The Descent of Love

by Bender, Bert

• ISBN13: 9780812233445
• ISBN10: 0812233441
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1996-05-01
• Publisher: Univ of Pennsylvania Pr

Summary

Upon its publication in 1871, Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex sent shock waves through the scientific community and the public at large. In an original and persuasive study, Bert Bender demonstrates that it is this treatise, rather than any of Darwin's earlier works, that provoked the most immediate and vigorous response from American fiction writers. These authors embraced and incorporated Darwin's theories, insights, and language, creating an increasingly dark and violent view of sexual love in American realist literature.
In The Descent of Love, Bender carefully rereads the works of William Dean Howells, Henry James, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Harold Frederic, Charles W. Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, and Ernest Hemingway, teasing from them a startling but utterly convincing preoccupation with questions of sexual selection. Competing for readership as novelists who best grasped the "real" nature of human love, these writers also participated in a heated social debate over racial and sexual differences and the nature of sex itself. Influenced more by The Descent of Man than by the Origin of Species, Bender's novelists built upon Darwin's anthropological and zoological materials to anatomize their characters' courtship behavior, returning consistently to concerns with physical beauty, natural dominance, and the power to select a mate.

Author Biography

Bert Bender is Professor of English at Arizona State University.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xv
Introduction	p. 1
The 1870s and 1880s	p. 31
Evolutionary Anthropology and Sexual Selection in William Dean Howells's Their Wedding Journey	p. 33
Courting Design: Chance, Choice, and Sexual Difference in Howells's Courtship Novels of the 1870s	p. 58
Darwinian Problems in a Modern Instance: Heredity, Primitive Marriage, and Male Sexual Aggression	p. 83
Henry James and the Descent of Man: "The Loves of the Quadrupeds" In "The Madonna of the Future" and Roderick Hudson	p. 107
Psychological Darwinism In the Portrait of a Lady	p. 132
Darwin and "The Natural History of Doctresses": the Sex War Between Howells, Phelps, Jewett, and James	p. 155
The 1890s	p. 195
Kate Chopin's Quarrel with Darwin before The Awakening	p. 197
The Teeth of Desire: The Awakening and the Descent of Man	p. 214
The Damnation of Theron Ware: His Failure in "The Work of Selection"	p. 230
Sources of Power in the Market-Place: Sexual Vigor, Nerve Force, and the Concealment of Emotions	p. 261
1900-1926	p. 287
Race and Sexual Selection in Charles W Chesnutt's the House Behind the Cedars	p. 289
Edith Wharton, From "The Descent of Man" to the Reef	p. 314
Sexual Selection in the Sun Also Rises	p. 341
Appendix Darwin in American Literary History Since 1950	p. 361
Notes	p. 369
Works Cited	p. 405
Index	p. 421
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