Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

94 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
of pesticides and her support for the extermination of house sparrows. Clark notes that
Ormerod “played a pivotal role in the promotion of the large-scale use of Paris green,” a
copper acetoarsenite compound, as an insecticide (446). Th ere was limited understanding
of the dangers of arsenite compounds in the late nineteenth century. Medical doctors and
agricultural scientists were aware of arsenic’s acute toxicity in large quantities but were less
alert to its chronic toxicity when encountered in small amounts over a long period (Clark
446). Th e compound was widely used as a pigment in green paints (hence its name) and
was also used medicinally in preparations such as Fowler’s solution. As a result, there was
little public objection to the adoption of Paris Green as a pesticide, and Ormerod herself
proudly declared that she wished her tombstone to read, “SHE INTRODUCED PARIS
GREEN TO ENGLAND” (Wallace 206-7).
Clark cites Woolf’s biographical sketch, “Miss Ormerod” (published in the Dial in
December 1924 and later incorporated into “Lives of the Obscure” in the American edition
of Th e Common Reader), in support of his condemnation of Ormerod and her science.
He takes Woolf’s description of Ormerod as a “pioneer of purity even more than of
Paris Green” as confi rmation of his contention that Ormerod’s success in the masculine
fi eld of applied entomology was made possible only by the suppression of her sexuality
(E4 136, cited in Clark 431). However, Clark’s deployment of Woolf as a guarantor of
his ecofeminist argument demands examination. Much of Woolf’s writing does, without
question, support ecocritical interpretation, but Woolf’s representation of economic entomology
in “Miss Ormerod” complicates this view.
I would argue that, unlike that of Clark, Woolf’s portrayal of Ormerod and her
science is essentially approving. To what extent, then, did the nature of Ormerod’s science
fi gure into Woolf’s evaluation of her subject? Did Woolf champion Ormerod simply
because she was a woman who achieved success in a male-dominated fi eld, regardless of
the focus of her research, or was the nature of Ormerod’s science in some way responsible
for Woolf’s interest in and approval of Ormerod? If the latter, what are the implications
of this approval to an understanding of Woolf’s views of science and nature? I will argue
that Woolf championed Ormerod because Woolf was not primarily concerned with the
environmental eff ects of Ormerod’s policies but instead viewed Ormerod and her science
in relation to the earlier nineteenth-century tradition of taxonomic natural history and
welcomed the overthrow of this quintessentially Victorian scientifi c tradition by more
modern disciplines such as economic entomology.
In his critique of Ormerod, Clark describes economic entomology as part of “the
new empirical science, bent upon the dissection of nature’s anatomy” (451). In the early
twentieth century, this new science was seen as possessing a revolutionary potential. Writers
such as H. G. Wells and Marie Carmichael presented the new biology of the laboratory
alongside Fabian socialism, feminist activism, and free love as a possible means of social
amelioration. Woolf was also susceptible to such optimism. With regards to the study of
nature, Woolf appears to have viewed only the established tradition of taxonomic natural
history as irredeemably patriarchal. She saw modern sciences, economic entomology included,
as potentially transformative, having the capacity to overthrow the dogmatism of
not only the old scientifi c order but also established social conventions and hierarchies.
As Clark correctly notes, Ormerod was not an overt feminist. She was publicly dismissive
of the women’s movement, responding to Lydia Becker’s praise that she was “proof