Evolution and "The Sex Problem" : American Narratives During the Eclipse of Darwinism

by Bender, Bert

• ISBN13: 9780873388092
• ISBN10: 0873388097
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-11-01
• Publisher: Kent State Univ Pr

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Acknowledgments	xv
Introduction: In a Dark lime	1	(297)
"Man's Place in Nature," Life Itself, and the Sex Problem	8	(4)
Aspects of the Sex Problem	12	(4)
Modern Psychology and the Sex Problem	16	(14)
1 Frank Norris on the Evolution and Repression of the Sexual Instinct	30	(22)
Joseph Le Conte's Version of Darwinian Theory and His Emphasis on Sexual Reproduction	32	(3)
Norris's Battle with the Theory of Sexual Selection	35	(12)
Norris and the Repression of the Sexual Emotions	47	(5)
2 "The Chaos of His Brain": Evolutionary Psychology in The Red Badge of Courage	52	(20)
Crane and William James	56	(1)
Evolutionary Progress, the "Throat-Grappling Instinct," and the Emotions	57	(5)
Sexual Selection and the "Law of Battle"	62	(10)
3 Jack London and "the Sex Problem"	72	(44)
London's Early Explorations of Sexual Selection: A Daughter of the Snows, The Kempton-Wace Letters, and The Sea-Wolf	73	(5)
Martin Eden and The Valley of the Moon: Havelock Ellis, Freud, and the Ecological Vision	78	(13)
The "Bawling of Sex" in The Little Lady of the Big House	91	(25)
4 Theodore Dreiser, Science, and "It"	116	(19)
The Problem and Solution: The Evolutionary Tangle and Evolutionary Progress	119	(2)
Carrie's Choice and the "Distant Wings" of Beauty	121	(5)
"A Real Man-A Financier"	126	(9)
5 "The Varieties of Human Experience": Sexual Intimacy, Heredity, and Emotional Conflict in Gertrude Stein's Early Work	135	(28)
Heredity and Female Choice in The Making of Americans (1903)	138	(2)
Q.E.D.: The Howling Wolves of Love	140	(6)
"The Nature of Woman" in Fernhurst: The "Deepening Knowledge of Life and Love and Sex"	146	(2)
Three Lives: Anna's "Strange Coquetry of Anger and Fear"	148	(5)
"The Gentle Lena": The Tyranny of Matchmakers and the Father-Instinct	153	(2)
Melanctha: "Too Complex with Desire"	155	(8)
6 Sex and Evolution in Willa (other's O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark	163	(26)
Creative Evolution and Sex	166	(2)
Marie and Alexandra: Beyond Sexual Selection in O Pioneers!	168	(4)
"Dreamers on the Frontier"	172	(4)
Sexual Desire in The Song of the Lark	176	(3)
Sex and Sublimation in The Power of Sound	179	(2)
Sexual Selection, Marriage, and Evolutionary Play	181	(8)
7 "Under the Shell of Life": Sherwood Anderson and "the Call of Sex"	189	(35)
The Darwinian Pattern in Anderson's Fiction	194	(1)
Sexual Difference: "The Maleness of the Male"	195	(5)
Sexual Difference: The Woman "Strong to Be Loved"	200	(7)
Reflections of Freud and Havelock Ellis in Anderson's Presentation of Sex	207	(9)
"The Hidden Wonder Story": The Unconscious and Anderson's Transcendental Naturalism Sexual Violence, Play of Mind, and Transcendence in Winesburg, Ohio	216	(8)
8 "His Mind Aglow": The Biological Undercurrent in Fitzgerald's Gatsby and other Works	224	(20)
"Love or Eugenics"	225	(1)
The Riddle of the Universe: Accident, Heredity, and Selection	226	(6)
Sexual Selection in The Great Gatsby	232	(12)
9 Harlem, 1928: The Biology of the Black Soul and the "Rising Tide of Rhythm"	244	(54)
W.E.B. DuBois's Dark Princess: The Talented Soul	250	(7)
Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun: A "Biology [that] Transcends Society!"	257	(7)
Nella Larsen's Quicksand: Darwin, James, Freud, and the Psychology of Mixed Race	264	(8)
Claude McKay's Home to Harlem: The "It's a Be-Be Itching Life" Blues	272	(11)
Rudolph Fisher's The Walls of Jericho and the "Rising Tide of Rhythm"	283	(15)
10 V.F. Calverton and the Principles of Red Love	298	(14)
11 "To Be Alive": John Steinbeck's The Log from the Sea of Cortez and The Wayward Bus	312	(17)
The Log from the Sea of Cortez: Ecology and Man's Place in Nature	315	(5)
Sweetheart's "Rear End" and the Marriage Problem in The Wayward Bus	320	(9)
12 "Night Song": Africa and Eden in Hemingway's Late Work	329	(29)
Courtship and Anthropology in Africa	333	(9)
Dark Eden	342	(16)
Afterword	358	(4)
Works Cited	362	(14)
Index	376