Title: The Degenerates Author: J. Albert Mann
Published: March 17, 2020
Genre(s): Historical Fiction
Page Count: 288
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:The Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded is not a happy place. The young women who are already there certainly don’t think so. Not Maxine, who is doing everything she can to protect her younger sister Rose in an institution where vicious attendants and bullying older girls treat them as the morons, imbeciles, and idiots the doctors have deemed them to be. Not Alice, either, who was left there when her brother couldn’t bring himself to support a sister with a club foot. And not London, who has just been dragged there from the best foster situation she’s ever had, thanks to one unexpected, life altering moment. Each girl is determined to change her fate, no matter what it takes.
One period of American history we’ve all collectively decided to sweep under the rug is the 20th century’s eugenics movement. This mass amnesia is why “feminist hero” Margaret Sanger is so frequently and uncritically lauded by even the most socially aware activists. Indeed, in her first YA novel, What Every Girl Should Know, J. Albert Mann herself wrote a novel about Sanger that seemingly fails to address her involvement in policies aimed at keeping the poor and “unfit” from passing on their genes. I find this both odd and disappointing, and I wonder if Mann then wrote The Degenerates—which stands in opposition to Sanger’s beliefs—as a kind of “fix it” for her 2019 novel. But this author’s confusing track record is a different conversation for a different blog post.
The Degenerates is a young adult novel about several girls who are diagnosed as “idiots, imbeciles, and morons” and are subsequently committed to a state institution. Here is a life sentence with no hope of escape, parole, or appeal. Once you enter the Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded, you’re there to stay.
I can imagine that a great deal of this very detailed book would be shocking to teen audiences. My own first exposure to American eugenics (which came through the rabbit hole of my morbid hyperfixation with Nazis in the fourth grade) was one of dismay and disgust. There’s a certain sense of betrayal when you’re young and first discover the myriad ways “land of the free” is merely a myth, perpetuated by the very individuals so keen on denying freedoms whenever possible. Worse still to learn that it has always been a myth. After all, there’s no functional difference between a government which denies your right to have children via forced sterilization and a government which denies your right to not have children via bans on contraceptives and abortion.
Here, Mann is clearly trying to educate her readers, but she’s doing so through the vehicle of a gripping story. The Degenerates puts a human face on the historical atrocities, exploring the different ways each of the four narrators has been deemed “unfit” to remain in the community—homosexuality, promiscuity, developmental delays, physical disability. The backstories are all unique, but the result is the same: magnanimous dehumanization. Of course, the girls aren’t feeble-minded, and they know it perfectly well. So they keep hope alive through the shared bonds of trauma and dreams of a kinder life.
I will say, though, that for such a brief book, four distinct narrators was probably too many. Much as I wanted each girl in the institution to have a voice, I don’t think Mann was able to fully develop the characters’ personalities. But I do appreciate that The Degenerates permits each protagonist to define her story on her own terms. Over the course of the narrative, the reader is able to see London, Alice, Maxine, Rose, and countless others find their strength. A few even find peace and contentment, of a sort, so that even the realistic-yet-bittersweet conclusion feels like a partial victory. (Each day of survival in a world hellbent on your destruction is a triumph.)
The Degenerates is a historical novel that prioritizes delivering information over pure storytelling, but it’s not made less worthy as a result. Mann clearly did a great deal of research prior to writing, and the text is unflinching in its examination of the ways eugenics policies destroyed lives and communities. Yet this isn’t a bleak, joyless tale: the author highlights love and sisterhood as the characters struggle to make sense of their place in an unwelcoming world.
