The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [17]
Proust’s father was at the forefront of medical science and his works, such as L’Hygiène du neurasthénique [How to Live with Neurasthenia], co-authored with Gilbert Ballet in 1897, broke new ground in the understanding of nervous illness of precisely the sort from which his son suffered. Neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion, whose symptoms could include fatigue, headaches, insomnia and neuralgia was a medical condition identified by the American neurologist George Beard in the 1860s and made widely known in his work of 1881, American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences. The increased speeds and intensities of modern life, argued Beard, had led to the spread of nervous disorders. Proust père and others continued Beard’s work, seeking to understand the blight of nervous illness in a European context. Asthma (again a condition from which Professor Proust’s son suffered) was thought to be one such illness. The interconnections between the mind, the nervous system, the emotions and the body were explored in the 1880s and 1890s in the medical sciences, experimental psychology, sexology and philosophy – all branches of enquiry seeking recognizable principles and systematized knowledge – and this diversity of approaches to the understanding of the functioning and frailties of the human form translates directly into the pages of the Search, which even in its title mirrors the questing, knowledge-seeking flavour of its age.
While love is often metaphorically medicalized in Proust’s novel, in the same period sexual behaviour was a central topic, often related to mental health, in the discourses of medical science. Certain sexual practices were believed to lead to mental problems and certain mental illnesses and ‘aberrant’ behaviours were thought to be hereditary. Medical-neurological theories of degeneracy as well as Hippolyte Taine’s historical conception of the importance of ‘race, milieu et moment’ in the development of the individual find their greatest literary exploration in the twenty volumes of Émile Zola’s novelistic history of the Rougon-Macquart family (published 1871–93); they also find later echoes in Proust’s novel. Homosexuality was medicalized, deemed to be an illness, or a vice that should be treated like an ailment. Masturbation was, as William Carter has summarized, ‘condemned by parents, priests, teachers and doctors’;9 when Proust’s parents learnt of their adolescent son’s compulsive masturbation and his advances towards his male friends, Professor Proust felt it appropriate to send him to a brothel as a ‘solution’.10
It is against this backcloth of attitudes to sexuality that Proust, who had already fought a duel over insinuations of homosexuality, set about writing his novel in which a broad array of sexual preferences is explored and discussed. His radically modern conception that each individual’s sexuality was a shifting conglomerate of traits both masculine and feminine, with desire leading each of us to focus on different objects, male or female, depending on our particular disposition at a given moment, anticipates the findings of Alfred Kinsey’s research into human sexuality in the 1940s and 1950s. Although Proust frequently refers to homosexuality in terms redolent of the dominant, conventional mindset of his time (in Sodom and Gomorrah homosexuals are described as ‘a race upon which a curse is laid’; SG, 17; 1219), he also does much, as Malcolm Bowie puts it, ‘imaginatively [to reinvent]