SOURCE: Shumaker, Jeanette Roberts. “Abjection and Degeneration in Thomas Hardy's ‘Barbara of the House of Grebe.’” College Literature 26, no. 2 (spring 1999): 1-17.

In the following essay, Shumaker asserts that Hardy illustrates the danger of the Victorian myth of degeneration in “Barbara of the House of Grebe.”

Thomas Hardy's Gothic tale, “Barbara of the House of Grebe” (1891), dramatizes the horrid consequences of belief in the Victorian myth of degeneration. Only months after writing Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Hardy creates another tragedy in the less well-known “Barbara”; this time tragedy stems from dread of the lower class and of sexually assertive women of any class.¹ The theory of degeneration situates the hatred of the working class and women seen in “Barbara” within the pseudo-scientific debates of the late-Victorian era. Hardy shows how belief in the myth of degeneration could ruin relationships and lives.

Recent studies of degenerationism in history and literature...