Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degeneration

Yearbook of English Studies, Annual, 2004 by Tim Armstrong

Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degeneration. By DONALD J. CHILDS. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 2001. vii 266 pp. 40 [pounds sterling]; $59.95. ISBN: 0-521-80601-1.

This is an area in which a good general study is overdue, in the wake of pioneering work by Roy Greenslade, David Bradshaw, and others. Donald J. Childs's book goes part-way towards meeting that demand, including a solid introduction sketching a wider context, and illuminating essays on each writer. But there are also limitations to the case-study approach; and in attempting to squeeze the maximum material out of its three authors this book raises general questions about the elucidation of relations between a discursive field such as eugenics and literary texts.

As Childs shows, eugenics permeates modern thinking about class, race, degeneration, and politics; and influences considerations of literary character (types), tradition, and creativity. It affects the way that all three authors think about psychological malaise, sex, and children. Eugenics is often, as he demonstrates, linked to a Lamarkianism which enables it to encode a social topography and a sense of transmitted, or threatened, cultural achievement. On Eliot and Yeats, Childs is working with fairly explicit views, and he has much that is interesting to say about Eliot's thinking on biology and society, particularly the influence of E. W. MacBride on his cultural pessimism. On Yeats, he makes a case for seeing eugenic thinking as present well before the bitter politics of the 1930s, tracing his reading on the subject from as early as 1900 and applying it to the drama in particular.

My hesitations relate to the unresolved question of the marginality or centrality of eugenics itself. First, amidst the detail the larger picture is sometimes lost. We learn a lot about contexts for The Waste Land, but the discussion remains more like an extended annotation than a dynamic interpretation, unlike, say, David Trotter's linkage of its eugenics to imperial topography. Conversely, the topic is sometimes pushed into centre stage beyond where many readers would follow, concretizing traces as almost allegorical representations (characters become 'eugenical heroes'). Woolf is the test case here, since beyond one irritated diary comment that imbeciles 'should certainly be killed', there is little explicit material. Childs argues that eugenics 'remains largely invisible and relatively unscathed in the margins of Woolf's text' (p. 42)--that she reproduces the discourse uncontested. But in pursuing that argument, hints sometimes become secure conclusions. Discussing Mrs Dalloway, he argues that while Bradshaw is mocked the narrative gaze nevertheless shares his eugenic vision. The evidence? Reading back, one finds that the novel's eugenics (meditations on beggars and so on) are usually delimited by focalization; all Childs offers as an instance of narratorial description is a brief characterization of Septimus as trembling-lipped and a marginal type. Or, to take another example, a 1923 letter in which Woolf marvels at modern youth for their sexual freedom and knowledge of contraception is presented as evidence for a eugenicist fear of sex without procreation, then applied as an established fact to Woolf's comments on masculine isolation in A Room of One's Own. There are also a few mistakes: a discussion of the phrase 'the sedulous ape' as Darwinian seemingly unaware of its source; Yeats's Steinach operation linked to the possibility of procreation when it was a double vasectomy.

To point out that Childs is a passionate follower of clues and to argue about particular moments is not, however, to contest his general exploration of the issue, which remains rewarding. Rather, we seem to approach the limits of a historiography in which discursive traces offer a more global reading of literary texts. How do we integrate such a pervasive discursive context as eugenics into our interpretive strategies? This is a question that underlies much of the recent turn to cultural history.

TIM ARMSTRONG

ROYAL HOLLOWAY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON