Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

96 WOOLFIAN BOUNDARIES
Taxonomy in its popular, Victorian form was also rather prim. Although the Linnaean
system of classifi cation was a sexual system, distinguishing between species based on the number,
form, proportion, and situation of sexual organs, in translations and reformulations of
Linnaean taxonomy meant for the general public, this basis was concealed: Patricia Fara highlights
in particular William Withering’s “bowdlerised botany,” which “translated contentious
words into harmless but meaningless English equivalents such as ‘chives’ and ‘pointals’” (42).
Th e moralising of nature was one of the aspects of the Victorian practice of natural history
that Woolf disdained, an attitude that placed her in agreement with the emerging class
of professional biologists who, in the words of Suzanne Le-May Sheffi eld, “sought to rid science
of its moral, religious and metaphysical associations” (179). Ormerod herself “focussed
exclusively upon the practical utility of entomology, completely ignoring any entertainment
value or moral or religious worth” (Sheffi eld 172). Woolf notes that the injurious insects that
were Ormerod’s chosen specialty were “Not, one would have thought, among God’s most
triumphant creations” (E4 136): the natural theology that had justifi ed the study of nature
for much of the nineteenth century played no part in Ormerod’s motivation. Th ough her
brother Edward sought to bar her from the unseemly study of anatomy, “never lik[ing] [her]
to do more than take sections of teeth,” Ormerod persevered, and Woolf has her heroine
preface her discussion of her anatomical investigations with the airy remark, “my brother—
oh, he’s dead now—a very good man” (E4 136). Th e death of this embodiment of Victorian
morality released Ormerod to engage with nature on new terms.
Woolf regards this casting off of the moralised view of nature as Ormerod’s greatest
triumph. Apostrophising Ormerod, Woolf declares:
Ah, but Eleanor, the Bot and the Hessian have more power over you than Mr
Edward Ormerod himself. Under the microscope you clearly perceive that these
insects have organs, orifi ces, excrement; they do, most emphatically, copulate.
Escorted on one side by the Bot or Warble, on the other by the Hessian Fly, Miss
Ormerod advanced statelily, if slowly, into the open. Never did her features show
more sublime than when lit up with the candour of her avowal. “Th is is excrement;
these, though Ritzema Bos is positive to the contrary, are the generative
organs of the male. I’ve proved it.” Upon her head the hood of Edinburgh most
fi tly descended; pioneer of purity even more than of Paris Green. (E4 136)
It is Ormerod’s frank, scientifi c treatment of anatomy, sex, and other bodily functions—purifying
organs and excrement of taboo—that Woolf celebrates above all her other accomplishments.
Clark takes Woolf’s description of Ormerod as “a pioneer of purity” as a demonstration
of Woolf’s agreement with his own assessment that Ormerod denied her sexuality in
order to achieve success in the masculine world of science. Yet Woolf’s description seems
rather to suggest that Ormerod’s science, far from being grounded in a suppression or
rejection of sex, was based upon a frank and unashamed treatment of it.
It is this demystifi cation that Woolf highlights as well in her discussion of Ormerod’s
campaign against the house sparrow. By the 1890s, the systematic destruction of birds of
prey by farmers and game keepers had upset the “balance of birds,” as E. M Nicholson
termed it (25): the numbers of natural predators had declined and as a result adaptable
species such as the sparrow had proliferated and, in some areas, become pests. Th at the