I chose protagonists who were supremely dominated by their nerves and their blood, deprived of free will and drawn into every action of their lives by the predetermined lot of their flesh. Thérèse and Laurent are human animals, nothing more. In these animals, I have tried to follow step by step the silent operation of desires, the urgings of instinct and the cerebral disorders consequent on a nervous crisis (une crise nerveuse)… . [W]hat I have been compelled to call their “remorse” consists in a simple organic disruption, a revolt of the nervous system when it has been stretched to breaking-point. I freely admit that the soul is entirely absent, which is as I wanted it.
ZOLA “Preface” to the second edition of Thérèse Raquin (1868) (4)
ZOLA AND STRINDBERG
“HUMAN ANIMALS” … “NERVOUS CRISIS” … “revolt of the nervous system”: Zola’s words are an attempt to shock the bourgeoisie through the force of the brute body. But the passage is also a reasonably accurate account of the neurophysiological maelstrom of Thérèse Raquin, a world not just dominated but determined by nerves, blood, and environment.1 It is one of the ironies of the nineteenth century that medical science contributed not only to the construction but also to the steady demolition of the paradigmatically masculine virtue of autonomy. Medicine and science may have been quintessentially Promethean endeavors, but Prometheus ends up, as we know, chained to a rock. It is a predicament and a paradox that Émile Zola and August Strindberg both wrestled with over the course of their careers.
Zola’s 1873 theatrical adaptation of his early novel, Thérèse Raquin (1867), is generally considered the first Naturalist drama, and Miss Julie (1888), dubbed by Strindberg “the first Naturalistic tragedy in Swedish,” has become the best-known exemplar of the movement. While aesthetic Naturalism has been variously defined ever since it was first advanced in France in the 1860s, it almost always entailed a commitment to the general application of scientific methods and discoveries to the artistic sphere, and to the more specific notion that human beings are best understood and represented through the clinical examination of such factors as heredity, physiology, and social milieu, which collectively determine character. Zola was committed to this determinist view, as well as to the notion that the artist, like the scientist, ought to be both an experimenter and an independent observer. The tension between this simultaneous commitment to determinism and to the independent observer leads to fissures within the Naturalist project itself. Already apparent with Thérèse Raquin, these fissures break open with Miss Julie.
The dramatic version of Thérèse Raquin captures, in a way the novel cannot, the gestural immobility of this world, the sense in which motions of body and mind (the two are inseparable) are frozen into cycles that grow only more vicious as the play proceeds. The opening of the play, a dialogue between Camille (posing in an armchair) and Laurent (at his easel), already hints at the condition.
CAMILLE: (After a long pause.) All right if I talk? Won’t disturb you, will it?
LAURENT: Not in the least, so long as you don’t move.
CAMILLE: I fall asleep at dinner if I don’t talk… . You’re lucky, you’re healthy. You can eat anything … I shouldn’t have had that second helping of syllabub, it always makes me ill. My stomach is so delicate … You like syllabub, don’t you? (26)
The postprandial stupor, the inertial sentiments, the indigestion: no play before Thérèse Raquin and very few after it capture so precisely the mood of petit-bourgeois dyspepsia. One cannot help wondering how many Belle Époque audience members, trying to remain conscious after too many oysters at the Restaurant Durand, would, if they were capable of listening at all, have nodded in faint agreement with its opening lines. “[T]his can’t be particularly good for the old digestive system, sitting still like this after a meal,” offers Camille a few lines later, and then, “I’ve never been able to understand how my wife manages to stay perfectly still for hours at a time, without even moving a finger. It gets on my nerves (c’est énervant)” (26).
This is a gastrointestinal world and a neurotic one. Zola draws our attention to this workaday neurosis with two secondary characters in particular, the family friends Grivet and Michaud. Grivet, a railroad clerk, is described as “exactitude itself,” while the police superintendent Michaud is “just as precise” (29–30). Grivet’s compulsions are the more extreme of the two, and are spatial as well as temporal. When he first enters, we see him fussing with Mme Raquin over where she will place his umbrella.
GRIVET: Not in that corner, not in that corner; you know my little habits … In the other corner. There, thank you.
MME RAQUIN: Give me your galoshes.
GRIVET: No, no, I’ll put them away myself. (He sits on the chair she offers him.) I have my own little system (mon petit ménage). Yes, yes, I like everything to be in its place, you understand. (He places galoshes next to umbrella.) That way I don’t worry. (31)
Moving around is as exacting an activity for him as placing things; in the dialogue that follows, he relates that he “always keep[s] to the left” when walking, “like the railways” (31). Zola offers here, very likely for the first time in theater history, a character exhibiting what would later be called “obsessive compulsive disorder,” and what at the time was beginning to be examined under the rubric of the “idée fixe.”2 In a typical gesture, Zola establishes a clear connection between this psychological disorder and a broader cultural condition. This cultural condition, of course, is the one we examined in Chapter 3: the revolutionary impact of the railways on the experience of time and space. It is a condition that will return in Miss Julie, the breathless speed of which is driven not only by erotic energies but also by the railway timetable itself, which urges the characters to flee “right away, before it’s too late. Right this minute!” (104).
In his essays “The Experimental Novel” (Le roman expérimental, 1880) and Naturalism in the Theatre (Le naturalisme au théâtre, 1881), Zola famously identifies the Naturalistic movement with a centuries-long shift from metaphysics to physiognomy, from the soul to the body.
In effect, the great naturalistic evolution which comes down directly from the fifteenth century to ours has everything to do with the gradual substitution of physiological man for metaphysical man. In tragedy metaphysical man, man according to dogma and logic, reigned absolutely. The body did not count; the soul was regarded as the only interesting piece of human machinery; drama took place in the air, in pure mind. Consequently, what was the use of the tangible world? …
… The whole history of our theatre is in this conquest by the physiological man, who emerged more clearly in each period from behind the dummy of religious and philosophical idealism. (“Naturalism” 135)
The purview of the Naturalist artist precisely parallels that of the physiognomist. Like the physiognomist, the artist’s “territory is equally the body of man, as shown by his sensory and cerebral phenomena, both in their normal and pathological condition” (“Experimental” 32). As Stanton Garner has argued, Zola’s goal is that the Naturalist theater “ground itself in the ‘real’ of the physiological body and install a medicalized gaze as its normative optics” (536).
Zola’s characters may be mere “hommes physiologiques,” but the ability to understand them remains a testament to the triumph of modern science. It is an optimism that Zola learned above all from the neurophysiologist Claude Bernard. A former student of François Magendie (whose work we touched on in Chapter 2), Bernard made groundbreaking discoveries in the functioning of various internal organs and processes (most famously the pancreas gland, the glycogenic function of the liver, and the vasomotor nerves—the last of which he discovered) and also pioneered methods of blind experiment. By the time Zola wrote “The Experimental Novel,” Bernard was two years deceased, having been awarded honors unprecedented for a French scientist, including admission to the Académie française and a state funeral. By his own enthusiastic admission, Zola derived his Naturalism from Bernard’s An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (Introduction à l’étude de la médicine expérimentale, 1865), the principles of which he claimed to be merely reapplying to literature.
“‘The experimentalist is the examining magistrate of nature,’ ” Zola writes in “The Experimental Novel,” quoting Claude Bernard—and then goes on to draw the necessary correlate that “[w]e novelists are the examining magistrates of men and their passions” (10). Scientists and artists are operating, as it were, in the same theater. “In a word, we are working with the whole country toward that great object, the conquest of nature and the increase of man’s power a hundredfold… . We are the ones who possess strength and morality” (31). The Naturalist possesses strength and morality—that is to say, manliness, of which Bernard is Zola’s great exemplar. “I know of none more manly (plus viriles)” writes Zola before quoting Bernard’s “great and strong words” against “ ‘systematic or lazy minds’ ” (41). There is, as Elin Diamond has shown, a close connection between this claim of virility and the objective “window on reality” offered by the Naturalist stage. That objective view, as Diamond puts it, “depends on, and insists on a stability of reference, an objective world that is the source and guarantor of knowledge,” and thus “[f]or nineteenth-century middle-class audiences duly impressed by the authority and methods of positivism, theatrical realism fed a hunger for objects that supplied evidence, characters who supplied testimony, plots that cried out for interpretive acuity and, pleasurably, judgment” (5). That the “source and guarantor of [objective] knowledge” as well as the interpreter and judge of this spectacle was typically gendered male in the nineteenth century almost goes without saying. Less explicitly in Zola and more explicitly in Strindberg, the ideal viewer of the Naturalist stage is the masterful man—a mastery, as we shall see, that is problematic for Zola and ultimately impossible for Strindberg.
For Zola, scientific mastery is mastery of a peculiar sort, peculiar because the scientific perspective largely involves rigorous training in self-surrender. This surrender takes three forms: the passivity of observation, the dispassion of experimentation, and the submission to method. To begin with, the practice of scientific observation is a practice of passivity. Quoting again from Bernard, Zola writes that “[t]he observer relates purely and simply the phenomena which he has under his eyes… . He listens to nature and writes under its dictation” (“Experimental” 7). Joined to this passive practice of observation is the active practice of experiment, and the two practices, Bernard and Zola agree, work in harmony with each other. Where the observer serves as nature’s amanuensis, the experimentalist “reflects, tries out, gropes, compares, contrives, so as to find the experimental conditions best suited to gain the end which he sets before him” (7). While active, however, experiment involves self-abnegation of a different kind. Where the ideal observer is as passive and receptive as wax, the ideal experimenter is as dispassionate and disinterested as a pair of forceps. Over and again, Zola captures both the invasiveness and the dispassion in his “Preface” to the Second Edition of Thérèse Raquin: “I have merely performed on two living bodies the analytical work that surgeons carry out on dead ones”; “While I was writing Thérèse Raquin, I forgot everybody and lost myself in a precise, minute reproduction of life, giving myself up entirely to the analysis of the working of the human animal”; “this writer is a mere analyst, who may have turned his attention to human corruption, but in the same way as a doctor becomes absorbed in an operating theatre”; “I wrote every scene, even the most passionate ones, with the pure curiosity of a scientist” (4–6; emphasis added). The final aspect of the Naturalist’s self-abnegation is the surrender of personality to the scientific method, and in “The Experimental Novel” Zola repeatedly cites Bernard’s insistence that the scientific method quashes individual authority and opinion (44–45).
Three forms of self-surrender, then, in order to gain mastery. Bernard himself captures the concept, with its push-me/pull-you dynamics of passivity and activity, dominance and submission in a refiguring of the old image of veiled nature.
I may say that our experimenter puts questions to nature; but that, as soon as she speaks, he must hold his peace; he must note her answer, hear her out and in every case accept her decision. It has been said that the experimenter must force nature to unveil herself. Yes, the experimenter doubtless forces nature to unveil herself by attacking her with all manner of questions; he must never answer for her nor listen partially to her answers by taking, from the results of an experiment, only those which support or confirm his hypothesis… . An experimenter must not hold to his idea, except as a means of inviting an answer from nature. But he must submit his idea to nature and be ready to abandon, to alter or to supplant it, in accordance with what he learns from observing the phenomena which he has induced. (Bernard 22–23)
The description may serve as a summa of Bernard’s method as well as Zola’s appropriation of it. The scientist (and for Zola, of course, the Naturalist writer) appears as a rapacious figure, but one whose conquest comes through absolute self-abandonment to the feminine other. In this vision of mastery through self-surrender, Bernard’s Introduction to Experimental Medicine and Zola’s reception of it are paradigmatic of the rise of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth century.3
With Thérèse Raquin, Zola teaches his audience to adopt his own role of dispassionate scientific observer, to adopt a position of “mere analyst” that is at once masterly and submissive.4 And Zola provides, as subjects for that observer, characters wholly stripped of autonomy. When the curtain rises for the second of the play’s four acts, we find that the psychological states of compulsive repetition and nervous paralysis have only tightened their grip. “One year has passed,” read the stage descriptions, “without change to the room… . All are seated exactly as at the end of Act 1. THÉRÈSE at her work table looking dreary and unwell … A silence during which MME RAQUIN and SUZANNE serve tea, exactly repeating their motions of Act 2.” There is a hint, here, of Chekhov’s plays to come, whose repetitions suggest a similar stultification—and beyond Chekhov’s vicious circles, those of Sartre and Beckett. As with those later authors, repetition has turned conversation into an exercise in chasing one’s tail. When Grivet quotes an article about Camille’s drowning, Michaud upbraids him.
MICHAUD: If you haven’t quoted that article in your paper a hundred times! It’s most disagreeable, understand? No, Mme Raquin won’t stop crying for another quarter of an hour.
GRIVET: (Shouting.) Well you started it.
MICHAUD: What! No. Damn it! You did.
GRIVET: You’ll be calling me a fool in a minute. (34)
By the time the third act starts, the pattern has ossified: “[LAURENT and THÉRÈSE] repeat exactly the same gestures as in Act 1 Scene 5” (43). The two lovers attempt to cure their vicious cycle of mutual blame and abuse by repeating loving gestures of the past—to break repetition through counter-repetition—with predictably sorry results. As their argument escalates, Mme Raquin overhears their confessions of murder, and crying, “They killed my child!” she collapses in “an attack of spasms (prise de spasmes)” that leave her entirely paralyzed and unable to speak (44).
Just as Grivet embodies a certain neurotic compulsion inseparable from the industrialization of space and time, so Mme Raquin’s paralysis concretizes the absence of agency that characterizes the world of the play. Indeed, as she slowly awakens during the last scene of the play, Mme Raquin’s syndrome catches like an infection. Thus Laurent, “broken, head in his hands,” admits that he is incapable of taking action to change their situation (“I can’t, I can’t”) and “THÉRÈSE remains immobile, listening” before “she is gradually seized by a fit” (49). As Mme Raquin’s earlier seizure spreads virally across the stage, her nervous paralysis comes to stand for a more general cultural condition. Over the course of his career, Zola diagnosed society as sick with nerves. In an essay included in his collection My Hatreds (Mes haines, 1866), Zola characterized his generation as “panicked and hysterical (affolés et hysteriques),” suffering from “hypertrophy of the brain [and] nerves developed to the detriment of muscles,” and generally indicating a “victory of nerves over blood” (Oeuvres 1.750). And the end of the century finds Zola still inveighing against the nervous sickness of European culture. “Ours is a society racked ceaselessly by a nervous erethism,” he wrote in 1896. “We are sickened by our industrial progress, by science; we live in a fever, and we like to dig deeper into our sores” (quoted in Silverman 80). Returning to Thérèse Raquin, Zola personified the vicious-circle determinism of his human animals in a figure unprecedented in drama: the figure of the locked-in mute. And so we are confronted with another remarkable intersection between art and neurology, the first stage representation of the neurological condition of aphasia.
It is unclear whether Zola had read medical works on aphasia before writing any version of Thérèse Raquin; his intellectual beacons at the time, such as Claude Bernard and Hippolyte Taine, did not consider the issue. And it should also be noted that the general public’s interest in debates over aphasia grew slowly over the last third of the century. That said, the discourse of aphasia had been established for a decade by the time Zola wrote the play, and, even if the word itself might have been unfamiliar to him, Zola seems (as so often in his career) to have been uncannily perceptive about the winds of cultural change. About twenty years later, the neurologist Désiré Bernard, in a footnote to his De l’aphasie et de ses diverses formes (1889), praised Zola for his clinically accurate depiction of the condition in Thérèse Raquin. “If a place ought to be reserved in this study for literature, it would be necessary to mention above all M. Émile Zola, who, as early as 1867, portrayed an aphasic in the moving pages of Thérèse Raquin, with a perfect understanding of what he was talking about” (De l’aphasie 7).5
In any case, by the late nineteenth century, the concept of aphasia was beginning to seize both scientific and popular imaginations. This interest can be traced back to Franz Gall at the beginning of the century. Gall, as we have seen, had attempted to connect mental faculties and dispositions—including linguistic abilities—with specific brain regions. While the details of Gall’s theories had been long since dismissed in scientific circles by the late nineteenth century, the fact that correlations could be drawn between particular speech disorders and specific brain lesions seemed at least to bolster Gall’s argument for cerebral localization. To many neurologists, aphasia seemed a promising path to the discovery of cerebral centers. The word itself, meaning partial or total loss, as a result of brain damage, of the ability to understand or express speech, was introduced into regular scientific discourse by Armand Trousseau in 1864 (partly replacing the more vaguely defined “aphemia”) (Lee 602). The very next year, Paul Broca claimed that the left half of the brain performed different functions—including those of language—from those of the right half, a claim subsequently expanded upon by neurologists (such as Carl Wernicke and Ludwig Lichtheim) who devoted themselves to the pursuit of cerebral localization. Over the course of the last third of the nineteenth century, aphasia became one of the most heavily debated issues of medical science and, like hypnotism and hysteria, a topic discussed across a range of fields: neurology, psychology, philosophy, and the arts (Damasio 532; O. Marx, “Freud” 817). It is no coincidence that Sigmund Freud’s first monograph was entitled On Aphasia (Zur Auffassung der Aphasien, 1891).6
In depicting society and the “human animal” as viciously neurotic, aphasic, and “locked-in,” Thérèse Raquin exposes principles of bourgeois humanism—principles such as autonomy, independence, and free will—as an illusion and a ruse. Yet the hope of an independent, objective perspective endures, albeit from outside the playworld. It endures in the pen of the Naturalist playwright, who listens attentively to the way things actually are and describes them as such, who performs on “living bodies the analytical work that surgeons carry out on dead ones.” Moreover, the hope of the independent observer endures in the eyes and ears of the audience, who are expected to submit to a similar process of objective observation and analysis. At the same time, however, Zola’s totalizing if fragile determinism draws into question the possibility of any sort of meaningful communication or useful observation. With gestures frozen into repetition and paralysis and circulations of nerves looping into compulsive repetitions, legibility becomes not so much impossible as irrelevant, and the independent observer is ultimately rendered as powerless as Mme Raquin: we in the audience watch silently, in horror, and our knowledge does not avail. Aphasia becomes a figurative condition of the neural subject.
For this independence of observation—the ability to stand outside the loop of biology and environment and render objective judgment—is a fragile thing. The play itself suggests this fragility with its relentless rebukes to illusions of autonomy, and it is suggested again in Zola’s otherwise aggressively positivistic “Experimental Novel” essay. The only section of the essay in which Zola becomes sharply defensive is the one in which he insists that his is not a fatalistic doctrine. He cites the “great reproach” against his movement that “we did not accept free will, that as soon as man was no more to us than a living machine, acting under the influence of heredity and surroundings, we should fall into gross fatalism” (29), and against this charge he insists upon a fundamental distinction between determinism and fatalism. “[T]he moment that we can act, and that we do act, on the determining case of phenomena—by modifying their surroundings, for example—we cease to be fatalists” (30). Determinists but not fatalistes; the distinction answers Zola’s desire to keep open some window of unforced action within the general condition he depicts. But the distinction is tenuous at best, for the radicality of his own position closes the loop more tightly and extends it more broadly than he allows. If the ability “to act” (agir) is the crucial point of separation between determinists and fatalists, one cannot help wondering what it might mean to “act.” Zola suggests that it is through this “act” that agency might be reaffirmed, but if every act has a determinate cause, then it is difficult to see how this reaffirmation might take place through any human action. In this case, the distinction between “determinism” and “fatalism,” crucial as it is for Zola, fades into a mere semantic difference. And indeed, in his Preface to his play, Zola writes not of the mere determinism but of the stronger “fatalité” of the Raquin household (Oeuvre 6.315). This challenge of distinguishing determinism from “fatalism” is not a problem that Zola (or, for that matter, Bernard) examines very closely, leaving it difficult, if not impossible, to see how any act might save the possibility of undetermined agency or otherwise escape the closure of determinate causation. And if there is no escape from this condition, if determinism truly “dominates everything,” as Zola asserts, then it surely incorporates audiences and authors as well.
The point might be purely theoretical if it were not the case that Thérèse Raquin demonstrates so thoroughly—one might even say so programmatically—the totality of this determinism. In Hannah Thompson’s account, “the final message of Thérèse Raquin seems unequivocal: failure to control the ‘human beast’ brings about the protagonists’ untimely and horrific demise”; at the same time the work “also poses a question that recurs insistently throughout Zola’s work: can desire ever be mastered?” (55–56). If we put this in somewhat different terms, the play simultaneously condemns Thérèse and Laurent and exonerates them. The brutality of their actions is depicted unblinkingly, the fulfillment of their relationship is presented unerotically (it freezes immediately into icy hate after the murder), and their own bad conscience ultimately renders their lives unlivable. But while all of this evil would seem to reaffirm the moral order, in that adultery and murder receive their just deserts, the very determinism that dominates the entirety of the playworld, and comes to be personified by Mme Raquin’s aphasic, “locked-in” state, makes the very matter of moral judgment seem misguided. More than this outcome, Zola’s totalizing if fragile determinism draws into question the possibility of any sort of judgment, indeed of independent observation itself. In both theory and practice, Zola’s Naturalism provokes a crisis within the very objectivity that inspires and sustains it. Strindberg’s Naturalism will apply violent pressure to this fault line.
Strindberg’s nominally Naturalist play questions the possibility of any external standpoint, exacerbating a crisis inherent in Naturalism from its origin. It does so in two ways. First, Strindberg sees many determinant causes as so vastly complex and multiple as to be largely untraceable and, second, he broadens the field of determinant causes to include unconscious forces so ubiquitous that they include both the experimenter and the observer in the general determinate network.
More than Zola, Strindberg engaged directly with the sciences of his day. At age nineteen he apprenticed himself to the Swedish doctor Axel Lamm, living with his family, following him on his rounds, studying “zoology, anatomy, botany, physics and chemistry” and practicing laboratory techniques (Prideaux 59). Though he decided not to pursue medicine, he kept up with scientific literature until his death. In 1872 he helped to translate Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious into Swedish, and in the mid-1880s immersed himself in the fashionable neuropsychological literature, reading Henry Maudsley’s The Pathology of Mind (1879), Théodule-Armand Ribot’s Les maladies de la volonté (1883) and Les maladies de la personnalité (1885), Max Nordau’s Paradoxes psychologiques (1885), and Bernheim’s De la suggestion et ses applications à la thérapeutique (1886) (Meyer 174; Prideaux 139). During his stay in Berlin (1892–1893), Strindberg’s circle included the illustrious neurologist and surgeon Carl Ludwig Schleich, the gynecologist Max Asch, and the former neurology student Stanislaw Przybyszewski, alongside artists such as Richard Dehmel, Knut Hamsun, and Edvard Munch. Scientific as well as cultural matters were enthusiastically discussed by the Berlin circle, with recent discoveries in neurology proving an especially popular topic (Cordulack 32). Throughout the 1890s Strindberg engaged in a range of experiments, some methodologically scientific, some occultish and alchemical, and some, particularly in the depths of his “Inferno Crisis” of 1894–1896, more or less mad. While much of this work was pseudoscientific even by the standards of the time, it is worth noting that Carl Ludwig Schleich defended the scientific merits of Strindberg’s research, concluding that “Strindberg was no frivolous dilettante” (259). Schleich singled out as genuinely insightful Strindberg’s suggestion that plants use cells as nervous conductors, and argued that Strindberg anticipated Marie Curie’s work in radioactivity. Though perhaps biased as a friend of Strindberg’s from their Berlin days, Schleich was certainly in a position to evaluate the worth of Strindberg’s scientific work, as he was a pioneer in anesthesiology and an accomplished neurologist who advanced scientific understanding of the role played by glial cells in nervous-system functions.
The shift from Zola’s Naturalism of biology and environment to Strindberg’s mélange of biology, environment, and hypnotic forces can also be expressed as a shift in mentors, for what Bernard and Taine were for Zola, Charcot and Bernheim were for Strindberg.7 Strindberg’s collection of essays and stories Vivisections (Vivisektioner, 1887) expresses the Zola-esque conviction that his writing should have the aim, as he puts it elsewhere, of “taking the corpse of the person I have known best and learning anatomy, physiology, psychology, and history from the carcass”—or, more succinctly, of performing “anatomical psychology” (Brev 5.344; Letters 1.204). Similar echoes of Zola can also be heard in an 1886 letter to Edvard Brandes, in which Strindberg writes, “I believe literature should emancipate itself from art entirely, and become a science” (Letters 2.202). But as deeply indebted as a work such as Vivisections is to Zola, Strindberg’s scholarly references there reflect a fundamental difference between them. While Bernard and Taine go unmentioned in Vivisections, the semiautobiographical story “The Battle of the Brains” (“Hjärnornas kamp”), which appears in the volume, opens with a discussion of Charcot and Bernheim. Another story in the collection (“Mysticism—For Now” [“Mystik—tills vidare”]) similarly discusses Charcot in its opening sentences, and references to Bernheim also feature prominently in “Soul Murder” (“Själamord,” which might also be translated as “Psychic Murder”). Both Zola and Strindberg represent the human as essentially neurophysiological, but for Zola that condition corporealizes the human, renders him or her a fleshly nervous beast subject to physical laws of heredity and environment. For Strindberg, by contrast—and here he echoes Schopenhauer and Wagner, as we saw in Chapter 4—our essentially neurological condition at once corporealizes and decorporealizes us. Strindberg extends the neural subject to encompass a network of invisible energies so vast as to make the search for determinate causality seem a lost cause.
“Every event in life—and this is a fairly new discovery!—is usually the result of a whole series of more or less deep-seated motives,” writes Strindberg in the “Preface to Miss Julie,” “but the spectator usually selects the one that he most easily understands or that best flatters his powers of judgment” (58). It is the Naturalist’s obligation to frustrate this lazy temptation: “the summary judgments that authors pass on people—this one is stupid, that one brutal, this one jealous, that one mean—ought to be challenged by Naturalists, who know how richly complicated the soul is” (59). This embrace of the irreducibly multifarious is the course that Strindberg claims to employ in Miss Julie, giving us characters with a plethora of complex motivations.
I have motivated Miss Julie’s tragic fate with an abundance of circumstances: her mother’s “bad” basic instincts; her father’s improper bringing-up of the girl; her own nature and the influence her fiancé’s suggestions had on her weak, degenerate brain; also, and more immediately: the festive atmosphere of Midsummer Night; her father’s absence; her period; her preoccupation with animals; the intoxicating effect of the dance; the light summer night; the powerful aphrodisiac influence of the flowers; and finally chance that drives these two people together in a room apart, plus the boldness of the aroused man. (58)
This series seems less overdetermined than so haphazard and multiple (it gives the sense that it could go on forever or end at any point) as to defeat analysis. This kaleidoscope of physiological and psychological, environmental and hereditary influences produces characters who are pastiches to the core, “conglomerates of past and present stages of culture, bits out of books and newspapers, scraps of humanity, torn shreds of once fine clothing now turned to rags, exactly as the human soul is patched together” (60). A multiplicity operating upon a collection of conglomerates: to continue to speak of discoverable determining causes in the face of this world picture is to risk sounding hopelessly naive.
Influenced by Bernheim’s idea that hypnotism is essentially a form of suggestion and that suggestion is more or less ubiquitous in the social world, as well as by the psychologist Théodule-Armand Ribot’s arguments for the multiple nature of the self, Strindberg adds hypnotic forces to the maelstrom of psychological, physiological, and environmental influences that shape his characters.8 These forces are omnipresent and every bit as potent as the more obviously material forces that compel the drama.
I have … allowed these souls to get “ideas,” or suggestions as they are called, from one another, from the milieu (the death of the siskin), and from objects (the razor). I have also facilitated Gedankenübertragung [thought transference or telepathy] via an inanimate medium (the Count’s boots, the bell). Finally, I have made use of “waking suggestion,” a variation of hypnotic suggestion, which is now so well known and popularized that it cannot arouse the ridicule or scepticism it would have done in Mesmer’s time. (60)
In Strindberg’s description, as in the play itself, the distinction between animate and inanimate objects, as between psychological and material forces, becomes nearly impossible to draw. Not only the Count’s boots and the bell, but also the speaking tube, Jean’s livery, and numerous lesser objects exhibit at least as much agency as the characters themselves. Electrical, neural, hypnotic energies flow through all points of the network and, as Christoph Asendorf notes, “[t]he invisible electrical currents are the metaphor of the life of the nerves: the body becomes a force field, a contingent intersection of effects determined elsewhere” (176). In Chapter 1, we found that Shelley’s The Cenci suggested a world in which all things have become things, a world that echoes with Beatrice’s cry of “O God! what thing am I?” But if this terror has roots in Shelley’s dark Romanticism, then Strindberg’s play develops the theme into a principle of dramatic construction. Here the horror of becoming—or, worse still, inescapably being—a thing is less uttered than shown, shown through the vitalization of things and the reification of people.
This blurred line between person and thing further drives the play’s subversion of any humanistic notion of character. In fact, Strindberg had already begun this subversion in his earlier Naturalistic play, The Father (Fadren, 1887), a drama whose location and theme—a bourgeois drawing room, a father’s claim to paternity—might seem an homage to Ibsen. But that same work identifies several characters (The Captain, The Parson, The Nurse, The Orderly) only by their professional titles, while the others are listed only by their first names, a stylistic choice that marks a clear rejection of the irreducible protagonists of Ibsen’s prose plays. This jumble of domestic detail with archetypal figuration put off one important reader of the play: Zola himself, to whom Strindberg sent the script in hopeful expectation of a favorable reception. When Zola’s reply came, it was a disappointment. After praising of some aspects of the drama, Zola began his critique.
You know perhaps that I am not fond of abstraction. I like it when characters have a complete social identity, when one can rub shoulders with them, when they breathe the same air as we do. And your Captain does not even have a name, and your other characters, who are almost reasonable beings, do not give me the complete sense of life which I demand. (“Zola’s” 303)
Zola’s retort underscores the sharp differences between these two self-declared Naturalists. Zola’s Naturalism, for all its debts to medical sciences, preserved at least the outward form of the well-rounded character with whom one “can rub shoulders,” who gives us a “complete sense of life.” That sense of character is threatened by Thérèse Raquin, with its protagonists “deprived of free will” because dominated by heredity and environment, but Zola remained committed to the increasingly paradoxical position that even such virtual automata should have a “complete social identity.” With Strindberg’s move toward what eventually became the techniques of Expressionism, this tension starts to dissolve—which is to say that Strindberg increasingly liquidates character into rivulets of impulse and impression.
“It would be strange if you don’t believe in ‘spirits’ now. That’s the way souls (vibrations of brains) continue in other souls, and therefore the vital soul does possess a kind of immortality!” wrote Strindberg to his friend Ola Hansson on January 3, 1889 (Letters 1.300). The soul as brain vibrations, flowing in and through other vibrations, endlessly, like waves in a sea: this is a leitmotif of Strindberg’s Naturalistic writings. The motif has five basic elements: that the human will is a material force like electricity; that it acts and is acted upon by other living beings as well as by inanimate objects; that we all live in and consist of an invisible matrix of nervous energies; that our actions are the result of these ceaseless interactions and thus largely unconscious; and that all the states of being of the world (whether physical, physiological, or psychological) are therefore the result of conflicts of power. In this view, distinctions between, say, “souls” and “vibrations of brains,” or the power of suggestion and the power of a material force, or artistic genius and nervous energy, are little more than differences of terminology. We find aspects of this philosophy throughout Strindberg’s writings as well as the recollections of his companions, as, for example, Edvard Munch’s remark that “there must be some truth in what Strindberg said about waves which surround and influence us. Perhaps we have a sort of radio receiver in the brain? I often turn round when I am walking along the street; I feel that if I continue, I will meet someone whom I dislike” (quoted in Lathe 199). And it is Munch who crystallized this Strindbergian notion in his 1896 lithographic portrait of the writer. Bordering Strindberg’s visage in Munch’s lithograph is a double line of waves, turning from angular to curvaceous: vortices of that neuro-electrical sea, giving rise (in some versions) to the naked body of a woman.9 The portrait echoes passages of Strindberg’s writing such as one from his novel By the Open Sea (I havsbandet, 1890), in which the sight of women’s gestures is compared to the sensation of music.
The same undulations which the successive repetition of a single note produces on the drum of the ear and transmits to the nervous system, the same gentle vibrations were set in motion now by the eye, and made to sound through the white strings which are stretched from the scroll of the cranium across the sounding board of the chest, and carry the trembling pulses to the very depth of the soul. (122)
As Munch’s lithograph suggests, the artist, too, is immersed in these neuropsychological force fields—a point that Strindberg learned above all through his reading of Max Nordau. Until the publication of Nordau’s vehemently reactionary Degeneration (Entartung, 1892), Strindberg adored Nordau’s work, calling it his “Bible.”10 Especially influential was Nordau’s Paradoxes (Paradoxe, 1885), in which he sought to combine a neo-Romantic idea of the artist-genius with the recent theories of neurology and psychology, above all those emerging out of the School of Nancy. Going beyond Bernheim’s more cautious theories, Nordau defined “suggestion” as a purely material force, “the transference of the molecular motions of one brain to another, in the same way as one string communicates its vibrations to another string in its neighborhood” (192). It was then but a step to define “men of genius” as men capable of “transfer[ing] new conceptions to the brains of the masses” by force of suggestion, “just as Bernheim is wont to stand in front of a hypnotized hysterical patient” (203, 201). Strindberg echoes the thought in the opening paragraph of his “Battle of the Brains” story, writing that “[i]t is the mind of the politician, thinker and author which sets other people’s minds in automatic motion,” and concluding that “[a]ll political, religious and literary disputes seem to me nothing but the battle that an individual or party has to impose their view upon others by way of suggestion” (25). Art, like any other kind of powerful mental labor, was largely a matter of hypnotic suggestion, which is to say the manipulation of invisible nervous energies. The idea is echoed time and again in Strindberg’s writings from the late 1880s and early 1890s; his words (from a letter of January 27, 1894) urging the Swedish scientist Bengt Lidforss to become a writer are typical: “[t]ake the plunge and feel the power when you set other people’s brains into molecular motion (molekularrörelse) with your pen” (Brev 9.374).
The “Preface to Miss Julie” ricochets back and forth between a Zola-esque insistence on objectivity and a Nordau-esque sense of the ubiquity of nervous suggestion. Strindberg’s opening salvo against the stage makes Zola’s “Naturalism in the Theatre” look meek by comparison. Strindberg dismisses the theater in toto as “an elementary school for the young, the semi-educated, and women, who still retain the primitive capacity for deceiving themselves or for letting themselves be deceived, that is, for succumbing to illusions and to the hypnotic suggestions of the author.” Such backwardness is especially unsuited to a scientific age, when this primitive way of thinking “appears to be evolving into reflection, investigation, and analysis” (56). (Or as he more forcefully puts it in a letter of May 22, 1886, “the brain should rule nowadays, the heart is only for savages and children” [Letters 1.201].) But while much of the “Preface” basically replays Zola’s Naturalism in a minor key, the argument significantly shifts in the essay’s second half. At this point, Strindberg justifies some of the play’s most avant-garde elements, including the elimination of act divisions and the use of asymmetrical stage sets. One might expect him to justify the elimination of act divisions in Naturalistic terms—because, say, a single, compressed act encourages the audience to surrender itself to the work of attentive observation. But Strindberg chooses a different route, arguing for the elimination of act divisions because it strengthens a modern audience’s ability to accept theatrical illusion, and therefore places it more fully under the control of a mesmeric artist. “I have done this because it seems to me that our declining susceptibility to illusion would possibly be disturbed by intervals,” he writes, “during which the spectator has time to reflect and thereby escape from the suggestive influence of the dramatist-hypnotist” (64).
The sentence is an odd one. Where at the beginning of the essay Strindberg pointed to modernity’s declining susceptibility to illusion as a reason for the creation of a theater without illusions, here he points to the same “declining susceptibility” as a reason for the creation of more heightened illusions. The goal now, as Strindberg makes clear with his reference to “the suggestive influence of the dramatist-hypnotist,” is not to disenchant but to enthrall. And when he turns to the use of asymmetrical stage sets in Miss Julie, Strindberg’s rationale is again illusionistic: “I have borrowed the asymmetry and cropped framing of impressionist painting, and believe I have thereby succeeded in strengthening the illusion” (65–66). Indeed, illusion is so important for Strindberg that he uses it not only as a justification for his aesthetic innovations, but also as a justification for keeping more conventional structures in place. Thus Miss Julie will still make use of “three art forms that belong to the drama, namely the monologue, mime, and ballet” “in order to provide resting places for the audience and the actors without breaking the illusion for the audience” (64). Further, Strindberg argues for his introduction of music into the play (in the form of the Midsummer dance) because music “exerts its beguiling power” on the audience (65).
The “Preface,” then, is essentially a bait-and-switch operation (and not a few readers have taken the bait). Though it opens with a Zola-esque gambit about the need for a scientific drama for a scientific age, that idea is gradually replaced with a very different one: the notion (equally “scientific” in Strindberg’s eyes) that the theater is actually a hypnotic space. Indeed, Strindberg had already tipped his hand when he wrote, in his discussion of Charcot and Bernheim at the beginning of his “Battle of the Brains” story, that the mind of the writer “sets other people’s minds in automatic motion. The actor hypnotizes his wide-awake public, forcing it to applaud, weep and laugh” (25).
If this theater is to be a hypnotic one, then this, as Strindberg sees it, is nothing new under the sun. For hypnotism and suggestion—the operation of stronger minds upon weaker ones—is precisely what the theater has always been. Few have noted the irony at work here, as Strindberg opens his “Preface” with an attack on all those weaklings (“the young, the semi-educated, and women”) for whom the theater is merely an opportunity to submit “to the hypnotic suggestions of the author,” and then concludes his essay with a call for a re-envisioned theater in which illusions will be not eliminated but strengthened and audiences (once more) hypnotized. The beginning and the end of the “Preface” are actually not contradictory, for the implied argument is that while weaker and more primitive minds could be hypnotized by weaker and more primitive means, modern minds will need stronger and smarter stuff. The theatrical innovations Strindberg recommends, many of which he borrows from André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre, are to be employed to decidedly anti-Naturalistic ends, not to enlighten but to entrance.
Strindberg’s praise and critique of Thérèse Raquin, in his 1889 essay “On Modern Drama and Modern Theatre,” reinforces the point. He begins by extolling the work as “a new departure,” in which “the author has clearly felt that a greater unity of place would provide his audience with a stronger sense of illusion, thus enabling the action to impress its main features more forcefully upon the spectators, who would be haunted by their memories of the preceding act at every curtain up, and hence be captivated by the action through the impact of the recurring milieu” (Selected Essays 77). The terms of admiration here are those of the hypnotic stage: illusion, haunting, captivation, forceful impression of features upon spectators. Strindberg’s criticism of Thérèse Raquin, tellingly, is that Zola allows a year’s time to elapse in the storyline between acts 1 and 2, thus sapping the strength of his unified illusion.
Naturalism as a feint for a theater of sensation: Miss Julie reflects this strategy of misdirection, shifting the audience’s perspective from an apparently “objective” one at the outset (with its kitchen-sink mise en scène and its workaday dialogue—reality as though observed “through a keyhole”) to an increasingly “subjective” one with Julie’s Medea-like tirade against men (“I’d like to see your sex, swimming in a sea of blood” [103]), until at last the audience is entirely made to share Julie’s hypnotized state. In the play’s last moments, Jean hypnotizes Julie and gives her a razor, and she exits the house, presumably to kill herself. For many, the ending has always strained credulity. The critic Georg Brandes, to whom Strindberg sent a manuscript copy in 1888, may have been the first to criticize the play’s ending as implausible, telling Strindberg that he found the play “brilliant—up to the end. About that I have my reservations. You do not kill yourself when there is no danger at hand, and here there is no danger. Maybe about 5 months from now but not that night. The ending is Romanticism, determined by the need to end the play powerfully” (Brev 7.126).11 But the ending of the play is not intended to rely for its plausibility merely on the hypnotism of Julie by Jean, but also on the hypnotism of the audience by the work. Though rarely realized in performance, Strindberg’s stage directions make clear that in the last minutes of the play the audience suddenly merges with Julie. As she falls under Jean’s hypnotic control, she hallucinates, imagining Jean to be “like an iron stove, dressed all in black with a top hat—your eyes glow like coals in a dying fire—and your face is a white spot, like ashes” (109). It is at this point that Strindberg suddenly illuminates Jean: “The sunlight has now fallen upon the floor, and is shining on JEAN” (109). While Strindberg is occasionally accused of “stealing” this climactic sunrise from Ibsen’s Ghosts, in fact it has a fundamentally different function here. It functions not only, as in Ghosts, to magnify the tragedy with a false dawn, but also and more importantly to make us see through Julie’s somnambulant eyes.
What remains, then, of the independent observer in Miss Julie? A simple answer would be that it shifts from the audience, where it initially appears to be located, to the dramatist—or, more precisely, to the “dramatist-hypnotist.” But, as we have seen, Strindberg had already rendered the autonomy of the authorial position untenable in that his neurological conception of psychological interactions contained no exterior, no Archimedean point from which a psyche could operate independently upon others. Michael Robinson points to the “deep affinity” between Strindberg and Miss Julie, exemplified by the fact that Julie’s character “accords with [Strindberg’s] recent self-analysis in The Son of a Servant, where Johan, his pseudonymous self, is, like Julie, ‘an ensemble of reflexes, a complex of urges, drives, and instincts, [which are] alternately suppressed and unleashed’ ” (“Introduction,” xvii). Beyond this possible association with the suggestible Julie, Strindberg further suggests that the artist in particular operates under hypnotic influence when he creates. Here, for example, is Strindberg’s description of his state of mind when composing The Father, a year before turning to Miss Julie.
It seems to me as if I’m walking in my sleep; as if my life and writing have got all jumbled up. I don’t know if The Father is a work of literature or if my life has been; but I feel as if, probably quite soon, at a given moment, it will suddenly break upon me, and then I shall collapse either into madness and remorse, or suicide. Through much writing, my life has become a shadow life; I no longer feel as if I am walking the earth but floating weightless in an atmosphere not of air but darkness. If light enters this darkness, I shall drop down, crushed! (to Axel Lundegård, November 12, 1887; Letters 2.255)
This notion of the artist’s singular status as simultaneous hypnotized and hypnotizer did not, of course, originate with Strindberg, and indeed the account may even have been inspired by Wagner’s Rheingold fever dream three decades earlier in Spezia (discussed in Chapter 4). But the idea that this avowedly scientific drama (sent to Zola for approval!) should originate from a mesmeric trace gives a sense of the contrariness of Strindberg’s position.
Like Woyzeck, Miss Julie gives us a Punch and Judy show without a puppeteer. While a first-blush reading might conclude that the power in this play lies mainly with Jean, he is actually shown to be driven by a score of forces, and ends the play in hysterical fear of the Count. Could the prime mover then be the invisible but somehow ever present Count? But he, too, would seem to be compelled, as Jean reminds us in his concluding speech, “To be so afraid of a bell!—Yes, but it’s not just a bell—there’s somebody behind it—a hand sets it in motion—and something else sets that hand in motion—” (110; italics added). To look for an answer to the question of determinate cause would be to look for an ordering principle that Strindberg systematically undermines. We are forced, as readers and as audience members, to develop a sense of the multifarious, even undiscoverable, nature of the body, the psyche, and the world. Strindberg gives us, like Zola, a determinate system, but also one that eludes final comprehension and that includes the Naturalist himself. Meaningful communication in such a system becomes, as in Thérèse Raquin, close to impossible—with the added subtraction that the standpoint of the independent observer gradually vanishes over the course of the play. Suggestion ubiquitous, hypnotism inescapable, gestures emptied of meaning, nervous energies engaged in ceaseless struggle: “human beings,” as the Daughter of Indra will repeatedly sigh in A Dream Play, “are to be pitied.”
From the perspective of much feminist criticism, it is Zola who has emerged as relatively laudable, while Strindberg has been widely consigned to the underworld of fin-de-siècle misogyny. And not without good reason.12 But a more thorough reading of Strindberg’s gender politics also ought to take into account the way that plays such as Miss Julie dismantle the ideology of masculine autonomy. Where Zola’s social criticisms are legitimized by a scientific, implicitly masculine gaze, a gaze whose legitimacy and objectivity are themselves outside the frame of the work and therefore beyond question, Strindberg’s authorities are perpetually unstable, with both authorial and spectatorial positions constantly collapsing back into the loop of representation. At first glance, it is Zola who is the more radical social critic, but on deeper analysis, it is Strindberg who more relentlessly undermines the foundations of the autonomous subject—a radicality, like that of Büchner, that results in part from an uncompromising engagement with the neurological sciences of his day.
Returning to Thérèse Raquin, we may recall that Zola’s theatrical representation of a paralyzed mute was unprecedented. Let us now add that it was also, in another sense, quite familiar. For while aphasia had never been theatrically represented before, muteness was a mainstay of the popular stage. Melodrama in particular thrived on the character of the innocent, victimized mute—sometimes born speechless, sometimes rendered so by physical or psychic trauma, but in almost all cases a figure who knows some essential secret of the play, a secret he or she cannot divulge. Melodrama frequently gave center stage to society’s orphans and outcasts, but no such character was more emblematic than the mute, a figure that points back to the roots of melodrama in pantomime and recalls melodrama’s frequent association of eloquent speech with corruption (it is primarily through the language of gesture, as we saw in Chapter 1, that honest nature speaks).13 As a figure for whom the spoken and sometimes even the written word was impossible, the mute could communicate only through that purest, most universal, in a sense most innocent and democratic of means. While the mute character in a melodrama was rarely the protagonist, he or she was hardly marginal, either, and typically held the answer to whatever complication, deception, or misunderstanding drove the plot. If the mute could only speak, all would be revealed: this is melodrama’s persistent desire.
The transformation of the melodramatic mute into the locked-in aphasic of Thérèse Raquin tells the story, in shorthand, of the collapse of faith in gestural communication and the concomitant rise in a neurological account of the subject. Like the melodramatic mute, Mme Raquin is a wronged innocent and a possessor of hidden knowledge that drives the whole crisis of the play. Unlike them, her muteness extends to encompass almost her entire body (in the novel, Zola writes that she was left with only “the language of the eyes” [148]). Almost but not entirely—at one point, she threatens to reveal her secret by writing with her finger in the tablecloth; at another, her face “reflects the emotions that she is feeling” (48); and at the very end of the play, she finally stands up and accuses the couple, provoking their mutual suicide. She makes gestures, then, even after her collapse into paralysis, but these gestures are ultimately peripheral to her true revenge, which lies in silence. As she reveals in the last exchange of the play, “I began to write your act of indictment on the table. But I stopped myself; I thought that human justice would be too quick. And I want to watch your slow death, here in this room, where you stole from me all my happiness” (50). Thus gestural communication moves in the play from repetition to paralysis to something like irrelevance. The freezing up of the melodramatic mute into a mummy-like paralytic whose knowledge, when finally revealed, leads not to happy restoration but to revenge; this is the movement from melodrama to Thérèse Raquin. The transformation of the Speechless One from a mummy to a ghost; this is the movement from Thérèse Raquin to a Symbolist play such as Maeterlinck’s The Blind (Les aveugles, 1890), in which a group of sightless people desperately waits for a Priest to guide them out of a dark wood—while the Priest, or rather his lifeless corpse, sits unseen and silent at the base of a nearby tree.
But in Miss Julie, even this comfort—the comfort that there might possibly be someone who once would have known—is gone. Which is not to say that the figure has entirely disappeared. We still find the Speechless One in the form of the Count, whose absent presence haunts the play, as well as in his onstage markers, the “enormous boots” that Jean brings in at the beginning of the play and that watch over the playspace throughout, and the speaking tube that commands obedience at the play’s end. But the offstage Count and his onstage avatars are all unknowing in their silence. They have force and authority here but no hidden insight, and their speech, were it to come, would solve nothing. Miss Julie presents us with a world in which epistemic privilege is erased, and silence no clue to wisdom.14
The year of Miss Julie’s premiere, 1889, was also the year in which Freud conducted his first major case study, the analysis of “Emmy von N.” Where Zola rendered the figure paralyzed and Strindberg made it ghostly, Freud’s psychoanalytic conception naturalized and universalized the Speechless One while returning to the figure a narrative of emancipation and reconciliation. Where Strindberg evacuated speechlessness of its epistemic and moral privilege, Freud restored these qualities to it. Freud was to help the silent figure to once again become, as in melodrama, an image of the self at its most vulnerable and traumatized, but also at its most inward, essential, and knowing. And to once again become a figure that could and should be helped to speak.
1 The claim that “there is an absolute determinism for all human phenomena” is a leitmotif of Zola’s essays and especially central to “The Experimental Novel” (“Experimental” 18). Studies of Zola’s determinism include Johnson; Mourad 159; Nelson 65–87; Rivers 177–180.
2 According to Jan Goldstein, idée fixe was “originally a medical term, probably coined by the phrenologists Gall and Spurzheim in connection with [Jean-Étienne Dominique] Esquirol’s delineation of monomania,” and the term “was readily transferred to nonmedical culture, most notably by the composer Hector Berlioz, who used it to signify a recurrent, insistent melodic motif in a symphony” (155–156). More precisely, the monomania that interested Berlioz, like the central monomania of Thérèse Raquin, was obsessive love.
3 According to Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison in their 2007 study of the term objectivity, it is only in the mid-nineteenth century that the word gains its modern meaning—that is, that it comes to mean something like “knowledge that bears no trace of the knower—knowledge unmarked by prejudice or skill, fantasy or judgment, wishing or striving” (17). Objectivity in this sense demands that the object of study be represented in all its multifarious differences and dissonances of nature, and all impulses to simplify, harmonize, or otherwise idealize the object be thereby resisted. This resistance entailed a suppression of aspects of the self, aspects now identified as “subjective.” The scientific subject that emerged in the late nineteenth century was one committed to an endless internal campaign, an “ethico-epistemic battle against an insidious subjectivity” that threated at every turn to deceive or overwhelm his clear-eyed dispassion (189). Objectivity thus becomes not simply a scientific model but also an epistemic virtue—in other words, a set of “norms that are internalized and enforced by appeal to ethical values, as well as to pragmatic efficacy in securing knowledge,” a way of “molding the self” (40).
4 In her study of the play, Amy Holzapfel further notes that this closed room is “a clear gesture toward Bernard’s emphasis on the importance of a ‘control room’ in which to conduct his physiological experiments” (66).
5 Clarke and Jacyna (117–119) and Eagle (17–20) all wrestle with Zola’s relationship to the emergent discourse of aphasia in their cultural studies, though they come to different conclusions, with Clarke and Jacyna favoring a stronger connection and Eagle a weaker one (for Eagle, Madame Raquin is better understood as a mute rather than as an aphasiac). It is not necessary to the argument of this chapter to weigh in on the disagreement, but rather simply to note that Zola’s (proto-)aphasic character stands as a hinge between the early-nineteenth-century figure of the melodramatic mute and that of the fully aphasic figure of the fin de siècle.
6 Laura Salisbury has further argued that the discourse of aphasia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries helped to create “an account of language and a speaking subject within which meaning did not inhere, it could not simply be found; it instead needed to be forged and made” (205). She thus links this discourse with the creation of “the subject of modernity” (204).
7 Despite his firsthand experience of Charcot’s work with hysterics at the Salpêtrière in the 1880s, Zola does not seem to have drawn creative inspiration from Charcot’s work until he was researching his novel Lourdes (1894), for which he read Charcot’s The Faith Cure (La foi qui guérit, 1892). In general, the influence of Charcot on Zola was marginal; see Delamotte.
8 Ribot particularly developed this argument in Diseases of the Will (Les maladies de la volonté, 1883) and Diseases of Personality (Les maladies de la personnalité, 1885), both of which Strindberg read shortly after their publication.
9 Strindberg was insulted by the incorporation of a naked woman into the border of this lithograph, as well as by Munch’s (presumably unintentional) misspelling of his name at the base. In future versions, drawn while Strindberg sat within reach of a pistol, Munch corrected the misspelling and replaced the woman with a continuation of the wavy lines of the border (Prideaux 226).
10 His reaction upon reading Nordau’s The Conventional Lies of Civilization (Die konventionellen Lügen der Kulturmenschheit, 1883), in a letter to Erik Thyselius of January 11, 1884, “Nordau: It is the Bible, it is Holy Writ! Now may thy servant Strindberg depart in peace to his rest, for Nordau will do more than all the plays and satires of the world” (Letters 1.119). And to Jonas Lie, on Christmas Eve, 1884, “I’m convinced only Nordau and I are right! Just we two, unfortunately!” (1.170).
11 To this Strindberg responded that “it is extremely likely that a Count’s daughter would kill herself after bestiality and burglary!” (Brev 7.126)—and then again, a few days later, that “[t]he ending is not romantic, on the contrary completely modern with waking hypnotism (the battle of the brains)” (Brev 7.130). And Strindberg was clearly provoked enough by Brandes’s critique that he felt it necessary to justify his ending for a third time in yet another letter to Brandes, this time stressing the multiplicity of Miss Julie’s motives in words that echo the passage on her multiple motives in the “Preface” (Letters 1.295–296).
12 While Strindberg’s full-throated (one is tempted to say hysterical) misogyny finds no counterpart in Zola, Zola’s conception of gender was a somewhat mixed bag. While on the one hand Zola praised relatively traditional patriarchal family structures as necessary to the well-being of the French state, on the other hand he depicted many female characters who break this mold without being punished or condemned for it, and furthermore depicted, with exceptional insight and force, the social and psychic toll of such structures. His characters also frequently undermine the clearly delineated gender differences Zola himself espoused. For a nuanced account of Zola on gender and sexuality, see especially Thompson; for the same on Strindberg, see especially Fahlgren.
13 A partial sample of English-language melodramas that happen to have the word “dumb” in the title gives a sense of the popularity of the figure: The Dumb Boy (1821); Homicide; or, The Dumb Boy and the Spectre Knight (1824); The Inchcape Bell; or, The Dumb Sailor Boy (1828); The Dumb Belle (1831); The Dumb Brigand (1832); The Dumb Conscript (1835); The Dumb Boy of Avignon (1841); The Dumb Girl of the Inn (1847); The Irish Doctor; or, The Dumb Lady Cured (1856), and so on—and when the search is expanded to all those melodramas that featured such characters, the list becomes nearly endless (Mattacks 35; Raub 442; for a far longer list of such plays, see Nicoll 131–132).
14 Strindberg’s play The Stronger (1889), written just after Miss Julie, exemplifies a similar rejection of the association of speechlessness with privileged knowledge. The brief play consists of a dialogue between two women in a café—or a monologue, really, as one of the women is silent throughout. While this silence appears at the outset to be a sign and source of her power and an indication that she possesses secret knowledge (of her affair with the other woman’s husband), over the course of her monologue the speaking woman unravels the whole mystery herself. It was Strindberg’s thought that the speaking woman, contrary to expectations, is in fact the “stronger” in the play.