| From natural theologian William Paley to adamantly secular biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, nineteenth-century scientists claimed that science teaches ways of thinking that develop the student's moral character and used this assertion to establish science's cultural authority. My dissertation argues that in their fiction George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and H. G. Wells explore the social ramifications of this claim as they ask how the study of nature shapes the scientist's personal morality, behavior towards others, and attitudes towards larger social obligations. In the fifty years spanned by my project, I uncover broad shifts in the place of science in the realist novel. As interest in biology and natural history is overtaken by awareness of physics, astronomy, and thermodynamics, and as science becomes a profession, optimism about the usefulness of scientific thinking for moral or ethical questions gives way to pessimism, and science is transformed from an integral element of the realist novel to a way of thinking antithetical to realist fiction.In the early 1860s, Eliot and Gaskell accepted the moral benefits of scientific thinking and integrated science into their novels. In Eliot's early fiction, natural history and geology help establish the moral basis for her realist aesthetic. Gaskell's Wives and Daughters (1866) thematizes the moral benefits of scientific thinking in the character of Roger Hamley, whose science entwines with his moral excellence to motivate the courtship plot. In Middlemarch (1872), however, the opposition between Lydgate's courtship plot and his scientific work signals that Eliot has begun to question the moral benefits of science. Romance and science are explicitly at odds in Hardy's Two on a Tower (1882). Imagining the stellar universe, Hardy concludes, produces indifference towards cosmically insignificant human lives, but he also asserts that those lives are the proper subject of the realist novel. H. G. Wells's science fiction of the 1890s is shaped by a similar realization that fiction about science cannot accommodate representation of personal relationships. In consequence, Wells turned to the realist novel. Ann Veronica (1909), Tono-Bungay (1909), and Marriage (1912) explore science's limitations as their protagonists confront the ethical dilemma of choosing between their relationships and their science. |
