Beasts in the Blood: Degeneration & Temporal Collapse in Fin-de-Siècle Gothic Fiction

Abstract

In 1859, following the publication of Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species, the fin-de-siècle imagination became consumed by the belief that if creatures could evolve into intelligence and rationality, they could equally devolve into degeneracy and depravity. This essay utilises Max Nordau’s seminal 1892 work Degeneration as a lens with which to explore and explicate the motif of degeneration across Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula', Arthur Machen’s 'The Great God Pan', and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles. Informed by both fin-de-siècle and contemporary literature, including Cesare Lombroso’s Criminal Man and Kelly Hurley’s The Gothic Body, this essay investigates how Gothic literature of the era inflamed the public imagination through its depiction of an atavistic society besieged by devolution, prevalent across the realms of the mental and the physical before arriving at its horrifying terminus: the monstrous.