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Thesis ID: CBB001567471

How the Past Remains: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and the Victorian Anthropological Doctrine of Survivals (2013)

Northwestern University
Law, Jules
Lane, Christopher
Law, Jules
Herbert, Christopher
Lane, Christopher

ISBN: 9781303122859

Publication Date: 2013
Edition Details: Advisor: Herbert, Christopher; Committee Members: Lane, Christopher, Law, Jules.
Physical Details: 251 pp.
Language: English

Outside Links

Academia.edu

Anthropology Science and literature 19th century Great Britain Tylor, Edward Burnett Tylor, Edward Burnett Hardy, Thomas Eliot, George

In this dissertation I demonstrate how English anthropologists and novelists in the second half of the nineteenth century became enthralled by the idea that civilization contained vestiges of distant, primitive ages within it. I argue that, despite their overlapping interests and approaches, Victorian social scientists and literary writers viewed such cultural traces quite differently. In 1871, Edward Burnett Tylor rested his argument that all mankind evolved from the primitive to the civilized on his "doctrine of survivals"--a theory (influenced by Charles Darwin, among others) that a given society bore evidence of its primitive, savage past in its customs, superstitions, and religious institutions. Tylor envisioned anthropology as a "reformer's science" bent on ridding advanced society of anachronistic irrationalities, which he often located in the English countryside. As I show, however, his influential notion of cultural survival was fraught with characteristically Victorian tensions over what separated the savage from the civilized and distinguished progress from degeneration: the survival thus becomes in Tylor's work a contradictory figure. Similar tensions emerge, I argue, in novels by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, writers who were deeply engaged in the discourse of evolutionary anthropology throughout their careers. Their representations of England's disintegrating rural culture often confirm, in their own idioms, Tylor's view of long-held customs as socially destructive, however illuminating they may be on the course of evolution. Yet, even as Eliot and Hardy anticipated and appropriated elements of survival theory, they critiqued the imaginative limits of Victorian anthropology by finding pervasive function in supposedly useless cultural relics. At the same time, they dramatized the equivocations of the survival concept, showing civilization to be more overrun with primitive ghosts and shadows than even Tylor could admit. In so doing, I contend, they paved the way for early-twentieth-century grapplings with the nature of civilization and its developmental remains--as in the work of functionalist anthropologists who eventually rejected the survival concept and literary writers who relished it as a dynamic figure of civilization's latent primitivism and lingering past.

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Description Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 74/09(E), Mar 2014. Proquest Document ID: 1400274461.

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