Zoological Modernism: Literature, Science, and Animals in Early
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ZOOLOGICAL MODERNISM: LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ANIMALS IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITAIN By Caroline Louise Hovanec Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English August, 2013 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Professor Jay Clayton Professor Mark Wollaeger Professor Rachel Teukolsky Professor Kelly Oliver ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation has benefited immeasurably from the guidance of my committee, Jay Clayton, Mark Wollaeger, Rachel Teukolsky, and Kelly Oliver. I am endlessly grateful for their careful reading, incisive questioning, and enthusiastic support of this project. My deepest thanks also go to the other Graduate Fellows at the Warren Center: Elizabeth Barnett, Michael Alijewicz, Lara Giordano, Paddy McQueen, Cory Duclos, Rosie Seagraves, and Jennifer Vogt. They made the dissertation-writing year more fun than it had any right to be. I am especially thankful to Elizabeth for her generous reading and even more generous friendship over the past five years. Donika Ross and Heather Freeman have also been insightful readers and supportive friends throughout the course of this project. My project has been funded by the Elizabeth E. Fleming Fellowship from the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities and a Dissertation Enhancement Grant from the Graduate School. I am particularly grateful to Mona Frederick at the Warren Center. I am also indebted to the staff of the Fondren Library at Rice University and the British Film Institute, who graciously helped me perform research in their archives. Finally, I am grateful to my parents for always believing in me, and to Andrew Leathers for making me laugh, putting up with all the books everywhere, and just being there. And my dissertation about modern animals would not be complete without acknowledging Jasper, whose dog-ly strangeness inspires me every day. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS............................................................................................................ ii LIST OF FIGURES .........................................................................................................................v Chapter INTRODUCTION: WRITING ANIMALS IN MODERN BRITAIN............................................1 Darwin and Twentieth-Century Zoology.............................................................................8 The Name and Nature of Zoological Modernism..............................................................16 Modernism and the Animal Turn.......................................................................................25 Chapter Outline..................................................................................................................32 I. INVASION ECOLOGY: WELLS AND ELTON ................................................................38 A Proto-Modernist Ecology: H.G. Wells at the Turn of the Century................................44 Managing the Animal Community: Charles Elton in the 1920s and 30s ..........................66 Engineering Utopian Environments: Wells After Ecology ...............................................78 Conclusion: Waste Lands ..................................................................................................89 II. ROMANTIC ETHOLOGIES: LAWRENCE AND HUXLEY ...........................................93 Lawrence, Huxley, and Animal Ideologies .......................................................................97 Solitary and Social Animals ............................................................................................109 Animal Language and Emotional Expression .................................................................119 Animal Spirits, Vitalism, and Play ..................................................................................134 Conclusion: Images of Opposition ..................................................................................143 III. MODERNIST NATURAL HISTORY IN THE CINEMA: SECRETS OF NATURE .....146 The Natural History Tradition .........................................................................................150 Modernist Aesthetics in the Secrets of Nature.................................................................163 Animal Movement and the Film Medium .......................................................................176 Conclusion: Modernism and the Nonhuman ...................................................................190 IV. INHABITING THE ANIMAL MIND: RUSSELL, HALDANE, WOOLF ....................195 Animal Psychology and the Problem of Animal Experience ..........................................201 Bertrand Russell and the Philosophy of Perspectivism ...................................................210 J.B.S. Haldane and the Epistemology of Animals...........................................................216 Virginia Woolf and the Aesthetics of Animal Experience ..............................................222 iii Conclusion: Open Subjects..............................................................................................243 CODA: THE ZOOLOGICAL OUTLOOK IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY .................246 BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................................254 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. Social network of zoological modernists................................................................................3 2. Table of contents of Birds, Beasts, and Flowers ..................................................................30 3. Organization of ecology........................................................................................................76 4. Magic Myxies......................................................................................................................147 5. Sea anemones......................................................................................................................166 6. Vorticella ............................................................................................................................170 7. The Lawrence Tree .............................................................................................................172 8. Caterpillar ...........................................................................................................................173 9. Aphis...................................................................................................................................174 10. Octopus ...............................................................................................................................188 v INTRODUCTION WRITING ANIMALS IN MODERN BRITAIN Aldous Huxley’s 1928 novel Point Counter Point opens a window into the world of 1920s British intellectual culture, a world in which modern science and modernist literature evolve together in surprising ways. For one of Huxley’s characters, the writer Philip Quarles, zoology becomes the hinge of his literary experimentation. Quarles records in his writing journal, “Since reading Alverdes and Wheeler I have quite decided that my novelist must be an amateur zoologist. Or, better still, a professional zoologist who is writing a novel in his spare time.”1 What does it mean for the novelist to be a zoologist? For Quarles, it means applying the scientific gaze to people, recognizing what is termite-like or duck-like in us. But there are other possible answers. As this dissertation shows, some modernist writers explored the question of what it would mean to write as a zoologist, and some modern biologists similarly toyed with the question of what it would mean for the zoologist to be a novelist or poet “in his spare time.” H.G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf, like Quarles, played with the parallels between humans and animals in their writing, but their zoological inclinations took other forms as well— they also found animals’ strangeness and differences from humans aesthetically compelling and a fit subject for literature. Meanwhile, biologists such as Julian Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, and Charles Elton, along with the filmmakers behind the natural history series Secrets of Nature, explored “literary” problems such as the use of metaphor and the role of affect in scientific 1 Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point, 315. Alverdes and Wheeler are Friedrich Alverdes, author of the 1927 Social Life in the Animal World, and William Morton Wheeler, an entomologist who studied social insects. 1 representations of animals.2 These figures’ works are zoological in the sense that they reveal a shared fascination with animals, and modernist in the sense that they self-consciously grapple with the seeming impossibility of capturing those animals in language or images, an impossibility that drives them to experiment in their animal representations. Together, they make up a cultural formation that I am calling zoological modernism. Scholars have rarely discussed the relationship between early twentieth-century literature and zoology, a surprising omission considering how central biology and natural history have become to Victorian studies. It is almost as if, following Darwin’s death in 1882, biology fell off the cultural map. But in fact, the biological sciences enjoyed a new flowering in early twentieth- century Britain. Biologists, newly institutionalized in universities and field stations, ushered in a new era of