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George Eliot and Herbert Spencer
Feminism, Evolutionism, and the Reconstruction Of Gender
By Nancy L. Paxton PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06841-1
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Now we think it an immense mistake to maintain that there is no sex in literature. Science has no sex: the mere knowing and reasoning faculties, if they act correctly, must go through the same process, and arrive at the same result. But in art and literature, which imply the action of the entire being, in which every fibre of the nature is engaged, in which every peculiar modification of the individual makes itself felt, woman has something to contribute. Under every imaginable social condition, she will necessarily have a class of sensations and emotions—the maternal ones—which must remain unknown to man; and the fact of her comparative physical weakness, which, however it may have been exaggerated by a vicious civilization, can never be cancelled, introduces a distinctively feminine condition into the wondrous chemistry of the affections and sentiments, which inevitably gives rise to distinctive forms and combinations.
—George Elliot, "Woman in France: Madame de Sablé"
George Eliot is still frequently regarded as a sort of Victorian Athena, the self-created, motherless, and mother-denying daughter who sprang full-grown and fully armed, with a pen at least, from the head of a paternal and magisterial George Henry Lewes. Henry James may have initiated this critical tradition when he complained that Eliot always proceeded "from the abstract to the concrete," and his assessment of Eliot as an overly intellectual novelist has been elaborated by some of her most celebrated critics. Most of Eliot's more recent readers, however, no longer regard her intellectualism as necessarily a defect, and they have produced many excellent studies in the last twenty years describing her response to the philosophical and scientific traditions of her day. Yet the habit of seeing Eliot as the overly intellectual creation of the men she knew, or read, persists. She is portrayed, for example, in major biographical studies, as well as in a number of otherwise successful analyses of her thought, as a passive vessel into which the ideas of Darwin, Spencer, Lewes, Comte, Bain, and others were poured.
Gordon Haight cautions against taking this approach when he writes that "every main bias of Eliot's mind" had been established before she met Lewes. Eliot's letters show that she insisted on her own intellectual independence when her friends or contemporaries presumed that Lewes—or, indeed, any one else—spoke for her. In 1860, for example, she wrote a bristling letter to Sara Hennell, in which she complained: "Let me say for once for all that you must not impute my opinions to him nor vice versa. The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions" (GEL 3: 358). Eliot's correspondence and biography demonstrate repeatedly her effort to establish and protect her identity as a strong-minded woman.
Several recent studies of Eliot's response to Victorian science have avoided this condescending depiction of Eliot as Lewes's creature by revealing her penetrating criticism of Darwinian science, but they nonetheless misrepresent the extent of Eliot's feminist resistance to evolutionary theory by ignoring the prior and more pervasive role that Herbert Spencer played in Eliot's life and writing throughout her career.
Spencer's contributions to evolutionary theory are typically ignored by most recent historians of science who retrospectively see Charles Darwin as the only true spokesman of evolution. Robert M. Young, for example, contends that the "significance of the writings of Robert Chambers, Herbert Spencer, and A. R. Wallace was far greater than has been reflected in writings about the debate." This exclusive focus on Darwin not only distorts our understanding of the history of Victorian science but also reifies the authority of modern science by suppressing the history of its mistakes. In describing Spencer's contributions to Victorian science, in particular, Young contends:
The problem about Spencer is ... to get historians to see how central his work and influence were to the nineteenth-century debate, both among scientists and the broader public. His reputation has suffered most among the leaders of thought in the period because subsequent scientists (followed dutifully by historians) have anachronistically dismissed him for holding a "Lamarckian" theory of the mechanism of evolution. Two things should be noticed about this position. First, that it was a theory which, though embattled, was taken seriously throughout the nineteenth century and indeed, was given increasing weight by Darwin (just as Spencer allowed the increasing role for natural selection). This point should lend perspective to the dismissal of Spencer as a serious figure. Second, he was unequivocal in pointing out that he attached great weight to the question of the mechanism of evolution precisely because of its ethical, educational, social, and political consequences. Throughout his mature life he was seeking a scientific basis for a doctrine of inevitable progress which would justify his belief in an extreme of laissez-faire economics and social theory. ("Historiographic" 382–83)
Spencer's role in establishing evolutionary science as a master discourse defining sexuality, knowledge, and power in the second half of the nineteenth century can best be seen when we consider the matrix of ideas suggested by the broad term evolutionism, which spans the uncertain and shifting territory defined by his interpretations of biogenetic law, natural and sexual selection, adaptation, equilibrium, and decadence.
The primary objective of this study is to disclose Eliot's ongoing dialogue with Spencer throughout her career, and to demonstrate her resolute feminist resistance to many aspects of Spencer's biological determinism, especially as it found expression in his developing analysis of female sexuality and motherhood. Moreover, by understanding Eliot's acceptance of some tenets of Spencerian—as opposed to Darwinian—evolutionism, we can begin to understand the conservative force that Victorian science and evolutionary theory exerted in containing the debate on what Victorians called the Woman Question. Indeed, in an era when Darwin could simply dismiss J. S. Mill's arguments for women's emancipation in The Subjection of Women as "unscientific" (Russett 15-14), we must recognize the monumental challenge that evolutionary theory posed for feminist intellectuals who, like Eliot, saw Victorian science as promoting a more accurate view of the natural world.
Of course, the problem of defining the origins of ideas—evolutionary or otherwise—is a complex and humbling one, as Eliot reminds us in Daniel Deronda. Instructed by this novel, I do not propose to argue that Spencer influenced Eliot more profoundly than Darwin did. Instead, I wish to trace those parallels in their lives and in their ideas about evolution, nature, women, sex, and gender that have not been recognized sufficiently by critics of Eliot's work. Many biographical similarities invite this approach, for Eliot and Spencer were born only a year apart and both grew up in the Midlands. Early in life, both were exposed to this region's Dissenting traditions of evangelicalism and socialism. Both were largely self-educated and both earned their livelihoods, for a time, as editors of serious intellectual periodicals. And both won fame among the ranks of the most prolific and ambitious thinkers of their time. But this comparison also exposes the profound impact of gender on their lives and in the positions they take, revealing how Eliot's gender limited her agency and means of resistance as an intellectual woman in Victorian England.
The following chapters show that when Eliot and Spencer began their lifelong friendship in 1851, they agreed in endorsing several of the goals espoused by Victorian feminists in the 1840s and 1850s. However, by the time Eliot's Adam Bede appeared in 1859, Spencer had already begun his dramatic repudiation of the feminist causes he originally supported. How Spencer's feminism transformed itself into passionate antifeminism under the pressure of his evolutionary ideas, and how Eliot retained what has seemed to most modern readers an ambivalent feminism at best, is part of the story I wish to relate in the pages that follow.
This study presents an analysis of the anxiety of influence that existed between George Eliot and Herbert Spencer rather than an argument about the direction of influence. The extant biographical record is too incomplete on several important questions to allow the dynamics of influence to be determined more precisely, for John Cross destroyed many of Eliot's letters, especially from the crucial early years of her friendship with Spencer, and many of Spencer's letters from this period have also been lost (Haight, George Eliot 71,112). While the letters that remain do show that Eliot initially responded to Spencer's work with enthusiasm, they also reveal how her appreciation for his developing evolutionary analysis turned to an angry criticism which, by 1861, prompted her refusal to discuss with him its implications for art, literature, education, social reform, and feminism. This criticism is inscribed in all of her novels. By the time Middlemarch (1871–1872) had established Eliot's reputation as a serious novelist, however, she had achieved a more good-humored perspective on Spencer and regarded her friend's intellectual crotchets with more indulgence. Perhaps this is why Darwinism appears to be more influential in her last two novels.
In Eliot's own time and after her death, however, she was regarded as a disciple of Spencer rather than Darwin. A few months after Eliot's death in 1880, Spencer himself tried to correct what he saw as an overestimation of his influence on her. To one journalist he wrote:
It may be, and probably is as you say, that she was influenced all along by my books. In fact, accepting their general views as she did, it could hardly be otherwise; and it may be that the Principles of Psychology was a help to her in the respect of her analysis. But it never occurred to me to consider the effect so great as you suppose. Her powers in respect of introspection and sympathetic insight into others were naturally extremely great; and I think her achievements in the way of delineation of character are almost wholly due to spontaneous intuition.
Because many of Eliot's readers apparently continued to have difficulty imagining that she possessed a mind of her own, Spencer's ambivalent efforts to correct presumptions about her debts to him went unheeded until his own reputation suffered a precipitous decline in the early years of this century.
Spencer's debts to Eliot have been even more difficult to recognize, because, first of all, he seemed incapable of acknowledging intellectual influences of any kind. His refutation of the obvious influence of Comte on his social theories is, perhaps, the best known example. While he did not, and probably could not, admit that Eliot had also profoundly influenced his thought, he describes numerous meetings and conversations with her in his Autobiography.
The most persuasive evidence that Spencer felt an anxiety of influence in his relation to Eliot can be seen in his efforts to suppress most of the passages in his writing that reveal Eliot's role in his personal and intellectual life, especially in the 1850s. After Eliot's death in 1880, Spencer obliterated or distorted the record of his early position on feminism by erasing most of the chapter on "The Rights of Women" and rewriting many other passages about women in his Social Statics and in the first editions of the earlier volumes of his Synthetic Philosophy. None of his modern editors has commented on the significance of these changes. Similarly, his depiction of Eliot—and his comments and silences about women more generally in his Autobiography—expose, but do not acknowledge or justify, the astonishing reversal in his assessment of feminism and women's evolutionary potential.
In fact, Spencer's failure to reconcile his ideas about evolutionism with his attitudes about Victorian feminism, and his subsequent repudiation and erasure of his inconsistencies, especially in his evaluation of gender roles and motherhood, give us insight into how post-Darwinian science and medicine received and subsequently reinscribed traditional interpretations of biological differences in what I call the "reconstruction of gender" that followed Darwin's revolution. Unlike most Victorians, who began to discern the profound implications of evolutionary theory only after the publication of On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, Spencer and Eliot recognized the challenge that evolutionary theory posed for feminism and other social reforms in the early 1850s. They both realized that as orthodox Christianity came under attack by evolutionary theory, a reassessment of the "biopolitics" of Victorian society would follow, requiring a reevaluation, for example, of the elements Michel Foucault has identified as central to it: "health, progeny, race, the future of the species, [and] the vitality of the social body." These issues were most sharply confronted, as we shall see, when they considered the subject of motherhood and the language, symbols, and ideology that defined it
Another consequence of Spencer's habit of revising himself is that it is difficult to reconstruct and document a clear chronology of the development of his ideas by consulting standard editions of his Synthetic Philosophy. Nearly all of the prose that appears in the Synthetic Philosophy was published at least twice, appearing first in contemporary periodicals or in serial form available in installments to individual private subscribers. These "numbers" were later consolidated, usually without further editing, and reissued as complete volumes. In the analysis that follows, I dte whenever possible from the first editions of these volumes rather than from the earlier ephemeral serial versions, though this sometimes may create the impression that Eliot was responding to ideas that Spencer had not yet published.
Eliot's letters show, however, that she and George Henry Lewes helped Spencer develop his plan for the serial publication of the Synthetic Philosophy, kept in close contact with him over the years, and often read his essays, sometimes in draft form and frequently before their publication as numbers. Moreover, it was not difficult to anticipate the general direction that Spencer's evolutionary analysis would take after 1860 when he published a detailed outline for his projected series of volumes, later called the Synthetic Philosophy. Over the next twelve years, Spencer doggedly organized his research and writing according to this schedule. It was not until February 1872, when Eliot was writing Book 5 of Middlemarch, that Spencer interrupted his research for the first volume of The Principles of Sociology in order to write The Study of Sociology, first published in Contemporary Review between April 1872 and October 1873. Thus, for most of Eliot's writing career, Spencer's evolutionary ideas developed in very predictable patterns. My reading of her novels indicates that Eliot often responded to and sometimes anticipated Spencer's most sexist and racist evolutionary arguments.
Eliot's intellectualism and her contributions to the Victorian novel and to Victorian thought no longer need to be defended, but Spencer's work still demands reassessment. Like Eliot, he too occupies a unique place in the intellectual history of the Victorian period because he acted as an interpreter, promoting the dialogue between what Foucault has described as two distinct orders of knowledge in nineteenth-century discourse about sex: "a biology of reproduction which developed continuously according to a general scientific normativity" and "a medicine of sex conforming to quite different rules of formulation" (54). Foucault argues that there was no real exchange between these two orders of knowledge, but Spencer's writing belies this assertion. Moreover, Spencer's work facilitated this exchange and profoundly influenced scientists and doctors on both rides of the Atlantic, helping to change permanently the ways Victorians wrote about women, gender, sex, and motherhood.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from George Eliot and Herbert Spencer by Nancy L. Paxton. Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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