Darwinian Entanglement in Hudson's Green Mansions

Darwinian Entanglement in Hudson's Green Mansions John Glendening University of Montana CAUGHT UNEASILY between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries , between romanticism and a more modern orientation, W. H. Hudson 's romance, Green Mansions ( 1904), occupies a literary no-man's land that probably contributed to its decline in popularity over the last halfcentury . Untroubled by discordant elements more evident today, many of Hudson's contemporaries considered it profound and moving; Alfred A. Knopf loved the novel so much that he founded his firm in order to publish it in America. It retained its status as a modern classic into the 1950s, when it was made into a feature film and was still standard fare in America's classrooms. In his own time Hudson's works, especially his nonfiction treatments of nature but also his fiction, were praised, often extravagantly, by such authors as Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, John Galsworthy, Ezra Pound, and D. H. Lawrence. Although Hudson's nature writings have regained some of their one-time repute, Green Mansions remains in eclipse.1 This essay will reconsider the novel in light of its connection to late nineteenth-century scientific debates over evolution. Its evolutionary provenance suggests not only one reason why the text eventually lost appeal, but, more importantly, why it merits réévaluation. Behind its tale of love and loss lies a poignant but little noted conflict between, on the one hand, Darwin's principle of natural selection—antipathetic to the notion of romantic, benevolent Nature —and, on the other, the more optimistic Lamarckian explanation of evolution, readily enlisted in support of a sympathetic universe. Although the story suffers a sort of narrative breakdown in trying to negotiate between these contrary visions, awareness of the tension opens up a thematic, almost allegorical depth that anticipates some of the orientations of twentieth-century literature. During the years W. H. Hudson worked on Green Mansions he struggled with Darwinism in a contest that had begun long before when 259 ELT 43 : 3 2000 he read On the Origin of Species (1859) as a teenager and, under its influence , embraced evolution but not its underpinning theory of natural selection. Thus the sixth edition of the Origin errs when, after citing Hudson for his work on birds and calling him "an excellent observer," Darwin describes him as "a strong disbeliever in evolution."2 It is resistance to natural selection, not to evolution, that sometimes surfaces in Hudson's writings. Hudson could not accept the implication that the development of life lacks purpose and direction, even though the Origin had helped undermine his religious beliefs. Of course, science, and evolutionary science in particular, eroded the Christian faith of many Victorians , while others found it possible to make compromises between the two spheres of belief. Hudson became an atheist but compensated for his loss with a romantic view of nature that generally satisfied him. Nevertheless , he never relinquished a degree of ill will toward author and theory that had not only undermined his religion but, through Darwin's success and acceptance by the scientific community, accentuated Hudson 's status as an outsider—a self-educated Argentinean immigrant who for years struggled in London to escape poverty, obscurity, ill health, and the confines of the metropolis itself. In reaction both to natural selection and to Darwinism as a new scientific orthodoxy, Hudson favored the evolutionary theories of J. B. Lamarck. Yet the Origin and its theory of natural selection remained as a sort of ghost immune to exorcism. Traces of Darwinism inform Green Mansions, particularly in regard to a series of passages in which Abel, the protagonist, encounters entanglements of jungle vegetation. These moments recall Darwin's "entangled bank," which signals the conclusion of the Origin; Darwin invites us to "consider an entangled bank," briefly describes it, and then exploits the creative potential of this image of ecological interdependence .3 Green Mansions translates the entangled bank into episodes that enact the cognitive entanglements of Darwin's theory while testifying to its power to subvert understandings about humanity and nature; at the same time the novel struggles to sustain a quasi-Lamarckian vision of nature dis-entangled from natural selection—a vision embodied in...