The sedulous ape: atavism, professionalism, and Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde

belletristic tradition associated with more conventional critics of the period like George Saintsbury or Edmund Gosse. The rise of "professional man" in turn coincides with the final consolidation of power during the nineteenth century in the hands of a capitalist bourgeoisie. 62 By definition professionals are middle class (and in this period male); their discourses are among the means by which middle-class life elaborates and extends itself. Certainly, degeneration theory provides an at times startlingly clear instance of this process. Nordau reveals the theory's class-bias when he asserts that, despite degeneracy's rapid spread, "the bourgeoisie are sound" (2), an assertion his evidence seems everywhere to contradict. He theoretically locates the problem instead within an exhausted aristocracy and certain sections of a depraved working class. In practice, however, the degenerate label is attached to any aesthetic or political program that Nordau considers disruptive of middle-class ideals: degenerative practices "mean the end of an established order, which for thousands of years has satisfied logic, fettered depravity, and in every art matured something of beauty" (3). Nordau, like many of his brethren, designates all progressive political programs as ideologies of the pathological. Indeed, he suggests, given a certain level of intelligence, degenerate individuals are invariably driven to become either mystical poets or else socialists. Severe cases lead to anarchism or – it comes to the same thing for Nordau – a love for the poetry of Swinburne. We can easily dismiss or ridicule Nordau, though such responses fail to account for the status his book enjoyed. Despite his desire for that book to be considered a work of science, Degeneration is instead an unusually clear articulation of the "common sense" view of degeneration and of its relation to such diverse topics as sexual deviance, national character, class, literary style, interpretation, professionalism, and modernity. The book also reveals how thoroughly entwined degeneration theory was with the collective anxieties of the bourgeoisie in this period. Nordau's arguments were in most cases simply extensions and elaborations of highly "respectable" habits of thought; as Stokes correctly notes, he "seemed at the time to be interestingly extreme rather than woefully eccentric."63 Nordau is mean-spirited, his conclusions nasty and narrow, but that very nastiness often serves to foreground the fears he tries to ward off. Invocations of degenerative paradigms are invariably tied up with concerns about the decline and fall of the bourgeoisie. Indeed, though degeneration theory is overtly concerned with the Other, it covertly expresses the anxieties of a middle class worried about its own present status and future prospects. CHAPTER 2