Meeting as Wonderstruck Kin

Marissa Grunes reviews Renée Bergland’s “Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science.”

By Marissa GrunesJuly 21, 2024

• Science & Technology

• Biography & Autobiography

• Poetry

• Literary Criticism

• Environment

IN ONE OF her more mysterious poems, Emily Dickinson imagines being buried near a friendly corpse:

I died for Beauty—but was scarce
Adjusted in the Tomb
When One who died for Truth, was lain
In an adjoining Room—

He questioned softly “Why I failed”?
“For Beauty,” I replied—
“And I—for Truth—Themself are One—
We Bretheren, are,” He said—

And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night—
We talked between the Rooms—
Until the Moss had reached our lips—
And covered up—Our names—

Who is this anonymous lover of truth who becomes a companion in the grave? The “Belle of Amherst” never married, and there’s no reason to believe that this imagined kinsman is based on an actual person. But if it were, might it be another poet, such as John Keats? Or a pastor, such as the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, with whom a youthful Dickinson may have fallen in love? Maybe a judge, like Otis Lord, with whom she became close in her later years? Or perhaps that new breed, the man of science? Could it, in fact, be Charles Darwin? By 1862, when Dickinson wrote this poem, she would have been able to read about Darwin’s theories in her beloved Atlantic Monthly. Her letters reveal a sharp understanding of his ideas and their importance. “We thought Darwin had thrown ‘the Redeemer’ away,” she slyly wrote in an 1882 letter to Lord.

Such speculation is more than schoolgirl fantasy. As Renée Bergland muses in the closing pages of her new book Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science, the identity of this lover of truth would teach us not only about Dickinson but also about how the poet and her contemporaries understood the relation between beauty and truth. Poetry and scientific inquiry were not so starkly separated at the time. Indeed, Bergland describes how poetry and science parted ways during the lifetimes of Darwin and Dickinson, who were among the last intellectuals to bridge the disciplines. Both saw beauty and truth as kin, united by wonder. Darwin wrote of “beautiful co-adaptations” between species, even in the “humblest parasite which clings to the hairs of a quadruped,” while Dickinson, with the same marveling attention, remarks that “to hear an Oriole sing / May be a common thing— / Or only a divine.” In short, Bergland suggests, both the naturalist and the poet “invite us home to an enchanted world.”

In her deeply researched and crisply accessible book, Bergland explores the upbringing, education, and output of these two icons—a naturalist who loved poetry and a poet trained in natural history—to illuminate how they mingled literature and science, philosophy and theology. These disciplines converged in the now-obsolete category of “natural magic.” By the 19th century, as Bergland explains, “mysterious natural forces and transformations—changes related to life and death, electricity and magnetism, the formation of crystals and gases—had long been understood as natural magic.” Lovers of American literature might think of Moby-Dick’s Captain Ahab, who harnesses magnetism and electricity to awe his sailors and hold their allegiance. In one instance, as Ahab prepares to correct a compass needle inverted by lightning, his showman’s flair prompts the sailors to exchange “abashed glances of servile wonder” as they await “whatever magic might follow.”

But natural magic does not simply refer to parlor tricks. It arises when sensitive observers—scrutinizing the details of biology, physics, or chemistry with humility and precision—experience wonder. For them, discovery does not demystify the world; rather, in the words of E. O. Wilson, “our sense of wonder grows exponentially: the greater the knowledge, the deeper the mystery and the more we seek knowledge to create new mystery.” It’s no coincidence that Wilson’s 1984 book Biophilia quotes Darwin’s response to arriving in Rio de Janeiro on the HMS Beagle: “wonder, astonishment & sublime devotion, fill & elevate the mind.”

Bergland’s book unfolds in a series of short chapters that narrate Darwin’s and Dickinson’s lives in parallel. They form an odd pair. Darwin became an international public figure whose adventurous youth took him on a four-year voyage to the tropics, while Dickinson is known for her reclusive, homebound life. Darwin felt the pressure to “publish or perish” in the early days of professional science, while Dickinson chose to hold back from publication over 1,000 poems. Darwin was a man of science and Dickinson a woman of lyric interiority.

Yet, as Bergland shows, their lives, circumstances, and sensibilities overlapped. Born roughly 20 years apart to similarly wealthy, intellectually elite families, they enjoyed outdoor pursuits including botany, and admired some of the same writers—particularly George Eliot, both an inspiration to Dickinson and one of Darwin’s close personal friends. The two also shared a mutual friend: abolitionist writer and Union officer Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who corresponded with and visited both.

Bergland explores these similarities in brief chunks of their lives spanning five to 10 years. A chapter on “Dickinson the Bold” takes us to Amherst from 1836 to 1847 to show Dickinson maturing from age six to 16, when she received her core scientific education from role models such as the highly regarded (and unmarried) chemist Mary Lyon. The following chapter, “The Leading Scientific Men,” shuttles us over to Darwin’s experiences from 1836 to 1845 after he disembarked the Beagle and began to find his scientific voice with the guidance of his own mentors, particularly the geologist Charles Lyell and the unmarried, best-selling sociologist Harriet Martineau, who was his brother’s constant companion but around whom Darwin felt uncomfortable. (Darwin’s brother tried to ease the naturalist’s discomfort by advising him “not to look at her as a woman.”)

The figures of Lyon and Martineau raise one of Bergland’s key themes: the openness of preprofessional natural philosophy to women. Surprisingly, we learn that Dickinson’s formal scientific education was more thorough than Darwin’s—in part because the sciences, including botany and geology, were deemed safer for girls than the study of politically charged Latin and Greek classics. Indeed, William Whewell coined the term “scientist” in the 1840s as a replacement for the more common “men of science” in order to include women like the polymath Mary Somerville. (Darwin himself, though fiercely progressive on the issue of race, wrestled with gender equality and rarely used Whewell’s term.) This window of opportunity for girls in the sciences would close over the course of Darwin’s and Dickinson’s lives as the scientific disciplines became professionalized. As Bergland discusses in her 2008 book Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer Among the American Romantics, the internationally famed American female astronomer Maria Mitchell became the first woman inducted into the Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1848, but no women succeeded her during her lifetime. In 1881, she would ask: “At what time did scientific associations close to women?”

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The walls of discipline and gender that arose around the sciences were part of a broader cultural march toward “rationalization.” In 1918, after the horrifically mechanized First World War had devastated Europe, the German sociologist Max Weber spoke of “the disenchantment of the world.” Weber believed that the West had entered an era of demystification, when secularization, technology, and capitalism served to “rationalize” forms of organization that squeezed out mystery and even religion. He used the term “Entzauberung,” which literally translates to “de-magicking,” but he was referring back to the German Romantic Friedrich Schiller, whose phrase had been “entgötterte Natur”: “de-godded Nature.” Greek gods had once been conjured to explain things like lightning or earthquakes or the wonders of fire—that is to say, natural magic. Our modern world, by contrast, follows reliable physical and social laws that can be analyzed, replicated, and in some cases quantified. Most of us don’t understand how streetcars work, Weber remarked in his 1917 lecture “Science as a Vocation,” but we don’t need to know. We can rely on the functioning of this technology, secure in the knowledge that somebody else understands it. Ours has become a world governed not by petty gods or mystical forces or even—arguably—by divinity of any sort. It is governed by humans.

The idea of a world in which humans are the highest authority is unsettling. It’s a bit like being the smartest person in the room. It’s lonely. And it makes you wonder: is this really all there is? Perhaps the loneliness of disenchantment explains the hold magic still has in the 21st century. Not only have dragons and wizards taken over TV, film, and video-game screens, but popular representations of science—like BBC’s Planet Earth (2006)—also tend to emphasize wonder. The ivory tower, too, seems fascinated by forms of enchantment. A few weeks after Bergland’s book appeared, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor published a monumental 640-page tome titled Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment. Taylor’s book, too, hearkens back to 19th-century Romanticism to show how poetic language creates experiences of transcendent connection with the surrounding world—experiences frustrated by Weberian disenchantment. While Taylor’s book is hardly trendy—if anything, within literary academia, it swims against the historicist current—his widespread appeal both within and beyond academia suggests that his arguments have struck a nerve.

Bergland’s insight is to enfold re-enchantment into her own ongoing project: a reevaluation of the history of science, interdisciplinarity, and gender in the 19th century. Disenchantment is visible, she suggests, in the ways scientific professionalization closed opportunities to women, while (not coincidentally) giving rise to what C. P. Snow in 1959 would call the “two cultures”: “Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists.” In the earlier days of enchanted science, a proponent of inductive reasoning such as John Herschel could describe careful scientific observers as people who “walk in the midst of wonders.” Even the man whose ideas arguably brought enchantment—and religion—crashing down, Charles Darwin, did not isolate science from poetic wonder. “Darwin would try again and again to explain that the adaptation and change at the heart of natural selection could offer consolation and inspire hope,” Bergland argues.

Today, young people are looking for hope amid a new form of existential loneliness: the climate crisis. In Bill McKibben’s phrase, we have reached the “end of nature,” when human influence pervades every corner of the natural world, from microplastics found in deep-sea shrimp to warming-induced extreme weather events. Even rain no longer has an “independent and mysterious existence,” McKibben laments. “There’s nothing there except us.”

Fittingly, Bergland says that the idea for her book emerged from an essay on how Dickinson’s interdisciplinary poetry can help us think about the climate crisis. If modern technology, scientific arrogance, and human control—in other words, forms of disenchantment—created the mess we’re in, then perhaps older, enchanted forms of scientific discovery can offer an alternative approach. In particular, Bergland implies, we should focus on the idea of kinship.

It is often said that Darwin did for biology what Copernicus did for cosmology: he pushed humans off their throne at the center of the universe. In Darwinian evolution, we are no longer the culmination of divine purpose, nor have we been given dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air. Instead, we are all kin. In an early notebook entry, Darwin described “animals” as “our fellow brethren in pain, disease[,] death & suffering & famine,” yoked to us by “our origin in one common ancestor [by which] we may be all netted together.” In his 1839 book The Voyage of the Beagle, he remarked that “we do not steadily bear in mind, how profoundly ignorant we are of the conditions of existence of every animal.” Quoting this line in The Atlantic Monthly in 1862, Thomas Wentworth Higginson—the radical abolitionist and mutual friend to Darwin and Dickinson—praised Darwin’s “noble scientific humility.” For Higginson, Darwin’s vision of kinship among all living things also spoke to the equality of the human races.

Dickinson understood the value of such humility. She saw that—in Ed Yong’s repurposing of another Romantic poet, William Blake—humans inhabit “an immense world” rich with neighboring consciousnesses. Writing to Higginson, Dickinson remarked: “I know the Butterfly—and the Lizard—and the Orchis—Are not those your Countrymen?” These were her countrymen too—as was the lover of truth with whom she met “as Kinsmen” beyond the grave. We need this sense of kinship today, if only to slow down and reflect on the ways in which technologies like geoengineering and artificial intelligence are transforming the world. As Darwin and Dickinson show, the “two cultures” stand to gain clarity and humility from becoming resolutely entangled with one another and with the planet whose natural magic eludes our mastery.

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Featured image: William Fraser Garden. River Landscape near St. Ives, Huntingdonshire, 1897. Bequest of Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund. National Gallery of Art (2017.12.2). CC0, nga.gov. Accessed July 20, 2024.