Darwin and women Flashcards
social activist on Darwin and women
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, evolutionary theory “provided a new way for women to view the universe and their role in it, and a new language to describe what they saw”.
Hardy’s Darwinian reading of the dairy maids
“They writhed feverishly under the oppressiveness of an emotion thrust on them by cruel Nature’s law – an emotion which they had neither expected nor desired”
waddington on science
H. Waddington comments in ‘The Character of Biological Form’
‘Science is essentially concerned with causal relations; and causal relations cannot be expressed unless there is change. It is therefore in the changes of form – during individual development, during evolution, or under the influence of function – that the biologist is mainly interested’.
the rape tissue
‘why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue… there should have been traces such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive’
penny on tess
penny boumela states “Tess brings together the ‘types’ of women that have frequently been counterpoised in the earlier work – the woman compromised and doomed by her own sexuality, either as victim or as femme fatale (fanny robin)”.
tess reading history
‘finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad… the best is not to remember that your nature and your past doings have been like thousands’ and thousands’…”.
eliot DD tragic girl
Daniel’s sightings of Mirah stirs in him a memory of ‘the girl tragedies that are going on in the world, hidden, unheeded, as if they were but tragedies of the copse or hedgerow’. The blending of genre – in this case, the girl tragedy - into natural landscape creates a sense of reconciliation between science and fiction by envoking order through categorisation onto the chaos evoked by nature
genre and anti-oedipus
Genre, then, can be viewed in light of Delezue and Felix Guattari’s work work Anti-Oedipus as a ‘social formation’ - its prime function being to ‘codify the flows of desire, to inscribe them, to record them, to see that no flow exists that is not properly damned up, channelled, regulated.’
Genre becomes a way of codifying the flows of characters and seizing narrative control. Genre, like species, relies on types and rules whereby characters conform to.
Mirah singing
‘poor and miserable’ Mirah submits in accordance to her type as the tragic girl: she sings for Klesmer, ‘simply bent on doing what [he] Desired’, and afterwards stands ‘meekly awaiting judgement’.
to use Deleuze and Guattari’s mechanistic metaphor, she is a functioning cog maintaining and being maintained by the great genre machine.
middlemarch on women
the ‘struggles’ of women, who, in striving for more seemed ‘mere inconsistency and formlessness’
inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women:
the ‘limits of variation’ for ‘the social lot of women’.
‘variation under domestication’ is a difficult endeavour for women.
Eliot also condemns female writers for ‘typing’
“Silly Novels by Lady Novelists are a genus with many species, determined by the particular quality of silliness that predominates in them’. in particular, their single minded dedication to “Rank and Beauty”
the issue of women heroines
E.S. Dallas ‘The Gay Science’
But when women are the chief characters, how are you to set them in motion? The life of women cannot well be described as a life of action. When women are thus put forward to lead the action of a plot, they must be urged into a false position. To get vigorous action they are described as rushing into crime and doing masculine deeds. […] The very prominence of the position which women occupy in recent fiction leads by a natural process to their appearing in a light which is not good.
