Sexual Selection, Automata and Ethics in George Eliot'sThe Mill on the Flossand Olive Schreiner'sUndineandFrom Man to Man

Abstract

Sidgwick, the exercise of a mysterious 'I', the basis of formed ethical will, is what most clearly distinguishes humans from other species, but this was a distinction that evolutionary thinking was rendering increasingly fragile. For Darwin in the Descent, ethical or socially responsible behaviour is the product of evolutionary forces, and not an instance of the special human privileges and burdens endowed by a divine creator. But this biological account raised its own problems in relation to a modern yearning for freedom and self-fulfilment that was particularly sharply felt by women seeking to transform traditional gendered expectations about their lives. It is in novels that this tension is most tellingly explored.From the 1870s on, Sidgwick's 'mysterious' human will and the moral capacities with which it is associated came under direct attack from the new physiological understanding of mind.Volitional consciousness itself came to be seen as a metaphysical fiction in theories which threatened to collapse long-held assumptions about self and consciousness, motive and action.

Allegory and animals in Olive Schreiner’sUndine: A Queer Little Child(1929)

“…Assessments of Undine have therefore been tentative and partial, with critics tending to see the novel as a draft version or forerunner of The Story of An African Farm (1883) (Colby 1970, 55-6;Cronwright-Schreiner [1924] 1973Friedmann 1954, 3), as interesting primarily for its autobiographical content (Bradford 1995;First and Scott 1990, 84; Parker Lewis 2010), or as a poor imitation of "a host of nineteenthcentury novels" by writers like George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Oliphant: "If these predecessors had not existed, Undine might be a remarkably original novel" (Monsman 1991, 38). Only recently has the novel been taken more seriously as a work of literature that both draws on, and departs from, realist narrative forms as a way of engaging with, and questioning, dominant culture at the fin de siècle (Burdett 2009;Munslow Ong 2014).…”