Charles and the Hopeful Monster: Postmodern Evolutionary Theory in The French Lieutenant's Woman

Abstract

The French Lieutenant's Woman clearly enough tells story involving the great crisis of Darwinism in Victorian England. But we should look closely at the precise way in which Fowles represents this crisis, otherwise we may miss the significance of the Darwin of our own time, which is equally important in the novel.(1) The book makes it plain that we have this later Darwin to consider. Of his protagonist, Smithson, the narrator tells us that Charles called Darwinist, and yet he had not really understood Darwin. But then, nor had Darwin himself (45). We here in the late twentieth century have corrected at least some of these earlier misunderstandings and in the process of doing so have defined ourselves historically. For as Dr. Grogan says at one point, The Origin of Species is the living ... not the dead (131). Our understanding of evolution determines in profound way our understanding of ourselves as living beings. And of course modern culture is a culture dominated by evolutionary (Beer 5) to the point that many who have never actually read any evolutionary theory take the basic idea for granted. Writers such as Gillian Beer, Sally Shuttleworth, and Redmond O'Hanlon have studied the effects of an actual reading knowledge of Darwin on famous Victorian writers. George Levine, on the hand, in Darwin and the Novelists, has discussed the way Darwinism permeates Victorian realism, even among writers who probably did not know any science first hand (3). But Levine does not set out simply to show that fictional and Darwin's evolutionary theory get constructed in similar ways. Rather he aims to Shadow forth Darwin more disruptive, perhaps, than even the greatest of his literary followers can suggest, Darwin who, if by his contemporary novelists, might well have led to kinds of narratives. (22) In words, Levine will read Victorian novels in light of what we now know of Darwin's ideas. For Darwinism has changed since Darwin was alive. In the same way that Darwinism embodied the assumptions of the Victorian novel and, conversely, the Victorian novel embodied the Victorian Darwin, so we shall find that the postmodern or fully absorbed Darwin embodies the postmodern novel and, conversely, the postmodern novel - in this case The French Lieutenant's Woman is paradigmatic example of one of those other kinds of narratives suggested by Levine - embodies the postmodern Darwin. To explain this relationship, we will first need to establish what seems postmodern about recent Darwinian theory, and having done this we will then examine Fowles's novel. By the postmodern Darwin, I mean that in the last 30 to 40 years certain ideas have become especially prominent in evolutionary theory, and these ideas are of kind with host of ideas that many of us lump under the term postmodernism. Of course developments in evolutionary theory have arisen from within the scientific disciplines involved. But it is also true that disciplinary histories are not purely self-contained affairs. Historical periods may be defined by related complexes of thought appearing contemporaneously across wide areas of knowledge and interest. The elements of postmodern thinking that will be most relevant here revolve, as always, around the fundamental critique of metaphysical absolutes of all kinds, metaphysical absolute being any representation that is taken consciously or unconsciously as entirely self-contained, self-identical, self-present, and therefore outside the realm of culture, history, desire, and ideology. The critique may be direct, as in overtly deconstructive kinds of interpretations, or it may be indirect, corollary to certain analyses. Thus Thomas Kuhn's recasting of the history of scientific revolutions plays part in the critique of metaphysics even though this is not the specific aim of his argument. In any case, whatever the particular realm in which the critique of metaphysical absolutes occurs, one common outcome is the discovery that absolutes of this kind always function as unconscious anchors for certain kind of identity. …