English II: English Literature 1800-1900: Heavenly Genes: Reform, Degeneration, and National Identity in Victorian Culture

Chair: Jane Rago

West Virginia University

Jvrago5@aol.com

Secretary: Cynthia Van Sickle

McHenry County College

cmvansickle@wayne.edu

Session A

Evolutionary theory and the Irish Literary Revival

Irish Literary Revival dramatist John Millington Synge’s adolescent encounter with Darwinism in the 1880s induced a consciousness of a universe ruled by randomness and existential hopelessness. Like W.B Yeats, Synge links loss of religious faith in the face of evolutionary theory to the passing away of naiveté in socio-political matters (allegiance switched from “the Kingdom of God” to the “kingdom of Ireland”). In his autobiographical writings, the dramatist’s initial reading of evolutionary theory is entwined with the subsequent “Fall” into sinful adolescence (he notes that on reading Darwin, “incest and parricide were but a consequence of the idea that possessed me”), and the interest in the “primitive” evinced in his representations of marginalized rural population groups is an attempt to “reconstruct” the “paradise lost” of a pre-pubescent love relationship detailed in “Autobiography”(“We both understood all the facts of life and spoke of them without much hesitation but a certain propriety that was decidedly wholesome… [and] identical with the attitude of folk-tales”). In his prose and plays, Synge endeavors to inscribe islanders and rural “tinkers” (“Irish Gypsies”) as dwellers in pre-lapsarian cultural time, and simultaneously constructs them as operators in a space uncontaminated by Darwinism. Due to the interconnection of the loss of religious belief with a Fall into a sense of immorality, that which is constructed as being without “sin” and degeneracy (in the broadest sense) is also, in the Syngean imagination, pre-Darwinian. In Synge’s work, notions of pre-lapsarian wholeness are mapped onto the pervasive contemporary Revival nationalist rhetoric of the intrinsic “authenticity” of Ireland’s peripheral rural and island culture and the importance of such peoples to the “reconstitution” of a “free and pure” Ireland.

Mary Burke

University of Connecticut

mary.2.burke@UCONN.EDU

Dundreary the Degenerate: Galton, E. A. Sothern, and the Imagining of English “Silliness”

“In the order next above idiots and imbeciles are a large number of milder cases scattered among private families and kept out of sight, the existence of whom is, however, well known to relatives and friends; they are too silly to take a part in general society, but are easily amused with some trivial, harmless occupation. Then comes a class of whom the Lord Dundreary of the famous play may be considered a representative; and so, proceeding through successive grades, we gradually ascend to mediocrity.” Francis Galton (my emphasis)

“It’s so seldom I get an idea that when I do get one it startles me. Let us get a pickle bottle.” Lord Dundreary

Although neglected by literary critics, actor Edward Askew Sothern’s interpretation of the brainless Lord Dundreary in Tom Taylor’s Victorian comedy Our American Cousin – infamous now as the play Abraham Lincoln was watching when John Wilkes Booth shot him in Washington in 1865 – was, according to Winton Tolles, “one of the most celebrated comic parts in nineteenth-century theatre” (178; see also Banham 15-16). Sothern, who is largely credited with transforming the play from “mediocre drama” to successful farce, originated the role for the play’s premiere in New York on Oct. 15, 1858, and appeared as the character in England when it played for 477 performances in one season at the Haymarket Theatre in 1861 (Tolles 178; “Our American Cousin”). Sothern made the role a success by improvising eccentric and foolish lines, and by paying close attention to dress and manner. He wore an ankle-length coat, adopted peg-top plaid trousers, a flowing cravat, long weeping whiskers, and a monocle, and he spoke with a lisp and stutter. His walk, an odd gait supposedly reminiscent of “Don Bryant’s negro minstrels” became famous as the “Dundreary hop,” and his senseless aphorisms, such as “birds of a feather gather no moss” became known as “Dundrearyisms” and “created a vogue for this type of [half]-witticism” (Tolle 179).

I argue that the popularity of Sothern’s Dundreary reflects Victorian England’s anxious attitude toward stupidity, as expressed also in early psychology, especially the work of Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin, and also known as ‘the father of eugenics’. In his first major scientific work, Hereditary Genius (1869), Galton actually refers to Dundreary as a representative of those with slow wits whom he rates between the “imbeciles” and “idiots,” and the mediocre, suggesting that the famed theatrical performance may have inspired his thoughts on “hereditary silliness” (Galton 66). This paper, then, will examine the relationship between Sothern’s Dundreary and Galton’s mental science, and show how both reflect growing fears in late Victorian England about the degeneration of the English race. I propose that, while Sothern’s Dundreary was “attractive in his stupidity” because “the audience could see through his blundering and comic mental processes” and “feel superior,” he was also a source of anxiety. Dundreary, after all, is a noble silly-ass Englishman who gets by on inherited wealth and degenerating blood lines rather than hard work and ability; according to Galton, “an old peerage is a valueless title to natural gifts” (126). Sothern’s Dundreary is more ‘barbaric’ than ‘civilized’ and so representative of all that English nation was afraid it could become if it did not improve, as Galton would have it, the overall mental capacity of the nation.

Robin Durnford

The University of Alberta, Canada

durnford@ualberta.ca

Going Native in Greece: Charles Lever, the Feminized Orient, and the Real “Brute” of the British Empire

“There can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians. [And] we must, however, acknowledge […] that man with all his noble qualities, […] still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.” These words, written in Charles Darwin’s 1871 publication The Descent of Man, radically changed the way in which Victorians and their successors would look at themselves and their place in the world. They echo Darwin’s groundbreaking work Origin of the Species, whose chapter on natural selection also reminded readers that human beings had both benefited and suffered from the evolutionary process, for it brought to mind the ill-adapted native peoples who had “allowed foreigners to take firm possession of the land,” who “might have been modified with advantage, so as to have better resisted such intruders” (IV). The idea of the conquered enabling his own conquering takes us all the way to 1978, when Edward Said suggested in his book Orientalism that the Orient was Othered by the West “because it could be – that is, submitted to being – made Oriental” (1280). In this relationship “of power, of domination, [and] of varying degrees of complex hegemony” (1279), colonized lands not only marked the difference between savagery and civilization but also the difference, as Joseph Valente has shown in “The Myth of Sovereignty,” between the conquered feminine, “encompassing a passive repose in organic cyclicality, affective immanence and domestic concerns,” and the conquering masculine, “encompassing an aggressive will to historical progress, technical mastery and rational transcendence” (188). Gilbert and Gubar in their book Sexchanges argue that terror from this “subliminal conspiracy between ‘strange’ races and the (eternal) feminine […] forced colonizers to confront what they feared was the primordial ‘barbarism’ of the human” (40). Although the titles alone of works such as William Greenslade’s Degeneration, Culture and the Novel: 1880-1940 and Stephen Arata’s Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle suggest that the Victorian hysteria of degeneration was limited to the end of the nineteenth century, Johanna M. Smith’s “Degeneration and Eugenics” has proposed that works such as Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius (1869) demonstrate an even earlier fear of man (namely the Englishman) returning to the “lowly origins” still stamped in his frame (59). In this light, it becomes possible to see how a short story published in Blackwoods in 1873, Charles Lever’s “Some One Pays,” about British imperial power in Greece, might act as a forerunner to the mainstream addresses of degeneration later in the century.

It is perhaps fitting that Anglo-Irish author Charles Lever should have been so attune to the fear of degeneration given the entropy of his own career. As Chris Morash has stated, “[His works] were too Irish for an English canon but they were too English for an Irish canon, and, as a result, they fell somewhere into the Irish Sea – and that’s where they’ve been floundering around ever since” (qtd. in Haddelsey 25). Though Stephen Haddelsey’s 2000 book The Lost Victorian has most recently attempted to reclaim Lever from this sea of anonymity, it has not prepared his works for the canon’s laws of survival of the fittest, instead offering thin excuses for Lever’s lack of popularity: Lever was constrained by “the demands of his publisher; he “wanted to ‘do better;’” not enough attention has been paid to his later, more “serious” works (55). Rather than offering more sweeping generalizations about the seriousness of this author’s career, I offer an “inside-out” approach to building upon Leverian scholarship – a look inside one of Lever’s previously untreated stories in the hopes of drawing out further interest and scholarship to compliment this piece. With the help of Rodanthi Tzanelli’s historical inquiry into Greek klephtism and Valente’s look into English reaction to Irish insurrection, I will demonstrate how Lever plays upon historical events that cast Greeks as the Briton’s savage, femininely irrational Other in order to reflect his English narrator’s own fear of degeneration. I will then demonstrate how Lever uses his unreliable narrator to cast the same critical eye toward British imperial power that W. J. McCormack’s Burke to Beckett and Richard Haslam’s “Transitional States in Lever” have found the author casting toward “the irresponsibility and apathy” of Protestant ascendancy in Ireland (Haslam 76). Ultimately, I argue, Lever depicts what Gilbert and Gubar call a “separate-but-equal otherness” (41), in which the Britons are no more civilized than the Greeks they control, for both sides are as heavily marked by the “indelible stamp of [their] lowly origin.”

Julie Kraft

Creighton University

jukraft@hotmail.com

Discussant: Beth Torgerson, Flagler College

Session B

London 1899: Degeneration, Eugenics, and the New Woman

Evolutionary theory and ideas of degeneration radically shaped the cultural landscape of late Victorian England. In Faces of Degeneration, Daniel Pick traces the shared discursive tensions of degeneration theory across France, Italy, and England. Pick claims that while questions about the decline of empires are not unique to the second half of the nineteenth century, what is unique to this historical moment is that degeneration became central to scientific and medical investigations. I would add to his claim that not only was degeneration central to scientific and medical investigations, but that it was central in racializing and pathologizing class, gender, and nationality into a bio-politics of identity that culminated in the narrative of eugenics by the close of the century.

In 1885 the Criminal Law Amendment was passed in England in an attempt to assuage increasing anxiety about the perceived urban squalor, poverty, and criminality in London. The combined power of the authority of medicine and evolutionary theory had, by this time, firmly established the urban problem as belonging to the realm of science. What was hitherto seen as a social, moral, or political problem, was now seen as a medically scientific problem. This paper explores this shift from an ideology of morality to an ideology of biology. The trajectory of moral reform through the latter half of the nineteenth century led from moral environmentalism to medical hegemony, and ultimately to the social hygiene movement of eugenics.

In particular, I wish to examine the intersections between the feminist movement and eugenics. Most critical explorations of eugenics are located in either Nazi Germany or the southern United States during the first forty years of the twentieth century. Eugenic discourse, however, finds its most sustained narrative outlet in fiction and polemical prose, specifically in New Women fiction and politics, in the last two decades of nineteenth-century England. The discourse of degeneration, based in evolutionary theory, places sex at the very center of cultural debates, and increasingly naturalized women: the reform movements of the mid-century that highlighted women’s moral duty to the urban poor were replaced with notions of women’s natural instinct and regenerative power by the end of the century. Interestingly, eugenics was never put into practice in England: it remained, at best, a smattering of competing and often contradictory discourses that all revolved around space and bodies. In this project, I will illustrate how race, gender, and class become a bio-political identity that, through the discourse of eugenics, dissects the mid-century ideal Victorian bourgeois woman and foreshadows the urban, transitory, intellectual, and struggling modern woman. Ultimately, the language of degeneration provides an impetus and a space for the seemingly contradictory eugenics movement and the feminist movement. Yet these movements both use the same metaphors of meaning and both continued to struggle with the dissection of general equivalent of the domestic woman and her material body within the shifting spaces, identities, and degeneration of late Victorian scientific discourse.

Jane V. Rago

West Virginia University

Jvrago5@aol.com

Monsters and Alibis: French Decadence in the Victorian Imagination

The critical history of literary decadence is marked by a series of moral disparagements. Nineteenth century critics judged its obsession with excess, artificiality, sexual perversion and degeneration as the literary manifestation of the diseased and immoral mind of the author. That Victorian understanding has enjoyed a strange and extended shelf life, as contemporary critics continue to dismiss decadent writing as a kind of literary sickness that is opposed to culturally valued terms such as evolution, nature, life and truth. Even generous readers often maintain that decadence is a kind of literary pathology, understood only through its opposition to Victorian bourgeois ideals of progress, positivist science, health, heterosexuality, reproduction and the nation state. This paper will reconsider the epistemological value of literary decadence by arguing that the Victorian objection to it was much more than a general anxiety about the precariousness of the bourgeois moral order that it threatened. I will examine the ways in which the discourses of decadent texts were made intelligible in Britain by the contention that they were a product of something specifically French. That is to say that the idea of France functioned as a kind of vague fantastical alibi for Victorians to explain the pathological decadent imaginations that had contaminated the sanctity of Britain’s borders, as a particular form of “French-ness” became coterminous with the “sickness” of decadence.

Yet if the “sickness” of decadence has never been properly exercised from the literary imagination, it is apparently due to the remarkable ability of “French-ness” to infect and reproduce itself – both figuratively and literally. According to Vladimir Jankélévitch’s influential essay “La Décadence” (1950), it produces a “fever of proliferation” that fails to generate artistic masterpieces but succeeds in making, “new families of monsters” (Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, Vol. 55, p. 345). Provoked by arguments like Jankélévitch’s, I will consider the ideological implications of the rhetoric of sickness, literary contagion and monstrosity in the language of critics, but only to insist that what they reproduce is the discourse of the literary texts themselves rather than a coherent argument about them. I will then examine J. -K. Huysmans’ A Rebours (known as the “Bible of Decadence) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in order to consider whether the discourse of contagion and monstrosity in the texts themselves can support the critical claims that have been made about them.

Jessica Davies

University of California, Berkeley

Rosa Campbell Praed’s Fictions of Colonial Bodies

A good deal of criticism has already been devoted to representations of women in fin de siècle adventure or colonial fiction by male authors. H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, H Rider Haggard’s She, and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim have all been written on fairly extensively. Thus, what I do in this paper is not look again at the disturbing ways in which both white women and women from colonies are depicted in these texts, but to look at the ways in which late nineteenth-century British women (particularly Rosa Campbell Praed) depict themselves and others in adventure or colonial stories of their own. I look at both the ways in which “New Women” conceptualize their own bodies in this genre of literature, and also how they portray the bodies of “racially other” women. Haggard’s Ayesha in She is an exotic, powerful, dangerous woman who is clearly marked as racially “other.” Do authors like Praed also depict women of the colonies in problematic ways? Are there important differences to be found? After all, as Elleke Boehmer points out, “in the colonial context, though Western women may have shared the race and (generally speaking) the class of those officially in charge, they were in almost all cases differently positioned relative to the colonial power on the basis of their gender” (xxvii).

As previously stated, the paper will concentrate primarily on Rosa Campbell Praed, who wrote numerous colonial adventure stories. Very little criticism has been devoted to Praed, but I believe she deserves a closer look. Praed’s Fugitive Anne: A Romance of the Unexplored Bush is particularly interesting as it is similar in plot to Haggard’s She. In it, the heroine Anne Bedo discovers a hidden civilization in that is ruled by a powerful priestess, just as a hidden civilization ruled by a woman is found in She. Praed’s story, however, differs from Haggard’s in important ways too. For example, Anne finds this civilization because she is running away from her abusive husband (she jumps off a ship in the middle of the night and swims to shore), she is able to survive the elements because she was raised in Australia and encouraged to explore her surroundings as a child, she respects both Catholic saints and the gods of the bush alike, and she is also for a time given the position of high priestess over the civilization she has found. The novel both expresses a new confidence about white women’s bodies while it offers a problematic portrayal of racially “other” women’s bodies—strong and beautiful (in fact, superior to white women’s bodies), yet sexually dangerous at the same time. Praed’s Madame Izàn also offers a different look at “foreign bodies.” In it, the heroine (British) chooses to marry a Japanese man instead of the strapping, handsome Australian/British Mr. Windeatt who has been courting her. Like Fugitive Anne, this novel works to counteract many stereotypes about degeneration and racially “other” bodies, even as it reinforces others.

Melissa Purdue

University of Kentucky

mpurd2@uky.edu

Discussant: Cynthia M. Van Sickle, McHenry County College

Session C

The Ethics of Evolution: Dracula and the Balkans Crisis

Development of sciences in the nineteenth century led eventually to fundamental challenging of religious and moral assumptions that shaped the Victorian world-view. Prominent Victorian thinkers struggled to explain the confusion brought about by the new science and the theories of evolution. One way of resolving the crisis was through the application of rationalist principles to traditional Christian teachings or liberation of the Christian tradition from superstitious beliefs. However, the evolutionist theories challenged the moral order per se. In his series of lectures “Evolution and Ethics” (1893), Thomas Huxley discusses the problematic nature of the phrase “survival of the fittest” pointing to the incompatibility of the analogy of cosmic or natural processes with the nature of society. Moreover, he raised the question of the place of ethics in evolutionary process. According to Huxley, on one hand, society functions as a check on the self-serving impulses that encourage the survival of the strongest and the most self-assertive, and on the other hand, it promotes the survival of the ethically best.

In my paper, I will look at Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) as an exploration of the moral dilemma brought about by the religious crisis and displaced on the figure of the Balkan other. In the wake of fervent nationalist strife following the independence from the Ottoman Empire, the Balkans were in the focus of attention of the Western public. I will argue that mapping out of the ethically best in Huxley’s terms entails the construction of the other as morally inferior.

With his imposing stature, massive eyebrows, bushy hair, and heavy mustache, Dracula embodies the Balkan stereotype expressed through tropes of masculinity. Szekelys, Dracula’s race, emerged from “the whirlpool of European races” fighting European, Asian, and African invaders and held in check the Turks for centuries. Dracula exemplifies the survival of the fittest in the crudest sense. Therefore, Dracula, a Christian monster, illuminates Victorian ethical dilemmas. Praying on others in order to survive, he stands for the order lacking in ennobling qualities of human cooperation. Moreover, as a vampire who almost literally emerges from the superstitious whisperings of the Wallachian peasants, Dracula stands for the old order no longer tenable in the age of progress.

In writing Dracula, Stoker drew on Emily Gerard’s travel narrative about Transylvania The Land beyond the Forest (1888). In her book, Gerard argues that stubborn separatism of the various nationalities and clinging to superstition are the main causes of the backwardness of the region. Against this inferior order stands the cooperation of the Western allies in Dracula. Moreover, an ethical order grounded in rationality emerges as the only viable option against the perceived threat to British national identity.

Ana Savic

University of California, Riverside

anasavic5@hotmail.com

The Big Black Baboon: Devolutionary Anxieties in Sensation Novel Reviews

The years following the publication of On the Origin of Species (1859) saw the immense influence of Darwin’s seminal text on not only scientific but popular and creative thought. Sensation fiction—inaugurated by Wilke Collins’s The Woman in White (1859-60)—shows traces of evolutionary theory in its concerns with origins and genetic inheritance in relation to family survival. My paper applies a broader cultural perspective, shifting from the focus on literary content to a view that encompasses critical attitudes about literary form. In the wake of Darwin’s Origin national culture is beginning to be more widely talked and thought about in biological terms. I examine how critics are imagining literary forms as (often harmful) biological forms.

Many negative reviews of sensation novels in the 1860s reveal anxieties about newly circulating theories of evolution. These reviews share common traits: rhetoric that is both outraged and anxious; more emphasis on the genre as a whole than on the book in question; biological metaphors; feminization of the reading audience; and overtones of fears about sexual and racial menace. For instance, Henry Mansel’s 1863 review-article “Sensation Novels” portrays the sensation novel as a bad sexual influence, enticing woman readers with glamorized descriptions of bigamy and infidelity. For Mansel, sensation fiction poses concrete danger to the gene pool, threatening to impose its fictional world onto actuality by inspiring sexual practices that endanger the sanctity of the marital institution and introduce an excess of genetic mixing and a potential confusion of origins. An unsigned 1866 review of Wilkie Collins’s Armadale similarly ties “improper” mixing with anxieties about animal origins by comparing bigamy in sensation novels to a big black baboon attracting all the young girls in the country.

As in the case of the big black baboon, critical anxiety about sensation fiction’s sexual influence often has racist and xenophobic overtones. Mansel depicts the sensation novel as both a bad foreign influence, spreading loose continental morals, and as a viscerally bad foreign integration—an unwholesome incorporation of the French novel into healthy English stock. And both Mansel’s article and the unsigned review share a metaphoric association of sensation fiction with foreign cuisine, picturing its success as uncritical consumption by sexualized female mouths. My paper examines the influences of Darwinian concepts (dissemination, natural selection, the struggle for existence) on the critical condemnation of readerly promiscuity and “easy” modes of fiction distribution (periodicals, lending libraries, railway stalls) as allowing for easier admission of damaging foreign influence into English literature and culture. My conclusion highlights the relationship between suggested programs of sensation novel distribution control and eugenics.

Michael Lee

McGill University, Canada

michael.lee@mail.mcgill.ca

Generational Textuality in Wuthering Heights

The generational expanse of Emily Brontë’s novel dramatizes questions of heredity, nature vs. nurture, and potential incest. Characters share names, physical features, and dispositions, but the verbal and physiological signs of heredity are transformed by the force of upbringing and environment, of which narrative, and literacy in general, are prominent elements.

The novel’s narrator, Lockwood, is first and foremost a reader. When he first lays eyes on the Yorkshire estate, his persistent attempts to make sense of the strange scene, and particularly his efforts to discern familial relationships, prove disastrously ineffective. He toils over the list of names etched in a window frame – “Catherine Earnshaw – Catherine Heathcliff – Catherine Linton.” After falling ill, this inaccurate reader becomes instead an avid listener as the housekeeper Nelly Dean provides the generational narrative behind this list of proper names. The curative potential of narrative cradles the novel as a whole, and Nelly’s story-telling coupled with Lockwood’s transcription of her tale facilitate his recovery. Lockwood plays on this connection between texts and bodies when he wonders about the fate of his heart if he fell in love with the second Catherine and if “the daughter turned out to be a second edition of the mother” (120). Heredity is understood through the metaphor of textual reproduction. The transformative potential of texts additionally establishes a division between the first and second generations. In the second Catherine’s education of the brutish Hareton, literacy reveals hereditary characteristics. Tempted into her tutelage, Hareton is transformed from the barbaric oaf Heathcliff has raised him to be: as he reads under Cathy’s guidance, “his brightening mind brightened his features, and added spirit and nobility to their aspect” (244). Books intercede in the conflict between nature and nurture that Heathcliff exacts on his rival’s son, the child of the wealthier Linton but the charge of the classless but landed Heathcliff. Literacy allows Hareton to resume his innate position, paradoxically performing both acculturation and a return to the more noble status of his birth. The romance of the first generation, however, is removed from the world of books. Their relationship is overtly suggestive of incest, most famously in Catherine’s line to Nelly that Heathcliff is “more myself than I am” (62). Raised as siblings, their problematic proximity is nevertheless an appropriate part of Wuthering Heights, in which two families, with only rare outside additions, intermarry. One function of literacy is to make available the possibility of difference: Lockwood’s narrative presents the rural north to the urban southern reader, and the rejection of books by Heathcliff and Catherine seems to be an index for the refusal of their love to acknowledge the outside world. As they never marry or produce offspring, they are divorced from both the tenor and vehicle of Lockwood’s metaphor: together, they engage in neither print culture nor sexual reproduction. The names Lockwood struggles to interpret cloud the generational relationships that Nelly’s narrative elucidates, and Cathy’s education of Hareton, one of the novel’s final images, unites hereditary nobility with cultural refinement by the mediation of literacy.

Jeanne Britton

University of Chicago

jmb@uchicago.edu

Discussant: Beth Torgerson, Flagler College