Visit to download the full and correct content document: https://ebookmass.com/product/embryology-and-the-rise-of-the-gothic-novel-diana-pe rez-edelman/
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine Series Editors
Sharon Ruston
Department of English and Creative Writing
Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK
Alice Jenkins
School of Critical Studies
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK
Jessica Howell
Department of English
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX, USA
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting new series that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplinary areas in literary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine. Comprised of academic monographs, essay collections, and Palgrave Pivot books, the series will emphasize a historical approach to its subjects, in conjunction with a range of other theoretical approaches. The series will cover all aspects of this rich and varied feld and is open to new and emerging topics as well as established ones.
Andrew M. Beresford, Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University, UK
Steven Connor, Professor of English, University of Cambridge, UK
Lisa Diedrich, Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, Stony Brook University, USA
Kate Hayles, Professor of English, Duke University, USA
Jessica Howell, Associate Professor of English, Texas A&M University, USA
Peter Middleton, Professor of English, University of Southampton, UK
Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Professor of English and Theatre Studies, University of Oxford, UK
Sally Shuttleworth, Professorial Fellow in English, St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, UK
Susan Squier, Professor of Women’s Studies and English, Pennsylvania State University, USA
Martin Willis, Professor of English, University of Westminster, UK
Karen A. Winstead, Professor of English, The Ohio State University, USA
More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14613
Diana Pérez EdelmanDiana Pérez Edelman
University of North Georgia
Oakwood, GA, USA
ISSN 2634-6435
ISSN 2634-6443 (electronic)
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
ISBN 978-3-030-73647-7
ISBN 978-3-030-73648-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73648-4
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifcally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microflms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations.
Cover illustration: Historical Images Archive / Alamy Stock Photo
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To James and Robert Young, my little monsters
This book project has been developing since I was in the PhD program at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill while pregnant, ironically, with my frst child, who is now nineteen years old. I have stepped away from the project for years at a time—rearing human children while putting the intellectual ones on hold. The project narrowed from one about Romanticism and its connections to embryology and obstetrics more broadly to its current focus on embryology and the Gothic. I have many, many friends, colleagues, and institutions to thank for helping me bring it to its current form.
I am so grateful to Professor Jeanne Moskal at UNC-Chapel Hill for her guidance and direction when this project was initially conceived; she challenged me and made me a better thinker and writer. Thanks, also, to Elizabeth Stockton, a colleague at UNC, who recommended that I free write about my ideas, which signaled a turning point in my thinking. To this day, I tell that story to my students to convince them that free writing works. My dissertation writing group was instrumental in encouraging me to make “big” claims about the relevance of obstetrics to the period—Amy Weldon, Kathryn Wymer, Tom Horan, and Gena Chandler (now ChandlerSmith). I am also grateful to Professor Robert Mitchell at Duke University, who generously read the manuscript and suggested narrowing to the Gothic; perhaps more importantly, he helped me shift the focus of the work by recommending Helmut Müller-Sievers’ book, Self-Generation.
After a long hiatus, I returned to academia and participated in an NEH Summer Seminar with Professor Stephen Behrendt in Lincoln, Nebraska,
in 2013. This six-week seminar reignited the project, moving it to the next stage. The encouragement of Professor Behrendt, who generously commented on the manuscript, and the support of the life-long friends I made that summer enabled me to return to the project with new direction. I would like to thank Yohei Igarashi for recommending Stephen Gould’s work and Brian Rejack for recommending Denise Gigante’s Life: Romanticism and Organic Form. Kellie Donovan-Condron has been instrumental in supporting the project from afar as we have been accountability partners since our time at NEH. Thank you, Chris Washington, for reading several versions of the fnal proposal and helping me get it to its fnal state. James Rovira has always been a cheerleader and supporter in many ways (too many to count), and for that I am thankful.
I am grateful to my home institution, the University of North Georgia (UGA), for offering fnancial support for parts of this project. In 2015, I won two internal awards: the Presidential Semester Scholar Award and the Presidential Summer Scholar Award. My gratitude also goes to Mary Carney and my WriteIN faculty writing group, including Steve Pearson, Michael Rifenburg, and Leigh Dillard, for reading and commenting on drafts of the proposal for this award. During those months of research leave, I was able to conduct research at the Wellcome Library, Archives & Special Collections at the University of Glasgow, and the Royal College of Surgeons of England. A special thanks to Kelly Ball at Emory University, who provided me with archival research training before my trips.
A signifcant portion of my gratitude for bringing the project to its fnal state goes to the anonymous readers of the frst two proposals that I sent to Palgrave and to Professor Anne Williams at the University of Georgia. The frst two rounds of the reader’s comments were most generous and encouraging and signifcantly helped me reframe the project. And thank you to Professor Williams, my former MA thesis advisor at UGA, for encouraging me to write a chapter on Walpole and to rethink and reframe the introductory material. She has read the manuscript twice in the last two years. Furthermore, well before this project was even on my radar, she ignited my love for the Gothic in the mid-1990s, and her book Art of Darkness has been enormously infuential.
And, thank you, dear Friends and Family, for listening to me talk about this book for years and years and years, always believing in me, and encouraging me even when I wanted to give up. You know who you are.
“Foregrounding some of the most canonical and widely studied Gothic and Romantic texts, offering readings that are at once vibrant and new while still somehow familiar in the best possible way, Edelman makes it clear just how fundamental a concern with generation is to any understanding of the period. This work is deeply learned and wonderfully accessible—and profoundly urgent.”
—James Robert Allard, Brock University, Canada, and author of Romanticism, Medicine, and the Poet’s Body (2007)
“Edelman argues that contemporary theories of embryology (not yet an empirical science) debate often contradictory concerns about origins, identity, hybridity, and the potential for an infnite number of forms. Gothic narratives express similar anxieties, adapting to popular and high art, changing historical circumstances, and media unimaginable at their birth. Reading the evolution of Gothic in the context of inherently contradictory theories of embryology illuminates the literature’s own contradictions. (Is it conservative or revolutionary? Feminist or misogynist?) Edelman’s learned and cogent exposition of this unexpected biological context will engage not only students of the Gothic tradition, but also the growing audience discovering the material and scientifc roots of Romanticism.”
—Anne Williams, Professor of English Emeritus, University of Georgia, USA, and author of Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (1995)
Mathematic Form is Eternal in the Reasoning Memory. Living Form is Eternal Existence. Grecian is Mathematic Form
Gothic is Living Form William Blake, On Virgil (Blake 1822, 270)
In 1764, Horace Walpole defned the Gothic as a “new species” (Otranto 14) designed to unleash the “great resources of fancy [that] have been dammed up” through the redeployment of medieval “miracles, visions, necromancy, dreams, and other preternatural events” (Otranto 6).1 This blending of ancient and modern romances, conceived as a new life, is made possible only through the fantastic and terrifc. Walpole’s very pointed species metaphor suggests that the Gothic can be read through the lens of those branches of science most concerned with the origins and continuation of the human species: the sciences of generation.2 Indeed,
1 All references to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and the two prefaces will be referred to in the text as Otranto. All references to Walpole’s letters are to the Yale Correspondence available online and will be referred to as Yale Correspondence and by volume and page number.
2 Throughout this work, I use the term “reproductive sciences” and “generation” interchangeably. Although the term “reproductive sciences” is applied anachronistically, it offers
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
D. P. Edelman, Embryology and the Rise of the Gothic Novel, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73648-4_1
1
Walpole turned to the reproductive sciences, embryology in particular, well before The Castle of Otranto. In a 1737 letter to Richard West, when Walpole still had poetic aspirations, he equates imaginative processes with embryological ones, indicating that the embryological foundations of Walpole’s new genre emerged much earlier than his most famous publication. The poem attached to the letter describes, using the discourse of contemporary embryological debates, his imaginative process in which the pretty phrases of well-formed poetry turn toward the macabre, the seeds of the Gothic.
Embryology and the Rise of the Gothic Novel explores the relevance of the sciences of generation to the Gothic novel, which will not only broaden our understanding of the historical and cultural contexts of Romanticism and the Gothic, but also suggests additional source material that illuminates the original forms that the Gothic novel generated during this time. Reading the Gothic alongside the sciences of generation helps readers understand the questions (and answers) that these writers asked about the nature of aesthetic creation as well as destabilizes some of the dichotomies traditionally associated with the Gothic, dichotomies that are reinforced over and over again in its critical history—male versus female, natural versus supernatural, horror versus terror, conservative versus progressive. As Maggie Kilgour asked over twenty years ago, is the Gothic “Revolutionary or reactionary? An incoherent mess or a self-conscious critique of repressive concepts of coherence and order?…Transgressive and lawless or conformist and meekly law-abiding?” (Kilgour, 1995 10). Is the Gothic merely a reaction to Enlightenment reason? Is it an aesthetic failure? Is it really a return to a barbaric past because it fears the technological future promised by modernity? I would suggest that tracing the relationship
more precision than “natural philosophy,” the contemporary term that encompasses many branches of sciences that we now treat as distinct. Our modern defnition of “science” refers primarily to areas such as chemistry, physics, biology, and geology. In the Romantic period, “science” was generally used to denote any branch of knowledge, even those that we would now categorize as part of the humanities such as linguistics and literature. Further, from ancient times to the nineteenth century, the term “generation” was used more often than “reproduction” for the discussion of sexual reproduction in humans and animals. The term “scientist” in the modern sense was not coined until 1834. In the period covered in this book, the broadest and most common term was “natural philosopher.” In the medical feld, depending on discipline, one could be called “medical man,” “man-midwife,” “surgeon,” “anatomist,” and the like. The frst known use of the term “embryologist” in English was 1795 (OED), but I use the term to refer to those in the period working specifcally on explanations of conception and fetal development.
between the frst Gothic works and their embryological contexts reveals that the Gothic, even the Radcliffean kind, is transgressive in its embrace of scientifc discoveries that articulate and accept the “incoherent mess” of organic life. Diane Hoeveler has argued that the Gothic is one of the cultural productions that ushered in modern, secular ideals; the “triumph of the ideology of individualism, interiority, and modern subjectivity as we know it today…were initially honed in the food of gothic works that permeated European culture during this period” (Hoeveler 2010, 12). Thus, instead of the Gothic being primarily nostalgia for a sacred and superstitious past, it was a way of mediating the shift to a secular and progressive modernity, albeit an “ambivalent” one as Hoeveler terms it (Hoeveler 2010, 6). When read through the sciences of generation, the Gothic emerges, ironically, as scientifcally progressive and an aesthetic success in its proliferation of genres.
The embryological contexts of the Gothic also offer a response to William Patrick Day’s assertion that “we must also attempt to explain why [the Gothic] has endured when other popular forms, such as the Newgate novel or the silver-fork novel or cousins like the sensation and the ‘blood’ novel, had their brief lives and disappeared” (Day 1985, 5). This study provides the beginnings of an answer to the question that Steven Bruhm asked in 2002: why do we still need the Gothic? (Bruhm 2002). He writes that “We search for a genesis but fnd only ghostly manifestations” (Bruhm 2002, 259). It is these “ghostly manifestations” that I trace to the mysteries of generation. The Gothic, concerned with origins, follows a trajectory parallel to changes in ideas about the process of conception and continues to be one of the key methods by which advances in the sciences of reproduction are predicted, explored, and challenged. Further, the Gothic, both then and now, has produced a number of subgenres, which is no accident given that the Gothic is concerned simultaneously with biological and aesthetic creation. Although the “narrative incoherence” of the Gothic has “[lead] to the denigration of the form for its lack of aesthetic unity” (Kilgour 1995, 5), these features are not failures, but rather signs of its success, for it has created perhaps more aesthetic life than Romanticism itself. David Punter argued almost forty years ago that the “narrative complexity” of Gothic and “its tendency to raise technical problems which it often fails to resolve” comes from the “diffculty” of dealing with the “taboo quality of many of the themes to which Gothic addresses itself— incest, rape, various kinds of transgressions of the boundaries between the natural and the human, the human and the divine” (Punter 1980, 19). In
addition to the socio-cultural and psychological diffculties that Punter enumerates, the Gothic addresses the question of biological and aesthetic origins, questions that have been somewhat obscured in the scholarship by more seductive questions about the ghosts of sexual repression, the nightmare of history, and the drama of gender dynamics. As scholars continue to reassess and redefne Romanticism, particularly in its scientifc contexts, embryology and the reproductive sciences offer insights into not only how and why the Gothic came to be, but also why it continues so spectacularly in many media other than prose fction.
Drawing on the history of medicine, this study contributes to feminist studies of the body in literary and scientifc scholarship by focusing on the relationship between embryology and genre formation, a connection that has remained relatively unexplored. While scholarship in the history of medicine has long acknowledged the imbalance of power between men and women, particularly in the feld of obstetrics and midwifery, it has not discussed as frequently the science of embryology.3 Similarly, feminist studies of the female body in literature tend to replicate this focus on pregnancy and obstetrics as well as on cultural constructs of the maternal, not on embryological sciences specifcally. In 1977, Ellen Moers famously equated the female Gothic with her reading of Frankenstein as a “birth myth” and as an exploration of the “motif of revulsion against newborn life, and the drama of guilt, dread, and fight surrounding birth and its consequences” (Moers 1977, 92–93). Juliann Fleenor added to Moers’ argument stating that the female Gothic is “self-fear and self-disgust directed toward the female role, female sexuality, female physiology, and procreation” (Fleenor 1983, 15). In both of these cases, as in many of the studies that have followed suit, the focus is on the maternal body and birth itself, not on what happens at the moment of creation/conception (or even before), which is the central concern of embryology.4 The sciences of generation in this period will take us in a different direction in interpreting the Gothic. In recent decades, Romantic-period scholarship has attempted to articulate the ways in which the sciences are central to our ideas of what constitutes Romanticism; however, very few, if any, mention embryology.
3 Studies in the history of medicine have acknowledged the relevance of the female body in numerous ways. See Eccles (1982), Arney (1982), Shorter (1982, 1991), McLaren (1978, 1984, 1992), Jordanova (1989, 1999), Hanson (2004) and Wilson (1995, 2014).
4 I realize that it is impossible physiologically to divorce the moment of conception from the female body itself, but I am here trying to make a distinction between attempts to articulate the how of creation/conception with the horrors of its aftermath.
Embryology and the Rise of the Gothic Novel introduces embryology into these discussions and synthesizes feminist and medical perspectives to articulate the role that embryology played in the formation and development of the Gothic mode. This approach reveals the extent to which the Gothic embraces and challenges scientifc, technological, and social progress and explains why the Gothic continues to be the mode most suited to explore these questions.
Studies that paved the way for a focus on the medical and bodily in the Romantic period, as opposed to the sciences in general, include Hermione de Almeida’s Romantic Medicine and John Keats (1990), Steven Bruhm’s Gothic Bodies (1994), Alan Bewell’s Romanticism and Colonial Disease, and Alan Richardson’s British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (2001). Richardson’s work grounds Romantic theories of psychology in brain-based models of mind arguing, ultimately, that “although literary Romanticism has most often been associated with idealistic and transcendental conceptions of mind, the many points of contact between scientifc and literary representations of the embodied psyche helps [sic] remind us of an antidualistic, materialist register within Romantic writing that has, until recently, been badly ignored” (Richardson 2001, 36). Embryology and the Rise of the Gothic Novel adds to the scholarship of the “materialist register” of the period identifying the nexus between “scientifc and literary representations” of conception, a connection that provides a more thorough understanding of why and how the genre developed as it did and, perhaps more importantly, why it continues to be associated with “alternative” ways of being.
Scholarship since Richardson has continued to search out and explain this “materialist register,” but they almost always overlook reproductive bodies and women writers. James Robert Allard’s Romanticism, Medicine, and the Poet’s Body argues that both poets and medical practitioners sought to establish authority in the marketplace of the material and did so through the body, thus he “theorize[s] an interrelation between poetry and medicine that constitutes and is constituted by contemporary notions—and the concomitant representations—of the body” (Allard 2007, 5). Gavin Budge’s Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural, similar to Richardson’s work, “stress[es] the somatic dimension of nineteenthcentury accounts of hallucination in a way that framing the subject in terms of psychology would not really allow” (Budge 2012, 3). According to Budge, an “ambiguous relationship between bodily materiality and the immateriality of mind” is “representative” of the writing of the period
(Budge 2012, 5). All of these studies instantiate a shift from the immaterial to the material in Romantic-period scholarship, focusing on male authors and on scientifc concepts like nerve theory, sensibility, and irritability. My project joins this discussion of the “materialist register” in the Romantic period, but extends it to the reproductive sciences offering a new way of seeing the period as one that is defned, at least in part, by a focus on aesthetic and biological origins.
There are, notably, two important studies that directly address the medical dimensions of the maternal. In Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism, Paul Youngquist argues that “medicine, at the historical moment of its emergence as a distinct institutional and professional practice, produces and enforces a cultural norm of human embodiment. Monstrosities offer medicine a material occasion for such operations” (Youngquist 2003, xi). Youngquist’s thesis—that medicine itself generated the idea of a “proper body” (Youngquist 2003, xiv), which then fostered a fascination with “improper” or “monstrous” bodies—underscores my claim that it is no accident that the Gothic developed alongside changes in the reproductive landscape, in particular embryology. The British fascination with monstrous bodies in museums and circuses is not unlike the reading public’s fascination with the Gothic, the monstrous narrative that replicates, as I will argue, the processes of generation. A signifcant portion of Youngquist’s work focuses on male bodies, male writers, and male medical professionals; however, his chapter, “Mother Flesh,” addresses the material reality of the female body and the ways in which obstetrical medicine serves to regulate that body in the “private and public spheres,” creating and sustaining it as abject property (Youngquist 2003, 130). Monstrosities outlines the relevance of the work of John and William Hunter to the creation of that abject body, which, he argues, Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley challenge.
In Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic, Julie Kipp (2003) also raises the question of the signifcance of the maternal body in the public sphere. Kipp brings together several cultural strands surrounding the maternal body—medical, legal, educational—and argues that the treatment of mothers and mother-child bonds in literature refects the reality that the maternal body was a site on which political, economic, and social issues were worked out. Treatments of motherhood in these felds, Kipp argues, are not idiosyncratic, but “rendered the physical processes associated with mothering matters of national importance” (Kipp 2003, 1). Embryology and the Rise of the Gothic Novel recognizes Kipp’s astute
conclusions regarding the maternal body as cultural symbol, but narrows the focus to embryology in order to identify and describe the frame of mind that contributed to changes in the embryological and aesthetic discourses of the period and their implications. This study treats male and female authors as engaging equally, if differently, in these matters and in ways that transcend the dichotomies with which we generally treat them: male/female, horror/terror, conservative/progressive.
In order to introduce the parallels between the Gothic and embryology, we must return to a moment of imaginative conception—Walpole’s 1737 poem, which I will call by its provocative frst line, “Seeds of poetry and rhyme.” This poem and its accompanying letter provide a useful illustration of the embryological subtexts of the Gothic mode. Walpole’s early, unpublished poem adumbrates techniques, themes, and plot devices of the Gothic mode and underscores the relationship between embryological and aesthetic concerns about origins. The letter introduces the poem with a metaphor that evokes two competing theories of generation of the period, preformation and epigenesis:
In short as naturalists account for insects in places, where they can’t tell how they got there, but cry the wind wafts their eggs about into all parts, and some perish, and some, meeting with proper juices, thrive; so Nature, I believe, wafts about poetical eggs or seeds, and thence come poets, when the grain don’t light upon a barren surface. But I’ll give you some account of it, as far as my own experience goes, in verse; as the best way to describe a circle, is to draw it: You will perceive that my knowledge extends no farther than the miscarrying embryos. (Yale Correspondence 13:121)5
When Walpole writes that the naturalists “can’t tell how they [insects] got there,” he indicates the central problem in eighteenth-century embryology: the inability to identify biological origins empirically. This passage reveals not only Walpole’s knowledge of the various theories of embryology in his day, but also the link, in his imagination, however unconscious, between aesthetic and biological origins. While we cannot say for certain
5 This letter is to Mr. Richard West and dated Monday, 3 January 1737. All letters are hereafter referred to in the text as Yale Correspondence by volume and page number. All Walpole letters can be found at http://images.library.yale.edu/hwcorrespondence/
that Walpole read embryological treatises, particularly not this early, Walpole knew several “naturalists” over the course of his life. Walpole had a friendship with the famous William Hunter, anatomist, man-midwife, and brother of the Father of Modern Surgery, John Hunter. Lisa Forman Cody notes that Walpole “frequently mentioned [William] Hunter, both as a friend and confdant and as go-between and carrier of political pamphlets, rare books, exotic tea-trees, and even wallpaper samples between various clients and friends” (Cody 2005, 190).6 In addition, Walpole knew the famous natural historian Sir Hans Sloane who entrusted part of his collection to him in 1753; of the collection, Walpole wrote, “It is a rent charge to keep the foetuses in spirits!” (Yale Correspondence, 20:359).7
Walpole was even an admirer of the epigenesist Count de Buffon visiting him in Paris in 1766. In a letter to Sir Horace Mann in 1779, Walpole writes, “The philosophes, except Buffon, are solemn, arrogant, dictatorial coxcombs—I need not say superlatively disagreeable: the rest are amazingly ignorant in general, and void of all conversation but the routine with women—my dear and very old friend is a relic of a better age—and at near eighty-four has all the impetuosity that was the character of the French” (Yale Correspondence, 24:498). While these specifc references are clearly after the period of the writing of the 1737 poem, Walpole, as a highranking British intellectual, was very likely aware of the scientifc contexts of his early years, which are embedded in his early poem.
Walpole’s letter and poem deploy metaphors and images that evoke the two competing theories of generation of the period—preformation and epigenesis—and their opposing worldviews, which center on the relative importance of each component in a series of fundamental dichotomies: male/female, internal/external, natural/supernatural, conservative/progressive, mechanical/organic. In embryology, the contest addressed the origins of human life; in aesthetics, the battle was the need to understand and explain how the imagination creates, a central concern of the Romantic period more generally, but also of the Gothic. Walpole’s poem describes how he is haunted by external forms of origination as he struggles, but fails, to achieve poetic autonomy. I will transcribe the poem in its entirety.
6 In another interesting connection, the surgeon John Douglas dedicated his 1736 A Short Account of the State of Midwifery in London, Westminster, &c. to Lady Walpole, Horace Walpole’s mother. See Douglas (1736).
7 This letter is to Sir Horace Mann, dated 14 February 1753.
1.
Seeds of poetry and rhyme
Nature in my soul implanted; But the genial hand of Time, Still to ripen ‘em is wanted: Or soon as they begin to blow, 5 My cold soil nips the buds with snow.
2.
If a plenteous crop arise, Copious numbers, swelling grain, Judgment from the harvest fies, And careless spares to weed the plain: 10 Tares of similes choke the roots, Or poppy-thoughts blast all the shoots.
3.
Youth, his torrid beams who plays, Bids the poetic spirit fourish; But though fowers his ardour raise, 15 Maggots too ‘twill form and nourish; And variegated Fancy’s seen Vainly enamelling the green.
4.
First when pastorals I read; Purling streams and cooling breezes 20 I only wrote of; and my head
Rhymed on, reclined beneath the treezes: In pretty dialogue I told Of Phoebus’ heat, and Daphne’s cold.
5.
Battles, sieges, men and arms, 25 If heroic verse I’m reading, I burn to write, with Myra’s charms
In episodes, to show my breeding: But if my Myra cruel be, I tell her so in elegy. 30
6.
Tragic numbers, buskined strains, If Melpomene inspire,
I sing; but fckle throw my trains
And half an act into the fre: Perhaps Thalia prompts a sonnet 35 On Chloe’s fan or Cælia’s bonnet.
7.
For one silk-worm thought that thrives, Twenty more in embryo die; Some spin away their little lives, In ductile lines of foolery: 40 Then for one moiety of the year, Pent in a chrysalis appear.
8.
Till again the rolling sun
Bursts th’ inactive shell, and thoughts
Like butterfies their prison shun, 45
Buzzing with all their parent faults; And springing from the sluggish mould
Expand their wings of fimsy gold.
9.
But, my dear, these fies, they say, Can boast of one good quality, 50
To Phoebus gratefully they pay
Their little songs and melody:
So I to you this trife give, Whose infuence frst bid it live. (Yale Correspondence, 13:121–123)8
The poem, although juvenile, illustrates a pattern of degeneration from the light and beautiful parts of nature to the darker and more grotesque. The poem is fundamentally concerned with origins—that of the poet and, by implication, the poetry. Walpole seeks “to show [my] breeding” (ln. 28), his aesthetic heritage, which necessarily derives from previous generations. At the same time, the poem also questions his ability to do that because of this burning spirit of originality that is part of his poetic identity. This confict between light and dark, mechanical and organic narrates the poet’s struggle to master external forms of origination, or
8 Line numbers have been added and will be referenced parenthetically in the text. Stanza numbers are in the original.
predetermined forms, which he contrasts with the internal fre of his poetic spirit, hinting at the two major theories of the period that attempted to explain the beginnings of life. Preformation, one attempt to explain origins, posited that all beings were fully formed by God prior to conception and that the process of gestation in the womb was merely a growing larger over time of an infnitesimally small human being. Preformationist theories bifurcated along male and female lines: ovist preformation suggested that the fully formed being resided in the egg whereas spermist (or animalculist) preformation posited that it resided in the male sperm. Epigenesis, by contrast, asserted that human beings developed organ by organ over time in a complex process of matter and motion, a process driven by vital “juices” and variously explained “powers.” In short, preformation relied on supernatural explanations of origins external to the being itself, for God predetermines being and identity. Epigenesis, by contrast, located origins within the material itself and attempted, as we shall see in more detail below, to reject supernatural explanations in favor of scientifc ones, but as with the genre itself, the supernatural was a lingering, constitutive presence.9 A pivotal argument in these debates was the existence of monsters—defned as anything from a minor birth defect to the spawn of interspecies copulation.10 While epigenesists could easily explain birth defects, monstrosity, hybrids, and polyps as the result of the anomalies of matter and motion, preformationists had to contend with the notion that God pre-ordained them, an idea that disrupted their concept of a harmonious universe.
The poem and letter evoke traits of the various theories of generation of the time—panspermism (an early version of preformation), preformation, and epigenesis. The poetical eggs of the letter and the chrysalis in the
9 Scholars of Romanticism will note that this distinction is notably similar to Coleridge’s famous distinction between mechanic and organic form, suggesting the wider applicability of embryological sciences to aesthetic concerns.
10 Earlier in the century, prior to the height of the confict between preformationists and epigenesists, monstrous births were explained as effects of the maternal imagination on the fetus. As Dennis Todd (1995) explains, belief in the power of the maternal imagination partially explains why so many people, including eminent natural philosophers, were able to believe the infamous 1726 hoax of Mary Toft, who claimed to give birth to 17 rabbits. At that point in history, the “attribution of monstrosities to God or the devil had become less convincing as European thought had grown more secularized,” so the “power of the imagination had become the explanation of frst resort within the last century and a half” (Todd 1995, 48). For a detailed discussion of the discourse on the maternal imagination and its effects on the literature of the period, see Buckley (2017).
poem represent preformation whereas the “proper juices” of the letter and the “torrid beams,” “poetic spirit,” and “ardour” of stanza three are suggestive of various epigenetic explanations for what starts this process. The image of the wind carrying eggs mentioned in the body of the letter is a direct reference to an early version of preformation, panspermism, which suggested that the preformed germs created by God were actually foating through the air and ingested by their hosts. In 1651, William Harvey describes panspermism: “many animals, especially insects, arise and are propagated from elements and seeds so small as to be invisible, (like atoms fying in the air,) scattered and dispersed here and there by the winds” (Harvey 1847, 321). The eggs, germs, or seeds of preformation are ingested by the host who then nourishes them, but they are externally sourced. As the frst two lines of the poem indicate, personifed Nature implants these preformed seeds into the poet; creation occurs prior and outside. Throughout the poem, though, the poet’s own spirit changes the nature of these preformed seeds, which, according to preformation theory, should have been perfectly formed to begin with. Like epigenetic processes, though, the vagaries of matter and motion, in this case the poet himself, changes the very nature of the seeds, turning them into something darker than intended. The poet’s “cold soil nips the buds” (ln. 6). His “torrid beams” and “ardour” create not only fowers, but also “maggots” (ll. 13, 15, 16), small creatures that eat dead fesh. The poet’s very nature resists the preformed.
The image of the chrysalis in stanzas seven and eight also evokes preformation, but just as Walpole’s poetic self destroys the eggs of panspermism, so too his internal heat, his “ardour,” creates monstrosities—fesh-eating maggots and “miscarrying embryos.” While maggots and miscarriages are certainly part of the natural world, they signify the dark undercurrents of that world, the undercurrents that the Gothic explores more directly than any other genre. The chrysalis as scientifc proof of preformation was made famous by Jan Swammerdam, seventeenth-century Dutch entomologist. Swammerdam argued for preformation based on insect observations, particularly the butterfy. Joseph Needham, British biochemist and historian of science, summarizes Swammerdam’s work: “having hardened the chrysalis with alcohol, [he] had seen the butterfy folded up and perfectly formed within the cocoon. He concluded that the butterfy had been hidden or masked….in the caterpillar, and thence it was no great step to regard the egg in a similar light…Before long, Swammerdam extended this theory to man” (Needham 1959, 170). Walpole’s poems are “pent in
a chrysalis” (ln. 42) until the warmth of the sun “Bursts the inactive shell, and thoughts / Like butterfies their prison shun” (ll. 44–45). The “inactive shell” alludes to the cocoon, which is just a casing for what is already formed, according to preformation theory. Read alongside Swammerdam’s argument, the shell signifes the body of the parent, the host who incubates and nourishes, but does not generate. Like butterfies in a chrysalis, the poems are already fully formed as indicated by Walpole’s repeated references to well-established genres and other literary infuences.
The image of the beautiful butterfies is, however, undercut by negative descriptions of the newly emerged butterfies: “parent faults,” “sluggish,” and “fimsy” (ll. 46–48). In the next stanza, he calls them “fies” (ln. 49), and readers cannot help but return to the earlier image of the maggots in line sixteen and the twenty dead silkworm embryos of line thirty-eight. Although these features are part of the natural world, their irregularity can be associated with monstrosity as it was perceived at the time. Monstrosity was anything that deviated from a harmonious norm—birth defects, hybrids, and other malformations. Further, given that this poem describes the nature of Walpole’s imagination, these images should be read in the context of contemporary beliefs that the imagination is the “agent of teratogenesis” (Todd 1995, 52). As Todd explains, it was the imagination that had the “capacity to misshape the fetus” because it was considered, at the time, the intermediary between mind and body (Todd 1995, 52). Walpole, perhaps, draws on this belief when he describes the monstrous capacities of his own imagination, but in doing so, he also points to the emerging embryological debate in which epigenesists could explain monstrosities more satisfactorily.
The “ardour” of his poetic spirit, which is internal to the poet and necessary for the organic creation of poetry, parallels the various elements of epigenetic processes that embryologists used to explain conception and development. As with epigenetic processes, though, this ardor creates fowers, but “maggots too ‘twill form and nourish” (ln. 16). The maggots, a kind of monstrous offspring in this context, represent death and the darker sides of nature. In this way, stanza three suggests epigenetic processes, which can as easily give birth to monsters as to healthy, well-shaped human beings. In Walpole’s metaphor, his poetic thoughts sometimes grow into something beautiful, but oftentimes, malnourished and distorted, they turn into something else. Unlike preformation wherein God created each perfect being ahead of time, epigenesis was subject to the anomalies of matter, motion, and environment and could, thus, explain
more easily the existence of monsters. In fact, this question of monstrous births was a defning feature of the debate between the two theories (see Park and Daston 1981). The pattern of preformed perfection morphing into malformed monstrosity is characteristic of the poem. The imagery shifts from life to death—from ripening seeds to frozen buds, from plenteous crops to blasted shoots, from fowers to maggots, from butterfies to fies. Walpole cannot quite submit to the mechanical rules of poetry, predetermined forms, because the organic products of his own imagination, like epigenesis, are subject to malformation and monstrosity. Although the poem expresses an anxiety about being able to live up to the models of the past, the most interesting parts of the poem are the images of deformity, the ones that emerge organically from Walpole’s imagination, suggesting his preference, despite what he says on the literal level, for originality.
While alluding to the various theories of embryology in the pattern of imagery that hints at the monstrous, the poem also evokes the confict between the mechanical and the organic as well as the male and the female; both dichotomies are important components of all theories of generation. Walpole associates the darker side of the natural world with the organic, with internal forms of origination and generation. By contrast, the “lighter” side is much more mechanical; his references to earlier forms read like a shopping list of conventions to deploy—“purling streams” and “curling breezes” of line 20 and “Battles, sieges, men and arms” in line twenty fve. It is merely “Fancy” at work here, not unlike what Samuel Taylor Coleridge would later describe as a “mode of memory” that plays with “fxities and defnites” (Coleridge 1985, 313). Although dark, the images that emerge from Walpole’s mind are organic because they come naturally from within; they are not forced from the outside. Although he refers to his “cold soil” in the frst stanza, most of the terms associated with his imagination are warm—the “torrid beams” and “ardour” of stanza three.
The poem also embeds the underlying confict between male and female that is explicitly stated in most embryological theories. Although he references some female fgures in Greek mythology—Melpomene, Thalia, Myra—Walpole dedicates the poem to Phoebus (Apollo), God of the Sun. The female element of generation is notably absent or repressed, which offers an additional parallel with the various embryological theories of the day, each of which struggled to articulate satisfactorily the role of male and female, and more often than not, downplayed the female role. Although the allusion to Melpomene, a tragic muse, may indicate the
participation of the feminine in creation, the imagery of the poem as a whole replicates the problem of theories of generation of the time—the female provides the material but the male the creative spirit. References to “Chloe’s fan or Cælia’s bonnet” (ln. 36), mere trifes, place the feminine in the lesser role of providing material, but not creative energy or life, which is reserved for the male poet. This hierarchy is explicit in Aristotelian biology, which asserted that the female provides only the material whereas the male provides the spirit of life. Later theories deployed a similar hierarchy, but in varying ways.
This brief analysis of Walpole’s juvenile poem demonstrates the interpretive potential offered by an embryological reading, in particular a new understanding of how and why the genre developed as it did in some of its most representative examples.11 Perhaps more importantly, embryological discourse helps answer the lingering questions surrounding the implicit dichotomies central to both embryology and the Gothic: mechanical versus organic, supernatural versus natural, healthy versus “monstrous,” male versus female. To what extent does the Gothic (and its later permutations such as science fction) support/reject scientifc and technological advances? Who or what is the monster/the monstrous? Is the genre regressive or progressive politically, socially, culturally? Does it reinforce or challenge social norms? Each novel raises these and similar questions; embryological discourse will bring some answers into relief.
While the history of criticism clearly addresses science and medicine as important themes in Gothic fction, the scholarship in this area can be enhanced by attending to a signifcant omission: the reproductive sciences, specifcally embryology. In a 2015 issue of Gothic Studies, Sara Wasson asserts that “Medicine itself can be seen as an incorrigibly Gothic project,” but Wasson’s account addresses neither obstetrics nor embryology (Wasson 2015, 1). In the last 20–30 years, scholars have explored electricity, galvanism, Newtonian physics, botany, chemistry, and psychology.12 While there is a strand of scholarship that attends to the body and the medical sciences more specifcally, embryology has received relatively little attention in this context.
11 Much has been written on the history of the Gothic and its varieties of source material, from the medieval romance to Shakespearean tragedy, from French adventure stories to German horror stories. For a brief overview, see Clery (2002) and Hale (2002).
12 A notable exception to this lack is Alan Bewell (1988). See the following: Cunningham and Jardine (1990), Fulford et al. (2004), Holmes (2008), Jackson (2008) and Ruston (2013).
As Sharon Ruston contends in Creating Romanticism, “science and medicine should be recognized as playing a part in the creation of what we now, anachronistically, call ‘Romanticism’. It recognizes, as do the writers themselves, that scientifc and medical writing as much as any other kind of writing is a product of its historical moment and shows that this writing is employed knowingly for political purposes” (Ruston 2013, 2).13 The reproductive sciences are, I contend, “product[s] of [their] historical moment” and play a part in what we call “Gothic.” The reproductive sciences, both popular and professional, provided some of the key images, motifs, and themes that came to be associated with the Gothic novel. The Gothic novel, in turn, became a place wherein both superstitions and scientifc advances could be challenged and explored, for as Ruston argues, the “political purposes” of any kind of writing are ever-present. As Ruston does for Romanticism and the sciences, I want to argue that the Gothic novel is the aesthetic manifestation of the social and political concerns implicit in the embryological sciences of the time.
The importance of the sciences in genre formation is acknowledged in several important studies: Katherine Kickel’s Novel Notions: Medical Discourse and the Mapping of the Imagination in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (2007); Helmut Müller-Sievers’ Self-Generation: Biology, Philosophy, and Literature around 1800 (1997); Denise Gigante’s Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (2009); and Tilottama Rajan’s article “The Epigenesis of Genre: New Forms from Old” (2009).14 In Kickel’s work, she successfully demonstrates that the development of the English novel is “indebted to earlier conversations about the imagination in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century medicine” (Kickel 2007, 4). Kickel shows, through Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, and Radcliffe, that “the English novel was shaped by the contemporaneous medical and philosophical investigations of the imagination to produce an increasingly self-promoting
13 Similar to Ruston’s argument in Creating Romanticism, this study suggests that medical documents, as much as literary ones, are formative. While Ruston discusses Romanticism more broadly and a variety of scientifc discourses (e.g., animal magnetism and botany), I narrow my focus to the Gothic and the reproductive sciences.
14 I am indebted to Brian Rejack, NEH Summer Scholar (Lincoln, NE 2013), for recommending Gigante’s book and to Robert Mitchell of Duke University for recommending Müller-Sievers’ book. Another important work in this context, which shares with MüllerSievers a focus on German philosophy and biological theories, is Richards (2002). In this study Richards argues that “the central currents of nineteenth-century biology had their origins in the Romantic movement” (Richards 2002, xix).
aesthetic object” (Kickel 2007, 7). Similarly, I argue that the Gothic novel was shaped by conceptions of conception, by medical arguments about the formation of the self in the womb. The genre developed, in part, as a refection of and response to embryological discourse. The novels I treat in this book are touchstones, key moments in the development of the various forms of the Gothic novel.
While Kickel addresses medical discourse on the imagination, MüllerSievers discusses embryological discourse, specifcally epigenesis, and its effect on German literature and philosophy. He argues that
The romantic insistence on the autogony of the self in poetry and in the novel of development [Bildungsroman] also relies on the acceptance of epigenetic forms of origination. The genealogy and function of epigenesis— this is the thesis of the following study—provides an altogether unique means by which to understand the momentous and irrevocable changes in philosophy, language philosophy, and literature at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. (Müller-Sievers 1997, 4)
Müller-Sievers is here arguing that a specifc embryological theory—epigenesis—had a radical infuence on German aesthetics, specifcally the notion that life is internally sourced, the “autogony of the self.” He argues for the existence of “epigenetic literature,” the most prominent example being the Bildungsroman (Müller-Sievers 1997, 20). The infuence of a particular version of embryology is not, however, limited to a thematic component of literature. There are, as Müller-Sievers argues, consequences for form: “epigenesis and preformation cannot be contained in the position of theme or content but always have formative consequences for their Darstellung” (Müller-Sievers 1997, 18). One such consequence is what he calls “endless narration,” the tendency of the narrative to never truly end because origins cannot be known (Müller-Sievers 1997, 20). Thus, the embryological point of view of any given text affects its form. Although Müller-Sievers discusses German literature and philosophy around 1800, his argument about the “genealogy and function of epigenesis” applies equally well to British Romanticism, which was, of course, highly infuenced by German philosophy, literature, and natural philosophy.
Like Müller-Sievers, Gigante takes up the feld of embryology and applies it to British poetry, specifcally John Keats, Percy Shelley, and Christopher Smart. Her analysis turns to discussions of vitality and power in embryological medicine. Beginning with the premise that Romantic
scientists and poets were both confronted with the same question, “what is life?” Gigante claims that “science and aesthetics confronted the same formal problems” and that Romantic life science “made possible the analogy between aesthetic and biological form upon which we still rely” (Gigante 2009, 3). Through this analogy, Gigante argues for the existence of an “epigenesist poetics,” which she applies primarily to Romantic poetry (Gigante 2009, 46). Her “epigenesist poetics” is much like MüllerSievers’ argument for an epigenetic literature in German aesthetics. The poems she chooses as examples of this poetics are those that demonstrate, through their form, the unpredictability of vitality and power, both key elements of her defnition of “life.” If life is power, then the poet “risk[s] the object’s slipping out of representation, and hence out of imaginative control. As the Romanticists recognized, power, even when in balance, is still power, and the slightest alteration in circumstance or environment could set that power in unpredictable motion” (Gigante 2009, 2–3). This unpredictability turns to “monstrosity,” which, she argues, “came to represent life’s relentless fecundity” (Gigante 2009, 6). Gigante’s defnition of “epigenesist poetics” applies even more directly, I would suggest, to the Gothic, which embodies this monstrosity and “relentless fecundity” not only in its individual artifacts, but also of the genre as a whole. Just as Walpole articulated in his early poem, the Gothic imagination will assert itself, turning butterfies into maggots, and the genre itself has spawned innumerable other genres and subgenres that, unlike other genres that have “had their brief lives and disappeared” as Day reminds us, continues in full force (Day 1985, 5).
Just as Kickel, Müller-Sievers, and Gigante argue that developments in the sciences had material effects on the aesthetic products of the period, so too Rajan claims that biological developments led to a proliferation of Romantic genres. The central purpose of Rajan’s article is to challenge the critical history of Romanticism that suggests that the Romantics codifed the concept of “Literature” around which our current idea of disciplines and aesthetic education revolve. Instead, she asserts that “in the Romantic period Literature had yet to emerge as a discipline with a defned curricular core,” a fact that changes our understanding of what constitutes the art object. She begins, though, with the premise that the Romantic “aesthetics for individual genius” led to a deformalization of genres and “a more contingent and hybrid notion of genre as historically produced and still in process” (Rajan 2009, 508). Rajan’s “aesthetics for individual genius,” Kickel’s “self-promoting aesthetic object,” and Müller-Sievers’ “autogony
of the self” foreground the Romantic privileging of internal sources of origination, identity, art. The Romantic desire to create an aesthetic identity in defance of external sources of origination, not unlike what was exemplifed in Walpole’s poem (and, indeed, much of Romantic poetry from Wordsworth to Keats), led to a variety of genres, including ones that are monstrous, hybrid, unfnished. Rajan argues that the diversity of genres in the Romantic period is directly linked to developments in biology, specifcally embryology (Rajan 2009, 511–513). For my purposes, the most signifcant aspect of Rajan’s argument is the link between the biological sciences and “genres-in-progress” of which the Gothic is the most notable example (Rajan 2009, 525). Rajan argues that “developments in biology make it possible at an archeological level not only to rethink the system of genre epigenetically (as adding new forms where needed), but even to rethink what constitutes the aesthetic organism” (Rajan 2009, 516–517). In this way, Rajan makes a parallel between epigenetic formation and genre formation; for both biological species and literary species, new forms can be either regressive or progressive. Notably, epigenesis accounts for “the incomplete, for failed or botched forms” (Rajan 2009, 517), the monstrous. As the history of Gothic studies shows, which I alluded to at the beginning of this chapter, the Gothic itself challenges what we consider the art object. Just as epigenesis accounts for biological monstrosity so too Romantic aesthetics, according to Rajan, accounts for genres in process, genres like the Gothic that are bound up in monstrosity:
the Gothic is the presently deformed possibility of future transformations— a genre, like so many others, that invites embryological reading as confictedly progressive and regressive. As the case of the Gothic suggests, an embryology rather than a formalism or thematics of genre may in the end be the most signifcant contribution of Romantic genre viewed as a practical poetics. (Rajan 2009, 526)
The “deformed” nature of the Gothic “invites embryological reading,” partly because, as I am arguing, embryology, specifcally epigenesis, is the science that explains monstrosity, hybridity, species formation. “Formalism,” which indicates a predetermined form coming from outside the thing itself, contrasts with an epigenetic approach to genre, which allows the “future transformations.” Rajan’s argument ends with a reference to the Gothic as the epitome of those genres in process. I wish to pick up where she left off and explore in more depth the epigenetic nature of
the genre and the ways in which it not only mirrors the epistemological and ontological concerns of embryology, but also how it answers some of the questions it raises. The Gothic as a genre can be explained, in part, by its embryological contexts not merely as a metaphor but, as I hope to show, a practical reality, for as I have suggested and will demonstrate more thoroughly in the chapters that follow, the Gothic refects an epigenetic aesthetics, which explains, in part, the unique forms its most famous novels have taken and its continuation, to this day, into its deformed “future transformations”—science fction, horror, psychological thriller, slasher flms, dark metal and Goth rock, eco-Gothic, Southern Gothic, ad infnitum.
“modeS of PercePtion”; or, eighteenth-century embryology
Fully grasping the implications of applying embryology to the Gothic novel begins with understanding that the sciences of generation in this period were, to a great extent, fctions devised to support a particular worldview. Epigenesist, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, writes:
But are we certain these qualities [impenetrability, divisibility, elasticity, etc.] are the only ones which matter possesses, or rather, must we not think these qualities, which we take for principles, are only modes of perception; and that if our senses were differently formed, we should discover in matter, qualities different from those which we have enumerated? (Buffon 1792, 2:308; emphasis added)15
In this passage Buffon, attempting to explain his theory fetal formation and development, asserts that some scientifc principles are not a matter of material proof, but of perception. We cannot see gravity or elasticity, but
15 See Buffon (1792, 2:308). Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle was published in thirty one volumes between 1749 and 1789. Abridged English translations began appearing around 1780, the most famous being Barr’s Buffon. There was a 9-volume version in 1780 published in Edinburgh and a second edition published in London with notes by Scottish publisher William Smellie (not the obstetrician) in 1785. Another printing occurred in 1790 for C. and G. Kearsley, and it is this edition that Mary Wollstonecraft reviewed for Joseph Johnson at the Analytical Review. J. S. Barr published abridged versions in 1792 (10 volumes) and 1797 (2 volumes). Unless otherwise noted, the quotations from Buffon come from the 1792 Barr’s Buffon version and will be cited by volume and page number in the text.
we perceive them. In other words, the imagination must fll the gaps created by the limitations of our senses. Not unlike the Gothic novel, embryological discourse itself was shaped by the imaginations of its writers, writers who were struggling, like Walpole, to strike a balance between the rational and the supernatural. The major embryological theories of the day, the key terms of the debates, and the philosophical differences that led to the gradual preference, in scientifc circles, for epigenetic explanations of life over preformationist ones play an important role in the development of the Gothic novel. The philosophical differences among the key players in embryology hinged on the confict between the mechanic and the organic, science and the supernatural, female and male, and internal and external sources of human generation, as did Walpole’s early poem in which he provided a cursory explanation of his aesthetic. Within this context, “monsters” played a crucial role in the evidence in favor of epigenesis. These same conficts are constitutive of the Gothic, which shares with embryology a focus on origins and a development around the clash between the scientifc and supernatural. The following section provides a broad overview of the history of embryology and a more detailed explanation of the two competing worldviews that marked the eighteenth-century debates.
The history of embryology underscores the struggle between imagination and scientifc evidence, with scientifc evidence, as we currently understand it, emerging relatively late in the story. More often than not, imagination and perception, buttressed by political and cultural ideologies, flled the gaps that scientifc evidence left. Jane Maienschein explains that “epistemological issues of rightness, and the coexistence of competing sets of epistemological values, often strongly direct the scientifc discussions and underlie the controversies involved in particular cases,” sometimes even more so than empirical evidence itself (Maienschein 2000, 123). Maienschein’s claim is evident in the history of embryology from Aristotle onward, for preconceived notions about the world and humans’ place within it often drove the interpretation of evidence, if there even was evidence at all.
The debates were complex and rarely were there clear dividing lines among the theories available, but three sets of binaries generally appeared, in various forms, in all discussions, from Aristotle in the fourth century B.C.E. to the preformationists and epigenesists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: mechanicism versus organicism, materialism versus vitalism, external versus internal sources of identity. Implicit within these
binaries is the confict between the scientifc and supernatural, which is, not surprisingly, a key component of the Gothic genre as originally conceived and as it continues to play out. Walpole attempted to marry the fantastic with the realistic in terms of how human beings would organically and “naturally” respond to fantastic or supernatural situations, and discussions of the genre from its earliest times until now invoke a need for balance between the two. Further, Walpole wanted to combine the supernatural and the rational in order to create a new genre, but he did so with some clear ambivalence about the supernatural. Similarly, embryologists struggled to articulate a balance between the scientifc and supernatural, and many embryologists wanted/needed to keep the supernatural in play while others rejected it. As Shirley Roe (1981) points out, the embryological debates pivoted on the confict between mechanical and organic explanations of life, which in turn had serious implications for one’s understanding of God’s role in the universe. Mechanicism, the notion that life can be explained as merely a combination of matter and motion, conficted with organicism, which suggested that life is explained as a whole system wherein the individual parts cannot be separated from the whole and wherein the properties of life are inherent to the material. Related to this mechanical/organic binary is materialism and vitalism. Materialism, the philosophical perspective that explains life in terms of the material and its internal properties, contrasts with vitalism, which explains life in terms of supernatural, external forces. Materialism and vitalism had clear ideological implications as evidenced by the Lawrence-Abernethy debates. John Abernethy argued for the existence of a soul as the necessary prerequisite of life whereas Lawrence argued that organization and the material were the only necessary elements of life. In other words, there is no soul; life is material. Referring to the more conservative, reactionary fears expressed by The Radical Triumvirate, Sharon Ruston sums up the implications of the debates for contemporaries of Abernethy and Lawrence:
Abernethy’s response to contemporary calls for law and order in a time when reform was being demanded was to portray the principle of life as a sovereign substance, controlling the gross and inert matter of the body. By making virtue something that was imposed and regulated from outside the self, he gave a physiological support for a system of society that operated using legal organisations to enforce good behaviour…In contrast…Lawrence’s theory is a republican one, levelling all matter and denying that a ‘monarch’ was needed as the head of the state. (Ruston 2005, 75)
The political and theological implications of the materialist-vitalist debate of course infltrated the various theories of embryology, which rested on similar assumptions about the sources of life. Generally speaking, preformation came to be associated with mechanism and a religious point of view that insisted that God, an external source, was the origin of life.16 Epigenesis, on the other hand, sought to identify, from scientifcally observable phenomena, organic, material causes internal to the being itself instead of supernatural, external explanations of life. Epigenesists were not always successful in fnding purely internal sources, often lapsing into vitalism, which was essentially a supernatural concept despite the specifc labels they applied to it. These binaries—vitalism/materialism, mechanicism/ organicism, external/internal—were the major threads running through each theory, each of which had its own epistemological and ontological implications.
Embryological history in the West generally begins with the Aristotelian fantasy of gender and species hierarchy, for within his system women are inferior to men, animals inferior to humans, and plants inferior to animals.17 Signifcantly, Aristotle’s theory was committed to explaining life as something that occurs within the creature itself; there are no external forces, but the being, of whatever variety (plant, animal, human), holds the potential within the material. Thus, life is “self-sourced,” to coin a term. Aristotle’s system was, of course, pre-Christian and committed to the notion of female inferiority, for in Aristotle’s program the male provides the essence of life, the creative force, whereas the female provides only the material.18 His system also supports species hierarchy wherein the vegetable is the lowest form of identity and the male human the highest.
Aristotle’s theory articulated a relationship between the form and the material, a relationship that later theorists continued to discuss and revise
16 Because of vitalism’s supernatural element, it might seem that preformationists would lean in that direction; however, according to preformation theory, God had already done the act of creating, so any suggestion that creation occurred in the present few in the face of the preformationist emphasis on God as First Cause. Further, vitalism did not necessarily imply God, but something extra-natural and outside the material, which is the reason that the scientifcally minded rejected it or attempted to steer around it.
17 This explanation of Aristotelian theory relies heavily on Maienschein (2017).
18 There were some earlier theories that suggested that both male and female contributed seed to conception. According to Needham, Hippocrates articulated the doctrine of the two seeds in which both male and female contribute semen to the process. The female seed is “identifed with the vaginal secretion.” This theory competed with Aristotelian theory for centuries. See Needham (1959, 35). 1