In the Hollow of the Wave: Virginia Woolf and Modernist Uses of Nature

2. Diversions of Darwin and Natural History

42 By the early twentieth century, the field of natural history had yielded much of its authority to a more theoretical, discipline-based pursuit of science situated in professional societies and the academy and, as feminist historians of science have recognized, largely off-limits to women and people of color.1 Natural history still attracted the general public, including women. These “common readers” of science might also apply “survival of the fittest,”2 or some other smattering of Darwinian evolutionary theory to daily discourse . For Woolf, the observers and collectors of nature were as interesting as what they collected. Writing of the eighteenth-century naturalist Gilbert There are in the Natural History Museum certain little insects so small that they have to be gummed to the cardboard with the lightest of fingers, but each of them, as one observes with constant surprise, has its fine Latin name spreading far to the right and left of the miniature body. We have often speculated upon the capture of these insects and the christening of them, and marveled at the labours of the humble, indefatigable men who thus extend our knowledge. •Woolf, “A Scribbling Dame” No currency has stood the test of time like the Darwin currency. •Woolf, “In Any Family Save the Darwins” 2 Diversions of Darwin and Natural History Diversions of Darwin and Natural History 43 White, she sets up with imaginary binoculars to study White as he watches migratory swallows: “We observe in the first place the creature’s charming simplicity. He is quite indifferent to public opinion. He will transplant a colony of crickets to his lawn; imprison one in a paper cage on his table; bawl through a speaking trumpet at his bees” (“White’s Selbourne,” E 6:190). Woolf’s novels, essays, and personal writings are replete with carefully delineated natural history enthusiasts and provide complex contexts and artistic angles for the study of nature. Woolf and others in the Bloomsbury circle had considerable respect for White. Edmund Blunden’s Nature in Literature, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf in 1929 as one in a series of “Hogarth Lectures,” ends with a chapter that credits “The Selbornian” with the lasting popularity of natural history pursuits in England, and with literary influence on numerous British writers, from Darwin to Massingham (150–55). Woolf also attends to nineteenth-century women working on the peripheries of the science—figures who have also found their place in present-day feminist science studies. Woolf’spresentationofnaturalhistoryamateursbeginsinthefirstchapter of her first novel, her approach including parody and deflation of male authority . Rachel Vinrace compares Mr. Pepper to the “fossilized fish” she lifts from a basin (VO 19). Knowledgeable in many things, including zoology and Greek, Pepper has accompanied the group “either to get things out of the sea, or to write upon the probable course of Odysseus” (19). He accomplishes his own deflation in “a discourse, addressed to nobody, for nobody had called for it, upon the unplumbed depths of the ocean,” proceeding “white, hairless, blind monsters . . . which would explode if you brought them to the surface, their sides bursting asunder and scattering entrails to the winds” (22–23). Pepper is prevailed upon by the ship’s owner—Rachel’s father, Willoughby Vinrace—to stop. Pepper’s own physical description by Rachel and her aunt Helen falls short of a masculine heterosexual ideal, or even human evolutionary stature—quite the reverse of the tall and burly Willoughby. Pepper delivers his discourse by “leaping on to his seat, both feet tucked under him, with the action of a spinster who detects a mouse” (22).3 Rachel and Helen metamorphose him into a “vivacious and malicious old ape” (17). Like Pepper , the ship’s steward, Mr. Grice, launches into the “tirade of a fanatical man” concerning the merits of the sea, “with good flesh down here waiting and asking to be caught” to feed the hungry of Europe (53). Grice is certain that nature is there to serve human needs and pleasures. 44 In the Hollow of the Wave Woolf was, however, deeply interested in the rapidly developing, theoretical disciplines of science—particularly the fields of biology and psychology, but also physics and astronomy. Though she may have made light of some amateurs, she was one herself, and what she saw and read influenced her. The family library visited in Between the Acts includes works by Eddington, Darwin , and Jeans (BA 20). On a 1907...