In Climate of Denial: Darwin, Climate Change, and the Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century, Allen MacDuffie reads models of denial and disavowal found in the literature of the Long Nineteenth Century into the current debates surrounding the climate crisis. This project grapples with fundamental questions of knowing and metacognition, as well as the historical systems of capital and labor that incentivize the structural denial of inconvenient truths. Through exceptional close readings of texts from Darwin to Virginia Woolf, even up to Annie Dillard and Margaret Atwood, MacDuffie traces representations of disavowal (some may say self-delusion) in both scientific literature and fiction alongside the documented struggles these writers faced in understanding and accepting humanity’s decentered place in a Darwinian world. Among the many insights MacDuffie’s book offers, perhaps the most striking is the sheer number of topics and experiences that shifted with the reconceptualization of Man as Homosapien—as a part of the natural world no different from any other taxonomizable being. The residue of the belief that our species is set apart from the natural world, MacDuffie argues, not only informed the literature of the Long Nineteenth Century, but continues to shape debates around ecology and naturalism, preventing meaningful action when human actors are faced with natural cataclysms on the scale of the climate crisis.

Methodologically, Climate of Denial draws on Eco-Critical and Marxist critics, with supporting material drawn from Historicist and Freudian traditions. MacDuffie systematically evaluates his primary texts, including The Origin of Species and novels such as Middlemarch and To The Lighthouse, through an eco-critical lens that reveals how structures of capital and personal investment in each work’s historical context facilitates the denial and disavowal that appear in each text. On a more granular level, MacDuffie is invested in formal elements including narrative voice, free indirect discourse, and the novel form itself. In evaluating these formal elements, we find the recognizable features of academic inquiry into the Long Nineteenth Century. Where this study truly shines, however, is in MacDuffie’s organization, which keeps the contemporary climate crisis, and climate change denialism more specifically, at the forefront regardless of individual text tasked with illuminating another facet of that expansive problem.

The first chapter, “Forms of Denial,” does the definitional and theoretical work that the rest of the project relies on. MacDuffie roots his use of the term “denial” in the metacognitive work required to simultaneously hold contrasting views. The particular brand of doublethink that MacDuffie is interested in is the “soft denial” that does not reject a concept out of hand (here MacDuffie gives an example of “hard denial” in those who refuse to entertain the idea of climate change at all), but instead accepts the veracity of an inconvenient truth, all while refusing to make any meaningful change on account of it. In a Darwinian context, this soft denial manifests in acknowledging scientific fact, including Mankind’s origins and ultimate end, while also willfully maintaining, as George Eliot does, a “veil” between that reality and the firm belief in something higher—be that religion or a secular belief in humanity’s higher faculties. 

Lurking behind this veil, MacDuffie highlights the imperialist and capitalist enterprises that weaponized concepts of natural “hierarchies” (another willful misreading of Darwin’s theory) and a natural world ripe for plunder as its divine Creator is divorced from it. Such pitfalls and perversions of the Darwinian project roll into the second chapter of Climate of Denial, which expands on the “anthropocentric biases” arising from those who believed themselves disciples of Darwin—yet another outgrowth of soft denial. As the imperial projects of Western Europe grew more and more bloated, justification for that imperialism was found in the separation of certain populations from the natural world: “civilizations are defined by the degree to which they are at the mercy of natural forces.” The imperial powers writing these definitions saw themselves as ascending above the Darwinian morass of struggle and extinction. As MacDuffie puts it, “a select minority of humans were somehow imagined to be from, but not of, nature.” In this historicization, MacDuffie explicitly connects these institutional forces and their corresponding notions of individual exceptionalism to the current moment, leaving no excuse for his audience to engage in any similar brand of denialism. 

Having laid this definitional and historical foundation, the final three chapters of Climate of Denial are dedicated to the ways in which Victorian and modernist texts engage with “realism,” here defined as participation in that Darwinian soft denialism. The third chapter examines this denialism in first person narratives, while Chapter Four takes up the narrative form of free indirect discourse. First-person narration in the poetry of Tennyson’s In Memoriam, as in H.G Wells’s The Time Machine, depicts a speaker grappling with deep time beyond the scale of human comprehension, just as other narratives like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness grapple with natural worlds beyond human control—and human cruelties beyond imagining. In both contexts, first-person narration reveals the doublethink necessary to exist in human society as narrators experience situations in which disavowal is no longer possible. Within free indirect discourse, illustrated here through the work of George Eliot, these moments of crisis are experienced by both narrator and character simultaneously. MacDuffie pairs Eliot’s interest in denial with her interest in the “real.” Eliot thrives in the paradoxical spaces that open up the soft denial of one’s place in the natural world. While fascinated with the natural, Eliot nonetheless often excludes it from her narratives, offering what MacDuffie terms “a compensatory sense of human exceptionalism.” It is the formal conventions of the narrative voice of free indirect discourse, and the novel more broadly, that allow for this precarious balancing act.

The fifth chapter of Climate of Denial addresses Virginia Woolf, who MacDuffie reads as “the great diagnostician of denial, someone who observes critically, but not unsympathetically, her cultures inability or unwillingness to fully countenance the implications of its own scientific discoveries.” Woolf builds on the patterns of her predecessors by representing denialism as a part of human experience that constantly presents, resolves, retreats, and re-presents itself. In her formal and thematic innovations, Woolf narrates characters who absorb, resolve, forget, and remember inconvenient and incomprehensible truths about their world around them. This is most clearly present in To The Lighthouse, which locates the miniscule, everyday actions of its characters within the removed yet devastatingly present reality of the Great War and the evident, yet softly denied, circumstances that led to it. Woolf, MacDuffie argues, presents this denialism as firmly rooted in the trivial and everyday, leaving open the possibility that such ordinary people and actions, in refusing to actively prevent, inadvertently facilitate avoidable catastrophe. In this, MacDuffie locates a “mix of caustic criticism and generous sympathy” all too applicable to current ecological movements.

In the conclusion to Climate of Denial, MacDuffie makes a temporal leap that brings us nearer the present moment. Invoking Margaret Atwood as an “erstwhile Victorianist” (having begun, but never finished, her literature PhD at Harvard), MacDuffie reads the MaddAddam trilogy with the same attention to ecological crisis and cultures of denialism. Atwood utilizes the same free indirect discourse within her novels as her Victorian and modernist forebears, and this narrative voice literalizes the metacognition experienced by her characters in order to maintain their denialism. In the modern context, these denials weave the individual’s dislocation with larger background systems outside their control, and are accompanied by the ever-numbing hum of a never-ending news cycle. In such a system in which the individual feels devoid of agency, denial becomes the new opiate of the masses, and ecological catastrophe is blundered into half-asleep. 

MacDuffie’s project poignantly addresses the lived experience best summed in his invocation of Octave Mannoni’s “je sais bien, mais quand même . . .” that is, “I know well, but all the same . . .” While the primary texts foregrounded in this book are decidedly Victorian and modernist—including canonical heavy-hitters like Dickens, Eliot, and Woolf—the project rings terrifyingly relevant to the present moment. What Climate of Denial does so well is build its case for the ubiquity of soft denial throughout human experience, and its flourishing amid the scientific revelations of the Long Nineteenth Century. In its historical distance from the current moment, readers will be confronted by the undeniable denialism of past generations, and MacDuffie ensures that the parallels to the current moment cannot be missed. The unanswered question that haunts this text, however, is whether any effective prescription exists to combat this apathetic soft denial. It is easy, as MacDuffie points out, to condemn the follies of the past, all while willfully engaging in the exact same behavior. The case of the climate crisis, as well as its remedies, have been laid out as clearly as MacDuffie lays out the case for denialism in the Long Nineteenth Century. We know well, but all the same.