Germinating Memory: Hardy and Evolutionary Biology

Abstract

Thomas Hardy's passionate interest in Darwin and Darwinism is well documented. The partly autobiographical Life of Hardy, ostensibly authored by his second wife Florence Lavinia, records his consistent and developing fascination with scientific theories influenced in various ways by the paradigms of evolution and natural selection. Critics of Hardy and historians of the influence of Darwinian theories on Victorian culture have sought in Hardy's work some consistent model of evolutionary theory by which we might place the novelist and poet among his scientifically-inclined contemporaries. This search for an overarching evolutionary narrative within the work may be seen as part of a larger effort to disentangle the varied and often antagonistic tendrils of thought inspired by Darwin from the tangled bank of Victorian evolutionary hypotheses. Like other Victorian writers, such as Samuel Butler and George Eliot, Hardy looked to evolutionary biology as a means of conceptualizing alternative models of inheritance. By turns grim and hopeful, biological narratives of inheritance in the late nineteenth-century lent themselves to a welter of competing interpretations by cultural critics. In his comprehensive analysis of the influence of evolutionary biology on Victorian literary culture, Peter Morton observes that during the few decades which elapsed between the publication of the Origin and the foundation of Mendelian genetics around the turn of the century, evolutionary biology was in a state of extraordinary confusion and ambiguity, and a wide range of writers were able to exploit science for their own aesthetic or polemic ends.1 Mortons claim applies not only to writers of fiction in a cultural context where