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Thesis ID: CBB001560760

Gothic Taxonomies: Heredity and Sites of Domestication in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (2012)

Michigan State University
Stoddart, Judith
Juengel, Scott

Publication Date: 2012
Edition Details: Advisors: Stoddart, Judith; Scott Juengel
Physical Details: 271 pp.
Language: English

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Academia.edu

This project reads the ways in which systems of taxonomy and gothic novels, when read together, chart the history of nineteenth-century theories of heredity. By pitting Enlightenment empiricist and rationalist thought against gothic novels, literary critics have posited the two fields as diametrically opposed entities. However, I argue here that the gothic novel translates naturalists' and taxonomists' questions about species, applying them to the social, political and biological structure of the human family. The central term of the project, "gothic taxonomy," refers to the moments in each of these disciplines, and in the exchanges between them, that describe failed systematizations, the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of nineteenth-century attempts to encapsulate the laws of hereditary transmission in a single set of natural laws. By reading taxonomy as a process with social and political consequences, this project provides much-needed nuance to the often reductive critical debates about hereditarians and their foes during the nineteenth century. Revising and complicating these notions forces us to rethink the gothic as a discourse that is merely oppositional in nature, existing only to challenge the narratives of Enlightenment. Reading the gothic as an interpretive model that actively unpacks the inconsistencies of systematization, rather than simply as a reactionary celebration of the irrational or the subconscious, allows us to read it as a discourse with a real contribution of its own to make to scientific debates about the biological and social role of heredity during the period. These readings posit the domesticized gothic as an interpretive mode that challenges the logic of inclusion and of social boundedness promulgated in the nineteenth century realist novel. In each chapter, I examine the conversations about heredity that occur at four different iterations of the domestic: the home, the farm and the garden, and the nation. The first chapter uses Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Jean Baptiste de Lamarck's Zoological Philosophy in order to argue that the novel uses the space of the home and its boundaries in order to first provoke a series of misleading and inaccurate versions of the family tree, and then to force the reader to redefine notions of enclosure, belonging, and the family itself. Chapter two positions Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall against the Romantic-scientific poetry of Erasmus Darwin; I argue that Brontë reclaims and reformulates debates about "breeding" and education in order to construct a model of heredity which favors maternal influence, in spite of the economic and legal legacies of the patriarchal conventions of the time. The third chapter places Charles Darwin's The Variations of Plants and Animals Under Domestication in conversation with the novels of Wilkie Collins, arguing that post-Origin thinking about heredity relied on an invisible materialism rooted in much older notions of invisible fluid matter, notions which allowed contemporaries to paradoxically straddle the boundary between determinism and autonomy. In the final chapter, I argue that Mona Caird's The Daughters of Danaus (1894) returns to Anne Brontë's earlier logic of "breeding" in order to sketch out the complicated relationship between women's bodies and nationalism; Caird revises Walter Bagehot's gendered notions of a hereditary basis for the nation and embraces a mythic matriarchal past which allows her to subvert biologically-based arguments about the New Woman without denying the importance of heredity for the individual and the nation.

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Description On how “systems of taxonomy and gothic novels, when read together, chart the history of nineteenth-century theories of heredity.” (from the abstract) Cited in ProQuest Diss. & Thes. . ProQuest Doc. ID 1038378848.

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001560760/

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