“Evolving Science Fictions: Nineteenth-Century Biological Representations in Britain.”

A Dissertation Abstract—Dissertation Completed June 2006.

Nathan R. Elliott

Recent Victorian criticism has begun to reassess the ways that the Victorians addressed and shaped questions of objectivity and relativism; Amanda Anderson’s The Powers of Distance and George Levine’s Dying to Know have both attempted to resurrect qualified notions of detachment and objectivity by looking to Victorian-era writers and scientists, while Christopher Herbert’s Victorian Relativity makes a compelling case that the Victorians anticipated, even created, Einstein’s relativistic thinking. My dissertation, “Evolving Science Fictions,” illuminates the difficulty that lies behind these discussions by focusing on nineteenth-century biological representation. Instead of coming at these problems from the assumption that the Victorians approached knowledge as either objectivism or subjectivism, my analysis of biological representation examines how the either/or dilemma arises out of the Victorians’ refusal to abandon objectivity even when they understood knowledge to be relative. More specifically, I argue that intellectual struggles to understand the complications surrounding biological representation exacerbated the objective/relative distinction into the categories that we know today. I also argue that despite that exacerbated distinction, nineteenth-century writers and scientists often left the contradiction unresolved, because many of them came to feel that recognition of the epistemological difficulty was sufficient to recover access to a common reality.
          In order to make these arguments, the dissertation moves through two different phases of nineteenth-century proto-biology and biology. In the first half of the nineteenth-century, we see anatomists and phrenologists striving to produce, through scrupulous observation, precise visual representations. A representational anxiety emerges, however, in the awareness of temporality that anticipated the advent of evolutionary narratives; in trying to define the ‘normal,’ phase of a body or a species for representation, these writers became aware of the way that temporal development complicates notions of normality. In the second half of the nineteenth-century, the gradual acceptance of evolutionary narratives rendered the biological essentialism of the first half of the nineteenth-century untenable. These developments forced writers and scientists to find ways of practicing science apart from the stable language categories that had supported their project in earlier works.
          Contrary to my initial expectations for the project, however, the corresponding loss of faith in scientific certainty went relatively un-mourned. Nineteenth-century writers and scientists engaged in biological representation came—not only to accept the tentative epistemological nature of any scientific enterprise so closely tied to human perception—but also to utilize that tentative epistemology. Paradoxically, recognizing the perceptual inaccuracy inherent in any representation became key to producing accurate—if limited—representations. Many of the writers, especially Wells, Eliot, and Darwin, felt that their scientific writing was not accurate unless it recognized the limited nature of representation itself.

 Chapter 1: “‘Unball’d Sockets’ and ‘The Mockery of Speech:’ Diagnostic Anxiety and the Theater of Joanna Baillie.” Playwright Joanna Baillie has attracted much attention in Romantic-era criticism in the last few years, but these initial studies have too often assumed that Baillie’s faith in the scientific underpinnings of her project remained unchanged; this chapter illuminates the way in which Baillie’s faith in scientific representation foundered on the difficulties of theatrical representation. Baillie’s “Introductory Discourse” and her play De Monfort manifest the influence of the Linnaean inspired taxonomy of her uncle William (which demanded a scrupulous attention to the individual organism in its ‘representative’ phase), as well as the more vitalistic taxonomy of her uncle John (which put far more emphasis on the development of the organism, and the definition of life itself). Published in her first volume of “Plays on the Passions,” these early pieces struggle to find a way to convey the development of disease while keeping the body static enough to be diagnosable. Orra, a play from the third volume of “Plays on the Passions,” rejects the stable body of William Hunter, and ends with a profound loss of faith in the possibility of medical representation, at least on the Romantic-era stage.

Chapter 2: “According to the Eye with which we are Viewed:” The Tribulations of Skull Hermeneutics in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë.” This chapter explicates Charlotte Brontë’s evolving attitude toward phrenology’s claim to empirical certainty. Previous investigations of Brontë’s use of phrenology have not taken into account an important aspect of George Combe’s phrenological manuals; Combe promotes phrenology as the key to obtaining objective knowledge, even at the same time that he acknowledges that knowledge itself is socially constructed. I argue that, as a result of that contradiction, Brontë progressively came to question her own reliance on a phrenological conception of human psychology. While Jane Eyre incorporates phrenology give its readers exact portraits of its cast, Villette continually undermines phrenology’s ability to give its readers any knowledge apart from social community. Lucy cannot comprehend her novel’s characters with the same confidence that Jane understands her fictional compatriots; Lucy must understand social context before all else. Brontë recognized the impossibility of separating empiricism from the social situation that makes it possible.

Chapter 3: “More Poets than Observers of Nature:” Narrative and Archetypal Representation in Darwin and Eliot. Charles Darwin and George Eliot rejected the essentialist body that Brontë and Baillie had struggled to define. Nevertheless, Darwin needed the general category of species, even if he wanted to disregard the essentialism that had hitherto been an inherent part of it. He proposed that the biological archetype set forth by naturalist Richard Owen in order to explain homologous organs and features between species—rather than a metaphysical blueprint employed by the creator—had instead been a historical reality. In doing so, Darwin synthesized the epistemological move central to this dissertation; he insisted on scrupulously describing an empirical reality, while insisting that that description was always provisional; more importantly, that description’s purchase on reality was completely dependent upon the recognition that it was provisional. I argue that Eliot’s essays, as well as Daniel Deronda, make it clear that she saw the Jewish race as an exemplar of this kind of archetypal development. Presenting the Jewish race as such allowed her to impart a personal agency to Daniel in much the same way that Darwin was able to recognize the individuality of organisms and reconcile that individuality with their biological connection to other members of the species. Thus, the archetype allowed Darwin and Eliot to recognize the tentative nature of all knowledge, since the archetype retained much of its tentative, metaphysical nature; doing so, paradoxically, allowed them to make practicable assertions about the nature of reality.

 Chapter 4: When Scientists Degenerate: Wells, Nordau and Scientific/Artistic Representation. H.G. Wells used evolutionary thought to complicate the categories of scientific discourse employed to stabilize phenomena for representation and manipulation. Most notably, in “The Fallacy of the Common Noun,” Wells argued that scientific insight itself gave the lie to any representation of phenomena. As a result, scientists write their own fictions about the natural world, based on the fictions of science that they have already employed. Wells, along with the degeneration theorist Max Nordau, recognized the possibility that scientific insight was as dependent upon individual perspectives as other disciplines. I end the chapter by arguing that this figure of the scientist as a weaver of fictions finds expression in The Island of Dr. Moreau; in that novel Moreau simultaneously constructs and believes in an alternate mythic structure that is ‘science.’ Rather than a simple parody of religious belief, the credo of Moreau assumes the place of faith in any ultimate reality, whether religious or empirical. These beliefs, however, have a creative force of their own that demonstrates science’s very real ability to shape reality.