Evolutionary narrative and anxieties of race in the Victorian novel (H. Rider Haggard, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, H. G. Wells)

This dissertation examines Victorian novels and contemporary narratives of evolutionary science as they participate in the cultural project of constructing an increasingly modern idea of "race." As "race" itself derives from many disciplinary paradigms, this dissertation employs histories and critiques of science and primary scientific texts, as well as literary history and criticism, to argue that the Victorian fictional narratives problematize evolutionary theory and that novels by writers very different in politics, style, and popularity reveal the anxieties evolutionary theory, especially as applied to race, produced in the Victorian imagination.; The novels discussed extend evolutionary race theories from Darwin's seminal texts to often threatening conclusions. My analysis exposes moments of logical weakness or insecurity in the texts, illuminating the ways in which race and racial hierarchy were continually built and unsettled in the Victorian imagination. After a theoretical introduction, I argue that Rider Haggard's African adventure novels, especially Allan Quatermain and She, employ evolutionary models to construct the bases of racial difference and an apparent justification for imperial dominance, but while Haggard's critics have begged the question by asking only about the author's "racism," I explore the anxieties the novels betray as their racial hierarchies deconstruct under the logical extension of natural selection. The second body chapter demonstrates how George Eliot's Daniel Deronda responds to the Jewish Question by using an evolutionary narrative model to criticize English racism and sense of superiority; evolutionary science is both world view and epistemology, a hybrid of biological essentialism and historiographic rhetoric that proves inescapable for Deronda's narrator, despite the political sensibilities of its author. The third chapter continues with the notion of evolutionary epistemology, using Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, Armadale, and The Woman in White, where racial "others" are regularly the only narrative authorities, to show how evolution as race science threatened the English by rendering them out of control of scientific processes and information. The fourth chapter examines H. G. Wells' The Time Machine as a horrific fin de siecle vision of race science's future. Finally, I discuss my rationale for teaching these texts and this approach to race and Victorian studies.