PRIMITIVE MINDS P RIMITIVE MINDS Evolution and Spiritual Experience in the Victorian Novel Anna Neill THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS • COLUMBUS Copyright © 2013 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Neill, Anna, 1965– Primitive minds : evolution and spiritual experience in the Victorian novel / Anna Neill. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1225-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8142-9327-0 (cd) 1. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. English literature—19th cen- tury—History and criticism. 3. Spiritualism in literature. 4. Psychology in literature. 5. Psy- chology and literature. 6. Realism in literature. 7. Literature and science. I. Title. PR878.P75N45 2013 823'.809353—dc23 2013008650 Cover design by Laurence J. Nozik Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Garamond Pro Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American Na- tional Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materi- als. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Kirk and Connor C ONTENTS Acknowledgments ix INTRODUCTION • EVOLUTION AND THE DREAMY MIND 1 I. Corporeal Spirit: The Evolution and Dissolution of Mind 14 II. Will, Automatism, and Spiritual Experience 21 III. The Realist Novel and the Dreamy Mind 27 CHAPTER 1 • CHARLOTTE Brontë’s HYPOCHONDRIACAL HEROINES 33 I. Hypochondriasis, Self-Control, and the Evolution of Consciousness 40 II. Rapture and Realism in Jane Eyre 47 III. Villette: Demonic Imagination and the Repellent Real 55 CHAPTER 2 • SPIRITS AND SEIZURES IN BLEAK HOUSE AND OUR MUTUAL FRIEND 64 I. Ghosts in the Brain 68 II. Epilepsy and the Vanishing Self: Bleak House 74 III. The Disembodied Voices of Our Mutual Friend 83 viii • CONTENTS CHAPTER 3 • SUSPENDED ANIMATION AND SECOND SIGHT: DANIEL DERONDA AND SILAS MARNER 91 I. Greater and Lesser Minds 93 II. Vision and Deanimation in Daniel Deronda 98 III. Catalepsy in Silas Marner 107 CHAPTER 4 • DREAMY INTUITION AND DETECTIVE GENIUS: EZRA JENNINGS AND SHERLOCK HOLMES 122 I. Mesmerism, Dreamy Degeneracy, and Literary Form 125 II. Medical Science and Mysticism in The Moonstone 129 III. The Savage Genius of Sherlock Holmes 135 CHAPTER 5 • THE END OF THE NOVEL: NATURALISM AND REVERIE IN TESS OF THe d’URBERVILLES AND THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE 152 I. The Novel and the Modern Ache 153 II. Automatism and Escape from the Modern 159 III. Hallucination and Insight 167 IV. Vision in Poetry 174 CONCLUSION 181 Notes 185 Works Cited 213 Index 229 A CKNOWLEDGMENTS began writing this book nearly a decade ago when I was new to the fields of nineteenth-century literature and evolutionary science. ForI that reason, I am deeply indebted to the Victorianist friends and col- leagues who encouraged and guided me and who read (sometimes multiple) drafts of portions of the manuscript. I owe a great deal especially to Dorice Elliott, Talia Schaffer, and Pamela Thurschwell. Other readers and advi- sors who helped me enormously include Sebastian Black, Byron Caminero- Santangelo, Marta Caminero-Santangelo, Joseph Carroll, Santanu Das, Vicky Eden, Jocelyn Harris, Linda Hughes, Michael Neill, Phil Wedge, and anonymous reviewers. The students in my 2008 graduate seminar, “Evolu- tion and the Victorian Novel,” responded generously to my prodding about some of the issues discussed here and gave me much to ponder. The English Departments at the University of Otago and University College London, and the Department of Humanities and Western Civilization at the University of Kansas, all kindly hosted me as a speaker on the book’s topic and gave me wonderful feedback. I am also grateful to Dawn McGinnis at the Clenden- ing History of Medicine Library at the University of Kansas Medical Cen- ter for her considerable help and support in the early phases of the project. ix x • ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Portions of several chapters of this book have already appeared in print, and I would like to thank Cambridge University Press and Johns Hopkins University Press for their permission to reproduce the material here: Chapter 2: “Evolution and Epilepsy in Bleak House.” Reprinted with per- mission from SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 51, no. 4 (Autumn 2011). Chapter 3: Copyright © 2008 by the Johns Hopkins University Press. This article, “The Primitive Mind of Silas Marner,” first appeared in ELH 75.4 (2008), 939–62. Reprinted with permission by the Johns Hop- kins University Press. Chapter 4: “The Savage Genius of Sherlock Holmes,” first published in Vic- torian Literature and Culture 37, no. 2 (2009). The project was supported by the University of Kansas General Research Fund awards 2301445, 2301247, and 2301023. The Hall Center for the Humanities at KU generously assisted me with grant proposals related to the project. I am also grateful to Joanne Wilkes and the University of Auckland English Department for hosting me as an Honorary Research Fellow during the final writing stages. During that time, too, I was privileged and honored to be working in the private study of the late Dame Judith Binney. I also owe tremendous thanks to Sandy Crooms and the other editorial, production, and marketing staff at The Ohio State University Press, espe- cially Maggie Diehl, Juliet Williams, and Laurie Avery. Finally, I owe perhaps the greatest debt to my family, especially my son, Connor, and to the dear friends in Lawrence and elsewhere who anchored me during the difficult years that this book tries indirectly to describe. I NTRODUCTION EVOLUTION AND THE DREAMY MIND Ancient traditions, tested by severe processes of modern investigation, commonly enough fade away into mere dreams: but it is singular how often the dream turns out to have been a half-waking one, presaging a reality. Ovid foreshadowed the discoveries of the geologist: the Atlantis was an imagination, but Columbus found a western world: and though the quaint forms of Centaurs and Satyrs have an existence only in the realms of art, creatures approaching man more nearly than they in essen- tial structure, and yet as thoroughly brutal as the goat’s or horse’s half of the mythical compound, are now not only known, but notorious. —Thomas Henry Huxley, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature 9 t is curious that Thomas Huxley begins his essay “On the Natural History of Man-like Apes” (1863) with a reference to the prophetic contentI of waking dreams. Dream, prophecy, and artistic imagination are, on the face of it, anathema to the rigor of nascent professional science that Hux- ley represents in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. Creation stories and magi- cal teleologies are precisely what the theory of natural selection ejects from natural history, and Huxley had defended the theory on Darwin’s behalf in 1860. Yet in this rather surprising passage, Huxley rhetorically folds the history of science into the projections of dreamy or mystical vision. In his 1 2 • INTRODUCTION description, the “mere dreams” of religion and art that should vanish under the pressure of Darwinian evolution are not discarded as the detritus of a pre- modern past but instead mutate into prophetic intuition. The “half-waking” state in which prevision occurs reveals a primordial power of awareness whose discoveries empirical knowledge will subsequently confirm. Huxley links evolutionary science with the stuff of dream as a preface to his record of travelers’ descriptions of chimpanzees, gibbons, and orangutans. In other nineteenth-century British applications of evolutionary theory, how- ever, dreamy visions become a central object of medical investigation or, alter- natively, a vehicle of explanation that may compete or even converge with scientific inquiry. For Victorian psychology, the dreamy mind offered a rich source of information about the history and nature of unconscious mental processes, nervous organization and the brain, and about human intellectual development. In imaginative literature, the physiology of dreamy states— including the study of those nervous arrangements that produce clairvoy- ance, expanded reminiscence, double-consciousness, or simply a brief shift of awareness such as déjà vu—influences character and events often as pow- erfully as conscious motives or uncontrollable passions do. In realist fiction especially, a character’s or narrator’s dreamy awareness often provides insight into human nature, social bonds, and heredity, intuiting connections that careful, clinical observation and documentation cannot capture, or at least not as quickly. Primitive Minds explores how dreamy, usually spiritual, experience inter- sects with the findings of evolutionary science in the Victorian realist novel— a form that rose largely as an expression of secular culture and scientific method.1 In combination with its patient accumulation of observable facts about the physical and social worlds it describes, the novel also rests its claim to modernity on the creation of a narrative first-person or omniscient, cen- tered consciousness, whose finely tuned responses to environment and broad observational talents make it a suitable instrument for delivering such facts to the reader. This conception of literary responsibility to the evidence of the senses, to the depiction of contemporary events, and to concrete social experience is very remote from Sir Philip Sidney’s idea of the poet as one who converts the brazen world of reality into a delightful, golden imitation of it. Yet it involves a conversion process nonetheless. In its endeavor to depict “things as they are,” realist narrative consciousness transforms what N. Katherine Hayles calls “the inherently unknowable and unreachable flux” of a reality “out there” into the constructed concepts that constitute our human world.2 However limited its direct communication of the real, this narrative EVOLUTION AND THE DREAMY MIND • 3 awareness can, in György Lukács’s formulation, open a “multitude of doors” or perspectives that together bridge the gap between individual experience and the otherwise invisible social totality.3 This transformative dimension of realism reminds us that its narrative mode does not claim to be transparent.