Inherited Behaviour in Wilkie Collins ’ s The Legacy of Cain : Victorian Studies and Twenty-First-Century Science Policy

The Legacy of Cain (1888), the last novel Wilkie Collins published before his death, is structured as a case study of the respective influences of nature and nurture. The central question is whether the daughter of a murderess will reveal a 'hereditary taint' or whether a loving and religious environment will prove the stronger influence on the child's character. The Victorians knew nothing about genetics, but scientists and novelists alike shared a vigorous discourse about the hereditary transmission of behaviour and whether 'character' was heritable. In the wake of genetic and epigenetic discoveries, we find ourselves faced with a situation comparable to that Collins encountered in the 1880s, when evolutionary theory was unsettling many things Victorians held dear. Exploring how novelists and scientists in the late-nineteenth century attempted to cope with notions of inherited behaviour without genetics sheds an interesting light on twenty-first-century reactions to the news that acquired characteristics and behavioural traits may be passed on to future generations through mechanisms other than the gene. The emergence of an influential, semi-autonomous zone of activity known as the policy arena, which occupies an intermediate position between the disciplinary specialist and the public sphere, enables humanists to participate in science policy today in ways comparable to the contributions made by Victorian literary figures such as Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold and Samuel Butler.

the wisdom of pursuing such avenues of research, the heritability of behaviour is once again a hot topic.
In the biological sciences this renewed interest comes from three main directions: genetics, which garners the lion's share of public attention for its success in identifying genes that are associated with increased probability for a given trait (a success that has accelerated dramatically in the past few years with the advent of genome wide association studies); neuroscience, a diverse field that draws variously on cognitive psychology, linguistics, brain imaging and evolutionary biology; and epigenetics, which is the concern of this article. Because of its focus on non-genetic sources of inherited traits, epigenetics should be of interest to scholars of a period that did not yet understand the genetic mechanism of inheritance.
Epigenetics can be defined as the study of heritable characteristics that have a molecular basis independent of DNA. According to the journal Nature, which ran a special section on the field in May 2007, ‗epigenetics is riding a wave of popularity.' 1 Noting that more than 2,500 articles had been published on the subject within the year, the editors of Nature observed that the media portrays epigenetics as ‗a revolutionary new science.' 2 Epigenetic changes are crucial for normal cell growth and have long been a topic in developmental biology, but the recent discoveries have to do with how cells can transmit acquired traits to daughter cells through non-genetic modes of inheritance and with evidence that some variations in species may be directed rather than random. Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb have 2 summarised the four main contentions of epigenetics in their book Evolution in Four Dimensions (2005): there is more to heredity than genes; some hereditary variations are non-random in origin; some acquired information is inherited; evolutionary change can result from instruction as well as selection. 3 These are disorienting claims, which seem to violate some of the central tenets of genetics and contradict much of what we have learned about Darwinian evolution.
They suggest that biological traits can be inherited from sources other than DNA, that natural selection does not arise solely from random mutation, that Lamarckism may have more validity than most of us dreamed, and that evolution at times may be directed toward specific goals. I will explain more of the fundamentals of this new research as I proceed, but first I want to suggest that the interdisciplinary study of the nineteenth century has something valuable to contribute to the public policy debate emerging around this ‗revolutionary new science'.
Public perceptions of science play a large role in the policy making process today. 4 Ethics committees and policy boards recognise that literature, film, and other media shape popular understandings of science and that cultural values are relevant to decisions about scientific policy. Unlike debates over whether culture shapes the findings of science, no one disputes that culture plays a role in matters of science policy. The groups that have the greatest influence on establishing science policy are interdisciplinary committees of researchers and scholars, who hold hearings, sponsor colloquia, and issue recommendations. The participants in this process are drawn from a wide cross-section of the scholarly and professional world: scientists, doctors, lawyers, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, and increasingly, theologians. A noticeable absence in these interdisciplinary gatherings, however, is anyone trained to interpret and comment on culture. Scholars of literature, history, art and art history, performance studies, film and theatre are largely missing from the policy making process. This imbalance represents both a problem and an opportunity for humanists. The problem, of course, is that our absence from the room skews the resulting image of culture. The opportunity is for literary and The chief change in this relationship is the emergence of an influential, semiautonomous zone of activity known as the policy arena. This zone occupies an intermediate position between the disciplinary specialist and the public sphere, mediating even as it formalises the process of speaking out about public issues. The people who gain a voice in this arena are sometimes referred to as policy experts, but the source of their expertise lies in disciplines outside the policy arena. For example, one may get a master's degree or do a post-Doc in health policy, but this credential generally complements rather than replaces the MD, JD, or PhD that constitutes the expert's primary qualification. At the higher levels of the policy world, the credential that matters, the ticket that earns one a seat at the table, is scholarly distinction in one's home discipline. The policy process is best described as a transdisciplinary activity since its work is done by ad hoc groups of experts from other disciplines, who come together to forge positions on specific problems. is structured as a case study of the respective influences of nature and nurture, to use the terms Francis Galton coined just a few years earlier. The novel tells the story of two sisters raised in the same household, one the adopted daughter of a woman who was executed for murder, the other the biological child of the Reverend Abel Gracedieu and his wife. The central question of the book is whether the daughter of the murderess will reveal a ‗hereditary taint' from her mother or whether a loving and religious environment will prove the stronger influence on the child's character. 9 To complicate the mystery, the minister, after his wife's early death, conceals from everyone that one of the two children was adopted. For much of the novel, the reader is kept guessing about which young lady is the daughter of a murderer. One finds oneself weighing each mental and physical characteristic of the sisters against one's memory of the two mothers, the murderess and the minister's wife.
Let me relieve your suspense. If I don't reveal the sisters' names, I can safely disclose the outcome of this convoluted plot without ruining the novel for anyone who has not read it. The daughter of the murderess does indeed inherit the propensity for murder from her mother, but the daughter of the minister himself is the one who actually attempts to commit a real murder. It is the minister's biological daughter who ends up trying to poison her fiancé. The unexpected twist of having the murderer's daughter resist the temptation to kill and the minister's daughter give into the same temptation stems from Collins's conviction that the power of maternal inheritance is greater than any influences that descend from the father, through either nature or nurture. This seems paradoxical until one realises that the murderess's daughter inherits both her mother's propensity for violence and her capacity for love, and that it is the latter that wins out in the end.
Collins reveals that the innocent daughter is struggling against an inherited tendency toward murder by a simple novelistic expedient, ready at hand from gothic conventions. When betrayed in love, she finds herself literally possessed by her mother's murderous spirit. The ghost of her mother, in a perverse echo of Dickens's The evil sister, the minister's own daughter, ends up trying to poison her fiancé, for reasons I need not go into other than to say that they stem from her maternal inheritance. When crossed in love, the minister's daughter does not resist the temptation to kill because she has inherited her mother's cold, intellectual disposition. Just as the impulse to love in the first sister is a finer quality she has While, therefore, I resigned myself to recognize the existence of the hereditary maternal taint, I firmly believed in the counterbalancing influences for good which had been part of the girl's birthright. They had been derived, perhaps, from the better qualities in her father's nature; they had been certainly developed by the tender care, the religious vigilance, which had guarded the adopted child so lovingly in the Minister's household; and they had served their purpose until time brought with it the change, for which the tranquil domestic influences were not prepared. With the great, the vital transformation, which marks the ripening of the girl into the woman's maturity of thought and passion, a new power for Good, strong enough to resist the latent power for Evil, sprang into being, and sheltered [her] under the supremacy of Love. (LOC 216-17) Woman's innate power to love seems to exist independent of nature or nurture. Postulating this innate quality in womanhood renders all the forgoing analysis of heredity incoherent. Gender assumptions trump everything Collins's knows about nineteenth-century scientific theories of inheritance. If the change brought by time, the great and vital transformation that marks the ripening of the girl into womanhood, is nothing other than puberty, then why did not the other sister find strength in a similar transformation? The answer appears to be simple: the other sister is just too bright. Collins emphasises again and again how much smarter the evil sister is than the good, and her cleverness, inherited from her mother, seems to prevent the ripening of a feminine power for good.
Two conclusions relevant to twenty-first-century science policy may be drawn from this discussion of inherited behaviour in Collins's The Legacy of Cain.
(1) Before genetics, the cultural understanding of inheritance made ample allowance To look for a Victorian anticipation of epigenetics, I would like to turn to an unlikely source, Francis Galton. Galton was committed to the principle that ‗Nature is far stronger than Nurture' in shaping character, 17  The fact that the mother's cytoplasm makes an important contribution to the developing faculties of the embryo was established many decades ago, but epigenetics has given a new twist to this fact. Research on DNA methylation and RNA interference has suggested mechanisms by which heritable information other than DNA can be transmitted not only from cell to cell but from parent to child.
These mechanisms can be activated by environmental stress, and if the stressful conditions continue for long enough, these cellular states can become subject to natural selection. This is, in effect, an explanation of how environmental conditions affecting the parent can be passed on to the child.

III
A study of Collins, or even of the controversy among nineteenth-century neo- Collins nor Galton were tempted to see the hand of an intelligent designer in adaptive evolution, many other people in the 1880s were eager to draw exactly that conclusionas they are today.
Jablonka and Lamb explicitly reject an intelligent-design interpretation of their results, but scientists rarely have control over how their findings are interpreted. Literature, drama, the arts, media, popular culture, religious discourse and countless other forces play roles in shaping how such research is understood.
Although I am not so foolhardy as to believe that literary studies can guide the way in which our society dreams its scientific dreams or shudders at its technological nightmares, I do believe that we have a valuable perspective on such matters, which could be of benefit to public policy decisions.
find ourselves faced with a situation comparable to that Collins encountered in the 1880s, when evolutionary theory was unsettling many things Victorians held dear.
In the Victorian era, literary figures may not have been clear-sighted in every case, but at least they were confident that their words joined in dialogue with those of scientists such as Galton, Huxley and Weismann, whose vision, after all, was not always pellucid about the social consequences of evolution. Although the institutional framework that enables humanists to participate in science policy today is entirely different from that which prevailed more than a century ago, the opportunity exists once again. Those of us interested in how culture shapes understandings of science should consider how we will respond to this opportunity. 24 Endnotes: