Search Results

This chapter retells the story of Darwin, the moral theorist. Although Charles Darwin himself neither used nor explicitly resisted the language of altruism, many others, from the 1870s to the present, have made claims about Darwin as a theorist of altruism and selfishness. Darwin, in fact, saw sympathy and love, alongside selfishness and violence, throughout the natural world. In insect societies as well as human ones, cooperation and benevolence had evolved for good reasons. The theory of the evolution of the moral sense that Darwin developed in The Descent of Man (1871) was complicated and not entirely ‘Darwinian’. It combined ideas from moral philosophy with observations of the instincts of insects, all within a theoretical framework that included a belief in the heritability of acquired characteristics and the ability of nature to select at the level of communities as well as individuals.

“Evolution and the Natural Order” introduces the key themes of the book, notably that evolutionary theory profoundly impacted ideas about gender and sex and that the American reception of Charles Darwin was often highly gendered. The connections between Darwin and new thinking about gender can especially be seen the American reception of The Descent of Man(1871). This chapter also introduces the Darwinian feminists who are further analyzed in the rest of the book.

Chapter 13 deals with Darwin’s final assembly of the components of sexual selection and human sexual and racial divergence into the Descent of Man. It is argued that the Descent was structured by Darwin’s differences with Alfred Russel Wallace, by his conflicts over the thesis of "primitive promiscuity" adopted by the “new” evolutionary anthropologists, and the enduring resonances of savage encounter. His views on women and differences with John Stuart Mill are assessed. The problems posed by his detailed reconstructions of plumage and attribution of high aesthetic appreciation to female birds, and the contradictions engendered by his key thesis of the primacy of beauty-based male choice as the determinant of human racial divergence are analysed.

From the beginning of his theorizing, Darwin had human beings in mind. He sought to give an account of their, emotional repertoire, linguistic abilities, and high intelligence; he offered ingenious explanations of these traits. The chief human trait of moral capacity did not so easily yield to his analysis. A principle difficult was that natural selection might produce instinctive behaviors that provided benefit to those expressing them, but altruistic behaviors benefited others, not self. Darwin was able to explain the evolution of morality only after he solved a more fundamental problem that arose in the case of the social insects. His solution allowed him to understand how moral behavior might have arisen in proto-human clans. Darwin has provided an explanation of morality that can meet contemporary requirements for normative justification.

Chapter 14 explores the response to the Descent through Darwin’s late Victorian readership, not simply his scientific readers, but the wider reading public who variously adopted, adapted, or rejected his theory of sexual selection. The criticisms of its major scientific opponents, St. George Mivart and Alfred Russel Wallace, are assessed. As sexual selection (along with natural selection) went into eclipse, female choice was seized upon by an array of social purists, eugenicists, sexual reformers, birth controllers, feminists and socialists, notably Wallace, who in a volte face in1890 advocated a post socialist world in which free and informed female choice would guide the future direction of humanity. Thomas Henry Huxley’s reaction to all this is analysed through the content and context of his famous Romanes lecture.

In ‘The Struggle for Existence’ (1888) Huxley portrayed nature as a Malthusian gladiators arena in which only the strong survived. While this was the context from which humans had evolved, mankind had formed society to oppose these forces. However, anticipating his 1893 essay ‘Evolution and Ethics’, Huxley concluded that although an ethical society would preserve the lives of those that nature would otherwise have destroyed; they would breed and pass on their traits, becoming an ever-greater burden upon the rest. Society would ultimately succumb to struggle once more. The Russian émigré anarchist Peter Kropotkin communicated his vehement disagreement in a series of publications. Mutual aid and cooperation were just as much a factor in evolution as competition, especially among social species. While Huxley based his account of evolution on the competitive ethic that ran throughout Origin, Kropotkin's account was much closer to what Darwin had written in Descent of Man.

Chapter 12 picks up the history of sexual selection in the late 1860s as Darwin set about researching and writing the Descent of Man. It analyses Darwin’s prolonged dispute with Wallace over the issues of female choice, protective colouration and human evolution in the contexts of the Huxley-led drive for Darwinian cognitive and cultural authority, institutional conflict between the Darwinian Ethnological Society and the racialist Anthropological Society of London, the American Civil War, the Eyre affair, the social and professional implications of the “irrepressible” woman question and John Stuart Mill’s championing of women’s rights.

The third chapter argues that the analytical method on display in Poe’s detective fiction is drawn from and influential in structuring the dynamics of terror in his confessional and sublime tales. My chapter returns to the poststructuralist readings of Poe’s detective fiction, and recovers in response Poe’s own definition of analysis as a bipartite system of resolution and composition. By ascertaining the shape of analysis responsible, ultimately, for the recursive and uncanny shape of the poststructuralist debate, my chapter shows the continuity between Poe’s seemingly calculated tales of reason’s mastery over nature and his seemingly irrational tales of madness and peril. The second part of the chapter finds and analyzes the same reciprocal dynamic of resolution and composition within his sublime and confessional tales.

Chapter three analyzes how various thinkers applied evolutionary theory to turn-of-the-twentieth century debates about motherhood. Opponents of women’s advancement typically claimed that women’s foremost function was to bear and raise children; any intellectual or professional endeavors detracted from this sacred duty and imperiled the human race. These arguments were often couched in evolutionary discourse, as exemplified by the much-studied “Race Suicide” panic of the early 1900s. Because of the flexibility of Darwinian discourse, however, evolutionary theory also buttressed a feminist redefinition of motherhood– promoted by Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others—which claimed, in part, that it was unnatural for women to be confined to domestic tasks because female domesticity had no precedent in the animal kingdom. Focusing on feminist applications of animal-human kinship, this chapter examines the turn-of-the-century vogue for fit pregnancy and demands for the reapportionment of domestic duties to enable mothers to work outside the home.

Having adopted Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary mechanism called survival of the fittest in Origin of Species (1859), Darwin turned his attentions to human societies and the remarkable turn entailed “natural selection applying to itself its own selective law.” In this fold in natural selection, human cultures evinced altruistic behaviors as well as egotistical rivalries. With Origin published six years after Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Darwin would argue in favor of affects like sympathy and compassion. Yet how did such affects come about and how could they be demonstrated empirically? While hesitating over the origin of instincts in selection and habituation, Darwin simultaneously worked on his “demonstration” of the universality of five basic affects (pleasure, fear, suffering or grief, rage, and disgust). Though the mechanism of transmission of moral sentiments might be in doubt, these basic affects could be read on faces, whether sketched, photographed or through epistolary descriptions. One year after the Descent of Man (1871), Darwin published his thirty-year long research as The expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). In that work, he would argue that human expressions provide us a window into the affective mind, essentially of all human cultures. This was the empirical research needed for supporting the claim for the universality of human emotions. The work inaugurated a debate still current today centered on the role of culture in bodily semiosis. Surprisingly, Darwin aligned anxiety with grief rather than fear and suffering.

Chapter 9 introduces the crucial embryological understandings underpinning Darwin’s threefold analogue, sketches their political and social implications and shows their functioning in Darwin’s integration of the critical theoretical components of sexual selection: development, inheritance and divergence. It indicates how this developmentally centered understanding confirmed the agency of female choice in animals, powered Darwin’s dispute with Wallace and gave him the confidence and self-belief to write the Descent of Man.

Charles Robert Darwin published the Origin of Species in 1859 and then the follow-up book on our species, the Descent of Man, in 1871. He argued not just for the idea of evolution but also for a mechanism, natural selection brought on by a struggle for existence, and a secondary mechanism, sexual selection. At once Darwin’s work was seen as significant and rapidly the idea of evolution was accepted even by Christian believers. Natural selection was more problematic. No one denied its operation, but professional scientists tended to downplay its significance. Yet natural selection (and then sexual selection) was a great success among those (mainly amateurs) collecting and studying fast-breeding organisms like butterflies and also more generally at a popular level. No longer was evolutionary theorizing pseudoscientific, but it tended more to the popular level of science rather than the professional realm.

Charles Robert Darwin, the English naturalist, published On the Origin of Species in 1859 and the follow-up work The Descent of Man in 1871. In these works, he argued for his theory of evolution through natural selection, applying it to all organisms, living and dead, including our own species, Homo sapiens. Although controversial from the start, Darwin’s thinking was deeply embedded in the culture of his day, that of a middle-class Englishman. Evolution as such was an immediate success in scientific circles, but although the mechanism of selection had supporters in the scientific community (especially among those working with fast-breeding organisms), its real success was in the popular domain. Natural selection, and particularly the side mechanism of sexual selection, were known to all and popular themes in fiction and elsewhere.

Jesus apparently proscribed violence, which meant that—as was understood by early Christians—war is prohibited. As Christianity became the state religion, by focusing on our innate unhappy nature—“original sin”—Augustine devised “just war theory,” legitimizing the Christian use of war and specifying the conditions under which it could be fought. Augustinian philosophy influenced Anglican theology, although, by the nineteenth century, thinking about war was fashioned more to the needs of empire building. Darwin discussed war in detail in the Descent, in respects accepting Augustinian thinking about our original violent nature, but putting this in the context of natural selection making for a progressive climb to humankind. Unlike the Christian who thinks that war will be with us always, Darwin envisioned a war-free future.

This chapter offers a revisionary account of the emergence of modernist epic through a detailed reading of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. In the late-nineteenth-century United States, the prevailing paradigm for narrations of national destiny was Darwinian. Mostly written between 1903 and 1911, Stein’s book opens as if it were in agreement with such narrations of the national story. Stein announces it as a developmental narrative of the United States, tracing two families’ progressions and westward movement, from a first generation of immigrants to their children and then grandchildren. The Making of Americans, however, does not fulfil its developmentalist prospects in any straightforward manner. Rather, the book stalls, digresses, and—to use Stein’s words—“begins again and again.” In its second half, the narrative comes to resemble less the work of nineteenth-century historians, and more the extensive later portions of modernist modern epics by Robert Musil, Marcel Proust, or James Joyce. The chapter describes how Stein’s turn to a digressive open-form narrative corresponds to her shifting interests in biological science and experimental writing. Her work, it argues, marks the advent of new kind of modernist epic, motivated by attempts to find a way to represent national life beyond social Darwinism and its heteropatriarchal protocols.

In the forty-plus years, from the time of the Descent in 1871 to the time of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, people influenced by or responding to Darwin’s thinking wrote extensively on the nature of war. Often, religious upbringing—as for Herbert Spencer and Alfred Russel Wallace—infused discussions showing how really the whole debate was as much religious as scientific. Thomas Henry Huxley showed his innate Calvinism and Prince Petr Kropotkin equally showed his Russian roots. American thinkers tended to worry about the eugenical effects of war, and William James proposed a kind of proto Peace Corps to harness the violent tendencies of the young. Across in Germany, Friedrich von Bernhardi was hymning the necessity of war, although in major respects his ideas owed more to Germanic philosophy, especially Hegel, than to anything coming out of England, a country he feared and despised.