When Did the Victorian Period End? Relativity, Sexuality, Narrative

In responding to the roundtable question, I will address how and when culture changed from Victorian to the Modernist period in physics, psychology, sexuality, love, ethics, religion, and art.

Throughout the Victorian period classical physics, based on Galileo and Newton, held that the motion of inert matter in space and time could be explained and predicted on the basis of Newton's threelaws of motion plus gravitation. Such knowledge was the model of the highest kind of knowing that was associated with science. It was responsible for the enormous progress in the conquest of the natural world that Victorians prided themselves in achieving, and social scientists aspired to approximate that kind of 'positivist' knowledge of human behaviour.

Two revolutions diminished the authority of the classical model in physics. The first began with J.J. Thomson's discovery of the electron in 1897, which meant that the atom was not the solid plenum of matter that Victorians believed it to be but largely empty space. That breach in the edifice of absolute knowledge further widened in 1900 with Max Planck's identification of a constant (Planck's constant) that was necessary to account for discontinuities identified in experiments on the behavior of subatomic particles and waves. Subsequent research revealed the function of Planck's constant throughout the subatomic world. By the late 1920s the fuller elaboration of quantum physics would undermine five aspects of the classical model that reigned throughout the Victorian period: determinism, predictability, continuity, objectivity, and visualizability. ¹ Thus, the behavior of matter and energy at the subatomic world was rather indeterministic, unpredictable, discontinuous, subjective, and unvisualizable, a set of stunning ideas implied by Heisenberg's 'Uncertainty Principle', announced in 1927.

While quantum theory undermined the Victorian conception ofthe atomic world, Einstein's relativity theory of 1905 undermined the classical conception of the greater universe and shattered the view that a single set of laws governed events in the microcosm and the macrocosm. Victorian physicists believed that matter moved in a single absolute space in a single absolute time and that the concept of simultaneity could be applied unproblematically to events throughout the universe. As a consequence of relativity theory, however, time and space are relative to motion. Einstein's General Theory of 1916 elaborated that idea to cover accelerated motion. Because every particle of matter in the universe exerts a gravitational force that acts on matter within its gravitational field and accelerates its motion, there are as many different temporal and spatial reference systems as there are bits of matter. Thus time and space are relative to motion and not universal or absolute.

It is ironic that Einstein's theory came to be called relativity theory, because it was based on the fact that the speed of transmission of the energy used to measure time and space, namely light, is not relative but constant at 186,000 miles per second. He originally wanted to call it the theory of invariance but settled on relativity theory. Einstein was not saying that 'everything is relative' as many popularisers thought, but he did relativise time and space for huge macrocosmic events in which objects move at extremely high speeds relative to one another. That important modification to the classical model transformed thinking about the basic dimensions of experience, namely space and time,and shook the metaphysical foundations of the Victorian world view as 'relativity' remained a code word for modernist pluralism generally. While the classical model continued to be applicable to motions that human beings experience in their everyday world, Victorian physicsas applied to subatomic and macrocosmic events began to become obsolete between 1900 and 1905 and was entirely superseded by 1927.

Victorian psychology was grounded on the pleasure principle, which is that people are driven by the desire to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Although Freud's formal transcendence of the pleasure principle came with the publication of Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920, his early dream theory in the late 1890s began the challenge. According to that theory every dream is a disguised fulfillment of a repressed wish, and the wish must satisfy the...