Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel by Anne DeWitt (review)

The introduction to Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel clearly announces its bold departure from what Anne DeWitt, channeling Gillian Beer’s One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature (1988), calls the “one culture” approach to science and literature studies. Interrogating the belief that literature and science shared “one culture,” Moral Authority backs away from re-embracing the discredited “two cultures” thesis of C. P. Snow’s 1959 essay (2). As DeWitt argues, “This is not to say, however, that I think we should see science and literature as two separate cultures. … This book, then, is not the story of two cultures locked in an agon, but rather an argument about the genre of the novel and the discipline of science in a period when both science and novel-writing were in the process of professionalization” (6). DeWitt’s intention—to “attend to the science that appears on the surface of the novel”—locates her work outside a model of discursive fluidity between science and literature. Instead, she concentrates on “characters who practice or study science, fictional conversations about science, narrative comments on or references to science” (6). This critical turn is potentially rich, but it doesn’t seem to necessitate what DeWitt provocatively insists upon: that scholarly work such as Gillian Beer’s and George Levine’s invents meaning where it doesn’t exist. DeWitt characterizes scholarship following the “one culture” model as looking for the “hidden scientific significance of a non-scientific element”—often employing “strenuous interpretive work” in order to reveal “hidden meaning” (6).

That DeWitt sees the “one culture” thesis as a doxa (or even dogma) of nineteenth-century science and literature studies is apparent quite early on in her book. It is surprising to see her discount a large body of scholarship by implying that such modes of argumentation have a mercenary quality: “The one-culture model thus benefits the arguments of literary scholars by proving a status-quo view that that the scholar can overturn. … Like any good paradigm, it offers researchers a fresh field of inquiry, providing them with both new objects of study (Victorian scientific writing) and a highly productive method” (4). Certainly it is useful to interrogate any underlying idea that one believes has rigidified into dogma, but questioning motivation isn’t so much an effort of interrogation as it is an act of toppling. Others have complicated the “one culture” model, noting how bitterly contested and unstable the categories of literature and science were. DeWitt intends to be provocative and hence may unintentionally flatten the extent to which these earlier critics emphasize divergences as well as commonalities between the two. DeWitt aligns herself methodologically with theorists of the new “surface reading,” Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best, who have probingly studied the potential problems of what they have called “symptomatic reading” (6). DeWitt productively attends to the “surface,” sensitively unpacking the way in which the nineteenth-century novel integrated references to science and scientific practitioners into their narratives, reinvigorating earlier thematic strategies of reading (such as Leo Henkin’s Darwinism in the English Novel 1860–1910, which does not appear in an otherwise impressively extensive bibliography).

DeWitt gives succinct histories of such scientific arenas as vivisection, medicine, astronomy, and scientific naturalism, combining this with judicious and sensitive close readings of the novels. One of the most useful aspects of this project is the way in which it treats a wide spectrum of the (increasingly specialized and professionalizing) sciences across the century; this broad scope makes it a useful introductory book. Moreover, individual chapters stand well on their own, with a particular highlight being the second chapter on natural history in Elizabeth Gaskell’s and George Eliot’s works, which appeared previously in Victorian Periodicals Review. Here DeWitt’s work on early Eliot (Scenes of Clerical Life, most notably) and its contextualization within Lewes’s Sea-Side Studies is important. Also significant...