Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman Ann L. Ardis (bio) Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman, by Angelique Richardson; pp. xvii + 250. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, £45.00, $70.00. Angelique Richardson first established herself as an important contributor to the study of the figure of the New Woman through her work as editor, with Chris Willis, of The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms (2001) and Women Who Did: Stories by Men and Women, 1890-1914 (2002), and her occasional essays on Sarah Grand, Thomas Hardy, and issues of fitness and health in New Woman fiction. Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman both consolidates and further enhances her stature in the field, while also giving her a bigger canvas on which to paint her careful historical documentation of "the intimate relations" between late Victorian feminism and eugenics (xvii). As Richardson reminds us at the outset of her study, although the atrocities of Nazism have "encouraged a perception of eugenics as a product and practice of the Third Reich," the earliest manifestation of eugenics as a theory of rational reproduction was a late-nineteenth-century "class-based application" of post-Darwinian evolutionary discourse (3). Scholarship on the New Woman written in the 1990s, Richardson suggests, tends to emphasize Victorian feminists' challenges to "essentialist thinking about class, genetics, maternal instinct, and sexual determinism" (7). By contrast, Love and Eugenics insists upon recognition of the other feminist agendas at the turn of the century: the conservative feminist endorsements and reworkings of the ideology of separate spheres, for example; and the feminist constructions of biology as destiny that were proffered as a bulwark against the degeneration of British culture and empire. "Eugenic love was the politics of the state mapped onto bodies," Richardson argues: the "rational selection of a reproductive partner" replaces romance in an attempt better "to serve the state through breeding" (9). And the novels and short stories of three of the most influential New Woman writers, Grand, George Egerton, and Mona Caird, were an important vehicle for the expression and dissemination of these eugenic arguments. Indeed, insofar as early British eugenics was "primarily a matter of rhetoric and representation" rather than legislative action and public policy, their fiction provided "the most sustained expressions of eugenic ideas" in the Victorian fin de siècle (xvii). The strengths of this study are twofold. The broad historical contextualizations offered in the first four chapters illuminate these New Woman writers' deep engagements with eugenic theory. Richardson's thorough survey of pre- and post-Darwinian theories of cultural and biological evolution, together with her documentation of the proliferation of professional societies, philanthropic initiatives, and social purity organizations enabling the dissemination of eugenic ideas at the turn of the century, situates their work in a tradition of popular science writing that includes Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Darwin as well as Francis Galton and Havelock Ellis. The close readings of novels and short stories that Richardson provides in the final four chapters work as well as they do because of this larger, extraliterary contextualization. The chapters on Grand are particularly strong. Although most of the scholarship on Grand to date focuses on the runaway bestsellers of the 1890s, Richardson's study invites more careful consideration of Grand's last two novels, Adnam's Orchard (1912) and The Winged Victory (1916). Positioning them in relation to Patrick Geddes's environmental reformism and the Garden City Movement [End Page 706] provides insights both into Grand's "residual romantic attachment to aristocracy" and her sympathies with a socialism that "was compatible with eugenics" (154). If there is a weakness here, I would suggest it lies in Richardson's rather casual documentation of the history of recent scholarship on the New Woman, not in her historical recovery work. Is it in fact true that "the oppressive ideas that coexisted with the emancipatory theories of some New Women...remain largely unexamined," and that the focus of scholarship to date in this field "remains on her more progressive...