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40 THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
to advance notions of the inexorable progress of civilization, it also
implied the possibility of degeneracy, or atavism; if humanity had
evolved from the animal kingdom, it was conceivable that it could
regress in the same direction. Certainly, Charles Darwin himself had
presaged such an interpretation of his ideas, when he wrote that certain
actions, such as ‘the bristling of hair under the influence of extreme
terror, or the uncovering of the teeth under that of furious rage’ should
be understood ‘on the belief that man once existed in a much lower
and animal-like condition [sic].’ 91 Writers on the subject of lycanthropy
were quick to recognize the implications of such statements. The
overarching idea in Fiske’s essay, for example, is the notion that the
werewolf myth might be explained in terms of degeneration theory.
In this sense, the focus on science remained strong in the late nineteenth
century, but it was a haunted science, the science of degeneration
theorists, of spiritualists and occultists, and, increasingly, scientists
of the human psyche. Meanwhile, a resurgent Gothic literature was
equally obsessed with the discourses of science. As Kelly Hurley has
observed, ‘the end-of-century Gothic is a genre thoroughly imbricated
with biology and social medicine’, 92 and other critics have noted the
particular significance of Gothic to the development of psychiatry
in the twentieth century. 93 Sigmund Freud was certainly alert to the
convergences between Gothic and scientific traditions in his work,
writing that ‘the poets and philosophers before me discovered the
unconscious. What I discovered was the scientific method by which
the unconscious can be studied.’ 94 And further: ‘it strikes me myself
as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories
and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science.’ 95
Certainly, Freud’s ‘cases’ resonated with the ‘cases’ of the fictional
detectives who flourished contemporaneously in the hands of writers
such as Conan Doyle.
The figure of the detective emerged from the fin de siècle Gothic
tradition, with its focus on the boundaries between the known and the
unknown; according to Hurley, fin de siècle Gothic was populated by
‘scientist-protagonists (doctors, psychologists, chemists, anthropologists,
natural historians) … hesitating between scientific and occultist