Eugenic fictions and radical resistances

Abstract

This paper considers the inspiration of Charles Darwin and J. S. Mill for writers and feminists at the end of the nineteenth century, tracing ways in which Darwin's anti-essentialism and his commitment to monogenism—the idea of the unity of races—and Mill's challenge to innatism—the idea that biology is wholly determining—provided a vital framework for early objections to eugenics. This anti-essentialism also helped to expose ways in which capitalism employed biologism, the attribution to nature of that which is social. The paper also explores the opposition to fascism which a socialist internationalism informed by monogenism was able to provide in the early twentieth century, as evidenced in the work of Sylvia Pankhurst and at the Battle of Cable Street. It concludes by considering, through the friendship of Hardy and Sassoon, ways in which poetry protesting the First World War denounced the biologistic thought and division that so often underpinned militarism.