Scientia sexualis y saber psiquiátrico en la novela naturalista decimonónica

Abstract

The nineteenth-century naturalist novel genre introduces in fiction the basic principles of experimental medicine, as postulated by Claude Bernard; in Spain this originated the so called medical-social novel. This variety of fiction is characterized by a "will to know" about sexuality, giving fruit throughout all the nineteenth century to many psychiatric and physiological studies concerning the so called perverse pleasure; this is all sexuality escaping traditional morality, witnessed from a religious or medical perspective. At the end of the past century, writers are influenced by theories postulating the degeneration of the human race, thus favouring their fatalistic determinism. They study the phenomenology of physical passion as a new issue for the novel, viewed as the origin of strong psychological and physiological deviations. At the same time they spread a medical-hygienic ideology that shall transform the naturalist novel into a means of [pseudo] scientific divulgation, also anticipating twentieth-century erotic novel.