Transcript Women and Madness

Victorianism MA
Intellectual Background
Science
• Thomas Arnold: „the atmosphere of
paradox hanging around many of our
ablest young men of the present day”
(1838)
Academic/scientific life
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
1826: University of London
1854/1856: University Acts
Royal Institution
the British Association for the
Advancement of Science (BAAS – 1831)
Natural History Museum (Kensington,
1881-86)
Magazines, industrial centres
Humphrey Davy – Michael Faraday
Scientific societies
Science
• David Friedrich Strauss: Das Leben Jesu
(1835—tr. George Eliot 1864)
• Mary Somerville: On The Connexion of the
Physical Sciences (1834)
• Charles Lyell: Principles of Geology (183033)
• (Philip Gosse: Omphalos [1857])
Charles Darwin (1809-82)
• Darwin: On the Origin of Species by
Means of Natural Selection, or the
Preservation of Favoured Races in the
Struggle for Life (1859)
• Darwin: The Descent of Man (1871)
Evolution
• Preceding notions:
– Divine Creation
– Carl Lynnaeus: taxonomy
– Transmutation (Lamarck: will/habit/consciousness/intention→
change), transformation, metamorphosis
• Mankind put back to nature; ecological interdependence
• Against fixity of species
• Foundational notions: hyperproductivity, variability,
natural/sexual selection, struggle for life
• Emphasis on individual differences (vs. type) – not
normative
• Competition (basis for social Darwinism)
• Adaptation/interaction (a web of complex relations – bw.
species, individuals within species, the environment)
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda
• “Men can do nothing without the makebelieve of a beginning. Even Science, the
strict measurer, is obliged to start with a
make-believe unit, and must fix on a point
in the stars’ unceasing journey.”
Darwin and literature
• Narrativity, metaphoricity
• Bildungsroman, condition of England
novel, social novel
– part and whole
– George Eliot: Adam Bede, Daniel Deronda,
Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch
• Naturalism (Zola, Maupassant, Hardy)
– Determinism
– Environment
– „blood”