RECLAIMING MEMORY: LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND THE RISE OF MEMORY AS PROPERTY, 1860-1945 By Elizabeth Reeves Covington Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English August 2011 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Professor Mark Wollaeger Professor Jay Clayton Professor Colin Dayan Professor Paul Saint-Amour Copyright © 2011 by Elizabeth Reeves Covington All Rights Reserved To Janet Reeves Covington and In loving memory of J.S. Covington, Jr. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It is with deepest gratitude that I thank my committee chairs, Mark Wollaeger and Jay Clayton, for their patience, support, wit, and brilliant thoughts and suggestions throughout this whole process. Paul Saint-Amour and Colin Dayan, the other two members of my dissertation committee, were amazing readers and kind mentors during the tough times. I owe this wonderful committee more than I can say. This project would not have been possible without the financial support of the Vanderbilt Graduate School Dissertation Enhancement Grant, the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, the Manson Myers Award, and the Vanderbilt English Department. I am grateful to the library staff at the Beinecke Library at Yale, the Houghton and Widener Libraries at Harvard, the Cambridge University Library, the British Library, and St. John’s College, Cambridge. Most of all, though, I am grateful to the amazing and forgiving library staff at Vanderbilt University who were always cheerful and kind, and never once reproached me for overdue books and my habit of recalling books from myself. Many of the faculty and staff at Vanderbilt University were unofficial members of my dissertation committee. Kathryn Schwarz and Katherine Crawford bestowed advice, emotional support, research opportunities, changes of scenery, and lots of really terrific pita bread. I hope one day to be able to repay them by providing my own students and friends with the same unending academic and emotional generosity. They are the model academics I strive to emulate. I want to thank Mark Schoenfield, Dana Nelson, Carolyn Dever, and Paul Young for all their encouragement and support. Donna Caplan and Janis iv May in the English Department have cheered me and kept me organized. I am grateful to all the people at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, particularly the other fellows Sarah Tyson, Christina Dickerson, Jason Parker, Clive Hunter, Sarah Glynn, Stacy Clifford, Jennifer Foley, Elizabeth Zagatta, and the director Mona Frederick. Of my friends, family, and colleagues, I most need to thank Elizabeth Meadows, who was there every step of the way and clarified my thinking, often while lifting weights. The dissertation emerged from conversations with Victor Martinez, and further conversations with Amanda Hagood, Sarah Kersh, Sarah Passino, Michael Alijewicz, and Diana Bellonby developed my ideas. Tom Covington and Michelle Mourad provided me with much-needed vacations, and I have to thank Susan Covington for my interest in Rebecca West’s thoughts on memory and for her sharp wit. Judy Brown has been a support and a guide throughout my time at graduate school, and I have to thank her for my first view of the moors in England and the Bronte parsonage. I want to thank my parents, Janet and James Covington, Allison Bradshaw, Kenny Baldwin, Nancy Eisenberg, and Kevin York-Simmons. Finally, I want to thank all the furry ones who sat on me during this process and kept despair at bay: Opus, Snooks, the Admiral Byrd, Prince, Lucy June, Binkley, my precious Biscuit, and Sammy, whose editing prowess helped me earn the Dissertation Enhancement Grant. v TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE DEDICATION …………….....…………………………………………………………..iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………iv INTRODUCTION…………...……………………………………………………………1 Chapter I. SAMUEL BUTLER’S COGNITIVE DISSONANCE: MEMORY AND PROPERTY IN LATE-VICTORIAN SCIENCE AND LITERATURE………..23 II. APPROPRIATED MEMORIES: J.T. MACCURDY, REBECCA WEST, AND THE CASE HISTORY………………………………………………………………………………………...61 III. THE MODERNIST DAY NOVEL: STORM JAMESON TAKES A DAY OFF FROM ULYSSES AND MRS. DALLOWAY……………………………………………………………...104 IV. MEMORY AS ART, MEMORY AS ASSET: THE POST-WAR MODERNIST AESTHETICIZATION OF REMINISCENCE………………………………...145 V. LYRICAL MEMORY: T.S. ELIOT AND THE SHIFT TO CULTURAL MEMORY PROPERTY IN LATE MODERNISM……………………………185 Appendix A. KEYWORD "MEMORY" IN BRITISH PERIODICALS, 1840-1940………...223 B. PERCENTAGE “MEMORY” ARTICLES IN BRITISH PERIODICALS……224 C. KEYWORDS “MEMORY” AND “TREACHEROUS” IN BRITISH PERIODICALS………………………………………………………………...225 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………....226 vi INTRODUCTION In a New York Times article in February 2011, the world-record holding memory champion Joshua Foer revealed his secrets for committing information to memory and observed: “For all of our griping over the everyday failings of our memories—the misplaced keys, the forgotten name, the factoid stuck on the tip of the tongue—our biggest failing may be that we forget how rarely we forget.”1 Foer’s assumption that his readers expect to forget mundane details and even important information demonstrates how completely scientific findings about the fallibility of human memory have overcome initial cultural resistance and permeated our culture. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, scientists were first beginning to think about memory as an object of scientific inquiry and to contemplate ways to conduct memory experiments, and they found that they were challenging some of the most engrained and cherished beliefs about what it means to be human. An 1880 article entitled “Illusions of Memory” in Cornhill Magazine summarizes the common reaction to suggestions that memory is unreliable: To challenge the veracity of a person’s memory is one of the boldest things one can do in the way of attacking deep-seated conviction. Memory is the peculiar domain of the individual. In going back in recollection to the scenes of other years he is drawing on the secret storehouse of his own consciousness, with which a stranger must not intermeddle….To cast doubt on a man’s memory is commonly resented as a rude impertinence. It looks like an attempt of another to walk into the strictly private apartment of his own mind. Even if the challenger professedly bases his challenge on the testimony of his own memory, the challenged party is hardly likely to allow the right of comparing testimonies. He can in most cases boldly assert that those who differ with him are lacking in his power of recollection. The past, in become the past, has, for most people, ceased 1 Joshua Foer, “Secrets of Mind Gamer: How I Trained My Brain and Became a World-Class Memory Athlete,” The New York Times Magazine, February 15, 2011. Emphasis mine. 1 to be a common object of reference; it has become a part of the individual’s own inner self, and cannot be easily dislodged or shaken.2 The author identifies the primary cultural hurdle confronting scientific investigations of memory: as philosophers such as John Locke have theorized, memory is not just something that the mind does, it is a fundamental part of who we are. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century memory scientists did not set out to compromise faith in memory and identity based on memory, but they verified the existence of two hazards with the capacity to destroy this faith: forgetting and construction. Within the first twenty-five years of heightened scientific scrutiny of memory, scientists found sufficient evidence to suggest that forgetting, far from the exception to the rule, is the normal response to experience, and that imaginative reconstruction plays a significant role in how we remember past events. Of course, even John Locke, the reigning memory theorist until the late nineteenth century, acknowledged that forgetting will ensue “if [the memory] be not sometimes renewed by repeated exercise of the senses, or reflection on those kinds of objects which at first occasioned them, the print wears out, and at last there remains nothing to be seen.”3 Evidence gathered by the first memory scientists led them to suggest that forgetting happens much more quickly than Locke imagined and is liable to be altered in renewal. In 1886, Frances Power Cobbe neatly summarized the scientific findings to date: “Memory is a finger mark traced on shifting sand, ever exposed to obliteration when left unrenewed, 2 J.S., “Illusions of Memory,” Cornhill Magazine, 41:244 (April1880), 416-17. After assuring his reader that he will not “commit the sacrilege of questioning the veracity of memory in general,” the author proceeds to catalogue the many ways that memory fails to accurately reproduce the events of the past, drawing on scientific evidence to support his points. 3 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 151. 2 and if renewed, then modified, and made not the same, but a fresh and different mark.”4 The implications of these findings for history, the formation of individual and collective identity, the judicial system, language, day-to-day existence, and many other aspects of life were overwhelming. Rather than incorporating these theories into the cultural vocabulary, however, the overarching response after the first explosion of discussion about memory was to maintain previous notions about memory despite emerging evidence to the contrary.5 New scientific theories of memory were still a part