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Renegotiating Science: British Women Novelists and Evolution Controversies, 1826-1876 Lauren Cameron a Dissertation Submitted To

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Renegotiating Science: British Women Novelists and Evolution Controversies, 1826-1876 Lauren Cameron a Dissertation Submitted To View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository Renegotiating Science: British Women Novelists and Evolution Controversies, 1826-1876 Lauren Cameron A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2013 Approved by: Pamela Cooper Danielle Coriale Jordynn Jack Jeanne Moskal Beverly Taylor © 2013 Lauren Cameron ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT LAUREN CAMERON: Renegotiating Science: British Women Novelists and Evolution Controversies, 1826-1876 (Under the direction of Beverly Taylor) “Renegotiating Science: British Women Novelists and Evolution Controversies, 1826-1876,” examines the cultural and literary discourses surrounding the publication of controversial evolutionary theories in mid-nineteenth century Britain. This project focuses on the intersection of genre, gender, and interventions in scientific discourse, arguing that the novel offered women an opportunity to act as serious investigators of the social implications of evolutionary theories and to voice their evaluations of the validity and usefulness of such theories alongside male fiction and nonfiction writers. In the nineteenth century, nonscientists could take scientific developments as open to collective negotiation, not as authoritative proclamations to be outright accepted or rejected. The women writers my dissertation focuses on reshaped evolutionary theory to meet social and individual needs from an applied perspective; their arguments forwarded the ethical values that were more salient from their gendered standpoint. While these scientific developments were still new and at their “most fictive”—as Gillian Beer put it in her seminal work, Darwin’s Plots— Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot constructed thought experiments that highlighted the problematics of theorizing evolution as an embodied experience and of failing to consider the concrete nature of evolution’s consequences for all populations, whether privileged or vulnerable. Moving away from a iii unidirectional model of influence from science to literature, my project instead draws on the insights of rhetorical theorists to argue that literary and scientific texts are similarly constructed, mutually constitutive, and equally representative of the cultural discourses from which they arose. The novels this dissertation focuses on individualize the lived experience of evolution and consider from multiple perspectives the ethical impulses and failures that arise from evolutionary theories, particularly the struggles of women to have their perspectives validated in a globalizing and modernizing world that was increasingly being shaped by scientific culture. iv To CDC, NEC, and TFC, without whose love and support this project would not have been possible. v Table of Contents List of Figures………………………………………………………………………………..vii Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter I. Shifting the Center: Mary Shelley’s Cuvierian Revolutions in Nature and Time…34 II. Politics and Metaphysics: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Opposition to The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in Aurora Leigh……………………..93 III. Working through Darwin’s Origin: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Sylvia’s Lovers as a Novel of Evolutionary Despair…….…………………………………………...156 IV. The Shape and Limits of Mental Development: George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and Spencerian Evolutionary Psychology……………………………………...221 Coda………………………………………………………………………………………...285 vi List of Figures Figure 1. The Kirkland Hyena Den, by William Conybeare………………………………..46 2. Leçons d’Anatomie Comparée…………………………………………………….72 3. Whitby Crest...…………………………………………………………………...184 4. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species.............................................................201 vii Introduction In January 1874, George Eliot published the first installment of what was to be her final finished novel, Daniel Deronda. The opening sentence read: “Was she beautiful or not beautiful? and what was the secret of form or expression which gave the dynamic quality to her glance?” Shortly thereafter, a review in The Examiner criticized “her affected use of the ‘slang’ of science”—the word “dynamic” was too technical for this reviewer and many others who objected to the harshness of such scientific jargon.1 To a twenty-first century audience, the term “dynamic” does not strike the ear as jargon, and it can be difficult for us to recognize the jarring nature of it and similar scientific terms in Victorian novels without such contemporaneous responses. The Examiner review is particularly interesting, though, because in its attempt to satirize Eliot’s “increasing tendency” to target an audience “whose culture is scientific,” the reviewer reveals a deep-seated anxiety about the inroads science has made into popular culture: “Our children may sing with rapture such staves as: ‘Her eye was kinetic, her voice was pneumatic, / Her mouth was hydrostatic, sweet Molly Malone’” (125). In the context of the review, this is meant to be a joke, though it rings hollow to a modern reader, especially one who has read such dystopic science fiction as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). But it raises a number of questions: Why is scientific language such a source of concern to a mid-century Victorian? Why is terminology specifically the target of worries about the influence science wields over broader culture? Why is George Eliot’s 1 “A New Novel by ‘George Eliot’,” The Examiner (London: 1808), 3548 (1876: Jan. 29), p.125. scientific language singled out as problematic? And what role did her novel, and novels more generally, play in the cultural negotiation of the meaning of such scientific developments? ABSTRACT OF ARGUMENT My dissertation seeks to answer the preceding and other related questions by considering the interdiscursive relationship of science and literature in the nineteenth century at the sites of four major and controversial developments in evolutionary theory, which combined the insights of multiple emergent sciences and so represents a fusion unparalleled by any other nineteenth-century scientific field. The interpretative possibilities evolutionary theory offered for writers of the time were taken up and hotly debated by scientists, academics, theologians, scientific thinkers and popularizers, and fiction writers in a number of popular outlets. Novels allowed women writers specifically to intervene in this male- dominated discussion by constructing thought experiments that explored the feasibility and validity of such evolutionary schemas in the social world, a move that at once worked within and expanded the bounds of realism. Many of these women writers focused on the ethical implications of societies and individuals embodying evolutionary principles and resisted the traditional teleological movement of “Development Hypotheses” that overlooked individual struggles. Moving away from a unidirectional model of influence from science to literature, my project instead considers the conversational nature of debates over developments in evolutionary theory. Each of my chapters seeks to deepen our understanding of how literary authors—and particularly women novelists—influenced the shape of the scientific project by acting as serious investigators of the social implications of evolutionary theories—as philosophers of science—and to recognize that when science does initiate ideas, it does not necessarily divorce itself from the strategies of narrative, nor does a literary work respond in 2 a direct and singular way. The dates that I have outlined for this project, 1826 to 1876, not only mark the publication of the earliest literary text under consideration (Mary Shelley’s The Last Man) and the conclusion of the three-volume text of the latest Victorian novel I focus on (George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda), but also the emergence and dominance of Victorian women writers and the establishment of evolutionary theory as a cultural and scientific force.2 In the last quarter of the century, transformations in publication patterns and evolutionary debates (which tended to be more or less centralized under the header of Darwinism) fundamentally changed the cultural landscape. OVERVIEW OF RELATED HISTORICAL RESEARCH AND LITERARY CRITICISM The study of science and literature in the nineteenth century is by no means a new one—Lionel Stevenson’s 1932 Darwin among the Poets is still a valuable resource, and articles on male canonical poets especially were published in a steady trickle throughout the mid-twentieth century. The creation of the subject as a subfield in its own right, however, can be traced to the 1980s, particularly the seminal works Darwin’s Plots (1983) by Gillian Beer and Darwin and the Novelists (1988) by George Levine. As is evident from the titles mentioned in the past couple of sentences, studies of Darwin’s influence in nineteenth- century culture, literary and otherwise, have predominated. Such a trend has only been reinforced by the 2009 celebration of the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth, which sparked a series of collections and special issues dedicated to Darwinian studies. The scholarly movement to acknowledge and study the multivocality of nineteenth-century evolutionary theory—which is generally considered the quintessential science of the time because of its controversial nature
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