Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity, and the Gothic at the Fin-de-Siecle

By Andrew Smith
New York: Manchester University Press, 2004.

This book turned out to be a lot less helpful than I would have thought.  Some of the historical context might be useful to return to, as Smith starts out with Nordau and Lombroso and then names almost every other doctor/sexologist/scientist who had relevant theories. 

Smith's overall argument is that a lot of these scientific theories (which, like all scientific theories, we can read as cultural narratives or ideologies), reflected or responded to anxiety about middle class professional masculinities at the end of the century.  (Cue Oscar Wilde's scandal.)  He tries to tie together issues of gender, sexuality, nationalism, and science, and I think it just ends up being too much (he even admits that his project was too ambitious in his conclusion...weird).

One idea that was helpful for me was the link between all this cultural context and the figure of the scientist.  All the scientist characters I'll be talking about are male, and I'm going to have to address that somehow.  In his Doyle chapter Smith argues that Holmes both represents the conflation of rationality and masculinity but also operates outside the bounds of what is culturally acceptable (i.e. he is not interested in heterosexual romance or domestic bliss).