drowned himself in the Seine in 1896.
Crackanthorpe, however, was an isolated enthusiast. Naturalism's more seasoned champions had long since ceased to champion. During the 1890s, Gissing concentrated on stories of intellectual life and middle-class rebellion. In 1891, Moore accused Zola of selling out. He now sailed under the flag not of Zola, but of Zola's erstwhile disciple, Huysmans-whose A rebours (1884) was a dandyish pastiche of naturalism-and of Wagner. From Confessions of a Young Man (1888) through to Evelyn Innes (1898) and Sister Teresa (1901), Moore's major concern was the pathology of faith and creativity.
And yet there is Esther Waters (1894), a peculiar hybrid of the «French» and «English» traditions. Esther is, in the French manner, the -616- victim of forces beyond her control; but she has been equipped, in the English manner, with moral resilience. Moore's mixed feelings led him to anatomize working-class life by means of a decline plot, and yet at the same time to draw back from the apocalyptic determinism usually inscribed in such plots. William Latch's seduction and abandonment of Esther would not have been out of place in a novel by Mrs. Gaskell or George Eliot. When she subsequently returns, pregnant and impoverished, to her equally impoverished family and immediately quarrels with her drunken, brutal stepfather, it seems as though she has entered a different kind of novel altogether. Mr. Saunders, however, is, by a cunning displacement, merely her step father: the bloodlines through which contamination invariably flows in naturalist fiction have been cut.
In this novel, identities are made rather than inherited. Esther creates an identity by managing a business and bringing up her child. For every degenerate like Mr. Saunders, there is someone who has identified, and been identified by, a talent or an occupation. Lanky, narrowchested Arthur Barfield, the son of Esther's first employer, comes into his own whenever he mounts a horse. In naturalist novels, people don't 'come into' a new identity. In English novels, they do, but not, on the whole, by mounting a horse. Moore avoided both «French» determinism and the «English» conviction that the only paths to self-discovery are introspection and marriage.
In chapter 44, Esther, now a widow and once again destitute, returns to Woodview, the home of the Barfield family, which has itself been destroyed by gambling. The opening paragraph repeats word for word the opening paragraph of the first chapter, which describes Esther's arrival at the local station. In chapter 1, the first sentence of the second paragraph-'An oblong box painted reddish brown and tied with a rough rope lay on the seat beside her'-is full of anticipation; the person it refers to has not yet been identified, and we read on eagerly, seeking clues. In chapter 44, the sentence has been expanded. 'An oblong box painted reddish brown lay on the seat beside a woman of seven or eight and thirty, stout and strongly built, short arms and hard-worked hands, dressed in dingy black skirt and a threadbare jacket too thin for the dampness of a November day.' Now there is nothing left to anticipate: the older Esther is the sum of the experiences that have shaped her appearance. The narrative loop confirms the decline plot, returning her, roughened and diminished, to her starting point. But she is not defeat-617- ed. Her decline cannot be attributed to the emergence of some moral or physical flaw. We are closer to the formal recapitulations of Henry James and James Joyce than to Zola's apocalypse.
Another writer who modified an earlier adherence to naturalism was Sarah Grand. The Beth Book (1897) reworks the Evadne story from The Heavenly Twins. Like Evadne, Beth Caldwell, cramped by lack of education and experience, marries a man, Dr. Dan Maclure, who turns out to be disreputable and corrupt. He has an affair with one of his patients, whom Beth regards as a 'parasite.' Both her husband and her most ardent admirer, a neurotic writer, are well embarked on decline: 'The one was earning atrophy for himself, the other fatty degeneration.' But Beth, like Esther Waters, refuses to decline along with her menfolk. Nurtured by a community of intellectual women that includes the heroines of Grand's earlier novels, she discovers a talent for writing and public speaking. Grand cleverly alters the proportions of the decline plot by devoting more than half the novel to Beth's childhood and youth. The talents and pleasures Beth develops are grounded in those early experiences. The book's conclusion, however, a mystical reunion with a man she has fallen in love with, somewhat qualifies the carefully accumulated emphasis on independence, female community, and ordinariness.
Gissing, Moore, and Grand all seem half-persuaded by Zola's determinism, by the plausibility of genetic explanations. But in the end they refuse apocalypse; partly, I think, because apocalypse seemed like a foreign invention. Galbraith reappears to counsel Beth, and to offer some gruff literary advice. Her husband is predictably fond of French novels. Galbraith, like Quentin Mallory, thinks that French novels have destroyed the French nation. Grand supports him, in a footnote, with an account of the cowardly behavior of Frenchmen during a recent emergency. The revaluation of Englishness that was in progress at the time undoubtedly reinforced the determination of British writers to steer clear of naturalism. Gissing relied heavily on it in his most popular novel, the semiautobiographical Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903). As for Moore, well, he learned to despise the English during the Boer War, and took up Irishness instead.
Gissing, Moore, and Grand fell back on English moralism. Other writers tried to sidestep the downward spiral of the decline plot without committing themselves to the counterbalance of moral absolutes. Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), for example, makes daz-618- zling play with the idea of degeneracy. Constantly collapsing the metaphoric into the literal, the metaphysical into the organic, it nonetheless refuses to come clean, to own up, to disavow appearances. For Wilde himself, however, the metaphor became distressingly literal. Max Nordau had classified him as a decadent and an egomaniac, claiming that his 'personal eccentricities' were the 'pathological aberration of a racial instinct.' Wilde, at the end of his tether, complied with the metaphor. Submitting a plea for release from prison, he confessed to sexual madness and endorsed Nordau's classification of him as a degenerate.
Thomas Hardy came closer than Wilde, in his fiction if not in his life, to acknowledging that sin is a disease. In Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), Angel Clare characterizes Tess as the product of a degenerate family. He invokes against her the degeneration plot that the novel harbors all along, but which it has so far resisted through its emphasis on her singularity. Hardy can scarcely be said to endorse Angel's point of view. But one might argue that Angel's degeneration plot takes the novel over, carrying Tess through «relapse» to murder and beyond.
One review of Jude the Obscure (1896), headed 'Hardy the Degenerate,' claimed that the author had depicted a humanity 'largely compounded of hoggishness and hysteria.' Jude does seem cloudily aware of degeneration theory. Depressed by interminable quarrels with Arabella, he decides that the best way to express his 'degraded position' is to get drunk. 'Drinking was the regular, stereotyped resource of the despairing worthless.' Jude will do what he thinks the hero of a naturalist novel would do. Appropriately enough, it is he who conveys the medical verdict on Father Time's massacre. Jude merely quotes degeneration theory. But he quotes it so convincingly that one cannot altogether avoid the suspicion that Hardy might have seen some truth in it. It would have suited his temperament. And Jude the Obscure does sometimes seem like a novel written by Angel Clare.
H. G. Wells took a more explicit interest in social and biological theory than Hardy or Wilde. The Time Machine (1895) explores the implications of the second law of thermodynamics, formulated in the 1850s, which envisages the gradual heat death of the universe. But its most gripping passages concern social rather than physical deterioration. When the time traveler reaches the year 802,701, he emerges into the middle of a crisis in the long- drawn-out feud between two degenerate species, the Eloi and the Morlocks (hysteria and hoggishness, again). - 619-
Wells told Huxley that he had tried to represent 'degeneration following security.' The Time Machine is a vision of social apocalypse framed within a vision of global entropy, and the rhetoric of apocalypse overshadows the rhetoric of entropy.
Later writers distanced themselves less equivocally. In The Secret Agent (1907), it is the loutish anarchist Ossipon who characterizes Stevie and Winnie as degenerates. On the latter occasion, Conrad speaks contemptuously of Ossipon invoking Lombroso 'as an Italian peasant recommends himself to his favourite saint.' In Joyce's
Another response that requires some discussion, because it had profound consequences for the twentieth- century novel, was present in the philosophy of the New Woman writers in the early 1890s but not developed into a new narrative form until somewhat later. Grant Allen, whose Woman Who Did (1895) was probably the most notorious of all the New Woman novels, preached a New Hedonism, a revision of sexual relationships that would eliminate 'race degradation' and promote 'race preservation.' Women had either to separate themselves from men or to mate with those men who were still, despite everything, racially sound. Thus the heroine of Sarah Grand's
