City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2017 Shame, Darwin, and Other Victorian Writers Aaron Khai Han Ho The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2265 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] SHAME, DARWIN, AND OTHER VICTORIAN WRITERS by AARON KHAI HAN HO A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2017 © 2017 AARON K. H. HO All Rights Reserved ii Shame, Darwin, and Other Victorian Writers by Aaron K. H. Ho This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ________________________ Date Talia Schaffer Chair of Examining Committee ________________________ Date Mario DiGangi Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Steven Kruger Caroline Reitz Talia Schaffer THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT Shame, Darwin, and Other Victorian Writers by Aaron K. H. Ho Advisor: Talia Schaffer The dissertation explores shame and how shame shapes identities in the nineteenth century. While many scholars examine Darwin in terms of narrativity, how he attempts to counter the theological language in Victorian evolutionary discourses, and the influences he has on his contemporary writers, I argue that his writing on shame, which is part of his long argument on evolution, secularizes the concept of shame, opposing the notions of many Victorians that shame is God-given. Both God-given shame and secular shame are rooted in sexuality, as this dissertation will show, and thus shame, sexuality, and identity are interconnected. Using Darwin as a springboard, I examine other aspects of shame such as nationalist shame, bodily shame, shame in an industrialized city, shame of minorities, and sexual shame via the books of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Elizabeth Gaskell, John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis. They were prolific in the beginning, middle, and end of the century respectively, giving account of how shame evolved through the long Victorian period and how Darwin’s concept of secular shame influenced their narratives. The writers, including Darwin, express their identities in relation to shame differently through their different writing styles, and those who embraced shame even as they were hiding it, produced what we would now call queer writing. iv To Melissa and William, with love. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Without Talia Schaffer, this dissertation would not have been completed. I’m also grateful to Steve Kruger and Caroline Reitz for their constructive remarks and detailed notes. vi Contents Introduction: The Origin of Shame, Identity, and Darwin 1 1. Darwin Ashamed and Why He Wrote 29 2. “We Must Inculcate the Sentiment of Shame”: Shame and Nation-Building 55 in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Caxtons Trilogy 3. Elizabeth Gaskell as St Sebastian: Shame and Transgendered Identity in 102 Cranford and Ruth 4. Autobiographies About Sex: John Addington Symonds, Havelock 150 Ellis, and Shame Bibliography 190 vii Introduction: The Origin of Shame, Identity, and Darwin In Plato’s Protagoras, the eponymous narrator relates a myth about the origin of shame during the creation of human beings. Epimethus, the twin of Prometheus, was given the responsibility to distribute traits to newly created animals. When it came to humans, he, lacking in foresight (his name means “afterthought”), had nothing left to give. Prometheus presented humanity the gifts of civilizing arts and fire, stolen from Zeus. However, these gifts only enabled humans to stay alive, without the wisdom of staying together; political knowledge (politikē technē) was kept with Zeus. Humans lived in isolation and could make fire, but they could not band together to protect themselves from wild beasts. Although humans did try to live as a community, they would eventually disperse and be destroyed, lacking in politikē technē. Afraid that the entire of humanity would be annihilated, Zeus sent Hermes to bestow justice and shame on all humans so that there would be order and bonds of friendship to create cities. Justice metes out fair punishments to offenders while shame prevents people from committing crimes. Against conventional thinking that shame is negative, the parable informs us that shame has its uses to keep a society functioning, and maintain bonds of relationships. Putting it in another way, studying the shame of a society illustrates the machinery behind it. Victorian society is one that involved much shame. “For shame!” is a familiar refrain that runs through the gamut of different genres in Victorian literature from Bleak House to Vanity Fair to Jane Eyre to Mary Barton to Wuthering Heights. Shame itself is a recurring and significant theme in many major nineteenth-century novels, often in the guise of secrets: Pip’s benefactor is revealed to be a fugitive from the law he has helped when he was a boy; Maggie Tulliver lives as a pariah after her disgraceful near-elopement; Lady Audley’s shameful bigamous secret is uncovered at great cost. Following Eve Sedgwick’s exposition of Silvan Tomkins on shame, critics such as Joseph Adamson, Katherine Hallemeier, and Andrew Miller have applied a reading of shame to George Eliot, Anne Bronte, Charles Dickens respectively. 1 Ashly Bennett’s article, “Shameful Signification: Narrative and Feeling in Jane Eyre,” is particularly interesting because she is developing a new way of reading Victorian novels as performative scenes of shame and readers as spectators. In this dissertation, however, I am invested in shame at a specific cultural and historical moment. In 1859, Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species which, if it did not change the minds of Victorians regarding the creation of humans, affected the path of Victorian literature, as Gillian Beer and George Levine have argued convincingly. Much of the discussion on Darwin is centered on his influence on the narratology of Victorian literature, but not on the emotive change in Victorian characters. Many people saw The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872, as a continuation of Darwin’s argument for evolution in Origin and The Descent of Man which was published only a year earlier. But in Emotions, while Darwin points out many similarities between humans and animals, a major phenomenal difference, one of which Darwin devotes the penultimate chapter, is that humans can blush and blushing is a sign of shame. While Beer and Levine explore how Darwin influenced the narrativity of Victorian novels, I propose to view the influence of Darwin in terms of shame. The Origin of Shame There are two contradictory theories on the origin of shame, one religious and one psychological, and both are helpful in the analysis of shame in the nineteenth century. In St. Augustine’s The City of God, he argues that the origin of shame coincides with the fall of man: It is right, therefore, to be ashamed of this lust, and it is right that the members which it moves or fails to move by its own right, so to speak, and not in complete conformity to our decision, should be called pudenda (“parts of shame”), which they were not called before man’s sin; for, as Scripture tells us, “they were naked, 2 and yet they felt no embarrassment.” This was not because they had not yet noticed their nakedness, but because nakedness was not yet disgraceful, because lust did not yet arouse those members independently of their decision. The flesh did not yet, in a fashion, give proof of man’s disobedience by a disobedience of its own… their obedience was chastized by a corresponding punishment, there appeared in the movements of their body a certain indecent novelty, which made nakedness shameful. It made them self-conscious and ashamed. (130-2) Although, as Robert Metcalf rightly concludes, St Augustine’s inductive reasoning to substantiate his hobbyhorse of the conflict between the will and the insubordinate body is merely a “wish-fulfilment” that harkens to his wish to return to a prelapsarian world and may hold no water,1 it is worth examining St Augustine’s notion of shame in relation to a Victorian society that was largely religious. For St Augustine, shame is the punishment of the bodily transgression and a reminder of the original sin. Thus the shame in Victorian novels is often sexual in nature. Jane Austen’s heroines are often shamed before finally choosing the right husband. Pip’s downfall is his desire to be compatible for Estella who is brought up to be cruel and heartless by the jilted Miss Havisham. Some novels, such as Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White and many Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s works, involve the kidnapping of a young woman who is forced to marry the villain. Victorian novels that revolve around shame are often informed by the theology of St Augustine. St Augustine also suggests that the tumescent or flaccid genitals are beyond one’s control, signifying that shame in humanity’s fallen nature is involuntary; delinquent behavior does not lead to shame—one can commit a crime without being ashamed—but shame is innate, always present as an appendage aroused at random, making us vulnerable. This aspect of shame 1 Among myriad interpretations of the Biblical scene, Augustine picked the one that suits his narrative. For other interpretations, see Pagel. 3 can be applied to a range of behaviors in Victorian novels from maidens blushing suddenly in front of their suitors to hiding a painting in the attic while shamelessly committing (often sexual) atrocities.