Darwinian Reading of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations : The Application of Natural Selection and Sexual Selection

• Main Authors: Yu-Lin Huang, 黃毓羚
• Other Authors: Chao-Fang Chen
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2006
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/13803393502495293853

碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 外國語文學系碩博士班 === 94 === The Victorian period can be regarded as a watershed of the history of literature. Before the Victorian period, people tended to see the world from a religious point of view. Because of the improvement of science, Victorians began to change their attitudes and started to consider things from a scientific perspective. Charles Darwin, the author of The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, introduced evolutionary theory and created a heated dispute that has lasted, to some degree, even until today. This thesis applies Darwin’s two ideas— natural selection and sexual selection— to investigate into Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. The introduction briefly discusses Darwin’s evolutionary theories and their application in Dickens’s Great Expectations. The first chapter investigates natural selection and sexual selection with more specifics. Simply put, for example, organic beings evolve in order to adapt to the environment. Male of all species try to seduce females in order to propagate. The second chapter deals with the difference between uniformitarianism and catastrophism, and how Darwin challenges the idea of “progress” and how natural selection applies to the notion of materialism. In addition, recalling Darwin’s observation that organic beings would change themselves due to the pressure of survival, readers of Dickens’s novels see how environmental changes bring effects upon characters. The third chapter concentrates on Darwin’s sexual selection, including the contrast between parthenogenetic reproduction and sexual selection, female supremacy in the animal world and male dominance in the human society, as well as female’s maternal instincts and male’s competitive tendencies. Finally, I conclude with the gendered ideology that both Darwin and Dickens reveal in their works. In conclusion, approaching Dickens’s novel from the perspective of Darwin’s evolutionary theories, we see how Victorian literature and science merged together.