Morbid

This final post is the second one responding to a passage from chapter four of Confessions of a Young Man: 

Many are the reasons for love, but I confess I only love woman or book, when it is as a voice of conscience, never heard before, heard suddenly, a voice I am at once endearingly intimate with. This announces feminine depravities in my affections. I am feminine, morbid, perverse. But above all perverse, almost everything perverse interests, fascinates me.

In my last post, I examined what the word 'perverse' is doing in this passage. I suggested that Confessions draws upon a number of different meanings associated with the word ‘perverse’ that were floating around at the end of the nineteenth century. It is a ‘perverse’ text in form and contents, I claimed. And I want to say something very similar about the word ‘morbid’. Like ‘perverse’, several different meanings of ‘morbid’ are relevant to this passage from Confessions; and like ‘perverse’, the word ‘morbid’ acquired particular meanings and connotations at the time Moore was writing which shed light on what he was doing.

Morel

Specifically, ‘morbid’ is central to the overlap between contemporary scientific developments and broader social values at the fin de siècle. Etymology is helpful here again. 'Morbid' derives from the Latin morbidus (causing disease / unhealthy), which in turn derives from morbus (disease). Hence the primary senses in English which mean 'causing disease, characteristic of disease' or referring to a diseased part of the body. 

OED indicates that the word transformed at the end of the eighteenth century, acquiring associations with a mental state 'characterised by excessive gloom or apprehension’. As this sense grew in usage, 'morbid' came to connote 'an unhealthy preoccupation with disease, death or other disturbing subject'. OED doesn't provide a great many examples to illustrate this, nor do those examples help to pin down when morbid gloom came to suggest a particular kind of gloom associated with death and disease. For my part, I think that the term was undergoing this sort of transformation around the time that Moore was writing. So that his use of morbid draws on and contributes to these complex developing associations.

For the word morbid had an important part to play in the way that some nineteenth century medical writers sought to reconcile empirical observation, psychology and evolutionary thinking. Max Nordau’s book, Degeneration is key here - published in German in 1890 and translated into English in 1895. In defining degeneration, Nordau cites the French scientist Bénédict Augustin Morel’s Treatise on Physical, Intellectual and Moral Degeneration [...] (1857), which included a description of ‘degeneracy' as 'a morbid deviation from an original type’. In this way, Nordau’s book helped to popularise the work of Morel and his near contemporary, the Italian scientist Cesare Lombroso, sparking debate about the concept of degeneration.

Lombroso

This concept combined contemporary anxieties about evolution (fears that humankind could slip back down the evolutionary ladder), with attempts to describe and classify physical and psychological ‘deviations’ from supposed norms - both in terms of physical appearance and outward behaviour. Nordau’s book would extend the researches of Morel and Lombroso into, respectively, ‘cretins’* and criminal types in order to diagnose literary artistic styles and methods. It would condemn, for example, the French poet Paul Verlaine on account of his break with classical French prosody (his experiments with unusual rhythms and forms) and through strong innuendo about his homosexuality. Verlaine's writings and his sexuality are read by Nordau as symptomatic of (morbid) degeneracy.

In quoting from Nordau, I’m quoting at several removes: I’m citing an English translation of a German text quoting from a French source.** But I think the word ‘morbid’ is recognised to have played an important role for English-speakers in negotiating the heady cocktail of physical, psychological, artistic and moral judgements that Nordau and his followers were flinging around in the later parts of the nineteenth century. 

Lombroso's
Criminal Types

If, for example, you search for 'morbid' using the Google books Ngram viewer (which tracks the frequency of occurrence of words or phrases within a dataset (or 'corpus') drawn from the books that have been digitised and made available online), there is a definite spike in occurrences around the 1860s and 70s, that begins back in the 1750s (confirming the pattern suggested by the OED). This suggests a change in the meaning and associations of 'morbid' coincided with or was driven by a rise in frequency of usage.

Nordau’s Degeneration was published a few years after Confessions of a Young Man, so Moore was ahead of the curve. But I think this sort of discourse is what he was tapping into when he has the narrator of Confessions describe himself as ‘feminine, morbid, perverse’. But note how he turns this into a badge of pride. Only a few pages later, the narrator boasts about his tastes in French poetry, proclaiming ‘Verlaine became my poet”. The innuendo about the narrator’s sexual identity and his 'feminine depravities' is so strong in this part of the book that it is almost explicit. The passage I’ve been discussing at length manages to combine this sexual identity with a general assault upon conventional morals and traditional literary forms. In Nordau's terms, Moore's use of 'morbid' is a way of declaring that this narrator is degenerate.

Nordau

Compare my passage from Confessions with Arthur Symons’ essay of ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’, which appeared in Harper’s Monthly Magazine in 1893. Symons describes Decadence:

this representative literature of to-day, interesting, beautiful, novel as it is, is really a new and beautiful and interesting disease.

Reference to ‘disease’ here also evokes the pseudo-medical discourse of Nordau, Lombroso and Morel. Like Moore’s narrator it turns the language of the critics of Decadence into an affirmation. Symons’ use of paradox suggests that Moore’s statement should be read in a similar light. These men transvalue the language of disease, creating in the process a Decadent aesthetics. Hence the glee in Moore's narrator declaring himself 'feminine, morbid, perverse' - he adopts the vocabulary of conservative opponents of the avant-garde, so that he can throw it back in their faces.

* This is Morel's term and not one I endorse.

** Morel doesn't seem to use the word 'morbide' in French - his word is 'maladive' (from what I can find). This seems to be a close proximity to 'morbid' in English - close enough for my general purposes.