Jane Austen & Charles Darwin: Naturalists and Novelists
by Peter W. Graham
(Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008)
CHRISTOPHER O. BLUM is the author of the introduction to the Ignatius Critical Edition of Pride and Prejudice and teaches Natural History, among other subjects, at Thomas More College.
Jane Austen’s novels have long been loved
for what the Oxford Aristotelian Richard
Whately spoke of as their “vivid distinctness
of description” and “minute fidelity
of detail.”1 From the quality of Robert
Martin’s penmanship to Robert Ferrars’
choice of a snuffbox, seemingly minor
matters in her hands prove to be revelations
of her characters’ souls. Although she
left behind only six completed novels and a
small stack of fragments and letters, Austen
wrote with such economy that these scanty
remains have provided sufficient matter
for now dozens of scholarly commentaries.
A more diffuse writer must write whole
shelves in order to say half as much. It is
precisely this fine-grained quality of her
vision that Professor Graham praises, seeing
in it an analogue to Charles Darwin’s
patient cataloguing and describing of the
natural world. In his “quartet of essays,”
he presents Austen in the light of a number
of Darwin’s works—not only The Origin of
Species—and offers a consideration of these
two “great English empiricists of the nineteenth
century” that, he hopes, might help
us to “learn to look closely at the social
and natural phenomena around us.” It is
an attempt worth making, and he is surely
right in supposing that we may become
better “attuned to reading the world by
reading Austen or Darwin.” For nature,
especially human nature, likes to hide, and
we often best learn its secrets by seeing
them in the mirrors that are the writings
of the wise.
What he admires, Professor Graham
imitates. In an age when transgressive
readings of literary classics have become
the norm, it is refreshing to hear from a
scholar who takes Jane Austen’s works as
he finds them, not as he wishes them to be.
In the four long essays devoted to observation
itself, sibling rivalry, marriage, and
what he calls—borrowing from Darwin—”variation,” he displays an admirable independence
from recent discussions of the
novelist’s works. Instead of judging whole
stories to be ironic, he rightly sees Austen’s
playful irony as but one tool in her kit,
and that used in the service of her satirical
juxtaposition of folly and right reason.
Instead of rejecting Austen’s happy endings
as unrepresentative of what must have
been the critical view of society held by
such a loner and outsider, he sees, rightly,
that good marriage is the chief personal
and social good that Austen had in view in
her tales. And, most wonderfully, instead
of concocting wild theories of supposed
influences on Austen’s thought based upon
flimsy evidence, he sticks to the texts of the
novels and wrings from them the meaning
that they hold—and wring he surely does,
devoting a full fifteen pages to the topic of
blushing alone. When he does turn to the
contemporary critical literature—usually
in the notes—it is more often than not to
take issue with one of the current fads. For
Professor Graham roots his interpretation
not in the rantings of some trendy postcolonialist,
but in the staid, myopic theories
of Charles Darwin.
Darwin’s own career, of course, was a
long and complex one. Graham is surely
right in reminding us that he was from
first to last a great observational naturalist
whose excursions into theory were longdelayed,
and, when they came, heavily
belabored. It is a shame that alongside his
patient readings of Austen’s novels, especially
Emma, Graham does not offer us a
tour of Darwin’s great work of natural history,
his Journal of Researches, known popularly
as the Voyage of the Beagle. In those
pages, the reader circumnavigates the
globe in the company of a zealous observer
full of wonder at the variety and the order
of nature. The young Darwin had not yet
learned to reduce every explanation to one
of origins, nor to explain away beauty and
fruitfulness as the epiphenomena of the
struggle for existence. He was still capable
of seeing the “primeval forests” of South
America as “temples filled with the varied
productions of the God of Nature,”
in the presence of which wonder became
awe: “no one can stand in these solitudes
unmoved, and not feel that there is more
in man than the mere breath of his body.”2
The young Darwin, like Jane Austen,
responded generously to the mental gifts
he had been given; the older Darwin, brow
deeply furrowed and vision crimped and
narrowed, descended into a tragic melancholia.
“If I had to live my life again,” he
wrote in his Autobiography, “I would have
made a rule to read some poetry and listen
to some music at least once every week.”
He judged his loss of “higher aesthetic
tastes”—to say nothing of his disbelief—to
be a “loss of happiness,” and perhaps even
an injury to “the moral character.”3
Darwin’s own blinders, skillfully packaged
by propagandists from T. H. Huxley
to Richard Dawkins, have become those
of our age. Consider our common scientific approach to nature. Instead of taking
nature as we find it, beautifully varied but
wonderfully ordered, we must collapse
the universe we see into a mere moment
of geological, nay, astrophysical time. We
have convinced ourselves that a scientific
account is an evolutionary one, and vice
versa. So, for instance, a well-known textbook
in ornithology frames the whole subject
in evolutionary terms, beginning with
a discussion of “origins” and ending with
population dynamics and “speciation.”
The marvels of flight, migration, song,
nest-building, and reproduction according
to kind—the objects of utter fascination
to thousands upon thousands of avid
birders—are subordinated to the evolutionary
account. At least, that is, in rhetoric:
“Some 150 million years ago, a small,
bipedal reptile lived among the dinosaurs.
Its stiff scales eventually became soft feathers.
Its leaps and short glides led to graceful
flight. Feathered insulation enhanced control
of a high body temperature, increasing
activity and endurance. Mastery of
flight opened a world of ecological opportunities.
A new group of vertebrates, the
Class Aves, evolved.”4 Hard as it may be to
believe that such bio-geo-fantasy can serve
as a controlling metaphor for a sober textbook
or that modern science would so brazenly
resort to the passive voice in order to
paper over explanatory gaps, such is indeed
the mind of contemporary natural history.
Darwin’s bland reductionism has become
second nature to us; we no longer notice
the cracks and distortions in his mirror.
There is a wonderful irony in Professor
Graham’s use of Darwinian theory to
attempt to illuminate Austen’s novels, for
he unwittingly provides a reductio ad absurdam
of Darwinism itself. Take, for instance,
his treatment of the middle Bennet daughter,
the mousy Mary, the one who devotes
her time to books and the piano and rather
likes the censorious Mr. Collins. Professor
Graham’s observations about Mary
are a fine example of his astute reading of
the importance of birth order in Austen’s
novels: she falls uncomfortably between
the elder sisters Jane and Elizabeth and the
younger tandem of Kitty and Lydia, and so
is, as it were, doomed to an unhappy position
in the family, even had she not been
plain. But when it comes time to draw a
conclusion, the Darwinian rhetorical overlay
is thickly spread: “Loneliness among
her sisters and lack of beauty drive Mary to
choose a studious niche in the family ecosystem.”
It is worth asking how the older
rhetoric would have made the same point;
how might Dr. Johnson have put it? “Set
in an uncomfortable middle between two
closely-matched pairs of sisters and lacking
in grace and beauty, Mary sought solace in
her books.” Does the ecological jargon in
fact make for a more illuminating explanation?
Or again, consider this repackaging
of the famous love-story: “In proposing
to Elizabeth, Darcy has clearly followed
the imperatives of sexual selection, which
in this case felicitously correspond with
rather than fight against civilization’s cultivated
tastes. First struck by Eliza’s fine
eyes, healthy body, and abundant vitality,
he later comes to value her mental powers,
temperament, and moral principles.” But
has anyone ever doubted that man’s natural
inclination for union with woman has
involved bodily as well as mental attraction?
Does the phrase “sexual selection”
really explain anything, or does it rather
appeal to a certain habit of mind because it
seems to have the unvarnished, cold, even
unmasked character that we have come to
expect from science?
Darwinism, in its pure form, is little
better than systematic pessimism. The
glass is always half-empty: apparent balance
and order is only the chance result
of competition; instinctive behavior of
tremendous sophistication is only part of
a successful life-history strategy; evident
and consistent differences in kind are
only unsteady appearances. At least it can
be said, however, that some Darwinians,
and Professor Graham among them, still
hold—beyond what their principles can
justify—that nature is worth investigating,
deeply intelligible, and even in some ways
normative. To train a biologist’s eye upon
Jane Austen’s novels is not such a bad idea.
For a naturalist rightly sees that she depicts
individuals thriving in family “ecosystems.”
Graham is very right to notice her
positive treatment of married couples such
as the Crofts and families such as the Musgroves,
and, most perceptively, to chart the
generally bad character traits of her onlychild
characters such as the unstable Frank
Churchill, the reckless Willoughby, and
the reprobate Wickham. The only complaint
that one could lodge, beyond noting
the shortcomings of the Darwinian rhetoric,
is that he does not carry his analysis far
enough. When, for instance, he discusses
entail and primogeniture, he leaves behind
the family as biological unit and relapses
into an individualist account, alleging that
primogeniture has for one of its ends keeping
“the family name consequential over
generations”—as if the custom had been a
matter of emotion or of livery and silver
plate. No, entail and primogeniture were
almost ruthlessly biological, but the locus
of “selection” was the family as a biological
community seeking to perpetuate
itself over time. And this was very plain
to Jane Austen, who in Sir Walter Elliot
painted a portrait of a thoroughly emasculated
and sterile landed aristocrat. His
failure to perpetuate his estate by siring
an heir was the biological manifestation
of a thoroughgoing lack of generosity in
his soul. Conversely, Mr. Knightley is the
very paragon of fruitfulness: not only are
the strawberry beds, fields, and woodlots
of Donwell Abbey abounding in produce,
but their lord will also marry and, we have
every hope to expect, perpetuate his line
to the good of his extended family and,
indeed, the entire village community of
Highbury. It is true that Jane Austen had
a deeply natural view of human thriving;
she was in no way alienated from her femininity
or from her human nature. Yet in
the mirror of her novels, we do not see the
warped and twisted Darwinian cosmos,
but the bountiful, beautiful, and ordered
nature of Dr. Johnson, Aristotle, and the
Psalms.5
NOTES
- Richard Whately’s review of Northanger Abbey and
Persuasion in Quarterly Review (1821), reprinted in Jane
Austen: The Critical Heritage, ed. B.C. Southam (London:
Routledge, 1968), 96. - Charles Darwin, Voyage
of the Beagle, ed. Janet Browne and Michael Neve (London:
Penguin, 1989), 374. - Darwin, Autobiography,
ed. Nora Barlow (New York: Norton, 1958), 139. -
Frank B. Gill, Ornithology (New York: W. H. Freeman,
1990), 13. - See Scott D. Evans, Samuel Johnson’s “General
Nature”: Tradition and Transition in Eighteenth-Century
Discourse (Newark, DE: University of Delaware
Press, 1999).
