Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) January 2010 Accounting for Mysteries: Narratives of Intuition and Empiricism in the Victorian Novel Brooke Taylor Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd Recommended Citation Taylor, Brooke, "Accounting for Mysteries: Narratives of Intuition and Empiricism in the Victorian Novel" (2010). All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). 343. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/343 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY Department of English Dissertation Examination Committee: Miriam Bailin, Chair William McKelvy Wolfram Schmidgen Daniel Shea Harriet Stone Corinna Treitel ACCOUNTING FOR MYSTERIES: NARRATIVES OF INTUITION AND EMPIRICISM IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL by Brooke Diane Taylor A dissertation presented to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2010 Saint Louis, Missouri copyright by Brooke Diane Taylor May 2010 Acknowledgments I owe thanks to far more people than I can name—students, colleagues, professors, and the administrative staff of the English department at Washington University—who have assisted me over the course of this project. I would like to extend special thanks to my advisor, Professor Miriam Bailin, who constantly models excellence in teaching and in scholarship, and whose tactful criticism of my dissertation was always spot-on. I’d also like to thank Professor Bill McKelvy for his thoughtful comments on this study, and the other members of my dissertation committee, Professors Wolfram Schmidgen, Dan Shea, Corinna Treitel, and Harriett Stone, for their interest in my project. I want to thank my closest friends in the English department, especially Keya Kraft and Tarah Demant, who have helped me throughout this process to think hard and to laugh even harder. I’m also indebted to those friends and scholars within and outside the department who read pieces and talked through problems, including Ben Cooper, Courtney Bates, Anna Teekell, Debie Rudder Lohe, Christine Copeland, Melissa Wilkinson, and Janet Reed. I’ve appreciated the fresh perspectives of my friends outside my field, among them Natalie DeBoer, Monica Ellis Lewis, Jamie Eisenberg, and Beth Wilburn. And I’d like to acknowledge that this project would have never come to fruition if Erick Kelemen hadn’t first made me believe that I was up to the challenge. I am forever grateful to my parents, Thomas and Caroline Taylor, for their love and encouragement, and for raising me in a house filled with books. I owe thanks to my brother, Brandon, for setting the bar high when it comes to sibling rivalry. I would be remiss if I overlooked my constant companions during the writing process, L.M. and C., whose loyalty is unmatched and whose quiet company gave me more comfort than I can tell. Finally, my greatest thanks go to my husband, M. David Duckworth, who patiently endured my frustrations and enthusiastically celebrated my victories. I could not have written this study without his support and I dedicate the best of its pages to him. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii Introduction: Problems of Life and Mind and Literature 1 Chapter 1 “These Are Mysteries We Can’t Account For!”: Analysis and 22 Intuition in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House Chapter 2 “Mad To-Day and Sane To-Morrow”: Portraits and the Problem 65 of Proof in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret Chapter 3 “The Incredible Not Always Impossible”: Moral Certainty and 112 Circumstantial Evidence in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone Chapter 4 “Some Truth of What Will Be”: Empirical Facts and Visionary 158 Forces in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda Coda: Intuition and the Scientific Spirit of the Late Victorian Age 209 Works Cited 216 iii Introduction: Problems of Life and Mind and Literature George Henry Lewes spent the final years of his life working on a massive, multi- volume project called Problems of Life and Mind.1 A public intellectual and devoted rationalist, he is still perhaps most recognized as George Eliot‘s lifelong companion and is often credited with encouraging her to write fiction. Although his own professional pursuits tend to be overshadowed by George Eliot‘s literary success, Lewes was more than a devoted husband and supportive literary agent. Over the course of his long career, his professional endeavors were well-respected and widely varied. Engaging vigorously in contemporary intellectual debates about science, religion, politics, and the arts, Lewes was a journalist, philosopher, dramatist, novelist, scientist, and literary critic. Works by Rick Rylance and Rosemary Ashton have recently explored the scientific and cultural significance of Lewes‘s work outside the context of his relationship with Eliot.2 Rylance notes that Lewes‘s last work, the five-volume Problems of Life and Mind, has received relatively little critical attention, but, as Rylance argues, Problems is particularly significant in demonstrating the extent to which Lewes himself helped to shape the relationship between literature and science in the nineteenth century.3 Because of its length (over 2,000 pages) and its vast range of subject matter, Problems of Life and Mind feels unwieldy and sometimes disjointed. Some of these structural issues are likely related to the fact that three of the five volumes of Problems were unfinished at the time of Lewes‘s death, and were edited and published posthumously by George Eliot. However, the structural difficulties of the text also seem to stem from the central argument itself. 1 George Henry Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, 5 vols. (London: Trübner & Co., 1875-1879). 2 See Rick Rylance‘s final chapter ―Lewes: History, Mind, and Language‖ in Victorian Psychology and British Culture1850-1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and Rosemary Ashton‘s G. H. Lewes: An Unconventional Victorian (London: Pimlico, 2000). 3 Rylance, 252. 1 Problems of Life and Mind takes a scientific approach to theorizing how we can accurately read the world and verify our understanding of it. As Rylance notes, ―Problems of Life and Mind is about the historicality of truth.‖4 Hardly an easy task to begin with, Lewes‘s project is further complicated by his efforts to reconcile the authority of scientific fact with the historical limitations and cultural influences that influence even the laws of science. Rylance summarizes the work as comprised of Lewes‘s ―law-bound, law-discovering, scientific enterprise, grounded in Comtean Positivism, [combined with a] strong sense of the determination of intellectual and cultural life by the historical moment.‖5 This comprehensive and balanced strategy seems to be equally informed by Lewes‘s engagement with science and literature. His awareness of the historicity of nineteenth-century science distinguishes him from contemporary scientists like Herbert Spencer and Alexander Bain, whose works emphasize the transcendental truth they see in science and omit from consideration their entrenchment in their own historical context.6 This distinction from his fellow scientists demonstrates a unique and important affiliation between Lewes and nineteenth-century novelists, including those whose works are examined in this dissertation. Although only one of the novels in this study features a scientist as a central character (Ezra Jennings in Wilkie Collins‘s The Moonstone), the plot of each novel is significantly informed by contemporary developments and controversies in Victorian science. Questioning how we can accurately read the world around us and what methods of verification are reliable, these novels are quite self-consciousness about their own fictionality and yet persist, in remarkable 4 Rylance, 255. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 256. 2 and interesting ways, to grapple with issues very much in line with those Lewes struggles to clarify in Problems of Life and Mind. In the early chapters of Volume I of Problems of Life and Mind, published in 1874, Lewes explains that his project is in part a revision of the definition of empiricism in regard to science. In fact, a great deal of his project is concerned with finding scientific explanations for metaphysical phenomena: ―It is towards the transformation of Metaphysics by reduction to the Method of Science that these pages tend.‖7 Metaphysics, for Lewes, includes any phenomena that seem to be non-empirical and Lewes is dedicated to finding a way to account for empirical and non-empirical phenomena. By the 1870s, Lewes had moved away from the clear demarcations of Positivism, which strongly informed his approach to scientific research early in his career; however, he still abided by its emphasis on rationalism. His acknowledgment of metaphysics as a legitimate avenue of exploration rests on the significant qualification that it can ultimately be reduced to sensory experience, even if the experience is such that it seems undetectable. Non-empirical experiences must have some kind of empirical source, according to Lewes, who argues that all human experience is ultimately sensory (otherwise it is not actually experience). Therefore, an investigation that attempts to reach beyond the sensory is essentially pointless: ―whatever speculative curiosity may prompt, our real and lasting interest is in ascertaining the order of the things we know.‖8 The known world, according to Lewes, is that which is ―Sensible,‖ or, that which is known to us through empirical experience. But Lewes significantly expands the knowable world by acknowledging a category of understanding that he calls ―Extra-sensible,‖ a category which reaches beyond the typical definition of an empirical sensory experience to include 7 George Henry Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, vol.