ABSTRACT
Maier considers how the press and fiction manifested scandals of the fin de siècle which created anxiety in readers: how they reflected and capitalized on scandalous subjects like sexual scandal, blackmail, class, opium, and slumming as well as drug mania and absinthe drinking. The gossip of the parlors moved into the public realm over any kind of behavior seen as nonnormative, while fiction by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Marie Corelli inquired into human behavior with causes found in human frailty and bifurcated desires. These fictional readings of the masks men wear lead to a consideration of the monstrous and how theories of degeneracy, wherein one could physically identify a killer, were no match for the factual understanding of either the gentle man, Joseph Merrick, or the serial killer, “Jack the Ripper.”
