Retro Post 1: Pelican Presentation

One place to start a presentation on Audubon’s brown pelican might be, for the sake of contrast, to recognize the bird’s participation in at least one non-scientific tradition in the last several hundred years. We could look at the alchemists, for example, for whom the pelican represented, according to Johannes Fabricius’ book Alchemy, a “transition from Paradise to earth, or from spiritual to bodily existence [which] is represented by the ‘inexhaustible’ well of the pelican’s neck” (Fabricius 160). This pelican image is much different from Audubon’s—depicting an animal that in times of need tears the flesh from its own chest to feed its young with its own blood. This pelican has been taken as a Christ trope, shedding blood to save mankind, which I mention, because I think Audubon, too, recognizes this tradition. We can see this, I think, for example, in the episodes on 452-3 in which the pelicans allow the gulls to take its fish willingly out of their mouths, and, he says they “did not manifest the least anger towards the gulls”—which seems like a very Christian thing of a pelican to do. He juxtaposes this image of charity with one of wrath in which the Frigate Pelican and the Brown pelican fight: “It is said that the Frigate Pelican or Man-of-war Bird, forces the brown Pelican to disgorge its food, but of this I never saw an instance; nor do I believe it to be the case, considering the great strength and bill of the Pelican compared with those of the other bird.”

Here’s the frigate pelican. I only have these in black and white, but there’s not much color to this. I know I haven’t talked about the image of the brown pelican yet, but look here at the angles of the frigate, the downward motion of his flight, and his open beak—very aggressive position, as if he’s diving for prey. For me, this invokes a war in heaven kind of scene, the frigate versus the brown pelican.

Perhaps as a bit of a digression, the pelican is mentioned in Psalms 102, though I haven’t quite figured out the significance to Audubon’s bird biography, which echoes the pelican-owl pairing in the psalm on page 453. The psalm, verses 6-7, read, “I am like a pelican of the wilderness: / I am like an owl of the desert. / I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the housetop….” A tenuous connection, maybe, but maybe not. Also, Thomas Aquinas at one point refers to Jesus as a pelican: "Pelican of mercy, Jesu, Lord and God, cleanse me, wretched sinner, in thy precious Blood; Blood, whereof one drop for humankind outpoured, might from all transgression have the world restored." This is a link to Psalm 102, if you want to read it in its entirety (http://www.bartleby.com/108/19/102.html).

To return to Audubon’s pelican, from his tone, it seems apparent that Audubon admires the pelican. Did you listen to his overflown, over the top, romanticized descriptions of the pelican? (What is with his tone, btw? It’s different, right, from what he normally does?) For instance, on 450, he describes the flight of the pelicans: “When the weather is calm, and a flood of light and heat is poured down upon nature by the genial sun, they are often, especially during the love season, seen rising in broad circles…” (450). Under his admiration, though, is some suspicion of the bird’s goodness, but it’s as if he doesn’t want to point it out directly. Only every now and then he makes a comment or a comparison that seems to undercut his admiration. For instance, he compares the roosting pelicans on 451 to the vultures, which he has depicted as one of the lowest and creepiest of the birds, “Had they perched on yon mangroves, they would have laid themselves flat on the branches, or spread their wings to the sun or the breeze, as Vultures are wont to do.” Most importantly, I think, in comparing the pelican to the vulture, as Audubon has invited us to do, is in its voracity. Compare his exclamation on 452 in the first full paragraph “What voracious creatures they are!” with his judgment of the vultures, 297 second full paragraph, when he says, “Their voracity, however, soon caused their death.” I think their voracity, their gluttony (hinted at I think on 452 with the words, “gobble them up”), introduces a tension or a sense that maybe the pelican is not so perfect a transcendent figure. The tension between high and low, I think, recurs in several different ways in this biography, and it’s reflected also I think in the image.

Recall the frigate pelican, with its dark downward facing, angular, open-mouthed attack. Now, if we look at the brown pelican, we can see how this white line of the neck seems to isolate and emphasize the bird’s neck perhaps suggesting this kind of transcendental quality in the bird Fabricius describes, which represents the transition from spirit to body . Unlike some of his other birds with transcendental undertones, the emphasis through this reading, is on the materialization of the bird—that transfer from spirit to body—which, in the Audubon print, is complicated by the pelican’s body directing the eye upward and out the top of the page (symbolically towards enlightenment or heaven or whatever), as does the streaking of the bright yellow of the head and the feathers of the top of the neck. Furthermore the pelican is ascending his branch, though the branch is broken, preventing his ascension. Also, there’s tension generated there, with this line that often draws my gaze downward, from the pelican’s eye through the beak to the hanging mangrove bean again (shades of pink/red), perhaps emphasizing the materiality or lowness of the bird, further emphasized by the fact that the branch is covered in feces.

The Descent of Man and Visual Culture

This post on The Descent of Man began with a very simple observation: there are pictures in this book, and in On the Origin of Species there are not. This led to questions: Why is that? And why these pictures? What are they accomplishing (or attempting to) within Darwin’s argument, and how does this relate to, or deviate from, the work that his words achieve toward the same end? My first thought was how Darwin speaks so often throughout about those who love to “ornament”—male birds turn themselves into pleasing pictures in order to charm females, women likewise bedeck themselves in order to attract men—but even though one could extend the chain to say (and there is apparently a large body of scholarship on this very topic) that Darwin likewise “ornaments” his prose in order to seduce readers engaged with a growing visual culture, he also seems reluctant to take that method of seduction as far as, I imagine, he could.

I hope that those who drew these pictures would pardon my saying so now, but the images in Descent of Man are not masterful works of art, unlike so many other nineteenth-century scientific illustrations which are, in their own right (Chris and Sarah must be experts on this subject by now). What I'm interested in is what their non-artiness might actually be doing here, and how it serves Darwin. Rather than finished works, these illustrations are sketches, and perhaps because of that they carry a greater onus of proof; they do not become wrapped up in the elaborate and fanciful, entranced with their own beauty. They are very much in line, rather, with Darwin’s self-presentation throughout The Descent, as what Beth calls a “modest” scientist. These are modest images, but they make their point all the more powerfully because of it. This is, I think, fittingly demonstrated by Emer’s comparison of her responses to Audubon’s and Darwin’s verbal descriptions of birds; Darwin’s prose fascinates for her in a way that Audubon’s ornithological biographies do not, precisely because Audubon’s far more flamboyant images often outstrip his words; his status as wonderful artist casts a looming shadow over his credibility as scientific observer. How can he serve two masters? As Emer says, for her, “particularly where size and color were concerned, the engravings were the more satisfying source of information.” Verbal descriptions of plumage become less urgent, or even desirable, when a picture can do so well what an excess of language cannot: the old adage begs to be dredged up here, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” This is not what Darwin wants to happen, and I think he is careful, then, to avoid the aggrandized image.

Darwin is not the illustrator (making his distinction as “author,” and also as scientist, all the more clear) nor does he consistently use one illustrator who might threaten to vie with him for attention; he does not associate himself closely with anyone else in the way that, for instance, Tenniel and Carroll comprise an artistic unit. The original cover design given to us in our edition simply notes below the title that this book comes “With illustrations.” The texts given on the page “By The Same Author” also are sure to inform readers right away which of Darwin’s books do and don’t have pictures, and, for A Monograph of the Cirrepedia, even the enticement of coming “with numerous illustrations.” Here we see that the majority of Darwin’s published works—a surprise to me—actually featured images, and yet that connotation of the word “with” is so important here, as it constructs the text as primary and the pictures as supplementary (unlike an Audubon whose words were destined to the periphery of his drawings) while making it evident that their presence is something that nineteenth-century readers would absolutely want to know. Yet it intrigues me that Origin of Species stands as a unique instance of being picture-less (because of the fact that it was rushed to the press?) and I’m wondering if this gave Darwin the impetus to write differently, more imagistically maybe, than he otherwise would have. It’s my opinion that Origin contains more beautiful turns of phrase, or finer word-portraits, than Descent of Man does, although this could easily be for other reasons altogether.

However, in Descent of Man, we see Darwin as a compiler of images from many different locations and individuals, just as he takes his facts from a range of sources to show how widely spread and reasonable his views are. Images are constructed as simply another kind of fact, not to be let too far afield—or elevated above—the scientific work in which they’re found. But, all this said about distracting or dangerous pictures, I see no reason that Darwin couldn’t have done without them altogether, as he did in Origin, unless they were designed to serve a significant function within his “proof.” After all, as Darwin tells us in his preface to the second edition, more illustrations were added and “four of the old drawings replaced by better ones, done from life by Mr T.W. Wood,” and so as much as we’ve talked about the way that Darwin carefully re-crafted his sentences in various editions of his work, he apparently put that same attention into visual elements. Darwin mixes these new drawings from Wood with those of a score of others. His decisions to pick and choose implicitly convey that even across the boundaries of individual authors and illustrators, across myriad texts, pictures, and stylistic nuances, his theories can still be clearly seen as true. And so we have the figure on page 27, in which Darwin combines one image of a human embryo “from Ecker” with another of a dog embryo “from Bischoff” to show the similarities between them, telling the reader on the previous page that they are “carefully copied from two works of undoubted accuracy” (26).

It is in such moments of juxtaposition that images achieve for Darwin what words alone may not be able to, since the subjects he chooses are ones that are seldom easily or commonly seen, noting “some of my readers may never have seen a drawing of an embryo,” let alone an actual embryo (26). So, too, we have the human ear (fig. 2, page 32) where Darwin shows “the projecting point” that is a link to monkeys (again, most people have probably not attentively examined the inside of ears, partly because their positioning makes it so difficult to see inside one’s own, even with a mirror). And on page 34 (fig. 3) when faced with a drawing of an orangutan fetus, it is just not possible for rational readers to deny the similarity between it and a human infant. While Darwin slyly notes that his reason for including this figure is “shewing the form of the ear at this early age,” the viewer can see, without Darwin’s saying it, that the similarity between human and orangutan extends beyond the ear and to the shape of the infant’s entire cranium and face.

Moreover, Darwin is sure to point out that this is an “exact copy of a photograph” (34). In the “By the Same Author” page, Darwin’s publishers also specified the type of illustration, photographic being worthy of distinct appellation for the reader. The photograph would have a novelistic appeal as still a recent technology, and even viewed as more properly “scientific”—or objective—than a drawing (although, of course, it was subject to its own stylistic manipulations—the aesthetic repositioning of Civil War corpses comes to mind). So even though Darwin does not have photos here, it is helpful to him to align his images with that technology, noting throughout the text the means by which he acquired each illustration, frequently, as with the orangutan, remarking that if it’s not a photograph, it’s the next best thing.

In The Descent of Man, Darwin’s images prove the validity of his words, and direct the reader back to them (in order to find the answer “Why does this orangutan look so much like my own baby?”) not like Audubon’s that strut and flaunt. But Audubon never had as much to prove. So, too, Darwin’s modest collection of pictures become more credible in their quickly-jotted ‘roughness’ than many of those too-beautiful scientific illustrations, suggesting that someone who thinks too much about the composition of an image may have become distracted from the task of unraveling the composition of nature, and humanity, itself. So while it strikes me that these images may have felt initially less important in comparison to others we closely analyzed in class, like Tenniel’s in Alice in Wonderland or Through the Looking-Glass, or, of course, Audubon’s, it’s for this reason that I think they’re all the more compelling. Maybe it’s when we don’t consciously think about them as images that they’ve most succeeded; if we didn’t allude to and study them as their own separate entity, perhaps this is exactly what Darwin wanted: not for pictures to fly off the page, but to stay safely put in his argument, a natural extension of his thought rather than an artistic “Other” that threatens to engulf and capsize the text.

Darwin as Ornithological Biographer

Darwin’s bird writings, despite containing a large number of references to Audubon’s, are an entirely different animal from that latter author’s. If, when we open up the Ornithological Biography, we encounter a long list of species, our first impression of Darwin’s bird writings is a long list characteristics and behaviors, seemingly arbitrarily divided into three chapters. While Audubon is telling stories about specific species and, within that, individual birds, with a personal spin, Darwin’s protagonists are not the birds themselves but rather their evolved characteristics. The time frame is enlarged, and the search for a cause drives the plot. Human characters (data sources) proliferate until they are almost as numerous as the birds, while the birds function as examples—supporting details but not the main concern. Similar to the Ornithological Biography, I found myself inclined to read by picking whatever story appealed to me at the moment—reading straight through didn’t seem like the obvious strategy.

I’m a bit surprised to say that, in some ways at least, Darwin’s bird stories made for a more exciting read. In our class discussions of Audubon, we tended to focus quite a bit on the more straightforwardly story-like sections in which Audubon frequently figures as a character, trekking out into the swamps, locking captured puffins into his ship cabin, spending an unhealthy amount of time in a cave inhabited by pee-wee flycatchers, etc. Birds emerge as individuals at the same time that they serve as representatives of their species. Death is momentous enough to deserve description, in many cases. What was less compelling (for me at less) were the descriptions of plumage, bird cries, and flight patterns, which to me read like self-contained data sets: the goal was to provide accurate information. (It’s possible that I’m exaggerating the flatness of these Audubon sections in order to make my point.) Particularly where size and color were concerned, the engravings were the more satisfying source of information.

Darwin, on the other hand, manages to generate suspense around questions of plumage and molting patterns. Returning to the idea of the naturalist detective, Darwin presents us with a kind of whodunit story, reshuffling, like a deck of cards, the findings of every reputable ornithologist of the time in order to reveal larger patterns. The colorful plumage of male birds becomes an occasion for inquiring into animal aesthetics. In what seems to me a typically Darwinian attack on a generalized skeptic, Darwin writes: “He who thinks that he can safely gauge the discrimination and taste of the lower animals may deny that the female Argus pheasant can appreciate such refined beauty; but he will then be compelled to admit that the extraordinary attitudes assumed by the male during the act of courtship, by which the wonderful beauty of his plumage is fully displayed, are purposeless; and this is a conclusion which I for one will never admit” (449-450). True, this passage on an “almost human degree of taste” is a mini-narrative unto itself, focused on the actions of a single species, but it also a climactic moment in the narrative of the male bird’s plumage, in which the elaborate display-behavior of the male prompt a human response—appreciation of aesthetic details—which necessitates acknowledgement of a parallel appreciation by the female bird and, abracadabra, the solution to the puzzle. This is also another delightful case in which Darwin sets up his imaginary detractor’s responses to provide the evidence which proves his point. A “purposeless” trait would be anathema to Darwin’s entire method—already widely accepted at this point, I understand—though a creationist might also have difficulty (with a different reasoning process) subscribing to this kind of explanation.

By the way, there are several other places in the text where excessive behavior on the part of animals leads to conclusions which link bird-consciousness to human-consciousness, either directly or indirectly. One that I found particularly interesting was the explanation of extended singing. In the course of explaining this, Darwin writes that “nothing is more common than for animals to take pleasure in practicing whatever instinct they follow at other times for some real good” (419). This seems to suggest the practice of play (leisure activity as play) as an adaptive trait—a fascinating idea that I think is also a hot topic in child psychology right now, and probably something that Darwin brings up in other passages.

Benjamin Rush

Steven--

Here is Benjamin Rush's book I was telling you about for your syllabus. It's Medical Inquiries and Observations, Upon the Diseases of the Mind (1830). Didn't know that he was also a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

http://books.google.com/books?id=fR8wAAAAYAAJ&ots=v3bAxrWd7a&dq=benjamin%20rush%20medical%20inquiries%20and%20observations%20upon%20the%20diseases%20of%20the%20mind&pg=PR3#v=onepage&q&f=false

Steph

More Thoughts on "The Yellow Wallpaper": Aesthetic-Epistemological Desires and Text as Vaccine

(I’m also citing the extended version from the following site: http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/wallpaper.html)

I certainly agree with Dalia’s point that the narrator does not necessarily have to be read as a victim of sexist science (or at least, doesn’t have to only be read that way)—that is, other readings are both possible and potentially illuminating. My response—as I mentioned in class, and which I’ll try to flesh out more here—is to think about how Gilman’s narrator is not only the subject of a scientist, but how she also has the subjectivity of a scientist; in a sense, that the wife even “outdoctors” or “outsciences” her husband. Thus, rather than posit the two as dwelling in distinctly separate intellectual spheres, we can see how they’re both exercising similar (what I’m calling “scientific”) drives to classify and diagnose, be it woman or wall. What’s troubling, however, is how such epistemological desires—the narrator’s determination to exclusively access the secrets of the wall (“There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will!”)—become inextricably intertwined with impulses to beautify, or at least to remove the unbeautiful (dismantling the offensive paper). In this sense, Gilman’s text, like Hawthorne’s “The Birth Mark,” presents epistemological desire as born from, or with, aesthetic desire: a coupling with consequences.

The narrator’s first impulse, note, is not to enter physician mode; she doesn’t yet diagnose the wall (which she eventually does in denoting its shade as “sickly sulphur,” referring to its “lame uncertain curves,” tendency to “commit suicide,” and sufferance from a “broken neck”) but rather she laments that she has been forced to reside in an atmosphere of overwhelming ugliness. She makes an aesthetic judgment of worth (and saying that the wallpaper commits “every artistic sin” links a moral discourse with aesthetic evaluation as well); what is transgressive about the paper isn’t, at first, that it is sick, but that it is ugly. Ugliness then transfigures into, or is labeled as, sickness. In the beginning, the narrator only states, “I don’t like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings!” Her initial desire is for the beautiful, or more specifically, for the “pretty,” which may in fact be different in connotation: “Do let us go downstairs…there are such pretty rooms there.” Here Gilman’s narrator resembles the scientist of Hawthorne’s “The Birth Mark,” who desires perfect beauty in his wife; meanwhile, this quest for beauty (within a particularly classical sensibility pertaining to ideals of symmetry, harmony and balance), whether to find it or create it, is what actually motivates the move to science. This very relation calls into question why scientists choose the subjects that they do. For Gilman and Hawthorne, study isn’t only study, but is wrapped up with notions of alteration and correction. After all, it is specifically those things which, as the narrator says, “irritate,” that most “provoke study.”

The narrator begins her study with the hope of finding artistic “law” that she hopes is already, somewhere, present, like the naturalist who seeks to understand the operations of natural law. However, both Gilman’s narrator and Aylmer ultimately project their own classical notions of the perfect and the beautiful onto the objects of their study. On the other hand, we have Darwin who warns scientists not to assess perfection on reductive human aesthetic terms: as he says, a naturalist may see “a Crinoid [that] sometimes consists of no less than 150,000 pieces of shell, all arranged with perfect symmetry in radiating lines,” but he should “not consider an animal of this kind as more perfect than a bilateral one with comparatively few parts, and with none of these parts alike…he justly considers the differentiation and specialization of organs as the test of perfection” (Descent of Man, 114). Yet both Hawthorne’s scientist and Gilman’s narrator ignore Darwin’s warning and do, in fact, value symmetry above considerations of how their subjects are suited finely to their own functions; their perception of aesthetic lawlessness (a lop-sided, off-color birthmark, or a wallpaper that “was not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry”) dominates their understanding of other organisms as they are. Granted, Gilman’s wallpaper isn’t an organism in the same sense as a human being or a crinoid is, but for her narrator, it becomes an organism once she begins to study it in an attentive light, and she describes it variously as “a fungus,” a thing with “bulbous eyes,” or a “string of toadstools,” an entity capable of moving and shifting in different lights.

While the paper—like Aylmer’s wife Georgiana—stubbornly deviates from classical ideals of beauty, the dangerous scientific response is to attempt to bring these two kinds of “design”—natural and artistic—into alignment. The response to perceived lawlessness, for both Hawthorne’s scientist-husband, and let’s say, Gilman’s scientist-wife, is to attempt to impose law upon the lawless thing. The narrator of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” ‘dissects,’ or even conducts surgery upon, the wallpaper, by tearing the deviant design-less thing apart, while Aylmer less violently mixes up a medicine for his wife to remove her own asymmetrical flaw; in either case, attempting to bring artistic order to the natural Other, whether female body or embodied-wall (which also contains, for Gilman’s narrator, a female body) actually heralds chaos, arguably for doctor as much as patient.

A final note on Gilman’s “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper” (which can be found at http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/whyyw.html, the page I passed around the other day in class).We didn’t get to talk much about the powerful and complex affect of the story, but in this piece, Gilman cites one physician who wrote to her noting that “it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it.” Gilman disagrees with this reader, stating that the story “was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked,” noting that it has, “to my knowledge, saved one woman from a similar fate--so terrifying her family that they let her out into normal activity and she recovered.” I don’t think, though, that the physician reader has it entirely wrong, even by Gilman’s own logic, since the act of “saving” is given by her as a direct result of “terrifying”—that is, making the reader feel just enough of the narrator’s mental state in order to steer clear of the rest cure. We can’t, then, simply disown the maddening affects of the story’s language, or proclaim its restorative possibilities. The reading experience, if we pull Gilman’s own explanation apart, renders her text as vaccine. It imbues only a certain amount of affective “disease” to the reader in order to awaken and inoculate them against the possibilities of full attack.

Power Shifts: Animals, Man, God, and Knowledge

In The Descent of Man Darwin presents a theory about the origins of mankind that necessarily changes how we understand humans, gods, and animals. A world of natural selection, of change and chance, of interrelationship (between animals and each other, between animals and environment) replaces the orderly world of God’s dominion over man and man’s dominion over animals in a universe created by God. Nowhere (in the first three chapters, at least) does Darwin deny or refute the existence God, but he subtly plays with the categories of human, god, and animal, ultimately subverting them all.

As the title suggests, this book is partially about man’s descent into animality from a privileged place in creation. Throughout these early chapters, Darwin repeatedly depicts man with characteristics of the animal. In his fetus pictures he shows the similarities between a human and dog fetus, which resemble each other far more than their adult forms. Likewise, when Darwin discusses rudiments, he gives examples of people with unusual hair growth: long eyebrows, “persons born with their whole bodies and faces thickly covered with fine long hairs” (37), and lanugo on infants. These rudiments or reversions not only establish the descent of man from animals, but highlight his still animal nature.

At the same time, Darwin draws attention to the ways in which animals possess a human nature. He attributes to animals a dizzyingly extensive catalogue of human-like characteristics: language, tool use, appreciation of beauty, superstition, caprice, memory, “rude architecture and dress” (104), mental improvement or growth, reason, and emotional states including: terror, suspicion, deceit, courage, timidity, sulkiness, ill- and good-temperedness, furious rage, a capacity for “long-delayed and artful revenge” (90), love, a desire to be loved, maternal affection, sympathy, fidelity, shame, pride, boredom, wonder, curiosity, dread, jealousy, gratitude, magnanimity, and humor. This would all seem like very over-the-top anthropomorphism in a different context, but Darwin provides proof for his representation of the animal through numerous examples and in the context of natural selection and evolution. Animals are like humans, not because we project our interiorities onto them, but because we are them, or at least are a version of them.

Darwin is also aware of the ways his theory excludes or diminishes God or gods and religion. Evolutionary theory changes what God is or what God can mean to us. Darwin ends his first chapter by suggesting that if we deny evolution it is due to the “arrogance which made our forefathers declare that they were descended from demi-gods” (43). No longer made in the image of God, humans are made by their environment, by the same history of accumulation and sedimentation that produced animals and plants. However, Darwin also subverts the idea of a diminished human subject, referring to man’s “present high position in the organic scale” (85) and also suggesting that man is like a god to animals: “Professor Braubach goes so far as to maintain that a dog looks on his master as on a god” (119). Humans still have a high status in Darwin’s account, but man has achieved this status through a historical, natural process, not through divine intervention or creation.

These chapters focus on human and non-human animals, but Darwin does broach the topic of religion at a few points. Darwin employs a very light touch when referencing God or religion, but his comments on these subjects are telling. At the end of the first chapter, Darwin doesn’t explicitly say that his theory on the descent of man excludes God, but he does predict that one day people will be surprised that anyone ever believed humans and other animals were each “the work of a separate act of creation” (43). If species result from natural selection rather than separate acts of creation, the only place for God in this theory would be at the beginning, leading to a very deist interpretation of God (a diminished God). When discussing whether or not animals have religion or beliefs, Darwin brackets the question of whether or not “there exists a Creator and Ruler of the universe,” though he says “this has been answered in the affirmative by some of the highest intellects that have ever existed” (116). Darwin doesn’t say “of course God exists” or “I believe God exists,” merely “really smart people think it’s true,” which is a complete evasion of the question which defers its truth or untruth to the mental capabilities of man. Man’s knowledge is supreme, an idea that comes back at the end of chapter three when Darwin expresses “an infinite debt of gratitude we owe to the improvement of our reason, to science, and to our accumulated knowledge,” which saves us from the fear and superstition we might otherwise feel. In these chapters, Darwin elevates animals, diminishes man, and excludes God; intelligence, knowledge, and science become the gods and heroes of Darwin’s book, the tools that let us see the truth of our own descent.

The Patient, the Doctor, and the World: Gilman's (and Hawthorne's) Hoarding Scientists

Some of our more recent readings—Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark” and Holmes’ Elsie Venner for example—have centered around the relationship between the figure of the “doctor” or scientist and the (human) scientific subject, and we’ve thought about these sorts of issues all semester. Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” in contrast to these kinds of texts, gives us a narrative from the perspective of the subject, and I’m interested both in the way that Gilman figures the scientific subject and the ways that gothic “logics” of space influence representations of scientific/medical interactions.
Like most of you guys, I’ve studied this text a number of times, and within various methodological lenses. It seems to me that one thing that most critics agree on (explicitly or otherwise) is that our narrator is victim of sexist science, and that her husband, in “diagnosing” her as a hysterical woman, takes on the role of the patriarchal, oppressive male role (and again, many critics simply assume this as the story’s “plot,” and not something that even needs to be argued).
I don’t disagree with those readings; gendered power is unquestionably at play. However, this formulation of our narrator as victimized by science seems to me more complicated than some make it out to be. Yes, our narrator is forced into a room and isolates from the world because of her “nervousness”; however, the narrator complains very early in the story that “[John] does not think I’m sick!” (439). John’s apparent refusal to acknowledge the narrator’s “illness” (whatever she imagines it to be) is part of her frustration. Our narrator, here, WANTS to be the patient; she WANTS her husband to diagnose her with a “real” disease. Reading the story in this way runs counter to understandings of the narrator as a victim of sexist science.
People have read the Gilman as rejecting Freudian treatments of the hysteric female subject. More broadly, the clinic (including nineteenth-century clinics where women were routinely put on display and poked and prodded) has been cited as a patriarchal space where women become scientific objects subjected to the oppressive male “gaze” (I’m thinking of thinkers like Foucault, here). However, being seen and “read” seems to be what the narrator desires! Her room is a cage, but more importantly, she’s in a cage where no one can see her. Her husband hasn’t put her up as scientific display; he’s hidden her away from the world, and also refuses to look at her himself—as both a scientist and a husband. John becomes a scientist-hoarder (and Hawthorne comes to mind, here): he takes the scientific subject—his wife!—and hides it. Hawthorne does something similar with his doctor, I think: instead of studying the oddity (his wife’s bizarre birthmark), Aylmer wants to remove it.
These isolated spaces make me think about the relationship between the gothic and science. It’s hard not to notice that a lot of the texts we’ve read—including hardcore scientific texts—possess some elements of the gothic. Nineteenth-century gothic works, with their notable variety of diseased characters, characters that spontaneously explode, mesmerized subjects, mind-readers, and other “freaks” of nature, are very often (if not always) marked by a particular sense of isolated spaces, whether it’s the castle, the wilderness, the cave, and here, the doctors lab and ancestral grounds. I don’t have a solid interpretation of how scientific thinking and gothic writing as a genre work together, but it seems to me that the “space” of scientific work is directly related the a three-part relationship between the patient (in some cases, nature), the doctor, and the “world.”

Shame and Humor in Descent of Man

I think what I find really interesting in Descent of Man is the way Darwin approaches his continued project of de-centering the human through the use of humor. Though in the context of eugenics and racial sciences much of this book might not seem funny at all, I found there to be quite a bit of humor in the way Darwin draws together the behaviors, structures, and mental faculties of animals with those of humans. A lot of the instances he mentions seem to conjure up human ‘embarrassments’ or moments that could induce shame due to their display of a human in a compromised position. Since a nameless human, or sometimes a human tendency or habit is made the butt of the joke, it tends to provide the chance for a reader’s blush but also recognition of him or herself (probably him, descent of man…) in the humorous situation. Obviously, one of the key examples of this is Darwin’s description of drunken baboons, who experience a morning-after hangover so bad that they wear “a most pitiable expression” and when offered more hair of the dog vehemently refuse to drink it (4). At first it seems that the point is to laugh at the animal-playing-human, “haha, they’re so much like us, how cute!” but as usual, Darwin quickly makes man the butt of his joke: “An American monkey…after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus was wiser than many men. These trifling facts prove how similar the nerves of taste must be in monkeys and man, and how similarly their whole nervous system is affected” (4). Darwin seems to talk about these apes in a conventional anthro-centric way, only to end up elevating the status of the animal for having superior judgment to man on the subject of drinking, and in so doing humble the human, and then finally to bring human and ape to the same level. This strategy of humbling the reader (even the title seems to do this: “descent” of course as descending from some lineage, but also being lowered, or even, falling) began in Origin of the Species, but I think it really works on a much more intimate level here, calling into question the faculty that humans pride so much and that they believe sets them above the animal kingdom: reason and sound judgment.

My personal favorite of these examples, however, is the instance Darwin relates about long canine teeth in humans, and how they reveal a descent from an apelike progenitor. Here Darwin reveals another human blind spot, or embarrassment that we’d rather not like to be reminded of: vanity, especially as it might take the place of belief in something that humbles us. “”He who rejects with scorn the belief that the shape of his own canines, and their occasional great development in other men, are due to our early forefathers having been provided with these formidable weapons, will probably reveal, by sneering, the line of his descent” (31). Darwin’s trick is to say that by disagreeing, despite one’s best efforts to scoff at such an argument, his theory is inevitably proven. There’s no possible way out of his theory as demonstrated by the joke: to deny it only proves its validity, and causes you to display evidence of it, “snarling muscles,” despite your will, and even perhaps your right to believe what you want.

I find it significant that instead of trying to appease the reader by elevating him in some way or speaking his language and structures of feeling like he often did in Origin, Darwin finds it more effective to continue to weaken or attack the reader’s embarrassing weak points, only to convince him of what he already knows about himself in light of new information about his progenitor. That humans are vain, over-confident in their faculty of reason, and often prone to the pleasures and vices of liquor we already know and wish we didn’t about ourselves. Darwin just redirects those trouble spots as being linked not to ‘sinful nature’ or the inherent folly of man but to our descent from an animal progenitor, thus removing the moral burden and replacing it with an arguably neutral ‘natural’ one.

The Descent of Man as Sequel

The conventional wisdom regarding movie sequels is that they are rarely as good as the original. There are exceptions, of course, but I’ve found that rule a trustworthy one. I bring said rule up right now because I was struck by the degree to which Darwin positions The Descent of Man as a book that begins where On the Origin of Species left off. He does so in part by choosing to use the third sentence of his introduction to Descent to quote a line from the third to last page of Origin (“Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history” [Origin 425]). This new book will pick up where the last one left off, goes the promise, it will expand that tiny, tantalizing sentence into a book-length explanation. Interestingly, the quote that finds its place in the end of Origin and the beginning of Descent is something of an echo of a line from the introduction to the earlier book, Darwin’s claim that the facts he amassed on his trip “seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species” (11). Such is the natural, indeed inevitable path of Darwin’s inquiry—from the general (all species) to the specific (man). With that said, however, following the logic of the theory of evolution to discover its effects on one rather self-impressed species may be dangerous and controversial, but it’s not exactly suspenseful. Descent’s big idea—the theory of evolution via natural selection—has already been covered before the book reaches its first page. If the Darwin of Origin set a fuse, the Darwin of Descent is merely picking up the pieces after the bomb detonated.

Or at least that’s the narrative that Darwin is setting up in the introduction to the later work. But as Beth points out in her excellent post, Darwin’s attempts to position this later work as a foregone conclusion seems to be largely a rhetorical maneuver. While this maneuver may be useful in convincing readers that Darwin’s innovative work is a compendium of well-established and uncontroversial facts, it does not, however, serve as a means of selling the book or its importance. Similarly, Darwin’s talk in both introductions of amassing notes that he has to be “urged to publish” (Origin 11) or convinced that the time has come for their gentle reception (Descent) at first leaves the reader with the impression that these notes weren’t really as urgent as they might have been. In my opinion, however, Darwin is actually being rather savvy here, baiting the reader into saying with a gasp, “But my good Darwin, you don’t mean to suggest that had circumstances been slightly altered the world should never have seen these books?” Darwin’s suggestion that these books almost didn’t come into being bathes them in a sense of drama that seems at least partially artificial.

Regardless of whether or not the excessive humility displayed in these introductions serves to turn the reader off or whet the reader’s appetite, there’s no denying that The Descent of Man is a rather fascinating book. Indeed, while Origin may have the big idea, Descent has boozed-up monkeys, men tossing books with their foreheads, a picture of an Orangutan fetus, and much talk of pointy ears. And while he hasn’t exactly assembled a freak show here, Darwin has chosen examples that do seem a little more sensational than the pigeons that he used to open Origin. While I certainly see the value in discussing some of these rather peculiar cases, I do wonder why Darwin didn’t lead with examples of less spectacular parallels between monkey and man. Sure he begins with his most vivid examples, but are they really best suited to his purpose? Is his decision to use these examples a conscious attempt to excite and interest the reader? I fear I don’t know the answers, but I am glad that this class has led me to ask these kinds of questions when I look in a book of science writing. It was hard to break the habit of reading scientific writing for comprehension, of reading passively and justifying my refusal to engage with the writer by appealing to my scientific ignorance. Now, however, I have come to recognize that I can engage a Darwin on the literary and rhetorical ground on which I have some confidence. And, when I do so I am led to a final conclusion, that I am not bringing him to that terrain, but that he had one foot planted in it all along.

"It's Nothing Too Serious:" Female Illness in "The Yellow Wallpaper"

I used the full text of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” here: http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=GilYell.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=1&division=div1
Mitchell’s essay “Fat and Blood” can be found here (it’s the eighth edition, can you believe it was that popular?): http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16230/16230-h/16230-h.htm
Mitchell’s October 1913 article in The Forerunner, “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper” can be found here: http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/whyyw.html

When the depressed narrator of Frances Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is not improving at the rate her husband had wished, she remarks, “John says if I don’t pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall.” What is fascinating about Gilman’s autobiographically inspired story is that it would fit as easily into a course on gothic fiction as a course on science and literature. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a fictional rendering of the then-common treatment for a cluster of mood disorders that Silas Weir Mitchell and other nineteenth-century physicians classified as “Neurasthenia.” Mitchell, as Gilman’s narrator alludes to, was one of the leading advocates of “the rest cure” as treatment for female nervous disorders.

A striking theme within “The Yellow Wallpaper” is woman as feigner of illness or as exaggerator of illness. When Gilman’s piece is read within the context of Weir’s essay “Fat and Blood,” the desperateness of the narrator’s situation becomes all the more evident. The narrator begins the story by remarking that her husband John “does not believe I am sick!” Her realization—almost shamefully voiced—of her unhealthy emotional responses strike her (and the reader) as meriting attention. She wants to hold her newborn, but John’s sister Mary cares for the child because the narrator admits (but only to the reader), “I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous.” The reader is overcome with the feeling that although the narrator may be unwell, she is well enough to know her condition (and her emotions) better than the medical world (represented by John, his unnamed brother-in-law, and Mitchell). The narrator remarks, “John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.” But as a woman, the narrator must cede knowledge of herself to others: “If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression -- a slight hysterical tendency -- what is one to do?”

There is almost a sense of dramatic irony to the story approaching this piece in an era that has been so invested in understanding and acknowledging the seriousness of mental disorders. But in Gilman’s lifetime, the treatment that she and her narrator received was the norm. In “Fat and Blood,” Mitchell speaks to his medical colleagues from the pages, announcing that this work is devoted to describing the best treatment of the disorders of “nervous women,” “women of a class well known to every physician” (Chapter I). Mitchell’s treatment of the subject of nervous disorders in women, whether his tone is intentional or not, is disparaging and derisive. He parrots another physician author in mentioning that, “An hysterical girl is, as Wendell Holmes has said in his decisive phrase, a vampire who sucks the blood of the healthy people about her” (Chapter IV). A portion of his essay is devoted to “women who mimic fatigue,” yet his work is suggestive of the whole idea of a nervous disorder as a myth perpetuated by lazy women, by women who would rather lay in bed all day and who find no enjoyment in their lives is “the daily drama of the sick-room, with its little selfishness and its craving for sympathy and indulgence” (Chapter IV and V). Mitchell presents the rest cure almost as just desserts for hypochondriac antics, remarking that when his patients “are bidden to stay in bed a month, and neither to read, write, nor sew, and to have one nurse, who is not a relative,—then repose becomes for some women a rather bitter medicine” (Chapter V, my italics).

Mitchell observes that is the imaginative and emotional women who are most often the sufferers of nervous exhaustion. Gilman’s narrator remarks many times that her imaginative and creative mind is a handicap to her treatment. She looks past the bars on the windows and the shady paths leading across the grounds and can almost imagine people strolling down them. But John is frequently reminds her that “with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I try.” When she tells him about the wallpaper, he reminds her that “no one but myself can help me out of it, that I must use my will and self-control and not let any silly fancies run away with me.” He begs her, “for my sake and for our child's sake, as well as for your own, that you will never for one instant let that idea enter your mind! There is nothing so dangerous, so fascinating, to a temperament like yours. It is a false and foolish fancy. Can you not trust me as a physician when I tell you so?”

The narrator is a woman who is forced to distrust her body, her mind, her observations, and her emotions. She is infantilized by her physician husband who does not believe in the seriousness of her illness (as anything more than silly fancies), and yet she is told that she is the only one who can make herself well again. The narrative becomes a series of frames within frames echoing the narrator’s confinement and seclusion. She is taken off to the country for (as Mitchell states) there is no treating an hysterical woman in her own home. She is not allowed to read, to write, or to communicate with anyone but her husband, Mary, and Jennie (even though she wants desperately to visit her cousin Harry and Julia). This mental seclusion and “complete rest” is another tenant of Mitchell’s treatment.

The narrator is confined to a room that she did not want to inhabit. She mentions that it had been a nursery, but her description of the room (“Windows barred, wallpaper not within reach, rings on the wall”) is not evocative of a nursery. The bed is fixed in its place and there is a gate at the head of the stairs (perhaps to keep the narrator from throwing herself down them?). At night, she lays awake trying to decipher the pattern of the wallpaper, declaring that in “any kind of light, in twilight, candle light, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be.” She says she is not suicidal, but “To jump out of the window would be admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try… Besides I wouldn't do it. Of course not. I know well enough that a step like that is improper and might be misconstrued.” These thoughts of jumping and of burning the house down to erase the smell of the moldering wallpaper (even the vampire motif of Holmes) cannot help but recall to the mind of the reader the character of another “mad” woman, Bertha in Jane Eyre.

In 1913, Frances Perkins Gilman published “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper” in The Forerunner. She recounts her 1887 meeting with Mitchell, writing that “This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to ‘live as domestic a life as far as possible,’ to ‘have but two hours’ intellectual life a day,’ and ‘never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again’ as long as I lived.” It is this dismissal of the severity of mental disorders in women that pervades “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Fortunately for Gilman, she eventually let her emotional responses to the treatment supersede the knowledge of both the “noted specialist in nervous diseases” and her husband.