ABSTRACT
To say that Cesare Lombroso was interested in studying works of literature and music in addition to his anthropological-criminological pursuits is to make a distinction between these two fields of inquiry that Lombroso himself would have scarcely recognized. The worlds of science and works of art, real-life delinquents and fictitious characters, primitive “palimpsests” scrawled by prisoners and canonical works of European literature are inextricably intertwined in the very fiber of Lombroso's works. When Lombroso's ponderous tables and graphs failed to make a point as emphatically as he would have liked, a mélange of literary examples always served to achieve the desired rhetorical effect. For instance, in his 1893 La donna delinquente, la prostituta e la donna normale, Lombroso cites passages from the works of Flaubert, Schopenhauer, Zola, Molière, and Stendhal to bolster his conclusion that women are inveterate liars. Never mind if a passage might have been intended ironically or if the words were the narrator's or a character's – if it appeared in an important cultural work, it counted as evidence. As Nancy Harrowitz has rightly observed of this technique, “There is no distinction made between quotations from literary creations of these authors and direct statements from the authors themselves. Lombroso's use of such cultural expressions to make a ‘scientific’ point is the most unscientific part of his method” (Harrowitz 1994, 32). While distinguishing between “scientific” and “unscientific” in Lombroso is generally futile, the preponderance (and what is more indiscriminate use) of cultural works in Lombroso's anthropological texts is doubtless a primary feature to be found therein.
