I am Not Scientific: Women, Astronomy, and the Victorian Novel

Abstract

Taking Charlotte Brontë’s and Elizabeth Gaskell’s insistences that they were “not scientific” as a starting point, this thesis argues that to the contrary, discoveries in the science of astronomy informed the fiction of female writers. Tracing unexplored relations between the female author, astronomical discovery, and the Victorian novel, I am Not Scientific offers an original understanding of how the female author took inspiration from astronomical knowledge, while simultaneously used the novel to critique a masculine scientific culture. It argues that women writers, specifically Brontë, Gaskell, and George Eliot, were engaging with new conceptions of the universe arising out of the discipline of astronomy, which manifests in formal innovations in the novel as well as the re-writing of the female subject, desire in domestic spaces, and the marriage plot. The science of astronomy shaped and influenced the form and content of novels as diverse as Shirley, Villette, Cranford, Ruth, North and South, and The Mill on the Floss. In interrogating these connections, this argument fills a critical gap at the intersection of literature and astronomy studies that has, to date, largely neglected novels written by women. Scholarship on astronomy and literature tends to privilege both fictional works written by men and the poetic form – not the novel. This research considers the reasons why the science of astronomy, which the geologist Charles Lyell (1797-1875) said “gave the most violent shock to the prejudices and long-received opinions of men,” would be appealed to in fiction that investigates the status of women in society, education, and in the sciences.