Darwinian Feminism and Early Science Fiction

Angels, Amazons, and Women

Patrick B Sharp

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786832313
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Science Fiction
• Index: Literature

Darwinian Feminism in Early Science Fiction provides the first detailed scholarly examination of women's SF in the early magazine period before the Second World War. Tracing the tradition of women's SF back to the 1600s, the author demonstrates how women such as Margaret Cavendish and Mary Shelley drew critical attention to the colonial mindset of scientific masculinity, which was attached to scientific institutions that excluded women. In the late nineteenth century, Charles Darwin's theory of sexual selection provided an impetus for a number of first-wave feminists to imagine Amazonian worlds where women control their own bodies, relationships and destinies. Patrick B. Sharp traces how these feminist visions of scientific femininity, Amazonian power and evolutionary progress proved influential on many women publishing in the SF magazines of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and presents a compelling picture of the emergence to prominence of feminist SF in the early twentieth century before vanishing until the 1960s.

1

Scientific Masculinity and its Discontents

There is a great deal SF scholars can learn from the critical study of science by scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Unfortunately, as Roger Luckhurst put it over a decade ago, ‘the strangest silence in SF scholarship has surely been the marginal interface between SF critics and those in Science and Technology Studies and History of Science programs’ (2006: 2). Recent studies in the history of science have shown how early modern science – and what is known as the Scientific Revolution – was intertwined with European colonial expansion. In the introduction to the 2000 issue of Osiris entitled Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise, editor Roy MacLeod notes that for historians of science, the ‘scene has shifted considerably from asking whether science was a feature of imperialism (it was, and is), and whether imperialism advanced science (likely, if not always possible to prove), to a broader range of questions’ (2000: 11). Some recent scholarship on SF has moved in a similar direction. SF’s obsession with the frontier and meditations upon racial difference are now understood to be two key markers of the genre’s colonial origins. However, little work has been done to chart how both scientific narratives and SF drew from – and fed back into – larger colonial systems of genres as they were taking shape. Indeed, the failure of SF scholars to engage with critical scholarship on the sciences continues to be a major limitation of the field. Despite the recent work of scholars such as Luckhurst, Sherryl Vint and Colin Milburn – and the important foundational work of feminist scholars such as Donna Haraway, Constance Penley and Robin Roberts – many scholars remain uncritical of the ‘science’ part of SF studies.

What follows for the next two chapters is a brief history of Euro-American scientific narrative that pays particular attention to narratives of colonisation and the ways in which scientific masculinity and gendered formulations of nature became woven into the ‘scientific megatext’ (Attebery 2002: 41). Erika Lorraine Milam and Robert A. Nye note that it was ‘predominantly male groups that shaped the work of science, technology, and medicine’ and ‘authorized the construction of gendered and sexed bodies’ (2015: 2). In the process of defining gender and sex, these male groups drew on mutually constituting ‘masculine/feminine binaries’ that excluded women from ‘scientific cultures’ along with ‘qualified men … who did not seem to be the “right” kind of man’ (3). In this sense, perceived differences in class, religion, sexuality and eventually race became involved in ‘methods of differentiating between kinds of men’ (3). Masculinity was never monolithic, and at different times and places scientists were able to ‘choose from among a variety of masculine roles, including laboratory-based scientist-heroes, outdoor, self-reliant men, sensitive and sympathetic readers of nature, and family men’ (5). These masculine roles in scientific cultures became a basis for fictional and popular understandings and critiques of scientists and their various projects. Gendered formulations of scientific identity went hand in hand with narratives of colonial domination, and became central to the nascent speculations we now call SF. They also provided the hegemonic visions against which the first women writers of SF struggled as they spun heretical tales of heroic female scientists and unscrupulous men alienated from feminine morality.

Narratives of discovery

In the late 1400s and early 1500s, the printing press allowed accounts of the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci to receive a wide distribution in Europe (Loewen 2007: 38). A key feature of this new genre of discovery narrative was the detailed description of the ‘discovered’ lands and natives from the perspective of the male explorer. These early discovery narratives included detailed descriptions because of their connection to the colonial and mercantile purposes of such voyages: the authors were cataloguing the various resources of the lands they came across to make clear (and at times exaggerate) the profits and power that could be gained by future expeditions. If the folks back home who were footing the bill liked what they read, then it would be easier to get more funding down the road. These narratives often appealed to the Christianising mission of educating the natives and saving them from a chaotic existence that included cannibalism. In essence, some of these narratives suggested, Europeans were doing the natives a favour by bringing them under the umbrella of civilised European order. Not all colonial discovery narratives were flattering. Critics such as Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Dominican friar, emphasised in their accounts of colonisation the extreme cruelty and violence of the Europeans. However, a large number of people came to hail Columbus, Vespucci and scores of other explorers as heroes of Christianity, civilisation and progress (Berkhofer 1979: 5–12; Thomas 2000: 3–10; Zinn 2005: 1–12).

Whether condemning European depravity or providing glowing accounts of their journeys, these early gendered narratives of discovery became prominent within the system of genres circulating throughout Europe by the seventeenth century. An early fictional voyage that drew on this emerging genre was Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone (1638). In the preface to a 2009 scholarly edition, William Poole describes Godwin’s text as the ‘first work of English science fiction that can claim some title to that status’ (Godwin 2009: 7). Though some might consider Francis Bacon’s 1627 utopia The New Atlantis (discussed in the next section) as an earlier English-language SF narrative, Godwin’s text shows explicitly the connection between gender, colonial narratives and techno-scientific progress in the anglophone imagination of the seventeenth century. The story is narrated by Godwin’s diminutive Spanish protagonist Domingo Gonsales. After leaving school to pursue some adventures, the Spanish nobleman finds passage to the East Indies with ‘2000 Ducats’ where he is successful in his trading, earning a ‘yeeld ten for one’ on his investment (2009: 74). Falling sick on his return voyage, however, he is left on an idyllic island named St Helena to recover with only ‘a Negro’ named Diego to attend to him (76). While recovering on the island, Domingo muses, ‘I cannot but wonder, that our King in his wisdome hath not thought fit to plant a Colony’ on St Helena (74). Godwin’s story rationalises Domingo’s adventure in exploitive colonial terms, emphasising the financial value of such voyages and reinforcing emerging European colonial hierarchies by giving him a black servant. Godwin makes clear the financial incentive to plant colonies, as Domingo’s desire to put a colony on St Helena is justified by its ideal location for servicing ships travelling from the East Indies to Europe.

Godwin’s work also reveals the connection between colonial exploitation and the emerging techno-scientific desire to control nature. Using his year on the island to master the local animals, Domingo trains some ‘wilde Swans’ he calls ‘Gansas’ and creates a rig that allows the birds to carry his small frame through the air (76). When he finally takes his voyage home on a Spanish ship, superior British ships attack and Domingo is forced to save himself: he takes out his ‘Gansas’ and attaches them to his ‘Engine’, trusting that they ‘for safeguard of their own lives (which nature hath taught every living creature to preserve to their power) would make towards the Land’ (83–4). As a master of nature, Domingo is able to harness the very survival instincts of animals for his own purposes. However, the island his birds land upon is the site of ‘continuall warre’ between Spanish colonisers and ‘a Savage kinde of people’ (85). When the ‘Savages’ see Domingo land, they come down from the hills to attack. This dramatic aspect of colonial adventure – where inferior and bloodthirsty indigenous people threaten the techno-scientific hero of civilisation – would become increasingly important for both non-fiction and fictional narratives of male scientific prowess. Through his use of superior technology and his mastery of nature, Godwin’s lone inventor genius outwits a horde of natives, thus proving his own superiority and the superiority of his civilisation.

This is where the narrative turns to the fantastic, and where Godwin builds a direct link between colonial adventure on earth and a voyage into outer space that would become repeated in the later works of Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs and countless others. When Domingo’s birds flee the natives, they take him on their migratory route straight up, eventually landing on ‘the New World of the Moone’ (97). There he meets a society of giants superior in every way to the people on earth. The description of the ‘Lunars’ and their society is consistent with travelogues and anthropological accounts of the period (99, n. 4). Where travelogues and fantastic voyages of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries increasingly emphasised physical (and especially racial) differences, Godwin’s text focuses more on clothing and religion. The superiority of the Lunars is epitomised by their hatred of vice and their embrace of a fervent Christianity. The landscape of the moon is depicted as Edenic, and Lunar culture is described in utopian terms. However, Godwin also makes clear that the natural colonial order of earth extends to the moon: the Lunar people have developed a science whereby they can tell ‘by the stature, and some other notes they have, who are likely to bee of a wicked or imperfect disposition’ (113). In essence, Godwin promotes here an early version of eugenics, and those ‘wicked or imperfect’ people are banished to the earth. In another colonial twist, the people they banish are identified as the people of the Americas. In this way, Godwin’s narrative shows early traces of the colonial scientific racism that would become central to discovery narratives and travelogues over the next two centuries. Though he uses the Lunars to criticise the corruptions of European culture, he also strongly reinforces the belief that Europeans are the superior people of earth, and that European techno-scientific prowess is the key to expanding their dominion and horizons across the globe and into space.

Colonialism, gender and scientific masculinity

Godwin was not alone in linking colonisation, science and masculinity as central to progress. Narratives created about the ‘new science’ by writers such as Francis Bacon included accounts of male scientists subduing a female nature. As Mary Terrall shows, ‘The “new science” of the seventeenth century has long been linked to the voyages of discovery that expanded the conceptual and physical horizons of the European world’ (1998: 226). Bacon explicitly used the voyages of discovery as an inspiration for discarding older ways of thinking about nature and pursuing new paths to knowledge. A recurring image of discovery in the sixteenth century represented colonised lands such as the Americas as virginal females tempting or yielding to the male explorer (Brookes 2006). Explorers such as Sir Walter Raleigh represented ‘territorial conquest as the enforced defloration and possession of a female body’ (Montrose 1991: 30). Bacon kept the perspective of the male explorer, and altered the object of his exploration from a virginal female to a deceitful witch who reveals the truth under forceful interrogation (Merchant 1990: 168–9). Like Raleigh, Bacon’s imagery highlighted the domination of males over females.

As with the colonial voyages of discovery, the benefits the new Baconian science offered included wealth, power and prestige. However, as Katherine Park argues, the ‘Scientific Revolution’ was not the gloriously positive development traditional histories of science made it out to be: ‘Instead of liberating the human mind and laying the foundations for general human happiness, it both reflected and encouraged the continued and increasing subjection of women and the exploitation of the natural world’ (Park 2006: 490). A common feature of the colonial scientific gaze as it developed in the seventeenth century was the movement away from the image of nature as female toward the mechanical conception of nature as a machine. The mechanical view of nature (or Mechanism) was elaborated by French thinkers such as René Descartes and Pierre Gassendi, as well as by Englishmen such as Thomas Hobbes. As Merchant shows in her landmark work The Death of Nature, Mechanism ‘laid the foundation for a new synthesis of the cosmos, society, and the human being, construed as ordered systems of mechanical parts subject to governance by law and to predictability through deductive reasoning’ (1990: 214). In response to the religious, political and social upheavals of the seventeenth century, Mechanism provided an image of nature that was not unruly; rather, nature was inert and subject to control by those who carefully studied its laws. Likewise, social problems could be solved by the exercise of reason and authority. Mechanism promised to bring order to the chaos of European societies, and – through the ongoing enterprises of colonisation – to bring order to the rest of the world. The machine became ‘an image of the power of technology to order human life’ (Merchant 1990: 220).

Since this ‘Scientific Revolution’, modern scientific activity has been represented as a masculine pursuit in Euro-American culture. However, before the modern scientific academies were established in the late seventeenth century, women with social access participated in the scientific activities of artisan workshops, salons and royal courts (Noble 1992: 197–204; Schiebinger 1989: 17–19). These social and physical spaces were important in the development of the new empirical approaches of natural philosophy, approaches that rejected the teachings of the ancients dominating university curricula at the time. With few exceptions, the universities were closed to women; as such, the development of this new science outside universities provided women with important opportunities to contribute to knowledge about the natural world. This was particularly important in England, where Henry VIII’s closure of convents during the 1530s and 1540s eliminated the major centre of ‘spiritual and intellectual life’ for women (Schiebinger 1989: 13). In villages and among the poor, medical treatment usually came from ‘wise women’ such as midwives who practised a ‘popular magic’ learned from oral traditions. Women even played a major role in the development of the hermetic tradition of science in the seventeenth century (Noble 1992: 187–8).

The establishment of institutions such as the Royal Society of London marked both a legitimisation of the ‘new science’ as well as ‘the formal exclusion of women from science’ (Schiebinger 1989: 20). There were a number of factors that contributed to this formal exclusion. In medieval Europe, the pursuit of knowledge had become associated with a denial of the pleasures of the flesh. In particular, celibacy became a defining feature of the Christian ‘clerical asceticism’ that dominated academic life in monasteries, convents and universities. When the Royal Society was founded in 1660 (it was given a royal charter in 1662), members such as Robert Boyle championed ‘the celibate ideal’ in spite of the fact that they lived in ‘Protestant, anti-monastic England’ (Noble 1992: 226). For many of its male members, excluding women was an obvious step to take to ensure the respectability and purity of the institution (Noble 1992: 225–9; Schiebinger 1989: 12, 151–2).

The English Civil Wars and the Interregnum of the 1640s and 1650s also had a major effect on the exclusion of women from the Royal Society. The 1640s and 1650s saw the growth of various forms of religious dissent, political radicalism and social upheaval. With the Restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660, there was a powerful backlash against the unrest and radicalism of the previous two decades. This conservative backlash took many forms, but one focus of conservative energy was to attack the freedoms and positions of power women had gained over the past two decades. In the late 1650s, future members of the Royal Society began to distance themselves from hermetic beliefs they considered to be ‘feminine’ and aligned themselves with a politically neutral vision of science. The Royal Society was thus instituted as a home for a science that was ‘masculine’ and in opposition to radical and ‘feminine’ forms of pursuing knowledge (Keller 1985: 45–7, 51–4, 62–3; Noble 1992: 185–9, 228–9).

The writing of Francis Bacon from the early 1600s played an influential role in the Royal Society’s move toward a ‘masculine’ science. In his writings such as ‘The Masculine Birth of Time’ (1603) and The New Atlantis (1624), Bacon put forward a vision of a ‘science and technology… with the power to transform man’s relation to nature’ (Keller 1985: 48). The narrative of scientific activity that emerged from Bacon’s writing emphasised a male scientist pursuing a female nature to extract her secrets. This is not surprising: as Londa Schiebinger observes, ‘From ancient times to modern times, nature – the object of scientific study – has been conceived as unquestionably female. At the same time, it is abundantly clear that practitioners of science – scientists themselves – have overwhelmingly been men’ (1989: 122). However, the language that Bacon used seemed to call for a new relationship between the male scientific investigator and nature. As Carolyn Merchant has repeatedly shown, Bacon used metaphors of torture to characterise the new scientific approach for which he advocated (2006: 518–29; 2008: 733–5). In Bacon’s writing, the scientist was in the position of the inquisitor trying to wrest secrets from a witch who was associated with nature.

In the utopian vision of The New Atlantis, Bacon provided a model institution that was one inspiration for the Royal Society decades later. The New Atlantis imagined a rigidly patriarchal society epitomised by the (male) scientists working in a research centre known as Salomon’s House. Bacon’s account of scientific progress entailed extending the control and empire of scientific men over the entire natural world (Merchant 1990: 172–6; Noble 1992: 223–4). Baconian imagery and language played a role in the ongoing struggle against hermetic visions of the new science in the 1650s and 1660s. The hermetic tradition of science saw nature in hermaphroditic terms, with male and female principles operating throughout nature. Some future members of the Royal Society attacked hermetic thought as ‘feminine’ and sensual. After the founding of the Royal Society, some members continued to attack proponents of hermetic philosophy and associated them with witches (Keller 1985: 50–61; Noble 1992: 187–8). The Royal Society embraced a conservative masculine ideal that saw nature as an unruly female that was to be controlled by men, just as Bacon had envisioned. Though rejecting the political power for scientists that Bacon envisioned in The New Atlantis, the Royal Society moved forward with a clear ideal of controlled and controlling scientific masculinity. Feminists of the early modern period put forward a number of arguments for the equality or superiority of women, particularly in regard to their fitness to participate in scholarly pursuits. However, women became increasingly marginalised from the centres of the new science (Schiebinger 1989: 165–70).

Margaret Cavendish and her Blazing World

The work of Margaret Lucas Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, provided perhaps the earliest example in English of a woman author who critically examined the connections between gender, European colonial expansion and the imaginary framework of modern science. The upheavals of the British Civil Wars that shaped the founding of the Royal Society also shaped the life of Cavendish, a royalist whose husband lost a great deal of property and wealth due to his allegiance to the Crown. However, Cavendish ‘criticized mechanical and experimental philosophy’ and provided a singularly important voice that was contrary to the Royal Society (Sarasohn 2010: 2). In the consolidation of the Royal Society as an exclusively masculine space, Cavendish was the woman who was most conspicuously excluded: she was only allowed to visit a meeting of the society once on 30 May 1667, and was never allowed to join despite her well-known scientific writings (Hutton 2003: 161–2; Sarasohn 2010: 29–33). This exclusion helped fuel Cavendish’s playful use of genres in the 1666 publication of a scientific text, Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, which was coupled with the fictional adventure The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World in the same volume. It also fuelled her satirical description of scientific institutions in Blazing World, a text that was published the year before her visit to the Royal Society. In her publications – and during her visit to the Royal Society – Cavendish displayed a keen awareness of gendered performance. Cavendish ‘incorporated elements of male clothing’ into her dress for her visit to the Royal Society, thereby ‘problematizing her gender’ and tweaking the conservative ethos of many of the society’s members (Sarasohn 2010: 27–8). This ‘hermaphroditic’ performance of gender was ‘a reenactment of the spectacle her other self in the Blazing World had already performed’ (27, 33). In her fiction and her lived performances Cavendish engaged in a celebration of science and a critique of scientific masculinity that would become commonplace in feminist SF of the twentieth century.

Robert Boyle was an influential proponent of the new kind of scientific masculinity that became an object of Cavendish’s scorn. In Boyle’s vision of this masculine ideal, a good Christian scientific gentleman demonstrates that he is above the temptations of his social position and adopts the ‘posture of the disengaged searcher after truth’ (Shapin 1994: 150). Including elements such as ‘physical frailty as a badge of spirituality’, Boyle’s ideas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Scientific Masculinity and its Discontents
• Chapter 2: Charles Darwin, Gender and the Colonial Imagination
• Chapter 3: Evolution’s Amazons: Colonialism, Captivity and Liberation in Feminist Science Fiction
• Chapter 4: Women with Wings: Feminism, Evolution and the Rise of Magazine Science Fiction
• Chapter 5: Darwinian Feminism and the Changing Field of Women’s Science Fiction
• Works Cited