DOCSLIB.ORG

Dissertation FINAL

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Dissertation FINAL UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Evolutionary Aestheticism: Scientific Optimism and Cultural Progress, 1850-1913 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Lindsay Puawehiwa Wilhelm 2017 © Copyright by Lindsay Puawehiwa Wilhelm 2017 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Evolutionary Aestheticism: Scientific Optimism and Cultural Progress, 1850-1913 by Lindsay Puawehiwa Wilhelm Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2017 Professor Joseph E. Bristow, Chair While evolutionary science may appear to have little in common with the Aesthetic Movement—the “art for art’s sake” philosophy of culture that arose in Britain in the late 1860s—this dissertation contends that these schools of thought formed interdependently, through a sustained dialogic exchange between writers whose interests spanned both art and science. Prominent Victorian figures such as the polymath Herbert Spencer, the aesthete Oscar Wilde, and the critic Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) not only accepted the truth of Charles Darwin’s insights, but also converged in their conception of what I term “evolutionary aestheticism”: a rational and yet remarkably optimistic philosophy that looked to the enjoyment of beauty and the cultivation of taste, rather than violent Darwinian competition, for modes of peaceable evolutionary progress. ii Each chapter explores the development of evolutionary aestheticism, from the decade leading up to Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) to the publication of Lee’s aesthetic primer The Beautiful (1913). The first chapter traces the tradition to Darwin’s and Spencer’s mid-century evolutionary theories, which exempted aesthetic experience from brutal natural laws of scarcity and struggle. Next, the dissertation considers how the cultural critic Walter Pater and the mathematician W. K. Clifford shaped aestheticism in the 1870s—the movement’s formative years—by postulating a scientifically inflected ideal of the aesthetic temperament. The third chapter juxtaposes Wilde’s criticism with Grant Allen’s popular science writing: in the 1890s, these two writers articulated a radically hedonic aesthetics that equated individual happiness with social progress. The fourth chapter analyzes the “life-enhancing” aesthetics of Lee and the connoisseur Bernard Berenson, both of whom discerned the true value of beauty in its capacity to revitalize the entire species as well as the individual. A short coda evaluates the legacy of evolutionary aestheticism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Although the scientific claims of evolutionary aestheticism have all but disappeared from modern-day discourse, its central aim of reconciling aesthetic pleasure with social good has reemerged, this study concludes, in recent debates within literary and cultural criticism. iii The dissertation of Lindsay Puawehiwa Wilhelm is approved. Jonathan Hamilton Grossman Louise E. J. Hornby Robert G. Frank, Jr. Joseph E. Bristow, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2017 iv To JFS—an unexpected optimist, a man of science, and a true artist. v TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures ………………………………………………………………………………. vii Acknowledgments ………………………………………………………………………….. viii Vita …………………………………………………………………………………………… x Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter One …………………………………………………………………………………. 25 Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and the Origins of Evolutionary Aesthetics Chapter Two ………………………………………………………………………………… 90 A Religion of Humanity: The Evolutionary Aestheticism of W. K. Clifford, Walter Pater, and Mathilde Blind Chapter Three ……………………………………………………………………………….. 143 Sexual Selection and Social Progress: The Utopian Evolutionism of Grant Allen and Oscar Wilde Chapter Four ………………………………………………………………………………… 217 “Art for the Sake of Life”: The “Life-Enhancing” Aesthetics of Vernon Lee and Bernard Berenson Coda …………………………………………………………………………………………. 291 Evolutionary Aestheticism in the Twentieth Century Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………………… 318 vi LIST OF FIGURES George Du Maurier, “An Aesthetic Midday Meal,” Punch, 17 July 1880 …………………… 5 Edward Linley Sambourne, “Mr. Punch’s Designs After Nature,” Punch, 1 April 1871 ……. 17 vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS None of this would have been possible without the tireless mentorship of Joseph Bristow, whose brilliant scholarship is equaled only by his generosity toward his students. It has been my honor and privilege to work closely with him (and, more often than not, his dachshunds Leo and Sabrina) over the years. I also owe a great debt to Jonathan H. Grossman for his careful and incisive feedback on the dissertation as well as his unfailing collegiality. In addition, I offer my sincerest thanks to both Louise Hornby and Robert Frank for putting their prodigious bodies of expertise at my disposal. Throughout this whole endeavor, the four members of my committee have been consistently kind, encouraging, and enthusiastic: I am deeply grateful to them all. Many other faculty, from UCLA and elsewhere, have fostered my academic career. In particular, I must acknowledge the justly celebrated Anne K. Mellor, Chris Mott (nou kēia mahalo no kou ho‘okahua‘ana kūmaumau mai ia‘u), and my undergraduate advisor Jeff Spear. Thanks also to Kristin Mahoney, Diana Maltz, and Anne Stiles—three Victorianists at the height of their powers—for graciously taking me under their wing at every NAVSA conference. Furthermore, both my scholarship and my mental health have benefitted immensely from the friendship and guidance of my remarkable fellow graduate students, including Sarah Nance, Mike Nicholson, Dan Couch, Will Clark, Amy Wong, Jay Jin, Sam Sommers, Jordan Wingate, Alex Zobel, Amanda Hollander, Sydney Miller, Katie Charles, Cailey Hall, Jonathan Kincade, Ben Beck, Grant Rosson, Caitlin Benson, Alethia Shih, and others too numerous to name here. Lastly, I would like to thank my parents Marcy and Lance, my sister Kate, my grandmother Merle, and my partner John for their unconditional support. When the going got tough, what motivated me to keep working was the sure knowledge that they would love me regardless of whether I finished. viii *** Portions of the Introduction have appeared previously in “Evolutionary Science and Aestheticism: a Survey and a Suggestion,” Literature Compass 13:2 (2016): 88-97, DOI: 10.1111/lic3.12315. Chapter 2 is a version of “The Utopian Evolutionary Aestheticism of W. K. Clifford, Walter Pater, and Mathilde Blind,” Victorian Studies 59, no. 1 (Autumn 2016): 9-34. Chapter 3 is a version of “Sex in Utopia: The Evolutionary Hedonism of Grant Allen and Oscar Wilde,” in preparation for publication in Victorian Literature and Culture. ix LINDSAY PUAWEHIWA WILHELM Curriculum Vitae EDUCATION 2017 Ph.D. Candidate, English, University of California, Los Angeles Dissertation Title: “Evolutionary Aestheticism: Scientific Optimism and Cultural Progress, 1850-1913” Advisor: Professor Joseph Bristow 2013 M.A., English, UCLA 2010 B.A., magna cum laude, English and American Literature (Highest Honors), Politics, New York University PUBLICATIONS 2017 “Sex in Utopia: The Evolutionary Hedonism of Grant Allen and Oscar Wilde,” forthcoming in Victorian Literature and Culture 2016 “The Utopian Evolutionary Aestheticism of W. K. Clifford, Walter Pater, and Mathilde Blind,” Victorian Studies 59:1 (Autumn 2016), 9-34 2016 “Evolutionary Science and Aestheticism: a Survey and a Suggestion,” Literature Compass 13:2 (2016): 88-97 2014 “'Looking South': Envisioning the European South in North and South,” Studies in the Novel 46:4 (2014): 406-422 AWARDS AND FELLOWSHIPS 2016 Graduate Division Dissertation Year Fellowship, UCLA 2015 Department Distinction in Teaching, UCLA 2015 Department Dissertation Fellowship, UCLA 2013 Graduate Research Mentorship, UCLA 2010 Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship, UCLA INVITED TALK 2016 “Sex and Social Progress: The Utopian Hedonism of Grant Allen and Oscar Wilde,” UCLA Department of English Winter Athenaeum, February 18 x SELECTED CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS 2016 “Diagnosing the Body Politic: Victorian History and the Social Organism,” North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) Annual Conference, Phoenix, AZ, November 2-5 2015 “A Meeting of ‘Sister Sovereigns’: Hawaiian Royalty at Victoria’s Golden Jubilee,” NAVSA Annual Conference, Honolulu, HI, July 9-12 2014 “Connoisseurship, Curation, and Pleasure in the Work of Vernon Lee and Her Circle,” Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States Annual Conference, CSU Fullerton, Fullerton, CA, October 16-18 TEACHING EXPERIENCE Instructor of Record 2013 Critical Reading and Writing, Utopia and Dystopia Teaching Assistant 2015 Science Fiction; Early Romantic Literature 2014 English Literature from 1700-1850 2013 Literary Los Angeles; Shakespeare 2012 English Literature from 1700-1850; English Literature from 1850-Present 2011 The American Novel PROFESSIONAL/ORGANIZATIONAL EXPERIENCE 2016 UCLA Friends of English Southland Graduate Conference Co-chair 2015 UCLA Nineteenth Century Group Graduate Coordinator PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS Modern Language Association; North American Victorian Studies Association; Victorian Interdisciplinary Association of the Western United States; Phi Beta Kappa Society xi Introduction Aesthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change. —Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist” (1890, revised 1891) This dissertation investigates the
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Mathilde Blind
    University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln The George Eliot Review English, Department of 1998 Mathilde Blind Graham Handley Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/ger Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, Literature in English, British Isles Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Handley, Graham, "Mathilde Blind" (1998). The George Eliot Review. 316. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/ger/316 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English, Department of at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in The George Eliot Review by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. MATHILDE BLIND by Graham Handley The first titles in the Eminent Women Series published in 1883 by W. H. AlIen included stud­ ies of Emily Bronte and George Sand (Margaret Fuller, Maria Edgeworth, Elizabeth Fry, and Harriet Martineau would be in the next wave) as well as Mathilde Blind's pioneering, sensi­ tive, uneven and sympathetically feminist exposition of George Eliot's life and art. Blind her­ self deserves a full-length study, and at particular points her own life and works touch those of George Eliot. Born Mathilde Cohen in Mannheim in 1841, she took her stepfather's name when her mother remarried. Dr Karl Blind was an ardent republican in Baden, was imprisoned, freed, then exiled himself, first to Belgium then to England, the family settling in St John's Wood a couple of years after the European year of Revolutions in 1848. Richard Gamett, in the Memoir prefixed to the Poetical Works of Mathilde Blind (1900) refers to her unpublished autobiographical writings in which he notes her strong attachment to another girl at her school, her love of music and dancing (exemplified in her novel Tarantella, 1885) and her embracing of Christianity in her girlhood as 'this profoundly personal religion'.
    [Show full text]
  • Darwin's Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind By
    June 2018 NEW BIOLOGICAL BOOKS 151 and permanent exposure of the human penis, the the experimental data, I am compelled to question phenomenon of orgasm, and a social, not solely re- the runaway process—the fundamental premise of productive, function of sex. He suggests that human much of Prum’s book. pairbonding evolved by females’ choice of males that With that significant reservation, I heartily recom- provided more sexual pleasure—the human male’s mend The Evolution of Beauty as an immensely stim- equivalent of a pheasant’s plumes. Finally, Prum sug- ulating treatment of a wide range of issues. As a gests that female sexual autonomy can account for biologist and birder, I was enthralled by the author’s variation in human sexual orientation. He makes descriptions of a range of species and their displays, the important point that same-sex attraction proba- such as the extraordinary club-winged manakin and bly did not substantially lower reproductive success the legendary great argus (which, to my great disap- for most of human evolution: even today, many ho- pointment, I am unlikely ever to see). Biology teach- mosexual men marry and raise families to mitigate ers would do well to read Prum’s story of the sexually stigma and meet social expectations. The author antagonistic evolution of duck genitalia: it will cap- supposes that like most traits, variation in sexual ori- ture the most indifferent student’simagination.The entation may result from variation at many genetic ideas and evidence the author provides about the loci and in many environmental (social) factors.
    [Show full text]
  • A Flaming World Embrace”: Lucretian Materialism and the Question of Human Sympathy in Mathilde Blind’S the Ascent of Man
    “A flaming world embrace”: Lucretian Materialism and the Question of Human Sympathy in Mathilde Blind’s The Ascent of Man Melanie Asselmans (01711546) Promotor: Dr. Brecht de Groote Co-promotor: Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Bekers Masterproef voorgelegd tot het behalen van de graad van Master in Gender en Diversiteit Academiejaar 2018-2019 (28 mei 2019) Academisch artikel Woordaantal: 9.777 Deze masterproef is een examendocument dat niet werd GecorriGeerd voor eventueel vastGestelde fouten. In publicaties maG naar dit werk worden Gerefereerd, mits schriftelijke toelatinG van de promotor(en) die met naam op de titelpaGina is vermeld. Abstract It is known that the oeuvre of Victorian aesthete Mathilde Blind (1841-1896) was influenced by evolutionary theory. Her epic poem The Ascent of Man (1889) most attests to this. However, critics have yet to examine in depth Blind’s cultural critique on Darwin’s view of gender relations through her evocation of a universal emotion, in part shaped by her esteem for a Shelleyan brand of Romantic radicalism. This article examines Blind’s exploration of sympathetic citizenship in relation to the debate on materialism that pervaded much of Victorian thouGht and the conflict between the bodily and the spiritual it laid bare. It does so through the analysis of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura and the notion of clinamen, and focuses on her poem The Ascent of Man. By exploring the notion of human sympathy, Blind offers the means for an alternative to the prevailinG conventions of the time. Het oeuvre van de Victoriaanse dichter Mathilde Blind (1841-1896) toont de invloed van evolutietheorie aan, waarvan haar episch gedicht The Ascent of Man (1889) het grootste voorbeeld is.
    [Show full text]
  • Proquest Dissertations
    INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction Is dependent upon the quality of the copy subm itted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough. substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g.. maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher qualify 6” x 9” black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. Bell & Howell Information and Leaming 300 North Zeeb Road. Ann Arbor. Ml 48106-1346 USA UMI800-521-0600 THE CONTAGION OFLIFE: ROSSETTI, PATER, WILDE, AND THE AESTHETICIST BODY DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Stephen Weninger, MA., M A., M Phil. ***** The Ohio State University 1999 Dissertation Committee: Approved By: Professor David G.
    [Show full text]
  • Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies Issue 7.2 (Summer
    NINETEENTH-CENTURY GENDER STUDIES # ISSUE 7.2 (SUMMER 2011) ‘Over my boundless waste of soul’: Echoes of the Natural World, or a Feminine Naturphilosophie, in the Poetry of Emily Brontë and Mathilde Blind(1) By Paula Alexandra Guimarães, University of Minho (Braga), Portugal Tall ferns, washed down in sunlight, Beckoned with fingers green; Tall flowers nodded strangely, With white and glimm’ring sheen; They sighed, they sang so softly, They stretched their arms to me; […] (M. Blind “Entangled”) <1>Victorian women poets were confronted with the need to reassess the Romantic concepts on Man and Nature and to ‘re-present’ the natural world as also a feminine realm or domain. Poets such as Emily Brontë and Mathilde Blind – themselves professing a sort of nature religion – have not only questioned the notion of Creation as a male myth but also challenged the prevailing anthropocentric view of life on Earth. Brontë and Blind have not only generally reconsidered the place of feminine consciousness in the ecological web but also responded to their bioregional sensibilities, namely by expressing a strong sense of place/space. In their respective and diverse attempts to ‘translate’ Nature into Language, the two women poets seem both to cooperate with the natural realm by ‘writing with’ it and to diverge from it, thus subverting the traditional conceptions. They see themselves as fundamentally divided between creative imagination and natural reality, dramatically confronting Nature and Text. <2>These poets’ lines abound with vivid, deliberately placed depictions of the environment: weather, landscape and the seasons, communicating an excess of vital stimulation. But besides exalting community with a living, breathing Nature, Brontë and Blind expound an existential philosophy that, in spite of its implicit pantheism, is concerned with the ultimate destination of the human soul.
    [Show full text]
  • Aesthetic Evolution by Mate Choice: Darwin's Really Dangerous Idea
    Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B (2012) 367, 2253–2265 doi:10.1098/rstb.2011.0285 Review Aesthetic evolution by mate choice: Darwin’s really dangerous idea Richard O. Prum* Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA Darwin proposed an explicitly aesthetic theory of sexual selection in which he described mate pre- ferences as a ‘taste for the beautiful’, an ‘aesthetic capacity’, etc. These statements were not merely colourful Victorian mannerisms, but explicit expressions of Darwin’s hypothesis that mate prefer- ences can evolve for arbitrarily attractive traits that do not provide any additional benefits to mate choice. In his critique of Darwin, A. R. Wallace proposed an entirely modern mechanism of mate preference evolution through the correlation of display traits with male vigour or viability, but he called this mechanism natural selection. Wallace’s honest advertisement proposal was stri- dently anti-Darwinian and anti-aesthetic. Most modern sexual selection research relies on essentially the same Neo-Wallacean theory renamed as sexual selection. I define the process of aes- thetic evolution as the evolution of a communication signal through sensory/cognitive evaluation, which is most elaborated through coevolution of the signal and its evaluation. Sensory evaluation includes the possibility that display traits do not encode information that is being assessed, but are merely preferred. A genuinely Darwinian, aesthetic theory of sexual selection requires the incor- poration of the Lande–Kirkpatrick null model into sexual selection research, but also encompasses the possibility of sensory bias, good genes and direct benefits mechanisms.
    [Show full text]
  • CUM Smith Harry Whitaker Editors
    History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences C.U.M. Smith Harry Whitaker Editors Brain, Mind and Consciousness in the History of Neuroscience Brain, Mind and Consciousness in the History of Neuroscience History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences Volume 6 Editors: Charles T. Wolfe, Ghent University, Belgium Philippe Huneman, IHPST (CNRS/Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne), France Thomas A.C. Reydon, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany Editorial Board: Marshall Abrams (University of Alabama at Birmingham) Andre Ariew (Missouri) Minus van Baalen (UPMC, Paris) Domenico Bertoloni Meli (Indiana) Richard Burian (Virginia Tech) Pietro Corsi (EHESS, Paris) François Duchesneau (Université de Montréal) John Dupré (Exeter) Paul Farber (Oregon State) Lisa Gannett (Saint Mary’s University, Halifax) Andy Gardner (Oxford) Paul Griffi ths (Sydney) Jean Gayon (IHPST, Paris) Guido Giglioni (Warburg Institute, London) Thomas Heams (INRA, AgroParisTech, Paris) James Lennox (Pittsburgh) Annick Lesne (CNRS, UPMC, Paris) Tim Lewens (Cambridge) Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh) Alexandre Métraux (Archives Poincaré, Nancy) Hans Metz (Leiden) Roberta Millstein (Davis) Staffan Müller-Wille (Exeter) Dominic Murphy (Sydney) François Munoz (Université Montpellier 2) Stuart Newman (New York Medical College) Frederik Nijhout (Duke) Samir Okasha (Bristol) Susan Oyama (CUNY) Kevin Padian (Berkeley) David Queller (Washington University, St Louis) Stéphane Schmitt (SPHERE, CNRS, Paris) Phillip Sloan (Notre Dame) Jacqueline Sullivan (Western University, London,
    [Show full text]
  • The Evolution of Beauty PDF Summary”
    A summary from: https://blog.12min.com/the-evolution-of-beauty-pdf-summary/ “The Evolution of Beauty PDF Summary” Darwin’s Biggest Problem Darwin’s theory of evolution is, quite possibly, the most influential theory ever conceived by anyone. In fact, when back in 2012, Edge.org, the world’s smartest website, asked the world of science “what is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?” most of the intellectuals surveyed answered something along the lines: “of course it’s Darwin’s theory of evolution, but I suppose everyone will say that, so I’m going with…” Consequently, Darwin’s theory of evolution is a theory which needs no introduction, and which, by Darwin’s own admission from The Origin of Species, can be summed up in a single phrase of Herbert Spencer: “the survival of the fittest.” Most of the biologists living today would certainly agree with it; after all, why shouldn’t they: it’s a nice, neat theory which seems to explain the complexity of the world in such an economical manner that it’s difficult to find any flaws with it. And yet, Darwin himself found a big, almost gaping hole in it: if the biological point of life is to be fit enough so that you can leave some offspring, then why should so many animals be so brightly colored and feature traits which instead of helping them survive, make them more vulnerable? “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!” – grappling with this problem, Darwin wrote in a letter sent to Asa Gray on April 3, 1860.
    [Show full text]
  • Life: 1882-1884
    LIFE: 1882-1884 In 1882 Sharp decided his best hope was a concentrated effort to make a living by writing. In March, he accepted an invitation to visit Rossetti in Birchington. A week after he returned to London, Rossetti died. Deeply affected by the loss of his friend and mentor, Sharp also lamented the absence of his best critic and his chief entry into the literary life of London. Attempting to turn deprivation to gain, he accepted, in June, an invitation from Macmillan and Company to write a biography of Rossetti. Thus began his first attempt at a lengthy work in prose. During the summer, while staying with his mother and sisters at a cottage in Clynder on the Gare-loch, Sharp completed two-thirds of the manuscript. He finished it in the fall after returning to London, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Record and A Study was published in December. The book was widely read, and its generally favorable reception provided a significant boost to Sharp’s literary career. His first book of poems, The Human Inheritance; The New Hope; Motherhood, also appeared in 1882, published by Elliott Stock. According to Elizabeth, he considered this book “the beginning of the true work of his life.” As suggested by the title, it consists of three long poems. The first, “The Human Inheritance,” contains four sections which depict, in turn, childhood, youth, manhood/womanhood, and old age. “The New Hope” forecasts a spiritual regeneration of the world; and “Motherhood” attempts to demonstrate — by depicting the experience of giving birth — commonality of experience among all living creatures.
    [Show full text]
  • NINETEENTH-CENTURY GENDER STUDIES ISSUE 14.1 (SPRING 2018) 'Dare to Think Ye Free:' Being a Woman of Letters in Late-Victori
    NINETEENTH-CENTURY GENDER STUDIES ISSUE 14.1 (SPRING 2018) ‘Dare to think ye free:’ Being a Woman of Letters in late-Victorian England Mathilde Blind. Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters. James Diedrick. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2016. 313 pp. Reviewed by Maria Luigia Di Nisio, Gabriele D’Annunzio University, Chieti-Pescara <1>The emergence of the woman of letters in late-Victorian England has been tackled from a number of critical perspectives, particularly in relation to the Decadence movement and feminist issues. Critical attention has focused on the ways in which the figure of the woman writer interrogates current cultural binaries, especially those defining the idea of ‘true’ femininity, like the opposition between public life and domesticity. <2>James Diedrick’s recent study throws new light on the topic by reconstructing the life and artistic career of Mathilde Blind (1841-1896), poet, essayist, translator and novelist. As the subtitle suggests, his approach aims at connecting Blind’s biography to much broader issues regarding the role of women in fin-de-siècle society. Accordingly, each of the eight chapters is pivoted on a single cultural category such as the Feminist, the New Woman, and the Aesthete, showing how each construct shaped her experience (both personal and literary) and how in turn she contributed to their definition. <3>One of the most fascinating artistic experiences this book explores is Blind’s active involvement in British aestheticism. Women aesthetes, as Talia Schaffer has pointed out in her seminal study on Forgotten Female Aesthetes, challenged the very meaning of the artistic movement they joined; however, in her discussion Schaffer forgets Blind, who indeed, as her biographer makes clear, ‘remained an aesthete to the end’ (244).
    [Show full text]
  • Recalling the Poetics and Politics of the Exilic and Migrant Other in Some English Women’S Poetry
    Paula Alexandra Guimarães UNIVERSITY OF MINHO, PORTUGAL [email protected] Recalling the Poetics and Politics of the Exilic and Migrant Other in Some English Women’s Poetry Fain would I know if distance renders Relief or comfort to her woe. (C. Brontë) In her work on The Artistry of Exile (2013), Jane Stabler explains that “[i]t seems to have taken about five centuries for the concept of exile in English to grow from an externally imposed sentence into a form of identity” (p. 5) and, I would add, into collective memory as well. Although famous exiles such as those of Ovid and Dante1 can be interpreted both as historical events and as ‘states of mind’, she stresses that “the figurative meaning of the noun ‘exile’ to describe a banished person only emerged in the Romantic period” (p. 5) as such, when identification with historical and literary outcasts began to serve both political and aesthetic purposes.2 Therefore, literal and figurative dimensions of the term are inextricably related in the poets analysed here, in whose texts the imaginative conditions of the categories of exile, refugee, expatriate and émigré overlap and run into each other. Furthermore, the power and role of women in national histories, whether of Britain or of other European countries, also preoccupy many of the poets analysed here; as Andrew Ashfield states, they “remain unique examples of how historical realities such as the invasion threats of the 1790s and the drama of the expanding empire in the 1830s” combined with their own domestic and artistic concerns (1995, p.
    [Show full text]
  • Darwin's Heresy
    Darwin’s Heresy LENN E. GOODMAN Abstract Challenged by Lord Kelvin’s claims that earth and sun were too young to give evo- lution sufficient time to do its work, especially in the human case, where care for the weak blunts the edge of natural selection, Darwin leaned on Lamarckian thoughts to accelerate the process. The mental and moral traits crowning human distinctiveness, he urged, arose through sexual selection. But promiscuity, infanticide, early be- trothals, and female drudgery undermined these effects in “savage races.” In the in- evitable decline and ultimate extinction of the “melanin races” Darwin believed he could observe human evolution underway before his eyes. Years ago I had a colleague who cheerfully described himself as a red diaper baby. That is, he was raised as a Marxist. In those days, the Soviet Union still seemed viable; to some, even invincible. But Stalinism was already widely rued on the left, and my colleague hoped to show how later abuses, in thinking and practice, had under- cut Karl Marx’s insights. But after following the twists and turns of dialectical materialism through their several generations and gyra- tions, he reached the painful conclusion that the first to betray those ideas was Marx himself. The discovery had an ironic aptness, since Marx had pressed the thought that a system will bear the seeds of its own destruction. I’m not sure how far that Hegelian aperçu on the logic of tragedy can be generalized. Perhaps it could profit from a Darwinian (or Deweyan?) revision and should read: Any system bears within itself the seeds of its own destruction, unless it can adapt.
    [Show full text]