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Darwinian Obsessions: References to the Theory of Evolution in the Novels of John Fowles, A. S. Byatt, and Hilary Mantel

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Oramus D.

Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies

2012

issue 21/1

5-16

This paper challenges the critical cliché that in recent fiction Darwinism replaces religion and that the scientific worldview is always in opposition to Christian belief. A close reading of three British novels written between the late 1960s and the early 1990s – namely, John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, A.S. Byatt’s Morpho Eugenia (a short novel published together with her other novelette Conjugal Angel in the volume entitled Angels and Insects), and Hilary Mantel’s A Change of Climate demonstrates how Darwinian references themselves evolve over time. Three aspects of the novels are juxtaposed: primarily, the way they depict natural history in the 19th century – Darwin and his fellow naturalists – and thus create the myth of how modern science was born in Victorian England. Secondly, the paper establishes what the novelists in question understand by the word ‘science’ and whether for them natural science is or is not science proper. Thirdly and lastly, what is the novelists’ attitude to the alleged conflict between Christian belief and the theory of evolution. In the quarter century dividing Fowles’s novel from Mantel’s much changes in the way each of these problems is handled.

Two Exercises in Consilience: Annie Dillard and Kurt Vonnegut on the Galapagos Archipelago as the Archetypal Darwinian Setting

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Oramus D.

Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies

2014

issue 23/1

19-29

The aim of this essay is to compare how Darwinian references are used in the writings of two late 20th century American authors, Annie Dillard and Kurt Vonnegut who both choose the Galapagos archipelago as the focal setting of their symbolical narratives, as we see in Vonnegut’s novel Gala´pagos and in Dillard’s essay ‘‘Life on the Rock: the Gala´pagos.” As far as Dillard’s prose is concerned, she also depicts the archipelago in other short narratives from Teaching a Stone to Talk and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Although neither Dillard nor Vonnegut have a conspicuously political agenda, they both consider the theory of evolution a heavily ideological subject and both apply the Darwinian paradigm to describe nature and the human race within nature.

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2 Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies

2 Oramus D.

1 2014

1 2012

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Darwinian Obsessions: References to the Theory of Evolution in the Novels of John Fowles, A. S. Byatt, and Hilary Mantel

Two Exercises in Consilience: Annie Dillard and Kurt Vonnegut on the Galapagos Archipelago as the Archetypal Darwinian Setting