Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T06:12:34.277Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Thomas Hardy and the Value of Brains

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 May 2020

Sara Lyons
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article reads Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders (1887) and Jude the Obscure (1895) as ambivalent responses to the new conception of human intelligence that emerged from Victorian psychology and evolutionary theory and which formed the basis of what I describe as the Victorian biopolitics of intelligence. Although these novels reflect Hardy's endorsement of the new biological model of intelligence, they also register his resistance to what many late Victorians assumed to be its corollary: that mental worth can be an object of scientific measurement, classification, and ranking. I suggest that the work of the philosopher Jacques Rancière illuminates the extent to which these novels challenge the scientific reification of intellectual inequality and attempt to vindicate overlooked and stigmatized forms of intelligence.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , Summer 2020 , pp. 327 - 359
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Allen, Ansgar. Benign Violence: Education in and beyond the Age of Reason. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.Google Scholar
Beer, Gillian. Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Birch, Dinah, ed. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 7th ed.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Bownas, Jane L.Thomas Hardy and Empire: The Representation of Imperial Themes in the Work of Thomas Hardy. London: Routledge, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carson, John. The Measure of Merit: Talents, Intelligence, and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750–1940. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, William. “Arborealities: The Tactile Ecology of Hardy's Woodlanders.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 19 (2014): 1–22, www.19.bbk.ac.uk/articles/10.16995/ntn.690.Google Scholar
Cooper, Andrew. “Voicing the Language of Literature: Jude's Obscured Labor.” Victorian Literature and Culture 28, no. 2 (2000): 391–410.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Danziger, Kurt. Naming the Mind: How Psychology Found Its Language. London: Sage, 1997.Google Scholar
Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Edited by Moore, James and Desmond, Adrian. London: Penguin, 2004.Google Scholar
Daston, Lorraine. “The Naturalized Female Intellect.” Science in Context 5, no. 2 (1992): 209–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dell, Katherine Julia. The Book of Job as Sceptical Literature. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1991.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dickey, Colin. Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius. Denver: Unbridled Books, 2010.Google Scholar
Dutta, Shanta. Ambivalence in Hardy: A Study of His Attitude to Women. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eagleton, Terry. Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2009.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol 1: An Introduction. Translated by Hurley, Robert. London: Penguin Books, 1976.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. Translated by Macey, David. London: Penguin, 1997.Google Scholar
Frederickson, Kathleen. The Ploy of Instinct: Victorian Sciences of Nature and Sexuality in Liberal Governance. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Galton, Francis. Hereditary Genius. London: Macmillan, 1869.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garber, Marjorie. Hardy's Fables of Integrity: Woman, Body, Text. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Goodman, Lesley. “Rebellious Identification, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Arabella.” Narrative 18, no. 2 (2010): 163–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gosse, Edmund. “Mr. Hardy's New Novel.” Cosmopolis (1896): 60–69.Google Scholar
Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.Google Scholar
Greenslade, William. Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. 1895. Edited by Taylor, Dennis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Hardy, Thomas. A Pair of Blue Eyes. 1873. Edited by Manford, Alan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the d'Urbervilles. 1891. Edited by Riquelme, John Paul. Boston: Bedford St. Martin's, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hardy, Thomas. The Woodlanders. 1887. Edited by Kramer, Dale. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.Google Scholar
Heaney, John. “Arthur Schopenhauer, Evolution, and Ecology in Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders.” Nineteenth Century Literature 71, no. 4 (2017): 516–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Howell, Charles. “Education as Positional Good Reconsidered.” JPSE: Journal of the Philosophical Study of Education 1 (2011): 19–36.Google Scholar
Huxley, T. H. “On the Natural Inequality of Men.” The Nineteenth Century 27 (1890): 1–23.Google Scholar
Ingham, Patricia. The Language of Gender and Class: Transformation in the Victorian Novel. London: Routledge, 1996.Google Scholar
Jackson, Mark. The Borderland of Imbecility: Medicine, Society, and the Fabrication of the Feeble Mind in Late Victorian and Edwardian England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Jacobus, Mary. “Tree and Machine: The Woodlanders.” Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Thomas Hardy, edited by Kramer, Dale, 116–34. Totowa: Barnes & Noble Books, 1979.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keen, Suzanne. Thomas Hardy's Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy's Imagination. Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Kevles, Daniel J.In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Kidd, Benjamin. Social Evolution. London: Macmillan, 1894.Google Scholar
Kornbluh, Anna. “Obscure Forms: The Letter, the Law, and the Line in Hardy's Social Geometry.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 48, no. 1 (2015): 1–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lilly, W. S. “Darwinism and Democracy.” Fortnightly Review (1886): 34–50.Google Scholar
Lyons, Sara. “‘You Must Be as Clever as We Think You’: Assessing Intelligence in Henry James's The Tragic Muse.” Modern Philology 115, no. 1 (2017): 105–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marroni, Francesco. Victorian Disharmonies: A Reconsideration of Nineteenth-Century English Fiction. Dover: University of Delaware Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Mattisson, Jane. Knowledge and Survival in the Novels of Thomas Hardy. Lund: Lund University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Maudsley, Henry. Body and Mind. New York: D. Appleton, 1871.Google Scholar
Mazumdar, Pauline. Eugenics, Human Genetics, and Human Failings: The Eugenics Society, Its Sources and Its Critics in Britain. London: Routledge, 1991.Google Scholar
Memel, Jonathan. “‘Making the University Less Exclusive’: The Legacy of Jude the Obscure.” Neo-Victorian Studies 10, no. 1 (2017): 64–82.Google Scholar
Meroni, Maurizio. Political Biology: Science and Social Values in Human Heredity from Eugenics to Epigenetics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.Google Scholar
Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty and Other Essays. Edited by Gray, John. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Morton, Peter. The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination, 1860–1900. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984.Google Scholar
Orel, Harold, ed. Thomas Hardy's Personal Writings. London: Macmillan, 1967.Google Scholar
Paul, Diane, and Day, Benjamin. “John Stuart Mill, Innate Differences, and the Regulation of Reproduction.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 39 (2008): 222–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pearson, Karl. “Socialism and Natural Selection.” Fortnightly Review 56 (1894): 1–21.Google Scholar
Privateer, Paul Michael. Inventing Intelligence: A Social History of Smart. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rancière, Jacques. Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Translated by Corcoran, Stephen. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Rancière, Jacques. Chronicles of Consensual Times. Translated by Corcoran, Stephen. London: Continuum, 2010.Google Scholar
Rancière, Jacques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Translated by Corcoran, Stephen. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.Google Scholar
Rancière, Jacques. The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing. Translated by Mandell, Charlotte. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Rancière, Jacques. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Translated by Ross, Kristin. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Rancière, Jacques. The Lost Thread: The Democracy of Modern Fiction. Translated by Corcoran, Steven. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.Google Scholar
Rancière, Jacques. Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics. Translated by Swenson, James. New York: New York University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Literature. Translated by Rose, Julie. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Reid, Fred. Thomas Hardy and History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ribot, Théodule. Heredity: A Psychological Study of Its Phenomena, Laws, Causes, and Consequences. London: Henry S. King, 1875.Google Scholar
Richardson, Angelique. “Hardy and Biology.” In Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts, edited by Mallet, Philip, 156–79. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Richardson, Angelique. Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Ritchie, D. G. “Equality.” Contemporary Review 62 (1892): 563–68.Google Scholar
Roach, John. Public Examinations in England, 1850–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Romano, Serena. Moralising Poverty: The “Undeserving” Poor in the Public Gaze. London: Routledge, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shuman, Cathy. Pedagogical Economies: The Examination and the Victorian Literary Man. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Shuttleworth, Sally. The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840–1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Spencer, Herbert. The Principles of Biology. Vol 1. London: Williams and Norgate, 1864.Google Scholar
Spencer, Herbert. The Principles of Psychology. Vol 1. 3rd ed.London: Williams and Norgate, 1890.Google Scholar
Steinlight, Emily. “Hardy's Unnecessary Lives: The Novel as Surplus.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 47, no. 2 (2014): 224–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stiles, Anne. Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sutherland, Gillian. Ability, Merit, and Measurement: Mental Testing and English Education, 1880–1940. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Szreter, Simon. Fertility, Class, and Gender in Britain, 1860–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Venn, John. “Cambridge Anthropometry.” Journal of the Anthropological Institute 18 (1889): 140–54.Google Scholar
Wells, H. G.Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought. London: Chapman & Hill, 1901.Google Scholar
White, Paul. “Acquired Character: The Hereditary Material of the Self-Made Man.” In Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500–1870, edited by Müller-Wille, Staffan and Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg, 375–97. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Wilson, Andrew. “The Old Phrenology and the New.” The Gentleman's Magazine 244 (1879): 68–85.Google Scholar
Woloch, Alex. The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Wooldridge, Adrian. Measuring the Mind: Education and Psychology in England, c. 1860–c. 1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.Google Scholar