Oscar wilde, the science of Heredity, and The Picture of Dorian Gray

English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920

Volumn 54, Issue 4, 2011, Pages 494-522

  Wainwright, Michael ^a  

^a STAFFORDSHIRE UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 80052134066     PISSN: 00138339     EISSN: 15592715     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (70)

1. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, in Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 2003), 25.
2. Thomas Carlyle, The Letters of Thomas Carlyle, 1826-1836 (London: Macmillan, 1889), 46;
3. Gisela Argyle, Germany as Model and Monster: Allusions in English Fiction, 1830s-1930s (London: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002), 106.
4. M. J. S. Hodge, "England," in The Comparative Reception of Darwinism, Thomas F. Glick, ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 13.
5. Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde's Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of a Mind in the Making, Philip E. Smith and Michael S. Helfand, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 110. Wilde makes extensive use of the Greek semicolon • and underlining throughout his journals. These tendencies, along with Wilde's irregularities of grammar, are reproduced herein.
6. Oscar Wilde's Oxford Notebooks, 109.
7. Ibid., 112. In 1868, English zoologist Thomas Henry Huxley believed he had discovered the primordial source of organic life, which he named Bathybius Haeckelii in honor of his coeval. Huxley was later forced to admit, however, that Bathybius Haeckelii was a chemical product.
8. Philip E. Smith, "Protoplasmic Hierarchy and Philosophical Harmony: Science and Hegelian Aesthetics in Oscar Wilde's Notebooks," in Critical Essays on Oscar Wilde, Regenia Gagnier, ed. (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991), 204.
9. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Hamilton, 1987), 289;
10. Englishman William Kingdon Clifford (1845-1879) made his reputation as a mathematician and philosopher. The English anthropologist Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917), author of Primitive Culture (1871), was a founder of cultural anthropology. Born in Canada, George John Romanes (1848-1894) was an evolutionary biologist. Sir Charles Dilke, Second Baronet (1843-1911), was a reformist politician, a rare radical imperialist. Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (1829-1894) was a lawyer, judge, and professor who wrote History of the Criminal Law (1883). Prince Peter Alekseyevich Kropotkin (1842-1921) was a Russian anarchist, author of Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1899), Mutual Aid (1902), and Modern Science and Anarchism (1903). The Hungarian physician and philosopher Max Nordau (1849-1923) was cofounder of the World Zionist Organization in 1897. One wonders whether Wilde also knew, either personally and/or intellectually, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913). The Duke of Monmouth, who bores his much younger wife and those around him in The Picture of Dorian Gray with his "description of the last Brazilian beetle that he had added to his collection" (139), could be a sly caricature of Wallace. Although never a duke, Wallace was born in Usk, Monmouthshire, and married Annie Mitten, twenty-five years his junior.
11. Oscar Wilde's Oxford Notebooks, 81. Ironically, Smith and Helfand cite John Stuart Mill as a social evolutionist pertinent to Wilde's intellectual maturation, but Wilde disparaged Mill's lack of Darwinian enlightenment. "Ignorance of Darwin," remarks John Wilson Foster, "was enough to condemn a putative thinker in Wilde's eyes."
12. See John Wilson Foster, "Against Nature? Science and Oscar Wilde," University of Toronto Quarterly, 63.2 (Winter 1993/1994), 332. A letter of "thanks" from Wilde to W. L. Courtney for a copy of his Life of John Stuart Mill (1889) relates how Mill "gives me very little" because he "knew nothing of Plato or Darwin."
13. Oscar Wilde, "To W. L. Courtney" (January 1889), in The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis, eds. (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 388.
14. Wilde explicitly draws attention to The Origin of Species in "The Soul of Man under Socialism" (1891). The work of Weismann was a prominent absentee from the manifest of Wilde's library, but he lost various items during his changes of address and abode (the two places not always matching), and neither did or would Wilde necessarily own treatises that proved significant to his art.
15. Rita Severi, "Wilde's Library: Victorian Studies in Italy," Journal of Victorian Culture, 12.2 (Autumn 2007), 297;
16. Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 97.
17. Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1888), 2: 370.
18. Haeckel calls these external forces "waves." One category contains factors such as gravity, temperature, and humidity. The other category involves forces including diet, exercise, dissipation, and disease.
19. Andrew Reynolds, "The Theory of the Cell State and the Question of Cell Autonomy in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Biology," Science in Context, 20.1 (2007), 72.
20. Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen: Allgemeine Grundzüge der organischen Formen-Wissenschaft, mechanisch begründet durch die von C. Darwin reformirte Descendenz-Theorie (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1866), 2: 300 (emphasis added; my translation).
21. August Weismann, Essays upon Heredity and Kindred Biological Problems, Edward Bagnall Poulton, Selmar Schönland, and Arthur Everett Shipley, trans. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1889), 165.
22. Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants, 2: 454.
23. Weismann, Essays upon Heredity, 168.
24. Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 7.
25. Weismann, Essays upon Heredity, 165. The original reads, "wie kommt die einzelne Zelle dazu, das Ganze mit 'Portrait-Aehnlichkeit' reproduciren zu können?" August Weismann, "Die Continu-ität des Keimplasmas als Grundlage einer Theorie der Vererbung" (Jena: Verlag von Gustav Fischer, 1885), 1.
26. Weismann, "Die Continuität des Keimplasmas," 1. Poulton was an English naturalist, Schön-land was a German herbarium curator, and Shipley was an English comparative anatomist.
27. The preceding argument understands a "discourse" to be a transpersonal language system that constitutes the lexicon, concepts, and values of a specific epistemological community such as Darwinism or creationism, or Darwinism, Haeckelism, or Weismannism, or a subgroup within a larger movement, as instanced by embryology or genetics within the school of post-Darwinism.
28. Foster, "Against Nature? Science and Oscar Wilde," 206.
29. Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 523.
30. Smith, "Protoplasmic Hierarchy and Philosophical Harmony: Science and Hegelian Aesthetics in Oscar Wilde's Notebooks," 205.
31. Jowett was one of the foremost voices against the Germanization of Oxford. "There is nothing less I wish than to see Oxford turned into a German or a London University," he professed in 1847. "On the other hand," he conceded, "is it at all possible that we shall be allowed to remain as we are for twenty years longer, the one solitary, exclusive, unnational Corporation⋯?" See Evelyn Abbott and Lewis Campbell, Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett (London: John Murray, 1897), 1: 190.
32. Walter Pater, "A Novel by Mr. Oscar Wilde," in Selected Writings of Walter Pater, Harold Bloom, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 263.
33. Ibid., 205.
34. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 16.
35. The Picture of Dorian Gray, 25. Lord Henry Wotton will later translate this Darwinian struggle along national lines as an English "survival of the pushing" (141) and Gray will conclude on the day of James Vane's death that "success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak" (144).
36. "A Novel by Mr. Oscar Wilde," 265.
37. The Picture of Dorian Gray, 77, 84.
38. Charles Blinderman, "Huxley, Pater, and Protoplasm," Journal of the History of Ideas, 43.3 (1982), 485.
39. Regenia Gagnier, "Sexuality, the Public, and the Art World," in Critical Essays on Oscar Wilde, 38 (see note 9).
40. Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte translates as A Natural History of Creation. Leibniz et al. practiced a secular teleology that dispensed with the notion of divine intervention while attributing an immanent drive toward the predetermined goal of perfection.
41. Argyle, Germany as Model and Monster, 129-30.
42. Ibid., 85. An edition of the St. James's Gazette, which Dorian happens to read, later confirms this exchange: "Considerable sympathy was expressed for the mother of the deceased, who was greatly affected during the giving of her own evidence, and that of Dr. Birrell, who had made the postmortem examination of the deceased" (96).
43. Robert Mighall, ed., The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde (London: Penguin, 2003), 242.
44. Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle (London: Penguin, 1989), 355.
45. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 6th ed. (London: John Murray, 1888), 12.
46. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles (London: Everyman, 1993), 200.
47. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles: Another Adventure of Sherlock Holmes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 139.
48. Ernst Haeckel, The Evolution of Man: A Popular Exposition of the Principal Points of Human Ontogeny and Phylogeny, Joseph McCabe, trans. (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2007), 1: 163.
49. The original reads, "Bei der Entwickelung fast eines jeden, höheren Organismus sehen wir, dass ne-ben der fortschreitenden Ausbildung der meisten Organe auch in einzelnen Theilen rückschreitende Entwickelungs-Processe vorkommen." Ernst Haeckel, Anthropogenie oder Entwickelungsgeschichte des Menschen (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1874), 134.
50. Die Welträthsel was published in English as The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (1900).
51. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1896), 45.
52. Patrick Carroll, Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 48.
53. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 208.
54. Oscar Wilde, "A Talk with Wilde: The Apostle of the Aesthetes Enunciates his Views," Philadelphia Press, 17 January 1882, 2.
55. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 64.
56. Woodrow's title at the presbytery was Professor of Natural Science in Connection with Revealed Religion.
57. Harry W. Paul, "Religion and Darwinism: Varieties of Catholic Reaction," in The Comparative Reception of Darwinism, 417 (see note 3). The English biologist St. George Jackson Mivart (1827-1900) converted to Roman Catholicism. M. D. Leroy (n.d.) was a French Dominican theologian. Father John Augustine Zahm (1851-1921) was a Catholic priest, scientist, and explorer.
58. Otis, Networking, 112.
59. Heather Seagroatt, "Hard Science, Soft Psychology, and Amorphous Art in The Picture of Dorian Gray," Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 38.4 (1998), 746.
60. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, Robert Baldick, trans. (London: Penguin, 2003), 22.
61. Seagroatt, "Hard Science, Soft Psychology, and Amorphous Art in The Picture of Dorian Gray," 747.
62. Suzanne Raitt, "Freud's Theory of Metaphor: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Nineteenth-Century Science and Figurative Language," in Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis, 1830-1970: Essays in Honour of Gillian Beer, Helen Small and Trudi Tate, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 126.
63. Raitt, "Freud's Theory of Metaphor," 124.
64. Pater, "A Novel by Mr. Oscar Wilde," 266. Emphasis added.
65. Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (London: Penguin, 1996), 321.
66. Michel Foucault, "The Order of Discourse," in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, R. Young, ed. (Boston: Routledge, 1981), 61.
67. "For Wilde homosexual love roused him from pasteboard conformity to the expression of latent desires," Believes Ellmann. "After 1886 he was able to think of himself as a criminal, moving guiltily among the innocent" (Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 261).
68. Philip Appleman, "Darwin, Pater, and a Crisis in Criticism," in 1859: Entering an Age of Crisis, Philip Appleman, William A. Madden, and Michael Wolff, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 84.
69. Appleman, "Darwin, Pater, and a Crisis in Criticism," 86.
70. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (March 1850)," in The Communist Manifesto and Other Revolutionary Writings: Marx, Marat, Paine, Mao, Gandhi, and Others, Bob Blaisdell, ed. (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003), 156.