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Transforming the Race-Mother: Motherhood and Eugenics in British Modernism

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Transforming the Race-Mother: Motherhood and Eugenics in British Modernism TRANSFORMING THE RACE-MOTHER: MOTHERHOOD AND EUGENICS IN BRITISH MODERNISM By Persephone Emily Harbin Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillments of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English August, 2008 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Professor Mark A. Wollaeger Professor Jay B. Clayton Professor Roy K. Gottfried Professor Volney P. Gay Copyright © 2008 by Persephone Emily Harbin All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the Vanderbilt English Department for the financial and academic support I received while a student at Vanderbilt. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the English Department Research Grant that made possible my archival research. I would like to thank my advisor, Mark Wollaeger, for his support and excellent editing suggestions. I am grateful to the other members of my committee, Roy Gottfried, Jay Clayton, and Volney Gay, for their input and questions. Special thanks also go to Kathryn Schwartz, who deserves recognition as an advocate for graduate students. Thanks to the members of the department and my fellow graduate students who supported and encouraged me, and to Carolyn Dever for steering me toward the initial concept of the dissertation. Thanks to Rosa Shand for her encouragement and input on the early drafts of the dissertation and to the faculty of Converse College for providing me with a nurturing environment, both as an undergraduate student and as a teacher. I would also like to acknowledge the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London and The Galton Collection, also affiliated with University College London, for access to their archives and help with my research. Finally, there are not enough words to express my gratitude toward my family. Thanks to my husband Robert for sticking by me for the past few years. In particular, my parents have been a never-ending source of encouragement, love, comfort and support. My family was with me every step of the way and shared in both my pain and my joy. Without them, my dissertation would not have been possible. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS............................................................................................... iii INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................v Chapter I. THE EVOLUTION OF RACE-MOTHERHOOD: NEW WOMEN WRITERS AND EUGENICS ....................................................................................................1 II. MINA LOY: MODERNIST, MONGREL, RACE-MOTHER..............................56 III. VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE JOURNEY FROM RACE-MOTHER TO MODERNIST ARTIST .........................................................................................95 III. “STILL HARPING ON THE MOTHER:” JAMES JOYCE AND EUGENIC TRANSFORMATIONS ......................................................................................149 IV. CONCLUSION....................................................................................................209 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................222 iv INTRODUCTION British eugenics and Modernism have two things in common: each became popular during roughly the same period and each has been defined as a discourse centered on great men. Early definitions of Modernism concentrated on the “Men of 1914:” Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce. The study of British eugenics has focused on its originator and his successor, Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, and eugenics in general is more associated with Nietzsche and Hitler than with its British origins. Studies on Modernism and eugenics, then, tend to go down a predictable path. Eugenics is assumed to be encapsulated by the idea of the morally autonomous Superman and Modernism has been represented, until recently, primarily by the mentality of the “Men of 1914.” For example, in his study Breeding Superman , Dan Stone explores the influence of Nietzsche on British eugenics and argues that Nietzscheanism “lent credibility to an emerging Modernism which perceived itself to be fighting against an entrenched decadence in the artistic and literary world.” Stone says, “Nietzschean concepts and terms would be bandied around by George Bernard Shaw and W.B. Yeats, T.E. Hulme and Wyndham Lewis, as if the mere invocation of them was sufficient to send the Georgians and the pastoralists running” (65). According to this view, Modernists and eugenicists each regard themselves as superior and autonomous, rising above the deterioration of modern life. While the eugenicist would improve the race by controlling human breeding, weeding out the fit from the unfit, Modernists would v create art so complex that it would separate the true intellectual from the rest of the rabble. 1 Although studies like Stone’s clearly offer useful insights for certain Modernists, they hinge on a narrow definition of both Modernism and eugenics. Critical work on Modernism in the last thirty years has virtually exploded the myth of British Modernism as the exclusive domain of men. Feminist scholars such as Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Rita Felski, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Susan Stanford Friedman, Jane Marcus, and Bonnie Kime Scott have all done significant work in expanding the Modernist canon to include female authors. Other authors, such as Ann Ardis and Marianne DeKoven, have forged links between New Woman novels and Modernism. 2 Similarly, recent work on eugenics has revealed that it was not always the male-dominated, anti-feminist discourse many would assume. Like Modernism, eugenics included many different voices and emerged at time when the cultural imagination was preoccupied with the woman question. Although eugenics had a definite anti-feminist component, historians such as Lucy Bland, Leslie Hall, Greta Jones, George Robb, and Richard Soloway, have argued that women, even feminists, were deeply involved with the movement. 3 If we begin to think about eugenics as being as much about women as men (or perhaps, even more about women than about men), we discover a female figure alongside 1 For another example, see John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992). 2 See Ann L. Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990) and Marianne DeKoven, Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991). 3 See specifically Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: Feminism, Sex, and Morality (London and New York: Tauris Parke Publishers, 2001), Leslie Hall, "Women, Feminism, and Eugenics," Essays in the History of Eugenics , ed. Robert Peel (London: The Galton Institute, 1998), Greta Jones, "Women and Eugenics in Britain: The Case of Mary Scharlieb, Elizabeth Sloan Chesser, and Stella Browne," Annals of Science 52.5 (1995), George Robb, "The Way of All Flesh: Degeneration, Eugenics, and the Gospel of Free Love," Journal of the History of Sexuality 6.4 (1996), and Richard Soloway, "Feminism, Fertility, and Eugenics in Victorian and Edwardian England," Political Symbolism in Modern Europe , ed. Seymour Drescher (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1982). vi (and often opposing) the Superman – the eugenic mother, or race-mother. Although unfamiliar to most contemporary readers, the term “race-mother” was immediately recognizable to the reasonably educated British reader in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The term evoked contemporary debates about degeneration, a possibly weakening empire, eugenics, and the role of the mother in breeding and shaping the race of the future. “Race-motherhood” draws attention to the idea that the British family is a microcosm of the British Empire; the mothering choices and skills of individual woman thus have the power to determine the future of the entire British race. As the American poet William Ross Wallace wrote in 1865, “The hand that rocks the cradle / Is the hand that rules the world.” When one begins to consider eugenics and Modernism as co-existing, dynamic discourses, new avenues of inquiry open. For example, old questions about Modernism and the maternal body are made new when viewed through the lens of eugenic theory. A redefinition of eugenics reveals the presence of eugenic feminism, which in turn becomes a viable discourse for Modernists to question and to adopt. In this dissertation, I will examine how New Women and Modernist writers negotiated the fertile, prolific discourses of eugenics and maternity, strategically choosing whatever seemed most useful for their political and artistic ends. In responding to eugenics, writers did what eugenicists themselves had already done – allied themselves strategically with the ideas of the past, but placed them in a different context, causing them to signify differently. Building on scholarship linking New Woman novels to the emergence of Modernism, I will concentrate on the ways in which New Woman novelists challenged and redefined eugenics, paving the way for the more avant-garde Modernists. vii Before turning to the eugenic path from New Woman novels to the Modernist transformations of the race-mother we must first understand the cultural currents to which both eugenicists and Modernists were responding. Francis Galton’s eugenic theories can be traced back to his 1865
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