Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword by George Levine
- Preface to the first edition
- Preface to the second edition
- Preface to the third edition
- Introduction
- Part I Darwin's language
- Part II Darwin's plots
- 3 Analogy, metaphor and narrative in The Origin
- 4 Darwinian myths
- Part III Responses: George Eliot and Thomas Hardy
- Notes
- Select bibliography of primary works
- Further reading related to Charles Darwin
- Index
4 - Darwinian myths
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword by George Levine
- Preface to the first edition
- Preface to the second edition
- Preface to the third edition
- Introduction
- Part I Darwin's language
- Part II Darwin's plots
- 3 Analogy, metaphor and narrative in The Origin
- 4 Darwinian myths
- Part III Responses: George Eliot and Thomas Hardy
- Notes
- Select bibliography of primary works
- Further reading related to Charles Darwin
- Index
Summary
GROWTH AND ITS MYTHS
Evolutionary theory brings together two imaginative elements implicit in much nineteenth-century thinking and creativity. One was the fascination with growth expressed also in Natürphilosophie and in Bildungsroman. The other was the concept of transformation. The intellectual interest in märchen, fairy-tale, and myth, which increased as the century went on, was fuelled by these preoccupations, while its methodology was indebted to evolutionary patterns of argument. The work of anthropologists and mythographers such as Müller, Lubbock, Tylor, and Lang was strengthened by reference to the work of Darwin and Spencer, though their responses to Spencer were on the whole a good deal less enthusiastic than to Darwin.
The extraordinary metamorphoses within the natural life cycle of creatures such as frogs and butterflies, as well as the sustained transformation of baby into adult, had long been a subject of marvel. Such transformation now became a preoccupation with theorists of development:
It is a truth of very wide, if not universal, application, that every living creature commences its existence under a form different from, and simpler than, that which it eventually attains.
The oak is a more complex thing than the little rudimentary plant contained in the acorn; the caterpillar is more complex than the egg; the butterfly than the caterpillar; and each of these beings, in passing from its rudimentary to its perfect condition, runs through a series of changes, the sum of which is called its Development.[…]
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Darwin's PlotsEvolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, pp. 97 - 136Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009