Journal Article
Dark degenerations: Life, light, and transformation beneath the Earth, 1840–circa 1900
Flack, A.
Record Number:
5840
Year:
2022
Journal:
Isis
Pages:
331-351
Volume:
113
Abstract:
Abstract: Focusing on Kentucky’s immense and world-famous Mammoth
Cave, this essay considers contexts from across the nineteenth century in which
subterranean darkness was envisaged as a driving force in the transformation of
living things. In fact, the cave was the stage for several allied discourses of “dark
degeneracy” that conjured images of both generative and destructive mutability,
from the generation of animals without eyes to the apparent disintegration of
some kinds of human bodies and minds through exposure to the darkness. In
elucidating several parallel discourses of dark degeneracy, the essay offers a distinct
contribution to several bodies of scholarship by highlighting an important
and hitherto neglected manifestation of an intensifying nineteenth-century focus
on the how of natural processes and a growing sense of the transformative significance
of the apparent cohesion of malleable bodies with their wider environments.
At the same time, it evidences the influence ofMammoth Cave in forging
and contributing to late nineteenth-century debates about degeneration and
shows how dominant sensory hierarchies framed both popular and scientific understandings
of life in the deep darkness.
Times Cited:
2
Relevent Species: