Darwinism IN Victorian Period Lecture PDF

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Notes on the influence of Darwinism taken from BBC podcast In Our Time...

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DARWIN Next week's lecture (Mon 12pm) will focus on Charles Darwin and the role of Darwinian ideas in Victorian literary culture. I will be discussing the impact of The Origin of Species (1859), and particularly the responses of major writers including Tennyson, George Eliot and Hardy to the challenging implications of evolutionary theory. Reading the fairly short extracts from Darwin's work in the Norton Anthology of English Literature vol. 2 beforehand would be an advantage. My aim will be to make connections between these writers, while suggesting why the literary force of Darwin's own prose (its use of imagery, metaphor, analogy, personification) is inseparable from -- indeed constitutive of -- its scientific meanings. In the final part of the lecture I will focus on Darwin's later work on sexual selection, particularly in relation to Hardy. Perhaps most important work of the period = 1859 On the Origin of Species. A seminal work of science, but fundamental to literature of the period. Culture where ideas were exchanged between domains of science and literature; sharing of language i.e. imagery, metaphor. Nearly all Victorian writers were aware of his unavoidable influence/ had read it. Huxley’s review [Everybody had read Mr. Darwin’s book’. George Eliot had been an editor of the Westminster Review, around which her intellectual circle revolved; ideas from scientists and literary writers overlapped; readers would read science and literature side-by-side. Ruskin decried Darwin’s work as he saw nature a tribute to God’s grandeur. Darwinism = natural intellectual ally to underpinning Victorian notions of capitalism/ liberalism; survival of the fittest takes on socio-economic aspect. Darwin inaugurates new epoch in natural history. Demarcation between Darwin and Darwinism i.e. Social Darwinism = derived from other Victorians and not Darwin himself. Final movement of prose, Recapitulation and Conclusion [goes through 6 editions, enormously popular work], sometimes referred to as tangled bank passage: passage of considerable stylistic flair. He asks the reader to enter an act of contemplation, asking them to think of nature as an imagined prospect, to engage in this a kind of analysis/ reflection. This leads to an apprehension on the part of the reader of nature as something wondrous i.e. grandeur. Darwin = doggedly materialist but has a nobility i.e. the exalted object. Reference to beauty; a kind of aesthetic as well as scientific view. Wonder and its cognates consistently present throughout; a legacy of the Romantic sublime blended with scientific materialism. Motif of interdependence/ variety i.e. difference linked by some common connection. Flora, animals etc all part of single system despite diversity. Evolved ecosystem = not directly an expression of creator/ deity. ‘Superabundant’; from simplicity there is complexity. Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population = chiefly economic; Darwin reads this in the 1830s [published 1798]; formative to his theory of the struggle for life. Around 1859 there is huge controversy around natural selection, though Darwin took great pains to avoid speaking of humans specifically; though implications are clear that if the theory is true, it is clear evolutionary theory is extended to man; this is not explicit until 1871 ‘The Descent of Man’. On his death he was a controversial but celebrated figure. Concept of common ancestry = troubling to Victorians, source of satire i.e. Darwin depicted as an ape/ primate. The idea that the self is a necessary/ autonomous category is powerfully articulated by Descartes ‘I think therefore I am’. Darwin’s theory = radically anti-Cartesian; it associated our highest faculties with some underlying relationship with the primitive ‘there can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians’; Victorian period = when Empire/ ideological obsession in distinction between the civilised and uncivilised = at its height. Darwin = we cannot transcend our biology [!!] The phrase survival of the fittest was not coined by Darwin himself, but by Herbert Spencer, 1864. Perhaps unfairly referenced. Other misunderstood idea = that Darwin was making a deliberate and concerted attack on orthodox belief; it was allied to atheistic thinking [and still is], though this is not intentional, it does not disprove the existence of God; it simply means the mechanism functions sufficiently itself without any direction/ purpose/ sense of divinity.

Interesting qualifications throughout that the work does not arrive at metaphysical certainties, but simply opens them up i.e. the nature of morality. On the Origin of Species is conceived in imaginative terms i.e. metaphor, analogy, personification in order to make scientific terms [though Darwin disavowed any imagination]. Natural selection = amoral, impersonal process, though the language seems to constantly suggest some kind of agency. Metaphor grounds the theory; natural selection is a metaphor; it is metaphorically driven understanding. Rhetorical slippage whereby natural selection comes to mean something reassuring i.e. evolution means improvement; though this is not what it means. ‘Complex web of relations’ [motif of interdependence]; Eliot’s Middlemarch explores this theme [see slides]. Tree of Life extended metaphor [biblical image, Genesis; distinction between Tree of Life and Tree of Knowledge]; the tree = appropriate image for evolutionary organization. Diagrammatic representation = too vast to be achievable, so the reader must IMAGINE this web of relations. Metaphor itself is a process of understanding likeness in unlike things; as a rhetorical device, it finds unity in disparate things. Megalosaurus in opening of Bleak House; Victorians are conscious of dwelling with the memory of prehistoric species/ dinosaurs. In Memoriam [before Darwin] = saw nature as amoral/ wasteful ‘and finding that of fifty seeds / She often brings but one to bear’ [1850]. Dover Beach ‘Sea of Faith’ = great crisis of faith poem, 1867. Biologising the self: Victorian preoccupation with the relationships between the mind/body/the conscious. Lydgate in Middlemarch is interested in biological explanations for human behaviour ‘that delicate poise and transition which determine the growth of happy or unhappy consciousness’ = MATERALIST. Pathologies of the self discoverable through biological makeup i.e. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, evolutionary residue [a troglodyte]. Sexual selection = Descent of Man, 1871; suggests human sexual behaviour can be described within evolutionary frame which supports traditionally conservative contemporary gender stereotypes i.e. competition of active males over passive female; relationship between ideological Victorian worldviews of gender and this theory. Jude the Obscure [1895] = Jude has moment of sexual epiphany in chap. 5, previously a high minded man, despite his working class status; narrative focalised through Jude’s perspective in his meeting with Arabella i.e. a pig’s penis is thrown, ‘She was a complete and substantial female animal – no more, no less’ = obvious evolutionary sexual awakening. The garden scene, chap. 19 in Tess of the D’Urbervilles. There are metaphysical consequences of Darwinian worldview; the Darwin world is one of chance where the human is decentred; matters of evolutionary biology play into attempts to categorise the social in Victorian society i.e. race and gender. Fear of reversal i.e. weak masculinity was feared in late 19th century; questions of inheritance, sexual reproduction. Hardy = naturalism, development of realism; the world of the novel is godless and unsympathetic to particular characters....