I've finished reading The Signature of All Things. This is the first part of what will probably be a three-part essay, because there's just too much in that book that is pertinent to the politics we discuss daily--especially in regard to what constitutes feminism, and what kind of feminism it is that we are being asked to accept.

Part 1

Last week, I discussed Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things, a bildungsroman, or novel of development, which focuses on Alma Whittaker, a nineteenth-century botanist. Alma discovers the theory of natural selection a few years after Darwin, but before the publication of The Origin of Species. Gilbert's novel intertwines Alma’s search for a scientific theory that will explain all of life with her personal search for satisfaction and love.

Rather uncharacteristically, my first response when I finished the novel was that I needed to know how popular it had been—because if it was genuinely popular, I had a conundrum on my hands. You'll see why.

From the number of reviews and the stature of the sources (The Guardian, the Washington Post, the New York Times, etc.), I concluded that The Signature of All Things was highly successful:

“Quite simply one of the best novels I have read in years.”—Observer

“A historical-fantastical jeu d’esprit, a feminist fable, a cabinet of curiosities, a scholarly romp…told with verve and wit.”—Guardian

“An intricate, beautifully written historical novel… a passionate paean to the nineteenth-century women of science who strove for achievement against the odds.”—Anita Sethi, Metro

“The story of Alma Whittaker’s journey of discovery has irresistible momentum.” Helen Dunmore, The Times

“Dazzling in its scope and ambition…One of the most appealing, convincing, and original heroines in modern literature.”—Michael Palin, Observer Books of the Year

I even found articles discussing the real eighteenth-century house (the Woodlands) on which Gilbert had based her heroine’s home White Acre, and the notice of an event held on the grounds celebrating The Signature of All Things, none of which would exist had not large numbers of people noticed, read, and liked the book. In fact, The Woodlands has devised a tour for Signature of All Things book clubs!

https://www.woodlandsphila.org/soatbookclubs

So apparently, lots of people liked Gilbert's novel. And there are reasons for liking it. The writer has a gift for character, a nice turn of phrase, and a deep and well-informed interest in the historical period of her story.

But we are living in an age obsessed with minute ideological criticism of language—and therein lies my conundrum. Given what regularly gets attacked on social media as bigoted in one way or another, how on earth did The Signature of All Things avoid being criticized as racist? And colonialist too, for that matter, and possibly, from one point of view, even homophobic. The book appears to use feminism to get left-wing cred of some kind. But what kind of feminism resides in Gilbert's book?

I get the feeling I’m supposed to be inspired, in a left-wing, feminist kind of way, by Alma Whittaker’s journey of self-discovery. And the reviews bear that out; the book is “a passionate paean to the nineteenth-century women of science who strove for achievement against the odds,” “a feminist fable;” Alma herself is “one of the most appealing, convincing and original heroines in modern literature,” and her “journey of discovery has irresistible momentum.” Indeed, in the author’s own acknowledgements, she connects her work to the actual scientific contributions of women through the ages, saying: “Special recognition is due…indeed, to women of science throughout history.” Writing the story of Alma—or reading it and liking it—seems to put one on the side of feminism, the kind of feminism that finds its victories in stating that women can do “men’s work” too, and do it well.

Just to be clear--I have no problem with supporting that kind of feminism, as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Yes, of course, individual women can do work that has generally been culturally assigned to men. But if celebrating the strengths of those nonconformist women, or delighting in one or more individual women ascending to traditionally male roles is the entirety of your feminism, then your feminism will be well satisfied simply to know that Margaret Thatcher and Hillary Clinton exist; that there are female soldiers, cops, surgeons, and astronauts.

I’m old enough to remember a children’s book called What Girls Can Be.

I was given it as a little girl, and it told me all about how I could design dresses, teach children, be a nurse, a teacher, a wife, a mother—or even own a candy store. Luckily, I had a feminist mother, and when I asked her why she didn’t like the book she said “What about a girl astronaut?” (My mom is cool). When I was a kid Phyllis Schlafly was still saying that the idea of a woman police officer was ridiculous. So I don’t take this issue lightly, nor take the advances we gained from second-wave feminism for granted. But it’s also quite clear to me that a feminism focused primarily on women achieving vocational success in traditionally male roles is a feminism that can be summed up in the sentence “Upper-middle-class and upper-class girls can do anything their fathers and brothers can.”

Certainly it’s a feminism with no regard for race or class; a feminism that has no opinions on ecology or war; a feminism whose only thoughts about money are whether or not women get paid equally to men. It lacks many of the critiques that we feminists were making even in the 1980s. In fact, this feminism seems to be a simple application of American secular conservatism to the gender question. Those with talent and skill should be allowed to struggle to the top and succeed in whatever job they want—if they’re strong enough. The possession of breasts shouldn’t stop them.

I bring this up because this kind of conservatism is at the heart of The Signature of All Things. Alma’s grand, transformative revelation looks as much like social Darwinism as it looks like Darwinism. More so, actually, because as far as I know, Darwin would not have picked three human individuals and used them as exemplars of the weak (non-adaptive), the strong (adaptive) and the enigmatic (more on this later). He wouldn’t have used his personal experience with one or more individuals, or even with different human cultures, to exemplify his theory of natural selection. Because, if I understand it correctly, that’s not how Darwinism works.

I’m not a scientist; I’m a humanities and social sciences kind of gal. But as I dig through my dim memories of being taught about evolution, natural selection has to do with how individual variations in a species, interacting with a changing environment, make some individuals more likely to survive and reproduce, and thus propel their species in one direction or another. What the theory of natural selection does not do is treat human choices and social systems as interchangeable with, or analogous to, those physical characteristics of the natural environment that cause natural selection and species adaptation. That is what social Darwinism does, and it is what Alma does too. And it is an extraordinarily ugly philosophy; ugly enough that, when I had finished The Signature of All Things, I spent some time wishing Darwin had never made his discoveries; I felt we could do without the scientific knowledge if it meant taking the weapon of social Darwinism out of people's hands. I had never before properly appreciated how vicious that set of beliefs is.

Alma’s examples of adaptive strength and non-adaptive weakness are her husband, Ambrose, and a Tahitian man called Tomorrow Morning. Ambrose is an astounding botanical artist of great sensitivity, and possibly also a lunatic. He believes that God’s signature is in all things, especially plants. He believes that he can, when conditions are right, hear other people’s thoughts. He believes that one night he heard the starlight speak. He wants to live like the angels.
He is also terrified of physical contact, especially sex:

…Ambrose came alive. He gasped, and yanked his fingers from her mouth…He looked as though he were going to die of terror…He stared at her as though she were a stranger who had put a knife to his throat, as though she intended to use him for the most evil pleasures, then sever his head, carve out his bowels, and eat his heart with a long sharpened fork. (320-1)

Alma is passionately in love with him, and can’t bear to be near him under such conditions, but living separate from her husband causes gossip. So, with little regard for his ultimate well-being, she sends Ambrose to manage her family’s vanilla plantation in Tahiti, where he dies three years later.

His death comes about because a Tahitian man named Tomorrow Morning also falls in love with him, and, unlike Alma, doesn’t stop pressing him for sex. It’s not a rape, at least not in the sense of the use of physical force:

“Did you force yourself upon Ambrose?” she asked. “Did you bring injury to him?”
Tomorrow Morning did not take offense at this implicit accusation, but he did suddenly look older….”It appears that you do not quite understand what a conqueror is. It is not necessary for me to force things—once I am decided, the others have no choice.” (492)

With the strength of his personality, he convinced Ambrose to have sex with him basically against Ambrose's will. After it was over, Ambrose performed a Tahitian grief ceremony, which involved carving gashes into one’s forehead. But he didn’t know how to do it properly, and ended up dying from infection and loss of blood.

Now, I don’t know about you, but to me the description of Ambrose’ s reaction to the sexual advances of his wife (who, by the way, he genuinely loved) sounds a lot like sexual trauma. So does the way he cuts himself after being “convinced” into sex with Tomorrow Morning. Even his madness, if that is what it is, sounds a lot like one possible reaction to abuse. If you don’t interpret his character as traumatized or abused, then he becomes simply a strange, panentheistic eccentric, a cultural misfit. Whether you see him as a victim of sexual trauma or a freaky spiritualist misfit, picking that character to stand for the principle of non-adaptive weakness, in a Darwinian sense, clearly has terrible implications.

More next week!