The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels

An Entangled Bank , by John Glendening

Bibliographic Data

ID10867261
AuthorsJonathan Smith (0000-0002-6415-8179, corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume50
Issue3
Pages487-489
Publication date2008-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueVictorian Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0042-5222 • E-ISSN: 1527-2052
PublisherIndiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2979/vic.2008.50.3.487
OpenAlexW1509729831
LanguageEN
References cited15

Reviewed by: The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels: An Entangled Bank Jonathan Smith (bio) The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels: An Entangled Bank, by John Glendening; pp. 225. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2007, £55.00, $99.95. In this examination of evolutionary ideas in British fiction of the 1890s, John Glendening traces the imagery and thematics of entanglement. He argues that late-century novelists repeatedly resist and revise Charles Darwin’s famous “entangled bank” passage in the closing paragraph of the Origin of Species (1859), replacing its glimpse of a peaceful, interconnected, and law-bound natural world with one that is disorderly, confused, uncertain, and death-riddled. Taking up The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Dracula (1897), and Heart of Darkness (1902), Glendening sees in the concept of evolutionary entanglement a tension that reflects “the more fundamental opposition . . . of order and chaos.” These novels influenced by evolutionary thought thus “both support and undermine the overall order that literature struggles to impose on reality” (6). Glendening’s book has a number of strengths.I n revisiting Darwin’s entangled bank, he reminds us that the word “entangled” and its variants had mainly negative connotations and that Darwin’s use of it to characterize a complexly interdependent, law-bound [End Page 487] nature was at odds not only with this darker meaning, but with Darwin’s own anxious reaction to the entangled forests of Tierra del Fuego and his frequent depiction of nature in the Origin as contingent and competitive. Glendening also makes a compelling case that the specific scene Darwin has in mind with the entangled bank is less the profuse fecundity of the Brazilian rain forest than an English railway cutting. Turning to the novels, he offers careful, nuanced readings of descriptions and scenes in which entanglement appears, and he ruminates plausibly on their larger significance. While no new critical ground is broken here—as Glendening acknowledges, these novels’ relations to evolutionary thought have received extended attention—The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels enters into a critical conversation about these works in a way that is judicious and sensitive. The chapters on Tess and Heart of Darkness are perhaps the most representative in this regard. Glendening is also sufficiently well-versed in the work of the Darwin industry to be alert to the differences between Darwin’s work and that of late-century Darwinians (especially T. H. Huxley) and neo-Lamarckian thinkers. The central argument of Glendening’s book is ultimately not persuasive, however. Glendening contends that by “representing nature as happy and harmonious, a harbinger of perfection, the bank elides the struggle, disorder, and waste that, as Darwin makes clear elsewhere, attend natural selection” (41). This view can only be sustained by ignoring the sentences that immediately follow the description of the bank, in which Darwin speaks of “the war of nature” and of “famine and death,” and in which he names among the laws that have shaped the bank those of the Malthusian “Struggle for Life” and of “Extinction” (On the Origin of Species [Murray, 1859] 490). While Glendening’s basic point—that the Origin displays tension between positive and negative views of entanglement, and that the entangled bank image is mainly optimistic—is sound, he fails to appreciate the significance here of Darwin’s vaguely theistic invocation of natural laws as opposed to divine providence, and of his overturning of natural theology’s very different handling of interconnectedness, plenitude, order, and death. (Greater familiarity with the scholarship on natural theology and the pre-Darwinian evolutionary debates in Britain by historians like John Brooke, Adrian Desmond, Dov Ospovat, Nicolaas Rupke, Jim Secord, and Jonathan Topham would have facilitated an understanding of what was at stake in this closing passage.) As a result, Glendening uncharacteristically flattens his own initial reading, repeatedly offering an oversimplified, restricted interpretation of the entangled bank passage in order to construct a contrast between its ostensibly “benign” view of nature and that to be found in H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Bram Stoker, and Joseph Conrad. More problematically, Glendening’s frequent move from the physical entanglement of the natural world to the conceptual and epistemological entanglement

Art · Literature · Opposition (politics · Order (exchange · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

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