TY - JOUR
AU1 - Green, James Aaron
AB - Abstract In Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Charles Lyell appraised the distinct contribution made by his protégé, Charles Darwin (On the Origin of Species (1859)), to evolutionary theory: ‘Progression … is not a necessary accompaniment of variation and natural selection [… Darwin’s theory accounts] equally well for what is called degradation, or a retrogressive movement towards a simple structure’. In Rhoda Broughton’s first novel, Not Wisely, but Too Well (1867), written contemporaneously with Lyell’s book, the Crystal Palace at Sydenham prompts precisely this sort of Darwinian ambivalence to progress; but whether British civilization ‘advance[s] or retreat[s]’, her narrator adds that this prophesized state ‘will not be in our days’ – its realization exceeds the single lifespan. This article argues that Not Wisely, but Too Well is attentive to the irreconcilability of Darwinism to the Victorian ‘idea of progress’: Broughton’s novel, distinctly from its peers, raises the retrogressive and nihilistic potentials of Darwin’s theory and purposes them to reflect on the status of the individual in mid-century Britain. In February 1863, two works were published that, for the first time, considered the theory of natural selection in relation to the human case.1 In his Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, Charles Lyell appraised the distinctive contribution made to evolutionary theory by his protégé, Charles Darwin,2 through his seminal study On the Origin of Species (1859): Progression, therefore, is not a necessary accompaniment of variation and natural selection [ … Darwin’s theory] will account equally well for what is called degradation, or a retrograde movement towards a simple structure.3 For Lyell, the ambivalence of Darwin’s theory towards the Victorian ‘idea of progress’ was one of its most striking distinctions from prior interventions on the subject, such as Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). But the geologist was unwilling to trace the outlines of this anti-teleological sentiment too distinctly; at the close of Geological Evidences he was reasserting a narrative of inevitable progress: the ‘ever-increasing dominion of mind over matter’.4 In Thomas H. Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863), which immediately followed Lyell’s book, the issue of teleology was again forefront, including in its relation to his own, individual contribution made through the work to the progression of the species and society. Even Huxley, later known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ for his forthright defence of natural selection, found its dire implications for progress to be a disconcerting prospect; he himself found recourse through analogy. Rhoda Broughton wrote her first published novel, Not Wisely, but Too Well (1865–1866; 1867) during this time of fervid theorization about the application of Darwin’s theory to the human case, and its implications for the progress of the species and civilization.5 This article proposes that the influence of such debate is manifest in Broughton’s novel, and that dilemmas raised in the course of its sensational plot are vitally inflected by anxieties about the inevitability of advancement and the role of the individual in its attainment. Like the society around her, Broughton’s young protagonist exists ‘in a state of transition, though transition to what remained to be proved’ (p. 303). Focusing on the engagement of Not Wisely, but Too Well with evolutionary perspectives, this article responds to an intersection of interests first outlined in 2001 by Susan D. Bernstein,6 but which has since been overlooked amidst unprecedented critical interest shown in sensation fiction:7 the compelling overlap between the genre and evolutionary theory. Broughton’s novel is a rare case, I suggest, for not only ‘incorporat[ing] themes and vocabulary consistent with debates over human descent and biological taxonomy’, but also because it contains ‘direct allusions to apes and evolutionary theory’.8 These allusions and incorporations often underscore the nihilistic and retrogressive potentials of Darwin’s theory, and serve to highlight the novelty of Not Wisely, but Too Well, published as it was during a time when the ‘antiteleological aspects of Darwin’s thinking … were evaded or subverted by the majority of his contemporaries’.9 Not Wisely, but Too Well, and Broughton’s work more generally, has been absent from the critical genealogy of sensation fiction and Victorian women’s writing until the last two decades.10 Moreover, and clearly pertinent, is the fact that popular fiction was deprecated in scholarship before this time, and Sally Mitchell’s faint praise of such fictions as ‘emotional … rather than intellectual analyses, of a particular society’ exemplifies the regard in which they were held.11 This article thus proceeds from such recent work as that of Helen Debenham and Tamar Heller,12 which has sought to renovate Broughton’s works, and, broader, the category of popular fiction in which they are most closely located (as amalgams of sentiment and sensation);13 it extends especially the focus broached by readings from Laurence Talairach-Vielmas and Anna Despotopoulou,14 who consider Not Wisely, but Too Well against the backdrop of a modernizing mid-century Britain. Evolutionary perspectives reveal the novel’s individual-centric plot as being in dialogue with its social and historical conditions, for reasons that I attend to in the course of this article. Broughton’s use of evolutionary perspectives is sophisticated and innovative; her novel, and sensation fiction more widely, has much to add to our understanding of the intersections between literature and evolutionary theory, which has tended to focus on such canonical authors as George Eliot.15 The genre’s contemporaneity – both in terms of its narrative settings and location of first publication16 – enabled it to explore cultural anxieties with unrivalled immediacy and topicality, and to broach these anxieties with new and varied readerships.17 1. ‘IN THE SPECIES IT SEEMS PERENNIAL’: BROUGHTON AND EVOLUTIONARY THEORY Taken from Othello, the title of Broughton’s novel, Not Wisely, but Too Well, casts the young protagonist Kate Chester as a modern-day Desdemona to the roguish military-man Dare Stamer. On the cusp of an illicit liaison with him after their encounter in the Welsh seaside town of Pen Dyllas, Kate rejects Dare when he reveals to her that he is already married. Away from Pen Dyllas, she embarks on a life of charitable work under the tutelage of the ascetic clergyman James Stanley. Visiting the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, however, Kate meets Dare once more, and promises to resume their former intentions. On a train journey to elope with him, she is intercepted by James and convinced to abandon Dare; in the aftermath, she once more devotes herself resolutely to charity. When James dies in an influenza outbreak, Kate decides to join an Anglican sisterhood, but permits herself to attend the festivities for the wedding of her sister, Margaret. In the serial (published in the Dublin University Magazine, 1865–1866), Kate is confronted by Dare, who, consumed with jealous rage, shoots her and himself dead. In the book version (Tinsley Brothers, 1867), Kate hears of a fatal accident outside the party in which Dare is involved; breaching decorum, she stays beside him until he dies the next morning. The novel ends with a vision of Kate’s future good deeds as part of the sisterhood, and her eventual death. It seems probable that Broughton wrote Not Wisely, but Too Well during 1863,18 after the publication in February of Lyell’s Geological Evidences and Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature. Considered cursorily, it may seem incongruous to broach an overlap between popular fiction and these works of evolutionary theory – and traditionally Broughton’s novel has indeed been seen as remote from intellectual or speculative concerns.19 Yet this omits the manifold cross-pollinations of literature and science in the period,20 as well as how extensively evolutionary perspectives became assimilated into the cultural milieu.21 Equally, it ignores compelling biographical evidence for Broughton’s awareness of especially On the Origin of Species. Socially, Broughton belonged to that ‘far wider intellectual class [than the professed naturalist]’ who, according to the Edinburgh Review, ‘perused [Darwin’s work] with avidity’.22 The author was evidently conversant with Origin by 1883, when her novel Belinda was first published; its eponymous character recites a passage from the work, interpolating its conclusions on morphology with her own personal circumstances: ‘If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous slight modifications’ (in how many years am I likely to die?) ‘my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case. No doubt many organs exist of which’ (can the worm that never dies sting more sharply than this?) ‘we do not know the transitional grades.’23 Broughton’s purposing of evolutionary perspectives in Not Wisely, but Too Well is decidedly in this vein, or what Cannon Schmitt suggests is the way that such perspectives enabled novelists to ‘connect their characters’ beliefs and actions to the success of the human species’.24 Indeed, foregrounding the changes experienced by an individual – the end of whose life is coterminous with that of the novel – and juxtaposing them with those from prior stages of human history (the novel is replete with intertextual allusions to classical and Biblical figures), Not Wisely, but Too Well discerns the tensions and anxieties latent within a Darwinist perspective, as described by Gillian Beer: The optimistic ‘progressive’ reading of development can never expunge that other insistence that extinction is more probable than progress, that the individual life span is never a sufficient register for change or for the accomplishment of desire.25 The incommensurability between the evolutionary perspective – incorporating ‘lapses of time … so great as to be utterly unappreciable by the human intellect’, according to Darwin26 – and those of the individual, is confronted by the beginnings of both Broughton’s novel and Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature. Before delving into his argument concerning humanity’s relation to the ‘Lower Animals’, Huxley adapts a ‘well-worn metaphor’ for his own purposes: ‘the parallel between the life of man and the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the butterfly’. This comparison is more truthful, he decides, if the species is substituted for the individual: the ‘mental progress of the race’ instead of the single lifespan; as the grub grows from feeding on biological matter, shedding its skin after sufficient accumulations, so, Huxley accounts, the human mind has fed on knowledge and periodically torn apart its ‘theoretical coverings’ (here the theoretical foodstuff proffered by Darwin).27 This conflation of species and individual (phylogeny and ontogeny) is how Huxley reconciles himself to the inconsistencies of progress – by turns rapid and non-existent – and the miniscule contribution that his own work can feasibly make: since ‘every moult is a step gained’, so his own task is envisaged as being to ‘ease the cracking integument’ as best he can.28 The opening of Not Wisely, but Too Well moves in similar semantic circles to that of Huxley’s Evidence as it broaches a contemplation of beauty as a material and spiritual fact. There is the same collocation of individual and species, and of past and present, as evidenced clearest in an appeal for the reader to verify the inevitable decline of beauty from their own experience: ‘which of you, O daughters of Eve! has not made this interesting discovery in natural history for yourself, by one or other of the following pleasant processes?’ (p. 42). The terminology here, of process and discovery, posits this commentary as a variety of scientific experiment (in ‘natural history’, no less), the conclusions of which are empirically (and democratically) observable. Like Huxley, Broughton proclaims in her opening a concern for investigating a certain ‘truth’, and likewise atomizes vast processes (of evolution and decay, respectively) through the case of individuals. Both authors, furthermore, necessarily implicate their readers. In Man’s Place in Nature, Huxley strives to assuage the ‘certain shock’ that he is conscious his argument will elicit.29 Broughton, likewise, explicitly imagines the cry of such a shocked reader, at the realization of fading beauty: ‘Ay, me! Ay, me! indeed’ (p. 42). The beginnings of Man’s Place in Nature and Not Wisely, but Too Well coalesce most decisively, however, in their author’s deployment of the same imagery: the butterfly. In Broughton’s hands, this ‘well-worn metaphor’ is adapted once again to evoke evolutionary perspectives. Her narrator posits: ‘what so frail, so butterfly lived as beauty in the individual? Hardly are we consoled by the reflection that in the species it seems perennial’ (p. 42). Explicitly juxtaposing individual and species, and locating them within the frame of generational change (or, more precisely, stasis: the persistence of a trait between generations), Broughton’s simile is purposed to the same end as in Huxley’s text – it brings phylogeny (the history of the species) into comparison with ontogeny (the development of the individual). The differences in sentiment are marked and significant, however; whereas Huxley finds (intimate) consolation from such atomization, Broughton explicitly deprecates this potential. If not in dialogue with him, the phrasing has clear echoes of Darwin’s attempt in Origin to ameliorate the implications of his imagined struggle between individuals by recourse to species’ progression: When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiple.30 In its refusal of such consolation, Broughton’s novel already signals that its concern for evolutionary perspectives exists in their impact on the status of individuals; moreover, that these perspectives offer little consolation in the context of fears about the diminution of the status of individuals in a modernizing society.31 This first allusion is representative of Broughton’s investment in, and particular rendering of, evolutionary perspectives throughout the novel – its tenets are evident in various subsequent instances. Thus, after Kate’s first rejection of her suitor, Dare, leads her to join James in his charitable work, her emotional turmoil is captured by him in the following terms: ‘He knew compassionately that rawness of heart which prompted the desire for complete extinction’ (p. 177, emphasis added). ‘Utterly extinct’ was the state predicted by Darwin to be the natural course for the ‘greater number’ of species; extinction was, indeed, a central concept in natural selection – one of the concluding images in Origin – and, conversely, Darwin was crucial to the proliferation of the ecological meaning (to be anachronistic) of extinction in the public consciousness.32 The empathic sense of extinction that James is said to share with Kate is commensurate with that related in Origin in several ways – as in its Darwinian sense, extinction here is treated with no sense of dismay, but instead as a neutral object for the inconsolable individual (coming from personal loss, true, but also desired). So too is the desire for extinction engendered by the same sorts of conditions cited by Darwin, only that they occur at the personal, rather than species, level: Kate is absent of the ‘complex interdependen[cy]’ that she had established with Dare and is experiencing ‘changed conditions’ at the moment James ascribes these desires to her.33 This incidental use of ‘extinction’, therefore, is in fact immensely revealing of how Broughton utilizes a distinctly Darwinian evolutionary perspective in order to illuminate individual feelings and circumstances. This conflation of phylogeny and ontogeny continues to be evoked as Kate is courted by her cousin George. Repeatedly spurning his overtures, her most decisive rejection is provoked by his admission to playing billiards; but it enlarges from his personal deficiencies to become a criticism of men’s evolutionary shortcomings: Though you call yourselves the superior animals, you men are wretched things, after all … I begin to look on you as not much superior to the highest class of apes; minds very often closely approximating to the simian type, as they say in books. (p. 236) This appraisal echoes precisely sentiments expressed in a passage from Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature (the ‘books’ referred to here are most plausibly this and Lyell’s Geological Evidences). Having outlined the close morphological links between humans and gorillas, Huxley marshals ‘Darwin’s hypothesis’ to his argument (that is, a shared evolutionary path exists between the species); but he anticipates and imagines the reaction that such a proposition will elicit: On all sides I shall hear the cry—‘We are men and women, not a mere better sort of apes, … The power of knowledge—the conscience of good and evil—the pitiful tenderness of human affections raise us out of all real fellowship with the brutes, however closely they may seem to approximate us’34 The language with which Kate rebukes George is closely synonymous to this imagined ‘cry’, especially to those phrases emphasized above. It seems as if it is the absence of a ‘pitiful tenderness’, prompted by George’s admission of his billiard-playing, that elicits the gender-specificity of the rejection: it leads to a removal, as it were, of the ‘women’ from Huxley’s imagined audience, and to the questioning of how far ‘men’ alone are from the ‘brutes’. Although it may seem hyperbolic of Kate to denounce her cousin in this manner, recognition of the evolutionary significances that lie behind her choice of partner reveals what is at stake. Schmitt’s observation is pertinent here: Sexual selection breathed new life into the marriage plot that had long been a staple of the British novel, recasting the protagonist’s search for a mate as both shaped by evolutionary imperatives and destined to bolster or impair not only that protagonist’s happiness but the vigour of her or his descendants.35 But just as in her repurposing of the butterfly metaphor, Broughton’s distinctions from the sort of conciliatory appeal made by Huxley (against the more troubling implications of natural selection) illuminate her particular investment in evolutionary perspectives – their potential utility in terms of her fiction; here and elsewhere in Not Wisely, but Too Well, the distinction between humans and animals (which Huxley is at pains to reinforce) is shown to be contingent on social actions and qualities. Thus, the boundary is porous: the individual is liable to regress to the animalistic, if they are not already semi-bestial. This, then, is an ironic treatment of the ‘anxiety of simianation’ in the context of an abortive marriage plot.36 Although the case above shows how such a blurring of boundaries can privilege the female, any idea of a simplistic favouritism in Not Wisely, but Too Well is distanced in other statements; for example, Broughton’s (male) narrator claims earlier in the novel that women ‘have decidedly less of the brute, less of the “ape and tiger” … than men; but en revanche [on the other hand … ] infinitely less of the god’ (p. 84). As she does with Huxley, Broughton seizes on Tennyson’s epithet for humanity’s bestial nature (the ‘ape and tiger’)37 and applies it to only the male case. This sentiment is one borne out by the novel’s male characters – not only George (in Kate’s estimation, at least), but Dare can also be identified as a hybrid embodiment of both of Tennyson’s animals, because of his prodigious strength and physical features (his eyes are ‘tiger-like’ upon Kate (p. 412), yet he also has a ‘dark hairy face’ (p. 147); indeed, Dare’s ‘hairy countenance’ proves something of an epithet (pp. 93; 151)). Such a reading of Dare as an animal hybrid is encouraged by the discursive contexts of the decade. As Amanda Hodgson outlines, the 1860s abounded in comparisons between humans and the ‘lower animals’, particularly apes. In fact, if we accept a composition date of 1863, as I have proposed, then Not Wisely, but Too Well originated in the same year as the Anthropological Society of London, whose first exhibit was the skin of a ‘large male gorilla’; just as pertinent, it followed dissemination of Paul du Chaillu’s travels in ‘Equatorial Africa’ in the Athenaeum (11 May 1861), in which the explorer discloses a porosity between that species and humans: his account reveals that the gorillas he encountered ‘looked fearfully like hairy men’.38 The construction of Dare in similar physical and emotional terms (that is, displaying the animalistic rage du Chaillu identified in the gorillas) indicates how this fear about unstable species boundaries might cut both ways. It hardly needs stating, of course, that Not Wisely, but Too Well heightens the shocking and subversive potential of animal hybridity by making such a figure the object of Kate’s romantic desires. Superficially, Dare’s bestial associations would seem to render him an unlikely target for Kate to pursue if she is hoping to secure an evolutionarily advantageous mate. The contradiction can be reconciled, however, and in doing so larger tensions within contemporary ideas about masculinity are revealed. A typical and idealized image of men’s behaviour during the mid-Victorian era emphasized self-discipline in bodily and moral conduct; as Andrew Dowling and James Eli Adams observe of these conceptualizations, however, they function paradoxically to suggest the existence of a more volatile nature that requires restraining.39 Through his angry and passionate outbursts (metaphorized, vitally, as a ‘flood’ that ‘surge[s] and boil[s]’ inside him (p. 137), as if propriety is the placid waters), Dare represents exactly such a figure: the alter-ego of the cautious, controlled male. Importantly, whilst censure was undoubtedly the predominant public response to this sort of indecorous behaviour, Dowling identifies a surreptitious yearning for it also: this was ‘another, secret side of man that Victorian culture was just as eager to consume’; and of John Ruskin’s intervention on the topic, he discerns ‘a tantalising image of the bestial man, the man connected to brute nature rather than refined culture’.40 Broughton, I propose, conjures in Dare just such an image of the ‘bestial man’ as Dowling discerns, and she elaborates its ‘tantalising’ quality through the lens of female sexuality – the strong physical attraction Kate feels towards him. For it is vital to note that if Dare is aligned with humanity’s primitive ancestors in certain respects, that same robust physique also associates him with classical models for the ideal male body.41 When Kate spots Dare in the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, for instance (a complex section that I explore in greater detail below), a notice of his ape-like aspect (his ‘dark ugly face’ (p. 269)) is proceeded by a blazon of his physical prowess: [Dare] approached more nearly in physical conformation to Achilles or Telamonian Ajax than to most of the men one sees in the present small-boned days. Lean flanked, with shoulders that looked as if, Atlas-like, they could support the burden of the world; and a vast chest that five-and-forty inches could not have compassed … there were not many like him, thought the girl (p. 269) This description identifies the morphology of contemporary men as having devolved from the standards of the past, a decline from which Dare and few other specimens seem immune. Such a comparison aligns Not Wisely, but Too Well with various mid-to-late-century warnings about the pathological potential of modernity,42 although it is notable here that a generalized physical decline is proposed as the symptom of evolutionary retrogression.43 Compared favourably with the species, Dare’s appeal is also particularized within Kate’s search for a suitable partner – her cousin, another possible choice, is dismissed in physical terms as that ‘plump George Chester’ who exemplifies the ‘wretched and slight-framed and sketchy’ (p. 268) physiques displayed by men especially. Overall, Dare presents as a complex case in evolutionary terms: his physical form and moral conduct align him with primitivist discourse and hybridity via the figure of the gorilla;44 yet those same attributes render him extraneous to what Broughton suggests has been a process of decline in men’s physical prowess. This irreconcilability goes some way towards pinpointing Kate’s predicament and seeing Not Wisely, but Too Well as an example of how, as Schmitt observes, the marriage plot is complicated by ‘evolutionary imperatives’; according to them, none of Kate’s choices (for reasons given above) is without some deficiency, either moral or physical. This unresolvable tension may help explain why Broughton’s protagonist fails to achieve the reproductive futurity expected of her – incapable of finding an unambiguously ‘right’ choice according to sexual selection, she chooses to forego the decision altogether by entering the Anglican sisterhood. Crucially, Kate’s receptiveness to Dare characterizes her in similar bestial terms to him. Particularly through the ‘near misses’ she has in terms of eloping with him, Broughton’s protagonist registers as someone prone to the ‘animal abandon … the uncontrolled passion’ that one reviewer saw as connecting the heroine of sensation fiction with ‘brute nature’.45 It is to be recalled that only James’s intervention prevents Kate’s last attempt to be with Dare, when he intercepts her on a train journey. In this scene, the narrator affirms Dare’s animality when he describes the Colonel’s feelings for Kate as a ‘mad, wild-beast passion’ (p. 296) that threatens to sully her good character (in James’s eyes). But her complicity in this beast-like relationship is freely confessed; discussing herself in the third person, Kate admits: ‘she is most willing—for his [Dare’s] sake most thankful—to be dragged down to any depths. What are disgrace and shame and pollution, as you call it, to me in comparison to him, I should like to know?’ (p. 297). Synthesizing contemporary reviews of sensation fiction, Bernstein identifies a pertinent detail: that the ‘“animal part of our nature” [is represented in these reviews] as unsanctioned female desire’.46 Throughout this exchange, James tries to help Kate to control these animal passions by appealing to Anglican beliefs – he tries, in other words, to revive her ‘conscience of good and evil’, that quality which Huxley and others thought to be the crucial distinction of humans from the ‘brutes’ (Kate is reportedly ‘rent in twain by the two powers of good and evil’ (p. 299)).47 Capable of being reasoned out of her passionate liaison with Dare, and never without reservations in the first place (‘her inmost heart said differently’ (p. 297) is the narrator’s response to her claim of willingness to ‘disgrace’ herself with Dare), Kate’s ‘animal part’ never completely dominates – yet it is depicted as a dangerously assertive force nonetheless, with James questioning, after his success, whether ‘in saving her soul had he killed her body?’ (p. 301). What is the significance of this concern for Kate’s divided, semi-bestial nature and her attempt to suppress these animal passions? Dowling raises an enticing claim about the function of repression for the Victorian male that I judge to illuminate Broughton’s purpose here; he asserts that this quality created ‘greater psychological and emotional depth for men’ than was possible for the ‘ideal woman’, lacking as she did the potential for deviance and thus any need for repression.48 Not Wisely, but Too Well, by contrast, seems intent to challenge these assumptions as they might apply to Kate by having her strive to overcome her ‘unsanctioned … desire’ – she possesses greater depth than her suitor, Dare, who is almost entirely beholden to his ‘brute nature’ (especially, it must be added, in the violent conclusion to the serial version). Not only, therefore, do evolutionary perspectives complicate the marriage plot, but the case of Broughton’s protagonist shows how they might also give greater nuance to the female subject participating within it. Evolutionary retrogression of the species becomes a more sustained theme when, as I consider below, Kate visits the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, but such passages as those considered above hint, if not at how retrogression to the animal has already happened, then at how permeable and liable to transgression are boundaries and identities in a post-Darwinian world: ‘things are unfocused, fluid, without specific design or fixity … they continually slip away from an ever-changing norm’.49 2. ‘MERE FLESH-AND-BLOOD CREATURES’: EVOLUTIONARY SPECULATIONS IN THE CRYSTAL PALACE The evolutionary perspectives contained in Not Wisely, but Too Well find arguably their most sophisticated expression in Kate’s sojourn to the Crystal Palace at Sydenham. Before attending to this, it is first important to remark on the manifold evolutionary significations of the Palace itself. The vast exhibition space, first opened in 1854, bore an equally teleological purpose to its previous incarnation as the host of the Great Exhibition of 1851; its ‘chief object’, in the words of the accompanying Guide, was the ‘advancement of civilization’.50 This polemic function was instantiated through displays of art and architecture from across the world, arranged in such a way that visitors were encouraged to discern a diachronic development of forms – culminating, naturally, with Britain and her Empire.51 The discourse that surrounded the Palace and its purpose – iterating on ideas of progress, generational change, and survival52 – shows the strong influence of evolutionary perspectives on the theory and practice of architecture in this period, especially in its vogue for ‘development’.53 Even before Darwin’s theory renewed fears about decline and destruction, however, narratives of architectural evolution (most influentially John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice (1851–1853)) were eminently conscious of retrogression as both a possibility and historical fact – progress was inevitable, but proceeded by stops and starts. The Palace, again, exemplified this facet of architectural theory, as it did so many others; S. J. Hales relates how its guidebooks ‘constantly returned to the theme of the fall of empires. Almost every civilization represented in the [fine art] courts, but particularly Rome and Nineveh, could be demonstrated to have collapsed from decay within’.54 If Jeffrey A. Auerbach has observed that ‘as early as the 1860s … the Crystal Palace had, for many writers, come to symbolise not the triumph of progress but its failures’,55 then I suggest that, at least in the case of Broughton, this is because the evolutionary significations that it both expressed and catalysed had been problematized with the publication of Origin in 1859. The concept of the site fielded by Broughton’s young protagonist, Kate, is determinedly Darwinian: Marvellous pitch of civilization for us to have attained to, to be able to do such a thing! we must come soon to the highest pinnacle we are to reach, one thinks sometimes, and then begin to retrograde. Well, it is not much consequence to us personally which we do, advance or retreat; it will not be in our days. (pp. 259–60) The term ‘retrograde’ is replete with evolutionary, and especially Darwinian, significance. In his Geological Evidences, as I noted at the beginning of this article, Lyell claimed that it was the equal probability for ‘advance or retreat’, to use Broughton’s phrasing, that distinguished ‘Darwin’s theory’ from those preceding it: ‘degradation, or a retrograde movement towards a simple structure’ was ‘equally’ probable as ‘progression’.56 Just as in the previous formulations of evolutionary perspective in the novel, there is again a juxtaposition of ontogeny and phylogeny, attendant on a diminution of the former; furthermore, this discussion again explicitly reaches out to implicate the reader: the personal pronouns – us, we, our – vividly reinforce the sense of readerly involvement in this process. Notable as well is how the description subverts the logic of mid-century social evolution: if Britain is the apogee of societies’ purposive progression, what remains but movement backwards? These evolutionary perspectives multiply when Kate enters the Palace and diverges from the group accompanying her. Originally seeking a solitude that will allow her to contemplate ‘things past, present, and to come’ (p. 265), she determines instead to gratify her senses by taking in the artificial warmth of the Exotic Court. Her decision is, in another way, a rejection of the Palace’s polemic function in favour of indulging physiological wants – it is an instructive instance of how visitors’ freedom of movement around the Palace enabled them to subvert its intended meanings, inscribed in the arrangement of the exhibits, by viewing them in different orders.57 (To proceed ‘backwards’, for example, was to trace an anti-developmental narrative.) Kate’s idiosyncratic navigation of the Palace pre-empts her retrogressive interpretation of the Greek Court, the exhibition she visits afterwards. Inside, a reproduction of the famous Laocoön prompts an extended reflection on the discrepancies between sculptural and biological forms: Generation after generation of short-spanned living creatures has ripened and rotted, they [the statues] looking calmly on, superior in their unwithering amaranthine bloom—generation after generation has gaped open-mouthed, awed by their solemn presence—generation after generation will so gaze until the world is overrun with a new deluge of barbarians from the far West, or till it comes to its final ending. (p. 267) The refrain of ‘generation after generation’, itself repetitive, reproduces the dense appearance of this term within the discussion of generational change in, for instance, Chapter IV of Origin (‘Natural Selection’); there, the quantities in focus escalate until they reach incomprehensible levels: from a ‘thousand’ to a ‘hundred million generations’.58 Broughton’s description is distinguished by its concern for that implicit corollary to change occurring over such time-scales: its individual participants must be ‘short-spanned’ by comparison. In categorizing humans as ‘creatures’, whose lives can be articulated by the basest processes of growth and decomposition, Broughton spotlights the scientific naturalist perspective, of which natural selection was seen as the most potent (and provocative) manifestation.59 Just as in the popular conception of that worldview, the description here dispossesses humans of their exceptional status, positing them as disquietingly close to the ‘Lower Animals’ that are discussed in Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature (and thereby escalating the claim, noted earlier, for men’s proximity to apes). There is further emphasis on this disconcertingly materialist and evolutionary reading of the human as Broughton’s narrator continues: One feels inclined—perhaps from aversion to acknowledge that we have degenerated—to doubt whether those god-faces and Titan-frames could have been copied from any mere flesh-and-blood creature that, while in life, drudged away on the earth and had material blood flowing in his veins. [Could such have existed] in our world, where perfection in anything is proverbially unattainable? (pp. 267–68) The detail of ‘degeneration’ demands to be read alongside its cognate ‘retrograde’, considered earlier, for it possesses synonymous evolutionary significations. But whilst this passage continues and extends similar themes to that prior – materiality, fixity, ephemerality – there is a marked shift in tone: from a single declarative sentence in the previous to a statement replete with ambiguities, and culminating in an interrogative question. Uncertainty is raised through the details of ‘perhaps’ and ‘doubt’, and both are mediated by the fact that the description relates an ‘inclinat[ion]’ (more dubious for being felt). These details qualify the incendiary claim being made in this passage for the retrogression (or ‘degeneration’) of the human species; it may be said also that these details allude to the status of natural selection as theory, not established, or even empirical, fact – Darwin’s proposition demanded imagination (hence his extensive use of analogy throughout Origin),60 and much, in his own estimation, remained ambiguous about the processes he was delineating. By her final question Broughton deliberately argues herself into an intellectual stalemate, and raises an ambiguity latent in any rendering of evolution as purposeful and progressive (‘the arrangements for the species [being made] perfect’ or the ‘ever-increasing dominion of mind over matter’):61 can material forms ever be perfected if this is a condition that, according to Christian ontology, is denied in the physical world, and only obtainable in the spiritual? These speculations gesture to the inevitability of contemplating things ‘past, present, and to come’ in a society that was increasingly being understood via the historicizing lens of evolutionary science; yet, as Devin Griffiths notes, there was freedom in what could be concluded via this interpretive lens, as ‘naturalists and literary authors turned towards each other in their efforts to shape a historical understanding suited to their different ends’.62 Not Wisely, but Too Well is clearly locatable within such interactions, and from them Broughton produces an understanding of past and present that remodels notions of gender, progress, and individualism. 3. CONCLUSION Prompted by the ideas that Darwin had raised in On the Origin of Species, and by those he had opted to omit (to be taken up in The Descent of Man (1871)), Huxley announces in his own intervention on evolutionary theory, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature: The question of questions for mankind … is the ascertainment of the place which Man occupies in nature and of his relations to the universe of things. Whence our race has come … to what goal we are tending[,] are the problems which present themselves anew and with undiminished interest to every man born into the world.63 Not Wisely, but Too Well evidences the extent to which the question of humanity’s evolutionary position is of interest to every woman, as much as to every man; the tribulations of Kate Chester, Broughton’s unfixed and ‘transition[al]’ protagonist, are inflected by the Darwinian allusions woven throughout the novel. Lyn Pykett argues of the New Woman writers of the fin de siècle that many of them ‘transposed the fundamental terms of evolutionary discourse, and in the process transformed that discourse, by valorising its hitherto negative terms’.64 It is plausible and valuable, I contend, to see Broughton’s deployment of evolutionary perspectives in Not Wisely, but Too Well as achieving the same effect: the retrogressive and nihilistic propensities of Darwinian evolution are brought to the fore, yet these qualities are not a cause for dismay, but function productively in articulating Kate’s struggle to realize her own desires – at the same time as she strives to discern her role in society. Given that a concern for understanding the so-called ‘woman question’ through evolutionary perspectives is traditionally seen to emerge from the 1870s onwards,65 the concern exhibited in Broughton’s novel for this same issue is to suggest that sensation fiction of the 1860s is a rich and unexplored area for the understanding of the reach and cultural impact of such discourses. In the book version, Not Wisely, but Too Well ends with a syncretic effort to reconcile itself to Christian ontology, juxtaposing Kate’s later efforts in life, after the tragic loss of Dare, with the gradual advancement of the species across Biblical timescales: ‘we have all been struggling, making small progress, as it seems, through six thousand dragging years’ (p. 375). If this seems something of a repudiation of the Darwinian frame that I have been contending is vital in the novel, the experience of the historian Esmé Wingfield-Stratford is instructive. He recounts the reluctance, common to the Victorian period, of delving too far into certain topics: I had, all unwittingly, blundered into what, to every good Victorian, was the unforgivable sin … I had pried beneath the surface of a belief, … I had not known where to stop short of a logical consequence.66 Broughton’s sustained and innovative allusions to evolutionary perspectives are revealing of an author ‘pr[ying] beneath the surface’: feeling around the contours of Darwin’s theory, but conscious that it had, in the verdict of Peter Bowler, ‘the potential to destroy the value system within which it had been conceived’.67 If Rhoda Broughton did recognize how to stop short of a logical consequence, this was not before she had attended, in Not Wisely, but Too Well, to the manifold inflections and ambivalences of evolutionary perspectives, particularly on that intersection, so central to mid-century Britain, of individualism and progress. Ultimately, her novel voices that sense of how, in a post-Darwinian world, individuals and society are united ‘in a state of transition, though transition to what remained to be proved’. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) under a Doctoral Studentship from the South, West, and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership. The author gratefully acknowledges Harry Ford, for his feedback on an earlier version of this article, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. DISCLOSURE STATEMENT No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. James Aaron Green is an early-career scholar working in nineteenth-century studies, with additional interests in game studies. His research specializes in the intersections of popular fiction and science. He has articles forthcoming in Gothic Studies and Victorian Network, and is preparing a monograph on sensation fiction and modernity. Footnotes 1 On the Origin of Species gives only a single, ambiguous statement towards its conclusion on the subject of natural selection in the human case: ‘[In the distant future … ] light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history’; Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, ed. by Gillian Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 359. 2 In personal correspondence, Darwin referred to Lyell as his ‘old honoured guide and master’; Charles Darwin to Charles Lyell, 6 [March 1863], in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, ed. by Frederick Burkhardt and Duncan M. Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 11 (1863), p. 209. 3 Charles Lyell, The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (London: John Murray, 1863), p. 412. 4 Lyell, Geological Evidences, p. 506. 5 Rhoda Broughton, Not Wisely, but Too Well, ed. by Tamar Heller (Brighton: Victorian Secrets, 2013), p. 303. Subsequent parenthetical references refer to this edition; where necessary to differentiate the three-volume release of 1867 from the serialized version appearing in the Dublin University Magazine (DUM) from August 1865 to July 1866, the terms ‘book’ and ‘serial’ are used. 6 Susan D. Bernstein, ‘Ape Anxiety: Sensation Fiction, Evolution, and the Genre Question’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 6 (2001), 250–71. 7 Anne-Marie Beller gives an excellent critical overview of recent interest in the genre; ‘“The Fashions of the Current Season”: Recent Critical Work on Victorian Sensation Fiction’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 45 (2017), 461–73. 8 Bernstein, ‘Ape Anxiety’, 254. 9 Peter J. Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), p. 5. 10 Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); Broughton is absent from Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980); she is noted in passing in Lyn Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1992), pp. 66, 201. 11 Sally Mitchell, ‘Sentiment and Suffering: Women’s Recreational Reading in the 1860s’, Victorian Studies, 21 (1977), 29–45 (p. 34). 12 Helen Debenham, ‘Not Wisely but Too Well and the Art of Sensation’, in Victorian Identities: Social and Cultural Formations in Nineteenth-Century Literature, ed. by Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys (Hampshire: Macmillan’s, 1996), pp. 9–24; Tamar Heller, ‘“That Muddy, Polluted Flood of Earthly Love”: Ambivalence about the Body in Rhoda Broughton’s Not Wisely but Too Well’, in Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre, ed. by Kimberly Harrison and Richard Fantina (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2006), pp. 87–101. 13 Andrew Maunder proposes the taxonomy of ‘dramatic’ and ‘sentimental’ sensation; see, for instance, Varieties of Women’s Sensation Fiction: 1855–1890, ed. by Andrew Maunder, 6 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004), I, xxxvi. 14 Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, ‘A Journey through the Crystal Palace: Rhoda Broughton’s Politics of Plate-Glass in Not Wisely But Too Well’, in Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels (Abingdon and New York, NY: Routledge, 2007); Anna Despotopoulou, ‘Trains of Thought: The Challenges of Mobility in the Work of Rhoda Broughton’, Critical Survey, 23 (2011), 90–106. 15 The instructive case of this is Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 16 On periodicity, modernity, and sensation fiction, see Rob Allen, ‘“Pause You Who Read This”: Disruption and the Victorian Serial Novel’, in Serialization in Popular Culture, ed. by Rob Allen and Thijs van den Berg (Abingdon and New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), pp. 33–46. 17 ‘[T]he sensation novel came to signify a link between popular and elite literature in what I call the genre question of the 1860s’; Bernstein, ‘Ape Anxiety’, p. 254. 18 Marilyn Wood proposes the more expansive range of 1862 to 1863; Rhoda Broughton: Profile of a Novelist (Stamford, Lincolnshire: Paul Watkins, 1993), p. 10. The author gratefully acknowledges correspondence with Tamar Heller on dating the novel’s composition. The claim for 1863 is one I consider to be substantiated by various intertextual allusions given in this article. 19 See, for instance, Wood, Profile of a Novelist; Mitchell, ‘Sentiment and Suffering’. 20 This is a common point in studies of ‘literature and science’, but as it relates to Darwin specifically, see Devin Griffiths, The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwins (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). 21 On the dissemination of Darwinism in the press, see Alvar Ellegård, Darwin and the General Reader: The Reception of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in the British Periodical Press, 1859–1872 (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 24–29. 22 Cited in Ellegård, Darwin and the General Reader, p. 42. Evidence of a more anecdotal kind can be claimed of Broughton’s ‘prodigious read[ing] habits’, fully on display in the novel’s dense intertextuality; Broughton, Not Wisely, but Too Well, p. 35. 23 Rhoda Broughton, Belinda (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1883), p. 152. Emphasis in original. 24 Cannon Schmitt, ‘Evolution and Victorian Fiction’, in Evolution and Victorian Culture, ed. by Bernard Lightman and Bennett Zon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 17–38 (p. 18). 25 Beer, Darwin’s Plots, p. 6. 26 Darwin, On the Origin of Species, pp. 66, 341. 27 Thomas Henry Huxley, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (London: Williams and Norgate, 1863), p. 58. 28 Huxley, Man’s Place in Nature, p. 58. 29 Huxley, Man’s Place in Nature, pp. 58–59. An early commentary on Origin twice states that the work will elicit this affective response in readers; ‘Natural Selection’, All the Year Round, 3.63 (1860), 293–99 (pp. 293, 299). 30 Darwin, On the Origin of Species, p. 62. 31 The classic statement of this concern is given by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty (1859): ‘At present individuals are lost in the crowd’; On Liberty, Utilitarianism and Other Essays, ed. by Mark Philip and Frederick Rosen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 65. 32 Darwin, On the Origin of Species, p. 96.; Gillian Beer, ‘Darwin and the Uses of Extinction’, Victorian Studies, 51.2 (2009), 321–31. 33 Beer, ‘Darwin and the Uses of Extinction’, p. 323. 34 Huxley, Man’s Place in Nature, p. 109. Emphases added. 35 Schmitt, ‘Evolution and Victorian Fiction’, p. 18. Such considerations help us equally to understand a passage included only in the serial, the emotive tone of which is otherwise liable to seem extravagant. In response to her cousins’ suggestion that she marry James, Kate mentally rebukes it as a ‘detestable, revolting idea! She almost loathed him as she thought of it’ (p. 405). The corporeal inflections of that word ‘revulsion’ in particular indicate, I suggest, that physical considerations are forefront in Kate’s strident refusal to countenance James as a marriage partner (and they are proven right in some sense, when he succumbs to the fever). 36 This phrase is Bernstein’s; ‘Ape Anxiety’, p. 265. 37 Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, ed. by Robert H. Ross (New York, NY: Norton, 1973), l. 118.28. 38 Amanda Hodgson, ‘Defining the Species: Apes, Savages and Humans in Scientific and Literary Writing of the 1860s’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 4 (1999), 228–51 (pp. 230–31). See also Alexander Scott, ‘The “Missing Link” Between Science and Show Business: Exhibiting Gorillas and Chimpanzees in Victorian Liverpool’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 25 (2020), 1–20 (pp. 4–5). 39 Andrew Dowling, Manliness and the Male Novelist in Victorian Literature (Abingdon and New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), pp. 18–19. 40 Dowling, Manliness and the Male Novelist, p. 19. 41 Simon Goldhill points out that the Victorian ‘idealization of the classical male body’ was one means by which Ancient Greek culture enabled the construction of a ‘revolutionary sexual world’ during the period; Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), pp. 4–5. 42 See for example the Introduction to Amelia Bonea and others, Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). 43 For comparison, James Crichton Browne identifies various causes ‘deteriorating our race’ (and notes specifically the relevance of Darwin’s recent theory of natural selection), but it is unclear if this deterioration is mental or physical: ‘The History and Progress of Psychological Medicine. An Inaugural Address’, Journal of Mental Science, 7.37 (1861), 19–31 (p. 29). Benjamin Ward Richardson, seemingly by contrast to Broughton, disdains physical prowess and the need for ‘excessive physical exertion in sustaining the vital power of a race’; Diseases of Modern Life (London: Macmillan and Co., 1876), p. 170. 44 The case of the Doasyoulikes in Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863) is apposite; this ‘race’ reverts ‘by a precise and overtly-Darwinian process of sexual selection’ to physically approximate the apes: ‘their toes become prehensile and their bodies hairy’; Hodgson, ‘Defining the Species’, p. 238. 45 Susan D. Bernstein, ‘Dirty Reading: Sensation Fiction, Women, and Primitivism’, Criticism, 36 (1994), 213–41 (p. 224). 46 Bernstein, ‘Dirty Reading’, pp. 229–30. 47 Kingsley makes a nearly identical assertion in The Water-Babies, for instance; see Hodgson, ‘Defining the Species’, p. 234. 48 Dowling, Manliness and the Male Novelist, p. 22. 49 James Krasner, ‘A Chaos of Delight: Perception and Illusion in Darwin’s Scientific Writing’, Representations, 31 (1990), 118–41 (p. 118). 50 Samuel Phillips, Guide to the Crystal Palace and Park (London: Crystal Palace Library and Bradbury & Evans, 1854), p. 21. 51 For more on the polemic functions of visuality, particularly in the Palace’s fine art Courts, see Grazia Zaffuto, ‘“Visual Education” as the Alternative Mode of Learning at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham’, Victorian Network, 5 (2013), 9–27. 52 These are from Owen Jones, The Alhambra Court in the Crystal Palace (London: Crystal Palace Library and Bradbury & Evans, 1854). 53 Carla Yanni provides an insightful account of this influence; ‘Development and Display: Progressive Evolution in British Victorian Architecture and Architectural Theory’, in Evolution and Victorian Culture, ed. by Bernard Lightman and Bennett Zon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 227–60. 54 S. J. Hales, ‘Re-Casting Antiquity: Pompeii and the Crystal Palace’, Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, 14 (2006), 99–134 (p. 102). The decline of the Venetian Empire is noted especially in Volume III, aka ‘The Quarry’; John Ruskin, ‘The Quarry’, in The Stones of Venice, ed. by Edward Tyas Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 17–59 (p. 17). 55 Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 206. 56 Lyell, The Geological Evidences, p. 412. 57 See for instance Zaffuto, ‘Visual Education’, pp. 16–18. 58 Darwin, On the Origin of Species, pp. 91, 96. 59 Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution, p. 10. 60 Griffiths, The Age of Analogy, p. 11. 61 [Robert Chambers], Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (London: John Churchill, 1844), p. 377; Lyell, The Geological Evidences, p. 506. 62 Griffiths, The Age of Analogy, p. 9. 63 Huxley, Man’s Place in Nature, p. 58. 64 Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine, p. 112. 65 Lorna Duffin, ‘Prisoners of Progress: Women and Evolution’, in The Nineteenth-Century Woman: Her Cultural and Physical World, ed. by Lorna Duffin and Sarah Delamont (London: Croom Helm, 1978), pp. 57–91. Beer, Darwin’s Plots, p. 196. 66 Cited in Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 136. 67 Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution, p. 176. © 2021 Leeds Trinity University This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - ‘Short-Spanned Living Creatures’: Evolutionary Perspectives in Rhoda Broughton’s Not Wisely, but Too Well (1867)
JF - Journal of Victorian Culture
DO - 10.1093/jvcult/vcaa040
DA - 2021-01-22
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/short-spanned-living-creatures-evolutionary-perspectives-in-rhoda-jG9ta2fPj7
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EP - 1
VL - Advance Article
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DP - DeepDyve
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