Fin-de-siècle high society admitted the exotic outsider by recasting them as monstrous and supernatural

Evidence

Proust describes at great length how society, constantly on the lookout for the strange, the exotic, the dangerous, finally identifies the refined with the monstrous and gets ready to admit monstrosities—real or fancied—such as the surange, unfamiliar “Russian or Japanese play performed by native actors”; the “painted, paunchy, tightly buttoned personage [of the invert], reminding one of a box of exotic and dubious origin from which escapes the curious odor of fruits the mere thought of tasting which stirs the heart”; the “man of genius” who is supposed to emanate a “sense of the supernatural” and around whom society will “gather as though around a turning-table, to learn the secret of the Infinite.” In the atmosphere of this “necromancy,” a Jewish gentleman or a Turkish lady might appear “as if they really were creatures evoked by the effort of a medium.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 262

Categorization

• XREF: The construction of the ‘Other’ as simultaneously monstrous and fascinating is a direct antecedent of orientalism-reading themes on how the exotic is produced as a category.