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The French Lieutenant's Woman clearly enough tells a story involving the great crisis of Darwinism in Victorian England. But we should look closely at the precise way in which Fowles represents this crisis, otherwise we may miss the significance of the Darwin of our own time, which is equally important in the novel.1 The book makes it plain that we have this later Darwin to consider. Of his protagonist, Charles Smithson, the narrator tells us that "Charles called himself a Darwinist, and yet he had not really understood Darwin. But then, nor had Darwin himself" (45). We here in the late twentieth century have corrected at least some of these earlier misunderstandings and in the process of doing so have defined ourselves historically. For as Dr. Grogan says at one point, The Origin of Species is "about the living . . not the dead" ( 131). Our understanding of evolution determines in a profound way our understanding of ourselves as living beings. And of course modern culture is "a culture dominated by evolutionary ideas" (Beer 5) to the point that many who have never actually read any evolutionary theory take the basic idea for granted.
Writers such as Gillian Beer, Sally Shuttleworth, and Redmond O'Hanlon have studied the effects of an actual reading knowledge of Darwin on famous Victorian writers. George Levine, on the other hand, in Darwin and the Novelists, has discussed the way Darwinism permeates Victorian realism, even "among writers who probably did not know any science first hand" (3). But Levine does not set out simply to show that fictional narratives and Darwin's evolutionary theory get constructed in similar ways. Rather he aims
to shadow forth a Darwin more disruptive, perhaps, than even the greatest of his literary followers can suggest, a Darwin who, if fully absorbed by his contemporary novelists, might well have led to other kinds of narratives. (22)
In other words, Levine will read Victorian novels in light of what we now know of Darwin's ideas. For Darwinism has changed since Darwin himself was alive. In the same way that Darwinism embodied the assumptions of the Victorian novel and, conversely, the Victorian novel embodied the Victorian Darwin, so we shall find that the postmodern or "fully absorbed" Darwin embodies...