Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century by Anne Stiles (review)

Over the past four decades, Patrick Brantlinger and others have addressed the popular confluence of Victorian scientific developments with the genres of romance, the Gothic, and science fiction. Extensive scholarly work has been done in particular on the literary engagement with evolutionary science, especially with degeneration theory, criminology, and anthropology. In Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century, Anne Stiles explores “how certain formal and thematic conventions of the Gothic and romance genres mesh surprisingly well with a certain non-evolutionary strand of Victorian scientific thinking” (8). It is neurological experimentation, as opposed to evolutionary science, that holds central place in this thoughtful and thorough study.

Stiles’s monograph consists of five chapters that engage with five popular authors—Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Grant Allen, H.G. Wells, and Marie Corelli—each of whom incorporates some aspect of brain sciences into their writing. A worthy companion reading would be Christine Ferguson’s Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle: The Brutal Tongue (2006), which also offers chapters on Stoker, Allen, Wells, and Corelli. Stiles’s opening chapter enters into a dialogue with Julia Reid’s research on Stevenson and science, proposing that, while there are a number of earlier works on the double brain, scientific journalist Richard Proctor’s publications are likely to have been the main influence on Stevenson’s ideas about dual personality. In the chapter on Dracula, Stiles argues that Stoker turns to cerebral automatism to present an anxiety not around the possibility that human action could be confined to the soulless, mechanical reaction of the body to the brain, but around the inverse—that the brain could operate mechanically rather than serve as the ethical source of action. In this chapter, her discussion of Stoker’s rhetorical manoeuvring around the notion of “soul” is particularly insightful, and the consideration of spiritual significance is an important sub-theme that connects to the material that follows.

The chapter on Allen considers his politics and atheism in relation to cerebral localization theories and Cartesian notions of automatism. Seeing even human emotion and intellectual activity as mechanical, Allen was influenced by Thomas Huxley in his formulation of a “physiological reductionism” (89), most evident in the female sleuths of his detective fiction and their use of such things as photographic memory to find rational explanations for mysterious events. Stiles’s chapter on Wells, meanwhile, does engage with evolutionary theory, addressing his representations of aliens as a potential evolutionary result of the selfish, egocentric scientist—a swollen brain ironically reliant on others for its own contentment. The image also points to Wells’s place within the Decadent Movement, admittedly not the subject of Stiles’s study; in a Decadent context, however, the “indignity” that Moreau feels in “being treated like an animal” (141) attains an ethical depth that Stiles overlooks by viewing the connection as symbolic only. The scenario, moreover, echoes the insightful correlation Stiles recognizes between Frances Power Cobbe’s antivivisectionist parable and Stoker’s Dracula (73).

In her particularly innovative closing chapter, Stiles looks at the role of Victorian understandings of neural networks in Marie Corelli’s oeuvre, arguing that the widely read romance writer alleviated anxieties among her readers regarding neurological science’s threat to their religious faith. Corelli proposed that the electrical synapses occurring within a single brain could also occur between one brain and another, and, indeed, between the brain of an individual and spiritual entities, including Christ. Stiles suggests that the novels appealed to women in particular because Corelli depicted heroines who “capitalize on their nervous energies to achieve personal autonomy and spiritual insight” (161). However, the heroine of Corelli’s first major success, A Romance of Two Worlds, only occasionally appears able to act independently, and she rises from her initial state of depression and debilitation through the aid of three other characters, the paternal Heliobas in particular. Nevertheless, Stiles is correct in...