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UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Dickens and Darwin Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5kd656gk Author Perera, Nirshan Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ DICKENS AND DARWIN A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction Of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in LITERATURE by Nirshan Perera June 2012 The Dissertation of Nirshan Perera is approved _____________________________ Professor John O. Jordan, Chair _____________________________ Professor Loisa Nygaard _____________________________ Professor Richard Terdiman _____________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Nirshan Perera 2012 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Dickens’s Darwin.…………………………………………………………………….............1 Chapter One: Nemo’s Daughter……………………………………………………………………………..10 Chapter Two: Pip’s Progress……………………………………………………………………………………31 Chapter Three: Rokesmith’s Forge………………………………………………………………………….83 Conclusion: Drood’s Death……………………………………………………………………………………140 Bilibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………………..143 iii ABSTRACT “Dickens and Darwin” by Nirshan Perera This dissertation examines how Charles Dickens’s last completed novels, which appeared after the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859), process Victorian anxieties about evolutionary origins and connections. I argue that Dickens’s thematic work with origins and identity—specifically in Great Expectations (1860-61) and Our Mutual Friend (1864-65)—ultimately transcends the epistemological dislocations of Darwinism through an affirmation of self- determination and development over biological determination and origins. I examine how this is registered most powerfully in the novels’ emphasis on the liberatory and redemptive nature of self-narration and narrative fantasy. Furthermore, I read this aesthetic assertion as Dickens’s developing response to Darwinian evolutionary theory and a bridge between the social commentary of his last two completed novels. This aesthetic counterpositioning demonstrates how Dickens’s engagement with Darwinian science was complex and richly contradictory. I begin by summarizing and synthesizing Goldie Morgentaler’s and Anny Sadrin’s key work on issues of heredity and parentage in Dickens’s oeuvre. As Morgentaler and Sadrin have argued, Dickens’s work before 1859 primarily articulates a deterministic iv vision of cohesion and continuity in personal and social identity. Dickens’s treatment of self-formation, however, becomes increasingly critical of hereditary determinants and undergoes a radical unraveling in his post-Origin work. Building on Morgentaler’s and Sadrin’s work, among others, I argue that Great Expectations is ultimately unable to harmonize the deterministic tenets of evolutionary theory with the liberatory desires that underwrite any act of self-narration. Retrospective narration becomes a site for remaking origins and identity through the fruitful distortions of storytelling. Dickens’s next and last finished novel, Our Mutual Friend, extends and heightens this work. I present an extended reading and recontextualization of the lengthy soliloquy that bisects the book—in which the central character hijacks the narrative authority of the novel’s third-person omniscient narrator and seeks to remake himself through a conspicuous act of self- narration. The Harmon soliloquy grapples with issues of origin and predestination and privileges even more emphatically the self-germinating potential of the individual over hereditary and environmental determinants. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank John Jordan for his stewardship of my doctoral work and, more importantly, what stands behind it: my growth and maturation as a scholar and a teacher under his tutelage. John, you have been a mentor, teacher, and friend to me, and I hope, one day, to be something of the professor you are. I would also like to thank Loisa Nygaard and Dick Terdiman for their mentorship, encouragement, and friendship. Loisa, honestly some of my best memories of grad school are simply of talking to you in your office—I have always found your passion and enthusiasm as a scholar contagious and incredibly inspiring. Dick, your astute and exacting but patient and nurturing guidance is reflected in the pages that follow—thank you. I am very grateful to the Eugene Cota-Robles Program and the Anne and Jim Bay Endowment for Victorian Literature for their generous support of my graduate studies and doctoral research. Lastly, I would like to thank my family for their unwavering support and overflowing encouragement, especially my two baby girls— Zadie and Zoe, the best things I made in grad school—and my wife, Jen, who does not particularly like Dickens but who loves, loves, loves me. Joj, I’m excited we’ve gotten to this point but am more excited about what comes after! Thank you for demonstrating every day what you had engraved on my wedding ring ten years ago: “Barkis is willin’.” vi INTRODUCTION: DICKENS’S DARWIN This is a study of Charles Dickens’s treatment of self-determination before and after the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. Building on the work of Goldie Morgentaler and Anny Sadrin, among others, I examine how Dickens’s deterministic grasp of hereditary and social factors in the formation of the self gives way, in the Darwinian ferment of the 1860s, to a more flexible vision of identity that privileges the transmutative power of the individual will and imagination. While I reference Dickens’s journalism and short fiction, his speeches and personal correspondence throughout this study, I specifically highlight how the above trajectory emerges in Dickens’s major novels—the main sites of his developing views on personal identity. Dickens’s early and middle novels foreground and privilege the immutable forces of familial and social identity. Dickens’s mature post-Darwinian work, however, articulates a new, self-directed sense of identity formation—one that emphasizes the power of the human creative consciousness and de-emphasizes the importance of hereditary, social, and environmental influences. Conspicuous family portraits–in novels like Oliver Twist (1837-39) and Bleak House (1852-53)—that function as fixed markers of social identity and the dictates of heredity are replaced in late period texts—like Great Expectations (1860-61) and Our Mutual Friend (1864-65)—by outsize acts 1 of self-performance and role-playing, which enact Dickens’s insistence (amid pronouncement’s of his “permanent exhaustion”1 in a Victorian world post- Darwin) on the inexhaustible capacity of the human imagination to renew and transform the self. Much of the discussion that follows is anchored in a linked reading of Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend—the two novels Dickens completed after the publication of The Origin of Species, when he entered the post- Darwinian world, along with everyone else. The last decade of Dickens criticism—which has encompassed bicentenary celebrations of the birth of both Dickens and Darwin—has produced a particularly vibrant vein of criticism exploring Darwinian references and themes in Dickens’s writing,2 built on George Levine’s foundational work in Darwin and the Novelists. Dickens and Darwin aims to both echo and extend the current critical conversation on how Dickens’s post- Darwin fiction engages and processes Victorian anxieties about evolutionary origins and connections. I contend that Dickens’s thematic work with identity, origin, and influence engages the epistemological dislocations of Darwinism but ultimately transcends them through a powerful affirmation of self-determination and development over biological determination and origins. I specifically intervene in the ongoing critical discussion of Dickens and Darwin by demonstrating that this is registered most powerfully in the novels’ emphasis on the cathartic and transformative capacity of self-narration and 2 narrative fantasy—on their affirmation of the capacity of the self, and the liberatory and redemptive nature of narrative and fantasy, to transmute hereditary determinants. I read this aesthetic assertion as Dickens’s developing response to Darwinian evolutionary theory and a bridge between the social commentary of his last two mature, completed novels. To trace this aesthetic counterpositioning as an evolving theme in Dickens’s last completed novels is to recognize that Dickens’s engagement with Darwinian science was complex and richly contradictory. Although the title of this study is Dickens and Darwin, Dickens’s work is the central subject of my investigation. Others, most notably George Levine and Kate Flint,3 have written expansively on the interrelationship of Dickens’s and Darwin’s work and examined issues of reciprocal influence. This study, however, examines how Dickens appropriated some aspects of Darwinian science and rejected others—my work here is concerned with Dickens’s Darwin, with the contradictory ways in which Dickens deploys Darwinism and how it impacted his thinking on issues of identity development that were career-long concerns. Dickens and Darwin is comprised of three chapters that progressively elaborate how Dickens’s writing deals with the development of the self and self- determination before and after 1859. Chapter one, “Nemo’s Daughter,” functions as a preface for the discussion in