Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Pests And Pesticides
of how much a woman could do without the help of a man” with a declaration of her gratitude
to the men who had furthered her career (Clark 435). Woolf likewise observes that
Ormerod was conservative in many of her social and political views: she depicts Ormerod
toasting the Queen’s health, assembling her servants for prayer, lamenting the prospect
of Home Rule, and preserving her father’s “pigtail…in a box” (E4 139). Woolf suggests,
however, that where her scientifi c training came into play, Ormerod was iconoclastic, that
she was encouraged by her science to overturn established conventions, whether these
took the form of the taxonomic tradition of natural history or restrictive social and gender
norms. Woolf presents Ormerod as, almost against her will and certainly against the conditions
of her upbringing, challenging received values by means of her science.
In the most general sense, Woolf suggests that, over the course of Ormerod’s life,
her science gradually emboldened her to challenge masculine authority. As Woolf tells it,
Ormerod’s fi rst scientifi c observation, made as a small child while watching a tumbler full
of water grubs, sends her running to her father, fi lled with “eagerness to impart her observations”
(E4 133); her father dismisses her report that the grubs have eaten one of their
companions as “Nonsense” and, on this occasion, she does not protest, accepting that
“little girls are not allowed to contradict their fathers” (E4 133). During her apprenticeship
as a taxonomic entomologist, she continues to appeal to male authority fi gures, sending
a captured specimen to an Oxford professor for classifi cation (E4 134). Even once she
feels herself a competent judge, she initially conceals her own authority behind that of a
man: Woolf causes her to remark that “Dr Ritzema Bos is a great stand-by. For they won’t
take a woman’s word” (E4 136). Gradually, however, Ormerod gains the confi dence to
challenge even her former mentor, off ering the pronouncement, “these, though Ritzema
Bos is positive to the contrary, are the generative organs of the male. I’ve proved it” (E4:
136). By the end of her career, Woolf suggests, Ormerod has achieved public recognition
as an expert, as is demonstrated by her dictated letter to Messrs. Langridge: “Gentlemen, I
have examined your sample and fi nd…” (E4 138). From being a seeker after the opinions
of others, Ormerod has become an authority herself.
Woolf was justifi ed in regarding taxonomic natural history as a conservative infl uence.
As Londa Schiebinger has demonstrated in Nature’s Body, taxonomy in the Linnaean
tradition was socially conservative, importing human gender conventions such as male
priority and the domestic, nurturing role of the female wholesale into the classifi cation of
nature and thus reinforcing the existing social order by permitting it to appear “natural.”
Taxonomic natural history was also religiously orthodox. Linnaeus regarded taxonomy
as a continuation of Adam’s naming of the beasts in the garden and the practice received
further religious sanction from the philosophy of natural theology which argued that the
variety and complexity of natural forms off ered proof of the power and wisdom of their
creator and that the study of nature was thus a means of reverencing God. Th is doctrine
continued to serve as the primary justifi cation for the study of nature for much of the
nineteenth century, thanks in part to its reiteration in William Paley’s Natural Th eology. As
a result, for much of the Victorian period, the study of nature, particularly as a pastime for
women, children, and the working classes, was recommended as much on moral grounds
as on educational ones, the contemplation of God’s creation being regarded as a spiritually
edifying activity leading the attention “from the works of Nature up to the God of
Nature,” to quote F. O. Morris (History iv).
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