Eugenics: Yeats, Eliot, Woolf

ELT 46 : 3 2003 Love, with its representation of erotomania. If questions remain in readers ' minds, as they undoubtedly will, they are likely to elicit productive thought. It seems odd that Virginia Woolf is never mentioned (though her husband is). Why? Is it because she draws a portrait of schizophrenia , and not paranoia, in the character of Septimus Warren Smith? Or is it because, as a woman, she cannot invest in the masculinity that paranoid modernism demands? Or, unlikely as it seems, did she not pursue professional expertise as symbolic capital? Must fictional paranoia be male? Then, what of Joyce, who appears in this study mainly as the object of Lewis's repeated critiques? Perhaps, as Irving Babbit proclaimed, Ulysses could only have been written by an author in an advanced stage of disintegration; perhaps, as others have thought, schizophrenia explains Finnegan's Wake. Yet paranoia rather than schizophrenia is amply evidenced both in Joyce's life (during the Troubles he refused to return to Ireland, apparently believing that his family would be attacked and he himself shot) and in his writing (as Exiles, to mention only one work, shows). ALISTAIR M. DUCKWORTH __________________University of Florida, Gainesville Eugenics: Yeats, Eliot, Woolf Donald J. Childs. Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degeneration. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. vii + 266 pp. $59.95 IN THIS BOOK, Donald J. Childs investigates the influence of eugenics upon the lives and works of three modernist writers. Founded in the 1880s by Charles Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, the science of eugenics remained in vogue until Nazi racial policies discredited its prescriptions in the 1940s. Earlier in the century, Childs argues, eugenical thought was so pervasive that it was accepted with little questioning by writers of many different political persuasions: "That eugenics served projects as diverse as Yeats's Irish nationalism, Shaw's Fabian socialism , Woolf s feminism, Lawrence's vitalism, and Eliot's conservatism makes it a force to be reckoned with" (20). Childs makes a knowledgeable case for this view, but his conclusions would be more persuasive if they were stated with greater precision and restraint. Eugenists contended that Darwinian natural selection "had ceased to operate in the British population because public and private charity now enabled the weakest to survive" (2). Far from diminishing in numbers , less fit members of the population were multiplying at a greater 320 BOOK REVIEWS rate than superior specimens. The differential birthrate fueled anxieties about national degeneration, class dilution, and even race suicide. Eugenics proposed to reverse this trend by a combination of positive and negative measures. Positive measures would encourage biologically and culturally gifted individuals to beget more children, whereas negative measures, such as segregation, sterilization, and euthanasia, would discourage the less gifted from reproducing. Woolf, Eliot, and Yeats not only held eugenical beliefs but acted upon them, according to Childs. Eugenic considerations affected their decisions about marriage and parenthood. Worried about the degeneration of Ireland's racial stock, Yeats married and begot children late in life because it was "the eugenical thing to do" (226). Eliot broke off connubial relations because he was concerned about "the potentially dysgenical dimension of both his own and his wife's health problems" (99). Virginia and Leonard Woolf decided to have no children in part because of their "concern about the heritability of her ... mental instability" (50). Moreover, eugenics affected the poems, plays, essays, and novels of modernist writers, according to Childs. The clearest case is that of Yeats, who belonged to the Eugenical Society, read the Eugenics Review, and championed eugenical policies in On the Boiler (1939). Not only did he advocate breeding humans like racehorses, but he also believed that poetry and art should provide images of beautiful men and women to inspire eugenical mating. Childs contends that Yeats's interest in, and literary use of, eugenics began earlier than is commonly assumed. They date, he argues, from the turn of the century and were strongly influenced by two books in particular: The Oneida Community by Allan Estlake (1900) and The Sexual Question by Auguste Forel (1905; English translation 1908). These arguments are convincing but marred by a tendency toward overstatement that impairs...