"Morpho Eugenia" and the Fictions of Victorian Englishness: A. S. Byatt's Postcolonial Critique
"There I was, in lands never before entered by Englishmen, and round me fluttered Helen and Menelaus, Apollo and the Nine, Hector and Hecuba and Priam. The imagination of the scientist [Linnaeus] had colonised the untrodden jungle before I got there. There is something wonderful about naming a species. To bring a thing [such as a butterfly] that is wild, and rare, and hitherto unobserved under the net of human observation and human language …" [pondered William]. "Poor innocent insect," [replied Matty Crompton], "to have its small life burdened with so large an import."
Byatt, "Morpho Eugenia"
Classification, that process by which we order and name our object, is an ontological given of human reasoning, a fundamental mechanism of cognition. Yet as an instrument of thought, it is equally double-edged. While it affords the individual both godly power and joy to organize, colonize, and ascribe meaning to unnamed things, it is also an incarcerating force that occludes the deeper complexity of matter—life and the humanity within it—which cannot be so neatly captured in a name.
In her "Morpho Eugenia," the first of two novellas coupled under the title Angels and Insects, A.S. Byatt articulates the experience of those who are caught, netted, and bound to the laws of nature and society. Portraying the plight of such shackled beings, she expresses sympathy for the "poor [End Page 187] insect," that captive object of scientific scrutiny, "burdened" by the large "import" of taxonomies. "I see insects as the Not-human, in some sense the Other," she remarks, commenting on the makings of "Morpho Eugenia," "and I believe we ought to think about the not-human, in order to be fully human" (Byatt in Alfter and Noble, 192).1 What does this classification of insects as "Other" imply? And conversely, what does it mean to classify the "Other" as insect?2 A novella such as "Morpho Eugenia," which ostensibly reads as a Victorian romance, with meditations on Darwinian thought and Creationist theology, raises complex questions about the politics and ethics of human mastery, both social and epistemological. Byatt's text presents a sustained but protean, and often unsettled,3 analogy between two communities—insects and people. At times elusive, and often mutable, the correspondence Byatt introduces is less about whether or not the two species compared are truly alike than about whether or not an analogy can act as a heuristic device, a beacon to cast light on a certain selfhood. In "Morpho Eugenia," that selfhood is a decaying Victorian aristocracy [End Page 188] whose "Other" is multifold. Now a pinioned insect, now an underclass, sorted on rungs by degrees of skill, this "Other" also features as a colonial presence, an inchoate mass of exotic beauty and impenetrable "bestiality." It is this last "Other" which embodies the disturbing black hole in the larger whole of Victorian Englishness; it is the Amazonian dark shadow of the English hedgerow that repeatedly haunts the English community of "Morpho Eugenia." For amidst its simulacra of nineteenth-century realism, meticulous discussions of theology and entomology, Byatt's text does not fail to remind us that the local space of the English manor, Bredely Hall, is, in various ways, globally defined, and that the native English practice of butterfly hunting, pursued by Anglican clergymen and Darwinian naturalists, is mediated by travels to colonized worlds. Even those at the pinnacle of English society define their identity ambiguously through captures of "rude" and reptilian life abroad. Thus, musing on the outcome of his existence, Reverend Alabaster remarks: "I might perhaps hope that some monstrous toad or savage-teeming beetle in the jungle floor might immortalise me—Bufo amazoniensis haraldii—Cheops nigrissi alabastri" (18).4 In this, and more besides, "Morpho Eugenia" offers us a postcolonial appraisal of Victorian Englishness. At once preoccupied with the dynamic...
