The degenerate spouse: Eugenics and divorce in Arabella Kenealy's The Marriage Yoke (1904) and Gabriele Reuter's ‘Eines Toten Wiederkehr’ (1901)

Abstract

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, eugenics emphasised human intervention to rectify a perceived distortion of the ‘natural’ evolutionary progress. One of the interventions advocated by eugenicists was the prevention of marriages that were deemed incompatible. The union between the ‘fit’ and the ‘unfit’ was constantly propagated as the reason behind the degeneration of the race, especially in the wake of the rediscovery of Mendel's theories on heredity and the repudiation of Lamarckism. Both Arabella Kenealy's The Marriage Yoke (1904) and Gabriela Reuter's ‘Eines Toten Wiederkehr’ (1908) portray the tragedy of such a marriage to a ‘defective’ partner. Moreover, they emphasise the lost potential of this marriage, both for the individual and the nation, by also introducing healthier characters with whom a better eugenic match could have been made. Instead, the healthy partners are burdened by the care and nursing of their mentally and physically defective partners and children. In this article I will not only show how scientific discourses are echoed and mediated within the narrative, but also how they are used to advocate for social change.