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Life Histories: Ontogeny, Phylogeny and Narrative Structure LIFE HISTORIES: ONTOGENY, PHYLOGENY AND NARRATIVE STRUCTURE IN THE MODERNIST BILDUNGSROMAN by Daniel Aureliano Newman A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Daniel Aureliano Newman 2013 ABSTRACT: LIFE HISTORIES: ONTOGENY, PHYLOGENY AND NARRATIVE STRUCTURE IN THE MODERNIST BILDUNGSROMAN Daniel Aureliano Newman Doctor of Philosophy, 2013 Department of English University of Toronto This thesis offers new perspectives on the modernist bildungsroman, a genre currently enjoying much attention in Modernist Studies. Though modernist deformations of the Bildung plot are typically read symptomatically, I propose that in several cases these deformations are structural innovations reflecting contemporary discoveries in embryology, genetics and evolutionary theory. These discoveries offered models for exposing and subverting the bildungsroman’s historical (aesthetic, political, scientific, ideological) association with recapitulation—the theory that an individual’s development (ontogeny) replays the evolution of its species (phylogeny). Chapter One reads Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a clear example of a Bildung plot in which the traditional parallel between ontogeny and phylogeny is broken: Stephen Dedalus’s artistic maturation is obstructed by repeated returns to the personal, national, mythical and prehistoric past. Chapter Two considers Forster’s Howards End as a bildungsroman stretched beyond the realm of Bildung into that of genetic transmission. Exploiting Mendelism’s naturalization of atavism, Forster counters the genre’s inherited associations with recapitulation, progressivism and entropy. Chapter Three examines Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza, a bildungsroman remarkable for its ii extreme anachronies. Huxley’s rewriting of the Bildung plot is informed by research, by his brother Julian and others, on the possibility of inducing metamorphosis in a strange amphibian, the axolotl, which usually fails to reach morphological adulthood. Chapter Four proposes Woolf’s Orlando as a missing link between the seemingly esoteric biological engagements of the three aforementioned novels and the organicist aesthetics that characterize modernist theories of the novel. Relating Orlando’s metafictionality to criticism by Henry James, Forster and others, I corroborate current attempts in Modernist Studies that read the bildungsroman as a privileged testing ground for modernist aesthetics, ethics, politics and historiography. Connecting the four chapters is the common strategy of decoupling individual development from historical change and celebrating some kind of anti-chronology that I call reversion; informed by new biological theories of growth and evolution, reversion is enacted formally through manipulations of temporal structure. Thus the modernist bildungsroman enlarges, with help from biology, the range of possible and acceptable developmental trajectories. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many people helped me develop this dissertation from an inchoate germ to its current but of course unfinished incarnation. I was blessed by an excellent supervisory committee. My supervisor Cannon Schmitt has a way of asking tough questions that flatter and enable deeper thought, and from his apparently limitless expertise I have benefited endlessly, within and beyond the dissertation. From his enthusiasm I learned to value— and sometimes even to understand—my own ideas; I couldn’t have asked for a better mentor. Melba Cuddy-Keane has had a complementary effect: in seminars as in meetings, her commitment to literary studies and her eye for detail and nuance have contributed more than I can say to my growth as a scholar. I am also indebted to Greig Henderson for his stylistic interventions and his equally necessary humour. Special thanks to my external examiner Gregory Castle for his thorough, thought-provoking and generous criticisms and encouragement, as well as to Rick Greene and Dan White for their valuable questions and suggestions on how to improve my study. The dissertation was written with financial support from a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; the English Department at the University of Toronto; the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto; the Avie Bennett Foundation; the Anne Tanenbaum Scholarship in English Literature; and Massey College. Many people at the University of Toronto helped me with the project—some materially, others more indirectly, but all significantly. Chief among them are Elizabeth Harvey, Heather Jackson, Randy McLeod, Carol Percy, Dana Seitler and Paul Stevens, as well as Sangeeta Panjwani, Marguerite Perry and Tanuja Persaud, in the English iv Department; Christine Lehleiter in German Studies; Helen Rodd in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; John Fraser and Anna Luengo at Massey College; and Rachael Cayley, Peter Grav and especially Jane Freeman, to whom I am boundlessly grateful, at the English Language and Writing Support. The staff at the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library helped me access and reproduce images from late-nineteenth-century science texts. At Concordia University, thanks to André Furlani, Daniel O’Leary and most of all to Judith Herz, whose encouragement has quite literally allowed me to come this far. Thanks to my friends and colleagues Tony Antioniades, Claire Battershill, Stewart Cole, Fiona Coll, Trevor Cook, Lindsey Eckert, Adam Hammond, Heather Jessup, Pascale Manning and Kathleen Ogden. Special thanks to Inder Marwah for taking his afternoon coffee at the same time as I, and for being on hand to be quizzed about Kant, Mill or Hegel. My mother Adèle Doyon’s support and enthusiasm is behind everything I have done; thanks also to my father Jack and siblings Elise and David, and to John and Marion Davis, for help in every conceivable way. In Loïc Édouard and Tevia Émile, both born while I wrote the dissertation, I continually find reason to do well, to remember the importance of reading and to see the natural world with new, fascinated eyes. Finally, my greatest thanks go to Kellie Davis, whose patience and love are woven into every word and hidden between every line I wrote. Among the innumerable ways in which she made this study possible, I’ll single out this one only: she showed me how to love fiction as I do now, so I quite literally owe my vocation and my development to her. v TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures vii A Note on Terminology viii Introduction: Ontogeny, Phylogeny and Narrative Structure in the Modernist 1 Bildungsroman Chapter One: Experience for the Millionth Time: Words, Recapitulation and the 61 Structure of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Chapter Two: Inheritance and Entropy in Howards End, Forster’s Mendelian 100 Bildungsroman Chapter Three: “The Education of an Amphibian”: Neoteny, Anachrony and 152 Bildung in Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza Chapter Four: The Book Adapted to the Body: Woolf’s Orlando as Bildungsroman 207 and Fiction Théorique Conclusion 260 Works Consulted 268 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny in Haeckelian 13 recapitulation theory Figure 2: Arrested development and reversion according to recapitulation theory 39 Figure 3: Comparison of recapitulation and neoteny as different manifestations of 55 heterochrony Figure 4: Visual comparison between blending inheritance (in Weismann) and non- 106 blending inheritance (in Mendel) Figure 5: The genealogies (Fig. 5a) and genealogies + other inheritances (Fig. 5b) 130 that form the plot of Howards End Figure 6: Descendant versus ascendant genealogies 133 Figure 7: Hybrid descendant-ascendant genealogy 137 Figure 8: Story order and discourse order in Great Expectations and Eyeless in 173 Gaza vii A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY Many words and ideas in this study are unfamiliar to literary scholars, but this is a minor concern compared with the byzantine, protean and often idiosyncratic lexicon of early- twentieth-century biology. For concision and parsimony, I generally prefer to commit anachronism rather than to wade into a semantic quagmire (e.g., I tend to use the modern gene and allele instead of the contemporary pangene, id or unit character). I usually favour general terms unless specialized words serve the argument. This said, I try as much as possible to use scientific terms accurately. The most important distinction is between development and evolution, words often used interchangeably. I reserve development and its cognates for individual (ontogenetic) change and evolution and its cognates for historical, population or species (phylogenetic) change (my quotations, however, sometimes include less precise delineations of these two terms). Progress I use strictly to mean gradual amelioration over time. Narratological language is more familiar but also problematic. I use story and discourse strictly as technical terms equivalent to histoire and récit or fabula and syuzhet. By temporal structure I mean the relation between story and discourse, in terms of tempo or order of events. Plot I use more loosely to mean a chartable series of connected events, without necessarily inferring causality; narrative structure refers to a specific work’s overall plot trajectory, usually in relation to genre. Given the historical nature of this study, I self-consciously but silently use words that would require awkward qualifiers like “so-called” (e.g., savage,
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