VICTORIAN FICTION and the PSYCHOLOGY of SELF-CONTROL, 1855-1885 by ANNE E. RYAN Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Require

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VICTORIAN FICTION AND THE PSYCHOLOGY

OF SELF-CONTROL, 1855-1885

ANNE E. RYAN

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Dissertation Adviser: Dr. Athena Vrettos

Department of English

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

August, 2011

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES

We hereby approve the thesis/dissertation of

Anne E. Ryan ______

Doctor of Philosophy candidate for the ______degree *.

Athena Vrettos (signed)______(chair of the committee)

Jonathan Sadowsky ______

William R. Siebenschuh ______

Christopher Flint ______

______

June 2, 2011 (date) ______

*We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Framing Mid-Victorian Models of Self-Control ...... 4

Chapter One: Energetic Self-Control as Self-Destruction in Little Dorrit and The Emotions and the Will ...... 34

Chapter Two: Far From the Madding Crowd, Victorian Theories of Consciousness, and the Role of Attention in Self-Control ...... 72

Chapter Three: Emotion-Driven Self-Control in Daniel Deronda and Problems of Life and Mind ...... 116

Chapter Four: Unconscious Self-Determination: Embryology and Psychological Development in Samuel Butler’s Life and Habit and The Way of All Flesh ...... 166

Conclusion ...... 201

Works Cited ...... 212

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my dissertation advisor, Athena Vrettos, for introducing me to the fields of Victorian literature and psychology and for her generous direction and encouragement throughout this project. I would also like to thank the members of my committee, Chris Flint, William Siebenschuh, and Jonathan Sadowsky, for their time, advice, and crucial support.

I would like to thank all of my professors in the English Department at Case and to acknowledge the support of the Arthur Adrian Dissertation Fellowship.

Brandy Schillace read my chapters in their messiest stages and offered invaluable insight. Kristina Ryan provided countless hours of babysitting. John, Natalie, and Zoe made the last few years so happy and full.

Victorian Fiction and the Psychology of Self-Control, 1855-1885

Abstract

ANNE E. RYAN

The fact that Victorians in general were keenly interested in the practices of self- control—from emotional restraint to diligent work habits—and in the relationships between self-control, self-culture, and economic self-determination—is a critical commonplace well supported by popular nineteenth-century advice literature. However, literary scholars have also noted that advances in the study of psychology in the period tended to emphasize the physiological basis of the mind, which increasingly undermined confidence in a rational, controlling ego. Through analysis of novels by Charles Dickens,

Thomas Hardy, George Eliot and Samuel Butler, in tandem with psychological literature by Alexander Bain, William James, George Henry Lewes, and Samuel Butler, this dissertation considers the parallel efforts of novelists and psychologists to reconcile this tension between highly valuing self-control and recognizing the physical and psychological obstacles to cultivating this control. Novelists and physiological psychologists alike responded to growing concerns about the scientific validity of traditional notions of self-control by creatively exploring alternative models of control enabled by energy, attention, emotion, and unconscious memory. This dissertation uncovers a dialogue between the realist novel and the emerging scientific field of psychology about the necessity of physiological energy for self-control and its potential

to warp the mind, the power of attention to mediate the stream of consciousness and the mind-body relationship, the cognitive aspects of emotion and their role in psychological development, and the promise of unconscious memories to drive the evolution of both individuals and the species.

Introduction: Framing Mid-Victorian Models of Self-Control

If you have ever wished (I know you must have done so some time) for a chance of rising out of your sad life, and having friends, a quiet home, means of being useful to yourself and others, peace of mind, self-respect, everything you have lost. . . . I am going to offer you, not the chance but the certainty of all these blessings, if you will exert yourself to deserve them. . . . You must resolve to set a watch upon yourself, and to be firm in your control over yourself, and to restrain yourself; to be gentle, patient, persevering, and good-tempered. Above all things, to be truthful in every word you speak. Do this, and all the rest is easy.

—Charles Dickens, “An Appeal”

This dramatic appeal forms Charles Dickens’s invitation to Urania Cottage, a

home for fallen women that he helped to found in 1847. What is most striking in this

passage is Dickens’s guarantee that the women who sincerely follow the rehabilitation

program at Urania Cottage will certainly gain a quiet home and a secure new life.

Throughout this letter, which was designed to be given to women in police custody or coming out of jail, Dickens emphasizes the self-control that prospective residents will have to cultivate in order to improve their lives, yet he encourages these desperate women that once they attain self-control, they will easily overcome all other obstacles.

Such confidence in the power of self-control was pervasive throughout the nineteenth century, as is evident in the work of many self-help and advice authors who considered self-control to be the foundation of self-improvement, empowering aspiring men and women to turn their lives around, educate themselves, manage their homes well, achieve financial stability, and contribute to society. As Samuel Smiles, author of the international best-seller Self-Help (1859), exhorted a group of young working class men at a lecture series for “mutual improvement” in the 1840s, “their happiness and well- being as individuals in after life, must necessarily depend mainly upon themselves—upon their own diligent self-culture, self-discipline, and self-control—and, above all, on that

honest and upright performance of individual duty, which is the glory of manly character” (7). A generation later, he reports that many of those young men took his advice and “now occupy positions of trust and usefulness” (7). Throughout Self-Help,

Smiles extols the value of self-control in all aspects of life, including time management, money, leisure activities, the formation of habits, moods, and the attention. Above all, he stresses the importance of self-denial in cultivating self-control: “The worst education which teaches self-denial, is better than the best which teaches everything else, and not that” (243). Like Dickens, Smiles expresses great optimism not only about the results of self-control, but also about his audience’s potential to achieve self-control through diligent discipline and devotion to duty.1 Yet underlying Dickens’s and Smiles’s

confidence in the transformative power of self-control is a recognition of just how unruly

the self can be, which is evident in their emphasis on constant watchfulness, firmness,

thoroughness, diligence, and the heroic nature of self-denial. As this dissertation

1 These examples confirm what everyone already knows about the Victorians: they were keenly interested in the practice of self-control. As Walter Houghton explained over fifty years ago in his discussion of earnestness in The Victorian Frame of Mind, “By an elaborate practice of self-discipline, one had to lay the foundation of good habits and acquire the power of self-control” (234). More recently, Roger Smith succinctly expresses the prevailing (and mostly accurate) stereotype: “the word ‘Victorian’ conjures up a British literature of order and disorder that stressed individual control and the individual’s duty to society” (27). In Inhibition, Smith summarizes the importance of regulatory control in nineteenth-century discussions of behavior—from child-rearing to politics to self-help to popular physiology to sexuality to a prevailing fear of the loss of control (27-41). As twenty-first century readers, our approach to the Victorian discourse on self-control has also been shaped by Michel Foucault’s challenge to the “repression hypothesis.” In The History of Sexuality, Foucault shows that the characteristic Victorian emphasis on the repression of lower energies and “(highly prolix) directives enjoining discretion and modesty” corresponded not to a widespread repression of sex but rather to a proliferating scientific discourse that sought to categorize and regulate the diverse behaviors of individuals (22). Thus, the Victorian emphasis on control in general created an intense awareness of the countless ways that individuals could lose control of themselves.

explores, while fictional portrayals of self-control in the mid-Victorian period often associate self-control with happiness and occasionally reflect the optimism that Dickens’s appeal to fallen women expresses, they also highlight the subtext of his appeal: the stress of disciplining the self and the painful consequences associated with failing to achieve self-control. I argue that in confronting this tension, Victorian novelists drew on contemporary psychological theories of the interrelationship of the body and mind to challenge old models of self-regulation and to invent new ways of conceptualizing self- control.

Victorian psychologists likewise stressed both the desirability of self-control and the psychic and physical forces that work against it. The principle of mental control undergirded the widespread practice of moral management, the attempt to cure insane patients in humane asylums by appealing to their “desire of esteem” to teach them to regulate their actions (Taylor and Shuttleworth 228), and many writers on psychological subjects considered self-control to be the defining characteristic that distinguished the sane from the insane. In an 1843 lecture to the Royal Institution, for example, John

Barlow argued, “He who has given a proper direction to the intellectual force, and thus obtained an early command over the bodily organ by habituating it to processes of calm reasoning, remains sane amid all the vagaries of sense” (244). As Barlow makes clear, the ideal of mental self-control can be achieved only through early discipline of the brain and is given urgency by the danger of insanity lurking in even the sanest minds. He explains:

Should my position, that the difference between sanity and insanity

consists in the degree of self-control exercised, appear paradoxical to any

one, let him note for a short time the thoughts that pass through his mind, .

. . and he will find that, were they all expressed and indulged, they would

be as wild, and perhaps as frightful in their consequences as those of any

madman. But the man of strong mind represses them, and seeks fresh

impressions from without if he finds that aid needful. (245)

Stop filtering your thoughts for just a short time, Barlow suggests, and your actions may become as wild and frightful as any madman’s. Considered together, Dickens, Smiles, and Barlow suggest that the frequent Victorian emphasis on the power of self-control for achieving happiness, success, and mental health thinly disguises an equally powerful fascination with the multitude of ways that the self defies control. Throughout the nineteenth century, psychological writers increasingly enumerated such internal obstacles to self-control and self-determination, including the spontaneous randomness of the thought life that Barlow describes; the psychic divisions caused by competing mental faculties or clashing motives; the powerful role of heredity in shaping personality; the ineradicable traces of early experiences in the brain; the unconscious activity of the brain; the biological forces of the female bodily economy; the weight of ancestral and evolutionary memory; the susceptibility to the mesmerizing will of another; the influence of crowds and atmospheres; the power of instinctual drives; and the physical, involuntary, reflexive nature of emotion and consciousness itself.

Indeed, scholars recognize this tension—between highly valuing self-control and understanding the self to be fundamentally divided and uncontrollable—as one of the central conflicts within Victorian psychology and literature. In her seminal analysis of the culture of self-help and self-control that surrounded Charlotte Bronte in the 1830s and

40s, Sally Shuttleworth explains that the psychological and economic texts from this period express a common anxiety over whether individuals possess the power of social self-determination or whether they should be considered to be merely helpless cogs in the machine of society. She notes that these texts tend to resolve this puzzle by appealing to the power of self-control, agreeing that “rigorous control and regulation of the machinery of mind and body would offer a passport to autonomous selfhood and economic liberty”

(23). Yet Shuttleworth identifies an analogous tension in early Victorian medical literature, which, by stressing the inability of women to control the female bodily economy, represented the individual “both as an autonomous unit, gifted with powers of self-control, and also as a powerless material organism, caught within the operations of a wider field of force” (28). In her thorough readings of Bronte’s novels, Shuttleworth shows how Bronte’s characters are defined by their struggle to control their lives in the face of physiological instability. In recent discussions of The Way of All Flesh and

Daniel Deronda, Shuttleworth continues to explicate these ideological conflicts surrounding self-control in later Victorian novels. During the second half of the nineteenth century, as Nicholas Dames has noted, confidence in the rational mind’s ability to control the body’s actions, thoughts, desires, and emotions continued to erode due to the influence of physiological and evolutionary psychology (“Withering” 110).

While physiological psychologists stressed the power of “the unconscious mechanisms of the spinal apparatus” to produce or trump the conscious will, evolutionary psychologists like Herbert Spencer explained that human actions were governed by “instinctive adjustment to the environment” in addition to the inherited experiences of the species

(108-110). Both physiology and evolutionary theory began to question the category of

the will and to erase the hierarchical distinction between mind and body that underwrote traditional conceptions of self-control. In addition, as Athena Vrettos comments, the end-of-the-century interest in parapsychological phenomena similarly emphasized the mind’s intractability while exploring cases of intersubjectivity, haunting, and dramatic psychic fragmentation (“Victorian” 82). As Dames concludes, “as the collaboration between Victorian fiction and psychology came to an end, its final images were of individuals whose ‘hidden souls’—either nerves, hereditary traits, or embedded habits— were masters of their conscious selves” (110).

In this dissertation, I examine parallels between the representation of self-control in fiction and psychology from 1855 to about 1885, with a particular focus on the 1870s.2

While I do not intend to challenge this well-established trajectory toward greater and

greater pessimism about the feasibility of self-control, this project seeks to develop a

more textured understanding of the fictional portrayals and the psychological issues

surrounding self-control in this period. I trace a prevailing concern with the cultivation

of self-control in the persistent similarities between physiological psychology and self-

help literature in this period; in the continuing attention paid by psychologists to the role

of self-control in education, child development, rehabilitation, and moral action; and in

the enduring appeal of narratives of development for novelists of this period. I argue that

as mid-Victorian psychologists and novelists alike confronted the increasingly

compelling concerns raised by physiology and evolutionary theory about the tenuous

status of the will and the blurry boundaries between the body and mind that tended to

2 The novels I consider were composed between 1855 and 1884. While I consider William James’s The Principles of Psychology (1890) in the second chapter, his theory of the will in this work reflects his earlier articles on the will, “Are We Automata?” (1879) and “The Feeling of Effort” (1880).

undermine older ideas of self-control, they imagined new models for understanding psychological growth and the cultivation of self-control. The physiological and evolutionary psychologists I consider in depth—Alexander Bain, George Henry Lewes,

Samuel Butler, and William James—all address the problem of self-control in their discussions of volition, consciousness, emotion, and the shaping of character. Likewise, I argue that Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857), Thomas Hardy’s Far From the

Madding Crowd (1874), George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), and Samuel Butler’s The

Way of All Flesh (composed 1873-1884) all show their protagonists gaining greater social agency by growing in self-control—not in straightforward, uncontested ways, but in ways that parallel, anticipate, or revise the models of rational control explored by contemporary

Victorian psychologists.3

Historical Context: Defining Victorian Self-Control

Throughout this dissertation, I use the term self-control broadly to refer to the capacity of individuals to regulate their actions, emotions, and thoughts—a capacity that

3 These four novels were chosen because they offer particularly memorable and extensive examinations of the problem of self-control through their portrayals of unusually angry, strong-willed, or emotional characters. They also explicitly critique conventional approaches to self-control, such as those recommended in advice literature. In addition, they represent an array of interactions between literature and psychology on this issue. Although historically Dickens has not been considered a psychologically realistic novelist, Little Dorrit reflects his culture’s changing conceptions of self-control in its parallels with Alexander Bain’s cutting-edge investigations of psychological and physiological energy. Thomas Hardy’s intellectual debts to Darwinism, on the other hand, are well-known, and both Thomas Hardy and William James formulated their presentations of consciousness and attention in response to Darwinian psychology. In Daniel Deronda, George Eliot engages directly with her partner George Henry Lewes’s psychological theories. Her fiction both influenced and revises his theories. Finally, The Way of All Flesh maps an even closer relationship between literature and psychology, as Samuel Butler published several treatises presenting his own version of evolutionary psychology while he composed this semi-autobiographical novel. 10

for many Victorians was closely linked both to emotional restraint and to self- determination, the ability to shape one’s future character and circumstances. The disciplinary system that Charles Dickens describes at Urania House provides a useful index for the types of restrained behaviors associated with self-control. The women at the house were examined daily for good behavior according to a “mark table” consisting of nine categories: “Truthfulness, Industry, Temper, Propriety of Conduct and

Conversation, Temperance, Order, Punctuality, Economy, Cleanliness” (132). Dickens explains that the category of Temperance is interpreted “as defined by Johnson, from the

English of Spenser: ‘Moderation, patience, calmness, sedateness, moderation of passion’”

(132). Although the mark table at Urania House was designed exclusively for women, its emphasis on order and emotional moderation resonates with common applications of the term to both men and women. This usage, for instance, is evident in the first occurrence of the term self-control in the English language. Self-control first entered the English language in 1711 in Characteristicks of Men, Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author, a work of literary criticism by the Earl of Shaftesbury (OED). Arguing that Homer portrays no perfectly virtuous characters, Shaftesbury writes,

The perfection of Virtue is from long Art and Management, Self-Controul,

and, as it were, Force on Nature. But the common Auditor or Spectator,

who seeks Pleasure only, and loves to engage his Passion, by view of

other Passion and Emotion, comprehends little of the Restraints, Allays

and Corrections which form this new and artificial Creature. (260, n)

Here Shaftesbury’s use of the word self-control (rather than an older term like temperance) emphasizes a process of self-management that acts contrary to an

individual’s natural inclinations toward pleasure and the free expression of emotion.

Like the directors of Urania House, Shaftesbury associates self-control with perfect virtue and explains that it can only be achieved through self-denial and emotional moderation, by restraining, quelling and redirecting the passions (an ancient psychological term associated with the involuntary desires of the body).4,5

Many Victorian psychologists, however, tended to expand the idea of self-control

beyond actions and emotions to include the regulation of thoughts. In “The Physiology

of the Will,” for instance, the prominent physiologist William Carpenter writes,

From the time when the human being first becomes conscious that he has

a power within himself of determining the succession of his mental states,

from that time does he begin to be a free agent; and in proportion as he

acquires the power of self-control, does he become capable of

emancipating himself from the domination of his automatic tendencies,

and of turning his faculties to the most advantageous use. (“Physiology”

4 See Thomas Dixon for a discussion of the differences between the passions, the affections, and the emotions (a much more recent psychological category). 5 Although it is possible to demonstrate the continuity between the feminine forms of self-control encouraged at Urania House and Shaftesbury’s more masculine portrayal of self-control, it is also true that, as many scholars have shown, nineteenth-century standards for self-control were consistently and inequitably gendered. Masculine forms of self-control were generally more active and based on a more robust sense of mastering inner conflict and shaping one’s future character. In Tainted Souls and Painted Faces, Amanda Anderson locates the ideal of masculine self-control in John Stuart Mill’s discussion of the formation of character in On Liberty, and she demonstrates that the fallen woman in Victorian fiction and culture represented the opposite of this “coherent and self-regulated identity” (36). Anderson argues that, paradoxically, the emphasis on inner purity, submission, and self-denial for the “virtuous domestic woman” made her liable to fall (42): “the ideal of feminine virtue, insofar as it neglects ‘the internal culture of the individual,’ can actually promote rather than prevent fallenness” (37).

207-8)

Here Carpenter champions the popular Victorian view that voluntary attention was a psychologically valid means to mental self-control. He also explicitly connects the control of one’s own thoughts with the feeling of being a free agent, capable of directing one’s own life. Carpenter’s language of freedom, emancipation, and domination highlights the fact that self-control was often viewed as an inner power struggle between the conscious intellect and the unconscious forces of the body. His comments bring together a common cluster of themes related to self-control in the mid-nineteenth century: the ability to direct the stream of consciousness, the idea of free will, the capacity for self-determination through the cultivation of one’s mental faculties or abilities, and the conflicted relationship between the rational, controlling ego and the body’s automatic functions.

By studying self-control from a Victorian psychological perspective, I attempt to reconstruct a view of self-control before Freud articulated his own powerful model of the unconscious and the complex workings of repression. In the century since Freud developed psychoanalysis, his evocative ideas have taken on a life of their own, spawning many new theories and inspiring a variety of useful interpretations of the inner conflicts and puzzling behaviors depicted in Victorian fiction. Thus, as Dames notes,

“the task of the investigator of Victorian psychology is a kind of willed forgetting: temporarily to ignore the tremendous impact that psychoanalysis had on our definition of

‘psychology’ starting in the late nineteenth century” (“Withering” 92). In contrast to psychoanalytic understandings of repression and the unconscious, for instance, Victorian models of self-control emphasized conscious repression. Although nineteenth-century

psychologists did recognize an unconscious mind, it was not considered an inaccessible repository of unspeakable desires and symbols. Rather, the Victorian unconscious was theorized by different schools of psychologists throughout the century to describe the mind’s ability to make associations, connect with other minds through mesmerism, carry out the automatic work of the nervous system, or pass on the inherited memories of the species (Dames, “Withering” 105-110).

Historical Context: Physiological Psychology and the Mind-Body Relationship in

Representations of Self-Control

Rick Rylance uses the metaphors of the kaleidoscope and the stereoscope to describe the “cascading multiplicity” of Victorian writing about the mind during the mid- nineteenth century, which, like the Great Exhibition, was “a gigantic taxonomic exchange, an extravaganza of categorization” (15-16). Because psychology was not yet organized as a field of its own, writers from philosophical, theological, biological, medical, and a variety of non-specialist backgrounds all contributed to Victorian understandings of human thought and behavior. As Roger Smith notes, “psychology was first and foremost a discourse of lived experience, of religion, human relations, agency and responsibility, and such like. Only secondarily was it an academic subject area”

(“Physiology” 83). From this swirling mass of articles and treatises, Rylance usefully distinguishes four main strands of psychological argument, which represent four distinct ways of understanding the mind: “the discourse of the soul,” “the discourse of philosophy,” “the discourse of physiology in general biology,” and “the discourse of medicine.” My dissertation focuses on the third category, the discourse of physiology—in

part because it became one of the most influential elements of Victorian theorizing about the mind, merging with evolutionary approaches and developing into the well-defined discipline of experimental psychology by the end of the century, and also because several physiological psychologists had close ties with major novelists. For instance, the literary critic, philosopher, and physiologist George Henry Lewes was the partner of George

Eliot, and they both were friends with Alexander Bain and Herbert Spencer. In addition, the influential American psychologist William James was the brother of Henry James, and Samuel Butler himself wrote books on evolutionary psychology in addition to novels.

Most significantly, however, the fundamental assumptions underlying physiological psychology demanded a revision of established theories of the will—the mental category associated with self-control. Physiological psychologists argued that psychology should be investigated using techniques from biology and that all the aspects of the mind

(consciousness, rational thought, emotion, memory, and volition) that had previously been accounted for in spiritual or purely mental terms should be understood as arising from the activity of the nerves and the material conditions of the brain. In this manner, they overturned previous conceptions of the will as an exclusively mental or spiritual faculty that enabled self-control by repressing the desires of the body. For this reason, in the diverse outpouring of contemporary psychological discourse, physiological psychology became a focal point for cultural debates about the relationship between the body and the mind and the nature of the will.6

6 See Roger Smith’s article, “The Physiology of the Will: Mind, Body, and Psychology in the Periodical Literature, 1855-1875,” for a discussion of these debates in the periodical literature. 15

Although eighteenth-century physiologists had addressed psychological topics

(such as how sensation became perception and how animate motion was directed),7

physiological psychology emerged as a distinct and soon-to-be-dominant discourse in

Britain with the publication of Alexander Bain’s influential treatises, The Senses and the

Intellect (1855) and The Emotions and the Will (1859). Bain drew on physiological

research from earlier in the century that increasingly demonstrated the interrelationship of

mind and matter and blurred the distinctions between voluntary and involuntary actions.

In the 1830s, Marshall Hall had described the reflex action of specific spinal nerves,

demonstrating the physiological pathway for “sensori-motor” actions, actions which

occur automatically due to the stimulation of the nerves. Hall limited his discussion of

reflex action to the spinal nervous system, insisting on a sharp division between the

involuntary activity of the spinal nervous system and the willed activity of the brain

(Jacyna 111). Soon, however, the medical researcher Thomas Laycock extended the idea

of the automatic sensori-motor action to the brain, arguing that all nerves must function

similarly because they have the same morphology, and the physiologist William

Carpenter further developed Laycock’s views by describing even the emotions and the thoughts as reflexes (Jacyna 112). George Henry Lewes succinctly describes the complex view of the interrelationship of the mind and the body that physiological

psychologists developed when he writes, “If we classify certain phenomena as psychical,

and others as vital, the artifice is patent, since all psychical phenomena are vital, and in

all of them sensibility is a factor” (iv.9).

7 Danziger cites Albrecht von Haller’s Elementia Physiologiae from the mid-eighteenth century in Central Europe, as well as later texts from the early nineteenth century, including Johannes Muller’s Elements of Physiology (1838-42) (52).

In the face of growing agreement about the physical basis for the mind, many

Victorian commentators singled out the faculty of the will as the last evidence of humanity’s special place in the universe as free moral beings. For instance, the philosopher Henry Sidgwick considered the will to be the one human capacity that science could not explain in material terms, calling it the “the mysterious citadel of the will” (qtd in Daston 194). In The Emotions and the Will, however, Alexander Bain argued that even the will develops out of purely physical conditions. William Carpenter and William James, among others, wrote of “the physiology of the will,” and George

Henry Lewes helped to blur the boundaries between willed and involuntary actions by constructing a subtle continuum between reflex, automatic, involuntary, unconscious, voluntary, and conscious actions (3.374-80). It would seem logical to assume that the physiological psychologists’ emphasis on the bodily, reflexive, involuntary, apparently determined aspects of the will translated directly into a deterministic world view or even into a lack of confidence in the ability of individuals to rationally regulate their thoughts and actions. Yet, as Lorraine Daston notes, “in Britain attempts to create a characteristically psychological approach toward phenomena of mind were strongly influenced by a deep and persistent concern over the possible moral implications of the new discipline—in particular, the possible encouragement it might lend to materialist or fatalist theories of human conduct” (192). Daston identifies this preoccupation in the prominence British psychological treatises gave to theories of the will and the attention, as well as to their continued attempts to explicate the philosophical problem of the body- mind relationship, whether through theories of parallelism or monism (192).8

8 Parallelism, as William James explains, describes the mind-body relationship as the 17

My own reading confirms Daston’s observations, especially in the unexpected similarities between self-help literature and psychological treatises. Despite Bain’s radical arguments for a physiological basis for the will, which he develops into a culturally relativistic explanation for belief and morality as well as a strident argument against free will, his work echoes prevailing Victorian concerns about self-control by showing that a naturalistic theory of the will can still account for moral responsibility and self-control. The Emotions and the Will devotes an entire chapter to “The Moral Habits,” in which Bain explains that the habits are formed through a series of decisions (501).

Among the extensive list of moral habits he discusses are behaviors frequently associated with self-control: early rising, temperance, the control of the attention, emotional restraint—“The systematic calming down of physical excitement cannot be over- inculcated in education, nor too strongly aimed at by each one’s own volition”—(508), concentration, obedience to authority, promptitude, activity, alertness, grace, and a polite demeanour. At times, The Emotions and the Will reads like popular self-help and advice manuals like Smiles’s Self-Help or Sarah Stickney Ellis’s The Women of England with their single-minded emphasis on hard work, self-denial, and propriety. As Rylance notes,

Bain also wrote self-help essays and sometimes nearly equates will-power and morality

(Victorian 201).

In the 1870s, debates about the mind-body relationship and the limits of the will crystallized around the idea of human-automatism, the view that humans are simply

“blank unmediated correspondence, term for term, of the succession of states of consciousness with the succession of total brain-processes” (Principles 1.182). The term monism can be applied to either materialism or idealism (OED). Both views were expounded by Victorian writers. Dual-aspect monism, the doctrine supported by George Henry Lewes, views “physical and mental phenomena [as] both manifestations of an ultimate reality which cannot be identified with either matter or mind” (OED).

biological machines that can feel but cannot ultimately direct their thoughts or actions.

Interest in this theory peaked with the publication of Darwin’s Descent of Man in 1871, which emphasized the evolutionary origins of the human mind, and Thomas Huxley’s famous speech at the British Association meeting in 1874, “On the Hypothesis that

Humans are Automata.” Huxley’s speech and the public responses it provoked usefully highlight the main terms of this debate. “On the Hypothesis that Humans are Automata” opens by tracing nineteenth-century advances in physiology to the seventeenth-century theory “that the physical processes of life are capable of being explained in the same way as other physical phenomena, and, therefore, that the living body is a mechanism”

(199)—in other words, the ground-breaking idea that biological processes can be explained by scientific observation and experimentation. Specifically, Huxley credits

Descartes with proposing and explaining the basics of “the modern physiology of the nervous system” (203). He explains that Descartes anticipated five fundamental propositions of nineteenth-century physiological psychology: “the brain is the organ of sensation, thought, and emotion” (203); movement is caused by the muscles contracting when they are activated by the nerves (207); and the nervous system mediates between the external world and consciousness. Huxley stresses this because “either consciousness is the function of a something distinct from the brain, which we call the soul, and a sensation is the mode in which this soul is affected by the motion of a part of the brain; or there is no soul, and a sensation is something generated by the mode of motion of a part of the brain” (210). Moreover, Descartes discovered “reflex action” (211), and he theorized that memory had a physical basis in the brain (213). One of Descartes’s proposals which has not yet been fully embraced by physiology (though it should be

according to Huxley) is “the doctrine that brute animals are mere machines or automata, devoid not only of reason, but of any kind of consciousness” (216). Huxley describes a wide range of automatic behavior by citing current experiments on victims of spinal cord injury and frogs with severed spinal cords and the case history of a brain-damaged French sergeant before finally applying Descartes’ controversial idea to people, arguing,

all states of consciousness in us, as in them [brutes], are immediately

caused by molecular changes of the brain-substance. . . . We are conscious

automata, endowed with free will in the only intelligible sense of that

much-abused term—inasmuch as in many respects we are able to do as we

like—but nonetheless parts of the great series of causes and effects which,

in unbroken continuity, composes that which is, and has been, and shall

be—the sum of existence. (244)

Essentially, Huxley’s case for human automatism restates Bain’s earlier arguments about the physical basis of consciousness and the will, but Huxley’s close identification with

Darwin gives his version new weight.

Huxley’s speech inspired a highly-charged reaction because many in his audience believed that arguing against the existence of a conscious will challenged the cultural foundation for self-control, responsibility, and ultimately, morality in general.9 His

respondents included William Carpenter, who devoted a lengthy preface to the fourth

edition of his Principles of Mental Physiology (1876) to refuting Huxley’s argument.

Appealing to the common experience of choice and moral effort, Carpenter concludes,

9 See Rick Rylance for a succinct discussion of the ideological importance of the will in the nineteenth century (Victorian 194).

I cannot anticipate the time when that belief [in a “self-determining

power”] will be eliminated from the thought of Mankind;--when the words

“ought,” “duty,” “responsibility,” “choice,” “self-control,” and the like,

will cease to have the meaning we at present attach to them;--and when we

shall really treat each other as Automata who cannot help doing whatever

our “heredity” and “environments” necessitate. (lv)

As one of the inventors of the term “unconscious cerebration,” Carpenter was deeply interested in the unconscious, automatic activity of the mind, yet he was unwilling to relinquish the idea of a conscious, directing Ego, and he was committed to applying physiological knowledge to education and self-help. Carpenter explains that his treatise focuses on distinguishing between the “automatic” and “volitional” aspects of mental activity because this distinction “has long appeared to me the only sound basis, on the one hand, for Education and Self-discipline, and, on the other, for that Scientific study of the various forms of abnormal Mental activity” (ix). With his emphasis on the application of physiological psychology to self-discipline, the distinction between automatic and volitional mental activity, and his association between self-determination, choice, and self-control on the one hand, and heredity and environment on the other,

Carpenter’s comments exemplify the cluster of issues associated with a trend toward synthesizing a naturalistic view of the mind with the moralistic rhetoric of self-control.

Critical Context

Literary critics and writers on psychology have long recognized the productive interrelationship between Victorian literature and psychology. In fact, in The Physiology

of the Novel, Nicholas Dames demonstrates the surprising connections between the nineteenth-century study of human physiology and theories of novel-reading. It was

George Eliot who coined the term “psychological novel” in an 1855 review in which she referred semi-disparagingly to “’psychological novels’ (very excellent things in their own way), where life seems made up of talking and journalizing” (qtd in Dames, “Withering”

91). Despite her mocking tone, Eliot herself was deeply invested in portraying a rich inner life of thoughts and motivations in her own fiction. She viewed her novels as a type of psychological inquiry, remarking in a letter that they were “simply a set of experiments in life—an endeavour to see what our thought and emotion may be capable of” (Letters, 6:216). In Problems of Life and Mind, George Henry Lewes likewise describes fiction and psychology as complementary fields, both engaged in making the consciousness of other minds accessible: “In Literature and Art there are expressed the thoughts and feelings which I can interpret by my own” (Problems 4.98). Other examples of this close relationship include a lecture to the Royal Institution in 1868 in which the mathematician W.K. Clifford cites novelistic character development as an example of the ever-shifting nature of consciousness.

Is it not regarded as the greatest stroke of the novelist that he should be

able not merely to draw a character at any given time, but also sketch the

growth of it through the changing circumstances of life? In fact, if you

consider it a little further, you will see that it is not even true that a

character remains the same for a single day: every circumstance, however

trivial, that in any way affects the mind, leaves its mark, infinitely small it

may be, imperceptible in itself, but yet more indelible than the stone-

carved hieroglyphics of Egypt. (qtd in Rylance, Victorian 133)

Clifford’s comments help to indicate the degree to which many Victorians recognized how much the novelistic portrayal of character influenced psychological introspection, which here shaped a theory of the material basis for memory in the brain, as well as future empirical investigations.

Recently, literary critics have increasingly focused on explicating these close parallels between Victorian mental science and literature. My study benefits from this growing body of rich scholarly material and in particular from those critics who attend to physiological psychology’s attempt to bridge the mind-body divide and the implications of this scientific agenda for novelistic portrayals of consciousness and self-control. The following overview of the critical background for this dissertation includes historians who demonstrate the responsiveness of the new materialist psychology to concerns about self-control, literary critics who highlight the productive role of self-control for many

Victorians but do not address contemporary Victorian psychology, and literary critics who take an interdisciplinary approach to Victorian psychology but tend to emphasize the increasing conflict between the ideal of self-control and the uncontrollable, automatic workings of the mind posited by these new theories. This dissertation addresses a gap in these studies by exploring the ways in which Victorian fiction reflects an appreciation for the complexity of the mind that not only challenged older hierarchical models of self- control but also suggested new possibilities for non-hierarchical, distributed forms of self-control.

My investigation of mid-Victorian representations of self-control is indebted to

Michel Foucault’s new historicist methods but diverges from his analysis of discipline and control in the nineteenth-century in important aspects. My interdisciplinary attempt to historicize the notion of self-control borrows from Foucauldian discourse analysis by asking what were the particular preoccupations within the emerging discipline of psychology in the nineteenth-century that enabled psychologists and novelists to conceive of the self and its regulation in the ways that they did, ways that differ from other historical conceptions of self-control. However, Foucault’s arguments in Discipline and

Punish and The History of Sexuality are also directly related to the formation of a rhetoric of self-control during the nineteenth century. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes the historical shift from bodily torture to imprisonment as the dominant mode of punishment. During the Enlightenment, power began to function as the prison does, disciplining individuals by inscribing its methods of control—particularly surveillance— within their thought processes so that they become self-policing. In The History of

Sexuality, Foucault describes a parallel emphasis on regulating the body’s functions through two powerful discourses: “the disciplines of the body and the regulations of the population” (139). A Foucauldian analysis would locate the literature of self-help and the focuses of physiological psychology within this first discourse, which,

centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its

capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its

usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and

economic controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that

characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body.

(139)

Foucault’s definition of discourse is fundamentally related to the exercise of power, and in this passage, he addresses the nineteenth century’s characteristic concern with self- control from the standpoint of power relations. Here Foucault argues that the study of the body’s mechanisms became institutionalized through the formation of academic disciplines, which in turn became a way for institutionalized power to exert control over individuals. Although a Foucauldian analysis of how power is interiorized is well-suited to the relationships between Victorian psychology, the literature of self-help, and the related focus on self-control in contemporary fiction, in this dissertation, I focus on explicating how Victorian psychologists and novelists conceived of the psychological and physiological mechanisms that enabled self-control. While I offer a detailed comparison of the portrayal of self-control in the texts of physiological psychologists and contemporary novelists, a Foucauldian cultural analysis focusing on the political construction of self-controlled individuals might begin where my more limited textual investigation ends.

As Jill Matus notes, Foucault’s influence can also be seen in the recent work of historians of psychology who emphasize the cultural debates that influenced the formation of psychology as a discipline throughout the nineteenth century (Shock 31), and Rick Rylance’s analysis of the four discourses of the soul, philosophy, physiology, and medicine is an excellent example of this trend (“Victorian” 2158). Loraine Daston,

Edward Reed, and Roger Smith all seek to revise more narrowly focused histories of psychology that exclude the role of wider cultural concerns about religion and morality

(to which we can add the moralistic rhetoric of self-control) in shaping what was ostensibly a naturalistic discipline. According to Reed, “psychology succeeded in becoming a science in large part because of its defense of a theological conception of human nature” (7). He identifies a continuity between the traditional Protestant view of the soul as the core of the personality, which existed in opposition to sin and irrationality, and the new psychology’s emphasis on an opposition between the conscious and unconscious mind (7). In “The Physiology of the Will,” Smith similarly asserts, “The basic terms and framework for discussion of mind and brain came from religious and moral preoccupations” (84). The relationship between scientific discourse and the rhetoric of self-control is also the subject of Smith’s book Inhibition: History and

Meaning in the Sciences of Mind and Brain (1992), in which he presents the history of the word “inhibition” as it has been used across Europe and North America from the late eighteenth century to the present. Smith shows how the moral priorities embedded in the ideal of self-control influenced early neurophysiologists as they developed theories of biological regulation based on their new knowledge about the nervous system. The focus of these studies on the productive relationship between the cultural ideal of self-control and the scientific concept of biological regulation provides an important link between nineteenth-century science and middle-class culture and helps to guide my exploration of the tension between social and biological regulation in the literature of the period. In the novels I consider, I uncover analogous attempts to preserve an emphasis on self-control while reflecting the radically unsettling discoveries of physiology and evolutionary biology.

Literary critics John Reed and John Kucich also discuss the largely productive role of self-control for the Victorians. Although John Reed identifies a variety of positions articulated in nineteenth-century debates over free will and determinism in

Victorian Will, he argues that “recommended conduct was surprisingly uniform”— usually involving some form of self-denial, including submission to the will of God,

“self-restraint in the service of some high cause,” or “stoic endurance” (402). However,

Reed divides his study into two parts, first considering the historical background and then offering readings of the literary texts, so that while he discusses the comments of psychologists and scientists on free will and self-control in depth, he does not apply them in detail to his readings of the work of individual novelists. In Repression in Victorian

Fiction, Kucich defines repression broadly as a refusal of expression; in contrast to ahistorical Freudian views that stress the harmful effects of repressing important parts of the self, he sees repression as “a nineteenth-century strategy for exalting interiority” (2).

Drawing on the twentieth-century work of Georges Bataille to develop a theory of repression as “a libidinal form of self-negation” (17), Kucich’s readings of Bronte,

Dickens, and Eliot demonstrate his counter-intuitive insight that Victorian repression was the metaphorical expression of the desire for the ultimate expenditure of individual energy in death. Kucich argues that Victorian repression contributes to a heightened sense of self; it generates “a euphoric enlargement precisely because it creates a destabilizing split within the self, and transforms assertive energy into self-negating energy” (23). While I agree with Kucich’s emphasis on the emotionally productive role of repression in the nineteenth century and the particular type of subjectivity it enabled, I focus instead on Victorian psychological theories to examine the affirmations of inner

conflict as a means to self-control and the consequences of this conflict for self- knowledge and self-determination present in Victorian fiction.

Many recent investigations of the psychology of self-control and Victorian fiction offer detailed analyses of the psychological texts and the novels. Such studies include

Sally Shuttleworth’s Charlotte Bronte and Victorian Psychology, as well as her discussions of George Eliot in “The Malady of Thought” and Samuel Butler in

“Evolutionary Psychology and The Way of All Flesh.” In “Defining Habits: Dickens and the Psychology of Repetition,” Athena Vrettos shows that the individual’s ability to control himself was at stake in Victorian psychological theories of habit, which were often expressed in terms of mass production and consumption that challenged free will and emphasized the mechanical, unconscious, socially influenced nature of habit. In

“Flogging and Fascination: Dickens and the Fragile Will,” Natalie Rose draws on the physiologist William Carpenter’s theories of influence, the will, and reflex thought to explain the susceptibility of Dickens’s characters to fascination and a loss of control. In addition, Michael Davis, Jane Wood, and Lisa Smith have recently analyzed George

Eliot’s engagement with physiological psychology. Jill Matus’s new book on Victorian shock analyzes physiological theories of consciousness and emotion in relation to

Victorian novels, demonstrating the centrality of involuntary emotions to Victorian notions of the self (60). The essays in Neurology and Literature, 1860-1920 also address the mutual concerns of literary and scientific authors with the implications of a biologically reductionist view of the self; editor Anne Stiles helpfully describes the relationship between “brain science and imaginative fiction” during this period as

“dialogic or circular, a conversation where literary and scientific authors were mutually

responsive to one another” (2). Finally, in Thinking About Other People in Nineteenth-

Century British Writing, Adela Pinch describes the wide variety of Victorian theories about the potential for thinking about other people to actually affect them. Pinch discusses the extraordinary mesmeric and telepathic powers attributed to consciousness and the will by many Victorian writers, and she contrasts Victorian panpsychic, mystical, and occult views on the power of mental force with the extreme materialist views of human automatism and epiphenomenalism, “the philosophical position that mental events are totally immaterial and can have no effects at all on the physical world” (64). Pinch demonstrates, however, that such a dramatic view of the separation between physical and mental events actually allows for surprisingly freeing views on the power of consciousness to live on after death (71). What these excellent studies have in common is an appreciation for the great complexity of Victorian models of the mind-body relationship and the tendency of this complexity to, as Michael Davis comments,

“radically undermin[e] the notion of any unified, easily understandable or controllable subject” (19). In this dissertation, I build on these studies to not only identify a dialectic between the ideal of self-control and the uncontrollable, automatic workings of the mind posited by the new psychology, but also to consider the uneasy synthesis between these two poles offered in both mid-Victorian novels and psychological treatises.

Individual Chapters

In each of the chapters that follow, I pair the work of a physiological or evolutionary psychologist with a mid-Victorian novel to explore a range of responses to the problem of the physiology of the will and self-control. Each chapter focuses on a

different aspect of self-control, examining novelistic portrayals of energy, attention, emotion, and, finally, the roles of unconscious desire and inherited memory in psychological development.

In the first chapter, I examine the dark side of mid-Victorian self-control in the parallels between Alexander Bain’s physiology of the will in The Emotions and the Will and Charles Dickens’s exploration of the relationship between energy and self-control in

Little Dorrit. Appearing in monthly parts between December 1855 and June 1857, Little

Dorrit’s publication was roughly contemporary with the publication of Alexander Bain’s psychological texts, The Senses and the Intellect and The Emotions and the Will in 1855 and 1859. Bain’s most influential contribution to future conceptions of the will was his innovative concept of the mind as an energy system. In fact, he identified the body’s spontaneous energy as the underlying physical condition that initiates the development of the will in each individual. Bain represents emotional energy as a highly volatile form of psycho-physical energy; he notes that while expressing emotional energy can burn up the body’s physiological resources, suppressed emotional energy constantly threatens either to break out in new forms or to warp beliefs and motives. Like Bain, Dickens also treats high levels of mental and physical energy as both essential for will-power and potentially devastating. 10 Through the wide range of characters who populate Little Dorrit, Dickens

creates a spectrum of models of self-control from the self-denying Amy Dorrit and

Arthur Clennam to the intensely angry, strong-willed Tattycoram, Miss Wade, and Mrs.

Clennam. Dickens’s spectrum of self-control paradoxically emphasizes the necessity of

10 For Bain and Dickens, mental energy, physical energy, and willpower are closely related. Danziger notes that the electrical nature of the nerves had been empirically proven by the mid-century, which helped to facilitate the common analogy between physical and mental energy (62-4).

psychic and bodily energy for the cultivation of productive forms of self-control and highlights the ways in which great energy and a correspondingly great capacity for self- control can lead to self-destruction through the physiological costs of the inner conflict between energy and control, as well as by preventing self-knowledge and perverting conceptions of duty. I argue that Dickens’s and Bain’s similarly conflicted portrayals of energy and self-control reflect the wider culture’s shifting understanding of self-control, as psychologists, novelists, and readers in general struggled to assimilate the naturalistic view of the mind presented by physiological psychologists with what many recognized to be serious limitations in the more moralistic representations of self-control presented in self-help and advice literature.

In the second chapter, I consider Thomas Hardy’s representation of self-control in

Far From the Madding Crowd in relation to the novel’s portrayal of consciousness as inextricably linked to the body’s conditions. In the novel, consciousness exists on a continuum between an evanescent flow that reflects the body’s sensations in response to its environment and brief stopping points in moments of voluntary attention. I argue that

Far From the Madding Crowd resonates with contemporary physiological psychology in highlighting both the predominately involuntary nature of consciousness and the limited role of voluntary attention for self-control and shaping one’s future character. In this respect, Hardy anticipates William James in exploring the possibilities for free will and self-control available in the tensions between these two contrasting features of fully- embodied consciousness, flow and focus. In addition, Hardy’s exploration of the varied responses of the three lovers to Bathsheba foreshadows William James’s taxonomy of the will. Together, James’s three generic types of will and Hardy’s three lovers contribute to

an understanding of the effects of innate personalities on consciousness and self-control in their portrayal of habits of attention, typical stances toward the environment, and temperamental balances between expression and inhibition.

In the third chapter, I delve more deeply into Victorian theories of the mind-body connection with a discussion of the distinctiveness of George Eliot’s and George Henry

Lewes’s dual-aspect monism and theories of emotion. By stressing the interconnectedness of thinking and feeling in Daniel Deronda and Problems of Life and

Mind, these two writers emphasize the role of emotion as a form of intelligence and suggest the potential of emotion-driven self-control, in contrast to the more typical emphasis on attention that I discuss in the second chapter. I uncover an ongoing dialogue between Eliot and Lewes regarding the role of emotion in psychological development and argue that Eliot’s portrayal of Gwendolen’s fitful growth in Daniel Deronda revises

Lewes’s less flexible scheme for moral development from animalistic instinct to socialized self-control by demonstrating the interrelationship between rational thought and primitive emotions like fear.

While I argue in the third chapter that Eliot and Lewes’s emphasis on emotion gestures toward a nonhierarchical model of self-control distributed throughout the body, in the fourth chapter I suggest that Samuel Butler develops a cosmic, cross-generational theory of self-help and unconscious self-control in The Way of All Flesh and Life and

Habit. Butler’s Lamarckian theory of evolution counters Darwin’s emphasis on spontaneous variation and chance, granting greater self-determination to organisms by proposing that inherited memories drive evolutionary development. This chapter focuses on Butler’s use of images from embryology to demonstrate the consciousness of all of

life and to describe the natural course of development as one driven by unconscious desire. Butler opposes the traditional Victorian emphasis on duty and self-denial by indicating that, for Ernest Pontifex, doing what comes easily is a paradoxical form of self-control and self-determination.

Analyzing the psychology of self-control in Victorian novels alongside physiological and evolutionary psychology offers a fresh look at the middle-class ideal of self-control. This dissertation revises familiar notions of repressive Victorian self-control by exploring the positive roles of self-knowledge and emotion in self-control and identifying the wide-reaching implications of debates over the will. The representations of self-control in these novels often contrast dramatically with more simplistic views of self-control as merely a matter of trying hard to restrain one’s impulses and concentrating on one’s duty. By focusing on the psychological elements of energy, consciousness and attention, emotion, and unconscious memory and desire, I demonstrate that the complex ideological tensions that converged in the idea of self-control in psychology and literature during the mid-Victorian period stimulated new, creative attempts to reconcile deeply held views about self-determination with an equally profound appreciation for the complexity of the mind’s interrelationship with the material world.

Chapter One: Energetic Self-Control as Self-Destruction in Little Dorrit and The Emotions and the Will

“Then idiots talk,” said Eugene, leaning back, folding his arms, smoking with his eyes shut, and speaking slightly through his nose, “of Energy. If there is a word in the dictionary under any letter from A to Z that I abominate, it is energy. It is such a conventional superstition, such parrot gabble! What the deuce! Am I to rush out into the street, collar the first man of wealthy appearance that I meet, shake him, and say, ‘Go to law upon the spot, you dog, and retain me, or I’ll be the death of you’? Yet that would be energy.” “Precisely my view of the case, Eugene. But show me a good opportunity, show me something really worth being energetic about, and I’ll show you energy.” “And so will I,” said Eugene.

—Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

Is energy for idiots? Although Eugene Wrayburn’s lazy stance belies the seriousness of the subject of energy for Dickens, the random violence in his example— physically accosting and threatening a stranger on the street—taps into an important connection between inner energy, self-control, and violence throughout Dickens’ work.

Introduced as a man of “consummate indolence” at the beginning of Our Mutual Friend

(285), Eugene’s first glimpses of Lizzie Hexam soon fill him with a restless energy, a feeling of being “tickled and twitched all over” (167), and his growing obsession with her

provokes him to dangerous and immoral actions, including leading his unstable rival

Bradley Headstone on wild chases throughout London. While the results of Eugene’s passion for Lizzie (marriage and a productive work life) and Bradley’s mania for her

(murder and suicide) contrast stunningly, Dickens shows that Eugene is not wrong when he suggests that there is a mindless, uncontrollable quality to energy, and his observations resonate with concerns from the mid-century’s cutting-edge psychology. In The

Emotions and the Will (1859), Alexander Bain presents a pioneering model of the mind as an energy system, in which he theorizes that the body’s energy is both essential for

willpower and potentially devastating. Cautioning his readers about the price of passion, for example, Bain writes, “As regards the work to be done, nothing can be more effectual; as regards the happiness of the agent, the immolation is often remorseless”

(437). While passionate energy can be channeled into great accomplishments, at the same time, it can spell psychological and physical destruction for the individual. These examples from Dickens and Bain highlight their participation in a wider cultural conversation about the relationships between energy, passion, willpower, self-knowledge, and self-control. How are inner energy and self-control related? Is it possible to distinguish productive energy from destructive energy? What happens to the body’s energy when an individual attempts to channel or suppress it? Why are so many examples of energetic or self-controlled characters in Dickens’ novels either unethical or unattractive?

Dickens returns to these questions throughout his work. While Eugene Wrayburn represents one of Dickens’ most entertaining commentaries on Victorian notions of energy and self-control, none of his novels suggests more pessimistic answers to these questions about energy and control than his dark social critique, Little Dorrit. Nearly every character in the novel suffers from either a lack of energy or a surplus of energy that is channeled or suppressed in self-destructive ways. Although Little Dorrit herself bears a striking resemblance to the self-denying domestic women idealized by popular advice manuals, and though Daniel Doyce (an industrious engineer who is perhaps the novel’s most unambiguously positive figure) possesses a biography that could have been included in Samuel Smiles’s 1859 best-seller, Self-Help, Dickens subtly undermines these cultural paragons of self-control by emphasizing Little Dorrit’s physical and

psychological suffering and by showing the ways in which the inefficient English bureaucracy and corrupt financial system work to hinder Doyce. Dickens further complicates his treatment of self-control in the novel by presenting an array of characters, including three very angry women, whose remarkable energy and capacity for self- control are put to unethical and self-destructive uses.

Although critics have frequently investigated the role of energy and the will in

Dickens’ novels and in Little Dorrit in particular, they have less often connected

Dickens’ treatment of energy and control with contemporary nineteenth-century psychological debates about the nature of self-control. In an influential introduction to

Little Dorrit, Lionel Trilling highlights the conflicts between individual wills and society in the novel and comments on “the specificity and the subtlety and the boldness with which the human will is anatomized” (72). In Excess and Restraint in the Novels of

Charles Dickens, John Kucich traces an irreconcilable conflict between energy and control throughout Dickens’ work. He writes, “Dickens’ novels generate a series of explosions, in which the energy of characters or narrators is repeatedly concentrated against rigid limits to thought and action” (Excess 2). In Repression in Victorian Fiction,

Kucich extends his reading of Dickens’ energy to show that passion and repression are both connected to a fundamental desire to transcend the self through death, “to violate the coherence and integrity of the self in an absolute way, and to expend energy recklessly, in defiance of any concerns for the safety or advantage of the individual” (Repression

204).11 Like Kucich, Fred Kaplan notes that Dickens’ villains are just as likely to possess

11 Kucich’s comments illuminate the self-destructive tendencies present in both Eugene Wrayburn’s hypothetical example of energy with which I opened this paper and Dickens’ interrogation of self-control in Little Dorrit. However, Kucich’s theory of desire and 36

great energy and willpower as his heroes: “Dickens’ heroes succeed when they discover their will to be energetic and use that energy for beneficial purposes. However, . . . the forceful energy level and will power of many of the most fascinating and vivid Dickens characters are in the service of total self-interest” (172). Kaplan links Dickens’ portrayal of energy and willpower with the Victorian interest in mesmerism, concluding that inner energy is a source of both good and evil in Dickens’ novels.12 As this chapter will show,

in addition to mesmerism, Dickens associates the characters of Little Dorrit with a wide

range of contemporary discourses related to the subject of self-control, from the ideals of

the selfless domestic woman (Amy Dorrit), to the energetic, self-helping man of business

(Daniel Doyce), to the principles of moral management (Tattycoram),13 to the middle-

class goal of respectability (Mr. Dorrit and Fanny), and the austere extremes of

evangelicalism (Mrs. Clennam). What Dickens’ interrogation of all of these discourses

has in common is a recognition of the insidious power of personal experiences and blind spots to hinder or pervert the cultivation of self-control. In this regard, Dickens’ contradictory portrayal of self-control in Little Dorrit finds one of its strongest contemporary parallels in the work of Alexander Bain. Like Dickens, Bain explores the

repression relies on the work of the twentieth-century French writer George Bataille, while this chapter explores connections between Little Dorrit and Alexander Bain’s contemporary theories of desire and energy. 12 In Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction, Fred Kaplan unpacks the connections between Dickens’ work and another contemporary Victorian theory of psychological energy, mesmerism. The magnetic force was often described as a sort of mental energy controlled by the will of the mesmerist (Kaplan 19), and Kaplan argues that Dickens’ ongoing fascination with mesmerism in his personal life was due in part to the way in which the mesmeric relationship called out “great resources of energy and will within [Dickens] himself” (138). 13 Moral management was a popular treatment for the insane that emphasized self- discipline. In Dickens in Bedlam, David Oberhelman highlights Dickens’ interest in the principles of moral management advocated by his friend John Connolly (5). 37

ways in which individuals inadvertently deceive themselves in their attempts to be self- controlled along with the social pressures that influence them in his 1855 and 1859 psychological treatises The Senses and the Intellect and The Emotions and the Will.14 It is Bain’s innovative concept of the mind as an energy system, however, that sheds the greatest light on Dickens’ treatment of the costs of self-control in Little Dorrit. In their discussions of energy and control, both writers exploit the image of fire to blur the distinction between positive and negative forms of energy, emphasizing instead the potentially explosive, unwieldy nature of inner energy. These parallels between Bain’s and Dickens’ treatments of inner energy indicate that Dickens’ often negative portrayal of self-control in Little Dorrit is more than a critique of prevailing middle-class attitudes; it is also a reflection of how his culture’s ideas about self-control were evolving to accommodate a more materialistic understanding of the will.

Dickens and Psychology

Because Dickens is not generally considered a psychologically realistic writer (in the manner of George Eliot or Henry James), it may seem strange to link his work with the academic and normative psychology of Alexander Bain.15 Yet twentieth-century

critics have established his ongoing fascination with and knowledge of contemporary

14 Although The Emotions and the Will was not published until two years after Little Dorrit was completed in 1857, Bain’s theory of the will is outlined in his earlier treatise. 15 See Athena Vrettos’ “Defining Habits” for a summary of the critical debate over the psychological fidelity of Dickens’ characters. On one hand, some critics point to Dickens’ characters’ exaggerated quirks as evidence that they lack psychological depth, while others emphasize the fragmented and contradictory qualities of his characters as proof of Dickens’ more complex notions of identity (401). See Ben Winyard and Holly Furneaux for an overview of critical studies of Dickens’ engagement with psychology and science in general. 38

Victorian psychological questions. For example, Athena Vrettos shows how the apparently unrealistic, exaggerated “repetitive behavioral tics” prevalent throughout

Dickens’ fiction contribute to Victorian debates about the psychology of habit. Brian

Rosenberg emphasizes Dickens’ unique ability to convey uncertainty about character. He notes that Victorian novelists in general understood the personality to be “multilayered, fluid, and potentially divided” (94) and highlights Dickens’ uniquely perceptive exploration of fragmented personalities through “images of doubleness, inversion, and opposition such as twins, shadows, and mirrors” (26). Fred Kaplan details Dickens’ study of mesmerism, including his friendship with the physician John Elliotson, famous for his public demonstrations of mesmeric trances, as well as Dickens’ own practice of mesmerism with his family and friends. Michael Kearns argues that “Dickens’ psychology incorporated his era’s most generally accepted explanation of the life of the mind, associationism” (111). Articles in Sketches by Boz and Household Words demonstrate Dickens’ familiarity with phrenology, the treatment of the insane, and current issues in medicine.16 In addition, Dickens studied the principles of moral

management extensively in preparation for his participation in Urania House, a program

for rehabilitating women who had been imprisoned or were at risk for imprisonment

(Shatto 59). Moreover, it is possible that Dickens may have been familiar with

Alexander Bain’s arguments simply because Bain’s work was widely reviewed and

16 See “Our Next-Door Neighbor” from Sketches by Boz for Dickens’ facetious take on physiognomy and phrenology. “Things Within Dr. Connolly’s Remembrance” by H. Morley is a representative article from Household Words dealing with the treatment of the insane and contemporary medical practices. In the Household Words article, “The Nerves,” C.W. Mann offers a general overview of the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system. He refers to an important debate about the mind’s ability to control the emotions when he writes, “can we not—by controlling the outward sign of passion—to a greater degree master the passion itself?” (525). 39

politically controversial,17 and because, as Gardner Murphy asserts, “never had a

psychologist been so widely read in his own day” (qtd in Rylance, 164).

Whether or not Dickens was familiar with Bain, Bain himself, along with other physiological psychologists, did read and comment on Dickens’ fiction. Although

George Henry Lewes published a highly critical review of Dickens, asserting that “it is this complexity of the organism which Dickens wholly fails to conceive” (qtd in Menke,

617), Bain and other physiological psychologists occasionally drew on Dickens’

characters as exemplary psychological types. In a description of hatred, Bain writes that

in some individuals, “the enjoyment derivable from pure malevolence is intense and

unalloyed. . . . The Quilp of Dickens is a recent and highly illustrative specimen”

(Emotions 179). William Carpenter also cites Quilp as an example of a character whose

“attention [is] so completely and intentionally fixed upon the gratification of the selfish

or malevolent propensities, that the human nature acquires more of the Satanic than of the divine character” (217). Such treacherous characters are made more evil by their remarkable volitional capacities; they “use their power of self-control for the purpose of

hypocrisy and dissimulation, and cover the most malignant designs under the veil of

friendship” (Carpenter 217). Although Bain highlights Quilp’s intense pleasure in the

unbridled expression of emotion and Carpenter focuses on Quilp’s ability to channel this

energy, both psychologists express concern about the destructive potential of

psychological energy, a preoccupation that they share with Dickens.

Bain’s Innovative Theory of Spontaneous Activity and the Will

17 See Rylance for an overview of Bain’s reception (150-162). 40

The body’s energy, in fact, lies at the heart of Alexander Bain’s psychological theories. As the first psychological writer to apply then cutting-edge scientific knowledge about the physiology of the nervous system to the study of the mind, Bain is a pivotal figure in the history of psychology. “There is nothing I wish more than so to unite psychology and physiology that physiologists may be made to appreciate the true ends and drift of their researches into the nervous system, which no one man that I have yet encountered, does at the present moment,” Bain wrote enthusiastically (and accurately) to his friend John Stuart Mill in 1851 (qtd in Young, Mind 103). As Rick

Rylance explains, “The main burden of the physiological component of his work is to support the contention that the nervous system is a dynamic and transformative one. It is an energy system, he argues, which relays ‘nerve force’ (the precise character of which is undetermined) from point to point in the body” (174). Historians agree that one of Bain’s most important contributions to future psychology is this explanation of the mind as an active system characterized by spontaneous energy. 18 John Stuart Mill heralded this

concept as a major improvement on the “passive, reactive” model of the mind

traditionally described by associationists (Rylance 188-9, Ribot 197). Bain’s

commitment to the idea of energy not only saturates his psychological theory, but also his

choice of examples and illustrative metaphors, which celebrate the presence of this

energy. However, as Bain’s comments on Quilp’s tendency to revel in unrestrained

malevolence indicate, his discussion of the will reveals unresolved tensions. While Bain

18 Rylance (176). See also Ribot (206) and Danziger (63); Young remarks that Herbert Spencer unfortunately missed the significance of this aspect of Bain’s work in an important review essay (183). Edward Reed writes that Bain’s theory of spontaneous activity anticipates “a modern motor theory of perception” (76). Mischel suggests that Bain develops “an energy model of motivation” (141). Macmillan argues that Bain’s theories may have influenced Freud’s conception of thinking as “inhibited action” (187). 41

argues that the body’s energy is essential for the development of volition and he even celebrates this energy, he also cautions that the body’s energies are fundamentally amoral and uncontrollable.

Although Bain’s emphasis on the mind’s energetic activity was not entirely original, his application was “new and daring” (Rylance 178). It became a cornerstone of his theory of the will. In The Senses and the Intellect, Bain does claim originality in theorizing that the “germ of volition” is present at birth in the combination of the body’s spontaneous activity and the instinct for self-preservation (289, 292). In The Emotions and the Will, Bain expands upon this idea to create a detailed physiological theory of the development of the will. Bain defines the will as the interaction of spontaneous activity and learned responses to accidental experiences of pain or pleasure. According to Bain, the development of the will is a continuum that begins at birth. When an infant’s involuntary movements relieve pain or give pleasure, a connection is made in the brain.

Infants gain voluntary control over their actions as they gradually associate these spontaneous movements with results (358). Eventually, voluntary control extends from actions to thoughts and feelings; according to Bain, mature adults draw on the very same underlying mechanisms when performing intellectual work and making moral decisions that they used as babies when they learned to associate the reflex act of sucking with the satisfaction of hunger (413). Thus, in stark contrast to traditional notions of the will as a transcendent mental faculty or an aspect of the soul, Bain accounts for the existence and action of the will in strictly physical terms.

Throughout his explanation of the will, Bain repeatedly stresses the importance of a pre-existing “spontaneous energy” for the formation of the will. This spontaneous

movement is a defining characteristic of living beings, resulting from good health, nutrition and rest, and Bain points to the activity of young children and animals as an obvious example of its existence: “The bursting and bounding spirit of exercise, in these instances, is out of all proportion to any outward stimulants, and can only be accounted for by a central fire that needs no stirring from without” (329). Through his examples of infants kicking their legs in their nurses’ arms and colts frolicking in meadows, Bain highlights the delightful and gratuitous nature of expressing the body’s energy through play, in addition to stressing its primary physical and psychological role. Even consciousness itself, Bain insists, is secondary to the body’s energy: “the organic energy is the general and fundamental fact; consciousness is the occasional and accessory fact attached to it” (475). Moreover, drawing an analogy between the food and air that provide living animals with energy and the coal that fuels the steam-engine, Bain argues that the “central fire” of nerve force is a literal physical force, interchangeable with “the natural powers—Heat, Electricity, Chemical Affinity, Mechanical Force” (478).

Not only is the existence of a powerful, spontaneous energy fundamental for

Bain’s theory of the will, a sense of energy also characterizes his word-choice. For example, he writes that the will occasionally “operates with a promptness and energy resembling the explosion of gunpowder” (335). The exuberant energy of children when they are well-fed and well-rested and just released from their schoolwork is just such a case: “explosive, as of the bursting open of a floodgate” (335). He reiterates, “after every night’s repose, and after the nourishment of a meal, the active organs are charged with power ready to explode in any direction” (442). When describing a person who is creatively seeking for the solution to a problem, Bain compares the will to a wild animal

pouncing on an idea: “the volitional energy keeps up the attention, or the active search, and the moment that anything in point rises before the mind, springs upon that like a wild beast on its prey” (414). For Bain, the living nervous system is bursting with explosive, energetic potential, and he underscores this important attribute with frequent examples from sports and reflections on the pleasure of engaging in vigorous activities. Even when comparing the nervous system to an organ, a musical instrument not typically associated with pent-up force, Bain highlights the volatile nature of the body’s energy, writing that the nervous system “may be compared to an organ with bellows constantly charged, and ready to let off in any direction” (Senses 291). Added to images of detonating gunpowder, spring-loaded children, bursting dams, and pouncing beasts, Bain’s language suggests an exploding organ—keys, pedals, and pipes flying, as the bellows release air not just through the pipes, but “off in any direction.”

The explosive images scattered throughout The Emotions and the Will are logically consistent with Bain’s conception of nervous energy as a physical force, and their frequency and zestfulness highlight Bain’s fascination with the potential power of emotional and psychological energy. According to Bain, the body’s innate energy both facilitates and challenges the development of healthy forms of self-control. On one hand, high levels of energy are required for learning and for commanding the emotions and thoughts: “great natural activity is singularly favorable to the growth of associated actions” (378). Along these lines, Bain points to self-control as evidence of inner energy:

“In everyday life we look upon great self-command as regards temper, or any feeling that we know to be strong in an individual, as a volitional energy” (409). However, much of the body’s energy is manifested in emotion, and Bain’s descriptions of emotional

restraint foreground the large amounts of volitional energy required to suppress the energy of emotion. The willed suppression of emotion involves a painful clash of warring energies. “An acute shock of pain is felt through the system,” Bain writes. “We are made the arena of a severe conflict, and seem to be torn asunder by the opposing forces”

(64). Elsewhere, Bain describes the inner life as a “battleground, or scene of incessant warfare” between opposing motives (439), and this notion of self-control as a battle leads him to describe suppressed impulses as “imprisoned energies” that “chafe” and

“fret”(64).

Despite the pain of repressing emotions and the difficulty of controlling the thoughts, however, Bain repeatedly stresses the desirability of cultivating this kind of self-control, noting that it should be the goal of both the education of children and of the reader’s self-education. He emphasizes, “The systematic calming down of physical excitement cannot be over-inculcated in education, nor too strongly aimed at by each one’s own volition” (508). Bain devotes a considerable portion of The Emotions and the

Will to practical advice on how to cultivate this control. He recommends Benjamin

Franklin’s Moral Algebra, a formal system for determining the pros and cons of any given “daily-life question” (462), and offers advice on dissipating desire, which he describes as “an irritating, uneasy, distracted state, fretting the temper, and unfitting the mind for operations demanding a cool and concentrated attention” (481). A chapter on

“The Moral Habits” advocates long-term training in order to gradually form the habits of early-rising and temperance, as well as control over the attention, the emotions, and the appetites. Thus, Bain’s work displays an unresolved tension between his celebration of

the fundamental role played by spontaneous energy in the life of the mind and the body and his obsessive reiteration of the need to control these energies.

In fact, much of Bain’s insistence on the need for control may stem from his concurrent realization that so much of the mind’s activity is essentially uncontrollable.

(According to Bain, even an individual’s conscience, philosophical beliefs, and motives for action are formed unconsciously in a naturalistic process of associations that parallels the formation of the will). In the case of the emotions, the will’s activity is limited to controlling the muscles: “the voluntary control that we can exercise over the moving members of the body is the only means that we possess for suppressing or restraining emotion, apart from turning aside of the currents of the brain into other channels” (8).

Moreover, despite the will’s limited ability to stifle emotional expression through restraining the muscles or distracting the attention, emotional energy can live on: “By an impulse of voluntary origin, the action of the various muscles may be suspended, but it does not follow that the nerve-currents of the emotional wave shall at once cease because the free course of them is obstructed” (401). For this reason, it is sometimes safer to vent strong emotions: “Under a shock of joy or grief, a burst of anger or fear, we are recommended to give way for a little to the torrent, as the safest way of making it subside” (401). Even here when discussing the need to vent powerful emotions, however, Bain displays an ambivalent fascination with emotional energy. The fact that obstructed emotions threaten to break free with even greater force may or may not be a good thing. While their escape may cause physical or psychological harm in some cases, in other cases, this damming and subsequent release of energy yields relief and pleasure.

Even “the dullest emotions,” Bain observes, “can yield a moment of ecstasy when their

strength has been allowed to accumulate, instead of being incessantly dribbled off” (55).

At other times, however, Bain suggests that the blocked emotional waves simply seek new and unpredictable channels. He cautions that the emotions exert tremendous power to skew our perception of reality. They guide the attention, wipe out memories “like destroying Vandals” (46) and sway belief: “The perverted views of matters of common business, the superstructure of fable that envelopes the narration of the past, the incubus of superstition and blind faith, have their foundation and source in the power of emotion to bar out the impressions of reality” (47). In these examples, rather than the will taking the emotions captive, barbaric emotions overrun a defenseless intellect.

In addition, Bain’s explanation of motivation highlights his perception that the volitional energies are unwieldy and can be easily misdirected into all sorts of unreasonable behaviors. Bain theorizes that the will fundamentally seeks to increase pleasure and avoid pain, but due to the quirks of individual memories, certain experiences can become exaggerated and take on unreasonable motivating power. In adulthood and especially in industrialized societies, most people are motivated not by the basic experiences of pleasure or pain, but by more complicated combinations of experiences.

Bain writes, “The more artificial human life becomes, the more are we called upon to work for ends that are only each a step towards the final ends of all our voluntary labors”

(428-9). Because these life-goals, such as the pursuit of knowledge or security, prestige or self-fulfillment, require years to attain, some individuals become infatuated with the means to these ends. Hoarding and a passion for bookkeeping are examples of the volitional energies becoming misdirected from a more reasonable pursuit of wealth (430).

Bain invokes the pathetic images of a wealthy miser locked away with his accounting

books and of talented lawyers and men of science who waste their energy on irrelevant controversies rather than dedicating themselves to seeking out justice and truth (431).

How easily, Bain muses, the normal activity of a healthy volition can become diverted into “deluded and perverted” channels and even toward “excited, impassioned, exaggerated, irrational ends” (432). Here Bain explores the power of a single, random idea to completely hijack the will in a violent, destructive direction, whether it is “the temptation that seizes many people, when on the brink of a precipice, to throw themselves down” (433) or “the murderous prepossessions of a monomaniac” (435).

Energy in Little Dorrit: Self-control, Self-deception or Self-immolation

Like Bain, in Little Dorrit Dickens also portrays energy as an essential yet explosive and dangerous quality. While Bain insists that the essence of life is spontaneous activity, Dickens dramatizes the devastating effects of a lack of energy and purpose through Little Dorrit’s father. When Mr. Dorrit first arrived in the Marshalsea

Prison, “a very amiable and very helpless middle-aged gentleman,” he had intended to stay only a few days while he unraveled his affairs, which had become entangled in a bad business partnership (73). Soon, however, he moved his whole family to the Marshalsea and settled in to a life in prison that would last for over twenty years. The narrator comments that Mr. Dorrit submits surprisingly easily to the influence of the debtors’ prison:

Crushed at first by his imprisonment, he had soon found a dull relief in it.

He was under lock and key; but the lock and key that kept him in, kept

numbers of his troubles out. If he had been a man with strength of

purpose to face those troubles and fight them, he might have broken the

net that held him, or broken his heart; but being what he was, he languidly

slipped into this smooth descent, and never more took one step upward.

(79)

Because of Mr. Dorrit’s innate lack of energy and purpose, he begins to find the prison a safe and comfortable place that shields him from his creditors and responsibilities. Mr.

Dorrit copes with imprisonment by retreating into a fantasy life, re-creating himself as the

“Father of the Marshalsea” to whom the other debtors pay tribute. Although he and his children survive on these charitable gifts, they all suffer because of his inability to provide for them. The narrator suggests that Mr. Dorrit’s character flaws ultimately are not revealed in his inability to settle to his debts and escape the prison—even an energetic man may have failed in this attempt and “broken his heart”—but rather in his failure to struggle at all.

In a negative way, Mr. Dorrit seems to confirm the typical mid-Victorian emphasis on the importance of personal energy for success. Dickens exemplifies this attitude in a number of fictional examples, most notably David Copperfield, who attributes his success as a professional writer to “a patient and continuous energy” (560).

Similarly, Samuel Smiles dedicates an entire chapter in Self-Help to the topic of “Energy and Courage.” Smiles writes, “It is not eminent talent that is required to insure success in any pursuit so much as purpose,--not merely the power to achieve, but the will to labor energetically and perseveringly. Hence energy of will may be defined to be the very central power of character in a man, --in a word, it is the Man himself” (203). Like other

Victorian advice authors, Smiles takes pains to show that this energetic will must be

trained to good purposes through a focus on duty, but he also demonstrates that there is no substitute for a strong, energetic will through the story of Fowell Buxton, an obstinate, unruly boy whose mother sought to gently train, rather than break, his will:

Buxton was a dull, heavy boy, distinguished for his strong self-will, which

first exhibited itself in violent, domineering, and headstrong obstinacy. . . .

but fortunately he had a wise mother who trained his will with great care,

constraining him to obey, but encouraging the habit of deciding and acting

for himself in matters which might safely be left to him. This mother

believed that a strong will, directed upon worthy objects, was a valuable

manly quality if properly guided, and she acted accordingly. (248-9)

Although he squandered his time at school in his youth, Buxton grew up to be a successful brewer, studied law at night, and entered Parliament when he was only thirty- two. He became a great leader in the abolitionist movement and attributed his success to his energetic will. Buxton himself wrote: “I am certain that the great difference between men, between the feeble and the powerful, the great and the insignificant, is energy,-- invincible determination,--a purpose once fixed, and then death or victory!” (qtd in

Smiles 251). Buxton enthusiastically endorses the power of personal energy, yet it is striking that just as Dickens suggests that a man “with strength of purpose” in Mr.

Dorrit’s position would have either successfully extricated himself and his family from prison or broken his heart in the attempt, so Buxton implies that his only alternative to victory would have been death—that he would not have given up until death. Smiles,

Buxton, and Dickens all attribute an all-or-nothing quality to energy that has fatal overtones.

Like Mr. Dorrit, the novel’s hero, Arthur Clennam, is markedly lacking in energy, yet it is puzzling that the novel neither censors Arthur’s lethargy nor indicates that his energy level ever significantly improves. At the beginning of the novel, Arthur confesses, “I have no will. That is to say . . . next to none that I can put in action now”

(35). Arthur explains that his lack of direction stems from an oppressed childhood:

Trained by main force; broken, not bent; heavily ironed with an object on

which I was never consulted and which was never mine; shipped away to

the other end of the world before I was of age, and exiled there until my

father’s death there, a year ago; always grinding in a mill I always hated;

what is to be expected from me in middle-life? Will, purpose, hope? All

those lights were extinguished before I could sound the words. (35)

Arthur sees himself as psychologically flattened and metaphorically enslaved by his childhood, “heavily ironed” and “always grinding in a mill I always hated.” Although

Arthur does find purpose in his effort to atone for his family’s secret guilt by befriending

Little Dorrit, he never loses his sense of victimhood, and his most strenuous attempts to exert his will in the novel, including his renunciation of Pet (the woman he first falls in love with on his return) and his attempt to exonerate his business partner in the wake of financial scandal by publishing his responsibility in the papers and willingly going to debtor’s prison, are marked by passivity rather than energetic action. Dickens describes

Arthur throughout Little Dorrit as a dreamer, not a doer (56, 180). Many of Arthur’s successes in the novel are largely due to the efforts of others: his research into Little

Dorrit’s affairs leads to the release of the Dorrit family from prison due to Panck’s tireless efforts in unraveling Mr. Dorrit’s debts and discovering the family’s wealth;

Arthur himself is released from debtor’s prison due solely to Mr. Meagles’s and Doyce’s work on his behalf; and his happy marriage to Little Dorrit only takes place because

Little Dorrit herself proposes to him.

Given the unresolved tensions in these two portrayals of diminished personal energy in Little Dorrit, it is no wonder that Janet Larson calls Little Dorrit Dickens’

“most profoundly divided novel, formed of many contradictions left largely unresolved”

(179), and that Brian Rosenberg suggest that it “may be the Dickensian equivalent of a

Shakespearian problem play” (35). Rosenberg continues, “not one single contradiction, but a collection of contradictory attitudes about individual and social responsibility, the potential for freedom, the justifiability of faith, and the meaning of appearances accounts for the novel’s difficulties” (37-8). One of the novel’s most intractable contradictions regarding self-control concerns the meaning of appearances and the desirability of authenticity and self-knowledge. This tension is strongest in Amy Dorrit’s character, but it is also vividly expressed in a short passage introducing one the novel’s more minor characters, the physician who attends the great financier Merdle. In this passage describing a dinner party at Physician’s house on the night that Merdle commits suicide and reveals all of his investments to be fraudulent, Dickens contrasts the smooth composure required by society with reality and truthfulness:

The guests said to themselves, whether they were conscious of it or no,

“Here is a man who really has an acquaintance with us as we are, who is

admitted to some of us every day with our wigs and paint off, who hears

the wanderings of our minds, and sees the undisguised expression of our

faces, when both are past our control; we may as well make an approach

to reality with him, for the man has got the better of us and is too strong

for us.” Therefore Physician’s guests came out so surprisingly at his

round table that they were almost natural. (735)

Recognizing that Physician sees them in their homes when they are least composed,

Physician’s wealthy and influential patients tend to drop the elaborate social pretenses at his house that they would otherwise employ elsewhere. While Bain comments in a matter-of-fact manner in The Emotions and the Will on the ways in which society suppresses the true expression of feelings—“In grown human beings living under social usages, the actual display of a feeling is not to be taken as a measure of the genuine promptings of the occasion” (469)—here Dickens rails against this enforced subterfuge.

Dickens describes Physician as a wise, compassionate man. “Where he was, something real was,” the narrator comments, contrasting Physician’s integrity with the deceptive games that characterize the society Dickens bitterly satirizes throughout the novel (735).

Yet, even at their best, the guests only “approach reality”; they are only “almost natural.”

Even as the passage seems to value emotional genuineness above composure, it links authenticity not with psychological health but with sickness and vulnerability, wandering minds and expressions distorted with pain. It suggests that the site of a true, authentic self continually recedes behind more than social maneuvering and polite conventions, casting doubt on the potential for self-knowledge. Even the body laid bare by the confusion of illness fails to reveal an authentic self.

Dickens further questions the possibility of genuine self-knowledge by indicating that Amy Dorrit’s self-denial is inseparable from self-deception.19 As she confesses to

Arthur Clennam, “I could have never been of any use, if I had not pretended a little”

(185). Throughout the novel Dickens shows that Little Dorrit’s remarkably sacrificial

care for her self-centered father and siblings is accompanied not by “a little” pretending,

but rather by a great deal of pretending—whether Little Dorrit is imaginatively excusing

her family’s faults, embracing the impoverished conditions of their lives as permanent

inmates of a debtor’s prison, or minimizing her own needs. Whereas in the passage about

Physician the novel seems to value the guests’ imperfect attempts to approach

authenticity and self-awareness, in this case, Little Dorrit’s evasion of the truth is

presented as a necessary, even virtuous, coping mechanism that enables her disciplined

self-denial.

Dutiful, self-sacrificing, and hard-working, Amy Dorrit is in many respects the epitome of the ideal, self-controlled middle-class English woman described in mid-

Victorian advice literature. She closely mirrors the selfless domestic woman Sarah

Stickney Ellis describes in her popular conduct book, The Women of England. The

properly educated young woman, Ellis writes, should be “habituated to be on the watch for every opportunity of doing good to others; making it the first and the last inquiry of every day, ‘What can I do to make my parents, my brothers, or my sisters, more happy?’”

(88). Through his representation of the psychic costs of Little Dorrit’s relationship with

19 Charlotte Rotkin also argues that Little Dorrit practices deception as a way of coping with a life of poverty and drudgery, but she also suggests that Little Dorrit encourages her father’s fantasies in order to make herself invaluable to him and to preserve her power in the family (55). I would argue that Bain’s idea of the mind as an energy system helps to show that Little Dorrit’s self-deception is a physical consequence of her emotional and physical self-denial. 54

her exploitative father, however, Dickens subtly undermines this conduct-book model of submissive self-control. Born and raised in the Marshalsea, London’s famous debtor’s prison, Amy Dorrit became her father’s primary caregiver and her older brother and sister’s surrogate mother when she was only a little child. Because her father desperately seeks to carry out the illusion that he is a genteel man of leisure despite the fact that he has been living on the charity of the other debtors in the Marshalsea for nearly twenty- five years, Little Dorrit carefully conceals the facts that both she and her older sister

Fanny work for a living and that her brother Tip has recently become an inmate in the prison due to his own debts. In order to supply her father with little delicacies, Little

Dorrit frequently goes without food and wears threadbare clothes. Dickens’ description of Little Dorrit’s tender interactions with her father are both touching and disturbing.

Although some critics have argued that their relationship is quasi-incestuous and that

Amy’s self-denial is partially motivated by a desire to preserve her power within their family,20 Amy’s relationship with her father is also interesting because Dickens treats the

question of their self-awareness of their situation ambiguously. Although Little Dorrit is relentlessly faithful in her determination to protect her father and never to express any criticism of him even though she seems to be aware that he exploits her and the

Marshalsea inmates, it is unclear how thoroughly Mr. Dorrit is deceived by his illusion and how much Little Dorrit’s reluctance to probe her situation enables her remarkably self-sacrificial life-style. Little Dorrit’s quandary lends itself to psychoanalytic and biographical readings because her extreme reticence clearly stems from her childhood

20 See Rotkin (63).

relationship with a needy father.21 However, it is not necessary to draw on Freud’s theory of repression or Dickens’ biography to understand Little Dorrit’s psychological conditions because Bain’s contemporary concept of the mind as an energy system helps to explain the degree to which Dickens suggests in Little Dorrit that the cultivation of self-control relies on self-deception.22

In Dickens and Women, Michael Slater suggests that Little Dorrit is actually remarkably self-aware for a Dickens heroine:

Dickens presents the last of his middle-period heroines, Little Dorrit, as a

young woman who, unlike Esther, is not inhibited from allowing herself to

be fully aware of her own emotions. She is conscious of the shame

intermingled with the love and pity she feels so strongly for her father; and

she cherishes, with a kind of gentle pride, her secret and seemingly

hopeless love for Arthur Clennam, witness the touching autobiographical

fable about the ‘poor tiny woman’ and the shadow which she tells to her

poor idiot child, Maggy (257).

21 For a recent biographical and Freudian reading, see James R. Kincaid’s “Blessings for the Worthy: Dickens’s Little Dorrit and the Nature of Rants.” Kincaid argues that the novel is Dickens’ unreflective expression of pity for his childhood self and a “paternal incestuous fantasy” (17). 22 In “Little Dorrit: Necessary Fictions,” Janice Carlisle thoroughly discusses the deceptions Little Dorrit practices throughout the novel, from maintaining her father’s fantasy that they are all “idle beggars together” to using her nickname to “conceal the human potentiality of her relationship with Arthur Clennam” to hiding the secret of Arthur’s birth from him (200-2). Carlisle argues that Little Dorrit’s deceptions are part of Dickens’ “inquiry into the moral status of fiction” (195): “Little Dorrit’s role can be both ambiguous and unquestionably moral because of the context, the novel, in which she appears. Her lies are peculiarly like the ‘lies’ that the novelist tells: she deals with Clennam in much the same way in which Dickens deals with the reader” (204). 56

What Michael Slater does not discuss is that Little Dorrit pays a great price for self- awareness and self-denial. Her growth has been stunted due to years of malnourishment because she saves her food for her father; the narrator highlights the fact that Little

Dorrit’s diminutive size is not hereditary by contrasting her with her older sister Fanny,

“a pretty girl of a far better figure, and much more developed than Little Dorrit, though looking much younger in the face” (99). Amy also suffers from headaches and becomes increasingly timid and reclusive as she hides her love from Clennam. Little Dorrit’s portrayal is painful precisely because Dickens does grant her a measure of self-awareness but keeps her from exploring or acting on her moments of insight. There is a sense of release after she expresses her love for Clennam in the fable about the princess and the poor tiny woman who cherishes her shadow, but Little Dorrit quickly shields herself from this emotional openness. After being able to express her desire in this small way, the light of the sunset, which Dickens uses metaphorically throughout the novel to symbolize knowledge and truth, “was so bright on Little Dorrit’s face . . . that she interposed her hand to shade it” (315). Unable to act on her love for Clennam, Little Dorrit’s impulse is to hide from the light as she turns away from the window with “the sunset very bright upon her” (315). The painful physical consequences of Little Dorrit’s repression resonate both with Bain’s explanation of the physical resources required for self-control and with his observation that sometimes it is best to express emotion because “it is the same nervous system that has to bear the cost of the conquering agency” (Emotions 444).

Dickens also grants Little Dorrit fleeting moments in which she faces the mixture of shame and love that she feels for her father and then quickly represses it in order to preserve her self-denying habits. Dickens repeatedly describes Arthur Clennam’s

response to the sight of Little Dorrit’s devotion to her father as one of sadness for this reason. As the narrator comments, “To see her hand upon his arm in mute entreaty half repressed, and her timid little shrinking figure turning away, was to see a sad, sad sight”

(98). When Little Dorrit visits Arthur to thank him for paying her brother’s debts, Arthur notes with her regret her attempts to hide her “thin, worn shoe” (183). Dickens’ elaborate explanation of Arthur’s interpretation of Little Dorrit’s impulse to hide her threadbare shoes highlights her refusal to explore the nature of her father’s selfishness:

Little Dorrit was not ashamed of her poor shoes. He knew her story, and it

was not that. Little Dorrit had a misgiving that he might blame her father,

if he saw them; that he might think, ‘why did he dine to-day, and leave

this little creature to the mercy of the cold stones!’ She had no belief that

it would have been a just reflection; she simply knew, by experience, that

such delusions did sometimes present themselves to people. It was a part

of her father’s misfortunes that they did. (183)

Here Arthur blames Little Dorrit’s father for selfishly failing to provide for her. Eager to ascribe a saintly self-denial to Little Dorrit, however, Arthur imagines that she is experiencing a complex sequence of thoughts, moments of awareness, self-pity, and self- denial, in which she recognizes herself as a poor “little creature [left] to the mercy of the cold stones” and then remorsefully defends her father from her own accusations about his selfishness. Having grown up in a debtors prison and worked as a seamstress from a young age, Little Dorrit is neither sheltered nor naïve about the way others view her father. This knotty set of mediated perceptions tracing Little Dorrit’s refusal to openly consider her father’s exploitation and her complicated response to him parallel Bain’s

recognition of the unpredictable double-life of suppressed emotions and their ability to live on in altered forms and to crop up at inopportune times.

Just as he does in his characterization of Little Dorrit, throughout the novel,

Dickens links various forms of self-discipline with the refusal of knowledge. One of

Arthur’s most strenuous attempts at self-discipline in the novel is his renunciation of Pet

(the woman he first falls in love with on his return to England after a long absence).

Even as Dickens emphasizes the painful struggle that Arthur feels due to his unrequited love for Pet and his noble resolution to treat his rival Gowan in a friendly manner,

Dickens also treats it comically as “nobody’s story,” raising the question of how well

Arthur really knows himself. Arthur’s self-denial is motivated by genuinely benevolent intentions, but many other cases in the novel that link self-discipline and a refusal to be authentic or to seek self-knowledge do not stem from good intentions. Arthur’s mother, a harshly puritanical woman who has been confined to her room for fifteen years, tries to justify her own trade-off between self-mortification and refusal of knowledge to her servant Flintwinch, complaining, “If it is any compensation to me for my long confinement in my room, that while I am shut up from all pleasant change, I am also shut up from the knowledge of some things that I may prefer to avoid knowing, why should you, of all men, grudge me that relief?” (200). And the narrator ironically contrasts smoothly controlled social surfaces with courage and free speech in a description of Mrs.

General, the stuffy governess hired by Mr. Dorrit as a companion for his daughters after he inherits a legacy and is freed from the Marshalsea in the second half of the novel:

“There was a formation of surface going on around her on an amazing scale, and it had not a flaw of courage or honest free speech in it” (537).

Little Dorrit’s final act of self-denial in the novel involves one last destruction of the truth about both her own identity and Arthur’s; with full knowledge of the document’s contents, Little Dorrit asks Arthur to burn without reading the will that would settle a legacy on herself and reveal the truth about Arthur’s birth, for which he has been searching throughout the entire novel. As Garret Stewart comments, “the violence of this

Dickensian ending is to settle for individual union at all costs, whatever unethical deceits must be prolonged, whatever truth must be deferred. . . . to the supposed selflessness of this social ethic, the self-knowledge of the hero has been entirely sacrificed ” (537).

Stewart’s point is to draw attention to many of the narrative strands that the novel has set in motion but that Dickens must nevertheless terminate in order to create closure, but his comments also highlight the fact that Little Dorrit’s efforts at self-denial and self-control force her to abruptly cut short any efforts on her part or Arthur’s to examine their situations openly.

Just as Dickens uses Little Dorrit to interrogate the ideal of self-denial in contemporary advice literature for women, he clearly links Daniel Doyce to the discourse of self-control through the parallels between his story and the mini-biographies of successful engineers and businessmen that form the bulk of Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help.

An engineer and entrepreneur and eventually Arthur’s business partner, Daniel Doyce rose from a humble childhood as the orphaned “son of a north-country blacksmith” to a life of useful influence as the owner of a small factory (206). In his openness, energetic perseverance, and loyalty to Arthur, he is the novel’s most positive portrayal of self-help and self-control. Indeed, Sally Ledger has called Docye “the moral center of the novel” because of his honest and optimistic industriousness (223). Arthur first meets Doyce at

the Circumlocution Office, Dickens’ bitter parody of government bureaucracy, where

Doyce has been trying unsuccessfully for the last dozen years to patent a particularly ingenious and useful device that he had invented. Even after a dozen years of dealing with the Barnacles who run the Circumlocution Office according to the motto, “How Not to Do It,” Doyce’s persevering optimism is undaunted. As Doyce explains to Arthur, he expects that a life of meaning and purpose should require energetic perseverance: “You hold your life on the condition that to the last you shall struggle hard for it. Every man holds a discovery on the same terms” (207). In contrast to the novel’s portrayal of Little

Dorrit, the narrator affirms that Doyce’s patience is not an idealistic refusal to face the truth, but is grounded in a reality greater than even government bureaucracy: “A composed and unobtrusive self-sustainment was noticeable in Daniel Doyce—a calm knowledge that what was true must remain true, in spite of all the Barnacles in the family ocean, and would be just the truth, and neither more nor less, when even that sea had run dry—which had a kind of greatness in it, though not of the official quality” (208). After many years of struggle, Doyce’s confidence in the value of his invention is finally justified when he successfully patents it—although Dickens points out ironically that

Doyce could not achieve this success in England, but instead had to travel to Tsarist

Russia, a land ruled not by “the great political science How not to do it,” but by a “certain barbaric Power” (702).

Despite Doyce’s honesty and eventual success, Dickens describes the activity in

Doyce and Clennam’s factory in Bleeding Heart Yard in ominously self-destructive language. The workshop is full of “benches, and vices, and tools, and straps, and wheels; which, when they were in gear with the steam engine, went tearing around as though they

had a suicidal mission to grind the business to dust and tear the factory to pieces” (285).

Even more ominously, the shaft of light that illumines Clennam’s counting house at the end of the workshop reminds Clennam of “the child’s old picture-book, where similar rays were the witnesses of Abel’s murder” (285). Dickens’ violent description of the factory tools as “suicidal” and association of the light in Clennam’s office with Cain’s murder of his brother Abel is puzzling. Clennam loves his managerial work at Doyce’s factory and executes it well. Although the factory does close for a while after Arthur invests in Merdle’s financial schemes (foolishly, yet with good intentions), Doyce never loses his trust in Arthur, and after he returns to England, he mends the business and reinstates Arthur as his business partner. Instead, Dickens’ threatening description of the factory fits in with the novel’s over-all paradoxical treatment of energy and the will and its fascination with destructive forms of energy, which is expressed most dramatically and consistently in the novel’s trio of angry women, Mrs. Clennam, Miss Wade, and

Tattycoram.

In contrast to Amy Dorrit and Daniel Doyce, these three angry, strong-willed women are striking because of how far they diverge from the period’s ideal of self- controlled, well-adjusted adulthood. As John Kasson has discovered, nineteenth-century advice books rarely counseled women to control their anger, presumably because they assumed that women tended not to struggle with anger: “while both male and female advisers urged men to curb their tempers, they apparently assumed women had less of a temper to curb and were, both by nature and social circumstances, less disputatious”

(160). In contrast, Tattycoram first appears in the novel in a fit of rage, sobbing and tearing at herself after being overlooked by her guardians, the Meagles. She confesses

that she often struggles with anger. “When my temper comes upon me, I am mad. . . . I am afraid of myself when I feel my temper coming” (42-3). Tattycoram’s lack of emotional control in this scene is described as spectacular, and her angry energy appears almost supernatural: “It was wonderful to see the fury of the contest in the girl, and the bodily struggle she made as if she were rent by the Demons of old” (42). She is an extreme example of Bain’s observation that in attempting to suppress emotions we “seem to be torn asunder by the opposing forces” (64).

While Miss Wade looks on in fascinated sympathy at Tattycoram’s rage –“as one afflicted with a diseased part might curiously watch the dissection and exposition of an analogous case” (42)—, the other characters in the novel are frequently awed by Miss

Wade’s and Mrs. Clennam’s ability to control their smoldering anger. As John Kucich notes with regard to Mrs. Clennam, “Repression can become a form of intimidation as easily as passion can, by advertising an awesome and unpredictable fund of emotional force” (211). In fact, Bain also describes “ascetic self-restraint” as evidence of the

“passion for the exercise of power” (157). When Mrs. Clennam angrily repulses Arthur’s questions about his father’s remorse before his death, her response is all the more forceful because of her emotional control. The narrator comments, “Although she said this raging, she said it in a voice so far from being beyond her control, that it was even lower than her usual tone. She also spoke with great distinctness” (64). Later in the novel,

Arthur is transfixed by Miss Wade’s similar ability to express her hatred for Pet and

Gowan in a focused, controlled manner. “The anger with which she said it, the more remarkable for being so much under her restraint, fixed Clennam’s attention, and kept him on the spot. It flashed out of her dark eyes as they regarded him, quivered in her

nostrils, and fired the very breath she exhaled; but her face was otherwise composed into a disdainful serenity” (689). Miss Wade’s self-contained anger is spellbinding, revealing a powerful will. Together, Tattycoram, Miss Wade and Mrs. Clennam represent “the troublesome question of the female will” in the mid-Victorian era (Wood 45). As Jane

Wood explains, “the notion of a woman’s weak will, evidenced in her emotional, intuitive, and impulsive nature, existed simultaneously with a suspicion that some women had too strong a will” (45). In addition, as many critics have noted, Dickens sets Miss

Wade apart from the norm even further when he hints at the same-sex desire inherent in

Tattycoram and Miss Wade’s stormy, shadowy relationship.23

Although Tattycoram, Miss Wade, and Mrs. Clennam are unusually angry and

strong-willed, they face the same psychological and physiological trade-offs between

energy and control that Arthur and Little Dorrit do and that Bain outlines in The

Emotions and the Will. Just as Bain describes emotional energy as “a fire . . . raging

within” (399), Dickens frequently links fire with Tattycoram’s, Miss Wade’s, and Mrs.

Clennam’s psychological energy.24 For example, the narrator expresses Tattycoram’s

double-edged attitude toward the Meagles, her passionate anger and tender affection for

them, by comparing her to the light reflected off the glass conservatory attached to their

house: “in its more transparent portions flashing to the sun’s rays, now like fire and now

like harmless water drops; which might have stood for Tattycoram” (209). Likewise,

Dickens associates Miss Wade’s violent, self-destructive anger with fire. In her

autobiographical chapter, “The History of a Self-Tormentor,” Miss Wade recalls refusing

23 For an overview of interpretations of Miss Wade’s sexuality, see Annamarie Jagose. 24 See John Carey for a discussion of Dickens’ attraction to fire as a “beautiful and terrible destroyer, a visible expression of pure violence” (160). 64

to return to school by threatening her foster grandmother that “I would burn my sight away by throwing myself into the fire, rather than I would endure to look at their plotting faces” (695). The details of Miss Wade’s childhood threat—not only to throw herself into the fire but specifically to burn out her eyes—express a morbid fascination with harming herself, and the other characters frequently highlight her self-destructive personality. Pancks describes Miss Wade as a woman who “writhes under her life. A woman more angry, passionate, reckless, and revengeful never lived” (566), and Miss

Wade describes herself to Arthur as a “woman who had been shut up there . . . , devouring her own heart” (687). Like fire, Tattcoram’s and Miss Wade’s inner energy is both mesmerizing and frightening.

Dickens develops this association between self-destructive energy and fire most extensively in his characterization of Mrs. Clennam, developing a powerful connection between her repressed passion and the smoldering fire in her room. Dickens begins to associate Mrs. Clennam with the fire in her room early in the novel:

The varying light of fire and candle in Mrs. Clennam’s room made the

greatest change that ever broke the dead monotony of the spot. In her two

long narrow windows, the fire shone sullenly all day, and sullenly all

night. On rare occasions it flashed up passionately, as she did; but for the

most part it was suppressed, like her, and preyed upon itself evenly and

slowly. (195)

The full force of Mrs. Clennam’s anger, her almost superhuman will, and the extent to which her suppressed emotions have preyed upon her emotionally, physically, and mentally are not revealed until the very end of the novel when the villain Rigaud

provokes her to disclose the guilty truth of Arthur’s birth, a secret she has suppressed for over forty years. Mrs. Clennam is compelled to confess in her own words that she is not

Arthur’s real mother, but that she forced his unnamed birth mother to relinquish him as a baby when Mrs. Clennam discovered an ongoing love affair between her husband, Mr.

Clennam, and Arthur’s mother. Dickens’ description of Mrs. Clennam’s emotional explosion in this moment is strikingly powerful: “With the set expression of her face all torn away by the explosion of her passion, and with a bursting from every rent feature of the smouldering fire so long pent up, she cried out, ‘I will tell it myself!’” (807).

Rigaud’s earlier description of Mrs. Clennam as “a lady who has a will that can break the weak to powder: a lady without pity, without love, implacable, revengeful, cold as the stone, but raging as the fire” (805) foreshadows this dramatic eruption of the raging fire within this stoic invalid. Throughout her confession of how she punished Arthur’s mother by cutting her off from her child and her lover until she eventually lost her mind,

Mrs. Clennam uses the biblical language of divine wrath to justify her own extreme anger against this woman: “Was it my enemy that became my footstool, were they the words of my wrath that made her shrink and quiver! . . . If she knew herself to be surrounded by insatiable vengeance and unquenchable fires, were they mine? If I threatened her, then and afterwards, with the terrors that encompassed her, did I hold them in my right hand?”

(809-10). Mrs. Clennam’s rhetorical questions indicate that she views herself as God’s righteous instrument of judgment on Arthur’s mother. This outrageous identification of her own cruel revenge with the “insatiable vengeance and unquenchable fires” of an eternal hell reveals the extent to which Mrs. Clennam has allowed herself to be deluded by her anger and has allowed her remarkable passion and energy to poison her entire life.

As Kaplan comments, “[Mrs. Clennam] represent[s] those who become the victims of their own misuse of their inherent powers. Strong of will to translate desire into energetic action, they act out of pained disappointment to make others their slaves. In doing so they make slaves of themselves, bound in their own fetters of psychological limitation”

(Kaplan 180). Bain’s observations on revenge and the irascible personality also apply suggestively to Mrs. Clennam and Miss Wade: “the effect of an injury received is to suspend for the time the feelings of compassion, sympathy, and dutiful respect, and leave the field free to the other passions. It is declaring the individual an outlaw, withdrawing the barriers of a flood always ready to overflow, opening a battery constantly charged”

(168). Although these women are able to habitually “arrest the diffusive stimulation of the muscles, so as to put on a calm exterior while a fire is raging within” (Bain 399), living on the verge of emotional conflagration warps their perceptions and threatens to destroy them.

Mrs. Clennam’s delusions are recognized by the narrator, who remarks that, “It was curious how she seized the occasion to argue with some invisible opponent. Perhaps with her own better sense, always turning upon herself and her own deception” (379), and also by her business partner Jeremiah Flintwinch, who accuses her of “cheat[ing] yourself into making out, that you didn’t do all this business because you were a rigorous woman, all slight, and spite, and power, and unforgivingness, but because you were a servant and a minister, and were appointed to do it” (815).25 Mrs. Clennam is one of Dickens’ most

25 Dickens’ description of Flintwinch’s appearance is a comical illustration of the physical costs of emotional repression: “His neck was so twisted, that the knotted ends of his white cravat usually dangled under one ear; his natural acerbity and energy, always contending with a second nature of habitual repression, gave his features a swollen and suffused look; and altogether, he had a weird appearance of having hanged himself at one 67

memorable examples of the power of emotion and inner energy to warp the will. To quote Bain, her anger and disappointment act “like destroying Vandals” (46) and “bar out the impressions of reality” (47). Although Dickens portrays her passionate energy as phenomenally effective—even allowing her to overcome fifteen years of paralysis in order to walk to the prison to beg Little Dorrit to keep Arthur’s identity a secret and, moreover, effectively persuading Little Dorrit to do so—it is also the case that, just as

Bain warns, Mrs. Clennam’s passion leads to remorseless self-immolation. On the way home from the prison, Mrs. Clennam watches her house collapse, and until her death three years later, she is unable to move or speak: “the rigid silence she had so long held was evermore enforced upon her” (827).

It is part of the pessimism of this novel that Mrs. Clennam’s character appears to reveal the dangers inherent in attempts to cultivate self-control, rather than serving as an example of an extremely aberrant and strong-willed woman. In Victorian Will, John

Reed argues too optimistically, “Ultimately [Dickens’] picture of the will was a familiar one—that the will is untrustworthy because it can be corrupted by selfishness; hence he sanctioned self-renunciation as the true course to freedom. The free and strong will subordinates itself to duty” (245). According to Reed, Dickens uses Amy Dorrit’s character to show that true freedom is found in unselfishness (269). Yet Reed neglects the fact that Amy is not completely free to examine her situation openly, and he fails to consider how problematic the notion of duty is in the novel. Through Mrs. Clennam,

Dickens shows that the will is so untrustworthy that it even corrupts ideas about duty. time or other, and of having gone about ever since halter and all, exactly as some timely hand had cut him down” (52). Flintwinch’s effort to repress his energy twists his neck and causes his face to swell, as if he might someday spontaneously combust just as Krook does in Bleak House.

Tattycoram’s return to the Meagles at the end of the novel drives home the insufficiency of the idea of duty as a guide to self-control because of the tendency of individuals to self-deception.26 When Tattycoram gladly but remorsefully returns to the

Meagles with the iron box that contains the secret of Arthur’s birth, she promises Mr.

Meagles that she will count to “five and twenty thousand” before she ever gives in to her anger again. Mr. Meagles, having seen that counting to five and twenty is not effective in helping Tattycoram control her anger, advises another strategy for self-control.27 Calling her attention to Little Dorrit’s example of selflessness, he tells Tattycoram to keep her eyes fixed on her duty to others: “Duty, Tattycoram. Begin it early, and do it well; and there is no antecedent to it, in any origin or station, that will tell against us with the

Almighty, or with ourselves” (846). Mr. Meagles’s kindly but unqualified endorsement of duty is startling to the reader because it follows closely on the revelation of Mrs.

Clennams’ cruelty based on her deluded sense of duty. Like his quirky use of the word

“practical” to describe his own disinterested kindness, Mr. Meagles’s sense of “duty” fails to account for the wide variety of selfish definitions of duty available to others.28

26 Tattycoram’s character was inspired by a real woman named Rhena Dollard who lived at Urania Cottage, the home for women that Dickens helped to manage. Like Tattycoram, Rhena struggled to control her temper and threatened to run away from the home (Shatto 62). The ambivalent attitude toward self-control that Dickens expressed in his involvement with Urania Cottage is a study in itself. 27 Jenny Bourne Taylor suggests that the “radical duality” of Tattycoram’s personality (between passion and repression) recalls famous nineteenth-century cases of split personality (353). 28 Little Dorrit’s treatment of duty contrasts, for example, with Sarah Stickney Ellis’s representation of duty in The Women of England, where she presents it as an infallible defense against evil: “No human mind can set a bound, or prescribe a measure, to its voluntary deviations from the line of duty. We have been supposing a case in which these deviations are extremely minute, and yet so numerous as to form as it were a circle around the heart—a circle of evil” (319).

If Dickens had simply wanted to expose hypocrisy and corruption in Little Dorrit, he would not have needed to explore the dark side of psychological energy so extensively. Rather, his investigation of the costs of psychological energy and control in

Little Dorrit and the parallels between his work and Bain’s highlight Dickens’ sensitivity to one of mid-Victorian psychology’s most pressing dilemmas, which was how to reconcile the experience of an intelligent will with a materialist view of the mind. Bain’s argument in The Emotions and the Will that the will is comprised of two foundational elements, spontaneous activity and the association of actions and feelings, had significant philosophical ramifications for his Victorian readers. When Bain reduces the will to completely physical elements determined by the scientific law of causation, he engages head-on with a troubling, long-lasting debate in Victorian culture about human nature and the necessity of a free, transcendent will to ensure moral values.29 As Lorraine Daston

explains, “The central issue of the British controversy over the new psychology was

whether the firsthand experience of purpose and value affirmed by the exercise of

volition could be ultimately reduced to the physicalist, determinist framework provided

by late-nineteenth-century science in general and by physiology in particular” (194).

(Daston argues convincingly that this issue was never solved.) The tensions present in

Bain’s and Dickens’ celebration of energy and willpower and their simultaneous

recognition of the dangerous potential of energy can be seen as evidence of a shifting

29 As late as 1880, the psychological journal Mind, which Bain himself had founded, was still printing debates over Bain’s treatment of the idea of free will. For the Catholic writer W.G. Ward, conflicts of the will were decided by the free exercise of a transcendent soul: “His soul—such is the fact which he recognizes—has on certain occasions the power of redressing the balance of motives, but throwing its own self- originated force into this of that scale” (269). According to Ward, the stakes in this argument were very high: “There can be no such thing as Theistic morality without Free Will” (273).

cultural moment in which both psychologists and novelists were at work imagining how older ideas about self-control might be reconciled to a materialistic view of the will, a new type of will based not in a transcendent mental faculty or spiritual capacity but grounded in the body’s spontaneous activity. Together, Dickens’ and Bain’s views of emotional energy as an amoral, explosive, unpredictable, and potentially perception- warping force demonstrate the inadequacy of theories of self-control based simply on notions of inhibition, self-denial, and devotion to duty.

Chapter Two: Far From the Madding Crowd, Victorian Theories of Consciousness, and the Role of Attention in Self-Control

He was altogether too much for her, and Bathsheba seemed as one who, facing a reviving wind, finds it to blow so strongly that it stops the breath. He drew near and said, “I must be leaving you.” He drew nearer still. A minute later and she saw his scarlet form disappear amid the ferny thicket, almost in a flash, like a brand swiftly waved. That minute’s interval had brought the blood beating to her face, set her stinging as if aflame to the very hollows of her feet, and enlarged emotion to a compass which quite swamped thought. It had brought upon her a stroke resulting, as did that of Moses in Horeb, in a liquid stream—here a stream of tears.

—Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

While Dickens portrays the anger of the three strong-willed women in Little

Dorrit as an excess of energy with profound internal consequences, causing psychological vandalism and warped perceptions, Thomas Hardy’s representation of

Bathsheba Everdene, the similarly strong-minded, fiery heroine of Far From the

Madding Crowd, emphasizes instead the external forces that overpower her will, dissolve

the boundaries of her personality, and deprive her of self-control. Intelligent, energetic,

and independent, Bathsheba takes pride in her singleness and self-sufficiency, which give her a sense of control over her own life; she “nourish[es] a secret contempt for those girls who were the slaves of the first good-looking young fellow who should choose to salute them” (239). 30 Throughout the novel, however, Hardy traces the irresistible influences of

30 For this chapter, I used the 2000 Penguin edition of Far From the Madding Crowd, edited by Rosemarie Morgan. This edition presents the holograph manuscript of the novel which Hardy sent to Leslie Stephen for serial publication in the Cornhill Magazine. This manuscript was never returned to Hardy, and prior to the Penguin edition, all editions of Far From the Madding Crowd were based on the Cornhill text (Morgan xxxiii). Hardy’s manuscript version is especially interesting for this chapter because, as Morgan explains in Cancelled Words and in her notes, many of the changes that he and his editor made to the novel softened his original portrayal of Bathsheba’s sexuality and 72

the novel’s other characters and the environment itself over Bathsheba’s body and mind.

Just as Dickens’ portrayal of psychological energy reflects the challenges to the idea of self-control posed by a physiological model of mind as an energy system, so Hardy’s heightened awareness of the intimate connections between the environment, the body’s sensations and emotions, and the mind’s stream of consciousness engages with mid-

Victorian attempts to develop a physiology of consciousness. As this chapter explores, in

Far From the Madding Crowd, Hardy’s portrayal of the role of attention in mediating these relationships also resonates with the efforts of contemporary psychologists to reconcile a materialistic model of the mind with the pursuit of rational self-control through the voluntary activity of the attention.

In the passage above, Hardy represents Bathsheba’s loss of emotional and mental control as an intensely physical event influenced by a powerfully sensuous setting and

Sergeant Troy’s mesmerizing power over Bathsheba’s attention. In this famous scene set in the hollow amid the ferns, Troy treats Bathsheba to a dazzling display of swordsmanship. With awesome speed and dexterity, Troy’s sword cuts through the air so closely to Bathsheba’s body that, “had it been possible for the edge of the sword to leave in the air a permanent substance wherever it flew past, the space left untouched would have been a complete mould of Bathsheba’s figure” (162). Thrilled and terrified,

Bathsheba is “overcome by a hundred tumultuous feelings”; her body is weakened and her mind is scattered, as she “abstractedly sat down on a tuft of heather” (163). She experiences Troy’s presence as a physical force that, like a strong wind, takes her breath away. Finally, the kiss that occurs within the “minute’s interval” overcomes Bathsheba’s

“ferocity,” character traits that sometimes undermine her self-control through an excess of emotion but that also contribute to her remarkable will-power.

emotional and mental self-control, causing the well-defined borders of her body (which

Hardy highlights earlier when Troy traces them with his sword) to symbolically rupture in a burst of tears. In addition to Troy’s powerful presence, Hardy takes pains to show how every aspect of this sensuous setting—from the “plump and succulent” weeds, to the warm afternoon sun touching the ferns “with its long, luxuriant rays,” to the ferns’ “soft feathery arms caressing her up to her shoulders”—creates a mood that aids in Troy’s seduction of Bathsheba (159). Indeed, while the soft ferns merely brush the outside of her body at the beginning of the scene, by the end of scene, Hardy blurs the distinctions between Bathsheba and the setting by describing her as “aflame” (like the setting sun),

“to the very hollows of her feet” (a reference that echoes the hollow amid the ferns), and

“swamped” with emotion (like the hollow’s softly “yielding” floor of moss and grass).

As her physical and mental boundaries melt under the influence of both the setting and

Troy’s magnetic charm, Bathsheba becomes ready to abandon herself to an unexamined, uncharacteristic passion and to abdicate control of her life and property through marriage to Troy. As the narrator suggests elsewhere, Bathsheba’s state of mind in this passage reveals “how entirely the soul is the slave of the body, the ethereal spirit dependent for its quality upon the tangible flesh and blood” (310).

Throughout the novel, Hardy uses scenes like Troy’s seduction of Bathsheba amid the ferns to question individual agency and the possibility of achieving mental and emotional self-control against the onslaught of environmental stimuli on the body’s senses. In this respect, the novel’s characters often seem to reflect the more extreme views of contemporary materialist psychologists who argued that humans are simply conscious automatons, merely biological machines driven by involuntary reflexes and

unconscious instincts in whom, as William James succinctly explains, consciousness is “a mere collateral product of our nervous processes, unable to react upon them any more than a shadow reacts on the steps of the traveler whom it accompanies” (“Automata” 1).

However, despite all of the moments in which Hardy portrays Bathsheba’s mental or spiritual self to be enslaved to the body, he also represents her as capable of exerting immense self-control under extreme suffering, as he does, for example, when she stoically prepares Troy’s body for burial after his sudden, violent death. In his later novels, Hardy’s portrayal of the connection between his characters and their environment—which is always mediated through their bodies and increasingly driven by inherited tendencies—emphasizes their inability to ultimately assert control over their lives. Far From the Madding Crowd, however, presents a more optimistic picture of self-control and self-determination. It is one of the few Hardy novels that ends happily, when Bathsheba, one of Hardy’s most impulsive and strong-minded heroines, marries one of his most contentedly self-controlled heroes, the “intensely humane” shepherd

Gabriel Oak.31 In contrast to later characters such as Tess and Jude, who are doomed

from the beginning, Hardy endows Bathsheba and Gabriel with the power to create their

31 Critics disagree on how happy the ending is, but Susan Beegel argues, “We should sharpen our reading of the mature tragedy, the fulfillment of Hardy’s early pessimism, by appreciating Far From the Madding Crowd’s early, though fragile, optimism. It is the novelist’s fullest treatment of a rare, ideal love, written when Hardy, on the brink of his first marriage, still believed in both the existence of such love and the possibility of fulfilling it” (Beegel 209). Other critics suggest that Bathsheba and Gabriel’s marriage, which is based on the “good-fellowship” of “tried friends” (348), reflects Hardy’s hopefulness at the beginning of his own marriage in 1874. In Victorian Will, John Reed suggests that in Far From the Madding Crowd Hardy explores “the mechanics of consequence” set in motion by impulsive actions (349). Reed argues that the novel’s events are determined by character traits and circumstances, but I would argue that Hardy grants a bit more efficacy and spontaneity to the act of attention. 75

own happy ending, despite the powerful forces that undermine their efforts at self- control.

Hardy, Evolution, and Psychology

Because Hardy’s early interest in both evolutionary biology and psychology is well-documented and the Literary Notebooks demonstrate his ongoing interest in science and psychology, it is not surprising that his conflicted treatment of self-control and self- determination finds ready parallels in then-current psychological literature.32 In the mid-

to late-nineteenth century, physiological psychologists often attempted to resolve the

apparent contradiction between the mind’s dependence on the body and the common-

sense experience of volition and self-control through an emphasis on the role of voluntary

attention. As Lorraine Daston argues, the “theory of voluntary attention, adopted in

modified form by Carpenter, Sully, Ward, James, Seth, and others, opened a loophole for

moral conduct in the deterministic façade of psycho-physiology” (202).33 William

32 See Lennart Bjork’s Psychological Vision and Social Criticism in the Novels of Thomas Hardy for a discussion of the “Diagrams shewing Human Passions, Mind, & Character” that Hardy drew in 1863 based on his reading of the philosopher Charles Fourier and kept throughout his life (29-53). In his autobiography, Hardy writes that “as a young man he had been among the earliest acclaimers of The Origin of Species” (158), and later in life he identified “Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Comte, Hume, Mill” as the writers who had influenced him the most (Robinson 128). 33 In Suspensions of Perception, Jonathan Crary describes the newly central role of the attention in notions of subjectivity and psychological research during the second half of the nineteenth century. Crary demonstrates the ideological importance of empirical research on the attention, arguing, “the attempt to determine empirically the specific physiological and practical conditions under which a perceiving subject could be most acutely attentive to the world, or could stabilize and objectify the contents and relations within that world through an exercise of sovereign will, would also be a claiming of that subject’s self-possession as potential master and conscious organizer of that perceptible world” (45). Yet, he notes that such empirical psychological investigations demonstrated that attention was “continuous with states of distraction, reverie, dissociation, and trance” 76

James, for instance, writes, “the whole drama of the voluntary life hinges on the amount of attention, slightly more or slightly less, which rival motor ideas may receive”

(Principles 453). In fact, with his simultaneous emphasis on the fluid, transitory, involuntary aspects of the stream of consciousness as a reflection of the brain’s activity and the power of focused moments of voluntary attention, the writings of William James on consciousness and the will provide an apt parallel to Hardy’s portrayal of self-control in Far From the Madding Crowd. Far from the Madding Crowd anticipates James in highlighting the roles of attention and temperament in mediating the interactions between the mind, the body, and the environment, and, because both Hardy’s and James’s investigations of consciousness, attention, and self-control were formulated in response to

Darwinism, reading James’s evolutionary account of consciousness alongside of Hardy’s novel illuminates an important aspect of Hardy’s engagement with psychology and evolutionary biology.

Thus, in addition to exploring this previously uninvestigated parallel between

Hardy and Victorian psychology, this chapter intervenes in the critical debate surrounding Hardy’s philosophical responses to Darwinism. Two recent discussions of consciousness in Hardy’s fiction also connect his masterful depiction of “the sensory intimacy, the implicit symbiosis, between characters and their habitat” with the concerns of contemporary Victorian physiological psychology (David James 140).34 In an article

(46). Crary’s cultural-historical argument that the attention could only tenuously contribute to a controlled self parallels my reading of Far From the Madding Crowd. 34 As Robert Schweik notes, the challenges of unraveling the complexity of Hardy’s scientific and philosophical influences present almost limitless interpretive possibilities: “He was a voracious reader, widely inquisitive, but usually skeptical and hesitant to embrace wholeheartedly any of the various systems of ideas current in his day. Furthermore—as Hardy many times insisted—the views he did incorporate in his texts 77

on Hardy’s presentation of faciality, William Cohen aligns Hardy with Herbert Spencer and G.H. Lewes in treating perception and interiority as material processes, underscoring the fundamental role of the body and the environment (rather than the spirit) in subjectivity (438). Arguing that Hardy portrays the face as “a tissue of interwoven strata through which physical forms encounter and transform mental and spiritual entities”

(441), Cohen also links Hardy with twentieth-century theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix

were unsystematic and inconsistent ‘impressions’” (54). Other recent studies of Hardy’s engagement with contemporary psychology include J. B. Bullen’s exploration of Hardy’s treatment of perception and use of visual symbolism, in which he traces Hardy’s nuanced responses to the question: “To what extent is human consciousness moulded by the pictures which are fed to it by the eye?” (11). Bullen quotes Spencer, Bain, and John Stuart Mill to show that like Hardy, many mid-nineteenth century psychologists greatly emphasized the “importance of the eye in the development of the mind” (66-7). Angelique Richardson investigates Darwin’s and Hardy’s views of sexual selection and concludes that “while he covered similar ground to evolutionary scientists, he resisted their investment in the determining role of biology, and his work expresses a final lack of resolution in explaining the social and sexual in terms of nature” (158). Sally Shuttleworth describes how Hardy’s apparently grotesque portrayal of Little Father Time in Jude the Obscure actually reflects current views on heredity and the growing prevalence of child suicide. Anna Henchman notes that Hardy’s frequent comparisons between star-gazing and observing other people demonstrate his interest in the perceptual challenges that attend astronomical observations and understanding the interiors of other people’s minds. In another study of Hardy’s use of astronomy, Anne Dewitt argues that Hardy concludes that a reconciliation of science and literature is impossible because science cannot speak to the emotional elements of human life: “his habit of transforming the scientific writings that he uses so as to intensify their bleakness suggests that his fundamental assumption about the natural world is that it is hostile to many aspects of human life” (489). In Hardy the Physician: Medical Aspects of the Wessex Tradition, Tony Fincham describes Hardy’s detailed depictions of psychosomatic illnesses, arguing that “Hardy maintained a lifelong interest in the power the psyche exercised over the soma, whether explained in the old terms of witchcraft and spells or in the new terminology of scientific medicine” (157). Fincham calculates that a whopping 92.5% of the premature deaths in Wessex can be attributed to psychosomatic causes (131). Fincham defines deaths with psychosomatic causes very broadly as any death “attributable to the mental state or personality of the victim,” including alcohol-related deaths (124). Comparing his Wessex statistics with statistics from his own medical practice, Fincham argues that Hardy was exceptionally sensitive to the impact of psychological suffering on the body, an insight that Fincham argues is as badly needed in the twenty-first century as it was in Hardy’s day. 78

Guattari who conceive of Hardy’s characters as primarily “material objects, as agents of sensory interaction with the world, rather than as beings who transcend it” (437). Cohen illuminates Hardy’s presentation of thought as a physical process, his synesthetic portrayal of the senses, and his interweaving of people and landscape. In “Hearing

Hardy: Soundscapes and the Profitable Reader,” David James analyzes Hardy’s efforts to

“align our reading experience itself with the responsiveness of specific characters to their ambient surroundings” (133). James shows that Hardy drew on a wide variety of literary techniques, from his often praised pictorialism to a nuanced “acoustic mapping of landscapes,” in order to depict “the interaction of [his character’s] cerebral and somatic responses to the land” and to evoke similarly visceral impressions in his readers (134).

Both of these studies compare contemporary psychology with Hardy’s portrayal of the interconnections of mind, body, and environment to reinforce an overall impression of

Hardy’s characters as remarkably permeable subjects, profoundly swayed by their bodily senses, and extremely vulnerable to their environments.

Critics disagree about the possibility for self-determination in Hardy’s fiction, given his focus on the involuntary, reflexive aspects of consciousness in combination with his often pessimistically expressed Darwinian views. Hardy identified a tragic disparity between the highly evolved human capacity to experience emotion and the often brutal struggle for survival in nature and civilization. In 1881 Hardy wrote in his notebook, “After infinite trying to reconcile a scientific view of life with the emotional and spiritual, so that they may not be interdestructive, I come to the following: . . . The emotions have no place in a world of defect, and it is a cruel injustice that they should have developed in it” (Life 153). Again in 1889, Hardy recorded the “woeful fact—that

the human race is too extremely developed for its corporeal conditions, the nerves being evolved to an activity abnormal in such an environment. . . . This planet does not supply the materials for happiness to higher existences” (Life 227). In light of these comments,

Hardy’s exquisite ability to recreate the intimate relationship between setting and state of mind seems almost sadistic, and with good reason many critics who attend to Hardy’s response to nineteenth-century science have focused on the bleaker aspects of Hardy’s

Darwinian vision. Roger Robinson, for instance, writes that Hardy never wavered in his agreement with “the fundamental hopelessness of Darwin’s ideas” (128), and Robert

Schweik explains that “it was the plight of mankind trapped in a universe oblivious to human feelings and ethical aspirations that not only most powerfully moved Hardy but also set him apart from many of his contemporaries who saw some ‘grandeur’ or

‘progress’ in evolutionary change” (63). One notable exception is Gillian Beer, who explains Hardy’s portrayal of the conflict between joy and pain in the human condition as the “contradiction of plot and writing in Hardy’s work. We are filled with intolerable apprehensions of what future events may bring, while yet the text in process awakens us to sensation full of perceptual pleasure” (222). Beer concludes that Darwin’s work reveals a similar tension: “[Hardy] shared with Darwin that delight in material life in its widest diversity, the passion for particularity, and for individuality and plenitude which is the counter-element in Darwin’s narrative and theory” (240).35 Together, Robinson,

35 There are many excellent studies of Hardy and Darwinism, but they tend to focus on the later novels—Jude the Obscure and Tess of the D’Urbervilles, in particular. Peter Morton’s detailed analysis of contemporary theories of heredity in Tess is a good example. Far From the Madding Crowd, I would argue, tends to ignore questions about heredity. Hardy’s interaction with Darwinism is more evident in the novel’s portrayal of a human-animal continuum of consciousness (as Krielkamp explores), in its general 80

Schwiek, and Beer suggest that while Hardy’s portrayal of consciousness in a post-

Darwin world highlights the human capacity for both suffering and joy, it also tends to cast his characters in the role of passive subjects of sensation. As Schweik notes, much of the emotional suffering that Hardy’s characters experience is intensified by their realization that, although life is not what it should be, they are powerless to change it.

However, Hardy claimed that he was not a pessimist, but an evolutionary meliorist who sought to encourage positive change through honestly acknowledging the world’s problems and treating others with loving-kindness. As he writes in the preface to the Wessex edition of his Late Lyrics:

Whether the human and kindred animal races survive till the exhaustion or

destruction of the globe, or whether these races perish and are succeeded

by others before that conclusion comes, pain to all upon it, tongued or

dumb, shall be kept down to a minimum by loving-kindness, operating

through scientific knowledge, and actuated by the modicum of free will

conjecturally possessed by organic life when the mighty necessitating

forces . . . happen to be in equilibrium, which may or may not be often.

(“Preface” 53)

Here Hardy offers a vision of ethical action that aligns with a familiar model of Victorian self-control—selfless acts guided by knowledge and energized by free will—, yet

Hardy’s endorsement of free will in this passage is hardly emphatic and is couched in doubtful qualifications. The possibility of free will is merely “conjectural,” and the theoretically enabling conditions “may or may not” occur frequently. At best, Hardy exploration of the interactions between consciousness and environment, and in its exploration of free will and determinism.

suggests that the evolutionary universe allows for only a “modicum” of free will. His comments raise the question of whether he depicts the conditions necessary for a small amount of free will in Far From the Madding Crowd. Does Hardy reconcile his portrayal of the feeling of existence as a stream of sensations dependent on the body’s responses to the environment with the ideal of directing the thoughts through “scientific knowledge”—let alone “actuating free will”?

The Stream of Consciousness, Attention, and the Potential for Self-Control

As I discussed in the introduction, one of the most important results of nineteenth- century research into the reflex action of the nervous system was to break down earlier, rigid distinctions between the mind and the body. Physiologists believed that much of the brain’s activity was carried out automatically, and they often spoke of consciousness itself as the product of exclusively involuntary, physical causes, although the actual relationship between consciousness and the body remained mysterious. As Thomas

Huxley explained,

We class sensations along with emotions, and volitions, and thoughts,

under the common head of states of consciousness. But what

consciousness is, we know not; and how it is that anything so remarkable

as a state of consciousness comes about as the result of irritating nervous

tissue, is just as unaccountable as any other ultimate fact of nature.

(Lessons in Elementary Physiology, qtd in Rylance 77)

Yet physiological psychologists felt confident that such a causal relationship did exist and would prove to be the foundation for a truly scientific study of the mind. As William

James wrote, “the real thing to aim at is a causal account; and I must say that appears to lie (provisionally at least) in the region of the laws as yet unknown of the connexion of the mind with the body. There is the subject for a ‘science’ of psychology!” (qtd in

Daston, 205). Evolutionary biologists and physiological psychologists like Huxley and

James left a lasting impact on future discussions of consciousness in their description of the intimate relationships between consciousness, the body, and the environment, as well as the fluid, transient qualities of states of mind. Although William James is generally credited with coining the term “stream of consciousness” in the 1880s, it was actually the physiological psychologist George Henry Lewes who first wrote of “the general stream of consciousness” in 1859 in The Physiology of Common Life. As Rick Rylance notes,

Lewes refers to the stream of consciousness not as a disembodied phenomena of pure

“mental freewheeling,” but as an experience inextricably linked with the sensory world

(11). The term is embedded in Lewes’s discussion of unconscious sensations: although we may not perceive many of the sounds and sights surrounding us because we are not paying attention to them, they nonetheless affect our thoughts. Thus, in Lewes’s example, only a mother may wake when she hears her child cry while her sister sleeps on undisturbed in the same room, but “could we look into the mind of the sleeping sister, we should doubtless find that the sensation excited by the child’s cry had merged itself in the general stream of Consciousness, and perhaps modified her dreams” (61). In the same text, Lewes also writes of the “general stream of sensation which constitutes his [the reader’s] feeling of existence—the consciousness of himself as a sensitive being” (63).

Lewes’s concept of the “stream of sensation,” which arises from “the massive yet obscure sensibilities of the viscera,” emphasizes even further the bonds between consciousness

and the physical body (63). Because Lewes always treats thoughts and sensations as inextricably linked, his work furnishes a natural point of comparison with Hardy. Like

Lewes, James ties the stream of consciousness to the kaleidoscopic activity of the brain in response to its environment, but he also develops further the image of the general liquidity of thought in contrast to the fleeting stopping-points of voluntary attention, as well as the influence of temperament on consciousness and the will.

When Hardy describes Bathsheba’s soul as the slave of her body, he taps into this cultural dialogue on the nature of embodied consciousness and its implications for self- control. While the goal of rigorous mental self-control was frequently extolled by

Victorian writers, it was almost always considered to be intensely difficult to attain, especially when regarded in light of evolutionary psychology. In The Descent of Man,

Darwin writes that “the highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts, and ‘not even in inmost thought to think again the sins that made the past so pleasant to us’” (101). However, Darwin theorizes that individuals can only achieve mental self-control incrementally through the hereditary “transmission of moral tendencies,” and his recourse to heredity is tempered by the recognition that

“bad tendencies” can just as easily be passed down. Even in the context of the verse that

Darwin quotes above from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, the repentant Guinevere’s memory immediately goes “slipping back upon the golden days,” when she first met

Lancelot. Tennyson’s poem bears out the observations of the nineteenth-century psychologist Alexander Bain, who suggests that the ability to “control the intellectual trains” requires an “almost superhuman” will (Emotions 412).

Because Bain largely ignored evolutionary theories in early editions of The

Emotions and the Will, he actually tends to express greater confidence about the possibility of directing the thoughts than other Victorian writers who engaged more fully with evolution. Herbert Spencer, on the other hand, essentially denies the possibility of mental self-control, defining the ego as merely the undirected succession of states of consciousness, which are wholly determined inwardly by the flux of remembered experiences and outwardly by changes in the environment (86). Spencer points to the slippery, fluctuating nature of consciousness—the “continuous differentiation and integration” of “every passing process of thought”—as evidence that greatly complicates simple conceptions of the freedom of the will and even of a controlling ego (84).

According to Spencer, the fact that the stream of consciousness negates free will highlights its evolutionary benefits:

Free-will, did it exist, would be entirely at variance with that beneficent

necessity displayed in the progressive evolution of the correspondence

between the organism and its environment. That gradual advance in the

moulding of inner relations to outer relations . . . would be arrested, did

there exist anything which otherwise determined their cohesions. (87)

Like Hardy, Spencer describes the relationship between consciousness and the environment as a dynamic interplay of constant, subtle adjustments which is mediated through the body. Hardy also frequently portrays the passing stream of thought as a nearly insurmountable obstacle to self-control. In contrast to Hardy’s tragic sense of the possible disjunctions between feeling and states of existence, however, Spencer identifies

a growing correspondence between consciousness and the environment as long as the organism cannot interfere with the natural evolutionary process of adaptation.

Yet not all psychologists influenced by evolution considered the slippery quality of thought to be a barrier to mental self-control. In “Are We Automata?” William James uses the data of evolution to argue against the conscious-automaton theories supported by

Spencer and other materialist psychologists. “Consciousness,” he writes, “has been slowly evolved in the animal series, and resembles in this all organs that have a use” (3).

James explains that consciousness is best understood as a forum for choice, an opportunity to consider two or more options and choose the best one, the one that offers the best chance for the organism’s survival. Despite its spontaneous, fluctuating nature, consciousness offers an opportunity to exert control by focusing the attention on one choice or the other. In this way, it acts as a check to the human nervous system, whose physiological complexity and “hair-trigger organization” renders it an otherwise “happy- go-lucky, hit-or-miss affair” (5). Unlike a more primitive brain which has developed to perform a limited number of functions, without the safeguard of consciousness, the highly developed human brain is “as likely to do the crazy as the sane thing at any given moment” (5). While we may often experience consciousness as slippery and passive, it is constantly at work in focusing the attention (most often by choosing not to pay attention to most of the myriad stimuli bombarding our senses). According to James, attention is what allows us to make sense of sensory perceptions, to reason, and to make ethical choices.

These minute acts of attention that influence perception, reasoning, and ethical choices are creative and world-building. They shape the character by choosing from

possible future selves: “When he debates, Shall I commit this crime? choose that profession? accept that office, or marry this fortune?—his choice really lies between one of several equally possible future Selves. . . . The problem with the man is less what act he shall now choose to do, than what kind of a being he shall now resolve to become”

(13). And, on a much larger scale, James asserts that these acts of attention have directed evolution to shape the world we live in:

We may even, by our reasonings, unwind things back to that black and

jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms which

science calls the only real world. But all the while the world we feel and

live in, will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative

strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, as the sculptor extracts his

statue by simply rejecting the other portions of the stone” (14).

James represents consciousness as selecting details out of the “moving clouds of swarming atoms” that make up the sensory world in order to create a world in which humans can function.

For James, consciousness, both on an individual level and on a species level across generations, artificially limits and orders the outside world, just as a sculptor models a form out of an indefinite number of possible forms contained in a mass of stone or as a painter organizes the light and color of a landscape:

Out of what is in itself an undistinguishable, swarming continuum, devoid

of distinction or emphasis, our senses make for us, by attending to this

motion and ignoring that, a world full of contrasts, of sharp accents, of

abrupt changes, in a word, of picturesque light and shade.

If the sensations we receive from a given organ have their causes thus

picked out for us by the conformation of the organ’s termination, the

attention, on the other hand, out of all the sensations yielded, picks out

certain ones as worthy of its notice and suppresses all the rest.

(“Automata” 9)

This limiting and ordering process has two steps: the sensory organs first select information, and then the attention further winnows out objects of interest.

This choosing, focused aspect of consciousness is constantly in play, but James also emphasizes the fluid, shifting nature of the sensations and the thoughts. For instance, he describes feeling as “a sonorous plate”:

. . . the number of Chladni’s sand-figures it will furnish is as inexhaustible

as the whimsies which may turn up in the brain. But as the physicist’s

finger pressing the plate here or there determines nodal points that throw

the sand into shapes of relative fixity, so may the accentuating finger of

consciousness deal with the fluctuating eddies in the cerebral cortex”

(“Automata” 14-15).

Often, rather than fixing the “fluctuating eddies” of the brain, James describes consciousness as simply reflecting them. For James, one of the defining elements of consciousness is that it is always changing: “But as the brain-tension shifts from one relative state of equilibrium to another, like the gyrations of a kaleidoscope, now rapid and now slow, is it likely that its faithful psychic concomitant is heavier-footed than itself, and that it cannot match each one of the organ’s irradiations by a shifting inward iridescence of its own?” (Principles 235). Like an irradiating, iridescent, gyrating

kaleidoscope, consciousness is constantly in motion, and while James famously pictures it as a flowing river or stream, he also makes clear that thought does not all flow in one direction. Rather, there are lots of mini-currents and eddies, or, in a series of analogies that recall a light-show, James also writes of the activity in the “footlights” or “fringe” of consciousness (Briefer 157, 163), and the “meteoric shower of images and suggestions, irrelevant to the main line of thought, the continual presence of which every one who has once had his interest awakened in the subject, will without difficulty recognize in himself

(“Automata” 15).

In describing the frenetic activity of the consciousness, James piles on the metaphors; the previous passage continues: “Ordinarily these perish in being born, but if one by chance saunters into the mind, which is related to the dominant pursuit of the moment, presto! It is pounced upon and becomes part of the empirical Ego” (“Automata”

15). Here he depicts a feral thought as a nonchalant little animal sauntering into the mind and getting pounced on by the predatory ego. Summarizing the continuum of consciousness that he has described between randomly flowing activity and selective focus, James writes, “As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird’s life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings” (Psychology 243). As Crary comments, “James is of particular interest for his emphasis on the primacy of the ‘stream’ and at the same time for situating attention, that which figuratively freezes the stream, as an indispensable activity ‘without which experience is an utter chaos’” (61). It is this alternating series of flying and perching, letting go and then re-asserting a sense of stillness and control, or streaming and then selecting, that seems analogous to Hardy’s

portrayal of the interaction between consciousness, body, and environment in Far From the Madding Crowd and the transitory opportunities that attention offers for mediating these relationships and asserting control.

“Are We Automata?,” published in 1879, was one of James’s earliest psychological publications, yet he returned to this early conception of the will throughout his life. In 1880, James published “The Feeling of Effort,” his first attempt to describe the “physiology and psychology of volition” (151); parts of both articles later appeared in the chapter on the will in Principles of Psychology (1890) and were reworked again in

Talks to Teachers (1899). Although there is no reason to believe that James was particularly influential for Hardy (and James did by far the majority of his writing after

Hardy published Far From the Madding Crowd), because he frames his contributions to the Victorian dialogue on consciousness and self-control as a response to Darwinist theory, they provide an interesting counterpoint to Spencer’s determinism, on the one hand, and Hardy’s embodied evolutionary meliorism, on the other hand. In fact, Robert

Richardson argues that Darwinian theory helped James recover from suicidal depression in the early 1870s; James felt that Darwin’s theory of spontaneous variations could be applied to the life of the mind, where spontaneous creative ideas might provide the mechanism for free will (426). In contrast to Spencer, James does not represent evolution as an inevitably progressive force that is uninfluenced by individual acts of self- determination; rather, he argues that individuals can freely assert mental self-control, affect their own development, and speed up the development of the population through small, chancy, but unremitting acts of selective attention.

Far From the Madding Crowd: Embodied Consciousness, the Will, and Attention

In the following discussion of Far From the Madding Crowd, I investigate

Hardy’s Jamesian portrayal of the continuum of consciousness from an evanescent flow directed by the interactions between body and environment to briefly frozen instances of voluntary attention that offer opportunities for self-controlled agency. First, I argue that

Hardy anticipates James’s emphasis on the passive, embodied qualities of the stream of consciousness through the narrator’s concentration on the influence of bodily sensations over perceptions. Through his detailed depictions of Bathsheba’s blushes, Hardy also foregrounds the links between the body and the mind that challenge rational self-control.

Bathsheba’s blushes reveal the reflexive, involuntary, transitory nature of emotion and consciousness, in addition to the possibility of an evolutionary continuum of consciousness from animal to human subjectivity. Second, I demonstrate that despite his vivid exploration of the forces that impede self-control, Hardy’s exploration of

Bathsheba’s lovers’ contrasting temperaments as the combination of habitual modes of attention and stances toward the environment also resonates with William James’s discussion of three characteristic types of wills as the balance of impulses and inhibitions.

Finally, I argue that throughout the novel, Hardy locates a modicum of free will and a corresponding capacity for self-control and self-determination in attention, by granting to brief acts of attention the same world- and character-creating power that James does.

From the beginning of the novel, the narrator highlights the uncontrolled aspects of consciousness, stressing the roles of the preconscious senses in shaping perceptions and piquing the attention, consistently describing people and places in terms of what they might suggest to an observer’s mind and how they might act upon an observer’s body. (It

is as if Hardy is not describing them as things-in-themselves, but as forces that act upon an observer’s senses and capture his attention in either typical or idiosyncratic ways).

Describing Norcombe Hill, the ancient round hill where Gabriel tends his flock, the narrator highlights its suggestiveness, remarking that it “was one of those spots which suggest to a passer-by that he is in the presence of a shape approaching the indestructible as nearly as any to be found on earth” (8). In depicting the sounds of the wind, which

“floundered” and “gushed” through the trees, “simmered and boiled” the dry leaves, and blew upon the grasses with varying breezes, “one rubbing the blades heavily, another raking them piercingly, another brushing them like a soft broom,” the narrator comments that “the instinctive act of human-kind here was to stand, and listen, and learn how the trees on the right and the trees on the left wailed or chanted to each other in the regular antiphonies of a cathedral choir” (8). Hardy’s description has the effect of slowing readers down and drawing our attention to our own ears, just as the wind sounds would focus the attention of a passer-by who was physically present on Norcombe Hill, and the narrator suggests that such an act is “instinctive,” the unwilled response of the body and mind to a physical sensation, outside the realm of rational control. Not only the sound, but the feel of the wind is emphasized in this passage when a “tongue of air” licks up a few leaves and when the breezes rub, rake, and brush the grass “like a soft broom” (8).

Here, physical sensations evoke a state of consciousness—a still, intense state of listening. On the following page, Hardy describes a state of consciousness that calls up a physical sensation.

To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this—

the roll of the world eastward is almost a palpable movement. The

sensation may be caused by the panoramic glide of the stars past earthly

objects, which is perceptible in a few minutes of stillness; or by a fancy

that the better outlook upon space afforded by a hill emphasizes terrestrial

revolution; or by the wind; or by solitude; but whatever be its origin the

impression of riding along is vivid and abiding. (9)

Hardy suggests that the feeling of spinning with the earth is “palpable,” “vivid and abiding,” and that it is moreover a common (perhaps even instinctive) experience for people standing alone on a hill. All of the possible explanations for this feeling that

Hardy offers—the movement of the stars, “fancy,” the wind, or solitude—indicate that the setting conjures up a mood and the mood in turn creates a physical feeling of motion.

It is this intimate interrelationship between environment, consciousness, and body that leads Hardy to repeatedly emphasize his characters’ difficulties in controlling their thoughts and emotions. Early in the novel, Hardy seems to indicate Gabriel’s capacity for self-control when he describes him as a man whose “intellect and emotions were clearly separate,” having “passed the time during which the influence of youth indiscriminately mingles them in the character of impulse” (5). The narrator’s description seems to support a conventional view of self-control as the mind overruling the impulses and emotions of the body. However, although Gabriel may feel that his intellect and emotions are distinct at the opening of the novel, after meeting Bathsheba a few pages later, he discovers just how unwieldy his sensations and emotions continue to be. When she fortuitously saves his life after he nearly suffocates in his shepherd’s hut, he finds it impossible to capture his thoughts and feelings and order them in words: “he would as soon have thought of carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the

intangibilities of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language” (20). Gabriel Oak’s impressions of Bathsheba are like an aroma in their diffusiveness and in their ability to cling to his emotions. Despite the fact that Bathsheba has no money and Gabriel barely knows her, he cannot help proposing. “I can’t do what I think would be . . . wise,” he tells her (unwisely) (29). Although she appears to be more self-possessed than Gabriel and is certainly more gifted in “mapping out [her] mind upon [her] tongue” (21),

Bathsheba’s thoughts likewise elude control. She confesses that she cannot rationally consider his proposal because her “mind spreads away so” when out of doors (27).

Gabriel and Bathsheba’s early interactions demonstrate that, for Hardy, thought is powerfully influenced by both emotion and setting, and not any easier to control than emotion.

Hardy often locates the site of these mutual interactions between states of mind, the body, and the environment in the face, and he pays close attention to the signs that consciousness—and emotion in particular—leave on the outside of the body through his portrayal of blushing. Throughout Far From the Madding Crowd, Hardy focuses on blushing as a physical trace of consciousness and a reflexive sign of emotion

(embarrassment, shame, gladness, excitement, anger, or desire) that other characters can observe and interpret, despite the blushing individuals’ attempts to conceal or redirect their emotions. Hardy links blushing to the uncontrollable aspects of heredity, personality, and gender; it exemplifies the difficulty of controlling the stream of consciousness and sensation. Indeed his representation of blushing is a good example of

William Cohen’s assertion that for Hardy the face is “more than a mirror of the soul, [it] is a sensate record of flows and intensities” (449).

Beginning with the first blush in the novel, which occurs when Bathsheba smiles at herself in mirror while riding alone on her wagon, Hardy employs blushing as a bodily sign of growing knowledge and self-consciousness. Believing herself to be unobserved,

Bathsheba’s blush registers her innocence and, as Morgan remarks, “pure self-delight”

(123). While Hardy most often describes Bathsheba’s blushes, it is Gabriel who next blushes in the novel when he recognizes that Bathsheba is observing him observing her.

“That the girl’s thoughts hovered about her face and form as soon as she caught Oak’s eyes conning the same page was natural, and almost certain. . . . Yet it was the man who blushed, the maid not at all” (17). Soon, however, Bathsheba also blushes when she realizes that Gabriel has seen her “strange antics” on horseback—lying backwards on her pony’s back to pass under some low branches.

Recollection of the strange antics she had indulged in when passing

through the trees, was succeeded in the girl by a nettled palpitation, and

that by a hot face. It was a time to see a woman redden who was not given

to reddening as a rule: not a point in the milkmaid but was of the deepest

rose colour. From the Maiden’s Blush through all the varieties of the

Provence down to the Crimson Tuscany the countenance of Oak’s

acquaintance quickly graduated; whereupon he, in considerateness, had

turned away his head. (18)

Bathsheba’s gymnastics demonstrate her youthful athleticism, unconventionality, and zest for life, and the fact that she is not accustomed to blushing underscores both her inexperience and her self-confidence. Bullen highlights the mind-body imbrications evident in Hardy’s portrayal of blushing when he comments that blushing relates to

knowledge in Far From the Madding Crowd: “Blushing is the physiological consequence of self-consciousness ” (72).

In this passage, as in future passages, Hardy delights in describing the physical appearance of the blush as it unfolds. Here, Bathsheba’s blush begins with a stinging feeling and a hot face, and her color deepens from the pink of Maiden’s Blush to the intense red of the Crimson Tuscany rose.36 Elsewhere, Gabriel watches Bathsheba grow

“more or less red in the cheek, the blood wavering in uncertain flux and reflux over the sensitive space between ebb and flood” (130). With their varying shades of pink and red,

Hardy’s descriptions of Bathsheba’s blushes highlight the translucent quality of her skin,

as it provides glimpses into the inside of her body and mind, revealing both the “flux and

reflux” of her blood and her states of consciousness. As Elaine Scarry writes of Hardy,

“That all human acts take place through and out of [the] body never ceases to intrigue and

amaze him” (116). Scarry’s analysis of Hardy’s “most beautiful and haunting image of

the human body” in Tess also applies to his representation of Bathsheba’s blushes.

Commenting on the “image of the translucent dresses worn by the three milkmaids that, already full of light and air, brush against the grass and stir up butterflies that, caught

within the layers of the skirts, fly there visible from the outside,” Scarry writes, “the

gauze like dresses become the magnified image of this translucent tissue with

something—voice, bells, butterflies—something, caught in its meshes and flickering

through it like radiant consciousness” (117). In Far From the Madding Crowd, blushes

are a literal instance of these images that so fascinated Hardy—images of evanescent

spirit shimmering through semi-transparent materiality.

36 Rosemarie Morgan notes that these are the names of roses (357 n.4).

Thus, it seems ironic that the most beautiful blush in the novel belongs to a sheep.

Inside the grand old shearing barn, Bathsheba watches as Gabriel expertly shears a

“frightened ewe,” who responds to the indignity of being “dragg[ed]” to its station,

“[flung] over upon its buttocks,” and denuded by the shears with a delicate blush.

“She blushes at the insult,” murmured Bathsheba, watching the pink flush

which arose and overspread the neck and shoulders of the ewe where they

were left bare by the clapping shears—a flush which was enviable for its

delicacy, by many queens of the coteries, and would have been creditable,

for its promptness, to any woman in the world. (128)

Like Bathsheba’s blushes, the ewe’s blush mirrors the flow of consciousness, unfolding over time as it arises from within and gradually travels over the sheep’s skin. After strengthening the ties between Bathsheba and the ewe by associating it with queen-like sensitivity and feminine modesty, Hardy again humorously emphasizes the sheep’s endearing shyness by comparing it to the famous portrait of Aphrodite: “the clean sleek creature arose from its fleece—how perfectly like Aphrodite rising from the foam should have been seen to be realized—looking startled and shy at the loss of its garment which lay on the floor in one soft cloud” (128). In this scene, Hardy describes Gabriel as “fed with the luxury of content” while Bathsheba gives him her undivided attention, and the light-hearted description of the ewe perfectly fits this idyllic shared moment in the shearing barn. By placing the ewe at the center of this scene between Gabriel and

Bathsheba, associating the ewe with Bathsheba, and granting it a blushing self- consciousness, however, Hardy also emphasizes the similarities between humans and animals as creatures whose bodies register the complex interactions between reflexive

emotional responses and thought (however rudimentary a sheep’s consciousness may be).

As Ivan Krielkamp demonstrates, throughout the novel, Hardy creates moments of

“species crossing” like this one, which display “how deeply the putatively natural and nonhuman is often intertwined with the human” (474). Krielkamp concludes that

Hardy’s novel “remove[s] subjectivity and pity from any exclusively human sphere”

(481). 37 While this passage (in combination with other examples of shepherding)

certainly does highlight the sheep’s capacity for subjectivity, the links between the ewe’s

blushes and Bathsheba’s also emphasize the uncontrollable nature of her human

subjectivity. 38

Blushing links Bathsheba not only with the animal world but also with the natural

world of weather. Considerately turning away his head when Bathsheba first blushes,

Gabriel grows to be a more and more sensitive reader of Bathsheba’s expressions,

capitalizing on her inability to control them. In contrast to Boldwood, who “could not

read a woman” and feels that Bathsheba’s expressions are like the “cabala of a strange philosophy” (107), Gabriel interprets her face as expertly as he tells the time from the

stars or predicts the weather from the behavior of toads and sheep. The narrator

37As Schweik also notes, an important aspect of Hardy’s response to Darwinism was to insist on this human-animal continuum and the need to treat all creatures with kindness (62). 38 Far From the Madding Crowd came out two years after the publication of Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and in Animals in 1872. Although here and elsewhere Darwin certainly indicates that animals have rudimentary forms of consciousness—even, for example, attributing the early stages of spiritualist beliefs to dogs in The Descent of Man (67)!—he limits his extensive discussion of blushing in The Expression of the Emotions exclusively to humans, explaining, “Blushing is the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions. Monkeys redden from passion, but it would require an overwhelming amount of evidence to make us believe that any animal could blush” (244). Darwin attributes blushing to “self-attention” (244). His discussion interestingly spotlights the power of the attention to “affect certain parts and organs, which are not properly under the control of the will” (268).

comments, for instance, that to Gabriel, Bathsheba’s “face was as the uncertain glory of an April day”; he is “ever regardful of its faintest change” and “instantly discerned thereon the mark of some influence from without, in the form of a keenly self-conscious reddening” (107). When Bathsheba reacts to Gabriel’s poor opinion of her treatment of

Boldwood, her face turns the “angry crimson of a Danby sunset” (117). Although she remains silent, the narrator comments that “this reticence of her tongue only made the loquacity of her face the more noticeable” (117). Bathsheba’s face speaks to Gabriel in spite of herself, and Hardy further develops the theme of blushing as a mark of the inability to control emotion through the character of one of Bathsheba’s workers, Joseph

Poorgrass, who is painfully shy. Whenever he talks with her, he confesses, “’twas nothing but blushes with me. . . . Twere ‘er blush, blush, blush with me every minute of the time” (50). The other workers pity Joseph’s bashfulness, remarking that while it would be acceptable in a woman, “tis awkward for a man like him, poor feller” (51).

In fact, Hardy often portrays Bathsheba’s susceptibility to emotion as an especially feminine trait. In one particularly interesting passage in which Boldwood upbraids her for deciding to reject his proposal, Hardy explicitly links her inability to control her emotions with her female body:

Bathsheba, in spite of her mettle began to feel unmistakable signs that she

was inherently the weaker vessel. She strove miserably against this

feminality which would insist upon supplying unbidden emotions in

stronger and stronger current. She had tried to elude agitation by fixing

her mind on the trees, sky, any trivial object before her eyes, whilst his

reproaches fell, but ingenuity could not save her now. (178)

The Penguin edition has restored Hardy’s original term “feminality” to this passage.

Leslie Stephen replaced this neologism with “femininity” in the Cornhill edition of the novel because, as Morgan explains, “feminality implies a biological/hormonal influence

(overwhelming ‘unbidden emotions’ in the female faced with the brute force of the male)” (377 n. 1). Hardy’s portrayal of Bathsheba’s hormonal emotions demonstrates that, like many nineteenth-century emotion theorists, Hardy conceives of emotion as a primarily physical event. As Jill Matus explains, “Dispensing with the idea of a substantial or immaterial will existing independently of passions, appetites and desires, emotion theorists viewed feelings as concomitants of physical change, or nervous disturbance and mental process as dependent on bodily organs” (Shock 45). Yet, as

Matus also notes (and as I will discuss in greater detail in the next chapter), while the nineteenth century is often viewed as “the moment when emotion was conceived of as a bodily, physiological process,” many psychologists stressed the “interrelationship of mind and body, not the reduction of the former to the latter” (58). Because of its links to self-consciousness, Hardy uses Bathsheba’s blushes to draw attention to both the physiological and cognitive aspects of emotion.

Bathsheba’s blushes mirror the uncontrolled aspects of the stream of consciousness as they register the transient flow of emotion across her passive body, yet

Hardy consistently portrays her as a remarkably energetic and strong-willed woman.39 “I

shall be up before you are awake, I shall be afield before you are up, and I shall have

breakfasted before you are afield. In short I shall astonish you all,” Bathsheba promises

39 Early reviewers objected to this aspect of Bathsheba’s characterization. For instance, Henry James writes, “we cannot say that we either understand or like Bathsheba. She is a young lady of the inconsequential, willful, mettlesome type” (367).

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her men when she begins to manage her uncle’s farm, and she keeps her promise (74).

After the murder of her husband Sergeant Troy by her disappointed lover Farmer

Boldwood, Bathsheba again “astonish[es] all around her” when she stoically takes charge of the situation, proving that “she was the stuff of which great men’s mothers are made”

(333). Unlike the passage in which Bathsheba’s feminality overcomes her—or the even more spectacular moment of overwhelming emotion when Troy kisses her in the ferns—

Bathsheba often experiences emotion as an energizing force. She angrily fires Gabriel for criticizing her, almost causes Liddy to quit because of her quick temper, and chafes

“like a caged leopard” over giving up her independence to Troy (239). That such a strong-minded character as Bathsheba continually telegraphs the fleeting responses of consciousness through blushing and frequently finds herself swamped by emotion testifies to Hardy’s appreciation of the power of embodied emotion.

The challenge of directing and controlling states of consciousness is by no means an exclusively feminine problem in the novel. Through his portrayal of Bathsheba’s three suitors—the “intensely humane” shepherd Gabriel Oak, the impulsive Sergeant

Troy, and the repressed Farmer Boldwood—Hardy investigates ways in which different personality types interact with the environment and complicate efforts to focus the attention and assert self-control (32). As Rosemary Sumner points out, like many of

Hardy’s novels, in Far From the Madding Crowd, “the structure is specifically designed to highlight the variousness of human beings, and the widely different ways in which they respond to the same experiences” (56). Clearly, the most obvious set of contrasting responses in the novel are those of Bathsheba’s three suitors, and interestingly, these three characters correspond to (and anticipate) William James’s classification of three

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types of wills in The Principles of Psychology (1890). Here James describes the healthy will as the proper balance of impulses and inhibitions combined with a right vision of the world (a normal set of motivations) (536). From this healthy balance of impulses and inhibitions, James extrapolates two types of unhealthy wills, the explosive or precipitate will and the obstructed will, both of which represent extreme forms of two normal personality types (537). Later, when James argues that “effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of will” (562), it becomes possible to see these three types of will as three different habitual approaches to attention.

The novel classifies Gabriel as a member of the “even-tempered order of humanity” (30), a man whose impulses and inhibitions tend to be evenly balanced.

However, although Gabriel’s temperament contributes to his capacity for gentle self- control (including his patience with Bathsheba and his ability to conceal his feelings for her benefit), it also prevents him from forgetting her, which forever changes his life.

Early in the novel, when nearly all of Gabriel’s flock are tragically killed, the narrator calls Oak “an intensely humane man: indeed, his humanity often tore in pieces any politic intentions of his bordering on strategy, and carried him on as by gravitation” (32). Here

Gabriel is described as almost the victim of his compassionate temperament, which influences his actions as irresistibly as gravity, sometimes despite his intentions. Hardy uses similarly geological language to describe Bathsheba’s effect on Gabriel’s consciousness. Gabriel is a man “whose affection, placid and regular as it may be, flows deep and long” and despite being separated from Bathsheba feels “the secret fusion of himself in Bathsheba to be burning with a finer flame now that she was gone” (30).

Lying in bed and thinking of Bathsheba, Gabriel’s mind is “very busy with fancies and

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full of movement, like a river flowing rapidly under its ice” (63). When Gabriel perceives that a huge storm is coming that will destroy Bathsheba’s harvest, he decides to exert an immense effort to protect them by himself because of their great financial value and the lack of judgment shown by Bathsheba and her new husband Troy. The narrator, however, comments that money is not his true motivation: “man, even to himself, is a cryptographic page having an ostensible writing, and another between the lines. It is possible that there was this golden legend under the utilitarian one: ‘I will help to my last breath the woman I have loved so dearly’” (213). Like a river flowing deep and long under ice and an encoded page with the true meaning engraved under a top layer of writing, Gabriel’s consciousness is one in which the motivating idea of Bathsheba has lodged deeply and irrevocably. However, Gabriel’s love for Bathsheba escapes the destructive obsession of Boldwood because he has mastered “the simple lesson” of self- denial: “that among the multitude of interests by which he was surrounded, those which affected his personal well-being were not the most absorbing and important in his eyes.

Oak meditatively looked upon the horizon of circumstances without any special regard to his own standpoint in the midst” (257). Overall, Hardy’s characterization of Oak parallels James’s description of the well-conditioned will in Talks to Teachers: “the mind of him whose fields of consciousness are complex, and who, with the reasons for the action, sees the reasons against it, and yet, instead of being palsied, acts in the way that takes the whole field into consideration,--so, I say, is such a mind the ideal sort of mind that we should seek to reproduce in our pupils” (180).

In contrast to Gabriel’s ability to gaze upon the “horizon of circumstances” and to

“take the whole field [of consciousness] into consideration,” Sergeant Troy delights in

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living in the moment, simply reacting to whatever opportunities fall into his path. Hardy depicts Troy as a man whose attention is limited to the present, which allows him to give free expression to his impulses without regret for the past or concern for the future: “his outlook upon time was as a transient flash of the eye now and then” (145). James’s description of the normal explosive temperament is strikingly similar to Hardy’s portrayal of Sergeant Troy:

There is a normal type of character, for example, in which impulses seem

to discharge so promptly into movements that inhibitions get no time to

arise. These are the ‘dare-devil’ and ‘mercurial’ temperaments,

overflowing with animation, and fizzling with talk . . . . He will be the

king of his company, sing all the songs and make all the speeches, lead the

parties, carry out the practical jokes, kiss all the girls, fight the men . . . .

(538)

Troy “fizzles with talk.” He speaks “fluently and unceasingly” (147), and he first fascinates Bathsheba with his spontaneously creative flattery. When he impulsively praises her beauty, he confesses his enjoyment in giving expression to his stream of thoughts, “Half the pleasure of a feeling lies in being able to express it on the spur of the moment, and I let out mine” (150). Although James shows how the pathologically explosive will (a personality in which impulses are too strong or inhibitions are too weak) can lead to all sorts of addictions, the normally impulsive temperament that Troy displays can be extremely charming and very effective in accomplishing the tasks of the moment:

“it is the absence of scruples, of consequences, of considerations, the extraordinary simplification of each moment’s mental outlook, that gives to the explosive individual

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such motor energy and ease” (538). Interestingly, James and Hardy both associate the impulsive temperament with great athleticism. James cites an article on “The Mental

Qualities of an Athlete” in Harvard Monthly, which identifies a “rapidly impulsive temperament” as one of the most important qualities of an excellent athlete: “the good player, confident in his training and his practice, in the critical game trusts entirely to his impulse” (539). Thus, it is consistent with nineteenth-century psychology that Troy should be an excellent swordsman. When Hardy celebrates Troy’s amazing swordplay in the beautiful scene in the hollow amid the ferns, he associates Troy’s athleticism and artistry with the free expression of both athletic and erotic impulse. After demonstrating the basic moves, Troy tells Bathsheba that he’ll “be more interesting, and let you see some loose play—giving all the cuts and points, infantry and cavalry, quicker than lightening, and as promiscuously—with just enough rule to regulate instinct and yet not to fetter it” (161). Like lightening, Troy’s sword is quick, promiscuous, bright, beautiful, and dangerous. For Bathsheba, Troy’s sword seems to create an alternate reality:

In an instant the atmosphere was transformed to Bathsheba’s eyes. Beams

of light caught from the low sun’s rays, above, around, in front of her,

well-nigh shut out earth and heaven—all emitted in the marvelous

evolutions of Troy’s reflecting blade, which seemed everywhere at once,

and yet nowhere specially. These circumambient gleams were

accompanied by a keen sibilation that was almost a whistling—also

springing from all sides of her at once. In short, she was enclosed in a

firmament of lights and sharp hisses, resembling a sky-full of meteors

close at hand. (161-62)

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Troy’s sword mesmerizes Bathsheba and focuses her attention entirely on the present, cutting her off from her other concerns, and freeing her to respond impulsively to him.40

James notes that although a precipitate or explosive character like Troy’s may appear to have “more life in his little finger than can exist in the whole body of a correct judicious fellow,” more inhibited personalities may actually have a greater capacity for energy: “the judicious fellow all the while may have all these possibilities and more besides, ready to break out in the same or even a more violent way, if only the brakes were taken off” (538). It is this possibility that Hardy explores in the third suitor, the introverted middle-aged bachelor Farmer Boldwood. Falling in love with Bathsheba

“takes the brakes off” Boldwood’s previously unexpressed emotions and releases unprecedented depths of passion for her, which tragically leads to Boldwood’s eventual murder of Troy. Before the story’s violent end, however, Hardy describes Boldwood as a reserved man worthy of respect and details with compassion Boldwood’s new emotional vulnerability. When Boldwood lights up at Bathsheba’s presence, the narrator comments:

his face showed that he was now living outside his defenses for the first

time, and with a fearful sense of exposure. . . . The insulation of his heart

by his reserve during these many years, without a duct of any kind for

disposable emotion, had worked its effect. . . . . No mother existed to

absorb his devotion, no sister for his tenderness, no idle ties for sense. He

40 Troy’s habitual stance toward the world is one of ingenious, reactionary improvisation; he is “full of activity, but his activities were less of a locomotive than a vegetative nature, and never being based upon any original choice of foundation or direction, they were exercised on whatever chance might place in their way” (147).

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became supercharged with the compound, which was genuine lover’s

love. (106-7)

Rosemary Sumner argues that the imagery of “defensive walls” and of “powerful natural forces uncontrollable by fortifications—high tides, floods, rivers” that Hardy uses to describe Boldwood’s emotional state in this passage and throughout the novel supports

“the Freudian theory that the central feature of neurosis is ‘the lack of defence against a dangerous perception’” (54). For psychoanalytic critics like Sumner, Hardy anticipates

Freud in hinting that Boldwood’s neurosis stems from unconscious repression of a traumatic sexual experience (48)—the possible cause of “the old flood-marks faintly visible” in his character (106). However, given that Alexander Bain and G. H. Lewes use similar images of emotional channels and bursting flood gates to describe the emotions,

Hardy’s portrayal of Boldwood also exemplifies a Victorian understanding of emotional repression, which places a greater emphasis on the physiological consequences of consciously refusing to vent emotion than the psychological consequences of unconsciously denying traumatic memories. With his history of an imbalance of impulses and inhibitions, it seems plausible that when Bathsheba rejects Boldwood’s proposal because she has fallen in love with Troy, Boldwood would develop new symptoms which correspond in part to James’ definition of the obstructed will.

Boldwood becomes strangely blind to all other concerns beside Bathsheba, even unable to recognize how his obsession is hurting her. Similarly, according to James, individuals with a morbidly obstructed will may be “unable to rally its [the mind’s] attention to any determinate thing,” or they may be able to “will inwardly” but be incapable of carrying out any actions (546). In despair over the loss of Bathsheba, Boldwood neglects his farm

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and forgets to protect his harvest from the rain, despite the fact that, as Gabriel notes, “a few months earlier Boldwood’s forgetting his husbandry would have been as preposterous an idea as a sailor forgetting he was in a ship” (224). The once diligent and prosperous farmer’s actions become “stunned and sluggish,” and his feelings appear

“paralyzed” (175). Like one already dead, he wanders the hills like an “unhappy Shade in the Mournful Fields by Acheron” (206), and his expression is like the “smile on the countenance of a skull” (225). Boldwood becomes so inwardly focused, that he fails to recognize Bathsheba’s distress—so much so that after forcing her to promise to marry him in the future, he responds, “I am happy now,” while she sobs, “fairly beaten into non- resistance” (329). Moments later, at his own Christmas party, Boldwood is described as

“so absorbed in visions arising from her promise that he scarcely saw anything” (330).

While Hardy represents Boldwood’s strange inactivity and blindness as a sign of a pathologically obstructed will, he also shows that Boldwood suffers from an errant attention, which he makes clear from the beginning in his description of the effect of

Bathsheba’s letter on Boldwood. In contrast to Bathsheba’s utter carelessness in addressing the valentine to Boldwood and stamping it with a seal that reads “Marry Me” as a joke, Boldwood receives the letter with complete seriousness, symbolically raising the valentine to the center of his consciousness by placing it above the mantel clock at home (87). The valentine haunts Boldwood’s vision throughout the evening: “Here his gaze was continually fastening itself, till the large red seal became as a blot on the retina of his eye; and as he ate and drank he still read in fancy the words thereon, although they

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were too remote for his sight” (87).41 When he goes to bed, he brings the valentine into

his room and is “conscious of its presence even when his back was turned upon it” (88).

In his dreams, Boldwood vividly imagines the unknown woman who must have sent it to

him. This sequence demonstrates the beginning of a potentially morbid obsession as, like

a red blot in his eye, the valentine begins to warp Boldwood’s vision and attention.

As he does frequently throughout the novel, in this passage, Hardy pairs his

description of the setting with the character’s state of consciousness. Here Boldwood’s

susceptibility to the weirdness of the environment and his odd habits of attention

demonstrate the pathological tendencies of his will. The snow outside his window causes

the moonlight to cast strange shadows on Boldwood’s ceiling, and he jumps out of bed in

this “weird light” to reexamine the letter (88). Due to Hardy’s practice of incorporating

multiple points of view, it is unclear whether the weird light influences Boldwood’s

distorted view of the valentine’s significance, whether Boldwood perceives the light as

weird because of his mood, or whether the action simply takes place against the

background of an appropriately strange setting. Nevertheless, the sunrise also creates

strange effects that correspond to his mental state; it “burn[s] incandescent and rayless,

like a clear and flameless fire shining over a white hearthstone”—like a blot of red in the

eye or a red seal on a white envelope (89). In the dimly lit sky and the snowy ground

there is a “preternatural inversion of light and shade” that disorients the viewer, making it

difficult to discern the horizon (89). In this scene, it is striking that Hardy depicts

Boldwood, who is so frequently described as “wrapt up and indifferent, and seemingly so

41 Morgan notes that Hardy revised this passage later to read “a blot of blood on the retina” to more explicitly foreshadow Boldwood’s “distorted vision and organic breakdown” (366 n.3).

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far away from all he sees around him” (82), as carefully noticing the action of the frost on the snow’s shining surface, the ice-encased curving blades of grass, and the frozen footprints of the birds. The next time that Boldwood looks intently outward, it is to gaze at Bathsheba, the first time that he has ever “inspected a woman with the very centre and force of his glance” (103). Convinced that Bathsheba is both beautiful and longing to marry him, Boldwood’s mind and attention seem to freeze in this moment, so that he becomes unable to imagine life without her as his wife and is rarely portrayed to be clearly noticing the world outside of himself. As James notes, “A man’s Empirical

Thought depends on the objects and events he has experienced, but what these shall be is to a large extent determined by his habits of attention” (12). Boldwood is a vivid example of a man whose susceptibility to suggestions from the environment combines with a morbidly obsessed attention to create an alternative world of potential madness.

Throughout Far From the Madding Crowd, Hardy contrasts the usual flow of thoughts and sensations with the often fleeting moments of attention that can powerfully alter a life. In “Talks to Teachers,” James writes similarly of the brevity and power of attention:

You remember that, when we were talking of the subject of attention, we

discovered how much more intermittent and brief our acts of voluntary

attention are than is commonly supposed. If they were all summed

together, the time that they occupy would cover an almost incredibly small

portion of our lives. But I also said, you will remember, that their brevity

was not in proportion to their significance . . . . Our acts of voluntary

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attention, brief and fitful as they are, are nevertheless momentous and

critical, determining us, as they do, to higher or lower destinies. (189)

Boldwood’s fatal error is in giving Bathsheba’s valentine his serious attention and refusing to accept that it was not sent with a serious motive. Hardy’s narrator reiterates again and again the irony that a few small, “contemptibly little” and “absurdly minute” acts of attention should exert such a powerful influence over his emotions and future life.

The valentine is like “the first floating weed to Columbus—the contemptibly little suggesting possibilities of the infinitely great” (87). Of Boldwood’s decision to actually look at Bathsheba in the market, the narrator comments, “The result from capital employed in the production of any movement of a mental nature is sometimes as tremendous as the cause itself is absurdly minute” (102). One small moment of attention also plays a fateful role in Bathsheba’s story, when on her second meeting with Troy, she gives “an interested side thought” to his ingenious flattery (149), and then agrees with him that men do find her fascinating: “Capitulation—that was the purport of the simple reply . . . . Her tone and mien signified beyond mistake that the seed which was to lift the foundation had taken root in the chink: the remainder was a mere question of time and natural seriate changes” (151).42

However, acts of attention are certainly not always disastrous in this novel.

Hardy also writes of flashes of insight in terms that resonate with James’s description of

thoughts wandering into the mind and being pounced upon by the ego. This is the

42 Hardy uses a similar seed image to describe Boldwood’s attention to the valentine— “Bathsheba was far from dreaming that the dark and silent shape on which she had so carelessly thrown a seed was a hotbed of tropic intensity” (106)—as well as his later hope that she might marry him after Troy has been gone for seven years: “this fevered hope had grown up again like a grain of mustard seed” (291)

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pathway of both terrible and fantastic ideas, leading to both insanity and self-control; as

James writes, “The greatest inventions, the most brilliant thoughts often turn up thus accidentally, but may mould for all that the future of the man. Would they have gained this prominence about their peers without the watchful eye of consciousness to recognize their value and emphasize them into permanence?” (“Automata” 15). In Far From the

Madding Crowd, Hardy writes that a “horrible conviction darted through Oak” when he accurately anticipates the death of his sheep (32) and “a wild thought flashed into

Gabriel’s mind” when he guesses that some men he is overhearing are speaking of

Bathsheba (38). Likewise, Bathsheba begins to accurately suspect a deeper connection between Troy and her runaway servant Fanny in a “flash” that is mirrored by her suddenly turning pale: “No gem ever flashed from a rosy ray to a white one more rapidly than changed the young wife’s countenance” (242). Even Boldwood recognizes the close resemblance in both origin and outcome between sparks of insight and idle, destructive ideas. When Bathsheba tries to explain that sending the valentine was merely a

“wanton,” “thoughtless” act, he responds: “Don’t say thoughtlessness! Make me think it was something more—that it was a sort of prophetic instinct” (112).43

James argues that the secret of self-control (in the sense of ethical, voluntary

action) is in finding the “right conception” for a case (Talks 185). The familiar example

that he offers is that of an alcoholic who, rather than rationalizing away his reservations

about having a drink, simply and bluntly categorizes his choice as that of “being a

43 And, in fact, James asserts that it is by definition impossible to maintain voluntary attention for very long: “There is no such thing as voluntary attention sustained for more than a few seconds at a time” (Principles 420). Once a train of thought is voluntarily begun, an individual’s interest must bear it along.

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drunkard” or not (Talks 188). Once the proper conception for a case is decided upon, the difficult, moral act consists in preserving this definition in the attention. “It twinkles and goes out the moment it appears in the margin of our consciousness; and we need a resolute effort of voluntary attention to drag it into the focus of the field, and to keep it there long enough for its associative and motor effects to be exerted” (Talks 186). This vivid description of how difficult it is to maintain a mental focus on an idea that does not suit a prevailing mood or inclination emphasizes once again the continuum that James describes between consciousness as an involuntary flow that responds to the body, the environment, and temperament and consciousness as brief, twinkling bits of thought that can be “dragged” into focus or hung on to in some way—and that then become as solid as reality. This is the continuum of mental self-control both for James and for Hardy in Far

From the Madding Crowd.

In a final contrast between the many instances in the novel in which the narrator describes states of mind as misty (3), spreading (27), “a merry-go-round of skittishness”

(29), or idle and freakish (102), the narrator predicts that Gabriel and Bathsheba’s love will last because it is based on a friendship that “[grew] up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality” (348). Such a love is “the only love which is strong as death—that love which many waters cannot quench nor the floods drown, beside which the passion usually called by the name is evanescent as steam” (348). Borrowing from the beautifully sensuous language of the Song of Songs, Hardy distinguishes this enduring love from the airiness of passion because, although it began as a twinkle in the consciousness, it has been built up through so many conscious acts of attention that it has become like a geological feature in the psyche, one that exerts its own gravitational force.

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Hardy’s use of gas, liquid, and solid images to represent consciousness and character in this passage resonate with James’s analogy between the role of attention in creating future selves and the work of a sculptor—“all the while the world we feel and live in, will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, as the sculptor extracts his statue by simply rejecting the other portions of the stone” (“Automata” 14). These evocative, yet somehow intangible images reflect the challenge that nineteenth-century novelists and psychologists faced in attempting to reconcile a physiological emphasis on the interdependence between mind and body with a deeply entrenched commitment to the role of free will and self-control in the development of both fictional and psychological selves—and even future human evolution.

In Hardy’s later novels, the physical burden of heredity and the corresponding threat of evolutionary degeneration tend to outweigh the potential for positive forms of self-controlled agency through acts of attention. In Tess of the D’Urbervilles, for example, Hardy emphasizes the fatally life-altering power of brief acts of attention through the events set in motion when John Durbeyfield learns that he is the descendent of the ancient D’Urberville family. Just as Bathsheba’s “interested side thought” in

Troy’s flattery becomes “the seed which was to lift the foundation,” so Tess’s father’s choice to dwell on the parson’s revelation of his noble ancestors leads to his wife’s plan to send Tess to the D’Urberville estate, a decision which ends tragically for Tess.

Similarly, when Jude learns of Christminster from a departing schoolteacher in the first chapter of Jude the Obscure, this tiny act of attention on his part generates a growing dream to attend the university there, which instigates his unrewarded efforts at self-

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education throughout the novel. In these later novels, attention, although it involves volition, functions merely as a link in a fatally determined chain of events. In contrast to these acts of attention, which end in tragedy or failure as Tess and Jude are thwarted by the cruelty of others and their own inherited weaknesses, through Gabriel Oak’s faithful focus on Bathsheba’s best interests and eventual happy marriage, Hardy suggests in his earlier, more optimistic novel that acts of attention can contribute to a degree of free will and autonomy. Far From the Madding Crowd’s melioristic outlook resonates with

James’s assertion in The Principles of Psychology that the “the whole drama of the voluntary life hinges on . . . attention” and that “the whole sting and excitement of our voluntary life” derives from the feeling of free will, “our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago” (1.453).

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Chapter Three: Emotion-Driven Self-Control in Daniel Deronda and Problems of Life and Mind

Nineteenth-century notions of the stream of consciousness, as theorized by

George Henry Lewes and William James, emphasized the inextricable links between environmental stimuli, the body’s senses, the emotions, and the life of the mind. As I argued in the previous chapter, Thomas Hardy exploits these powerful connections through his evocative descriptions of landscapes and their influence on the mental states of his characters. At the same time, Hardy anticipates James in indicating that wisely focusing the attention can help to create a sense of self-controlled autonomy against the onslaught of sensory information from the environment. Most Victorian psychologists also recommended using the attention to control the emotions, which, as the work of

Dickens and Bain demonstrates, were frequently represented as explosive, unwieldy forms of energy that defied simple suppression. Not surprisingly, however, given the emphasis on the transformative power of emotion throughout her work, George Eliot offers an alternative view of attention, emotion, and self-control in Daniel Deronda.

Drawing on her partner George Henry Lewes’s radical emphasis on the fundamental role of feeling in the psyche, Eliot suggests in this novel that focusing the attention on even the most primitive, volatile emotions can provide individuals with crucial information about the world around them and unlock an unorthodox path to self-controlled psychological autonomy that is nevertheless thoroughly compatible with physiological psychology.

From the sadistic ennui of her reptilian villain, Mallinger Grandcourt, whose

“intermittent, flickering,” and undirected passions have degenerated into “mere ooze and mud” (156-7), to the repressed passion of Grandcourt’s spurned mistress, Lydia Glasher,

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whose desire erupts in a bitter curse on his young wife, George Eliot explores the diverse emotional forces that impede rational self-control throughout her final novel, Daniel

Deronda. No other character struggles against her emotions to achieve self-control more dramatically than Gwendolen Harleth, whose “potent charm” stems from “the iridescence of her character—the play of various, nay, contrary tendencies” (41-2). In her nature,

“there was a combination of proud reserve with rashness, or perilously-poised terror with defiance, which might alternatively flatter and disappoint control” (414). In her most rash and terrified moments, Gwendolen appears to be at the mercy of her destructive emotions, whether she is deliberately losing a small fortune at roulette, agreeing to marry

Grandcourt despite the fact that she knows him to be a scoundrel, disintegrating into terrified hysteria on her wedding night, or unwillingly watching her husband drown while she hesitates to throw the rope. However, Eliot complicates Gwendolen’s struggle between emotion and self-control when Daniel Deronda counsels Gwendolen that focusing on her fear of her own potential for wrongdoing can help to restrain her passionate actions: “Turn your fear into a safeguard,” he urges (452). Daniel’s advice is intended to help Gwendolen cultivate her conscience, and he insightfully guides her away from her habitual efforts at self-composure and self-formation, which, up until this point, have centered on repressing her rashness and terror, rather than seeking to understand herself more fully. Daniel’s advice is problematic, however, because Gwendolen’s reasonable dread of her own capacity for evil is linked thematically throughout the novel with her abnormal “susceptibility to terror,” her occasional experiences since childhood of paralyzing, irrational fear (63). In the larger context of the novel, Eliot uses Daniel’s

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advice to suggest that even the most irrational, most uncontrollable emotions can function paradoxically as a means to self-control.

The questions surrounding Gwendolen’s uncertain struggle for self-control reflect broader mid-Victorian scientific and philosophical debates about the role of emotion in rational self-control. Like Alexander Bain in The Emotions and the Will, physiological psychologists tended to highlight the uncontrollable nature of the emotions, drawing on recent advances in the study of the nervous system to define emotions as the reflex responses of the body to external stimuli. Although physiological psychologists in general undermined conventional notions of self-control by emphasizing the body’s influence over the mind, many of them attempted to account for self-control by stressing the role of the attention in repressing socially unacceptable emotions.44 In contrast,

George Henry Lewes proposed a radical new view of the mind-body relationship that

redefined the psychological mechanisms that enable self-control. Arguing that the mind

and the body are fundamentally inseparable, Lewes refused to give causative priority to

either the body or the mind. Explaining that rational thought and the emotions are

“indissolubly interwoven,” Lewes emphasized the fundamental and irrepressible role of

the emotions in shaping consciousness (v. 342). In his sprawling psychological treatise,

Problems of Life and Mind, Lewes argues that self-control is not ultimately the product of

44 The work of William Carpenter provides a good example of how both trends worked together. As Nicholas Dames explains, “The important conceptual breakthrough of physiology . . . was its erasure of the line between the conscious working of the cerebrum and the unconscious mechanisms of the spinal apparatus. This line is crossed most dramatically by William Carpenter’s 1874 Principles of Mental Physiology, which laid out the case for a ‘cerebral reflex,’ or the automatic workings of all mental activity” (108). At the same time that Carpenter theorized that the mind was essentially governed by bodily reflexes, however, he also stressed the importance of the attention as the way in which the mind could suppress unwanted thoughts and emotions and strengthen desirable ones.

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the will or the attention; rather, self-control represents the complex, deterministic interaction of an individual’s biological, social, and psychological conditions.45 This

chapter explores how Eliot intervenes in this contemporary debate about the interaction

between the body and the mind in the cultivation of self-control by exploring in Daniel

Deronda the possibly paradoxical role of Gwendolen’s emotions in her psychological

development. While Eliot clearly draws on Lewes’s innovative explanation of the mind-

body relationship throughout Daniel Deronda, she also extends his theory of the

emotions to highlight the active potential of all emotions to facilitate the cultivation of

self-control. Although Gwendolen’s story contains instances of spectacular failures to achieve self-control, Eliot offers hope that emotion may ultimately contribute to

Gwendolen’s successful self-formation. In short, Eliot suggests an alternative route to self-control through the emotions.

Recent critics who investigate Eliot’s use of physiological psychology in Daniel

Deronda tend to focus on the disruptive, destructive role of emotion in Gwendolen’s story. As Sally Shuttleworth argues, Eliot draws on Lewes’s theory of a multi-layered mind in her “subtle, psychological portrait” of Gwendolen’s “conflicting impulses and self-division” (Eliot 184). Shuttleworth emphasizes the parallels between nineteenth- century psychological theories and Gwendolen’s increasing lack of psychological and social control and her final position of “resigned despair” (200).46 In his recent book,

45 Lewes was working on the third volume of Problems of Life and Mind, The Physiological Basis of Mind, while Eliot was writing Daniel Deronda. Eliot’s sympathy with Lewes’s philosophy and psychology is well established. For representative discussions of the close relationship between Eliot’s and Lewes’s work, see Rick Rylance, K.K. Collins, Richard Menke, George Levine and Karen Chase. 46 Shuttleworth also argues that memory overcomes Gwendolen’s self-control (“Malady” 53).

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George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Psychology, Michael Davis similarly emphasizes the ways in which Gwendolen’s emotions obstruct her efforts at self-control. He writes that although “elsewhere in the novel, strong emotion can form an integral part of a real engagement with the world in which the whole individual being participates” (110), the isolating effects of Gwendolen’s passionate hatred for Grandcourt demonstrate “the destructive potential of any emotion, even if it is usually considered positive” (110).

Davis shows that Eliot must work carefully to contain Deronda’s and Mirah’s emotions in order to preserve an ethical ideal of the transformative power of emotion, while recognizing at the same time “the dangerous and varied possible consequences of emotional experience” (117). Lisa Smith also argues that Eliot loses faith in Daniel

Deronda in her previously optimistic model of perceptual change through powerful emotions. Smith explains that throughout her fiction Eliot works with a model of the mind in which emotional energy seeks an outlet outside the self in order to overcome egoism; thus Eliot often “depicts the powerful overflow of emotion as the key to altering perception” (219). However, Eliot loses hope in this type of emotional salvation in

Daniel Deronda. Smith comments on Daniel’s advice, “Deronda here is echoing the hopefulness of Middlemarch in which a painful confrontation between the self and the world is depicted as inevitable but salutary. . . . Deronda suggests that Gwendolen is already beginning to see beyond her own egotistic desire” (262). But, she continues,

“Gwendolen’s life does not in fact bear witness to Deronda’s assertion that pain leads to progress as she experiences a relentless repetition and intensification of terror” (263).47

47 Other recent critics who discuss the role of physiological psychology in Daniel Deronda include Jane Wood and Jill Matus. Noting that Gwendolen is Eliot’s “most searching inquiry into the nature of the relationship between the body and the mind” 120

In these readings of the novel, Deronda’s advice that Gwendolen embrace her fear as a means to self-control is overly optimistic and finally proves to be ineffective. However, in light of the ways in which Lewes’s theories of the mind-body relationship and the emotions diverge from those of his fellow physiological psychologists, I read Deronda’s advice as both more psychologically profound and more revealing of the ways in which the novel portrays Gwendolen’s psychological development and indicates hope for her eventual achievement of greater self-understanding, self-control, and real agency in the world—even through an emotion as dramatically unstable as Gwendolen’s fear.

Lewes’s Unique Theory of Emotion

Eliot’s and Lewes’s consideration of the productive possibilities of emotion challenged theories of emotion and self-control that were current among the physiological psychologists and evolutionary biologists with whom Lewes and Eliot were conversant in the 1870s, including James Sully, William Carpenter, Alexander Bain,

Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, and T.H. Huxley.48 Despite the fact that physiological

psychology ultimately tended to discredit the notion of a controlling ego because of its

(132), Jane Wood argues that Eliot offers no solution for Gwendolen’s psychological struggles. In a recent study of trauma in Daniel Deronda, Jill Matus also focuses on the fragmentary and gothic qualities of Gwendolen’s experiences, arguing that Eliot incorporates Lewes’s conception of the powerful influence of the unconscious mind on consciousness to depict Gwendolen’s traumatized response to Grandcourt’s drowning late in the novel. 48 William Baker’s The George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Library: An Annotated Catalogue documents the couple’s extensive reading in psychology and medicine. They owned hundreds of scientific works in addition to multiple copies of books by the psychologists mentioned in this paper: Sully, Carpenter, Bain, Spencer, Darwin, and Huxley. George Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda” Notebooks includes notes from Bain’s Logic, Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions, Sir James Paget’s “Nervous Mimicry,” and John Tyndall’s Fragments of Science. 121

focus on the body, the psychologists themselves proposed a range of responses to the problem of self-control. However, in contrast to Eliot’s and Lewes’s emphasis on the inseparable nature of the body and the mind, as well as feeling and thinking, their contemporaries’ varied responses to the problem of self-control all highlight a disjunction between the body and mind, feeling and thinking. At one end of the spectrum were polemicists like T.H. Huxley who (as we have seen) argued that animals and humans are conscious automata, fundamentally incapable of meaningful forms of self-control and self-formation. Huxley stated that mental conditions like volition and the consciousness of free choice are merely the “collateral product” of the working of the body, “as completely without any power of modifying that working as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence on its machinery”

(240). Describing physiological experiments similar to ones Lewes himself had performed on decapitated frogs, which had elicited a wide variety of automatic behaviors,49 Huxley argued that animal behavior is purely mechanical; consciousness

may accompany human behavior, but it does not cause it. Lewes’s friend and fellow

physiological psychologist James Sully similarly relied on the mechanistic workings of

the body to debunk the idea of free will, writing that the language of free will erroneously

suggests “not only that there exists quite apart from the processes of volitional

stimulation some substantial ego, but that this ego has a perfect controlling power over

these processes” (qtd in Shuttleworth, Eliot 185). At the other end of the spectrum were

49 Menke describes Lewes’s physiological experiments on frogs and his role in the vivisection debate. He also describes the fascinating parallels between vivisection and the techniques Eliot uses to create psychological depth in her characters. He writes, for example, “Vivisection and other animal experimentation revealed living things as dynamic, in flux, ever-changing—like the body and mind of Gwendolen Harleth” (637).

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psychologists like Alexander Bain and William Carpenter who acknowledged the challenge of exerting mental control over the body, but still tended to discuss the emotions as unruly, involuntary forces that individuals must learn to restrain through the judicious use of the attention and careful self-discipline. Lewes’s and Eliot’s treatments of feeling differ significantly from all of these theorists. Lewes’s emphasis on the unity of the mind and the body leads him to describe feeling and the emotions as so fundamental to the inner life and so intrinsically part of the constant activity of the organism as it relates to its medium (its biological, psychological, and social conditions) that we can begin to see why he insists on “the essential identity of all psychical phenomena,” claiming that “Feeling and Thought are indissolubly interwoven” (v. 342).

Although, like other physiological psychologists, Lewes certainly challenges traditional models of self-control, his emphasis on the inseparable nature of mind and body suggests that the flip-side of emotion-driven psychic fragmentation is (at least the theoretic possibility of) emotion-driven psychic integration, an idea that Eliot extends in her application of Deronda’s advice to Gwendolen’s inner conflicts.

As Thomas Dixon explains, the term “emotion” itself—a relatively recent category in nineteenth-century psychology that replaced the ancient psychological categories of the “passions” and the “affections,”—highlighted the involuntary nature of feeling, as well as a fundamental contrast between feeling and thinking (4). Victorian psychologists followed the turn-of-the-century Scottish philosopher Thomas Brown in defining the emotions as “a category of passive (rather than active), non-intellectual feelings or states (rather than actions of a power or faculty)” (Dixon 124). Describing emotion as the automatic response of the body to external and internal stimuli, Victorian

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psychologists often stressed the importance of directing the attention toward more socially desirable thoughts and emotions in order to weaken those less socially acceptable emotions. In “The Physiology of the Will,” for example, William Carpenter recommends that parents teach their children self-control by distracting their attention away from their emotional reactions to unpleasant events in order to control “their urgent impulses to immediate action” (208). He explains that “the power of self-control, thus usually acquired in the first instance in regard to those emotional impulses which directly prompt the conduct, gradually extends itself to the habitual succession of the thoughts” (208).

Carpenter’s recommendation that the repression of emotion leads to the ability to control one’s thoughts contrasts significantly with Eliot’s development of the role of awe and terror in Gwendolen’s development.

A prominent physiologist and comparative anatomist, William Carpenter was also a committed Unitarian and leader in the temperance movement, so it is not surprising to see him championing more traditional notions of self-control, but even evolutionary biologists like Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin emphasized the individual’s need to suppress anti-social emotions in order to behave in a rational, social manner. They described a hierarchy of emotions, from more primitive emotions (like fear) to more complex, civilized emotions (like sympathy). For example, in The Descent of Man

(1871), Darwin highlights the irrational, involuntary nature of emotions when he repeatedly draws parallels between human and animal emotions. Darwin traces the origins of morality from the social emotions of “sympathy, fidelity, and courage” that evolved when animals first banded together in social groups to increase their chances of survival (162). Although human morality begins in animalistic emotion, Darwin suggests

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that it culminates in attention-driven self-control. Like Carpenter, he stresses the need for control over one’s thoughts (101).

While Huxley’s and Sully’s arguments against free will emphasize an opposition between the mind and the body and Carpenter’s and Darwin’s explanations of self- control follow conventional Victorian accounts by relying on the mind’s ability to suppress the body, Lewes’s theory of the mind-body relationship in Problems of Life and

Mind requires a new understanding of the role of emotion in self-control. In The

Physiological Basis of Mind, Lewes distinguishes his view from three contemporary solutions to the mind-body problem. While advocates of the “old Dualism” asserted that the mind and body were completely separate and that the relationship between the two was an “insoluble mystery” (iii. 309), idealists and spiritualists ignored the body, focusing solely on psychological issues and arguing for the existence of a transcendent mind or soul. A third group, represented by the materialists,50 emphasized the body’s

determining influence on the mind. In contrast, Lewes advocates what he calls

“Reasoned Realism” (iii. 312). Also known (more recently) as dual-aspect monism,

Lewes’s “reasoned realism” collapses the gap between body and mind, viewing neural

processes and psychological processes as simply two aspects of the same phenomenon:

“these two widely different aspects, objective and subjective, are but the two faces of one

and the same reality” (iii. 403). Throughout Problems of Life and Mind, Lewes refuses to

give causative priority to either the body or the mind. He uses the metaphor of the inner and outer surfaces of a sphere to illustrate their simultaneity: “Every mental phenomenon has its corresponding neural phenomenon (the two being as convex and concave surfaces

50 This is a controversial term, but it is the one Lewes himself uses.

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of the same sphere, distinguishable, yet identical)” (i. 112).51 According to Lewes, the

body and the mind mutually constitute one another.

Victorian reviewers recognized Lewes’s dual-aspect solution to the mind-body

problem as one of his most original and controversial contributions to psychology.52 In

particular, they noted that dual-aspect monism posed conceptual problems for traditional

ideas of self-control. Rylance summarizes the comments of one favorable reviewer:

“[Spalding] notes that ‘the popular mind’ still holds, as a residue from theology, that the

body is the servant of the soul. Though this is an error it is at least intelligible, whereas

the contrary position . . . that thought is governed by feeling, is, in a very real sense,

unintelligible. It simply rubs common sense up the wrong way” (Victorian 269). Lewes

argues that just as organic states and mental states are two aspects of the same

phenomenon, so feeling and thought are ultimately inseparable, distinguishable only for

purposes of analysis. As K.K. Collins succinctly explains,

[Lewes] attempts to show that thought and feeling are at once harmonious,

analogous, and finally identical. In one sense, thought is feeling in

symbolic form, or primarily feeling (2. 80-82). In another sense, thought

and feeling are forms of sensibility, which itself belongs to the organism as

a whole; . . . . In yet another sense, thought and feeling are respectively

subjective and objective modes of sentience. (469)

In terms of the relative emphasis that Lewes places on feeling and thought in his treatise,

however, feeling is much more fundamental than thought in shaping the inner life. It

51 See Rylance’s article “Convex or Concave” for an insightful discussion of this metaphor. 52 See Rylance, Victorian, 287-90 for the responses of contemporary reviewers.

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should be emphasized that feeling is a capacious term for Lewes—“the most general term in Psychology, [including] Emotion not less than Sensation and Perception” (ii. 218-9).

Feeling “includes sensations, perceptions, images, appetites, instincts, or emotions” (v.

238). Lewes calls the “Emotive sphere” the “deepest, broadest agency in the organism”

(v. 406), and he argues that emotion directs thought: “All cognition is primarily emotion”

(iv. 42); “we only know what we have felt” (v. 395). Lewes argues that emotion is more important than thought in determining moral character: “Character is not measured by

Intellect, for Intellect can only prompt in company with Emotion” (v. 386). His innovative concept of the stream of consciousness also emphasizes the continuous activity of feeling in the inner life: 53

There is thus a stream of Consciousness formed out of the rivulets of

excitation, and this stream has its waves and ground-swell: the curves are

continuous and blend insensibly; there is no breach or pause. . . . And

under the incessantly fluctuating waves of special sensation there is the

continued ground-swell of systemic sensation, emotion, or ideal

preoccupation, which from time to time emerges into the prominence of

consciousness; and this, even when below the waves, is silently operating,

determining the direction of the general current, and obscurely preparing

the impulses which burst into action. Consciousness is composed of

Feelings, and Feelings are composed of elementary excitations. . . (v. 368-

53 Lewes coined the term, “stream of consciousness,” in The Physiology of Common Life (1859-60), well before William James adopted it (Rylance, Victorian 307).

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In contrast to William James’s influential description of the stream of thought, which stresses the constantly changing, yet continuous nature of conscious thought, Lewes’s images of waves, currents, and deeper ground-swells highlight the fluctuating interactions between multiple levels of the mind. According to Lewes, unconscious feeling is the silent force that determines the activity of consciousness. By emphasizing the radical role of emotion in directing conscious thought and moral character, Lewes fundamentally challenges models of self-control that require thought to direct emotion.

Lewes applies the principles of dual-aspect monism to questions of free will and self-formation at length in Problems of Life and Mind. Although individuals clearly have the capacity to make choices that shape their future selves, he cautions, “no one supposes that our desires are free” (iv. 109). Rather, desires and motives, as well as

“Consciousness, Self, and Personality,” are all determined by complex biological, psychological, and social conditions (iv. 111). However, Lewes takes care to set himself apart from the extreme materialist form of the argument against free will like that advocated by T.H. Huxley in his polemical address at the 1874 British Association meeting entitled, “On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History.” Lewes responds to Huxley’s speech at length in a chapter entitled, “Is Feeling an Agent?”54 He

objects to Huxley’s conscious automaton theory not because it threatens individual

responsibility, but because it does not fit the physiological facts about feeling.

As Rylance notes, Lewes argues that Huxley takes the mechanical nature of the

body’s reflex actions to an extreme (Rylance, Victorian 283). Given the physiological

fact that all of the body’s actions are “due to the operation of that mechanism,” Lewes

54 In his letters, Lewes comments that he hoped The Physical Basis of Mind would “effect . . . a final quashing of the automaton theory” (Letters 6:226).

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asks, “are we to conclude that it is an automaton essentially resembling the automata we construct, the movements of which may, or may not, be accompanied by Feeling, but are in no case determined by Feeling?” (iii.388). Decidedly not, Lewes counters, “all actions are . . . sentient, even when unconscious; they are therefore never purely mechanical, but always organical” (iii.390). Because feeling is inseparable from organic life and crucial for reflex action, “it is necessarily an agent” (iii.390). Feeling, moreover, is a “kind of volition” (iii.396). Although it may be accurate to claim that a decapitated frog or a brain-damaged patient behaves unconsciously, it is not accurate ”to deny that their actions exhibit the clearest evidence of sense-guidance, and the kind of volition which this sense-guidance implies; and this is quite enough to separate them from actions of automata” (iii.396). Moreover, Lewes argues that sentience and consciousness arise from the entire nervous system, not just the brain, as his contemporaries held (iii.405). In short, because it is guided by the senses, Lewes views the behavior of decapitated frogs and brain-damaged patients as displaying rudimentary forms of volition and consciousness. For Lewes, even when psychological data is set aside, the body itself reveals a remarkable amount of intelligence, and his view of feeling as a type of volition suggests that self-control may be achieved through a combination of feeling and thinking.

Feeling and Thinking in Daniel Deronda

Eliot makes this abstract, theoretical discussion about the mind, the body, and self-control palpably relevant in her description of Gwendolen’s struggle for self-control in the very first chapter of Daniel Deronda. As the scene opens, Gwendolen stands gambling at the roulette table in a luxurious European resort in Leubronn. Briefly

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alluding to the animal automatism debate, Eliot describes the gamblers who surround

Gwendolen at the casino as emitting the monotone sounds that might come from an

“ingeniously constructed automaton” (8).55 Although the roulette-table has attracted

players from all walks of life, the influence of gambling has reduced them all to the level of machines. The narrator comments, “there was a certain uniform negativeness of expression which had the effect of a mask—as if they had all eaten of some root that for the time compelled the brains of each to the same narrow monotony of action” (9). Like a drug, gambling has stolen the gamblers’ energy, their individuality, and their powers of self-control—all except for Gwendolen, who cares not so much for winning as for appearing striking and being admired. In only two pages, however, Eliot shows how

Gwendolen’s desire for admiration also robs her of rational self-control. Just as the desire to win degrades the other gamblers to “fierce yet tottering impulsiveness” (9), so

Gwendolen’s irritation at being watched critically by a stranger, a serious young English gentleman named Daniel Deronda, compels her to gamble away all her winnings in irrational defiance:

Yet when her next stake was swept away, she felt the orbits of her eyes

getting hot, and the certainty she had (without looking) of that man still

watching her was something like a pressure which begins to be torturing.

The more reason to her why she should not flinch, but go on playing as if

she were indifferent to loss or gain. Her friend touched her elbow and

proposed that they should quit the table. For reply Gwendolen put ten

55 Simon During suggests another contemporary reference, noting that “this term [automaton] belongs to the theory, popularized by William Carpenter, that gambling, like some forms of insanity, reduces action to a mere reflex” (98).

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louis on the same spot: she was in that mood of defiance in which the

mind loses sight of any end beyond the satisfaction of enraged resistance;

and with the puerile stupidity of a dominant impulse includes luck among

its objects of defiance. Since she was not winning strikingly, the next best

thing was to lose strikingly. She controlled her muscles, and showed no

tremor of mouth or hands. Each time her stake was swept off she doubled

it. (11)

This episode dramatizes the complex interaction between feeling and thinking—and the body and the mind in general—in Gwendolen’s misguided attempts at self-control. At the same time, Eliot takes great pains to show that Gwendolen is not an automaton; her actions are not mechanical, but are intensely “organical” and “sense-guided.” Because

Gwendolen is carried away by a “mood of defiance,” Eliot seems to suggest that

Gwendolen’s feeling body trumps her thinking mind, yet she also highlights

Gwendolen’s remarkable control over the expression of her emotions. When her eyes first meet Deronda’s, she does not blush (as Bathsheba Everdene might have), and although her lips turn pale, “she controlled herself by the help of an inward defiance”

(10). In the passage above, her eyes get hot, but “she controlled her muscles, and showed no tremor” (11). Despite her ability to repress the physical expression of her emotions, however, she is carried away by her deeply rooted desire for admiration and her extreme inability to bear criticism. “With puerile stupidity,” she deliberately loses a small fortune in response to the disapproving gaze of a total stranger. In this portrayal of Gwendolen’s failure to maintain rational self-control at the roulette table, Eliot traces the mutual influences between tangled layers of feeling and thinking: the complex give-and-take

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between physical sensations, emotional responses, and deceptive thought processes.

Like Lewes, Eliot refuses to give priority to either the mind or the body.

Gwendolen’s actions in this scene also bear out Lewes’s bleak assertion that “no one supposes that our desires are free” (iv. 109). The narrator reveals that she is a confirmed egoist, a member of “Vanity’s large family,” and that Gwendolen’s desire for admiration forms the foundation of habitual thought patterns that defy easy change (11).

“In Gwendolen’s habits of mind it had been taken for granted that she knew what was admirable and that she herself was admired. This basis of her thinking had received a disagreeable concussion, and reeled a little, but was not easily to be overthrown” (11-12).

The narrator’s diagnosis suggests that Gwendolen’s habits of mind will have to undergo major changes in order for her to consistently achieve mature self-control, but at this point the novel holds out little hope for this possibility. When she returns to her hotel room that evening, Gwendolen finds a letter from her mother, revealing that the firm holding their investments has failed and the family is now penniless. Surprisingly, two great financial losses in one day—one at the roulette table and one the result of the irresponsible speculations of an investment firm—do not shake Gwendolen’s confidence in her own preeminence and personal luck. Instead she decides to pawn an old necklace in order to continue gambling at the resort with the hopes of winning back some of her family’s fortune. Her plans are thwarted, however, when Deronda repurchases the necklace and sends it back to her. Motivated to return home after this new humiliating experience, Gwendolen conceals her “tears of mortification,” “summon[s] back her proud self-control,” and leaves for England (20-21). In both this instance and in her experience at the roulette table, Gwendolen maintains her composure by repressing the expression of

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her emotions. Although she senses a conflict between her emotions, thoughts, and actions in these episodes, in reality she is inexorably driven by her pride, her habitual emotional and mental attitude. In this sense, she experiences one aspect of the complex interrelationship of feeling and thinking that Lewes describes, but her emotion is destructive and does not lead to productive forms of self-control.

The dramatic image of a beautiful young woman gambling and losing in a gaudy

European casino held a painful personal resonance for Eliot and Lewes. Gordon Haight and Jane Irwin identify as the dramatic germ of Daniel Deronda a similar scene that Eliot and Lewes observed while visiting a resort in Homburg in 1872. As Eliot reported to her publisher John Blackwood: “The saddest thing to be witnessed is the play of Miss Leigh,

Byron’s grand-niece, who is only 26 years old, and is completely in the grasp of this mean, money-raking demon. It made me cry to see her young fresh face among the hags and brutally stupid men around her” (qtd in Haight, 457). Lewes also recorded the event in his diary, noting, “Miss Leigh (Byron’s granddaughter) having lost 500 £, looking feverishly excited. Painful sight” (qtd in Irwin, xxvii). Eliot’s emphasis on the poignancy of Miss Leigh’s youth, “her young fresh face,” suggests a link between her portrayal of Gwendolen in the novel’s first chapter and Lewes’s consideration of development in Problems of Life and Mind. By beginning Gwendolen’s story in the middle—the novel opens at the casino and later fills in the details of Gwendolen’s childhood and the events of the last few months that precipitated her flight there—Eliot presents the idea of character development as a problem. Gwendolen is twenty when the novel begins and has already established the thought patterns that leave her vulnerable to rash, irrationally egoistic actions, if not to “the grasp of this mean, money-raking

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demon.” Is she capable of changing? Or, as the work of many mid-Victorian physiological psychologists, including Lewes, seems to suggest, are the effects of youthful experiences irremediable because they leave a physical imprint on the developing nervous system? The novel’s answer centers on Eliot’s innovative application of Lewes’s theory of feeling and thinking to Gwendolen’s experience of irrational fear as well as her optimistic revision of his developmental sequence for the moral sense.

In “The Strange Case of Monomania,” Simon During contends provocatively that

Eliot could not incorporate physiological psychology into her novels because it did not allow for moral development: “Because its analysis ultimately works at the level of the body, the genetic, materialist bias of mid- and late-Victorian psychiatry cannot in principle be absorbed by the classic realist novel” (95). During argues that Eliot’s commitment to representing moral development forced her to work with an outdated psychology (95). It is possible, however, to see how Eliot is working within the current paradigm of physiological psychology, albeit stretching it, in her portrayal of

Gwendolen’s problematic moral development. As we have seen, the question of how far a psychology based on the body could allow for free will and self-directed personal growth and change was hotly debated in the period. While Lewes’s theory of personality in Problems of Life and Mind allows for some degree of self-formation and learning from experience, his focus on the determining role of social, biological, and psychological conditions, as well as his claim that personality is “the incorporation of our past experience” also renders change extremely difficult (iv.111). Lewes argues that his

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psychology has practical applications for parents and early childhood educators because early experience determines the structure of the mind:

A knowledge of the way in which faculties are evolved, impressions

organized, moral and scientific intuitions formed, habits established, and

the structure no less than the furniture of the mind receives its individual

character from the silent and incessant modifications of Experience, will

make parents and teachers keenly alive to the incalculable importance of

the conditions under which the early years of the child are passed. (iv. 45)

As the novel reveals after Gwendolen returns home from Leubronne, her early childhood experiences had been less than ideal. Her father had died when she was still a baby, and her mother had remarried unhappily. Gwendolen’s childhood had lacked the stable home that, according to the narrator, would have given her the sense of rootedness required for affection to flourish and for her to develop a proper sense of her place in the world (22).

Her early experiences, along with her strong personality and her mother’s loving but unwise indulgence, all combined to make her into the “spoiled child” in the title of the novel’s first book and the reckless young woman at the gaming table in the novel’s opening scene, seeking excitement and social distinction.

Despite these unpromising beginnings, Eliot shows Gwendolen continuing to develop psychologically throughout the novel in an unexpected way—as she learns to channel her most irrational emotion, her mysterious “susceptibility to terror” (63). As

Lisabeth During points out, Friedrich Nietzsche comments in On the Genealogy of

Morals (1887) that current English psychologists were continually and accurately, though perhaps unintentionally, “engaged in the same task of pushing into the foreground the

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nasty part of the psyche, looking for the effective moral forces of human development in the very last place we would wish to have them found” (88). During applies Nietzsche’s praise to Eliot, writing, “George Eliot did know very well where the sources of ‘human development’ were to be found. In the nasty parts of the psyche, in passive, mimetic, regressive movements of dread and desire” (88). In Daniel Deronda, During argues,

Gwendolen’s dread provides the moral insights that finally allow her a degree of personal and moral autonomy—a form of morality that contrasts with the more invasive, intersubjective model of sympathy represented by Daniel Deronda. I would argue that

Deronda unknowingly indicates the moral insight offered by dread and suggests the psychological role that irrational emotion can play in cultivating self-control when he counsels Gwendolen to “turn your fear into a safeguard” (452). In this scene, Deronda responds to Gwendolen’s confession that she is afraid of her own capacity for violence:

“I am frightened at everything. I am frightened at myself. When my blood is fired I can do daring things—take any leap” (452). Full of remorse for marrying Grandcourt after promising his mistress Lydia that she would not jeopardize the inheritance of Lydia and

Grandcourt’s children, Gwendolen dreads that Grandcourt will discover that she knew about his secret past; she fears his power over her, and she hates him passionately.

Daniel recognizes that Gwendolen’s rational fear of her violent potential can help her to develop her conscience and gain self-control.56 He continues:

56 Deronda’s message sounds familiar to readers of Eliot, many of whom agree with Henry James, who accepts Deronda’s advice as sound, but boring. In James’s “Daniel Deronda: A Conversation,” Pulcheria responds witheringly to Theodora’s enthusiastic admiration for Deronda’s advice: “What can be drearier than a novel in which the function of the hero—young, handsome, and brilliant—is to give didactic advice, in a proverbial form, to the young, beautiful and brilliant heroine?” (105). 136

Keep your dread fixed on the idea of increasing that remorse which is so

bitter to you. Fixed meditation may do a great deal towards defining our

longing or dread. We are not always in a state of strong emotion, and

when we are calm we can use our memories and gradually change the bias

of our fear, as we do our tastes. Take your fear as a safeguard. It is like

quickness of hearing. It may make consequences passionately present to

you. Try to take hold of your sensibility, and use it as if it were a faculty,

like vision. (452)

As Daniel’s speech suggests, Gwendolen’s fear is, in fact, visionary. At this point in the novel, however, Gwendolen struggles unsuccessfully to assimilate Deronda’s advice, and

Deronda himself misses the deeper psychological significance of his speech. Daniel soon realizes that he has underestimated the enormity of her hatred and fear: “He was under the baffling difficulty of discerning, that what he had been urging on her was thrown into the pallid distance of mere thought before the outburst of her habitual emotion. It was as if he saw her drowning while her limbs were bound” (453). For readers of the novel,

Gwendolen’s dramatic helplessness in the face of powerful emotion is familiar, and even though Deronda (who is unaware of her emotional past) seems simply to counsel

Gwendolen that her fear of her potential for evil can serve as a restraint by making

“consequences passionately present,” we sense that Gwendolen’s fear of herself in this scene is linked to her unexplained experiences of shatteringly irrational fear that have complicated her efforts at self-control since childhood. As readers, we wonder if, in the larger context of the novel, Deronda’s advice might not indicate that her irrational fear can also serve as a tool for self-understanding and self-control.

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Because Gwendolen’s mysterious fears have played such a formative role in her life, the novel treats them as inseparable from her experience of more reasonable fears.

Indeed, Gwendolen’s experiences of irrational terror are so extreme and so debilitating that critics have argued that they are a symptom of serious mental pathology, possibly hysteria or trauma from sexual abuse.57 As an adolescent, her terror manifests itself occasionally in wide open, solitary places, which “impressed her with an undefined feeling of immeasurable existence aloof from her, in the midst of which she was

helplessly incapable of asserting herself” (64). Then while performing a charade with her

sisters and cousins, the sudden glimpse of a painting of a dead face literally paralyzes her.

But after her marriage to Grandcourt, Gwendolen’s occasional irrational dread morphs

into an ever-present obsession that begins on her wedding night when Lydia sends

Gwendolen the diamonds Grandcourt had originally given her along with a bitter curse:

“I am the grave in which your chance of happiness is buried as well as mine” (359).

When Grandcourt discovers his bride later that evening, pale and shrieking with

“hysterical violence,” he recognizes that “the Furies had crossed his threshold” (359).

Gwendolen’s remorse over her betrayal of Lydia and her children and her perhaps

exaggerated sense that she deserves Lydia’s curse combines with her hatred of her

husband to form a new fear that is both “definite and vague” (424). It is definite in the

sense that this new fear is rationally connected both to her dread that Grandcourt will

discover her knowledge of Lydia (and how much she compromised herself ethically by

57Athena Vrettos suggests that Gwendolen suffers from hysteria, while Jane Wood defines her “morbid consciousness” as pathological and comments that her fear “signal[s] her potential for nervous disease” (138). Margaret Loewen Reimer argues recently that Gwendolen was abused by her step-father, and David Trotter considers Gwendolen agoraphobic.

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marrying him anyways) and to her dread that her hatred of Grandcourt will erupt in violence, but it is also connected to her childhood experiences of vague, free-floating fear in the sense that it takes on wildly irrational proportions. While visiting Sir Hugo’s estate, for example, she frequently imagines Grandcourt strangling her: “That white hand of his which was touching his whisker was capable, she fancied, of clinging round her neck and threatening to throttle her, for her fear of him, mingling with the vague foreboding of some retributive calamity which hung about her life, had reached a superstitious point” (427). The narrator highlights the superstitious quality of

Gwendolen’s fear of her husband by describing her mental state as a “nightmare of fear”

(447). Gwendolen does not dare contradict him because she feels that Grandcourt has “a ghostly army at his back” (447). By the time Gwendolen recalls Daniel’s advice later in the novel—she quotes it to herself at length while she and Grandcourt are yachting in the

Mediterranean (674)—her hatred for Grandcourt, her temptations to violence, and corresponding fear of herself have grown to such a degree that Eliot describes her thoughts as “something like the hidden rites of vengeance with which the persecuted have made a dark vent for their rage” (673). Her imagination is visited by “a white-lipped fierce-eyed temptation with murdering fingers” (674), and her wishes “tak[e] shapes possible and impossible, like a cloud of demon-faces” (681). Although it is perhaps not overly dramatic but strictly realistic to describe murderous thoughts so luridly, Eliot’s relentless focus on the vivid, visual quality of Gwendolen’s temptations links

Gwendolen’s fear of herself to the unspecified and visionary fears that she experiences elsewhere.

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Eliot’s development of Daniel’s advice runs counter to prevailing Victorian attitudes about the need to direct the attention away from emotion in order to maintain self-control. Gillian Beer astutely contrasts Eliot’s treatment of the emotion of fear in

Daniel Deronda with Darwin’s in The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals.

Darwin considered fear to be a primitive, anti-social emotion beyond conscious control, useful for survival in primitive states but requiring suppression in civilized states (213).

Beer writes, “For Gwendolen in particular [fear becomes] a mode of heightened apprehension, which can include prescience and freedom as well as the obliterative terror with which she receives Lydia’s diamonds, pallid, shrieking, spellbound” (213). She concludes, “In Daniel Deronda fear becomes a tool of consciousness, not something to be suppressed” (214). Beer’s comments help us see how Gwendolen’s fear can function as an unexpected strength.58 Although she does not discuss G. H. Lewes’s view of fear,

Beer’s comments on Daniel Deronda resonate with Lewes’s emphasis in Problems of

Life and Mind on the unity of thinking and feeling. In fact, both Problems of Life and

Mind and Daniel Deronda diverge from contemporary attitudes about emotions and self- control by describing the emotions in general and fear in particular as forms of intelligence.

Given Lewes’s emphasis on feeling, it is not surprising that he would describe the emotions as “elements of Intelligence” (v. 385). He explains:

58 Michael Davis describes additional ways in which Eliot’s treatment of emotion differs from many of her contemporaries. He notes that Eliot uses fluid metaphors to describe emotion throughout her novels, explaining, “It is this fluid quality of emotion which enables a blending of reason and emotional fundamental to Eliot’s ethical and aesthetic vision” (97). In addition, the fluid quality of emotion means that emotion cannot be separated easily from other kinds of feeling and that all types of sensibility are essentially active.

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Emotion is sensation on a more powerful scale, greater in energy, and

wider in range. But it also tends to become more restricted to definite

channels, and in proportion as this is the case, the emotions become

elements of Intelligence, that is, of Guidance. Surprise, for example, is

mild Terror, which may be a pleasurable or painful shock: it is an effective

impulse towards Interpretation, and therefore a source of Knowledge;

whereas the profounder agitation of Terror only leads to violent impulses

which prevent a survey of the objective conditions. Passion is blind. All

Cognition is founded on Emotion, but it is only from the less violent and

more restricted forms of this agitation, such as Desire, Curiosity, Interest,

that the higher forms of Cognition issue. Expectation and Hope are more

intellectual than Anxiety and Anger. (v. 385)

When Lewes categorizes emotion as a sensation, he builds on a rather intricate and nuanced discussion of sensation. According to his definition, sensation is the direct response of the organism to either an internal or external stimulus and may be experienced either consciously or unconsciously. Sensation involves the entire organism, not just the special organs of sense, and it is simultaneously a physical process and a psychical process in the sense that it involves both an objective physical impression and a subjective change in feeling (v. 263-4). In this passage, Lewes states that the emotions, as especially energetic forms of sensation, leave a physical record in the body (“definite channels”). For this reason, they are a powerful way in which the organism records and learns from its experience, and in this manner, they function as a “source of knowledge.”

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Lewes’s suggestion in this passage that the more violent emotions hinder thought parallels Daniel’s advice that Gwendolen attempt to tone down her fear: “when we are calm we can use our memories and gradually change the bias of our fear” (452). But

Lewes also refers to the emotion of terror at several other points in Problems of Life and

Mind as an illustration of the ways in which the emotions provide us with objective information about the external world: “the terror felt in darkness is in so far a quality of darkness, just as the sensation of sweetness is a quality of sugar” (ii.221). He reiterates in a later volume: “The terror excited by darkness is for those who feel it a quality of the darkness as much as its visual character” (v.381). The problems with accepting emotion as scientific evidence, according to Lewes, are that it is too diffusive and it is impossible to measure or accurately compare, not that it is not a legitimate or fundamental source of information (ii.221-2). The emotional qualities of objects (Lewes explains that terror is a

“quality of darkness”), while important and real, may “enter into our general theories of the Universe, but never into our theorems of the External Order in its impersonal aspects”

(ii.222). Yet, over and over, Lewes returns to the influence of feeling on our conscious and unconscious thoughts. For Lewes, it is impossible to overestimate the effect of sensation and emotion on our perception of reality.

Fear in Narratives of Development

Despite his radical insistence on the role of emotion (including fear) as a source of knowledge, however, Lewes’s comments in Problems of Life and Mind fail to account fully for the positive role Deronda ascribes to fear in Eliot’s novel because Lewes also describes an emotional progression much like Darwin’s, in which he theorizes that

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emotions begin as egoistic fear and naturally grow into sympathy through socialization

(v.158-159). Eliot’s representation of the emotions in Daniel Deronda and Lewes’s discussion of the natural history of the emotions and the moral sense, which Eliot edited, reveal an ongoing dialogue between the two thinkers that demonstrates Eliot’s investment in the possibility of Gwendolen’s development in Daniel Deronda. Although Eliot took painstaking care not to substantially alter Lewes’s thoughts in the fourth and fifth volumes of Problems of Life and Mind, which she prepared for publication after his death, K.K. Collins has documented over three hundred editorial changes she made to his work (465). Collins explains, “While most of these involve abridgements of repetitious passages, improvements of hasty sentences, and corrections of erroneous citations,

George Eliot seems to have found Lewes’s ethical arguments particularly engaging, for she entirely rewrote two paragraphs on the emotions . . . , as well as a subchapter entitled

‘The Moral Sense’” (465-6).59 Collins appends both Eliot’s and Lewes’s versions of

these passages for comparison at the end of the article, and it is interesting to note that

both Eliot and Lewes had Daniel Deronda in mind as they worked on versions of the

subchapter on “The Moral Sense.”

59 Collins concludes that Eliot subtly alters the bias of these passages in relation to contemporary ethical debates: “George Eliot counterbalances Lewes’s natural history of morals with her own attempt, founded upon her recognition of the importance of the individualistic conception of duty, to posit authoritative grounds for moral obligations” (466). Collins gives a useful overview of this debate over ethics, which is certainly related to the portrayal of emotion in Daniel Deronda since “the utilitarians tend to refer ultimately to emotion, or moral sentiment, in accounting for moral judgments; the intuitionists, to the authoritativeness of reason” (468). Collins shows how Eliot “collapses” the “distinction between thought and feeling” in Middlemarch by showing how inseparable Dorothea’s reasoning and feeling are in her determination to respond with forgiveness to Casaubon’s emotional hardness: “Dorothea reasons and wills her way into forgiveness, and into fulfilling her obligation towards Casaubon, by means of her imaginative sympathy; but she equally feels her way into forgiveness and fulfills her obligation by means of her reason and will” (482).

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Lewes’s version includes the epigraph from Daniel Deronda, “Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul,” as an illustration of the power of remorse (488).60 Although Eliot

removed this reference, she revised the passage on remorse in a way that more closely follows the development of Gwendolen’s conscience in the novel, and she more

explicitly argues that the development of remorse illustrates the progression of the moral

sense in general. Just as the moral value of remorse progresses from “that stage of

human remorse which consists in the misdoer’s mere terror of the vengeance he has

incurred from supernal powers” to “the agonized sense, the contrite contemplation, of the

wound inflicted on another” (489), so in Daniel Deronda, Gwendolen’s remorse over her

marriage to Grandcourt shifts from a vague terror of supernatural retribution to a more

personal sense of grief for the wrong she has inflicted on Lydia Glasher and her children.

Despite these parallels, Gwendolen’s moral progress in Daniel Deronda differs

significantly from both Lewes’s and Eliot’s expositions of the emotions and the moral

sense in Problems of Life and Mind, particularly in regard to Gwendolen’s internalization

of Deronda’s suggestion that her fear might act as a moral safeguard. In her revision of

the passage on the moral sense, Eliot greatly expands Lewes’s original statement that

“experience takes the form of a Moral Sense—a regulative intuition—teaching us to

repress a desire the fruition of which may bring pain to ourselves or others” (485).

Explaining the different forms that this regulative intuition may take, she identifies fear

as the most primitive force that motivates people to adapt their behavior to a moral

standard. “In the less endowed specimens of our race . . . the response to the moral

demands of society . . . is little more than the conflict of opposing appetites, the check

60 These page numbers are from Collins’s appendix.

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imposed by egoistic dread on egoistic desire” (485). From “egoistic dread,” this motivating force progresses to “the love of approbation” (485), until, paradoxically, the highest form of moral sense runs counter to social pressures, valuing the greater good to which society is blind. It “comes at last . . . to incorporate itself as protest and resistance, as the renunciation of immediate sympathy for the sake of a foreseen general good”

(486). This progression reflects Daniel Deronda’s narrative; by the end of the novel, he renounces immediate social sympathy by embracing his Jewish identity and working towards the founding of a Jewish state. However, it does not explain Gwendolen’s story.

Eliot again stresses the primitive nature of the emotion of fear in her revision of the two paragraphs on “The Affective States.” In these paragraphs, Lewes describes the progression of all emotions, both “egoistic and sympathetic” from the animal instincts of

“hunger or sexuality” (491). Eliot’s revision preserves the origin of emotions in hunger and sexuality, but she also proposes more explicitly, “all emotions in the beginning are egoistic, and their root-manifestation is probably a form of Fear” (491). Eliot suggests that the egoistic emotion of fear evolves into the sympathetic sentiments of love and duty

“through the influence of the social medium” (491). She concludes,

The consciousness of dependence is the continual check on the egoistic

desires, and the continual source of that interest in the experience of others

which is the wakener of sympathy; till we finally see in many highly

wrought natures a complete submergence (or, if you will, a transference)

of egoistic desire, and an habitual outrush of the emotional force in

sympathetic channels. (491)

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In other words, in this passage, sympathy and the “consciousness of dependence” act as a means to self-control, restraining the self-centered desires manifested primally by egoistic fear and transforming them from self-centered to other-centered impulses. In

Daniel Deronda, however, Gwendolen’s fear works in conjunction with her sense of dependence on Deronda to gradually shift her focus away from herself.

Like other natural histories of the moral sense, Lewes applies his history on both the species level and on the individual level, through the widely accepted view that individual development recapitulates species development. But Deronda’s advice to

Gwendolen alters the progression of emotion proposed by Lewes and arguably re- affirmed by Eliot. By advising Gwendolen to meditate on her fear, Deronda takes her back to the beginning of the sequence, as if her moral development has been arrested, and she must begin again.61 Deronda’s advice suggests the schematic, somewhat arbitrary,

nature of such generalized sequences and highlights Eliot’s interrogation of the concept of development throughout the novel.

Despite Gwendolen’s unpromising childhood, she does change throughout the novel. The narrator’s descriptions of Gwendolen indicate a profound change in her habitual method of self-control, from self-centered pride to other-centered humility, although it is unclear whether her fear or her progressive experiences of humiliation (and her growing capacity for affection) are more effective in bringing about this change.

Early on in the novel, Gwendolen’s remarkable composure is repeatedly described as

61 Nancy Paxton argues that Eliot presents Gwendolen as an example of (permanently) arrested development in order to “challeng[e] the assumptions that Spencer and Darwin made about the natural development of the sexual instincts” (205), but I see Gwendolen gradually developing as she tries to apply Deronda’s advice.

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prideful. After she is startled into “tears of mortification” when Daniel redeems her pawned necklace in Leubronn, for instance, Gwendolen “summon[s] back her proud self- control” (21). In contrast to her childhood fits of passion (including the time she strangled her sister’s canary), the narrator reports that as a young woman of twenty,

“some of her native force had turned into a self-control by which she guarded herself from penitential humiliation” (25). After her marriage, Gwendolen relies on her pride even more desperately in order to appear self-satisfied despite her miserable position. In fact, Gwendolen’s actions echo Carpenter’s advice on self-control. She attempts a similar type of repression and substitution through attention when she seeks to compose her emotions by dwelling on her beauty and social position: “It was her habitual effort now to magnify the satisfactions of her pride, on which she nourished her strength” (415).

However, Gwendolen’s pride is ultimately no match for either her terror or her desire to confess to Deronda. The narrator describes Gwendolen’s gradual realization of the inadequacy of her old methods of self-control:

Poor Gwendolen was conscious of an uneasy, transforming process—all

the old nature shaken to its depths, its hopes spoiled, its pleasures

perturbed, but still showing wholeness and strength in the will to reassert

itself. After every new shock of humiliation she tried to adjust herself and

seize her old supports—proud concealment, trust in new excitements that

would make life go by without much thinking; trust in some deed of

reparation to nullify her self-blame and shield her from a vague, ever-

visiting dread of some horrible calamity; trust in the hardening effect of

use and wont that would make her indifferent to her miseries. (423)

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Her pride, her ability to repress her emotions, entertainment, deeds of reparation, and habit all fail to provide Gwendolen with the psychological support she desperately needs.

Instead, the novel suggests, Gwendolen’s reliance on Deronda combines with her self- dread to restrain her impulses, heightening her awareness of moral consequences.

Deronda’s influence over Gwendolen is described as conversion through personalities coming into contact—Daniel’s personality “subdued her into receptiveness” (430). His

“restraining power over her” is like that of a “terrible-browed angel,” a judge from whom she can conceal nothing and who has invoked a “self-discontent which could only be satisfied by genuine change” (673). Slowly Gwendolen gains awareness of the changes she needs to make—changes that the narrator first indicated during the gambling scene in

Leubronn with the comment that the “basis of her thinking . . . was not easily to be overthrown” (12).

Gwendolen’s development is by no means smooth. Her experiences of dramatic inner struggle and painful failure to achieve self-control are the most memorable episodes in the second half of the novel. However, even while Gwendolen is plagued with obsessively murderous thoughts when, alarmed by her evident dependence on Deronda,

Grandcourt takes her on a long yachting trip in the Mediterranean, Eliot indicates that

Deronda’s advice is effective to a degree. Juxtaposed against her passionate hatred for

Grandcourt and the image of “a white dead face from which she was for ever trying to flee and for ever held back,” Gwendolen “remembered Deronda’s words: they were continually recurring in her thought—‘Turn your fear into a safeguard. . . .’” (674).

Deronda’s words do help to prevent Gwendolen from taking any rash action—her dread cancels her desire for violent revenge—although focusing on her dread fails to deliver her

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from its paralyzing effects: “In Gwendolen’s consciousness Temptation and Dread met and stared like two pale phantoms, each seeing itself in the other—each obstructed by its own image; and all the while her fuller self beheld the apparitions and sobbed for deliverance from them” (674). The trip ends in catastrophe when Grandcourt falls off the yacht and drowns. Yet, ironically, even when Gwendolen hesitates to throw the rope

(while her “heart said, ‘Die!’”), her guilt stems from her failure to act, not from the impulsive violence that she had feared (and prepared for by packing a knife) (696). In a sense, Gwendolen’s paralytic fear acts as an effective moral restraint in this scene. Even when Gwendolen lapses again into hysterics after Deronda rejects her love, she clings to the resolution that she first made at Sir Hugo’s house when Deronda first told her to take her fear as a safeguard: “it shall be better with me because I have known you” (453).

Gwendolen repeats this promise twice, first to her mother after Deronda tells her that he is going to marry someone else, a beautiful young Jewish woman named Mirah, and again at the very end of the novel in the letter she writes to Deronda on his wedding day.

By reiterating Gwendolen’s promise to “be better” (807), Eliot emphasizes Gwendolen’s own belief in her capacity for continued development and reminds the reader how much she has grown.

Without Deronda to help her, however, it is hard to imagine how Gwendolen will carry out her resolution. As Athena Vrettos summarizes Gwendolen’s desolate position,

“Gwendolen is left without a husband, a fortune, a career, or a confidante” (576). Noting

Gwendolen’s hysterical breakdown in the penultimate chapter, Vrettos concludes, “The end of Eliot’s novel thus remains radically unresolved, for Gwendolen has embraced

Daniel’s moral vision without eradicating her own nervous symptoms” (578). Eliot does

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deny Gwendolen the satisfying closure that she grants Deronda in his marriage to Mirah and quest to Palestine. But, while Gwendolen’s lonely, fragile state potentially indicates that Deronda’s advice is ultimately inadequate, that her love for him is psychically disastrous, and that embracing emotion (and humility) is a misguided means to self- control, other themes in the novel suggest that Gwendolen may still be on a (painful) path to psychological health and to achieving self-understanding and agency.

Gwendolen’s trajectory of personal development, which is full of fits, false starts, and catastrophes but nevertheless ultimately progresses, is congruent with other models of development in the novel. The novel’s epigraph famously states, “Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning” (7). Explaining that both science and poetry must start in medias res because “no retrospect will take us to the true beginning” (7),

Eliot draws attention to the essentially provisional and somewhat arbitrary nature of both scientific and literary narratives of development. A model of fragmented development is also confirmed by Eliot’s rather sinister use of horse imagery to describe Gwendolen.

Though the narrator highlights Gwendolen’s beauty and energetic high spirits by comparing her to a racehorse, Eliot unsettlingly extends the metaphor through Rev.

Gascoigne’s and Grandcourt’s comparisons of growing up to breaking in a horse, an often violent, yet generally successful model for gaining control over an unruly creature.

This painful image of growing up is strengthened by Eliot’s description of Gwendolen as a potentially blighted growing plant (68). (In contrast she describes Mirah innocuously as a fresh dewy flower) (732). Before Gwendolen and Grandcourt meet, when

Gwendolen and her trusting cousin Rex ride out to the hunt together, the narrator

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foreshadows her future troubles by emphasizing the vulnerability of a growing thing at each stage of growth.

For some of the goodness which Rex believed in was there. Goodness is a

large, often a prospective word; like harvest, which at one stage when we

talk of it lies all underground, with an indeterminate future: is the germ

prospering in the darkness? at another, it has put forth delicate green

blades, and by-and-by the trembling blossoms are ready to be dashed off

by an hour of rough wind or rain. Each stage has its peculiar blight, and

may have the healthy life choked out of it by a particular action of the foul

land which rears or neighbors it, or by damage brought from foulness afar.

(68)

The plant metaphor returns when Deronda comforts Gwendolen that in living for others, she “will find your life growing like a plant.” He continues, “This sorrow, which has cut down to the root, has come to you while you are so young—try to think of it, not as a spoiling of your life, but as a preparation for it” (769). Although Deronda’s words reinforce Gwendolen’s plant-like vulnerability to destruction, they also suggest a new hopeful characteristic of plants: the potential for new growth.

In addition to these images of fragmented development, the novel also emphasizes the role of the will in development. Eliot presents the idea of progress and development as a philosophical problem in the discussion at “The Philosophers,” the working man’s club that Deronda’s friend Mordecai attends. Buchan, one of the club members, addresses the idea of historical determinism when he asks, “How far and in what ways can we act upon the course of change so as to promote it where it is beneficial, and divert

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it where it is injurious?” (526). In response, Mordecai argues emphatically that the feelings and ideas of individuals can change the course of history: “I say that the strongest principle of growth lies in human choice” (538). While Mordecai’s comments refer specifically to the plight of the Jews, the power of human choice to bring about change is confirmed in the novel by Mordecai’s own experience, when his highly unlikely friendship with Daniel Deronda fulfills his deep desire for a kindred spirit to carry on his life’s work.

Prophetic Vision, Psychic Integration, and the Physiology of the Nerves

On the surface, Mordecai and Gwendolen are so different—he is an impoverished

Jewish scholar dying of consumption, while she inhabits an entirely separate world of the

English upper class—that his comments about growth seem inapplicable to her story.

Not only are the characters themselves unlike, but they occupy distinct plotlines in Daniel

Deronda, bridged only by their friendship with Daniel and Gwendolen’s brief meeting with Mordecai’s sister, Mirah. Despite the differences between Mordecai’s and

Gwendolen’s stories, however, the novel also presents striking similarities between their nervous sensitivities that indicate Gwendolen’s potential to experience the same control and feeling-guided psychological integration that Mordecai has achieved.

Since its publication, readers of Daniel Deronda have puzzled over the thematic and structural connections between the two halves of the novel, with F.R. Leavis most famously suggesting that the novel would be much better if the Jewish portion tracing

Mordecai’s and Deronda’s stories was excised and the “good part” renamed Gwendolen

Harleth (247). Critics like Leavis have often viewed Gwendolen’s half of the novel as an

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example of classic psychological realism, while the Jewish half seems unrealistic, romantic and overly symbolic.62 Daniel and Mordecai’s friendship, for instance, is

predicated on improbable coincidences. Daniel meets Mordecai by chance in a used

bookstore while he is randomly hunting for Mirah’s mother in Jewish neighborhoods.

Although Mirah’s mother is dead, Mordecai proves to be Mirah’s long-lost older brother.

In another unforeseen plot twist, Daniel, who has been raised by his foster father Sir

Hugo as an English gentleman, discovers from his long-lost mother that he is actually

Jewish. Soon he proves to be the kindred spirit Mordecai had foreseen in a vision, a

“second soul” who will fulfill his dream of returning to the East to establish a Jewish

state and who will publish his mystical Hebrew poetry (473).63

Just as unexpectedly in a novel clearly invested in psychological realism, both

Mordecai and Daniel experience a highly unusual degree of psychic unity (in terms of

inner harmony of desires, thoughts, and actions) that contrasts with Gwendolen’s by-now

more familiar inner fragmentation. In his marriage to Mirah and quest to the East, for

instance, the narrator comments that Daniel experiences “the very best of human

62 One sympathetic reviewer suggested in 1877 that this felt disjunction revealed a prevailing cynicism, noting ironically, “A Grandcourt whose nature is one main trunk of barren egoism from which all the branches of fresh desire have withered off, is recognized forthwith to be human. But Deronda, sensitive at every point with life which flows into him and throughout him, and streams forth from him in beneficent energy,-- Deronda is a pallid shadow rather than a man!” (Dowden 442). 63 Adela Pinch’s recent reading of Daniel Deronda emphasizes Eliot’s portrayal of the power of thinking as an important link between the two plotlines in the novel. She writes, “what holds Daniel Deronda together in spite of the famous divisions and entropic forces pulling its matter apart is, weirdly, the fictitious actions of Daniel and Gwendolen thinking about each other” (145). Pinch argues, “George Eliot regarded the belief that thinking about someone might make something happen to them as simultaneously epistemologically irrational and ethically efficacious” (144).

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possibilities . . . the blending of a complete personal love in one current with a larger duty” (623). Eliot’s descriptions of Daniel’s psychic integration—this blending of love and duty—are characterized by an emphasis on feeling. When Daniel hurries to tell

Mordecai the truth about his Jewish birth, Eliot writes, “The strongest tendencies of his nature were rushing in one current—the fervent affectionateness which made him delight in meeting the wish of beings near to him, and the imaginative need of some far-reaching relation to make the horizon of his immediate, daily acts” (746). She reiterates that

Daniel’s life now contains those “rare moments when yearnings and acts can be one”

(748). Even more dramatically, the fulfillment of Mordecai’s longing for a second soul represents both a dramatic unity of desires and actions and an uncanny correspondence between his feelings and future events. He seems to creatively shape Daniel’s identity and destiny. As Mordecai assures Daniel before he discovers the truth about his birth,

“You would remind me that I may be under an illusion . . . . So it might be with my trust, if you would make it an illusion. But you will not” (502). Mordecai’s statement that

Daniel will not make his trust an illusion suggests either that he is confident that Daniel is actually Jewish or that, regardless of Daniel’s birth, he is confident that their wills can mystically shape his biological and spiritual identity. As William Myers comments on this passage,

It is an astonishing repudiation of the scientific method, therefore, and so,

astonishingly, of that notion of Law consecrated by Judaism, for Mordecai

to claim as he does the power of making predictions about coincidences

and choices in the future which of their nature could never be part of a

sequence. In the light of such claims it is not surprising that George Eliot

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has to assure us, on no less than five occasions, that Mordecai is sane

according to the standard Associationist criteria. (220)

In fact, the novel offers a number of rationalistic, although potentially conflicting, explanations for Mordecai’s seemingly extra-scientific experiences of fulfilled prophetic longings.64 In addition to these explanations, as the following discussion will show,

Lewes’s Problems of Life and Mind reveals that Mordecai’s and Daniel’s experiences of

psychic integration are not only compatible with Lewes’s theory of feeling and his

explanation of how the nerves work, but also psychologically probable and attainable by

Gwendolen.

Eliot portrays Gwendolen’s fear as one aspect of her especially sensitive nature in

a way that links her fear with Mordecai’s mystical creativity. In Deronda’s words, her

fear is “a sensibility,” “like quickness of hearing” that may be used “as if it were a faculty, like vision.” Like Mordecai, Gwendolen experiences second sight when her vision of the dead white face prefigures Grandcourt’s eventual death by drowning. As

Jill Matus argues, Gwendolen and Mordecai “are implicitly connected on a spectrum of

64 Critics disagree about the degree to which the novel as a whole endorses Mordecai’s prophecies, but they do tend to agree that Eliot’s characterization of Mordecai is psychologically complex and acute. For example, George Levine argues that Eliot’s comparisons between Mordecai’s second-sight and the “concentrated prevision” of the scientist (483) reflect Lewes’s discussion of scientific hypotheses in Problems of Life and Mind (25). Mary Carpenter argues that Eliot’s description of Mordecai’s prophetic visions are simply a “recognizable example of poetic or artistic vision,” noting that Eliot’s treatment of Mordecai’s visions parallels the rational explanations of biblical prophecy offered by 19th century biblical commentators (62). While Athena Vrettos argues that the similarities between Mordecai’s visions and Gwendolen’s “spectral experiences” undermine his spiritual authority, suggesting “the possibility that all visionary powers are a function of nervous disease,” she nonetheless reads him as a psychologically realistic character (575). Jane Irwin comments that Eliot carefully blends Kabbalistic doctrines with descriptions of Mordecai’s psychological needs: “She has . . . taken pains to show the philosophical concept of souls and their transmigration as a product of human need, and consequently a real part of the larger life of humanity” (173).

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what we may call heightened consciousness” (67). In a famous passage defending

Mordecai’s experience of second sight, his prevision of Daniel rowing towards him against the sunset, Eliot writes,

“Second-sight” is a flag over disputed ground. But it is a matter of

knowledge that there are persons whose yearnings, conceptions—nay,

traveled conclusions—continually take the form of images which have a

foreshadowing power: the deed they would do starts up before them in

complete shape, making a coercive type; the event they hunger for or

dread rises into vision with a seed-like growth, feeding itself fast on

unnumbered impressions. They are not always the less capable of the

argumentative process, nor less sane than the commonplace calculators of

the market: sometimes it may be that their natures have manifold

openings, like the hundred-gated Thebes, where there may naturally be a

greater and more miscellaneous inrush than through a narrow beadle-

watched portal. (471)

In this passage, Eliot links desire, dread, and sensitivity with the creative power of the will. Proposing that “the event they hunger for or dread” grows out of “unnumbered impressions” and that “their natures have manifold openings,” Eliot suggests that those who experience second sight may be more open to sensation and thus actually be more in touch with material reality than their more normal counterparts. This suggestion is echoed by Lewes’s emphasis on the centrality of sensation and emotion in the inner life, the role of emotion in supplying information about the external world, and the body’s status as a “sensorium”—the entire body is an organ of sense, according to Lewes (v.

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378). In fact, although Mordecai’s vision of Daniel rowing against the sunset and

Gwendolen’s vision of the dead face are the novel’s most dramatic examples of second sight, the novel is full of instances of prevision. For example, Rex’s younger sister Anna begs him not to go riding after the hounds with Gwendolen, sensing accurately that he will soon confess his love to her and she will break his heart. “[Her] fears gifted her with second-sight,” the narrator remarks only half-ironically (67). While stopping in Genoa on the yachting trip, Gwendolen also dreams of meeting Deronda just “one hour” before she unexpectedly actually meets him on the hotel staircase (676). In both cases, Anna’s and Gwendolen’s previsions are accompanied by a state of heightened sensation due to their fears and desires. Eliot emphasizes this connection between heightened sensation and emotion when she compares Mirah’s dim awareness of her love for Deronda to “the sense of an approaching weather-change” (652). Her awareness “had extremely slight external prompting, such as we are ashamed to find all we can allege in support of the busy constructions that go on within us, not only without effort but even against it, under the influence of any blind emotional stirring” (652). Eliot’s comparison highlights the vague, yet real correspondence between “slight external promptings” and “blind emotional stirring” common to both the foreboding of a storm and dawning emotional self-knowledge and resonates with Lewes’s claim that the “emotions become elements of intelligence” (11).

In a passage that recalls Eliot’s comparison between the body’s senses and

“hundred-gated Thebes,” Lewes also proposes that ordinary humans possess numerous senses:

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“How many senses have you?” asks the traveler from Sirius (in Voltaire’s

Micromegas). The inhabitant of Saturn replies: “Seventy-two; but every

day we lament that we have so few.” We might have told the Saturnian

that our senses were not less numerous, and that our limitations consisted

in the obstacles which prevented so many of them from being intelligibly

connected with objects in the external sphere. (v. 381)

The multitude of sensory information that is available in the world yet inassimilable by humans is one of Eliot and Lewes’s favorite topics. As Eliot comments in Middlemarch,

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity” (2.20). Whereas in this passage from Middlemarch Eliot sees such heightened sensation as so overwhelming it could be fatal, in Daniel Deronda, Eliot creates characters who begin to approach this “keen vision and feeling.” Characters who, like

Mordecai and Gwendolen, are a little less “wadded with stupidity” can acquire what appears to be supernatural information through purely natural means.

Eliot describes these “natures who lend themselves to second-sight” as

“quiveringly-poised” (470), and her frequent use of the word “quiver” throughout the novel parallels Lewes’s theory of nerve action. Eliot uses the word “quiver” to indicate the presence of life, sensitivity, sympathy, and vulnerability. The action of quivering is associated with musical vibrations, the emotions of love and fear, breath, the wind on a leaf, and inherited longings. For instance, Daniel uses the image of a quivering string instrument to explain how his new identification with his Jewish heredity and his desire

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to help to create a Jewish homeland in the Middle East resonates with something that had always been present deep within himself:

Suppose the stolen offspring of some mountain tribe brought up in a city

of the plain, or one with an inherited genius for painting, born blind—the

ancestral life would live within them as a dim longing for unknown

objects and sensations, and the spell-bound habit of their inherited frames

would be like a cunningly-wrought musical instrument, never played on,

but quivering throughout in uneasy mysterious moanings of its intricate

structure that, under the right touch, give music. Something like that, I

think, has been my experience. (750)

Daniel describes a vague inner need that is inseparable from his genetic makeup and is delicately poised to express itself when it comes into contact with the right outer stimulus. Just as Mordecai’s inner need for a disciple created an outer fulfillment in

Daniel, so Daniel’s quiveringly-poised emotional sensitivity enables him to experience this unusually close correspondence between inner sensations and outer events.

Eliot’s images of quivering and reflection compare provocatively with Lewes’s explanation of the reverberation of the nerves. In contrast to the popular conception of the nerves as vibrating fibers, Lewes theorizes that a combination of the physics of vibration and residual magnetism is a more accurate picture of nerve action because “the residual neural energy has the quite peculiar property of alternating between subsiding and resurging vibrations—now slowly flaming up with renewed vigour” (v. 290). Like the deeper waves of subconscious feeling that operate below the surface of consciousness, pulses of residual neural energy wax and wane according to a “law of

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their own” just as remembered music often unexpectedly comes to mind: “Music when soft voices die/ Vibrates in the memory” (v. 291). Above all, these images express the unpredictable, uncontrollable, highly personal nature of information gained through emotion and sensitivity.

However, Lewes also ascribes to intelligent thought a degree of control over sensation and emotion in a manner that helps to explain why Gwendolen’s original sensitivity to terror tends toward psychological fragmentation, yet has the potential to contribute to feeling-driven self-control. Although he classes intellect and thought

“under the general head of Feeling,” Lewes explains that thought can and should control feeling at times. Logical thinking can perform a controlling, “regulative” role and can contradict false sensations because, as Lewes explains, “Speculation transcends and even contradicts the combinations of Sensible feeling” (v. 391).65 Mordecai possesses this

speculative ability in Daniel Deronda: his life experience and scholarly knowledge set his

emotional sensitivity apart from Gwendolen’s. Applying Lewes’s comments about

accumulated experience in Problems of Life and Mind to Eliot’s characterization of

Mordecai, George Levine comments, “George Eliot elaborates a distinction between the

mere gossamer dreaming of an inexperienced, egoistic Gwendolen and creative dreaming

based ‘in the stored up accumulation of previous experiences’ that will reveal the

‘unapparent relations’ hidden in ‘solid fact’” (24). In contrast to Mordecai’s sensitive,

65 Lewes includes an interesting personal anecdote that demonstrates the regulative role of intelligent thought in his own life and reflects his culture’s emphasis on self-control for mental health. After months of intensely studying the spinal cord under a microscope, Lewes became haunted by the vivid image of a particular section of spinal cord. Recognizing the danger of indulging in this hallucination, Lewes took a trip to Italy and successfully cleared his mind. Lewes’s prior knowledge of cases of hallucination allowed him to cure himself.

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educated nature, the narrator first describes Gwendolen’s fear as a sign of spiritual ignorance rather than a spiritual capacity. Although Gwendolen’s mother accepts

Gwendolen’s “susceptibility to terror” as a mark of her specialness, her “sensitiveness” and the “excitability of her nature,” the narrator objects that “these explanatory phrases required conciliation with much that seemed to be blank indifference or rare self- mastery” (64). Rather, the narrator suggests that Gwendolen’s inability to experience awe without terror stems both from her egotism and from her lack of a stable home in childhood (22). Both Gwendolen’s mother and the narrator are correct in diagnosing

Gwendolen’s terror as the result of sensitivity and egoism. Although Gwendolen experiences her terror as a “brief remembered madness,” her terror is not a symptom of insanity, but an accurate indication that the world is much bigger and much less controllable than she would like to believe. Gwendolen’s fear also points to the unpredictable aspects of her own personality that she would rather ignore. For example, when she recognizes her conflicting desires to refuse and accept Grandcourt’s proposal,

“she did not know on which she should fall. This subjection to a possible self, a self not to be absolutely predicted about, caused her some astonishment and terror” (136). When

Eliot suggests that “religious nomenclature” would help Gwendolen understand these uncontrollable aspects of her self, including her “fountain of awe,” she indicates that

Gwendolen’s experiences are not merely “a brief remembered madness, an unexplained exception from her normal life,” but that, with the proper knowledge, she may be capable of understanding these exceptional experiences and incorporating them into her life (63-

4).

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Eliot’s suggestion is confirmed by the contrast between Gwendolen’s fear of solitary, open spaces (because of the way they dwarf her) and the habits of Daniel and

Mordecai, two of the characters in the novel with the most authentic religious literacy.

Daniel rows at dusk in order to lose himself in “perfectly solitary spot[s]” where he can think “how far it might be possible habitually to shift his center till his own personality would be no less outside him than the landscape” (189), and Mordecai’s thought “went on in wide spaces; and whenever he could, he tried to have in reality the influences of a large sky” (474).66 Daniel’s and Mordecai’s relationship to contemplative places

indicates their emotional openness and their intuitive understanding of the direct link

between feeling and environment postulated by Lewes.

Eliot’s emphasis on the emotional sensitivity of her characters throughout the

novel influences her repeated descriptions of spiritual, historical places, from the

synagogues that Deronda visits in Germany to Sir Hugo’s renovated Abbey. Like

Deronda, Mordecai “was keenly alive to some poetic aspects of London” (474). For

Deronda and Mordecai even the second-hand book-shop becomes an awe-filled place:

“the very silence in the narrow space seemed alive with mingled awe and compassion

before this struggling fervor” (497). For Gwendolen, the beautiful choir-turned-stables at

Sir Hugo’s Abbey marks a developmental milestone, as her experiences subtly initiate

her into the appreciation of sacred places. Eliot’s description highlights the traces of the

Abbey’s religious past that contribute to the stable’s stunning beauty,

With the low wintry afternoon sun upon it, sending shadows from the

cedar boughs, and lighting up the touches of snow remaining on every

66 Even the wise musician Klesmer’s mannerisms suggest a love of “vast areas” (482).

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ledge, it had still a scarcely disturbed aspect of antique solemnity, which

gave the scene in the interior a startling effect; though, ecclesiastical or

reverential indignation apart, the eyes could hardly help dwelling with

pleasure on its piquant picturesqueness. Each finely-arched chapel was

turned into a stall, where in the dusty glazing of the windows there still

gleamed patches of crimson, orange, blue, and palest violet; . . . (419)

From the outside, the setting sun and snowy outline seem to restore the Abbey to its previous appearance, surprising its visitors into a heightened openness to the originally sacred purpose of its chapels and still glowing stained glass—to lift the minds of worshippers out of their mundane cares and into a contemplation of the divine. Terence

Cave comments that Deronda takes off his hat in this scene in “an involuntary response to the half-effaced historical—and numinous—life of the place” (830, n.3). Gwendolen also responds involuntarily to the beauty of the stables, exclaiming, “Oh, this is glorious!”

(420), but she is immediately embarrassed at appearing to covet what belonged to Sir

Hugo and what might possibly be due to Daniel. This moment combines her habitual appreciation for horses and affluence with her dawning consideration for what others deserve. This scene reveals Gwendolen’s growing capacity to respond to the sublime (in a way that she can incorporate into her life—her other experiences of the sublime create fissures in her experience) and links it with her growth in her ability to consider others.

Just as a sacred place, Sir Hugo’s beautiful stables, works through Gwendolen’s emotional sensitivity to help facilitate her growth in fellow-feeling, so her growing ability to focus her emotional sensitivity on others is repeatedly described by the narrator in terms of her responses to her place in the world. The final scene between Gwendolen and

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Daniel, in which Daniel reveals his upcoming marriage to Mirah, completes Gwendolen’s education in humility, although its catalyst is not dread but dread’s twin, desire. Like dread, desire acts as a “tool of consciousness” in this passage. It allows her to sense something “spiritual and vaguely tremendous” about her place in the world.

She was for the first time feeling the pressure of a vast mysterious

movement, for the first time being dislodged from her supremacy in her

own world, and getting a sense that her horizon was but a dipping onward

of an existence with which her own was revolving. . . . But there had

come a shock which went deeper than personal jealousy—something

spiritual and vaguely tremendous that thrust her away, and yet quelled all

anger into self-humiliation. (804)

Here Eliot describes Gwendolen’s new realization of Daniel’s role in the lives of others—in Mirah’s and Mordecai’s lives and in the historical movement for a Jewish nation—in terms of physical feelings: the feelings of “pressure,” “being dislodged,”

“dipping,” “revolving,” “shock,” and being “thrust” away. Given Eliot’s application of

Lewes’s theories throughout Daniel Deronda and Lewes’s emphasis in particular on the emotional role of information gained through the senses, it is likely that this description is not simply figurative. Gwendolen is again learning to incorporate sensory information about the world into her moral vision. Strikingly, the immediate result is emotional self- control, the quelling of anger. In this passage, Eliot succinctly merges feeling and thinking into a new form of self-control.

In harmony with Lewes’s emphasis on the unity of thinking and feeling,

Gwendolen learns to use her sensitivity as Deronda counseled, as a “faculty, like vision.”

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The heightened consciousness that gives rise to her fear proves to be the source of her remarkable sensitivity to the signs of future events and the spiritual elements inherent in day-to-day reality. Thus, trained by suffering and humiliation to focus on others,

Gwendolen inches closer to Mordecai’s and Deronda’s experiences of psychic integration. Although Eliot’s narrative revises the more rigid sequence for moral development proposed by Lewes and other physiological psychologists by focusing on the role of fear in Gwendolen’s painful development, by emphasizing the fundamental role of feeling in the inner life, both Eliot and Lewes intervene in the debate surrounding the application of physiological psychology to traditional models of self-control. In contrast to scientists like T.H. Huxley and James Sully who argued that the emotional body rendered the controlling ego a myth and others like William Carpenter and Charles

Darwin who emphasized the importance of repressing the emotions, Eliot’s novel and

Lewes’s treatise develop a new model of feeling and thinking in which emotion guides self-control.

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Chapter Four: Unconscious Self-Determination: Embryology and Psychological Development in Samuel Butler’s Life and Habit and The Way of All Flesh

“Is life worth living?” Samuel Butler muses in his published notebooks: “This is a

question for an embryo, not for a man” (266). Answering a serious, yet familiar question

with an apparently nonsensical twist, Butler suggests that embryos are better equipped with the knowledge to answer questions about the meaning of life than grown men. Like many of the epigrams that fill Butler’s published notebooks, his thoughts on the philosophical embryo may be intended simply to startle and amuse his readers, yet the sophisticated intelligence Butler grants the embryo in this note is consistent with an emphasis throughout his fiction and nonfiction on the consciousness and agency of all forms of life—from potatoes, lichens, and orchids, to amoebas, chick embryos, and humans. As Charles Darwin’s son Francis observed insightfully to Butler after reading his first book on evolution, Life and Habit, Butler’s thoughts about consciousness contrast dramatically with the mechanical model of mind proposed by prominent

Victorian scientists such as T.H. Huxley:

Have you ever read Huxley’s article or articles on ‘Animal Automatism,’

two or three years ago in the Contemporary? He tried to show that

consciousness was something superadded to nervous mechanism, like the

striking of a clock is added to the ordinary going parts. I mean that the

consciousness as we know it has nothing to do with the act, which is a

mere question of nerve-machinery.

You seem to me to have gone on the reverse tack—instead of

reducing consciousness to a passive looker-on, you have, I think made

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consciousness into an active cause, a producer of energy. (qtd in Jones,

263)

As we have seen, Huxley argued that the data of evolution effectively removed mind from the universe, replacing a world designed by an intelligent Creator in which humans held a special place as rational, volitional creatures, with a world driven by chance in which humans were part of the continuum of animal life, representing one link in the development of all living things. The human experiences of consciousness, reason, and choice were simply an illusory side-effect of the brain’s activity. Butler, however, embraced the evolutionary view of man’s place in nature as evidence of the consciousness of all of life. In Life and Habit, for instance, Butler writes of the amoeba,

there is no sufficient reason for supposing that these little specks of jelly,

without brain, or eyes, or stomach, or hands, or feet—the very lowest

known form, in fact, of animal life—are not imbued with a consciousness

of their needs, and with the reasoning faculties which shall enable them to

gratify those needs in a manner, all things considered, equaling the highest

flights of the ingenuity of the highest animal—man. (4:58)

Yet, while scientists like Huxley argued that the role of consciousness as a “passive looker-on” negated the experience of free will, Butler’s alternative view of consciousness in evolution tended not to bolster traditional conceptions of free will and self-control, but rather to redefine these concepts altogether, as his paradoxical attribution of philosophical reflection to the unborn suggests.

One might expect that the last place to look for a psychological explanation of the development of self-control would be in the work of Samuel Butler, whose semi-

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autobiographical novel, The Way of All Flesh, has been famously called “one of the time bombs of literature . . . lying in Butler’s desk at Clifford’s Inn for thirty years, waiting to blow up the Victorian family” (Pritchett, qtd in Raby, 4). Despite Butler’s remarkable act of self-censorship in declining to publish the novel during his lifetime for fear of offending his family, the novel itself is uninhibited in its bitterly satirical attacks on the family, the church, and institutionalized science. By revealing the family to be a site of cruel parental oppression and the church to be based on fraudulent doctrines, the novel seeks to discredit these two strongholds of traditional Victorian morality. When Overton, the narrator, claims that prominent men of science are just as hypocritical as the churchmen he exposes, the novel also debunks science as a potential source of a new secular morality. In addition, The Way of All Flesh lampoons the moral ideal of self- denial (upon which so many Victorian defenses of self-control rely) with such memorable aphorisms as, “All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it” (111), “We have all sinned and come short of making ourselves as comfortable as we easily might have done” (111), and “Who but a prig would set himself high aims, or make high resolves at all?” (379). At the same time, in The Way of All Flesh, Butler is clearly invested in tracing the psychological development of his hero, Ernest Pontifex, from his bewildered, oppressed childhood to an adulthood marked by self-knowledge, self-sufficiency, and self-determination—traits conventionally associated with self- control. Drawing on the theory of unconscious knowledge and volition that he develops in Life and Habit, Butler departs from the dominant themes in the discourse of Victorian self help by portraying Ernest’s growth in his capacity for self-determination as entirely separate from a devotion to duty and self-denial.

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Butler’s Evolutionary Theories: A Role for Self-Determination

First inspired by The Origin of Species to regard consciousness as the driving force behind evolution, Butler read Darwin’s work in 1860 while he was a sheep farmer in remote New Zealand.67 Having recently abandoned his plans to become a minister and

renounced his faith in the Bible, Butler found Darwin’s work so stimulating that he soon

published several creative responses to it, including an article on the evolution of

machines, which he later included in Erewhon (1872), his first work of fiction. As Butler

later wrote to Darwin, “I always delighted in your Origin of Species as soon as I saw it

out in N.Z.—not knowing anything whatsoever of natural history, but it enters into so many deeply interesting questions, or rather it suggests so many, that it thoroughly fascinated me” (qtd in Jones, 124). Butler soon began to speculate on how heredity works and on what causes the variations that drive natural selection, gradually shifting his views from being a fervent supporter of Darwinism to an outspoken proponent of an alternative theory of evolution. In his first book on evolution, Life and Habit (1877),

Butler proposes a new theory of heredity based on memory.68 His most counterintuitive proposal is that personality extends between generations, allowing habits, instincts, and patterns of growth to be passed from one generation to the next. In addition, Life and

Habit revives the Lamarckian view that adaptations are caused by an organism’s needs and desires. As Butler summarizes Lamarck,

67 See Gillian Beer’s recent essay, “Darwin and the Consciousness of Others,” for a discussion of Darwin’s interest in the potential consciousness of plants and animals. 68 Commentators on Butler disagree about the value of his contributions to the nineteenth-century debate on evolution. Basil Willey argues that Butler addressed an important gap in Darwinism by interrogating the causes of variations and not wanting to rely on chance as an explanation (83-4). 169

Genera and species have been evolved, in the main, by exactly the same

process as that by which human inventions and civilizations are now

progressing; and this involves that intelligence, ingenuity, heroism, and all

the elements of romance, should have had the main share in the

development of every herb and living creature among us. (4:206)

Inspired by this view of consciousness and will infusing all of life, throughout Life and

Habit and his subsequent works on evolution, Butler delights in describing the ingenuity of the simplest forms of life, such as the abilities of the amoeba to capture its food and of other microscopic one-celled creatures to build intricate structures, and he playfully grants personality and agency—“all of the elements of romance”—to the most immature forms. The excitement Butler must have felt when he was first introduced to natural history through The Origin of Species is palpable in these descriptions. The world of Life and Habit teems with fascinating creatures, seething with creativity. Even the chick embryo is seen as a resourceful craftsman: “A chicken, for example, is never so full of consciousness, activity, reasoning faculty, and volition, as when it is an embryo in the eggshell, making bones, and flesh, and feather, and eyes, and claws, with nothing but a little warmth and white of egg to make them from” (4:50). Pluckily choosing to create itself out of “a little warmth and white of egg” just as its chicken ancestors have done for generations, the chick embryo acts out on a miniature scale the drama of the evolution of life.

Critics often connect Butler’s attraction to Lamarckian evolution with his attachment to the ideas of free-will, self-help, and self-control. Most recently Sally

Shuttleworth writes that Butler became disillusioned with “a [Darwinian] model that

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seemed, oppressively, to give no reward to personal effort, and to suggest that change could only come about as a result of ‘luck’” (146). Butler’s biographer Peter Raby agrees that he was temperamentally unable to accept the Darwinian view that evolution is driven by blind chance and is unresponsive to effort and desire. He comments that Butler

“substituted for the exploded idea of instant, once-for-all creation a belief in the essential unity of life, life with a sense of will, purpose and progress. The mechanical alternative, as he saw it, blind, random, soulless, was too awful to contemplate” (169).69 As Butler’s

own comments reveal, he was appalled not by the lack of a God in a mechanical universe,

but by the lack of control and purpose granted to creatures in such a scheme. In Luck, or

Cunning?, he writes,

We must have evolution; consent is too spontaneous, instinctive, and

universal among those most able to form an opinion, to admit of further

doubt about this. We must also have mind and design. . . . There is design,

or cunning, but it is a cunning not despotically fashioning us from without

as a potter fashions his clay, but inhering democratically within the body

which is its highest outcome. (8:234)

69 Butler responded to philosophical mechanism by stressing the intelligence and feeling of all of life. See Herbert Sussman for an especially excellent discussion of Butler’s use of the machine as a metaphor for life and his conversion from mechanistic to vitalistic ideas to which I am indebted. In her recent essay on Butler’s contributions to late- Victorian evolutionary psychology, however, Ruth Parkin-Gounelas offers a new perspective by showing how Butler gradually shifted toward a more materialistic view of the mind: Butler’s “dedicated exploration of the period’s changing definitions of mind . . . had led him not so much towards materialism as towards a modification of the distinction between mind and body/matter to the extent that the distinction became unimportant” (212).

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In fact, Frank Turner argues that Butler’s difficulties with Christianity and scientific naturalism stemmed from the same core ideas, a rejection of determinism and an insistence on “man’s instinctive capacity for dealing with his moral and physical circumstances—an ability Butler denoted by the term ‘cunning’” (169). Moreover, as

Philip Pauly has shown, Butler was not alone in feeling this way. After Life and Habit,

Butler published three more books on his evolutionary theories: Evolution Old and New

(1879), Unconscious Memory (1880), and Luck, or Cunning, as the Main Means of

Organic Modification (1886). Although his arguments in each book became progressively overshadowed by the personal quarrel that he instigated with Charles

Darwin, (Butler accused Darwin of failing to acknowledge his sources), and although

Darwin’s friends (including T.H. Huxley and C.J. Romanes) marginalized him as a cranky non-specialist, his neo-Lamarckian ideas were shared by other British evolutionists (Pauly 162).70 Butler was only one of several Victorian philosophers,

scientists and psychologists who “sought to integrate psychological and biological explanation and to demonstrate that purposefulness was part of the evolutionary process”

(Pauly 162). As Butler himself writes, “Is luck, I would ask, or cunning, the more fitting matter to be insisted upon in connection with organic modification? Do animals and plants grow into conformity with their surroundings because they and their father and mothers take pains, or because their uncles and aunts go away?” (8:232). His answer, of course, is that animals and plants bring about their evolution through their efforts to better themselves. Although Butler records his friend Eliza Savage’s sarcastic remarks on the Self Help Club in his notebooks—“She said they were called the Self Help Club,

70 See Philip J. Pauly for an in-depth discussion of the public Butler-Darwin quarrel.

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because they helped themselves, and they were the only people whom they did help”

(249)—Butler’s evolutionary theories actually promote a cosmic, cross-generational theory of self-help. His work can be seen as an attempt to reconcile the widespread tension in Victorian culture between the ideal of self-determination and the seemingly determined, mechanistic views of evolutionary biology and physiological psychology.

Ironically, despite Butler’s rhetorically memorable and theoretically significant insistence on the intelligence, desire, and purposefulness of all of life in his evolutionary writings, The Way of All Flesh often seems to deliver a crushingly pessimistic view of the power of heredity and early experiences to thwart even the most energetic efforts at self- determination. By tracing five generations of the Pontifex family, Butler emphasizes the priggish traits Ernest has unavoidably inherited from his grandfather and father.

Reflecting on the stiflingly unsympathetic atmosphere of Ernest’s childhood, the narrator

Overton wonders how Ernest will ever overcome such disadvantages, “How was it possible that a lad so trained should grow up in any healthy or vigorous development?”

(136). Indeed, Ernest grows into a puny, unhappy child, and he makes disastrous decisions as a young man due to his prejudicially sheltered youth. This chapter, however, examines Butler’s portrayal of Ernest’s capacity for self-determination by focusing on a surprising similarity between Life and Habit and The Way of All Flesh: Butler’s use of illustrations from embryology to demonstrate the consciousness of all life and to describe

(what he felt to be) the natural course of development. The novel’s embryo references balance its more depressing view of heredity as destiny, echoing Life and Habit’s more playful sense of the creative ingenuity of all of life. They illustrate Butler’s paradoxical view of psychological development: one that is both conscious and unconscious, yet

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always driven by desire; one that takes startling, yet not unpredictable, forms; one that is directed by memory, and yet is a process of discovery that is profoundly adaptable to changes in environment; and one that moves toward greater complexity, yet does not always make clear whether one step builds on another. Butler’s use of the embryo as a paradigm for psychological development, along with his Lamarckian view that organisms evolve according to their desires and sensed needs, suggests that self-control and self- help can operate unconsciously. Indeed, in The Way of All Flesh, Butler emphasizes the wisdom of Ernest’s unconscious self in taking control of his growth and self-discovery.

Furthermore, as this essay will show, although Butler’s reconciliation of evolutionary psychology with the idea of self-control was highly imaginative and idiosyncratic, his use of the embryo resonated with popular contemporary views about evolutionary recapitulation, and the implications of his views for child-rearing and early education were shared by mainstream late-Victorian child psychologists.

Despite agreeing on Butler’s devotion to the efficacy of “taking pains” in his evolutionary works, critics are divided over whether or not Butler’s optimism about cunning and control extends to The Way of All Flesh. Although the novel was published posthumously in 1903, Butler wrote it between 1872 and 1884 while he was also working on Life and Habit, and the novel’s earliest readers recognized that it was closely related to Butler’s evolutionary theories. His literary executor, R.A. Streatfeild, comments in a prefatory note that the novel “may be taken as a practical illustration of the theory of heredity embodied in that book [Life and Habit]” (32), but he does not explain how The

Way of All Flesh embodies Butler’s theories. Since then, as Sally Shuttleworth summarizes, “the novel has been read, painstakingly, as a direct expression of Butler’s

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evolutionary theories, with attempts to extract both progressive and degenerative interpretations of social evolution” (144). In contrast, Shuttleworth focuses on more complex psychological connections between the novel and the theories involving “the power of hereditary memory, and the consequent difficulties of defining or maintaining a unified sense of selfhood” (144). She concludes that the novel offers little hope for self- help or self-determination:

Although Butler’s initial differences with Darwin were motivated by his

desire to introduce a more Lamarckian sense of the power of human

agency within human development, the text of The Way of All Flesh seems

to be weighed down at times by an almost overwhelming sense of

biological, psychological, and cultural determinism. (152)

Peter Raby agrees with Shuttleworth’s perceptions both that the novel fails to resolve this dilemma between self-determination and biological determinism and that the emotional weight of the novel leans toward a pessimistic determinism. Raby writes, “Ernest is an example of the power of the unconscious, half-suppressed memories urging him towards the light of a new life. Yet even while the narrative expresses optimism, the blatant, mechanical contrivances of the plot mock the conclusion, so that the novel leaves a bitter taste” (209). On the other hand, Peter Morton argues, “The Way of All Flesh does nothing if not extol the powers of the blindly groping will. Of course Ernest is a wretched creature with both an unstable ancestry and a miserable home life bearing down on him . . . yet for all that there is also what he chooses to do with his nature and nurture.

. . . the overall impression is one of freedom, not of determinism” (188). Danielle

Nielsen and Gillian Beer explore the ways in which Butler tries to resolve this tension

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between his philosophical commitments to biological determinism and free will. Nielsen argues that Butler allows Ernest consciously to change and grow in undetermined directions through his traumatic experiences, and Beer suggests that in Butler’s work

“future forms of life rely on unconscious memories and then outwit memory” (44). This critical debate highlights the often unsatisfying nature of trying to apply scientific theories to a work of fiction; Richard Hoggart attempts to avoid this task altogether when he comments, “Yet how much does the theory behind the book imaginatively inform its better parts? Very little, surely” (12). This essay seeks to contribute to the critical debate over the novel’s stance on biological determinism by exploring Butler’s views on unconscious volition.

Butler’s Embryology

The novel’s handful of “embryo” references take on greater significance in light of the fact that Butler introduces Life and Habit as a contribution to embryology. The book opens, “It will be our business in the following chapters to consider whether the unconsciousness, or quasi-unconsciousness, with which we perform certain acquired actions, throws any light upon embryology and inherited instincts” (4:1). Writing before the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics, Butler offers his theory of unconscious knowledge stemming from organic memory as a serious explanation of heredity and development.71

In the final chapter, Butler again draws on the process of generation to illustrate his argument:

71 See Gould, Otis, and Nielsen on Butler as a prominent promoter of the theory of organic memory.

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We conclude, therefore, that the small, apparently structureless,

impregnate ovum from which we have each one of us sprung, has a

potential recollection of all that has happened to each one of its ancestors

prior to the period at which any such ancestor has issued from the bodies

of its progenitors . . . . Each step of normal development will lead the

impregnate ovum up to, and remind it of, its next ordinary course of

action, in the same way as we, when we recite a well-known passage, are

led up to each successive sentence by the sentence which has immediately

preceded it. (4:242-243)

Butler’s arguments in Life and Habit often take literary and philosophical forms

(analyzing Darwin’s verbal equivocations in The Origin of Species, for example) rather than marshalling evidence from experiments or carefully documented field observations.

As the passage above shows, Butler seeks to entertain and persuade his readers through his paradoxical and imaginative use of illustrations from biology.72 The idea of the

microscopic fertilized egg containing millions of years of cross-generational memories

appeals not least of all because of the way it condenses vast amounts of time and

information into such a tiny space, but also because remembering is generally considered

to be a higher-level cognitive task—as Butler emphasizes by comparing the impregnate

72 As his detractors liked to point out, Butler was not trained as a scientist, nor did he carry out any experiments to test his hypotheses (Holt 60). As Bernard Lightman has argued, at best he can be considered a popularizer of science and a natural theologian (138).

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ovum’s development to reciting a well-known passage. It is a powerfully suggestive and opportune image given the status of embryology at that time.73

The science of embryology was an exciting, rapidly changing field in the middle

of the nineteenth century. Ernst Haeckel, the biologist who popularized the idea that

ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, wrote in 1875, “The embryology of organisms

occupies in the present a position very different from that in the first half of our century.

This science, although the youngest of its sister sciences, has in a very short time soared

to a height which is not merely prominent but actually dominating” (qtd in Oppenheimer

209). As Jane Oppenheimer explains, the mid-nineteenth century witnessed a shift in the

popular mindset from the belief that the details of generation were an “inscrutable

mystery” to a confidence that generation could be studied and understood.74 Anatomists

had made ground-breaking advances in embryology earlier in the century, many of which

were enabled by improved microscopes and techniques for preparing specimens

73 In mining the field of embryology for sources of literary attitudes toward identity, I build on several interesting critical studies. In “Embryologies of Modernism,” Susan Squier asks, “What connections may exist between the embryological "take" on the developing individual, and the literary approach to character construction in the first three decades of the twentieth century?” (145). She concludes, “In their adaptations of embryological techniques to questions of character construction--among them the temporal and spatial boundaries of the individual, the malleability of sex/gender, and the organizing principles of development--these modern literary texts demonstrate the range of cultural meanings both borrowed from, and enabled by, the discourse of early- twentieth-century embryology” (151). In “Embryonic Individuals: The Rhetoric of Seventeenth-Century Embryology and the Construction of Early Modern Identity,” Eve Keller examines the parallels between seventeenth-century theories of development and political understandings of the individual. She concludes, “The more man in his physiology resembles a machine or the product of a machine--something "stamped in a mould"--the more it becomes necessary to ensure that he is known to be something other than a machine, that he is a person, a human, a subject, from the first moment of his conception, or even before” (343). See also Vanessa Sasson and Jane Marie Law. 74 This quote is from an article on “Generation” in the 1842 Encyclopedia Britannica (Oppenheimer 210).

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(Churchill 2). The mammalian egg, for instance, although theorized by William Harvey in the seventeenth century, was not discovered until 1827. Its discoverer was Karl von

Baer, one of the pioneers of classical descriptive embryology, who used his pain-staking observations of chick embryos to formulate laws of development that remain influential today. Many nineteenth century milestones in biology were closely linked to embryology, notably cell theory, as well as advances in understanding how gametes are formed and how the body’s cells differentiate from the germ layers present in very early embryos (Churchill 16-17).75

Embryology took on even greater cultural significance with the publication of The

Origin of Species. As Darwin himself writes in a letter in 1860, “Embryology is to me by far the strongest single class of facts in favor of change of forms” (qtd in Gould 70). In his Autobiography, he recalls, “Hardly any point gave me so much satisfaction when I was at work on the Origin as the explanation of the wide differences in many classes between the embryo and the adult animals, and of the close resemblance of the embryos within the same class” (qtd in Gould 71). Although most modern commentators agree that Darwin’s work harmonizes with von Baer’s law of differentiation, which emphasizes that embryos of different species resemble each other because they are developing from common ancestral forms and not because they are recapitulating the adult forms of

evolutionary ancestors (Gould 71, Churchill 18), many of Darwin’s early readers,

75 While von Baer and his peers inaugurated a new era in descriptive embryology in the early nineteenth-century, embryology experienced another important change in the 1880s as it shifted from a descriptive to a more experimental science. German anatomist Wilhelm His called for an experimental approach to the study of the processes of development as he drew attention to the flaws in Haeckel’s theory of recapitulation in the 1870s (during the time that Butler was composing Life and Habit and The Way of All Flesh) (Maienschein 44).

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including Haeckel, believed that embryos actually recapitulated the evolutionary development of their species. For both the followers of von Baer and of Haeckel, embryology was useful for determining evolutionary relationships and constructing phylogenetic trees. For the recapitulationists in particular, however, embryology promised to explain the mechanism of evolutionary development because ontogeny (the development of the individual) and phylogeny (the development of the species) were seen as parallel processes. As Haeckel wrote, “Development is now the magic word by means of which we shall solve the riddles by which we are surrounded” (qtd in Oppenheimer

208). Even those naturalists who opposed the theory of evolution ascribed great philosophical significance to embryology. While Louis Aggasiz argued against attempts like Haeckel’s to “make the beginning of life in the individual solve that great mystery of the beginning of life in the world” (272), he suggested that embryology revealed no less than the mind of God: “Here we shall find not a material connection by which blind laws of matter have evolved the whole creation out of a single germ, but the clew to that intellectual conception which spans the whole series of geological ages, and is perfectly consistent in all its parts” (294-5).

Throughout his work, Butler refers to the growth of the embryo to express a similar sense of consistency between various modes of development. For example, an entry in the Notebooks comments on the “Embryology of Pictures: All things in nature grow up from small beginnings, and so should pictures. They should epitomise the history of painting, . . . and if possible should be begotten of some other picture which has suggested them” (266). Butler’s observation that pictures should “epitomise the history of painting” reflects the recapitulationist view that the embryo rehearses the

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history of evolution in its developmental stages and is symptomatic of the analogies between different types of development that were commonly drawn in the second half of the nineteenth century. Haeckel’s version of recapitulation, with its powerful connection between individual and species development, exerted an immense influence, as Stephen

Jay Gould has shown, on areas as diverse as criminal anthropology, racism, child development, primary education, and Freudian psychoanalysis. Butler explicitly embraced recapitulation, writing in Life and Habit, “It is admitted on all hands that there is more or less analogy between the embryological development of the individual, and the various phases or conditions of life through which his forefathers have passed” (4:103).

Consistent with a psychology that views all development as a continuum, in The Way of

All Flesh, Butler uses the image of the embryo to redefine what truly intelligent and volitional actions look like.

Butler’s first reference to embryos in the manuscript of The Way of All Flesh contributes to his redefinition of intelligence and volition by whimsically granting embryos a surprising degree of thoughtful sophistication. Reflecting on the unhappy childhood of Ernest’s father, Theobald, Overton observes, “I once saw a book in which it was maintained that embryos look upon birth much as we do upon death. No one, indeed, can say that this is not so, no one can say that we may not have had the most gloomy forebodings about birth and have forgotten them” (432 n.3). Overton’s comment introduces a digression on embryonic attitudes toward birth, which he closes by agreeing with those “gloomy” embryos: birth is actually worse than death. He concludes with bitter irony, “Could any death be as horrible as birth? Or any decrepitude so awful as childhood in a happy united God-fearing family?” (433 n.3). While Overton emphasizes

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the vulnerability of unborn children, who are helpless to resist birth despite their misgivings, he places an even greater stress on the vulnerability of children after birth, who often find themselves at the mercy of despotic, hypocritical parents. In fact, the embryos in this passage are more self-aware and expressive than the children in this novel, who tend to suffer mutely. Overton comments,

It was said that much the same arguments concerning the possibility of a

future life go on among embryos as amongst ourselves, some maintaining

that they shall enter upon a new life at birth for which they shall be better

or worse qualified according as they have done their duty well or ill during

their embryonic period of probation; while others say that there is no such

thing as life in any true sense of the word except in the womb. . . . (432

n.3)

This entire digression on embryos was actually omitted from the first edition by Butler’s literary executor, despite the fact that it develops the theme of the preceding chapter (the prevalence of unhappy childhoods) in original and interesting ways. This light-hearted suggestion of embryos holding metaphysical discussions about the nature of birth and death counteracts some of the venom Butler expresses toward “happy united God- fearing” families in this chapter. In addition, the hope of Butler’s witty embryos that they might be able to influence their later life by doing “their duty well or ill during their embryonic period of probation” highlights the tension within the novel between Butler’s own embittered childhood memories and his commitment to the ideals of self-control and self-determination.

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Moreover, this passage on embryos revisits some of the unusual ideas Butler had begun to explore in his 1872 satire Erewhon, in which a traveler from England visits an amazing topsy-turvy land. In fact, critics note that this is probably the book to which

Overton refers. Butler’s traveler discovers that the inhabitants of Erewhon have an elaborate mythology about the world of the unborn. The Erewhonians teach that “the unborn are perpetually plaguing and tormenting the married of both sexes, fluttering about them incessantly, and giving them no peace either of mind or body, until they have consented to take them under their protection” (2:136). This belief absolves parents from the responsibility of bringing a new life into the world: “If this were not so (this at least is what they urge), it would be a monstrous freedom for one man to take with another, to say that he should undergo the chances and changes of this mortal life without any option in the matter” (2:136). Erewhonian parents actually have their newborn babies sign a

“Birth Formulae,” which “give[s] the parents indemnity from all responsibility on the score of its birth” (2:137). In Erewhon the unborn are souls who should be perfectly happy all the time, yet the more foolish of them become bored with their disembodied existence and long to be born. The wiser unborn try to dissuade them, warning them that they will have no control over the circumstances that will shape their embodied lives and their relationships with their parents will be characterized by a struggle for independence

(2:144). They must, in fact, commit suicide by drinking poison in order to leave the world of the unborn. Restless and recklessly eager for new experiences, the Erewhonian unborn nevertheless display courage, persistence, and a desire to better themselves by entering a new state of existence (although it may be misguided). Thus, although the

Erewhonian “Book of the Unborn” emphasizes the antagonistic relationship between

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parents and children and the helplessness of children to shape their lives that Butler continues to explore in The Way of All Flesh, at the same time it attributes remarkable self-awareness and volition to the unborn.

In addition to this fanciful treatment of the unborn’s misgivings about birth in

Erewhon, Butler also emphasizes the embryo’s intelligence in his ostensibly scientific work, Life and Habit. In a chapter applying his theories to “the whole history and development of the embryo in all its stages,” Butler writes, “Birth is the beginning of doubt, the first hankering after skepticism, the dreaming of a dawn of trouble, the end of certainty and of settled convictions. . . . It [birth] is commonly considered as the point at which we begin to live. More truly it is the point at which we leave off knowing how to live” (4:49-50). Here Butler uses examples from embryology to flesh out his theory that the most perfect knowledge and volition consist of habits that have become unconscious through many, many repetitions:

. . . Perfect knowledge and perfect ignorance [are] extremes which meet

and become indistinguishable from one another; so also perfect volition

and perfect absence of volition, perfect memory and perfect forgetfulness;

for we are unconscious of knowing, willing, or remembering, either from

not yet having known or willed, or from knowing and willing so well and

so intensely as to be no longer conscious of either. (4:15)

An embryo quietly and rapidly undergoes dramatic changes by drawing on the unconscious memories of generations of embryos who developed in the same manner.

Once it is born, however, the young organism gains a new sort of consciousness and, as it

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begins to encounter experiences not faced by its ancestors, can no longer rely on its perfect unconscious knowledge to make decisions.

Peter Morton comments that Ernest’s “whole upbringing, though in essence autobiographical, is arranged to support Life and Habit’s dictum that birth . . . ‘is the point at which we leave off knowing how to live” (187). While Morton’s comments emphasize Ernest’s ignorance about life, in Life and Habit Butler celebrates the knowledge of the embryo with what Alfred Wallace, co-discoverer of natural selection, called, “extreme and, as some may think, perverted ingenuity” (479). Butler never tires of insisting on the parallels between the intricate developmental changes that an embryo undergoes and the complex activities engaged in by adult humans:

The action, therefore, of an embryo making its way up in the world from a

simple cell to a baby, developing for itself eyes, ears, hands, and feet

while yet unborn, proves to be exactly of one and the same kind as that of

a man of fifty who goes into the city and tells his broker to buy him so

many Great Northern A shares—that is to say, an effort of the will

exercised in due course on a balance of considerations as to the immediate

expediency, and guided by past experience. (61)

Far from demoting the business of the middle-aged investor from a state of conscious control to unconscious habit or instinct, Butler’s comparison grants the embryo free will and self-control, along with the abilities to rationally consider and choose a course of action. In fact, the idea of the unborn debating the nature of life and death in Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh is not far from Butler’s “scientific” description of the

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unhatched chicken’s unconscious knowledge and desire to better itself, illustrated by its growing a horny tip to its bill to peck itself out of the egg. He writes,

Now no one indeed supposes that the chicken does what it does, with the

same self-consciousness with which a tailor makes a suit of clothes. Not

any one who has thought upon the subject is likely to do the chicken so

great an injustice. The probability is that it knows what it is about to an

extent greater than any tailor ever did or will, for, to say the least of it,

many thousands of years to come. It works with such absolute certainty

and so vast an experience, that it is utterly incapable of following the

operations of its own mind. . . . If we allow that the half-hatched chicken

grew the horny tip to be ready for use, with an intensity of unconscious

contrivance which can be only attributed to experience, we are driven to

admit that from the first moment the hen began to sit upon it—and earlier,

too, than this—the egg was always full of consciousness and volition, and

that during its embryological condition the unhatched chicken is doing

exactly what it continues doing from the moment it is hatched till it dies;

that is to say, attempting to better itself, doing (as Aristotle says all

creature do all things upon all occasions) what it considers most for its

advantage under the existing circumstances. (4:52-3)

Passages like this support Wallace’s observation that Life and Habit is “more amusing than most novels” (480). In his enthusiasm for the complexity of the chick embryo’s development, Butler seems to contradict himself when he attributes both an “intensity of unconscious contrivance” and “consciousness and volition” to the unhatched chicken.

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Sussman calls this “the essential paradox of his theory, conscious design unaware of itself” (142). It is as if Butler is imagining another layer of consciousness, a sort of consciousness and volition within the unconscious mind that connects the chick with all of its chicken forebears, and beyond that with a cosmic desire to better itself that is connected with all of life.

Throughout Life and Habit, Butler frequently emphasizes that the embryo’s knowledge is perfect because it is unconscious and, at the same time, wants to grant the embryo consciousness, volition, and a desire to better itself. These two ideas seem incompatible, but Butler seems to want to have it both ways. (As the previous discussions of James, Hardy, Lewes, and Eliot have shown, Victorian concepts of consciousness in general presented a complex view of the relationship between conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings). When Butler applies the embryo metaphor to

Ernest’s progress toward maturity in The Way of All Flesh, however, he emphasizes

Ernest’s inability to consciously predict or control his own development. As a young man, Ernest is very impressionable and not accustomed to thinking for himself. He eagerly latches on to an opinion only to do an about-face several months later; Butler describes his swings in views as “snipe-like change[s] of flight” (256). At Cambridge,

Ernest prepares to become a clergyman like his father Theobald even though he is not very religious. Ernest is so easily influenced, however, that when he attends a sermon by a charismatic preacher from an extreme evangelical sect, he becomes very enthusiastic about his faith. After graduation, he is ordained as a curate in a poorer part of London where he works with Pryor, a slightly older senior curate, who impresses Ernest with his confidence, his good looks, and his plans to establish a College of Spiritual Pathology.

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Pryor’s theory is that a priest should be experienced in all sorts of vice in order to counsel his parishioners: “if we aspire to be priests in deed as well as in name, we must familiarize ourselves with the minutest and most repulsive details of all kinds of sin, so that we may recognize it in all its stages” (259). Ernest becomes enthralled with this outrageous new idea and entrusts Pryor with all of his money to invest for the college.

(Pryor loses most of it and absconds with the rest.) Overton comments on the strange shapes Ernest’s opinions have taken:

Embryo minds, like embryo bodies, pass through a number of strange

metamorphoses before they adopt their final shape. It is no more to be

wondered at that one who is going to turn out a Roman Catholic should

have passed through the stages of being first a Methodist, and then a free-

thinker, than that a man should at some former time have been a mere cell,

and later on an invertebrate animal. Ernest, however, could not be

expected to know this; embryos never do. Embryos think with each stage

of their development that they have now reached the only condition which

really suits them. (262)

Overton’s comparison between Ernest and the embryo seems to offer hope for Ernest that although his views are odd and varied, he will eventually find his way. Ernest’s passion for the College of Spiritual Pathology may simply correspond to a human embryo’s fish stage on the way to becoming a full-fledged mammal.

Morton comments that Overton’s analogy only “sounds impressive until we reflect that the outcome of embryological recapitulation is determined and that it always moves toward a goal of structural completion which is pre-set” (184). He argues that

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Butler contradicts himself by drawing an analogy between embryology and Ernest’s psychological development because an embryo’s final form is genetically pre-determined whereas Butler’s Lamarckian commitments would imply that Ernest is free to shape his mature character (184). However, this view glosses over some of the unexpected debates within the field of nineteenth-century embryology. While Von Baer had taught that embryos develop step-by-step from simple to complex and that new stages develop from the older ones, this issue became a focal point in the conflict between Wilhelm His and

Ernst Haeckel in the 1870s. As Jane Oppenheim explains, “His (1874) stated specifically that one step in development is the cause of the next, or at least its necessary condition.

He was laughed down by Haeckel who marshaled all the evidence from recapitulation to ridicule him” (214). For recapitulationists, developmental stages were not causally linked but simply reflected the evolutionary past. A second debate concerned at what point in development variations occur. The recapitulationist view “took a primarily linear perspective on both the order of nature and the understanding of individual development” (Nyhart 202). This view theorized that variations would generally come at the end of development, and it also emphasized the possibility of developmental arrests.

Von Baer, on the other hand, had rejected a linear view in favor of “four basic and distinct types of organization” (203). Von Baer’s was more of a branching, rather than linear, view of development, in which variations were likely to occur at earlier points in development (Nyhart 203). Thus Butler’s analogy is open to quite flexible interpretations for Ernest’s subsequent development.76

76 William Tipper offers another view of the relationship between Butler’s metaphoric use of recapitulation and Ernest’s development. Referring to Ernest’s eventual inheritance of his grandfather’s ability to acquire wealth, Tipper comments, “There is 189

Morton additionally suggests that this analogy misapplies ideas from biology to developmental psychology: “We should note that he is manipulating the raw material of one science—namely developmental psychology, which did not then exist as a coherent study—within the quite misapplied conceptual framework of another, genetics” (186).

However, Butler’s analogy between Ernest’s psychological stages, the stages of embryonic development, and the steps in human evolution was quite common among psychologists in the late nineteenth century. Many psychologists believed that the evolutionary principles that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny applied not only to the embryo but also to childhood development. As James Sully explained in 1885,

We are learning to connect the individual life with that of the race, and

this again with the collective life of all sentient creatures. The doctrine of

evolution bids us view the unfolding of a human intelligence to-day as

conditioned and prepared by long ages of human experiences, and still

longer cycles of animal experience. . . . the successive stage of the mental

life of the individual roughly answers to the periods of this extensive

process of organization—vegetal, animal, human, civilized life. (345)

Echoes of Life and Habit can be heard in Sully’s emphasis on the “collective life of all sentient creatures.” In an article from 1883, the child psychologist James Crichton-

Browne works out some of the further implications of viewing childhood as corresponding to the early stages of vegetal, animal, and human evolution:

something of a teleology of evolution here, but it is always predicated on the desirability of a cycling through difference . . . . If surpassed stages of development exist as threatening atavisms, waiting to reassert their genetic authority, so too do previous states of felicity” (100). Because he has many varied ancestors, Ernest is not constrained by the stages through which they passed.

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Parents should remember that children are not little nineteenth-century

men and women, but diamond editions of very remote ancestors, full of

savage whims and impulses, and savage rudiments of virtue. They should

not, therefore, be disheartened by inveterately mischievous propensities,

nor even by serious delinquencies now and then, which growth and good

management will correct; nor should they try to put a mask of propriety on

the wanton features of youthful animalism. (340)

Crichton-Browne encourages parents to take a more relaxed approach to educating their children, drawing on the narrative of human evolution to reassure them that mature behavior inevitably follows growth and good management. Like Overton’s comments in

The Way of All Flesh, Crichton-Browne’s emphasis is on the dramatic changes young people undergo in their moral and intellectual characteristics as they mature.

The next reference to embryology occurs in a chapter in which Overton ponders the influences of heredity and early childhood experiences over the mess his godson

Ernest has made of his life. Overton wonders if Ernest will ever gain more sense, given his foolish parents. This is Ernest’s lowest point in the novel. After serving as a clergyman for a few months in a poor section of London, Ernest becomes extremely confused and disillusioned in his unsuccessful efforts to convert his fellow lodgers in a run-down boarding house. After discovering a friend he idolized from Cambridge in the rooms of a prostitute there, Ernest mistakes the other young woman staying in the house for a prostitute, propositions her, and is sent to jail for assaulting her. As Overton prepares to meet Ernest’s father, Theobald, to tell him of Ernest’s imprisonment, he reflects on Ernest’s parents’ hypocrisy about their own failures and their ignorance of the

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world. He draws on the process of conception and birth to conclude that their inflexibility and stupidity are hereditary and irremediable.

As it was, the case was hopeless; it would be no use their even entering

into their mothers’ wombs and being born again. They must not only be

born again but they must be born again each one of them of a new father

and of a new mother and of a different line of ancestry for many

generations before their minds could become supple enough to learn anew.

(298)

Overton is pleasantly surprised, however, when Theobald reacts to the news by deciding to sever all ties with his son. Considering this to be a very sensible response, Overton decides there is hope that Ernest will outgrow his naïve foolishness:

I was pleased to reflect that Ernest’s father was less of a fool than I had

taken him to be, and had the greater hopes, therefore, that his son’s

blunders might be due to postnatal, rather than congenital misfortunes.

Accidents which happen to a man before he is born, in the persons of his

ancestors, will, if he remembers them at all, leave an indelible impression

on him; they will have moulded his character so that, do what he will, it is

hardly possible for him to escape their consequences. If a man is to enter

into the Kingdom of Heaven, he must do so, not only as a little child, but

as a little embryo, or rather a little zoosperm—and not only this, but as one

that has come of zoosperms which have entered into the Kingdom of

Heaven before him for many generations. (300)

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Both of these passages draw on ideas from Life and Habit about the continuity of personality between generations and the power of inherited memory, and their emphasis seems very deterministic; inherited memories are superlatively difficult to escape. By referring ironically to New Testament passages about spiritual rebirth and needing the faith of a child to enter the kingdom of heaven, Butler also discounts altogether the potential for spiritual conversion to bring about change. It is an extremely discouraging thought for anyone who, like Ernest or Samuel Butler himself, ever wanted to be different from their parents, hoping to exert self-control over his or her hereditary impulses. Yet the image of an intrepid little zoosperm swimming into the Kingdom of Heaven creates such an unexpected contrast that it seems to lessen the potential harshness of this passage’s deterministic vision. It also reminds the reader not to discount the desire of the zoosperm to “better itself.”

The novel’s final embryo references deal less with the ingenuity and desire of the embryo and more with the embryo as a paradigm of development that indicates there are necessary stages in psychological development that cannot be skipped or rushed over, but that nevertheless should not last too long. Thus when Overton is concerned about leaving

Ernest to keep shop for too long before he comes into his inheritance from his aunt,

Overton writes that poverty is “very wearing; it is a quasi-embryonic condition, through which a man had better pass if he is to hold his later developments securely, but like measles or scarlet fever, he had better have it mildly and get it over early” (368). Like his godfather, Ernest believes that poverty is a necessary part of development. He defends his decision to have his children raised by a family in the country with the theory that

“young people should go through the embryonic stages with their money as much as with

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their limbs, beginning life in a much lower social position than that in which their parents were” (412-3). Butler similarly draws on the image of the embryo as a paradigm for natural development in a discussion of art education in Alps and Sanctuaries. Butler favors an apprenticeship system in which young artists are allowed to learn by simply painting from nature with minimal supervision rather than an academic system in which young artists study the principles of art and copy great works. Critiquing an accomplished drawing by a twelve-year old boy in the academic system, Butler writes,

“The boy who did the drawing given above is not likely to produce good work in later life. He has been taught to see nature with an old man’s eyes at once, without going through the embryonic stages. . . . All his individuality has been crushed out of him”

(7:127). Implicit in these examples is Butler’s feeling that it is best not to interfere too much with the developmental process. In fact, this is an opinion that he shared with other recapitulationist psychologists, many of whom feared that children could be forced to grow up too quickly and “would be rushed through the process of evolution with unseemly haste” (Shuttleworth and Taylor 289). In an article on “Education and the

Nervous System” (1883), for instance, James Crichton-Browne warns about the dangers of “brain forcing”: preventing the brain from developing at its own pace could lead to mental failure, “a whole train of physical diseases,” and moral insanity (337-8).

“Every creature must be allowed to run its own development”

In The Way of All Flesh, Butler emphasizes the importance of allowing development to occur without being rushed through Theobald’s negative example.

“Theobald had never liked children,” the narrator explains. “Oh, why, he was inclined to

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ask himself, could not children be born into the world grown-up? . . . if people could buy ready-made children at a shop of whatever age and sex they liked, instead of always having to make them at home and to begin at the beginning with them—that might do better, but as it was he did not like it” (116). In one particularly awful scene, Theobald beats his toddler son for saying “tum” instead of “come.” It is a scene intended to shock the reader and to demonstrate Theobald’s failure as a father, his lack of sympathy for his son, and his ignorance of child development. Theobald justifies his cruelty because he believes that Ernest has willfully disobeyed him by mispronouncing the hard “c” sound.

Theobald believes that “no duty could be more important than that of teaching a child to obey its parents in all things. . . . The first signs of self-will must be carefully looked for, and plucked up by the roots at once before they had time to grow” (117). Raby notes that

Butler’s portrayal of Theobald is autobiographical; like Theobald, Butler’s parents followed the maxim: “Break your child’s will early, or he will break yours later on” (23).

Butler clearly intends to debunk Theobald’s parenting philosophy; the narrator describes the notion of “plucking up the roots of self-will” as a “numb serpent of a metaphor” that

Theobald “cherished . . . in his bosom” (117). Ernest absorbs his father’s cross impatience with his childish mistakes, and as a young boy he despairs over ever improving, musing like his father, “Oh, why, why, why, could not people be born into the world as grown-up persons?” (153). Throughout the novel, Theobald serves as an extreme example of what Sally Shuttleworth calls “the culture’s seeming obliviousness to the temporal nature of human development” (150). His actions betray a lack of understanding about the gradual, incremental nature of learning and development.

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In The Way of All Flesh, Butler shows that despite the fact that children are not born into the world ready-made, they are remarkably well equipped with the unconscious memories necessary to guide their growth. All growth and maturation require time and the proper balance of nurture and freedom, as Butler demonstrates through Overton’s and

Alethea’s hesitation to interfere too much in Ernest’s growth and by emphasizing the wisdom of Ernest’s unconscious self. As Overton remarks, “my only fear was lest I should meddle with him when it might be better for him to be left alone” (367). Alethea likewise provides an opportunity for Ernest to develop physically by encouraging him to build an organ, but she does not interfere with his mental growth, recognizing when he immaturely parrots “whatever jargon he heard from his elders,” that “this is the way in which even the greatest men as a general rule begin to develop” (175). Ernest’s unconscious self persuades his body to focus on the business of growing rather than learning in school: “Growing is not the easy plain sailing business that it is commonly supposed to be: it is hard work—harder than any but a growing boy can understand; it requires attention, and you are not strong enough to attend to your bodily growth, and to your lessons too” (158). Just as the chick embryo in Life and Habit displays a more perfect unconscious knowledge than the tailor as it ingeniously creates itself, Ernest’s unconscious self’s decision to focus on physical growth rather than gaining knowledge proves to be the right one.

For similar reasons, G. Stanley Hall, the turn-of-the-century child psychologist in whose work “recapitulation reached the acme of its influence outside biology” (Gould

143), argues that children should spend all of their time outdoors in nature:

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The child revels in savagery, and if its tribal, predatory, hunting, fishing,

fighting, roving, idle, playing proclivities could be indulged in the country

and under conditions that now, alas! seem hopelessly ideal, they could

conceivably be so organized and directed as to be far more truly

humanistic and liberal than all that the best modern school can provide.

Rudimentary organs of the soul now suppressed, perverted, or delayed, to

crop out in menacing forms later, would be developed in their season so

that we should be immune to them in mature years. (x)

“If only the proper environment could be provided,” Hall writes somewhat wistfully, then the dangers of brain-forcing and the threat of developmental arrests could be avoided (x). Children need to give expression to their primitive urges in order to develop proper self-control and to gain immunity from “menacing” psychological developments.

Like Hall, Butler draws on the principle of recapitulation in stressing the necessity of providing the proper environment for healthy development to occur. In Life and Habit,

Butler explains that the environment prompts the developing organism’s memory. In The

Way of All Flesh, Butler develops his theory of the interaction between the environment and the developing organism by showing how Theobald and Christina’s developments are stunted through their upbringing and choice of vocation,77 how Ernest requires his prison experience and a total change of environment in order to find himself, and how

Ernest’s decision to have his children raised in the country is motivated by an appreciation for the natural course of development. Overton explains that Ernest

77 Overton observes with tongue in cheek that if Christina had only married “a sensible layman—we will say a hotel-keeper—[she] would have developed into a good landlady” (84).

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“wanted his children to be brought up in the fresh pure air, and among other children who were happy and contented” (372). Ernest refers to an embryo’s development in the womb as a precedent for children growing up without a father: “A man first quarrels with his father about three-quarters of a year before he is born. It is then he insists on setting up a separate establishment” (373). Just as Hall recommends allowing children to run free outside, the proper environment in The Way of All Flesh is one that introduces a minimal amount of parental supervision. “Every creature must be allowed to ‘run’ its own development in its own way,” comments Butler in Life and Habit (109). Butler’s use of the embryo as a paradigm for development emphasizes the unconscious volition of the growing creature—its ability to “run” its own development—and has surprisingly optimistic implications for the healthy development of self-control, provided that a young person is given lots of freedom.

The novel’s final paragraph expresses a similarly hopeful attitude toward the possibility for self-determination by describing development as an open-ended process.

“Such is my friend’s latest development,” Overton concludes, implying that Ernest has the potential to grow and change throughout adulthood (430). He continues, “I must leave the reader to determine whether there is not a strong family likeness between the

Ernest of the College of Spiritual Pathology and the Ernest who will insist on addressing the next generation rather than his own” (430), suggesting that even though Ernest’s views have changed dramatically, they remain quirky and impractical, so that his mental stages seem both superficially disjointed and essentially consistent, just like the stages of embryonic development. At the same time, by following the suggestions of his unconscious self and pursuing his own interests in music and literature rather than wishes

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of his parents, Ernest has successfully escaped his father’s and grandfather’s influence, thus achieving a measure of self-determination. As Overton comments, “His father and grandfather could probably no more understand his state of mind than they could understand Chinese” (430). In fact, although his grandfather named him Ernest, hoping that “the possession of such a name might . . . have a permanent effect upon the boy’s character, and influence him for good during the more critical periods of his life” (106), by the end of the novel, Ernest’s life is marked by the opposite of moral earnestness, which was characterized for the Victorians by self-denial and inner struggle. As an independently wealthy bachelor, he enjoys “the luxury of a quiet unobtrusive life of self- indulgence” (408), having finally learned that “pleasure, after all, is a safer guide than either right or duty” (114).

At this point, Overton (as well as Butler) seems to have revised his more pessimistic theory about the near impossibility of differing from one’s inherited memories. Rather than trying to fight his ancestral impulses, Ernest creates a new life for himself by doing what gives him pleasure: writing, playing the organ, and living by himself. His life confirms his Aunt Alethea’s recommendation that “nothing is well done nor worth doing well unless, take it all round, it has come pretty easily” (178).

Paradoxically, for Butler, doing what comes easily is actually a form of self-control, in the sense of literally taking control of one’s destiny. This is a far cry from the recommendations of many other Victorian writers, who often stressed the necessity of self-denial, self-discipline, and devotion to duty in order to achieve success. Pursuing his desires (whether consciously or unconsciously) connects Ernest with his embryonic wisdom, that perfect unconscious knowledge and volition that guided his physical

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growth. Thus, in both The Way of All Flesh and Life and Habit, Samuel Butler employs the image of the embryo to redefine self-control and self-determination as the expression of unconscious knowledge and desire and to demonstrate that the natural course of psychological development is a sporadic, yet reliable unfolding of personal destiny.

Insisting as Butler does on the unconscious volition of the embryo, the personhood of the body’s cells (Life 85), and the idea that we are all “component atoms of a single compound creature, LIFE” (Life 105) creates a radically disruptive theory of identity. At times Butler’s theories appear to be simply counter-intuitive flights of fancy with little application to practical psychology and at best only interesting correspondences with his fictional portrayal of Ernest’s development in The Way of All

Flesh. Yet the parallels between Ernest’s reliance on unconscious knowledge as he grows to maturity and the recommendations of prominent psychologists (who likewise embraced the explanatory possibilities of embryonic recapitulation) suggest that Butler’s theory of unconscious memory and pan-psychic view of the universe really offered to his

Victorian readers what he promised them in Life and Habit, a clue to the sources of creative self-control and intelligent self-determination, an account of the “deepest mystery of organic life—the power to originate, to err, to sport, the power which differentiates the living organism from the machine” (14).

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Conclusion

The discourse of self-control in mid-Victorian literature and psychology varies widely, ranging from discussions of the “moral habits” that echo the confident claims of self-help authors about the power of individuals to shape their futures to the more nuanced critiques of novelists and psychologists, who, working within an increasingly materialist model of the mind, entertained bleak assertions of the inefficacy of consciousness as well as more mysterious claims about the cognitive and volitional aspects of the emotions. Some of the variety in this cultural conversation stems from the fact that mid-Victorian psychology itself was a capacious grab-bag of specialist and non- specialist participants who all felt that they were contributing to a cultural understanding about questions that seemed to affect the everyday lives of normal people—questions that included the relationship between animal and human consciousness, the distinctions between voluntary and involuntary action, the grounds for moral responsibility, and the possibility of self-control. Shared assumptions about the value of self-control frequently influenced the language, the analytical categories, and the narratives of development employed by psychologists as they worked out new theories about the physiological and evolutionary basis of the mind. As this dissertation has demonstrated, attending to the parallels between the portrayals of self-control in Victorian psychological treatises and novels not only confirms the existence of a widespread fascination with this issue that expressed itself in diverse ways, but also highlights multiple points of unresolved, yet productive conflicts about the nature and achievability of self-control.

The parallels between Charles Dickens’ exploration of the necessity of energy for healthy forms of self-control (as well as its inherent dangers) in Little Dorrit (1857) and

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Alexander Bain’s emphasis on physiological energy as the basis for the will in The

Emotions and the Will (1859) foreground the volatile nature of emotion as a form of bodily energy. The potential for repressed emotional energies to sap an individual’s physiological resources and lead to self-deception, as it does for Little Dorrit, or for repressed emotions to warp perceptions and cause self-immolation, as they do for Mrs.

Clennam, Tattycoram, and Miss Wade, helps to explain why Dickens’ portrayals of strong-willed, self-controlled characters are often so negative. Despite his frequent depictions of successfully self-helping characters, such as David Copperfield or Daniel

Doyce in Little Dorrit, and his insistence on the value of self-control in his work related to Urania House, Charles Dickens also fills his fiction with oddly unattractive representations of self-controlled characters, like Mrs. Clennam’s servant Flintwinch, whose “natural acerbity and energy, always contending with a second nature of habitual repression, gave his features a swollen and suffused look” (52), and the murderous schoolmaster Bradley Headstone in Our Mutual Friend. That is, despite his implicit faith in the utility of self-control, the fiction Dickens was compelled to write consistently drove him to discount the possibility that physiological energy could be used productively, leading him to a bleaker vision in the fiction than he was imagining in terms of practical effects in the real world.

In contrast to Dickens and Bain, Hardy and Eliot treat emotion less as a form of physiological energy and more as the reflexive response of the body to its environment.

In doing so, they interact with the theory of human-automatism, around which concerns about the possibility of self-control in the light of evolutionary theory and physiological psychology crystallized during the 1870s. In Far From the Madding Crowd (1874),

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Thomas Hardy’s portrayal of the influence of the body and the environment over the consciousness of his characters resonates with the prevailing trend toward a more thoroughly naturalistic psychology, but he also anticipates William James’s response to human-automatism in “Are We Automata?” (1879) by exploring the potential for the attention to intervene in the stream of consciousness to shape future character. Choosing to focus the attention on one or two objects of interest protects individuals from being overwhelmed by the presence of myriad environmental stimuli and allows individuals to gradually mold their thought patterns. Like Hardy and James, George Eliot and George

Henry Lewes emphasize the inextricable relationship between feeling and thinking. But their discussion of emotion and the senses suggests a more radical, less hierarchical form of self-control, in which openness to emotion as a source of knowledge leads to humility and fellow feeling, which for Eliot are inseparable from ethical forms of self-control.

Through her exploration of Gwendolen’s fear in Daniel Deronda (1876), George Eliot both influenced and revised George Henry Lewes’s theories in Problems of Life and

Mind (1874-9) regarding the role of primitive emotions as a source of intelligence and catalyst for psychological remediation. In their focus on the continuously shifting, nearly iridescent movement of consciousness and emotion in relation to the environment, Hardy and Eliot suggest a form of potential self-control that relies on constant, tiny modifications of attention and thus adapts itself to a physiological model of the mind.

Just as Eliot does in Daniel Deronda, Butler stretches evolutionary narratives of development in The Way of All Flesh (composed 1873-1884) and Life and Habit (1877) to sketch an alternative sequence for psychological development that grants individuals a greater degree of choice and control. Unlike Eliot, however, Butler develops a

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defamiliarizing view of consciousness and inherited memory to demonstrate the possibility of gaining self-control by relying on pleasure rather than duty. Despite his quirky illustrations of embryonic and nonhuman consciousness, however, Butler’s psychological theories are not as far out as they first appear. His whimsical portrayal of embryonic consciousness and desire in Life and Habit, Erewhon, and The Way of All

Flesh corresponds to nineteenth-century theories of recapitulation and anticipates the recommendations of developmental psychologists. Perhaps even more surprisingly,

Butler’s work resonates with Darwin’s openness to the consciousness of animals and plants. In the Descent, for example, Darwin describes the evidence for “some degree of permanent attachment” between two snails who found each other after being temporarily separated in an unfamiliar garden (Beer Darwin 252). The physiologist William

Carpenter also theorized that the best way to study human psychology was to “trace the

‘successive complication’ of mentality” from simple to more complex life forms (Jacyna

113). Just as Butler fancifully describes a bulb who gets “distracted” by the paper bag it has been stored in and forgets to send out shoots in the spring (Life 134), so Carpenter similarly but more drily locates the origins of human consciousness in “the capacity shown even by plants to repond to stimuli in ways which enhanced their chances of survival” (Jacyna 113). As Francis Darwin astutely noted in his correspondence with

Butler, while Huxley and others employed physiology to demonstrate man’s place in nature by arguing against consciousness as an efficacious force in animals and humans, it was also possible to naturalize human psychology by arguing in favor of a continuity of conscious intelligence, and thus a related potential for rational self-control, from lower to higher life forms.

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Dickens, Hardy, Eliot, and Butler intervene in mid-Victorian debates about whether a scientific physiological psychology could support the existence of the will as an independently active aspect of the mind and whether such a concept of the will was even necessary to account for individuals’ experiences of volition and self-control. These are the issues at stake in the type of will, for example, that William Carpenter describes in

“The Physiology of the Will” when he writes:

That there is a ‘mechanism in thought and morals,’ as there is in breathing

and walking, no physiologist can doubt for a moment. But, on the other

hand, the physiologist sees quite as clearly as the metaphysician that there

is a power beyond and above all such mechanism—a will, which alike in

the Mind and the Body, can utilize the Automatic agencies to work out its

own purposes; repressing them when too strong, fostering and developing

them when originally feeble, directing all healthful energy into the most

fitting channel for its exercise, and training and disciplining the entire

combination to harmonious and effective action. (192)

In Carpenter’s description, the will is a transcendent mental or spiritual entity—“a power beyond and above all such mechanism”—that “represses,” “fosters,” “directs” and

“disciplines” the automatic activities of the mind and body. In the 1870s, as this dissertation has explored, the status of such a will was the subject of energetic debate.

Through their engagement with a fully embodied psychology, novelists suggested forms of self-control that bypassed the need for this traditional sort of rational, repressing will.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the range of ideological values attached to the concept of the will, a consensus regarding the place of the will in a scientific psychology

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was never reached; rather, by the end of the century, British psychologists in general had resolved the issue by redefining the boundaries of psychology and ceasing to discuss the category of the will at all.78 As historians of psychology note, this shift away from the

will corresponded to the emergence of experimental psychology and the discipline’s

increasing specialization as it moved out of the pages of mainstream periodicals and

treatises addressed to a generalist audience and into the laboratories of universities.

During the mid-Victorian era, however, questions about the will’s status in a

physiological psychology and its relationship to self-control spilled over the boundaries of what was then a voluminous field of discourse, saturating the culture’s pervasive

rhetoric of self-control, surfacing in practical social efforts like Dickens’ Urania House

and popular guides to self-help like Samuel Smiles’s best-seller, and infiltrating both

complex psychological discussions regarding the mind-body relationship and novelistic

explorations of embodied selfhood.

Although the chapters in this dissertation have each focused separately on a

different aspect of the cultivation of self-control within a physiological framework, it is

possible to see each category—energy, attention, emotion, and unconscious memories

and desires—at work simultaneously in each of the novels. For example, although my

discussion of self-control in Little Dorrit emphasized Dickens’ portrayal of energy and

emotion, Dickens’ exploration of self-control in this novel also includes attention and

inherited memories. Thus when Mr. Meagles unsuccessfully attempts to curb

Tattycoram’s “flaming rage” it is by distracting her attention through the act of counting

and a focus on duty, and in expressing his compassion for Tattycoram, Mr. Meagles

78 See Daston (208), Danziger (64), and Dames (110).

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states his belief that she has inherited her passionate temper through no fault of her own:

“we see, in this unhappy girl, some reflection of what was raging in her mother’s heart before ever such a creature as this poor thing was, in the world” (342). By including references to the complex interactions between Tattycoram’s emotional energy, attention and heredity, Dickens emphasizes the wide range of physiological obstacles to cultivating healthy forms of self-control.

Hardy also invokes energy, attention, emotion and unconscious desires in his exploration of self-control in Far From the Madding Crowd. He often portrays

Bathsheba’s dramatic moments of both emotional poise and loss of control in terms of her physical energy; Bathsheba acknowledges the paradoxical role of energy in her character when she calls herself “wild in a steady way” (173). In addition, although

Hardy frequently represents Gabriel Oak’s restraint in terms of the interaction between attention and the body’s emotional responses to the environment and other characters, he also foregrounds the role of unconscious motivation when he refers to Gabriel’s mind as a “cryptographic page having an ostensible writing, and another between the lines” (213).

Likewise, Eliot highlights the physicality of thinking when she weaves together energy, attention, emotion, and desire in, for example, the passage in which Gwendolen at last comes to acknowledge her love for Daniel and to appreciate Daniel’s existence as one that does not revolve around her own. This is a mental revelation that affects her like a physical “shock” and simultaneously transforms emotion; it is “something spiritual and vaguely tremendous that thrust her away, and yet quelled all anger into self-humiliation”

(804). While she absorbs this information, Gwendolen sits “like a statue,” as if all of her physical energy has been concentrated by her mental attention—“the intensity of her

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mental action arresting all other excitation” (804). Even Butler's attention to embryonic genesis emphasizes the tireless productivity of the energetically developing embryo, its craftsman-like attention to detail, and its desire to improve its circumstances. For both

Eliot and Butler, this combination of physical and mental forces forms the most effective basis for self-control when combined with unconscious memory, as it does when

Deronda’s discovery of a vocation “give[s] shape to . . . an inherited yearning,” the long- dormant “ancestral life” within (750) and when Ernest Pontifex develops into a writer after being allowed to pass through his “embryonic” stages. Hardy, Eliot, and Butler represent the self as intensely physical; their multi-faceted representations of selfhood and consciousness express how completely the body both inhibits and enables self- control.

By discussing energy, emotion, attention, and unconscious memory separately throughout the dissertation, my intention is not to demonstrate a chronological or thematic progression toward more effective or optimistic models of self-control but rather to construct a synchronic view of the creative attempts of psychologists and novelists to account for the experience of volition within a materialist model of the mind during the mid-Victorian period. This, in turn, allows for a rich appreciation of the complex and scientifically nuanced portrayals of embodied consciousness and the development of self- control present in mid-Victorian novels, offering a perspective that has been missing from other accounts of the relationship between mid-Victorian fiction and psychology. In the process, this dissertation not only offers a window into a particular moment in the history of self-control but also suggests a poetics of self-control; these four categories

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provide a useful heuristic for unpacking novelistic portrayals of embodied consciousness within this period.

Ultimately, viewing mid-Victorian novelistic representations of self-control as the product of a complex interaction between the body’s energies, the mind’s attention, the emotional responses of the body to its environment, and the influence of inherited memories (rather than simply the product of the repressive power of the will) enhances our appreciation for the capacious nineteenth-century psychological novel as a particularly well-suited literary form for exploring character and consciousness as embodied phenomena. The novelists I have considered sought to investigate the development of self-control in a psychologically realistic manner not only by representing the inner thoughts and struggles of their characters, but also by portraying these thoughts, both conscious and unconscious, in intimate relationship with bodies, social institutions, natural environments, and other characters, and by tracing their changes across narrative time. The four “great factors” for the study of psychology that

Lewes identifies in Problems of Life and Mind—“Organism,” “External Medium,”

“Heredity,” and the “Social Medium” (iv.139)—are also the four “great factors” influencing character and the cultivation of self-control in the Victorian psychological novel. Thus, Dickens’ social critique in Little Dorrit leads him to construct a panoramic view of London’s “social medium” with an immense cast of characters stretching across many walks of life, each of which presents a unique combination of inner energy and personal history. Hardy weaves the rural landscape of Far From the Madding Crowd into the consciousness of his characters by frequently opening an episode with an extended description of the setting, demonstrating the inextricable relationship between

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“organism” and “external medium.” In Daniel Deronda, the novel of which Eliot wrote,

“I meant everything in the book to be related to everything else,” Eliot depicts these four factors as so powerfully overruling Gwendolen’s efforts at self-control that only a force as organically fundamental as the primitive emotion of fear can teach her to intelligently navigate her way in a wider world beyond her preoccupation with self. Finally, in The

Way of All Flesh, Butler likewise uses the form of the novel to explore the possibility of self-control in relation to these four factors; his quirky views on Lewes’s third factor,

“Heredity,” shape both the form of the novel and his approach to characterization with his successive investigation of four generations of Pontifexes. Thus, while the actual experiences of the women of Urania House may not have borne out the confidence expressed in Dickens’ invitation with which I opened this dissertation, the provisionary accounts of self-control suggested by these four novels help to indicate why Victorians so frequently associated self-control with self-determination and economic security, for these novels depict everything as related—from the automatic activity of the nerves to the inherited memories of the body’s cells to the structure of society to the “vaguely tremendous” movements of the universe. Yet the complexities and paradoxes in how these four authors confronted the physiological basis of self-control reveal how difficult it was for Victorians to resolve competing strains in humanist and psychological theories of human behavior. As a whole they imply that while in theory it may have been possible to rationally govern one’s thoughts, actions, and emotions by managing an intricately embodied consciousness enmeshed in a world as complex as those represented in

Victorian novels, in practice this was never so easy as Dickens seems to purport in his

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invitation to Urania House. It is this very irresolution regarding self-control that fuels the particular energies that shaped Victorian fiction.

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