ABSTRACT
If the terms degenerate and degeneracy have been pronounced dead as valid scientific concepts in the twentieth century, this death cannot be made to include their popular uses in a variety of contexts familiar to both Americans and Europeans. Though not as oft-employed as they once were in the popular culture of the West, these terms retain the power to evoke scenes of drunkenness, disorder, and collapsed morality; they sum up the pathetic condition of a fall from some cherished state of perfection. It is simple to trace the uses of degeneracy in popular culture to the frequently reproduced family histories of the Jukes and the Kallikaks and to a number of nineteenth-century literary sources, of which the best known are Emile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart novels. 1 The “real” and fictional subjects of these sagas are tainted with mental illness and violent emotions, have a fatal weakness for alcohol, weak constitutions, and constantly run afoul of the law.
