In Science's Shadow: Literary Constructions of Late Victorian Women (review)

Patricia Murphy's In Science's Shadow has a specific focus: to "delve microscopically" (2) into a series of non-canonical texts by male and female authors, texts that show how the issues of contemporary science could be handled to demonstrate the marginalization of women. These are hardly new waters, and they flow counter to other recent studies of women's agency and scientific writing in Victorian literature. The book's virtues nevertheless lie in readings of lesser-probed texts like Marianne North's autobiographical Recollections of a Happy Life (1892) and Charles Reade's The Woman Hater (1877). In the latter case, like Reade, Murphy effectively scrutinizes the dilemma of a woman doctor with respect to culturally designated roles for women; she also provides a context that discusses women's early attempts to enter medical science. Other texts placed under Murphy's magnifying lens are poems by Constance Naden, Thomas Hardy's Two on a Tower (1882), and Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science (1883). What these texts have in common, in addition to their demonstrating Murphy's thesis, is that all appeared about the same time as or during fallout from Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871). These are important years both in science studies, because they were a time of growing professionalism, and in women's history, because of the powerful female voices that emerged in the 1860s and influenced the following decades.

The first third of the book—chapter 1 on "The Gendered Context of Victorian Science" and chapter 2 on Constance Naden—remains in the shadows of earlier work. Referring to work by Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and other Victorian scientists, chapter 1 rehearses studies by other scholars and might have been greatly condensed, while most of chapter 2 is derived from Murphy's own fine essay in Victorian Poetry (40.2 [2002]) and is therefore available elsewhere. The latter two thirds of the book are fresher. The treatments of the novels, all by men, are for the most part good close readings, although Murphy does not fully explain why she has chosen these specific novels. Nor, with the exception of the section on The Woman Hater, does she carefully set the chapters on novelists and their concerns within the contexts of the scientific discourse of their day or suggest why the issues they raise were particular either to these novelists or to their moment in time.

Take for example the discussion of Hardy. Readers of Victorian Studies will be well acquainted with Hardy's examinations of the role that bright, powerful women and their sexuality can play in the fated lives of men like Jude Frawley. But just why, one wonders, did Hardy choose an astronomer-hero like Swithin for Two on a Tower and why a woman like Viviette to share Swithin's passion for the stars? As Pamela Gossin has recently shown (Thomas Hardy's Novel Universe: Astronomy, Cosmology and Gender in the Post-Darwinian World [2007]), Hardy himself was fascinated by astronomy. Did issues in this particular science capture Hardy's fancy at the time of writing Two on a Tower for some specific reason? Might he, for example, have been interested in the importance of contemporary female astronomers like Agnes Clerke? Or was the novel a dress-rehearsal for Jude the Obscure (1895) and therefore less important as a study of science's penumbrae than as a study in male/female psychology? Because Murphy chooses to read the novel through the scrim of French feminists Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray rather than deliver its scientific contexts, questions like the ones I just raised about astronomy largely remain unanswered. Murphy reads Viviette as a dangerous force who delays Swithin's passage from the maternal into the symbolic order of manhood and profession—which in this case just happens to be astronomy.

Murphy's probing of Collins's Heart and Science points up another...