‘Life built herself a myriad forms’: epics of gestation and co-operation in late nineteenth-century women’s poetry

ABSTRACT

This article argues for a specifically female appropriation and reshaping of the epic tradition in the wake of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Based on an analysis of Mathilde Blind’s The Ascent of Man and Louisa Sarah Bevington’s ‘Unto this Present’, it will show how this ‘female evolutionary epic’ responds to and counteracts Social Darwinist narratives of competition and struggle by emphasizing forces of (maternal) gestation, co-operation and sympathy in the development of life on earth. In doing so, these poems anticipate Peter Kropotkin’s notion of ‘mutual aid’ as the primary factor in evolution.

KEYWORDS:

• The female evolutionary epic
• social Darwinism
• Peter Kropotkin
• mutual aid
• motherhood
• Mathilde Blind
• Louisa Sarah Bevington

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In this capacity, the epic form is arguably still available and deployable, as attested to e.g. by Ralph O’Connor’s discussion of E.O. Wilson, who ‘made the connection with epic explicit in his reflections on evolutionary materialism as an “alternative mythology” whose “narrative form is the epic”: its explanatory power and sheer scale makes it “far more awesome than the first chapter of Genesis or the Ninevite Epic of Gilgamesh”’ (O’Connor 2009, 213).

2 For more detailed discussions of Kropotkin’s evolutionary theories and in particular their opposition to Social Darwinism, see Kinna (1995), Girón (2003) and Eddy (2010).

3 For detailed accounts of Kropotkin’s role in the development of European anarchism, see Shpayer-Makov (1987), Cahm (1989) and Ferretti (2019).

4 For more comprehensive and detailed analyses of Blind’s poetry and The Ascent of Man, see among others LaPorte (2006), Holmes (2009), Birch (2013) and Diedrick (2016).

5 In “Psychology of the Sexes” (1874), Spencer famously claims that ‘only that mental energy is normally feminine which can coexist with the production and nursing of the due number of healthy children’, stating further how, in women, ‘an arrest of individual development takes place while there is yet a considerable margin of nutrition: otherwise there could be no offspring’ (31, 32). In their best-selling The Evolution of Sex (1889/1908), Patrick Geddes and Arthur Thomson likewise make the case for a different temperamental economy of male and female evolution, which they classify as ‘anabolic’ and ‘katabolic’ respectively, arguing that (katabolic) ‘males are stronger, handsomer, or more emotional, simply because they are males, – i.e., of more active physiological habit than their mates’ while the (anabolic) ‘females, on the other hand, tend to live at a profit [with] constructive processes predominating in their life, whence indeed the capacity of bearing offspring’ (26).

6 This assumption of female primacy in evolution is not without its own scientific tradition, including writers such as Eliza Burt Gamble, Antoinette Brown Blackwell and Frances Swiney, who all employ their readings of Darwin and, to a lesser extent, Spencer, to make a case for, as Gamble puts it in The Evolution of Woman, ‘the female as the primary unit of creation’, whereas ‘the male functions simply supplement or complementary’ (1894, 31). For more detailed accounts of the proto-feminist appropriation of Darwinian evolutionary theories, see Deutscher (2004) and Hamlin (2014).

7 For a more comprehensive investigation of Bevington’s poetry, her connections to Kropotkin and important role in British anarchism, as well as the role her Quaker upbringing plays in the development of her social and political thinking, see Funk (2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wolfgang Funk

Wolfgang Funk is Assistant Professor at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany. He received his M.A. in English, German and History at Universität Regensburg and has taught at Regensburg, Hanover, Frankfurt and Leipzig. He is currently working on a post-doc project on late Victorian women poets and their use of evolutionary imagery. His other current research interests include the New Formalism, the representation of artificial intelligence, questions of authenticity in contemporary fiction as well as fictional representations of Brexit. He has published articles on Bryony Lavery (2007), Jasper Fforde (2010), Martin McDonagh (2010), Dave Eggers (2011), Jez Butterworth (2011), Hilary Mantel (2013), Peter the Wild Boy (2015), May Kendall (2015), Max Müller (2016), Louisa Sarah Bevington (2017), Amy Levy (2018). He is the co-editor of Fiktionen von Wirklichkeit: Authentizität zwischen Materialität und Konstruktion (2011) and The Aesthetics of Authenticity: Medial Constructions of the Real (2012). His PhD thesis, The Literature of Reconstruction: Authentic Fiction in the New Millennium was published with Bloomsbury in 2015 and has been awarded the ESSE First Book Award in 2016. He is also the author of an introduction to Gender Studies (in German; utb, 2018).