The Forms of Disavowal

Climate of Denial is an outstanding contribution to the vibrant subfield of Victorian literary and environmental studies. The period covered marks the full-scale onset of the Anthropocene, our current epoch of (it seems) permanent modification of the earth's natural systems by human activity, with the takeoff of the carbon-based industrial revolution and the West's planetwide geopolitical dominance. Recent monographs (this is a very selective list) range from Allen MacDuffie's own Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination (2014; his first book) and Jesse Oak Taylor's The Sky of Our Manufacture (2016) to Elizabeth Carolyn Miller's Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion (2021) and Nathan K. Hensley's Action Without Hope: Victorian Literature After Climate Collapse (2025). (The downward arc of these titles, from energy and imagination to exhaustion and collapse, tracks the escalation of the crisis in just a few years.) Building on an earlier generation of ecocriticism, which analyzed allusions to species extinction, habitat destruction, industrial pollution, and so on in literary texts, these recent works reckon with the apprehension of ongoing deep or macro-scale structural transformations in effects of literary form, beneath the explicit articulations of theme and topic. Literature (as Tobias Menely argues with reference to poetry across the long eighteenth century in Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics, 2021) can serve as a psychic barometer, registering what Raymond Williams calls “structures of feeling,” intuitions of impending historical forces before they precipitate into scientific concepts (128–35).Climate of Denial recovers the genealogy of a modern structure of feeling, “soft denial” or “disavowal,” in which individual acknowledgment of a systemic crisis (the state of nature or the planet) triggers an affective recoil from the new knowledge and a refusal to deal with its practical implications. The division “between accepting something to be true and real and fully assimilating it into one's sense of identity or experience of the world” (3) produces a “split in the disavowing subject that is accompanied (crucially) by the subject's own self-awareness of that split” (4). Here MacDuffie gives us a compelling redescription of the form of liberal subjectivity, ascendant in the period, which can stand beside influential recent accounts (trained on questions of politics and governance) by Lauren M. Goodlad (Victorian Literature and the Victorian State 2004) and Elaine Hadley (Living Liberalism 2010). MacDuffie argues that “hard denial,” outright refusal, whether (at the time) of Charles Darwin's vision of natural history or (now) of the reality of anthropogenic climate change, is less consequential, because less insidious, than the liberal stance of rational acceptance stymied by disavowal. “I know very well, but all the same”—MacDuffie cites this phrase for the operation of ideology from Octave Mannoni (2)—articulates an affective immunization against organized response to an unfolding emergency.MacDuffie's rewriting of the Victorian genealogy of ecosystemic meltdown as a history of sensibility brings something methodologically new and powerful to the ecocritical repertoire. Assent with disavowal, he argues, characterized the early reception of Darwin's evolutionary hypothesis (“descent with modification” winnowed by natural selection) before it came to define psychic management of the looming climate crisis. The first two chapters of Climate of Denial focus on the paradox whereby Victorian biologists and anthropologists, even as they professed their acceptance of Darwin's theory, went on to capture and neutralize the era's most devastating critique of humanity's self-enthroning at the center and end of history. MacDuffie traces two related strategies: the reinstatement of human exceptionalism through our very capacity to reflect upon the natural-historical condition posited by Darwin, and the reinstatement of an anthropocentric teleology premised on that intellectual mastery via the exaltation of human technical mastery over nature. “The diminution of the human species is accompanied by a seemingly limitless magnification of the power of human consciousness, a sense of a disembodied freedom to range across the universe” (76). MacDuffie cites the geologist Charles Lyell for this last point; the operation—of a material diminution triggering spiritual enlargement and transcendental freedom—is also, classically, that of Kantian aesthetics, in which the imagination's confrontation with a sublime phenomenon leads to the reassembly of human reason at a higher remove.MacDuffie links this reaffirmation of human exceptionalism to the accelerated instrumental domination of natural systems that accompanied Western imperial expansion: “Although we might expect that Darwin's discussion of the complex interconnectedness of all life would raise serious concerns about industrial growth and the rippling consequences of things like invasive mining practices, large-scale forest clearing, and increasing fossil-fuel consumption, in fact, it became in many influential quarters an important argument for that very regime” (64). As MacDuffie goes on to remark, “Despite his absolutely central place today in the annals of Western ecological thought, Darwin does not seem like much of an ‘environmentalist’ in the way we use that term today” (67)—the concerns just listed are largely absent from his writings. MacDuffie draws a contrast between Darwin and his codiscoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, who was far more acutely observant of the destructive impact of the European colonial and commercial enterprise on tropical ecosystems. As Taylor notes, Wallace's field experience in the Malay Archipelago, 1854–62, brought him to an “Anthropocene frontier” (Darwin 22) that was already significantly more degraded than the regions visited by Darwin on his expeditions in South America and Australasia in the early 1830s (27–30).MacDuffie's third chapter considers the management of disavowal in first-person poetic and fictional enunciations by Alfred Tennyson, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad. Highlights here include bracingly astute discussions of Tennyson's In Memoriam and, especially, Wells's scientific romances. By the close of The Time Machine, writes MacDuffie, “Wells has pulled off a rather stunning reversal: the obviously fictional journey of the Time Traveler has come to seem more ‘real’ than the world to which the narrator (and the reader) must return. It is the everyday world, not Wells's novel, that demands a willing suspension of disbelief” (110). The scientist antihero of Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau “is a character who believes himself to be a conscious evolutionary agent in a Lamarckian world but who actually, and unknowingly, functions in the symbolic economy of the novel as a kind of allegory for a Darwinian natural order: pitiless, chance-driven, undirected. Moreau is the opponent of Darwinian natural selection who, by opposing it, becomes its unwitting avatar” (126).No doubt these works, especially those of Wells and Conrad, lend themselves readily to MacDuffie's argument by virtue of their turn-of-the-century provenance and (hence) ability to thematize Darwinism's cultural and political fallout. Chapter 4, “George Eliot and Free Indirect Denial,” returns to Darwin's generation and to the Victorian realist novel—and makes for another of the book's high points. MacDuffie's crucial insight here is into the formal encoding of his structure of feeling, disavowal, through the aesthetic techniques of fictionality. The “willing suspension of disbelief” formulates exactly that conjunction of acknowledgment with refusal that MacDuffie describes, only with the valences reversed—in the Coleridgean formula, rational disavowal licenses imaginative investment. But the structure itself remains intact so that realist fiction plays a crucial role in its psychic activation and cultural normalization. Thus, “it is not just that the realist novel depends on its readers to suspend their disbelief in order to enter the fictional world, sympathize with the characters, and so on; it also normalizes that act of suspension by reflecting it back as one of the procedures by which everyday life is constructed by narrators, fictional characters, and ‘real’ people alike” (38). (Hence the neat trick, mentioned above, with which Wells upends this operation in The Time Machine.) MacDuffie analyzes free indirect discourse, long recognized as a key device of novelistic realism, as a powerful technique of the structure of feeling. In merging an individual perspective with a global system via the integration of first-person subjectivity into an “objective,” third-person narration, free indirect discourse also divides them. The “dual voice” of free indirect discourse (see Roy Pascal, The Dual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and Its Functioning in the Nineteenth-Century European Novel, 1977) “makes it an instrument uniquely capable of expressing divided minds, forms of self-deception, selective attention, motivated reasoning, strategic forgetfulness, and wishful thinking; that is, states of denial” (MacDuffie 132): “The ‘real’ emerges in an implicitly imagined consensus understanding of reality against which any individual departure can be assessed, ironized, and corrected. And yet, because of this, because of the consensus view that the device both relies upon and constructs, free indirect discourse is particularly susceptible to becoming a means of mystification itself, an instrument . . . for concealing the real through the very gestures with which it claims to uncover it” (132–33). Here MacDuffie makes a genuinely original contribution to a topic that has been extensively canvassed by theorists of narrative and the novel.MacDuffie's account of Eliot's major novels, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, also succeeds in making a fresh and compelling argument—this time in a field that has become very crowded lately. Eliot's management of free indirect discourse “renders the ambiguously mixed affective and epistemological condition of denial” (134) with unmatched virtuosity. Here the discussions of the moral predicaments of Eliot's characters are as finely attuned to local nuance, as well as to larger consequences, as any I can think of. The “heroic idealism” of Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch “makes her susceptible to wishful thinking, while her acute reflexivity and penchant for sophisticated, abstract thought makes it difficult for her to dwell for long in such a state”; unlike other characters in the novel, “she doesn't bend reality to fit a presupposed righteousness but wants to test herself against reality in order to improve herself” (145). As for Dorothea and Casaubon: “We sense that she does not quite know, then refuses to know, then pretends not to know, then finally does know, that her husband is not the man she imagined him to be and that, actually, the entire world of men is kind of a giant sham” (147).More controversial, perhaps, is MacDuffie's sharp attention to the limits of Eliot's anthropocentrism: “The moral development of Eliot's characters depends upon their coming to terms with an existence as a mere unit within a much larger whole, but that larger whole is framed as a human one: a community, a race, a nation. What they do not reckon with, what they are in face encouraged to keep out of mind, is the idea that they are mere units in a greater non-human whole that is far more threatening and destabilizing” (135). This argument bears fruit in an especially provocative reading of Daniel Deronda, which raises a critical question about the novel's resolution: “What appears to rescue the human . . . from the frightening vision of the ‘amalgamation with matter' is a racialized understanding of history” (179). As with Middlemarch, the analysis is illuminated by flashes of local insight: “Where Dorothea is consistently imagined as a source of potential energy, Gwendolen appears for most of the novel as an unwitting agent of entropy and loss, both participant and victim of a social world defined by exhaustion,” embodied by her husband Grandcourt—vividly characterized as “a kind of bottomless energy-drain” (164).MacDuffie's last chapter turns to Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse raises Victorian fiction's dialectic of disavowal to conscious, critical reflection. The novel brings the Great War into focus as a historical hinge between the theoretical claims of Darwinian natural history and the impending actuality of global catastrophe, through its character as a vast, dispersed destructive event (total war) unleashed by a human agency incapable of controlling it. Woolf's depiction of her characters, wrapped in their individual styles of disavowal, develops a Victorian realist procedure that she then tears apart in the “Time Passes” sequence. To the Lighthouse “ironizes the feelings that constitute disavowal without discounting them; the production of denial is critically anatomized but with sympathy and an acknowledgment of just how difficult it is to know how to process unsettling and inhuman realities” (201). The comment expresses MacDuffie's critical generosity toward the authors and works he considers, even as he trains an unfaltering analytic eye upon their shifts and evasions—shifts and evasions from which we ourselves are not exempt.A conclusion looks at Margaret Atwood's dystopian science fiction trilogy MaddAddam (2003–13), focusing on the first title, Oryx and Crake, with its explicit reflection on the genetic—and apocalyptic—human contamination of “nature.” MacDuffie asserts, in one of his arresting formulations, “The liberal horizon, the mechanism of disavowal, has arrived and it is the event horizon; on the other side lies the black hole of a fully extracted and exhausted planet” (221). Climate of Denial closes by posing its own uncomfortable, perhaps unanswerable questions to us, its readers: “It is one thing to expose denial as a massive cultural problem; it's another thing to define its opposite. Not to be in denial is to be what, exactly? Fully aware, all the time? Totally disillusioned? Is such a condition desirable, if it were even possible? And isn't the idea of achieving such a position also a fantasy of the sovereign, perfectly knowing subject?” (228). There's a becoming humility in this forthright statement of questions that cut to the ethical heart of MacDuffie's project.