Biopolitics, Female Choice, and First Wave Feminism: English and American Fiction, 1871-1916
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Biopolitics, Female Choice, and First Wave Feminism: English and American Fiction, 1871-1916 Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation Authors Kasper, Daniel Thomas Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction, presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 02/10/2021 17:38:40 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/633252 BIOPOLITICS, FEMALE CHOICE, AND FIRST WAVE FEMINISM: ENGLISH AND AMERICAN FICTION, 1871-1916 by Daniel Kasper __________________________ Copyright © Daniel Kasper 2019 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2019 2 3 Acknowledgements My dissertation is just the latest in a line of intellectual growth and evolution. First I say thank you to my wonderful committee chair, Jerrold Hogle, for his tireless work and insight. Thank you to my committee members Lynda Zwinger, Paul Hurh, and Manya Lempert for their unwavering support. I have grown immensely as a writer and scholar by your labor and example. I say thank you to the other professors and teachers that showed me the breadth and depth of the study of literature. Thank you to Steph Brown, Allison Dushane, Ben Fisher, Anna Kornbluh, Eric Savoy, Imre Szeman, Eddy Kent, Shannin Schroeder, Sara Day, Linda Tucker, Neil Melillo, and Debra Cluiss. This is a small gesture in return for the books that you have given me. I say thank you to my scholarly colleagues, who I have met in classes, at conferences, at symposia, on Twitter. To thank every one of you who has made me a better thinker and a better person would take another dissertation. But I wish to specifically thank the co-founders of the Victorian Salon for building a community that fit me perfectly: Grace Chen, Jayda Coons, Emily Lyons, and Ruixue Zhang. Whatever souls are made of, yours and mine are the same. Thank you to Emily Thomas, Kim Wine, Safari Ross, Carie Schneider, Hunter Knox, Betsy Labiner, Christine Walsh, Sovay Hansen, Dan Pinney, Emma Miller, Matt Kundert, Jonathan LaGuardia, Eli Turner, Salvatore J. Boenzi, Valérie Savard, Jill Fennell, Tabitha Lowery, Micah Dean Hicks, Jarrod Russell, and Alex Novotny. My friendships with you have made my life brighter and my dissertation stronger. I want to thank the generosity and capacious inquiry of the public schools that I was lucky to attend—Forney Independent School District, Southern Arkansas University, University of Alberta, and University of Arizona. Each of you has forged a link in the chain of this argument. Lastly, thank you to my loving family. I dedicate this dissertation to y’all. 4 Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................................ 5 Introduction ...................................................................................................................................... 6 Chapter 1: Darwin’s Female Choice in Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race ................................ 25 Female Choice .................................................................................................................. 29 The Eugenic Biopolitical .................................................................................................. 47 Chapter 2: Voicing Biopolitics in Henry James’s The Bostonians ................................................ 60 Possession of the Other(?) Sex ......................................................................................... 63 War for Biopolitics ........................................................................................................... 86 Selecting Discipline ........................................................................................................ 108 Chapter 3: Dracula’s Secretary and the New Woman’s Pastoral Power ..................................... 114 Pastoral Power ................................................................................................................ 119 Literary Government ....................................................................................................... 132 Where Dracula Leaves Us .............................................................................................. 164 Chapter 4: Biopolitical Motherhood in Gilman’s Herland and With Her in Ourland ................. 178 Eugenic Female Choice in Herland ................................................................................ 184 State Racism in Ourland ................................................................................................. 208 Epilogue ....................................................................................................................................... 230 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................. 236 5 Abstract “Biopolitics, Female Choice, and First Wave Feminism” argues that the shift allowing women to enter the public sphere hinged on integrating Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection into political discourse. Authors writing in genres as diverse as science fiction, psychological realism, the Gothic, and the imaginary journey deployed the logic of female choice in arguing for the emancipation of women, demonstrating that the circumscribed roles for women in Britain and the US were non-natural, cultural constructions. Moreover, basing their suffrage arguments on female sexuality and procreation meant embracing and explicating a line of political thought which reified nineteenth century notions of race hierarchy, which were themselves bolstered elsewhere by Darwin. Appropriating the power within sexual dynamics afforded to non-human species by scientific theory, white women characters adopted the assumptions of racial superiority that undergirded the popular understanding of evolutionary progress, using techniques of government revealed by Michel Foucault’s late work in order to persuade the men around them to support women’s suffrage. Plotting the arc of this persuasion—in novels from Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Henry James, Bram Stoker, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—demonstrates the increasing freedom afforded to white women at the expense of reinforcing non-scientific Victorian notions of race and eugenics, justifying the adoption of biopolitics by twentieth century governments through a seemingly feminist political shift. 6 Introduction We can understand, first of all, the link that was quickly—I almost said immediately— established between nineteenth-century biological theory and the discourse of power. Basically, evolutionism, understood in the broadest sense—or in other words, not so much Darwin’s theory itself as a set, a bundle of notions (such as: the hierarchy of species that grow form a common evolutionary tree, the struggle for existence among species, the selection that eliminates the less fit)—naturally became within a few years during the nineteenth century not simply a way of transcribing a political discourse into biological terms, and not simply a way of dressing up a political discourse in scientific clothing, but a real way of thinking about the relations between colonization, the necessity for wars, criminality, the phenomena of madness an mental illness, the history of societies with their different classes, and so on. —Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (1976/2003) Darwinism met with such overwhelming success because it provided, on the basis of inheritance, the ideological weapons for race as well as class rule and could be used for as well as against race-discrimination. Politically speaking, Darwinism, as such, was neutral and has led, indeed, to all kinds of pacifism and cosmopolitanism as well as to the sharpest forms of imperialistic ideologies. For political discussion, Darwinism offered two important concepts: the struggle for existence with optimistic assertion of the necessary and automatic “survival of the fittest” and the indefinite possibilities, which seemed to lie in the evolution of man out of animal life and which started the new “science” of eugenics. —Hannah Arendt, “Race-Thinking Before Race” (1944) In these passages, Foucault and Arendt point to the way that Darwinism’s thoroughgoing adoption as scientific theory in the late nineteenth century also meant that it was adopted into political discourse, especially useful for constructing ideological hierarchies. But they also demonstrate implicitly the messiness that resulted from this adoption. Foucault points to the broad range of the discourse that fell under the heading “evolutionism,” which went beyond Charles Darwin’s own writing into a set of widely- held notions about biology that were not containable within a single scheme; the writings of Darwin’s contemporaries, both supporting Darwin’s theory and attacking it, were also 7 part of the political discourse opened up by the biological. Arendt sees Darwinism itself as politically neutral, which allows it to be used in service in a multitude of ideologies, even those as incompatible as cosmopolitanism and Nazism. Gillian Beer agrees, writing that “even now, the articulation of Darwinian theory is fraught with multiple