Dickens and Heredity: When Like Begets Like by Goldie Morgentaler

Abstract

ESC 28, 2002 mination to (as he states in the preface) “try to understand” is carefully balanced with his obvious personal stance on the issue. A rare combination of meticulous detail and engaging prose, w ritten by a scholar who obviously treats his subject with re­ spect (warts and all), Monk Lewis will be the standard reference text on M atthew Lewis for decades to come. ELIZABETH MILLER / M em orial University of Newfoundland Goldie Morgentaler. Dickens and Heredity: When Like Begets Like. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 2000. 221. Cloth. W riting well before the discovery of DNA or even germ plasm, Charles Dickens, like one of his readers, Charles Darwin, knew virtually nothing about “the mechanics of heredity” (21, 160), Goldie Morgentaler contends in Dickens and Heredity, but his novels display an abiding fascination with its operations as well as an appreciation for the narrative potential of other combustible scientific theories. Dickens was heir to eighteenthcentury and early Victorian scientific and popular theories on heredity — now mostly proven false — and incorporated them in his fiction in ways that, as Morgentaler elaborates, influenced the novels’ constructions of identity, time, race, and class. While closely considering the extent to which heredity — not char­ acter— is fate in the Dickensian universe, Morgentaler’s lucid investigation sometimes gestures towards a potentially much broader study of heredity and narrative. Though potentially far-reaching in its implications, Dickens and Heredity is grounded in an examination of the scientific, biblical, and cultural contexts in which Dickens worked. Dick­ ens and Heredity mainly employs a traditional, old historicist model of historical reflection as it sketches pre-Victorian and Victorian attitudes towards heredity and then traces illustra­ tive patterns, motifs, and themes, in Morgentaler’s terms, in the novels. W ritten in a disarmingly straightforward style, this book presents a carefully researched argument that updates older de­ bates on nature/nurture, life/art, and determinism/free will in Victorian fiction and maintains a formalist focus on patterns of 744 REVIEWS doubling, twinning, pairing, and mirroring both within individ­ ual novels and in juxtaposed novels such as Great Expectations and David Copperfield. Morgentaler presents detailed readings of Dickens’s novels, with the exception of Nicholas Nickleby and Hard Times. While generally following in the footsteps of the ground-breaking studies of Darwin and Victorian fiction by Gillian Beer and George Levine, Morgentaler cites more recent readings of the novels though mostly in endnotes with their authors om itted from the index. Interest in heredity and eugenics has a long history, as does debate over the relative significance of a vast range of influ­ ences on reproduction, as Morgentaler explains. Aristotle dis­ tinguished passive female and active male contributions to fer­ tilization. For Aristotle, size did m atter: “a small penis was a better indicator of fertility than a large one, because the se­ men, having a shorter distance to travel to the womb, was in less danger of cooling” (4). In the seventeenth century, empha­ sis shifted to the role of the egg in procreation and the fe­ male imagination in forming or deforming the foetus, but by the eighteenth century emphasis reverted to the male contribu­ tion, as is well-known from the beginning of Tristram Shandy. Later, even Darwin believed that the volume of ejaculate de­ termined the child’s sex and its resemblance to its father (159). As Morgentaler explains, science reinforced dominant ideologies whether of biblical revelation or of species and racial stability, although the latter was challenged by the evidence of the chil­ dren of the slave trade. The developing understanding of the female role in reproduction, moreover, like the changing view of female anatomy, reinforced the increasing separation of the sexes into public and domestic domains, although the male role in heredity remained primary for the Victorians. Dickens’s handling of heredity was influenced by a variety of theories such as preformation, the notion that adults born throughout history had existed in dormant form within the first ancestor at the dawn of creation. Preformation reinforced the mechanistic conception of children as miniatures of their adult selves, a notion Dickens abhorred, although he, like Darwin, ac­ cepted aspects of “soft heredity” such as pangenesis...