2012/01/01 by Daniel A. Novak · 1 citation
Medicine · Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Historical and Scientific Studies #Decadence, Literature, and Society #Literature: history, themes, analysis #White (mutation) #Art #Racism #Aesthetics #Literature #Gender studies #Sociology #Biology
paper · doi:10.1057/9781137101495_9
openalex publication_date 2012/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
At first glance, the passage above from Thomas Grattan’s 1823 novel The Cagot’s Hut invokes assumptions familiar to the discourse of monstrosity—especially as it intersects with the kinds of biologically based colonial and racial discourse that Robert Young argues emerged in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. 2 The woman is described as primitive, diseased, lower class, immodest (“a short petticoat just covered her knees”), and visibly deformed. The narrator’s status and ethnographic knowledge enable him to add up these signs as legible markers of her racial difference, declaring his certainty that she is “a Cagot ”. 3 Yet the passage above and Grattan’s novel as a whole both anticipate the discourse of scientific racism and deviate from it. First, rather than being set apart by the darkness of her skin (as even “white” or passing figures like the Irish and Jews were imagined), the woman is visibly Other because of her “cadaverous” complexion. Nineteenth-century texts on the Cagot routinely cite their excessive whiteness, but the Cagot woman’s body is both white and not white—excluded from the privileges of whiteness and doubly marked by a disease-like pallor and an “olive-coloured” goiter. 4 Second, while her bodily and racial difference is made visible in marks of disease, disability, and deformity (the goître) , the effect of the whole is a kind of bodily incoherence—a “shapeless deformity” (emphasis added). This incoherence is produced by her body’s excess—its swelling beyond its boundaries into illegibility. 5 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.