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Copyright by Eileen M. Mcginnis 2013 Copyright by Eileen M. McGinnis 2013 The Dissertation Committee for Eileen Mary McGinnis certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Developing Hypotheses: Evolutions in the Poetics of Whitman and Melville Committee: Martin W. Kevorkian, Supervisor Brian A. Bremen Matthew Cohen Bruce J. Hunt Edward A. MacDuffie, III Developing Hypotheses: Evolutions in the Poetics of Whitman and Melville by Eileen Mary McGinnis, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2013 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Martin Kevorkian, for his kind encouragement of – and engagement with – my scholarship over the years. I am especially grateful for his thoughtful and generous readings of my dissertation (and, previously, my master’s report). I would also like to thank my committee members for their feedback and support. Thanks especially to Bruce Hunt, Matt Cohen, and Allen MacDuffie for their helpful comments on earlier versions of these chapters. My colleagues and friends in the graduate program, particularly Anna Stewart, Coye Heard, Sydney Bufkin, and Nicole Gray, have been a steady source of advice and morale boosting over the years (in Coye’s case, often of the gastronomic variety). Thanks also to Mike Landau and Kate Hagner, for their frequent hospitality, coffee-shop camaraderie, and perspective-imparting wisdom, which helped me to navigate those rocky first years of graduate school in Texas. Thanks to my parents, Diana and Robert McGinnis, for their constant love and support, and to my “little bro” Kevin McGinnis, whose phone calls inspired confidence and kept me laughing across the distance. Finally, I’d like to thank my fiancé and international man of mystery, Sol Swords: your support and companionship make it all worthwhile. iv Developing Hypotheses: Evolutions in the Poetics of Whitman and Melville Eileen Mary McGinnis, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2013 Supervisor: Martin W. Kevorkian In the foundational scholarship on literature and evolution, there remains a tendency to focus on Darwinian evolution’s influence on Victorian literature. Without ignoring Darwin’s importance to both the late-19th century and our own time, this dissertation contributes to an emerging interest among historians and literary scholars in exploring the pre-Darwinian, transatlantic contexts of evolutionary discourse. By returning to a time when ‘the development hypothesis’ was a more fluid concept, we can examine how writers and poets on both sides of the Atlantic were able to actively shape its meanings and to use it as a framework for reflecting on their literary craft. In this dissertation, I argue that for Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, development is a key term in their particular constructions of a distinctive American literature in the 1840s and ‘50s. It underlies Whitman’s conception of an experimental poetic voice in the 1855 Leaves of Grass as well as Melville’s ambitions for literary narrative in Mardi and Moby-Dick. At the same time, the sweep of their careers well beyond the publication of Origin of Species in 1859—into the last decade of the nineteenth century—allows us to chart their later responses as evolution increasingly gained acceptance and Darwin became a front man of sorts for evolution. Although v Whitman and Melville continue to incorporate evolution and scientific modernity into their late-career self-fashioning, we can trace a movement toward increasing distance, disillusionment, and abstraction in these deployments. This dissertation has implications not only for contemporary Whitman and Melville studies but also for re-assessing the broader trajectory of 19th-century American literary history. In conventional textbook accounts, the influence of Darwinian evolution is measured primarily in terms of the emergence of literary naturalism, a realist genre known for its unsparing look at lives caught in the scope of unsympathetic natural forces. Here, I suggest that developmental evolution offered alternative formal and epistemological possibilities for mid-19th-century American literature, enabling Whitman and Melville to develop hypotheses about literary truth and human value. vi Table of Contents Chapter 1. Vestiges ..................................................................................................1 1.1 Darwin’s Day............................................................................................1 1.2 Conversations, Models, Methods..............................................................7 1.3 “Man, considered zoologically”: Nineteenth-century Notions of Development........................................................................................12 1.4 The Development Hypothesis Comes to America..................................19 1.5 Chapter Outline.......................................................................................25 Chapter 2. Whitman’s Evolutionary Poetics..........................................................29 2.1 Early Critical Accounts...........................................................................35 2.2 “Knowledge in Transit”: Whitman’s Source Material............................46 2.3 “With science, and con amore”: Evolution and Affect in the 1855 Leaves ..............................................................................................................53 2.4 “Amelioration is one of the earth’s words”: Developments in the 1856 Leaves ..................................................................................................65 2.5 Conclusion ..............................................................................................74 Chapter 3. “The Unknown Road Still Marching”: Whitman and Development after 1859...............................................................................................................77 3.1 “Elemental Drifts”: The 1860 Leaves.....................................................82 3.2 Developing the Union War .....................................................................90 3.3 The Limits of Materialistic Mysticism: “A Passage to India”................96 3.4 “Darwinism—Then Furthermore”........................................................105 3.5 Conclusion ............................................................................................111 Chapter 4. Melville’s Fugitive Forms..................................................................114 4.1 Melville and Scientific Humor..............................................................118 4.2 Of Monikins and Men: Evolutionary Satire in Cooper and Mardi.......121 4.3 “All in the Family”: Moby-Dick’s Subversive Genealogies.................133 4.4 Conclusion ............................................................................................145 vii Chapter 5. Voyaging: Melville and Darwin in the Galápagos ............................149 5.1 “This Other and Darker World”: Truthful Vision in “The Encantadas”152 5.2 “Change Irreverent”: Faith and Science in Clarel ................................166 5.3 Conclusion ............................................................................................174 Works Cited .........................................................................................................176 viii Chapter 1 Vestiges Man, then, considered zoologically, and without regard to the distinct character assigned to him by theology, simply takes his place as the type of all types of the animal kingdom. —Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) 1.1 DARWIN’S DAY On The University of Texas campus, the Texas Natural Science Center holds an annual festival celebrating the anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. Each February, the museum organizes a day of family-friendly activities designed to communicate the foundations of Darwin’s work as well as its modern significance. The program at UT is one of a number of events held worldwide to commemorate “Darwin Day,” which, according to its official web site, was conceived not only as a tribute to Darwin but also as “a global celebration of science and reason.” In a state known for its contentious stance toward teaching evolution in schools,1 this effort on the part of the Texas Natural Science Center to generate public awareness of evolutionary theory is undoubtedly all to the good. For our purposes, though, UT’s Darwin Day conveniently illustrates a larger cultural phenomenon: even in the heart of Intelligent Design territory, Darwin’s name has not only become synonymous with evolution; he is also an icon of “science and reason” more generally. Truly, the international celebration of Darwin Day confirms that “Luther’s day” has now “expand[ed] to Darwin’s year,” as Herman Melville hinted in his 1876 poem Clarel 1 Most recently, Texas garnered national attention on the issue during the 2009 school board debates over teaching evolution as accepted mainstream science. Ultimately, the Texas Board of Education voted to drop a 20-year-old mandate that science teachers cover the “strengths and weaknesses” of all theories, including evolution. However, the vote was split, with social conservatives on the Board pushing hard to undermine the teaching of evolution as an established theory. 1 (498). Melville’s lines imply that we are no longer living in German theologian Martin Luther’s time, i.e., in a time where
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