Thomas Hardy and the Value of Brains

This article reads Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders (1887) and Jude the Obscure (1895) as ambivalent responses to the new conception of human intelligence that emerged from Victorian psychology and evolutionary theory and which formed the basis of what I describe as the Victorian biopolitics of intelligence. Although these novels reflect Hardy's endorsement of the new biological model of intelligence, they also register his resistance to what many late Victorians assumed to be its corollary: that mental worth can be an object of scientific measurement, classification, and ranking. I suggest that the work of the philosopher Jacques Rancière illuminates the extent to which these novels challenge the scientific reification of intellectual inequality and attempt to vindicate overlooked and stigmatized forms of intelligence.

“AND GRAVES GIVE UP THEIR DEAD”:THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP, VICTORIAN PSYCHOLOGY, AND THE NATURE OF THE FUTURE LIFE

Midway throughthe old curiosity shop(1840–41), Quilp returns home to discover his own wake in progress upstairs. He has been absent for three days, dogging the footsteps of the friends and family searching for Nell: materializing at Little Bethel, the chapel Kit's mother attends, or rising from the larder of the inn to which the single gentleman and Kit's mother retire after discovering from Mrs. Jarley that they have just missed Nell. Quilp's wife, having heard nothing from him all this time, has concluded that he has drowned, and so Quilp finds her, her mother, and the lawyer Sampson Brass at work on a descriptive advertisement for his corpse. As Quilp looks on, the group insultingly anatomizes him – “Large head, short body, legs crooked” (Dickens 382; ch. 49) – a process punctuated by the slightly inebriated Brass's musings on the afterlife to which the dwarf might have flown. Brass considers the possibility that the recently deceased might be at that moment watching from the next world, and this thought leads to another platitude about the dead:“I can almost fancy” said the lawyer shaking his head, “that I see his eye glistening down at the very bottom of my liquor. When shall we look upon his like again? Never, never! One minute we are here” – holding his tumbler before his eyes – “the next we are there” – gulping down its contents, and striking himself emphatically a little below the chest – “in the silent tomb.” (381; ch. 49)Brass's sentiments are, at least for a moment, tantalizingly vague. We, of course, know precisely where Quilp is – behind the door – but Dickens's suspension of Brass's speech until the lawyer has finished his drink seems to offer a much less definite possibility: that once the dead are no longer “here,” they are simply “there.” But where, when it comes to the future life, is that? Only in the silent tomb? For all its lack of seriousness, this scene gets to the heart of a fundamental curiosity in this novel about what might await us in the next life. In other words, while readers of the novel have tended to focus most intently on whether Little Nell might die, the novel itself seems equally interested in what might happen to Nell – and to us –afterdeath.

“‘Little bags of remembrance’: du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson and Victorian Theories of Ancestral Memory”

In the late-Victorian period considerable speculation that dreams provided access to ancestral memories appeared in both literary and psychological texts. Psychologists and psychical researchers such as Thomas Laycock, Samuel Butler, and F. W. H. Myers, among others, conceptualized memories and dreams as social, rather than solitary, mental functions, capable of making trans-historical connections with other minds. Their theories of ancestral memory effectively challenged the boundaries of subjectivity and the singularity of selfhood by extending identity across generations. One of the most sensational and sustained explorations of ancestral memory was George du Maurier’s 1891 novelPeter Ibbetson,which simultaneously adopted, popularized and expanded this ongoing debate about the nature of memory and the evolutionary scope of the unconscious. This essay traces the various ways in which these discourses on ancestral memory intersect. Both echoing and anticipating writers in the newly emerging memory sciences, Du Maurier’s novel explores the central role of the senses in producing and retrieving involuntary memories and envisions the mechanisms of memory as akin to modern technologies such as photography and phonography. Du Maurier’s account of ancestral memory thereby dramatizes some of the most far-reaching questions in late-Victorian psychology about the relationship between memory, identity, and the material world.