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IMMANENT METAPHOR, BRANCHING FORM(S), AND THE UNMAKING OF THE HUMAN IN ALICE AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 May 2015

Rasheed Tazudeen
Rasheed Tazudeen*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Extract

Forms are plastic, names cannot determine the essence of living things, and ceaselessly changing organisms cannot be conceived as elements within a signifying system. Each of these precepts of evolutionary theory finds itself reflected in Lewis Carroll's Alice books: Alice grows bigger and smaller without relation to any notion of a normal or standard size, fantastic organisms such as the “bread-and-butterfly” are generated out of metaphors and puns on taxonomic names, and the Queen's croquet game cannot function properly because the animals do not fulfill their prescribed roles. Lewis Carroll familiarized himself thoroughly with Darwinian theory in the years leading up to his composition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871). He “read widely on the subject of evolution” (Woolf 191), possessing “nineteen books on Darwin, his theories and his critics” (Smith 8), as well as five works of social evolutionist Herbert Spencer, including First Principles (1862), which put Darwinian theory in dialogue with religious understandings of the world (Cohen 350; Stern 17). As a lecturer in mathematics at Christchurch Oxford from 1855 to 1881, he was present during the famous 1860 debate at Oxford University Museum between Thomas Henry Huxley, one of the main proponents of evolutionary theory in the late nineteenth century, and Bishop of Oxford William Wilberforce, one of its major critics.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 533 - 558
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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