The Truth Machine (16 page)

Criminal anthropology therefore shored up the integrity of the liberal bourgeois subject just as it was undermining it.
⁴⁴
The question of criminal genius was but one exemplar of this general social crisis of criminal nature and human agency. Articulating the oppositional, the unsaid, and the unsayable, literature challenged received scientific wisdoms. Robert Louis Stevenson's
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1886) disputed criminology's maxim that there was a qualitative difference between the normal and the criminal: “man is not truly one, but truly two.” The novel suggested that within the healthy were hidden the seeds of the pathological: everyone was potentially suspect, a criminal in waiting. Inside everyman lay a dormant ailment, all too easily animated given the right circumstances. “I hazard the guess,” Jekyll says, “that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens.”
⁴⁵
It has been suggested that Jekyll's moral and temperamental transformation was absent from the first draft of the story. Even in the final version, Jekyll had been living two lives for many years prior to Hyde's physical materialization. The scientist's experiment is less a fatal error than it is the polarization of the antagonistic tendencies of his nature.
⁴⁶
In the end the novel, a thorough deconstruction of the Victorian cult of character, provides no solution to the dilemma as to how to expunge criminality from the self.

Physical decline and biological degeneration were an intoxicating mix, masterfully articulated by H. G. Wells in
The Time Machine
(1894). The future earth is imagined to be populated by two degenerate humanoid races, one lacking the power of reason, the other dissipated of energy. The Eloi were vapid and effete, their mental powers atrophied; the Morlocks were stunted abominations, deformed and morally depraved. The novel—in which cannibalistic and bestial Morlocks prey upon the vegetarian Eloi aesthetes—has been read as a “blue-print” of degenerationist concerns and a critique of “outcast London.”
⁴⁷
It is also a parable about the loss of energy and devitalization. Wells frequently examined the impermanence, imperfection, and insignificance of human life. A great admirer of Darwin and a one-time student of his “bulldog,” T. H. Huxley, Wells read into Darwin a legitimation of ephemerality, degradation, and teratology. Set on an island near the Galapagos,
Wells's
The Island of Dr. Moreau
(1896) is inhabited by monstrous humananimal hybrids. The “beast people” include Leopard Man, Dog Man, Puma Woman, Monkey Man, Wolf Woman, and the “Mare-Rhinoceros-Person,” a world “teeming with abominations.”
⁴⁸
Wells, like Lombroso (whose theory on female insensitivity Wells had written about), theorized “a human body both chaotic and entropic, both hybridized and prone to reversion.”
⁴⁹
The novel's protagonist Prendrick devolves during the narrative, becoming hysterical, nervous, and ineffectual, hairy and agile, and accustomed to sleeping in a den. Moreau—the novel's criminal genius—was the personification of nature. He represented the apex of human intellectual evolution but was as “inhuman” as his grotesque creations, bereft of any of the civilizing human emotions of compassion.
⁵⁰
Wells explained that the novel was “written just to give the utmost possible vividness to that conception of men as hewn and confused and tormented beasts.”
⁵¹
In the end, the novel accomplishes the ruination of the human subject, “without apology, without nostalgia, without remorse.”
⁵²

Like psychoanalysis, that fin-de-siècle science of the unconscious mind, what characterized the Gothic was a confessional mode, the impulse to unburden oneself of unpalatable truths. Revolving around the insecurities of biomedical knowledge and often featuring young, inexperienced medical doctors, Gothic novels featured an abundance of primary texts: letters, journals, interviews, official reports. It is as though the prolix archive of established medicine has had to be reopened; epistemology had to follow a cadavarous ontology and return itself to an earlier, primitive state of contestation. Once the body of knowledge has been exhumed, its disagreeable corporeality becomes evident. Horrific truths about human nature provide neither sensational thrills nor spectacular forewarnings but rather affect a nauseating collapse of meaning.
⁵³
The war against crime was allied to the administration of abnormality, expanding social control as it relaxed moral judgment.
⁵⁴
In this context, Goring's
The English Convict
can be read less as criticism of Lombrosoian science than as its rhizomatic outgrowth. For if criminal anthropology had blurred the boundary between the normal and the abnormal, then biometrics simply located these categories on the same normal distribution curve, the one imperceptibly blending into the other.
⁵⁵

In 1892, in a measured article warning of the dangers of over interpreting criminal statistics, the Rev. W. D. Morrison expressed a skeptical note about Lombroso's theory of the born criminal.
⁵⁶
“Whatever may be the ultimate fate of Lombroso's theory,” wrote Morrison, “he has unquestionably succeeded
in calling attention to the fact that a larger proportion of anomalies is to be found among the criminal population than among ordinary members of the community.” A “debilitated body,” after all, had “a tendency to produce a perverted mind.” But instead of regarding criminal stigmata as signs of degeneration, Morrison proffered a sociological version of events, suggesting that such marks might predispose a person to a life of crime simply as a result of social prejudice, a dearth of employment opportunities, and an embittered sensibility: “In the inevitable and unceasing struggle for existence a considerable proportion of the feeble, the degenerate, the malformed, the anomalous are not fitted for one reason or another to earn a living by normal methods, and society looks upon all who adopt abnormal methods as criminals.” Physical anomalies among offenders were neither evidence of their mental capacities nor did they support for the existence of a criminal type. Physical abnormalities were “proof of a fact apparent everywhere, that the physically anomalous and incapable are less adapted to fight the battle of life, and are accordingly more likely to come into collision with the law.”
⁵⁷
Visible stigmata were the cause of a criminality acquired through the hostile actions of the prejudiced.

Morrison argued that although it was widely believed that crime had fallen over the previous thirty years, this apparent decline could not be taken for granted without taking into account changes in judicial procedure and methods of incarceration. Changes in the law had criminalized some activities, while some criminal offences had been rendered harmless. In 1890, for example, proceedings against over eighty thousand parents had been initiated for not sending their children to school, a statutory requirement since the passing of the 1870 Elementary Education Act. An increase in the number of sexual crimes had occasioned the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, but the police were increasingly turning a blind eye to intemperance. The use of reformatories and juvenile homes challenged the usefulness of the incarceration statistics as a guide to crime rates. Despite living in an age when statistics were collated on a vast number of criminal subjects, those statistics could never be taken at face value. The more crime was studied the more obscure it appeared.

In 1893,
Science
carried a short review of Arthur MacDonald's
Criminology.
In his brief introduction to the book Lombroso had defended his theory of the criminal type, “the organicity of crime, its anatomical nature, and degenerative source.” The anonymous reviewer, however, claimed that the notion had been “distinctly rejected” by the criminal anthropologists assembled at the previous summer's Brussels congress, and it was “encouraging to note”
that MacDonald now considered the criminal type “from the psychological rather than the physical side… . This is virtually giving up the position of Lombroso, which, in fact, is no longer defensible. There is absolutely no fixed correlation between anatomical structure and crime, so far as has yet been shown.”
⁵⁸
Bemoaning the lack of progress in criminal anthropology a few years later, Gabriel Tarde concluded that “Lombroso's alleged criminal type is a chimera; that the Italian school is engaged in the desperate undertaking of rescuing from perdition an error which it knows to be an error, but which it hopes, in spite of the head of the school, to attach to some theory palpably less visionary. This can not be done.”
⁵⁹
The novelists had critiqued
homo criminalis:
now it was the turn of the criminologists.

“Prominent among the new ‘sciences' that have sprung up, mushroomlike, in our generation is ‘criminology.'” Thus began Dr. H. S. Williams' 1896
North American Review
article, “Can the Criminal be Reclaimed?”
⁶⁰
“Its advocates regard the criminal as a distinct type of the
genus homo.
With the true spirit of our induction-haunted age, they analyze the delinquent out of all association with his fellows, making him stand apart as a separate order of being.” Williams ridiculed the claim that criminologists could pick out the murderer before he had committed a murder or the inebriate who had never been intoxicated, adding: “No doubt the abstract robber, forger, and what not, will follow in due season.” “All this is very delightful if true. It suggests visions of a golden age, when science shall rule society and by its anticipatory action nip all crimes in the bud by restraining their would-be perpetrators. But with the vision comes also a doubt.”
⁶¹
Williams suggested that crime was not a particularly special phenomenon, “but merely the expression of a relation.” Criminality was a matter of social consensus: “deeds stamped as criminal under some circumstances are justified under others.” Killing in warfare, for example, or accidental homicide, were not considered crimes. Furthermore, since all human actions involved advancement for personal gain, a criminal act could not be singled out as particularly special: “sinfulness is fixed in accordance with an absolute standard of ethics, criminality in accordance with a relative or human standard.”
⁶²
Because ethical codes were constantly changing, the boundaries of criminal action were forever fluctuating. It was therefore impossible to define crime accurately. Williams accepted that it was a fact of human psychology that people had criminal desires, but these were repressed by the pressures of social life. “The spirit of practical altruism was born, and the cornerstone of civilization was laid.”
⁶³
Persons who had no moral sense were known as habitual criminals. According to criminology,
Williams wrote, people became criminals because of “inherently defective” brains. He proposed “that in the great majority of cases they have failed to evolve because they were human and could not rise far above their environment.”
⁶⁴
There was good and bad in everybody, but the two extremes of the social scale were not morally distinguishable: “Wax to receive, marble to retain, that young mind was graven deep with the lines of wrong living. A subtle poison permeated every cell of its body; what wonder if it thenceforth gave out none but poisoned thoughts?”
⁶⁵
Careful training was necessary if the best results were to be obtained because the “flowers of the human mind do not bloom on human weeds.”
⁶⁶
Williams pointed to the forced feeding of a larva in the hive that produces the queen bee, drawing a parallel with the process of socialization early in infancy and early childhood. It was “familiar knowledge that most wild beasts can be tamed only if taken while young,” “The day is past when it was supposed that the human mind is intrinsically different in kind from other animals. It is now known that general biological truths apply to each and every member of the organic scale from highest to lowest… . And in this connection it may not be amiss to note that the human family contains but a single species.”
⁶⁷

Practical humanitarians had rescued thousands of “vicious little John Does” from vice and developed them into useful citizens. To guard against mental disease by educating the mind and by avoiding pursuits that bring intellectual strain was a “problem of practical sociology.” “If this view is correct, the criminal differs from his fellows not so much in inherent depraved tendencies as in defective powers of resistance. The law-abiding individual has or has had many of the same propensities that are patent in the criminal, but they have been corrected, repressed, or even eradicated by the cultivation of higher instincts; that is, by ethical development.”
⁶⁸
A considerable degree of development was always possible, even in habitual criminals. A child reared by criminal parents would become a criminal, but there was no need to invoke heredity in explaining such cases. Statistics were at hand to prove that “even after the plastic period of childhood has been spent in the haunts of vice … much may still be done in many cases to develop the higher ethical sense upon which depends the resistant power that shall shield from crime.” Williams pointed to the records of the Reformatory at Elmira, New York. Of all the persons admitted, the records showed that forty percent had no moral sense; many had an ancestry made up of epileptics, the insane, or drunks. Of these “moral imbeciles,” sixty-seven percent were illiterate or could read and write only with difficulty. After treatment, the authors claimed, eighty
percent of them were returned to the world, and of these, four-fifths become permanent honest breadwinners. “When each penal institution in the land has come to be such an ethical factor as this,” Williams enthused, “the records of criminology will tell a very different story from the doleful one they now present.”
⁶⁹