Bert Bender - The Descent of Love: Darwin and the Theory of Sexual Selection in American Fiction, 1871-1926

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The Descent of Love

Darwin and the Theory of Sexual Selection in American Fiction, 18711926

Bert Bender

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia

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Copyright 1996 by the University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Bender, Bert. The descent of love: Darwin and the theory of sexual selection in American fiction, 18711926 / Bert Bender.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 081223344I (alk. paper)

1. American fiction19th centuryHistory and criticism. 2. Love stories, American

History and criticism. 3. American fiction20th centuryHistory and criticism.

4. Literature and scienceUnited StatesHistory. 5. Manwoman relationships in

literature. 6. Darwin, Charles, 18091882Influence. 7. American fictionEnglish

influences. 8. Evolution (Biology) in literature. 9. Mate selection in literature.

10. Courtship in literature. 11. Love in literature. 12. Sex in literature. I. Title.

PS374.L6B46 1996

813.409354dc20

9542582

CIP

Frontispiece: "The Descent of Love," by Tony Angell. This image is from the end of Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Just before Edna Pontellier drowns, "A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water."

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For Judith and Todd

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CONTENTS

Preface

xi

Note to the Reader

xi

Acknowledgments

xv

Introduction

The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex:

The Darwinian Unknown in American Literary History

Sexual Selection

The Descent of Love

Recurrent Problems, Themes, and Scenes in the Courtship Novels

18711926

Part I: The 1870s and 1880s

1. Evolutionary Anthropology and Sexual Selection in William Dean Howells's

Their Wedding Journey

The Origin of Civilisation

The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex

2. Courting Design: Chance, Choice, and Sexual Difference in Howells's

Courtship Novels of the 1870s

Howells's Design and "The Ugliness of the Original Design"

Sexual Difference: "Exquisite Manliness"

Sexual Difference: "Her Extreme Unconsciousness"

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3. Darwinian Problems in A Modern Instance: Heredity, Primitive Marriage, and

Male Sexual Aggression

Habit and Heredity

Primitive Promiscuity and Marriage

Sexual Selection: "Those Fastnesses of His Nature Which Psychology Has

Not Yet Explored"

4. Henry James and The Descent of Man: "The Loves of the Quadrupeds" in

"The Madonna of the Future" and Roderick Hudson

"The Large Intellectual Appetite"

"The Madonna of the Future"

Sexual Selection and Hereditary Genius in Roderick Hudson

5. Psychological Darwinism in The Portrait of a Lady

"The Big 'Wine and Water' Novel"

Spencer's "Comparative Psychology of the Sexes"

"The Element of Pursuit"

Isabel's Choice: "Half the Story"

Darwinism of the Mind

"Love"

6. Darwin and "The Natural History of Doctresses": The Sex War Between

Howells, Phelps, Jewett, and James

Dr. Breen's Practice

Dr. Zay

A Country Doctor

The Bostonians (Dr. Prance)

Part II: The 1890s

7. Kate Chopin's Quarrel with Darwin before The Awakening

Sexual Innocence and Racial Difference in At Fault

Early Stories of Male Dominance and Female Choice

"The Unsolved Mystery": "Love" and "SelfAssertion"

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8. The Teeth of Desire: The Awakening and The Descent of Man

"A Rich Mine of Facts"

"To Make a Selection"

"A Flaming, Outspoken Revolt Against the Ways of Nature"

"The Musky Odor of Pinks"

9. The Damnation of Theron Ware: His Failure in "The Work of Selection"

Harold Frederic and the "BiologicoLiterary Interaction"

"The Work of Illumination" and "The Work of Selection"

Atavism and Degeneration: Celia and Theron

10. Sources of Power in The MarketPlace: Sexual Vigor, Nerve Force, and

the Concealment of Emotions

"Man at 40"

The Weary English

The English Woman and the "Frank Barbarism of Power"

Fear and Courage: The Expression and Concealment of Emotions

Part III: 19001926

11. Race and Sexual Selection in Charles W. Chesnutt's The House Behind the

Cedars

Varieties of Racial Science in Howells, DuBois, Boas, and Le Conte

Freedom through Natural and Sexual Selection

BlueVeined Beauty with "No Appetite"

12. Edith Wharton, from "The Descent of Man" to The Reef

Wharton and Sexual Selection after the Turn of the Century

"The Descent of Man"

"The Choice"

The Reef

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13. Sexual Selection in The Sun Also Rises

Hemingway on Sherwood Anderson, Ford Madox Ford, and W. H.

Hudson

Sexual Selection According to Darwin, Ellis, and Pound

The Sun Also Rises

Appendix: Darwin in American Literary History since 1950

Notes

Works Cited

Index

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PREFACE

My chief purposes in The Descent of Love are to show, contrary to accepted literary history, that American writers began a vigorous response to Darwinian thought in the early 1870s, when they first felt what Freud called "the biological blow" that Darwin had dealt "to human narcissism" ( Standard Ed. 17: 141) that, writing of courtship and marriage after Darwin's The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), they were much more interested in his theory of sexual selection than his more famous theory of natural selection that the complications of sexual selection itself, together with the complex of evolutionary questions during the years I survey here, resulted in various forms of literary Darwinism that are far more subtle and interesting than the simple kind of "Darwinism" that literary historians have described in the work of Frank Norris, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser that American novels of courtship and marriage continued to draw on Darwin's theory of sexual selection throughout the first quarter of the twentieth century and that between 1871 and 1926 American novelists' views of sexual love became increasingly violent and dark.

Part of the larger development in latenineteenthcentury "social evolutionism [that] emerged... into a Darwinian milieu" (Stocking 120), the novels of courtship and marriage that I survey here appropriated terms resonant with the new view of life entangled, instinct, descent, struggle for existence, survival, fit, extinction,select, conditions of life, habit, rudimentary, use and disuse, chance, accident, variabilityand many others that more subtly resonated the Darwinian view

attraction, ornament, beauty, music, dance, expression, repression, emotions, unconscious, weakness, strength, vigor, dominance, submission, altruism,power, genius, vestige, ancestor, progenitor, arrested development, degenerate, primitive, superstition, higher and lower races, savage, barbaric, civilized