I've been working on a short article about Beresford's 1911 novel The Hampdenshire wonder, a not very enthralling work of proto-science fiction. Arthur Machen briefly, and favorably, reviewed it. Anyway, the Wonder is a child super-prodigy. It appears to me, though, that Beresford intends us to see his father, Ginger Stott, as an evolutionary throwback. Stoff has a deep chest, long arms, and reddish hair.

Now I have the impression that I have read some old thing somewhere that suggested red hair was associated with being "primitive." There might have been a confusion in the popular mind back then between "recessive" (if the concept of recessive traits goes back that far) and "regressive."

Anyway, I have been unable to confirm the red hair-atavism thing. Can anyone help? A reference to nonfiction or fiction, either or both, would be helpful. I've already done the obvious Googling without success, so there's no need to repeat my effort. I thought it possible that some reader here might have run across something like this.

Peter Quint, the villain turned spectre from "The Turn of the Screw", was a redhead with "very red" hair and whiskers. With small eyes and a wide mouth and thin lips. For whatever that is worth.

In "The Grahames" an 1866 novel, we meet a villainous looking burglar with a shock of red hair, and coarse brutish lips.

Thanks, Platypus -- and there's redhaired Uriah Heep, for that matter. So literary associations of red hair (in men) with villainy of one sort or another might be well established. It seems Judas was sometimes depicted as redhaired.

But I have the nagging sense of some bit of writing, late 1800s or early 1900s, that associated red hair and being an "evolutionary throwback." It might not be enough to suggest anything more than one author's notion.

Dale Nelson Wrote:
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> Thanks, Platypus -- and there's redhaired Uriah
> Heep, for that matter. So literary associations
> of red hair (in men) with villainy of one sort or
> another might be well established. It seems Judas
> was sometimes depicted as redhaired.

I doubt I can find anything that specific. But there are associations with brutishness. Including, but not limited to, sexual depravity.

"Very coarse red hair testifies to animal propensities."

- Anonymous, "Judging Character by the Hair", CURRENT OPINION, vol. 18, p. 169 (1895).

[books.google.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 19 Jul 23 | 07:36PM by Platypus.

(discussing women)
"... red hair has long been supposed to be associated with a sensual constitution ..."

-- G.H. Napheys, THE PHYSICAL LIFE OF WOMAN (1871), p. 64.
[books.google.com]

"It has been conjectured, that the odium attached to red hair originated, in England, from the aversion there felt to the red-haired Danes; which may or may not be true."

Robert Nares, A GLOSSARY (1822), p. 264 (s.v. "Judas Colour")

[books.google.com]

The Current Opinion citation is particularly intriguing.

"Anthropological authority was further quoted for primitive man being red-haired, and Darwin and Lord Avebury for atavism from crossing being shown by the appearance of red feathers in the offspring when interbreeding white and black breeds of poultry."
[...].
"As to the atavism of red hair, there is a long list of authorities.  The earliest must be Eusebius, an ecclesiastic who by a remarkable anticipation deduced, from the sporadic distribution of red hair among all nations of the earth, that Adam was red-haired!  The celebrated Broca noticed this same distribution, and said red hair arose by preference from certain "croisements."  Topinard ... opined that red hair in Europe came from reversion to a primitive rufous race, now extinct, living on either side of the Urals.  There is also evidence that red hair can result to-day from crosses, not only in poultry, but in man. 'Pruner Bey and others have noted that dark Spaniard and American Indian can procude a red-haired offspring, which appears as another instance of a pigment breakdown following hybridization.'"

W.C. Rivers, "Red Hair and Tuberculosis", THE PRACTITIONER (June 1921 at 419-25) at 420-21.  

[www.google.com]

"... Aunt Habersham was a little old maid, very unsocial, very red as to hair as well as diminutive in statute. Yes, it must have been because she was, to speak plainly, a red-headed dwarf, that she was an old maid [....]; and poor little Habersham, pale, diminutive, shrinking, was her very image. 'Atavism' is what they call it when the grandfather reproduces himself in his descendant, but a mere aunt, a father's sister, had no right .... to bequeath herself body and soul ... to a mere nephew!"

W.M. Baker, CARTER QUARTERMAN: A NOVEL (1876).

[books.google.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 20 Jul 23 | 12:02AM by Platypus.

Excellent, Platypus. I'd written, in my Books Around Machen piece on The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911):

--Ginger’s wide chest, long arms, and reddish hair are probably meant to suggest evolutionary atavism. He’s a throwback, which makes his siring a precursor of Future Man particularly ironic.--

I wanted to verify the red hair bit before the column "went to press." That bit has now, thanks to you, been sufficiently confirmed. I'll add a note to my little article to the effect that "Platypus, a contributor at the Eldritch Dark site, confirmed the association of red hair and atavism as a notion likely to be available to Beresford" -- if that is OK with you.

Glad to be of use.

Incidentally, I did a search for "red hair" and "Turanian" and came up with a number of late 19th century hits which drew an obscure connection between red-heads and Turanians. This despite the fact that the core Turanian type is supposed to be dark haired. The Finns, who are supposed to be Turanian, were pointed to in particular.

Which I suppose indicates the Turanian theory has a bit of a one-size fits all, loosey goosy, aspect to it. But makes a sort of sense in light of the above-mentioned ideas about red-headedness being connected to cross-breeding.

As you know, Turanians are vaguely connected to Machen's little people and R.E. Howard's little people. I don't recall, though, that their fiction ever made a connection to red-heads.

Thanks! I'm pretty sure you're right about Machen and red hair. I don't remember it in Howard, either, but it's a long time since I read more than a few stories by him.

Dale Nelson Wrote:
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> Thanks! I'm pretty sure you're right about Machen
> and red hair. I don't remember it in Howard,
> either, but it's a long time since I read more
> than a few stories by him.


For some reason, he is a very difficult author for me to read. It's one thing to confront directly ugly subject matter, especial as regards atavistic (hah! got to use the word!) human nature, but Howard, it seems to me, revels in them.

There's a certain desperate Nietzschian worldview.

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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I suspect "atavism" was all over the place in the pulps of the 1920s or so, when there was a lot of fussing about supposed racial degeneration especially among progressives.

This is from an essay to be published eventually at the Darkly Bright site:


Contraception propagandist Marie Stopes latched on to the potential of this theme. “’The way to rear an imperial race,’” she said in 1930, was to permit only some people to have children (p. 98). The norm in Christian society, in which a man left his parents and was joined to his wife, and they became one flesh and had children, evidently amounted, in Stopes’s view, to “’race suicide’” (p. 99). Such ideas were not new in 1930, but had been on the boil for a decade. Anxiety about racial degeneration in whites due to supposedly transmissible tendencies to blindness, deafness, epilepsy, etc. energized the campaign for government policy favoring eugenics legislation.

These famous progressives were all eugenicists: Stopes, Margaret Sanger, Julian Huxley, Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes, the sexologist Havelock Ellis, H. G. Wells (“those swarms of blacks, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency… will have to go”), and George Bernard Shaw (“The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man”).

Dale Nelson Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I suspect "atavism" was all over the place in the
> pulps of the 1920s or so, when there was a lot of
> fussing about supposed racial degeneration
> especially among progressives.
>
> This is from an essay to be published eventually
> at the Darkly Bright site:
>
>
> Contraception propagandist Marie Stopes latched on
> to the potential of this theme. “’The way to
> rear an imperial race,’” she said in 1930, was
> to permit only some people to have children (p.
> 98). The norm in Christian society, in which a
> man left his parents and was joined to his wife,
> and they became one flesh and had children,
> evidently amounted, in Stopes’s view, to
> “’race suicide’” (p. 99). Such ideas were
> not new in 1930, but had been on the boil for a
> decade. Anxiety about racial degeneration in
> whites due to supposedly transmissible tendencies
> to blindness, deafness, epilepsy, etc. energized
> the campaign for government policy favoring
> eugenics legislation.
>
> These famous progressives were all eugenicists:
> Stopes, Margaret Sanger, Julian Huxley, Bertrand
> Russell, John Maynard Keynes, the sexologist
> Havelock Ellis, H. G. Wells (“those swarms of
> blacks, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow
> people, who do not come into the new needs of
> efficiency… will have to go”), and George
> Bernard Shaw (“The only fundamental and possible
> socialism is the socialisation of the selective
> breeding of man”).

I'm much less concerned about any socio-political aspects of Howard. It's possible to make arguments in favor of social Darwinism and eugenics. While these positions are to me personally repugnant, if any given society decided that it wanted some heritable characteristics as a very high priority, rigid eugenics would deliver it. But most societies today do not want this as a priority.

What really troubles me about Howard is much more personal, I think. Again, he revels in the idea of all those actions needed to assure racial purity. It's one thing the understand what that entails in practice, entirely another thing to feel smugly superior about it.

I mean, ultimately, on reflection, one might decide that eugenics would yield results that could be seen as positive by most of society, but in accepting that, feel about eugenic policies the same as one would feel about euthanizing a terminally ill household pet.

So it's really Howard's personality, as he chooses to reveal it, rather than his favored social views.

I think he greatly misunderstands the tone of Nietzsche. Nietzsche was a flamboyant writer. He adopts a godlike tone as a narrative device. The immature will interpret this as a personal position of superiority and hence duty. Which, because they perceive that it endorses their personal existence, jump to it like ants to honey.

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~