Unmapped Countries: Biological Visions in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture (Anthem Nineteenth-Century Series) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1843311607 ISBN 13: 9781843311607

Publisher: Anthem Press, 2005

Synopsis

This important new book, including contributions from some of the most distinguished experts in the field, demonstrates that the relation between literature, culture and biology in the nineteenth century is far more complex than habitual references to Darwin would have us believe.

About this title

About the Author

Anne-Julia Zwierlein is Assistant Professor at the Centre for British Studies, University of Bamberg. She has published a monograph, 'Majestick Milton: British Imperial Expansion and Transformations of Paradise Lost, 1667–1837' (Münster, 2001) and co-edited 'Plotting Early Modern London: New Essays on Jacobean City Comedy' (Aldershot, 2004).

From the Back Cover

Biotechnology and human genetics are the dominant applied sciences in the twenty-first century. "Unmapped Countries" provides a critical retrospective on the nineteenth-century origins of modern biological science and their close connections with the cultural sphere. It explores the emerging cultural authority of the biological sciences during the nineteenth century, when fundamental discoveries in geology and physics dramatically destabilized the Victorian worldview.
In the field of literary and cultural studies, interest in nineteenth-century biology has been substantial for the last 20 years, yet the focus has been almost exclusively on evolutionary theory, neglecting other branches of nineteenth-century biology. This collection corrects that imbalance, shedding light on other discoveries in cell biology, physiology, neurology and virology. It examines the issue of authority in science, demonstrating the social 'embeddedness' of the natural sciences, and gender issues. It also shows how scientists and creative writers drew on a common imagination as well as narrative techniques and stylistic devices; indeed, often inspired by the same subjects.
This important new book, including contributions from some of the most distinguished experts in the field, demonstrates that the relation between literature, culture and biology in the nineteenth century is far more complex than habitual references to Darwin would have us believe.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Unmapped Countries

Biological Visions in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture

By Anne-Julia Zwierlein

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2005 Wimbledon Publishing Company
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84331-160-7

Contents

List of Illustrations, vii, 
About the Authors, xi, 
Preface, xvii, 
INTRODUCTION Unmapped Countries: Biology, Literature and Culture in the Nineteenth Century ANNE-JULIA ZWIERLEIN, 1, 
PART I: Science and Literature, 
1 This Questionable Little Book': Narrative Ambiguity in Nineteenth Century Literature of Science CHARLOTTE SLEIGH, 15, 
2 Vestiges of English Literature: Robert Chambers KLAUS STIERSTORFER, 27, 
PART II: Evolution and Degeneration, 
3 Aestheticism, Immorality and the Reception of Darwinism in Victorian Britain GOWAN DAWSON, 43, 
4 Constructing Darwinism in Literary Culture JANET BROWNE, 55, 
5 Close Encounters with a New Species: Darwin's Clash with the Feminists at the End of the Nineteenth Century GRIET VANDERMASSEN, MARYSA DEMOOR AND JOHAN BRAECKMAN, 71, 
6 Mutual Aid, a Factor of Peter Kropotkin's Literary Criticism CAROL PEAKER, 83, 
7 The Savage Within: Evolutionary Theory, Anthropology and the Unconscious in F in-de-siècle Literature PAUL GOETSCH, 95, 
8 Homer on the Evolutionary Scale: Interrelations between Biology and Literature in the Writings of William Gladstone and Grant Allen ANNETTE KERN-STÄHLER, 107, 
9 'Naturfreund' or 'Naturfeind'? Darwinism in the Early Drawings of Alfred Kubin ALEXANDRA KARL, 117, 
PART III: Physiology and Pathology, 
10 Cells and Networks in Nineteenth Century Literature LAURA OTIS, 135, 
11 Contagious Sympathies: George Eliot and Rudolf Virchow KIRSTIE BLAIR, 145, 
12 From Parasitology to Parapsychology: Parasites in Nineteenth Century Science and Literature ANNE-JULIA ZWIERLEIN, 155, 
13 Surgical Engineering in the Nineteenth Century: Frankenstein, The Island of Dr Moreau, Fiatland JÜRGEN MEYER, 173, 
14 'Serious' Science versus 'Light' Entertainment? Femininity Concepts in Nineteenth Century British Medical Discourse and Popular Fiction MERLE TÖNNIES, 183, 
15 Night Terrors: Medical and Literary Representations of Childhood Fear SALLY SHUTTLEWORTH, 193, 
16 Sensuous Knowledge KATE FLINT, 207, 
Notes, 217, 
Bibliography, 251, 

CHAPTER 1

'THIS QUESTIONABLE LITTLE BOOK': NARRATIVE AMBIGUITY IN NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE OF SCIENCE

Charlotte Sleigh

To no honest purpose was a man ever made or suffered to speak in the third person ... (Jeremy Bentham, Rationale of Judicial Evidence, Book III, Chapter X, §2)

Introduction

There has been some wonderful writing on science and literature over the last twenty years, by and large fine-grained analyses of the interaction of literature and science. The best of it makes the point that their interrelation must be seen as a two-way process. In other words, metaphors are things that are used to construct science, not just things that are inspired in literature by science.

Overviews of science and literature are, however, scarce, and I have found myself wondering how such a thing might be written. The obvious way (and this is the model employed by some books, and especially university courses) is to trace how themes of science have been echoed in the literature of their day. But this is a poor model for writing an overview, inasmuch as it tempts the reader once again to see the interaction of science and literature as one-way.

It occurred to me that a fruitful way to write a history of literature's intersection with modern science might be to focus on narrative authority: the ways in which texts invite their readers to trust or distrust the narrative perspective. Doing this, I suggest, might give a sufficiently continuous sense of the evolution of the novelistic genre while also suggesting specific work on contextualization, so that we do not lose sight of the particularities of the production and reading of any given text. In other words, I propose the treatment of narrative form as a socio-historical phenomenon.

Current approaches to the study of narrative mostly stem, in one way or another, from Gérard Genette's 1972 distinction between voice ('who speaks') and focalization ('who sees'). His concept of 'voice' includes the narrator's involvement in the story, the person – normally first or third – in which it is told, the time of narration and the level of narrative embedding. Thus in the work of Henry James, for example, there can be an intrusive narrative style that is focalized through the protagonist's account. It has been suggested that Genette's narrator voice, the standard against which to measure other narratological elements of the text, is too close to an imputed authorial voice the deadly sin of postmodernism. Another criticism of his work proceeds from the observation that no one has convincingly proposed any theoretical grounds upon which to label an aspect or a portion of the text as 'focalized' or 'voiced'; both, it is therefore claimed, are ungrounded interpretative manoeuvres. There have also been attempts to show that there can be narratorless narrative, which would also pose problems for Genette's division. Finally (in this by no means all-inclusive list), Franz Stanzel has been more concerned to find historically – or perhaps, rather, generically – typical combinations of what Genette calls voice and focalization, rather than seeking always to discriminate between them.

In these poststructural approaches, a sense of how narrative (whether read or written; standpoint, voice, or neither) might be treated as a socio-historical question has by and large been lost. Watt's mid-twentieth century history of the novel has had an ongoing influence, but there has been remarkably little in the same vein until recently, perhaps due to the postmodernist suspicions of grand narrative. My approach is resolutely metalinguistic: a revisitation of the history of literature that is encouraged by recent history of science and its adoption of the 'history of the book'. Though primarily a historiography of material culture, this also invites us, through the evidence it provides, to discover who readers of a given text were, what they made of it, and to what extent the author was engaging in a conversation with them. (It may be appropriate to treat some texts, such as newspaper editorials, as though there were authorial intention at work, while a nineteenth century reading of Milton clearly would not suit this analysis.)

Focusing on narrative authority suggestively echoes the issues of trust in testimony that were raised by Steven Shapin's A Social History of Truth, Shapin argued that since early modern times testimony has been an unavoidable part of scientific method, and that, correspondingly, reliance upon testimony – trust – remains a social dimension of epistemology that can never be purged from the practice of science. 'What we know about comets, icebergs and neutrinos irreducibly contains what we know of those people who speak for and about these things.'

Michael McKeon, influenced by Bakhtin, has also addressed the establishment of norms of cultural credibility in the early modern period – in his case in and through the construction of the novelistic form. His arguments corroborate Shapin's; McKeon's novels have the cultural function of mediating the difficult early modern issues of truth and virtue, exactly the same starting materials and processes necessary for the establishment of the 'discoveries' promulgated by Shapin's natural philosophers.

The questions I want to take from McKeon and Shapin and into the nineteenth century are: What models of trust and authority framed science in the nineteenth century? And how were these worked through in the literature of science? In my discussion of various texts, I will attempt to look for authorial efforts to impose a judgemental framework upon the reader, and the spaces in which the reader may be able to generate her own. Throughout I will use the term 'authoriality', generally used to indicate the relative presence or absence of the authorial (as opposed to narrative) voice in the text. Here the term is extended somewhat to be suggestive also of evident authorial intention, narrative authority (in terms of voice and/or focalization), and textual 'reality' or applicability/connection to the real world (not quite the same thing as realism). Like McKeon, I find that virtue (or – better in the nineteenth century context – morals) and epistemology are the key terms to conjure with. My working model compares the Benthamite standards informing some early nineteenth century thought and judgement with the more Whewellian model that later normalized scientific method, and with it, literature.

In this chapter I am purposely restricting myself to texts that have an obvious connection with science, though a lengthier study would obviously include 'non-scientific' literature as well as 'factual' accounts of science. I am also restricting myself to English-language texts read in Britain. Other themes would emerge if, for example, we were to look at French or Russian stories, with their more rigorous criteria for realism. Finally, I offer reservations over the brevity and oversimplification of my argument – due in part to its brevity, but also to the tentative stage of the research process that it reflects.

Early Century: a posteriori Desiderata and the Democratic Ideal

Jeremy Bentham's (1748–1832) Rationale of Judicial Evidence, later published 'for the use of non-lawyers as well as lawyers' had a considerable impact upon nineteenth century legal epistemology, and, for a brief time, appeared to crystallize opinions upon standards of proof within the sciences also. The overarching aim of Bentham's evidential writings was, first, to assert that no evidence ought ever to be excluded from judicial consideration. Nothing was to be ruled inadmissible as unreliable, as hearsay, or for any reason. Even the evidence of 'imbeciles' (infants, the superannuated and the insane) was to be heard and considered. The role of judge and jury was to exercise their judgement regarding the amount of trust that might be placed in each piece of evidence, and the force that evidence had for deciding the case as a whole. Although Bentham set out to provide guidelines regarding such judgements, his starting point was a fundamental faith in the Englishman's abilities to make them. In a deliberately domestic analogy, he compared these to the cook's tacit judgement, based on sundry factors, as to whether a leg of lamb was sufficiently cooked. Bentham did not, however, extend this same faith to the professional judiciary, whose powers of discernment he considered to be almost hopelessly blunted and spoiled by centuries of obfuscating legal tradition.

Bentham's friend and editor John Bowring (1792–1872) made the point even more strongly:

If the discovery of truth be the end of the rules of evidence, and if sagacity consist in the adaptation of means to ends, it appeared to me that, in the line of judicature, the sagacity displayed by the sages of law was as much below the level of that displayed by an illiterate peasant or mechanic in the bosom of his family, as, in the line of physical science, the sagacity displayed by the peasant is below the sagacity displayed in the same line by a Newton.

The comparison with science was important for Bowring, since he had himself been scientifically trained. Bentham did not share quite such an elevated opinion of science as Bowring's, but he did most certainly subscribe to the understanding that the same principles of evidence were needed in every area of modern life and 'the whole field of human knowledge', including science: 'Questions in natural philosophy, questions in natural history, questions in technology in all its branches, questions in medicine, are all questions of evidence. When we use the words observation, experience and experiment, what we mean is, facts observed, or supposed to be observed, by ourselves or others. ...'

In their critique of extant institutions, in their preference for the discriminatory abilities of the common man over that of the judiciary, and in the timing of their publication, Bentham's suggestions about evidence were profoundly democratic. At this time, the extension of the vote and the foundation of the British Association for the Advancement of Science both represented, in however partial and flawed a manner, a broadening of the circle of those permitted to arbitrate upon the evidence of politicians and men of science: to reach their own informed opinions, if not to superimpose these upon the most powerful.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (c. 1818)

'Every thing must have a beginning ... and that beginning must be linked to something that went before. The Hindoos give the world an elephant to support it, but they make the elephant stand upon a tortoise.' Thus Mary Shelley, in describing the generation of her story, indicates the infinity of textual regress; such tales of origin merely invite the question: On what does the tortoise stand?

This riddle forms the framework for the construction of Shelley's tale, which consists of stories within stories – a Russian doll of a novel. At one point, no fewer than five stories are nested within each other: Margaret Saville's trove of letters relates the tale of her brother Captain Walton, who tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, who recounts the Creature's autobiography, which includes the history of Safie (guaranteed, symmetrically enough, by another trove of letters supposed to be in the Creature's possession). While Safie's story, lying as it does at the heart of the book, provides one key to the novel, the most striking intertextuality concerns Walton and Frankenstein's narratives – a point that Shelley emphasized in her rewriting of the tale for its publication in 1831. Walton is given an increased regard for Frankenstein, bordering on hero-worship. Having heard from Victor's lips the ostensive warning to 'avoid ambition ... in science and discoveries', Walton copies his actions, not his words, and shows no sign of turning back with his near-mutinous crew.

On the one hand, this construction guides the reader in applying the novel's moral – the mortal danger in which Walton places himself reinforces the reader's need to take account of Frankenstein's tale. In fact there is a solid tradition of morals couched as stories within stories; readers or listeners familiar with the genre read them knowledgeably as such. The Bible contains many examples of dreams, warnings and parables within its once intimately known text. The story of David and the prophet Nathan (2 Samuel 12), for example, derived a large part of its force from the fact that the reader knew what was coming; nested within a larger moral text, its meaning was made all the more clear. By making layers of the text speak to each other, Shelley causes them to bear witness to one another's credibility.

An alternative reading of Shelley's nested narrative would, rather, highlight the levels of unreliability, each compounding the unreliability of the last (can we really trust Frankenstein's judgement?). In her 1831 introduction she compared the writing of her tale to the story of Columbus and the egg, bathetically suggesting that its composition was merely an act of pragmatism. Yet this apparently self-deprecating statement is slippery, for Columbus, after all, achieved something precisely on a par with Walton or Frankenstein.

This difficulty in pinning down the authoriality of Shelley's tale is perhaps the point. The reader's level of credulity determines where she will enter and exit the text; which doors she will use between stories and which will be her points of access to the real world, with their accordingly different outlooks. Perhaps in this the reader echoes Shelley's morally tergiversating response to the promises then held out by science.

Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1833-4)

Carlyle's legal training predisposed him to ask the same kinds of questions as Bentham regarding the plausibility of evidence; science and technology, rather than law were, however, a focus for Carlyle's questioning. Having begun its life as a serious essay upon metaphors, the volume Sartor Resartus was directly about the power of science (in its widest sense) to describe nature.

Sartor Resartus is predicated upon a fundamental narrative unreliability, not least in that it was initially published anonymously. Its account of the extraordinary Professor Teufelsdröckh [devil-dung] and his philosophy of clothes confutes normal categories of literature, being written by the 'editor', whose manuscript has apparently been subject to executive editing in the person of one 'Oliver Yorke' (Yorick?). Thus the moral and empirical distance generally assumed by the editorial perspective is utterly lost, and the reader is uncertain how to deal, for example, with an editorial apology for the revolutionary tone of the book when its contents are in fact all the editor's own. And although the book is supposedly inspired by the editor's exceptional regard for Professor Teufelsdröckh, the more words he expends, the more he 'inadvertently' gives an unsatisfactory or even adverse impression of his character and philosophy.

Carlyle muddied the waters still further when Sartor was first published as a single volume in Great Britain. 'This questionable little book was undoubtedly written among the mountain solitudes, in 1831', he began – and the tension internal to this opening sentence sets the tone for the narrative ambiguity throughout. In it, Carlyle implies that he is not the author/editor, for otherwise he would not need that disingenuous qualification, 'undoubtedly'. He further appended to the text by way of preface four letters of doubtful authenticity discussing the volume; all gave highly irregular reviews, while it has recently been suggested that one is a downright forgery. The book seemed so genuine, if this is not too paradoxical a judgement, that some reviewers announced in all seriousness their 'discovery' that it was, in fact, fiction. If Frankenstein offers the reader windows and doors between its intercalating texts and the real world, Sartor is a hall of mirrors.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Unmapped Countries by Anne-Julia Zwierlein. Copyright © 2005 Wimbledon Publishing Company. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1843311607
• ISBN 13: 9781843311607
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 283
• Editor: Zwierlein Anne-Julia