholar
Vorachek, Laura. “Mesmerists and Other Meddlers: Social Darwinism, Degeneration and Eugenics in Trilby.” Victorian Literature and Culture 37.1 (2009): 197–215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wells, H. G.Experiment in Autobiography. London: V. Gollancz, 1934.Google Scholar
Wells, H. G. “Mr. Zangwill's Master.” The Saturday Review 79 2064 (18 May 1895): 656–57. Rpt. Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Dennis Poupard. Vol. 16. Detroit: Gale Research, 1985. Gale Literature Resource Center, University of Utah. Web. 10 September 2009.Google Scholar
Wells, H. G.The Outline of History. Vol. 2. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004.Google Scholar
Whistler, James McNeill. The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. New York: Dover, 1967.Google Scholar
Wilde, Oscar. The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Ellmann, Richard. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.Google Scholar
Zangwill, Israel. From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill's Jewish Plays: Three Playscripts. Ed. Nahshon, Edna. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Zangwill, Israel. “In the World of Art and Letters.” Cosmopolitan 24 (December 1897): 221–24.Google Scholar
Zangwill, Israel. The Master. New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1895.Google Scholar
Zangwill, Israel.“The Master and Its Author: A Talk with Mr. Zangwill.” To-day 2.25 (28 April 1894): 361.Google Scholar
Zangwill, Israel. The Melting-Pot. New York: Macmillan, 1920.Google Scholar
Zangwill, Israel. Without Prejudice. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1896.Google Scholar
Zangwill, Israel. “Without Prejudice.” Pall Mall Magazine 10 (September 1896): 156–64.Google Scholar
Zangwill, Israel. “Without Prejudice.” Pall Mall Magazine 10 (September-December 1896): 445–52.Google Scholar
Zangwill, Israel. “Without Prejudice.” Pall Mall Magazine 3 (June 1894): 344–52.Google Scholar
Zangwill, Israel, and Cowen, Louis J.. The Premier and the Painter. 1888. 3rd ed.London: Heinemann, 1896.Google Scholar
Zatlin, Linda Gertner. The Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Jewish Novel. Boston: Twayne, 1981.Google Scholar