(Dis)entangling scientific and poetic discourse: Mathilde Blind’s The ascent of man (1889) and feminine rewriting of Darwinian evolution

Abstract

In a society where economic and social hierarchies were increasingly being defined in terms of scientific explanations of the natural world, late Victorian women poets (like Webster, Greenwell and Blind) represent poetry as a humanizing agent, demanding not only that it be contemporary but that it provide a more humane vision of the world. Mathilde Blind´s work, in particular, articulates existence in terms of struggle, where the success of the ‘strong’ is bought at the cost of the suffering of the ‘weak’. Her epic verse narrative The Ascent of Man (1889), whose title seems to mock Charles Darwin’s own in the Descent of Man (1871), is an attempt to recast Christian mythological formations and to posit a transcendent, and feminized, alternative to the brutality of the Darwinian struggle for survival. But, paradoxically, Blind’s is also an ardently Darwinian vision of the world, boisterous and celebratory (charged with images of natural power), mitigated by her passion for Shelley, whom she considers a ‘higher type of man’, and her inclination to mix Romantic thought and Evolutionary discourse. In fact, she draws on Darwin’s definition of imagination as ‘one of the highest prerogatives of man’. Being aware that poetry conflicted in a fundamental way with scientific modes of cognition, Blind still believed that both were ‘universal languages’, with power to transform the natural world and to retrieve triumph from defeat (i.e. violence and death). This chapter will thus attempt to ‘disentangle’ both discourses and to unravel their power of transformation in Blind’s ambitious poem.