Evolutionary Feminism in Late-Victorian Women's Poetry
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EVOLUTIONARY FEMINISM IN LATE- VICTORIAN WOMEN’S POETRY: MATHILDE BLIND, CONSTANCE NADEN AND MAY KENDALL by CATHERINE ELIZABETH BIRCH A thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English College of Arts and Law The University of Birmingham April 2011 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Abstract In recent years, feminist critics have moved from focusing on the misogynistic aspects of late-Victorian evolutionary science to recognising that many women found liberating possibilities within this science. However, most studies of evolution and gender in New Woman writing have concentrated on serious novels. This thesis is the first full-length study of representations of evolution in women’s poetry. Focusing predominantly on the work of Mathilde Blind, Constance Naden and May Kendall, I examine how the depiction of evolution in women’s poetry of the 1880s and 1890s, particularly comic poetry, responds to the conclusions of professional scientists about the application of evolutionary theory to human society. By reading the poetry in the context of contemporary scientific works, in books and periodicals, I demonstrate that, unlike many social Darwinists, who used evolutionary theory to reinforce the status quo, these poets found aspects within Darwin’s work that could be used to disrupt assumptions about natural femininity and to argue for the necessity of social change. The themes examined in this thesis include change, the blurring of boundaries and undermining of hierarchies, the association of white women with people of other races in scientific discourse, and Darwin’s representation of women’s sexual and reproductive role. Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Marion Thain. I have greatly appreciated her wisdom and ideas, and this thesis would have been significantly poorer without her input. I am very grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding this PhD. Their generous support has enabled me to focus fully on my research and also to take several fruitful research trips that would not have been possible without the funding. During the course of my research I have frequently depended on the kindness of librarians so I would like to thank the staff of Hugh Owen Library, Aberystwyth; the National Library of Wales; the British Library; Birmingham University Library and Special Collections; the Bodleian Library; the Borthwick Institute for Archives, York; York City Archives; Dr. Williams’s Library and Liverpool University Special Collections. Special thanks are due to Philip Thornborow from the Methodist Connexional Archives and Roy Lumb from Liverpool University Library for going above and beyond the call of duty. I have received a lot of support and encouragement from friends and colleagues at Aberystwyth and Birmingham universities, for which I am very grateful. Katherine Stansfield and Kelly Grovier deserve particular mention for their helpful advice and ideas. I am grateful to my parents and my sister for supporting me, listening to my complaints and solving my computer problems. Finally, I would like to thank my partner, Tom Francis, for his diligent proofreading and for cooking, cleaning and keeping me sane in the final months of the thesis: By his enthusiastic belief in her he gave her the only thing she wanted – a thorough belief in herself. (Mathilde Blind, George Eliot 89) Contents Introduction 1 Evolution and Feminism 1 Gender and Science in Periodicals and Novels 4 Poetry and Humour 15 Literature Review 21 Structure of the Thesis 28 1. Biographies 31 The Poets and Science 31 Mathilde Blind 33 Constance Naden 45 May Kendall 56 Other Poets 65 “Pin Your Faith to Darwin” 68 2. Change 78 Social Darwinism 78 Darwin and Change 81 Celebrating Change 86 Progressive Evolution 96 Undirected Change 105 Lamarckian Evolution 113 Conclusion 122 3. Crossing the Line 125 Hierarchies and Boundaries 125 “The Lower Life” 129 Language and Classification 139 Punch and Species Boundaries 149 Conclusion 158 4. The Other 160 Race and Gender 160 Identification and Appropriation in Blind’s Poetry 167 Race and “Fitness” in The Heather on Fire 178 Kendall and Craniology 187 Conclusion 196 5. Sexual Selection 199 Darwin and Femininity 199 Mating Rituals in “The Song of the Willi” 204 Blind and Sexual Selection in the 1880s 211 Naden and Human Sexual Selection 219 Blind and Motherhood 230 Childlessness in Naden’s Poetry 240 Conclusion 247 Conclusion 250 Summary 250 The Decline of Evolutionary Feminism 254 The Language of Science 261 Appendix 1: Poems 271 Appendix 2: Illustrations to May Kendall’s Poems in Punch 295 Bibliography 298 Introduction Evolution and Feminism When Mill wrote on the ―Subjection of Women,‖ Darwin had already written on the ―Origin of Species,‖ but there is no sign that the speculations of the naturalist had told upon the conclusions of the logician, nor did the average reader see why they should do so. Since that time there is no department of thought which they have not influenced. (Julia Wedgwood, ―Male and Female Created He Them‖ 122) The quotation above from an 1889 Contemporary Review article by Charles Darwin‘s niece, Julia Wedgwood, demonstrates how pervasive the influence of evolutionary theory had become in the three decades since the publication of The Origin of Species. As the reference to John Stuart Mill suggests, the Woman Question was one department of thought with which late-Victorian evolutionary science was particularly concerned. With the rise of the figure of the New Woman, women‘s increasing entry into higher education, demands for greater access to the professions for unmarried women, campaigns for more equal marriage and divorce laws, including custody of children for divorced mothers, and the beginnings of agitation for women‘s suffrage, the last two decades of the nineteenth century were a time of increasing anxiety for those who wanted to keep Victorian gender hierarchies intact. Authors on both sides of this debate made use of evolutionary science to give authority to their arguments. Focusing particularly on the work of Mathilde Blind (1841-1896), Constance Naden (1858-1889) and May Kendall (1861-1943), this study analyses the ways in which the presentation of evolutionary science in New Woman poetry of the 1880s and 1890s works both to reinforce and disrupt the conclusions of professional scientists about the 1 application of evolutionary theory to human society and gender relations.1 I have chosen to focus particularly on these poets because all three of them demonstrate a sustained engagement with the language, imagery and ideas of Victorian science, as well as an explicit or implicit commitment to the principles of women‘s rights. The work of four other women poets – L.S. Bevington, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emily Pfeiffer, and A. Mary F. Robinson – will also be discussed in this thesis.2 These poets will not receive the same degree of attention as Blind, Naden and Kendall because Gilman was more of a prose writer than a poet and the other three were less consistently concerned with either evolution or feminism so their work does not participate to the same extent in the evolutionary feminist poetic strategy that I have identified in the work of the other three poets. My focus in this study will be on the ways in which evolutionary theory could be used to support a variety of different, and even opposing, arguments, especially in relation to questions of gender. I will argue that the poets featured in this study took scientific theories that were frequently used to oppose increased rights for women and found potentially feminist elements within them. I will contrast the use of evolution in New Woman poetry with its use in other genres of New Woman literature such as periodical articles and realist novels in order to highlight the similar themes and approaches found in different genres of feminist literature but also the significant differences between the poetic and prose texts. In the title of this thesis I have defined the poets‘ responses to evolutionary theory as ―evolutionary feminism‖, despite the fact that the term ―feminism‖ was not in use in 1 Although the term ―New Woman‖ was not coined until 1894 (Ledger 2), and the poets‘ most overtly scientific poetry was published before this date, the New Woman figure was in existence before she was named. I am following Linda Hughes‘s example in designating feminist poets from the mid 1880s onwards as New Women (New Woman Poets 2). 2 Unlike Blind, Naden and Kendall, these poets all married and changed their names. I will refer to all of them by the name they are most frequently known by in their published works and in modern literary criticism. 2 Britain in the 1880s, when most of the poetry that will be examined in this thesis was written. The term ―féminisme‖ was coined in France in the 1880s and spread to Britain in the 1890s, only gradually entering into common usage (Offen 126). In this thesis I will follow the example of critics like Barbara Caine and Philippa Levine by applying the terms ―feminist‖ and ―feminism‖ to women who were active shortly before these terms began to be used in Britain, on the grounds that there is continuity between the women‘s rights campaigns of the 1880s and the twentieth-century feminist movement (Caine 4-7; Levine 14).