Book contents
- Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century
- Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Seeing Things
- Chapter 2 Divine Displays
- Chapter 3 Criminal Chameleons
- Chapter 4 Darwin’s Little Ironies
- Chapter 5 Blending in and Standing out, I
- Chapter 6 Blending in and Standing out, II
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Chapter 4 - Darwin’s Little Ironies
Evolution and the Ethics of Appearance in Thomas Hardy’s Fiction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 May 2020
- Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century
- Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Seeing Things
- Chapter 2 Divine Displays
- Chapter 3 Criminal Chameleons
- Chapter 4 Darwin’s Little Ironies
- Chapter 5 Blending in and Standing out, I
- Chapter 6 Blending in and Standing out, II
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Summary
Analysingthe fiction of Thomas Hardy, Chapter 4 considers Hardy’s depictions of deception, concealment and misleading appearances among humans alongside his interest in adaptive appearance. This interest clashed with Hardy’s channelling of the pastoral, which characterised the natural world and rural life by honesty and transparency. Critics have noted that Hardy’s fiction problematizes the ethics of honesty. It is argued here that the logic of adaptive appearance energised this tendency as characters’ fates depend on chance misperceptions and ambiguous appearances. This sense of Darwinian contingency complicates characters’ moral agency by suggesting that many of their acts, which have the effect of deceiving, are unconscious. Apparently purposeful behaviours blur with the more mechanised displays of natural and sexual selection. Through his evolutionary vision, Hardy sometimes reframes honesty and dishonesty as outgrowths of opposing primitive instincts toward altruism and egoism. However, this utilitarian framework also rendered deception morally ambiguous, allowing for the possibility of noble deceptions that would spare others pain. Hardy’s fiction further biologized deception by depicting physical bodies that hid or falsified their owners’ identities. Random variations and chance resemblances cause characters to interpret erroneous ancestral histories in each other, sometimes with disastrous consequences.
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- Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary CultureNature, Science and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination, pp. 116 - 148Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020