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Virginia Woolf and the Sciences of Prehistory: a Study of Five Major Novels – Korrakod Paetsasadee – June 2019 Acknowledgements

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Virginia Woolf and the Sciences of Prehistory: a Study of Five Major Novels – Korrakod Paetsasadee – June 2019 Acknowledgements Virginia Woolf and the Sciences of Prehistory: A Study of Five Major Novels Korrakod Paetsasadee This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2019 Department of English Literature and Creative Writing 1 Word Template by Friedman Morgan& 2014 For my parents i Word Template by Friedman Morgan& 2014 ii Word Template by Friedman Morgan& 2014 Declaration This thesis has not been submitted in support of an application for another degree at this or any other university. It is the result of my own work and includes nothing that is the outcome of work done in collaboration except where specifically indicated. Many of the ideas in this thesis were the product of discussion with my supervisor Mr. Tony Pinkney. iii Word Template by Friedman Morgan& 2014 Abstract This thesis examines Woolf’s major novels and other writings in relation to the discourses of science in her period. As a modernist writer, she has been considered as anti-science and an advocate of formalist aesthetics. A later literary-critical generation constructed her as a feminist writer, at once robust and subtle in her polemics and experimental techniques. But Woolf also consistently expressed her interest in a variety of sciences including natural history and biology, palaeontology, physics, psychoanalysis, technology, astronomy, archaeology and anthropology. By examining her diverse scientific interests, particularly as they cluster around the notion of prehistory, this thesis examines in detail five of her major novels. Her first novel The Voyage Out sets forth, in the light of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, on the mission of creating a new self and a language suitable for women’s use to express their subtle experiences and elusive attitudes to society. Jacob’s Room and Mrs. Dalloway reveal Woolf’s awareness of social agitation and national instability in a time of global turbulence through the discourses of melancholia, medicine and psychoanalysis. The Waves exemplifies the novelist’s attempt to integrate her interest in the new physics of her time to portray the radical indeterminacies of modern life as well as creating new forms of modernist writing. Woolf’s final novel, Between the Acts, which is informed by her archaeological and anthropological concerns, accentuates her sceptical ideas on human history and extinction drawing on Jane Harrison’s anthropological account of ancient Greek ritual as her modernist narrative technique. Science in Woolf is not a distraction from her feminist-experimental concerns, but rather an enabling condition of them. iv Word Template by Friedman Morgan& 2014 Virginia Woolf and the Sciences of Prehistory: A Study of Five Major Novels – Korrakod Paetsasadee – June 2019 Acknowledgements To my life-coach, my late father Somnuk Paetsasadee who always encouraged me to pursue my lifelong ambition. To my enthusiastic and supportive mother Sompond Paetsasadee: she is keen to know all about my academic progress and my well-being in England. I am grateful to my sister and nephew who constantly entertain me with their cheering news and their enquiries about what I am doing. I am also grateful to Ayuwat Katawee who provides me with emotional support along the way. I would also like to thank my other family members and my friends who have supported me during the last four years. My very special gratitude goes out to the Office of the Higher Education Commission of Thailand and Mahidol University for helping and providing the funding for my study. With a special mention to my supervisor Tony Pinkney. It was memorable to have the opportunity to work under your rigorous and energetic supervision. You show me how a good teacher should be. v Word Template by Friedman Morgan& 2014 Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................1 Chapter One. The Voyage Out: Prehistory, Life and Natural History ......................... 19 Chapter Two. Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway: Prehistory and Mind ...................... 58 Chapter Three. The Waves: Prehistory, Self and Physics ……………………………...124 Chapter Four: Between the Acts: Prehistory, Culture and Anthropology…………….182 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………244 Bibliography..……………………………………………………………………………...251 Word Template by Friedman Morgan& 2014 Paetsasadee 1 Introduction In Mrs Dalloway Septimus Smith declares that ‘One must be scientific, above all scientific’, and I examine five of Virginia Woolf’s major novels in the light of his maxim in this thesis.1 I shall suggest that, in both form and content, Woolf’s novels draw productively upon the varied scientific disciplines of her period, with an especial focus on the sciences of prehistory. This thesis is a contribution to, or case-study in, the wider literary-critical project of resituating modernist texts and writers in the scientific contexts of their own time. But before I can do that, I must trace the history of the relationship between science and literature more generally. Literature and science have been regarded as an epistemological dichotomy for centuries. In historical surveys of their interactions, Martin Willis and Charlotte Sleigh have tracked the early moments of this difficult relationship. Willis examines the interplay between these dual fields in areas ranging from Darwinian evolution, body and mind, physical sciences and animal studies. He investigates the early problems caused by the institutionalization of science in England in the seventeenth century, which required a ‘simple and direct prose style’ to communicate new scientific knowledge to the public.2 Charlotte Sleigh also investigates the early debates between literature and science, and she delineates the historical emergence of new scientific methods which were questioned and challenged by contemporary writers. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), for instance, was written to demonstrate the writer’s skepticism about the empirical methods for truth-production established by the Royal Society.3 Londa Schiebinger follows through the effects of the institutionalization of 1 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (London: Penguin Books, 2000), pp. 24, 74, 158. 2 Martin Willis, Literature and Science (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 12. 3 Charlotte Sleigh, Literature and Science (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 40. Word Template by Friedman Morgan& 2014 Paetsasadee 2 science into the late eighteenth century. This process resulted in narrowing gender perceptions in the scientific arena as well as a limitation of linguistic usage: Literature … was banished from science under the disgraceful title of the “feminine.” The equation of the poetic and the feminine ratified the exclusion of women from science, but also set limits to the kind of language (male) scientists could use.4 Scientific language is presumed to be rational and transparent, while literary language is seen as metaphorical, emotional and untrustworthy. This is a rigid dichotomy that recent theorists have been eager to challenge. It is when science and technology begin to transform national life in the Industrial Revolution that the issue of the relations between literature and science becomes a still more burning issue. William Wordsworth’s famous claim in ‘The Tables Turned’ that ‘we murder to dissect’ shows, in extreme form, a Romantic vein of hostility to science.5 But we should also recall that in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads he describes poetry as ‘the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science’, which suggests a more positive connection between the two terms.6 Creative synergies between the Romantic poets and the scientific community have been examined in Trevor Levere’s Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science, which studies the poet’s relationships with his scientific friends. He attended their lectures and drew ‘from them a considerable amount of materials for his literary texts’. In the same vein, Jan Golinski visualizes 4 Londa Schiebinger, cited in Susan M. Squier, ‘Invisible Assistants or Lab Partners? Female Modernism and the Culture(s) of Modern Science’, p. 303. 5 William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, ed. by R.L. Brett and A.R. Jones (Edinburgh: T. & A. Constable Ltd., 1965), p. 106. 6 Ibid., p. 259. Word Template by Friedman Morgan& 2014 Paetsasadee 3 Coleridge as an active, not passive, contributor to the contemporary scientific community.7 Another important landmark in the literature-science debate in England is Matthew Arnold’s lecture on ‘Literature and Science’ delivered in 1882, the year of Virginia Woolf’s birth. It was a response to Thomas H. Huxley’s 1880 oration on ‘Science and Culture’, which claimed that study of the classics was useless to the students of physical science. Moreover, scientific education could facilitate one in ‘attaining real culture’ no less than literary studies. Hence he insisted upon reinforcement of the study of physical science in ordinary education.8 To refute Huxley, Arnold asserted that all studies were ‘scientific’ when they were taught and learned ‘systematically’. Classical study means learning not only about Greek and Roman belles lettres but also about history, people and customs. He then concluded that ‘a genuine humanism is scientific’ and proposed ‘scientific’ humanism in education.9 For Arnold, literature and science shared the same objective: to pursue knowledge of life. While literature is interested in human nature, science attempts to understand
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