Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-century Fiction by Gillian Beer

by Gillian Beer, Unknown Author

Book by Beer, Gillian

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Literary Criticism, History, Victorian, Academic, Literature

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Dame Gillian Beer is a British literary critic and academic, and a Fellow of the British Academy. She was a King Edward VII Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Cambridge as wells as a past President of Clare Hall College. She also spent time as the Andrew Mellon Senior Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art.

Reviews

[Daniel · Rating 2 out of 5]

An examination of the way the language, metaphors, and narrative logic of Darwin's "Origin of Species" influenced the literary culture of Victorian Britain, with particular emphasis on Hardy and Eliot. The first part of the book focuses on Darwin's creativity--the literary qualities of his work, the metaphors and language he needed to arrive at to articulate this new plot of evolutionism. Beer is obviously very erudite and well-versed in the relevant literary, scientific, and scholarly contexts of her time period but her claims are unconvincingly developed. In Middlemarch she hones in on the "web of association" that Eliot uses to structure her plot and that was a central metaphor for Darwin. In Hardy, the Darwinian connections are more obvious, as Hardy is obsessed with the way chance dominates human destiny. This all sounds nice in theory, but Beer is unable to make what is inevitably a difficult case: that these aspects of Hardy and Eliot are specifically Darwinian, specifically shaped by the literary and imaginative tropes of "Origin."

[M.k. Yost · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though some times a bit hard to slog through, there were some fantastic observations and really enlightening comments about perceptions of evolution and nineteenth century thought and literature.

[James Kearns · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gillian Beer makes an important point in Darwin’s Plots, when she states that “[t]he debate between constancy and transmutation of species had been mooted throughout the eighteenth century, and was part of a much older debate about the constancy and transformation of matter” (11). As she explains, even the word “evolution” was at the time of comparative newness: “mean[ing] the stages through which a living being passes in the course of its development from egg to adult,” and providing “an account of a single life span” (11). Nevertheless, “evolutionary theory” would “challenge the single life span as a sufficient model for understanding experience” (11). To be exact, the biological term for this – the “pale of individual development” – is ontogeny, but later accounts of evolution, from the 1830s, expand to encompass “the development of a species rather than an individual,” that is, phylogeny (11). As Beer suggests, “[t]he blurring of the distinction between ontogeny […] and phylogeny […] in the single term ‘evolution’ proved to be one of the most fruitful disturbances of meaning in the literature of the ensuing hundred years and is a striking example of the multivalency of evolutionary concepts” (12).
Beer does not add “microgeny” to the debate which might take account of a mode of theorising what Virginia Woolf describes as “moments of being” (in her “Sketch of the Past”). In other words, Beer describes “ontogeny” and “phylogeny” without the possible recapitulating genetic influence of “microgeny.” If one were to remain with Woolf, we might suggest that adding “microgeny” to the evolutionary vocabulary would enable us, on the one hand, to account for Woolf’s own mode of theorising the said “moments of being” which she describes as “separate,” “exceptional” and, counterintuitively, as “nonbeing,” while on the other hand, we might attempt to disturb further the evolutionary account “of meaning” as one which deals not only with time across a lifetime, ontogeny, and time across aeons, phylogeny, but time across milliseconds, that is to say, microgeny: the time it takes from the moment a stimulus is presented until it registers in a behavioural response or in consciousness. That personal preference notwithstanding, Beer’s contribution here is indeed a landmark book.
In her reading of Claude Bernard, Beer suggests that, according to the Bernard’s formulation, “man is blind to the extent of the present, the phenomena by which he is laterally surrounded and which lie just beyond the activity of his unaided senses” – yes, she writes “laterally” to assert quite rightly that “[e]volutionary theory emphasises human unawareness of the past and obliges us to study a world from whose history we are largely absent” (17). Human observation of our surroundings is in this way curtailed, and it is only within the narrow limits of our observation that we may come to know the world. That is to say, we are seeking a world of antiquity from which we were absent.
Dame Gillian Beer’s focus in Darwin’s Plots centres on nineteenth-century fiction – she will in due course make interventions into Virginia Woolf’s fiction too – but her groundbreaking work has had and will continue to have a marked influence on literary studies now and well into the future.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book to be frustrating. Much of that frustration is me. I am not well-versed in the esoteric details of Darwin. Sure, I know the broad strokes, but to truly grasp this book a more detailed understanding of Darwin would be a definite advantage.

That said, this book has a thorough, detailed, and effectively argued thesis. Gillian Beer offers much evident scholarship and her focus is razor sharp (at least what I can grasp:-)

If you read Hardy or Eliot this book is one you should read. There is much to learn about how Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’ not only altered the path of 19C fiction but rocked it to its foundations.

[Erica · Rating 3 out of 5]

I generally admire Beer as a scholar, but I think I've already imbibed most of what she's argued here through other means. She reads Darwin and his theory of evolution for that moment in the 19th century when theory poses on the boundary between fiction and fact. She traces the ways that Darwin's thinking impacts Victorian thought generally, and then looks at his theory's influence on Eliot and Hardy especially.

[Nahra]

Anyone who loves George Eliot or the novels of Thomas Hardy will like this book for its connection of those authors and books with the big unavoidable presence of Charles Darwin -- even in ficiton.

[CL Chu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ignite my curiosity about Origin. Time to finally read the 19th century book after claiming to be doing history of ecology for years!