If the greatest blessing is to be well born, and it would be a blessing for the human race if only those who are sound of body and mind should marry, as Ferselius said long ago, then one may do well to take serious account of the considerations which have been set forth in the chapter treating of the causation of insanity. But every one must make his observations and reflections before he falls in love, for he cannot observe and reflect when he is in love; on the contrary, he will then see in the manifest imbecilities of his mistress only innocent prettinesses, in her unreasoning impulses only pretty caprices, in the sacrifices which she inflicts on others only rights withheld from her or wrongs done to her. Let him study her character in her history. What has been her life at home as a daughter ? Little things are not of little significance when they are rightly read as revelations of character.
In Othello’s eyes it was a loving virtue in Desdemona to deceive her father for his sake ; but if Othello had not been as thick-witted as he was brave, he might have suspected that a maiden of so refined a breed and nurture, who, in spite of nature, country, credit, everything, grossly and heartlessly deceived her father to throw herself into his coarse, sensual embraces, would be pretty sure insidiously to deceive herself and finally him if the sufficient temptation ever presented itself. (Henry Maudsley: The Pathology of Mind. A Study of the Distempers, Deformities, and Disorders. London: Macmillan and Co. 1895.)
Diesen Hinweis verdanke ich William Greenslade: Degeneration, culture, and the novel, 1880–1940. Cambridge ; New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press 1994, das jetzt als Reprint erschienen ist:
These narratives of diagnosis and discovery, which betrayed little in the way of psychological depth, but which insistently assumed the authority to speak for the whole man, reflected and contributed to the cultural hegemony which contemporary pathology and its practitioners commanded and which popular fabulists, like Conan Doyle, reinforced. The 1895 edition of The Pathology of Mind (a substantial re-working of the original study The Physiology and Pathology of Mind (1867)) found Henry Maudslcy urging prospective husbands to scrutinise their future wives for ‘physical signs … which betray the degeneracy of the stock … any malformations of the head, face, mouth, teeth and cars. Outward defects and deformities are the visible signs of inward and invisible faults which will have their influence in breeding.’ In effect, Maudsley was urging men to become amateur detectives of the salon and the drawing-room, enjoining them, bizarrely, to identify clues to the ‘inward and invisible’ mystery of degenerate female sexuality – a subject on which late nineteenth-century men were hardly reliable guides. Doyle’s fictional register and contemporary pathology have much in common. Both invite a wholehearted response to narratives of control, where the inspected deviant subject is appropriated by an equally confident display of diagnostic acumen.
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