Harley - Autobiologies: Charles Darwin and the natural history of the self

Autobiologies

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ISBN 978-1-61148-600-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-61148-601-8 (electronic)

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

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With love to Leigh and David Harley

In his wonderful book, Victorian Afterlives, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst evidences the Victorian fascination with the self and what goes after it by cataloguing the words that nineteenth-century writers prefaced with self. There is, as expected, Thomas Carlyles quintessentially Victorian coinage, self-help, first appearing in Sartor Resartus in 1831, and reworked in Samuel Smiless volume of 1859 (Self-Help, a book famously admired by steampunk capitalist, Margaret Thatcher). But there are also compounds that are so embedded in our twenty-first-century vocabulary that it is difficult to imagine the upheaval of their conception: self-absorption (1862), self-analysis (1860), self-changing (1865), self-criticism (1857), self-effacement (1866), self-estimate (1837), self-hatred (1865), self-identical (1877), self-induce (1886), selfless (1825), self-limitation (1847), self-observation (1832), self-perfecting (1883), self-reliance (1833), self-repression (1870), self-revelation (1852), self-similar (1867). With few exceptions, these coinages suggest the self as an object, to be scrutinized, managed, or cultivated. Unsurprisingly, the same Victorian literary culture that lodges this version of the self in its lexicon also propagates literary forms conducive to the analysis, regulation, or representation of the self. Autobiography, lyric poetry, the diary or journal, and the confessional letter are by no means the exclusive property of the nineteenth century, but they find there a readership, and writers, ravenous for records of personality.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, in the thick of this already burgeoning writing and reading about self, a new and vigorous strain of autobiographies appearedworks by British evolutionary thinkers. The first decades of the twentieth century saw still more examples of this new type, including Herbert Spencers An Autobiography (begun in 1866, and published posthumously in 1904), Francis Galtons Memories of My Life (1908), Henry Maudsleys Autobiography (1912), Alfred Russel Wallaces My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions (1905), along with autobiographies by evolutionary enthusiasts and hangers-on, such as Edmund Gosse with his anonymously published Father and Son:A Study of Two Temperaments (1907). For nigh on sixty years, almost anyone who had seriously taken up the topic of transmutation, development, evolution, degeneration, or natural selection turned to writing the story of his or her singular life, infected with what John Addington Symonds called the Lues Autobiographica, or autobiographical plague. and a persistently militant advocate in a war many would think is already won.)

Why this proliferation in the long nineteenth century of autobiologies? And why, a generation or two later, were the far more numerous disciples of Darwin producing far fewer autobiographies of any stripe? My answer is threefold. Firstly, many of the nineteenth centurys evolutionists understood themselves to be producing totalizing theories of knowledge. Herbert Spencers Development Hypothesis is an exemplary case, a theory that could be used to synthesize all studies of life, from sociology, to psychology, biology, and philosophy. Darwins theory of natural selection has a similar status: although the Origin of Species avoided all but a glancing reference to the human as an evolutionary subject, it was clear to Darwins first readers that all organic life was implicated. Harriet Martineau, one of the first English Comteans, held all aspects of human culture, from religion, to the family, language, the social organism and individual knowledge, as explicable by the same principle. These theories were nothing if not universal, and the test of their universality was to apply them to the individual selfparticularly as the figure of the individual was fast becoming one of the most culturally privileged ideals in a democratising, post-Romantic landscape.

Secondly, English evolutionary thinkers were born, predominantly, to disestablishmentarian, dissenting, or at the very least, Protestant families, and were in contact thereby with the traditions of the spiritual autobiography and with the uses of autobiography as a vehicle for proselytizing and apologia. The chief reason for this books focus on English evolutionist-autobiographers is that their prior relationship to the traditions of the spiritual autobiography is virtually guaranteed, although of course the same could be said for American Asa Gray, and I have made an exception for Irish-born Oscar Wilde, whose De Profundis is deeply aware both of the traditions of spiritual autobiography and of contemporary continental theories of degeneration. However widely accepted any given evolutionary theory was in the nineteenth century, it was still counter-cultural. It is no surprise that the proponents of such theories would turn to the genre that their parents, members of religious counter-cultures, had used to demonstrate the relevance of a grand narrative to an individual life and indeed to defend that life by representing the dissenters commitment to conventional moral positions.

Thirdly, I see these autobiographical projects as experiments conducted by thinkers who genuinely wanted to gauge what happens to the self, their own selves, when subjected to theories that problematize entrenched ideas about free will, the origins of identity, the special metaphysical status of mind, individuality, and purpose.

This book argues that although Victorian evolutionists systematically took up autobiography as a kind of Petri dish in which to examine the effects of evolutionary theories on the self, in the process their evolutionary theories became garbled by the exigencies of autobiography itself and by the specificities of the authors history, emotions, relationships, anxieties, and anticipated readership. Ideas about the self and about life (ideas that owe both to Enlightenment theories of causality and to the Romantic obsession with the uncaused, free-willed individual) are built into the autobiographical genre, broad as that genre is. In this sense, autobiography is perhaps the worst place in which to trial a rupture with prior ideas about the self. The Petri dish already sports a culture, and its cells inevitably interfere with the autobiographers self. The autobiographers self also interferes with its own representation. Autobiographys remit, to represent its authors life, obliges it to engage with some of the facts of that life, or at least with memories based on perceptions of facts. The author can try to control how those (memories of perceptions of) facts are interpreted and narrated, or elided and disavowed, but the business of life itself still exists, and this existence, with its factual imperatives, is especially pressing for natural historians trained in empirical method, the careful observation and documentation of organic life.