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the fin de siècle the novel was the obvious vehicle for exploring the implica-
tions of heredity for social and biological responsibilities  one of the most
pressing questions of the decade. As New Woman novelists became in-
creasingly taken up with regeneration, so romance was replaced by mar-
riage as a mediator of genealogy. In a deft reversal of the male reason
versus female intuition divide, several writers were arguing that female
reason would put a stop to the racial disasters of masculine passion.
Symbols of the ugly ( diseased ) and beautiful ( healthy ) sustain so-
cial orders through biological narratives (see Gilman 1995). These narra-
tives were coming into their own in the late 1800s and are exemplified in
the work of novelist Grant Allen. In his treatise of 1877, Physiological Aes-
thetics (dedicated to Herbert Spencer), Allen set out his object as  to exhibit
the purely physical origin of the sense of beauty, and its relativity to our
nervous organization (2). For Allen, beauty is joined to function. In an
essay in Mind, he wrote there must be  such an intimate correspondence
between the needs and tastes of each species, that the sight and voice of a
healthy, normal, well-formed mate must have become intrinsically pleas-
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Angelique Richardson
ing for its own sake, as well as indirectly for its associations, extrapolating
from this:
the heart and core of such a fixed hereditary taste for each species must
consist in the appreciation of the pure and healthy typical specific form. The
ugly for every kind, in its own eyes, must always be (in the main) the de-
formed, the aberrant, the weakly, the unnatural, the impotent. The beauti-
ful for every kind must similarly be (in the main) the healthy, the normal
the strong, the perfect, and the parentally sound. Were it ever otherwise 
did any race or kind ever habitually prefer the morbid to the sound, that
race or kind must be on the highroad to extinction. (1879: 92)
Following the same line of thought, Egerton argued that the hermeneutics
of the body be made simplified and accessible, urging for a universal, fixed,
and exacting standard of health, and an easy way of identifying the  un-
fit (arguments which have not been absent from debates surrounding
AIDS and public  awareness : see Buckley 1986, Fee and Fox 1992). In
Egerton s epistolary novel of 1901, Rosa Amorosa, the eponymous heroine
declares  the whole world of men and women would suddenly stand in
nudity, the moral effect would be colossal in a moment of seeming (and
seemingly anarchic) sexual liberation, but the moment is followed by a
vision of a totalitarian health regime:
all false shame would die a summary death, and the exigencies of continuing
the ordinary duties of life would compel people to cast all consideration of it
aside. The common idea of beauty would be entirely revolutionized; the
human face would lose its undue prominence and become a mere detail in a
whole; straight, clean limbs and a beautiful form be the only thing admirable;
disease and bodily blemishes the one right cause for shame, and, as a result,
concealment. (1901: 83 93, my emphasis)
Drawing heavily on biological discourses, Egerton s fiction points up ways
in which women might realize their roles as agents of regeneration. As an
example of Egerton s collusion with the new sociomedical interest in he-
redity, her epigraph to  The Regeneration of Two   love is the supreme
factor in the evolution of the world (1894: 163)  inks love indelibly into
the master narrative of evolution.
Egerton believed that the early imposition of strategic reading programs
would prepare girls for their regenerative roles. We learn of the heroine of
 The Heart of the Apple that there was  not one novel, not one romance
in her library (1897: 183); instead she has  books on birds and beasts and
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The Life Sciences
fishes and plants  books which would convey the facts of life without
the fiction of romance;  the miracle of sex, underlying every natural law,
its individual working in the propagation of the young, was no mystery to
her, and consequently no subject for prurient musing. Likewise, the fol-
lowing year in The Wheel of God, Mary  had books, school books, on botany
and zoology; and yet it was a sin to think of quite natural things if they
touched on men and women (1898: 44). Until novels could treat the
facts of life with the same frank clarity as a zoological treatise it was best to
steer clear of them. In Margaret Dunmore: or A Socialist Home, as Vera and
Joe attend the return of Vera s childbearing strength,  the study of physi-
ology was engaged in au sérieux by both. A class for instruction in this
science had been organized under the roof of La Maison, and to it outsid-
ers were made freely welcome (1897: 127).
The life sciences seemed to many to hold the key to regeneration. Evadne,
the heroine of Sarah Grand s sensational bestseller of 1893, The Heavenly
Twins, bans the romantic novel from her reading, feasting instead on medical
textbooks, which would impart the facts of life frankly and honestly. Among
the books Evadne reads are the works of Galton, and Spencer (1893: 176).
The Heavenly Twins sold 20,000 copies in Britain within a few weeks, and
more than five times as many copies in the USA (Kersley 1983: 72 3).
Even Tess was being used for sex education; Hardy reported that numer-
ous mothers  tell me they are putting Tess into their daughters hands to
safeguard their future (Hardy 1978 88, I: 255). Tess herself rebukes her
mother:  Ladies know what to fend hands against, because they read nov-
els that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance o learning in
that way, and you did not help me! (1891: 131).
As Grand saw it, it was the duty of women to rewrite the novel and cure
civilization of its love-madness; the transformation of the plot of the ro-
mance and the sentimental as a more effective solution to the reading
problem than direct censorship. In the words of Hugh Stutfield:  with her
head full of all the  ologies and  isms, with sex problems and heredity, and
other gleanings from the surgery and the lecture-room, there is no space
left for humour, and her novels are for the most part merely pamphlets,
sermons, or treatises in disguise (1895: 837).
Reviewing The Heavenly Twins in The Yellow Book, Arthur Waugh asked:
 what has [Sarah Grand] told us that we did not all know, or could not
learn from medical manuals? And what impression has she left us over
and above the memory of her unpalatable details? (1894: 218). Interest-
ingly, George Eliot had also been taken to task by male critics for putting
too much science into her novels; Henry James, for one, complained that
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Angelique Richardson
 Middlemarch is too often an echo of Messrs. Darwin and Huxley.
Grand opened The Heavenly Twins with these words from Darwin:  I am
inclined to agree with Francis Galton in believing that education and envi-
ronment produce only a small effect on the mind of anyone, and that
most of our qualities are innate (1893: 1). In its study of the interchange-
able qualities of twins, the novel has much in common with Galton s on-
going work on twins, which led him to conclude  a surprisingly small
margin seemed to be left to the effects of circumstances and education, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]