Edith Wharton's Evolutionary Conception

Darwinian Allegory in the Major Novels

Paul J. Ohler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135511470
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Edith Wharton's "Evolutionary Conception" investigates Edith Wharton's engagement with evolutionary theory in The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence. The book also examines The Descent of Man, The Fruit of the Tree, Twilight Sleep, and The Children to show that Wharton's interest in biology and sociology was central to the thematic and formal elements of her fiction. Ohler argues that Wharton depicts the complex interrelations of New York's gentry and socioeconomic elite from a perspective informed by the main concerns of evolutionary thought. Concentrating on her use of ideas she encountered in works by Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and T.H. Huxley, his readings of Wharton's major novels demonstrate the literary configuration of scientific ideas she drew on and, in some cases, disputed. R.W.B. Lewis writes that Wharton 'was passionately addicted to scientific study': this book explores the ramifications of this fact for her fictional sociobiology.
The book explores the ways in which Edith Wharton's scientific interests shaped her analysis of class, affected the formal properties of her fiction, and resulted in her negative valuation of social Darwinism.

Chapter One

Metaphors of “Instinct and Tradition”

I. “THE POETIC VALUE OF THE EVOLUTIONARY CONCEPTION”

In A Backward Glance (1934) Edith Wharton acknowledged the role in her intellectual development of scientific works introduced to her by her friend Egerton Winthrop:

He it was who gave me Wallace’s ‘Darwin and Darwinism,’ and ‘The Origin of Species,’ and made known to me Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Romanes, Haeckel, Westermarck, and the various popular exponents of the great evolutionary movement. But it is idle to prolong the list, and hopeless to convey to a younger generation the first overwhelming sense of cosmic vastness which such ‘magic casements’ let into our little geocentric universe. (94)

Much earlier in her life, she had mentioned in a letter her reading of neoDarwinist¹ works such as R. H. Lock’s Variation, Heredity and Evolution (1906) and Vernon Kellog’s Darwinism Today (1907). The French writer Paul Bourget, who met Wharton in 1893 and was thought by her to be “brilliant and stimulating” (BG 103), described her as deeply involved in scientific reading: “there is not a book of Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Renan, Taine, which she has not studied” (qtd. in Lewis 69). Her engagement with the “evolutionary movement” was not unusual, for Wharton avidly consumed scientific texts during a period in which an “overwhelming interest in scientific developments and the new rationalism” took hold in the United States (Hofstadter 24).

While Wharton participated in the trend of keeping up with scientific developments, she recognized in her reading of Darwin, the neo-Darwinists, and biologists such as Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) the applicability to human behavior and culture of theories that describe non-human animal behavior and change in nature. The contemporary contention “that it is not right to separate the Darwinian debate from broader cultural, ideological, political, and economic issues” (Young “Darwin and the Genre of Biography” 19) is one that Wharton’s novels during the period 1905–1920 predict by insisting that morality, and the dialectics of ideology, are related to the evolutionary heritage of humankind. This issue resonates with contemporary research in sociobiology. The evolutionary biologist Steven Pinker reflects that “[a]gency, personal responsibility and so on can all be tied to brain function [ ... ]. It’s a fallacy to think that hunger and thirst and sex drive are biological but that reasoning and decision making and learning are something else, something non-biological” (qtd. in Rakoff 27). That Wharton perceived something like Pinker’s contention is the topic of part one of this chapter. Part two considers the critical response to Wharton’s explorations of science in order to delineate the current state of knowledge on the subject. The final part of this chapter describes Wharton’s formal expression of evolutionary concepts as operant features within the social domain she details, and juxtaposes this feature of her fiction with her opinions on literary realism and naturalism.

* * *

One way Wharton summons the glittering surfaces of New York’s social whirl into the range of Darwin’s hypotheses lies in her depiction of male protagonists who are insensible to the possibility that cooperation among members of a class “tribe” (AI 32) might, if acknowledged and addressed, moderate the incinerating competition from the socioeconomic elite that predicts the end of gentry privilege. One statement of cooperation exists in The Descent of Man, in which Darwin writes that “an advancement in the standard of morality [ ... ] will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another” (185), delicately knitting the moral dimension of human behavior to the chancy processes of natural selection. Darwinism evidently offered Wharton a middle way between “the Spencerian notion of an accord between moral fitness and the ability to survive” (Beer Darwin’s Plots 64), which is known as social Darwinism, and, for her, the insupportable idea that culture possesses complete autonomy from nature. In The Fruit of the Tree (1907), her multi-themed novel about labor, social reform, and euthanasia, she posits ethics as “the universal consensus—the result of the world’s accumulated experience” (418), and it is arguable that ethics, a product of evolutionary processes in Darwin’s The Descent of Man, is a result of “accumulated experience” that is not exclusively the result of “reasoning.” For the group of novels addressed here, ethics is an aspect of the human experience that owes its existence to a combination of inherited biological predispositions and cultural history.

Wharton writes that “Milton’s allusion to Galileo’s ‘optic glass’ shows how early the poetic mind was ready to seize on any illustration furnished by the investigations of science” (“George Eliot” 72), and she summons an effective authorizing example for the disciplinary syncretism she practised. Relating to both formal and thematic issues, a set of questions arises from Wharton’s own seizing of scientific language to illustrate her subjects: To what purpose is the hybridization of social analysis and evolutionary and biological science put in the novels? What is at stake for Wharton, politically, in the premise that cultural forms such as class hierarchies, courtship and marriage rituals, rites of exclusion, and the concept of equality itself, might arise from an evolutionary foundation? To what extent is Wharton’s biological interpretation of culture an aesthetic conceit that capitalizes on a popular passion for things scientific, and to what degree does Wharton’s fiction assert that biological laws function as agents of social change? In what ways, from novel to novel, does she alter her interjection in the debate about the meaning of Darwin’s arguments, and in particular, what forms do her responses take to social Darwinist discourse regarding the idea that the “survival of the fittest” not only does obtain in human culture but should? As I address these questions, I also evaluate the success of the narrative strategies Wharton used to present these ideas in the literary marketplace, for her desire to rigorously analyze in fiction the social strata she depicted was matched by a need to persuade a wide audience of her conclusions.

The force of manners in distancing sexuality in the novels suggests ideology is a factor in the sublimation of desire some characters exhibit. A lack of awareness of ideological power displayed by many of Wharton’s weak men is an aspect of ideology’s depicted operation. A more substantial claim for Wharton’s representation of ideology,² though, exists in the possibility that she links it to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which is to be seen as a mechanism affecting social change. The critical history on the topic of Darwinism in Wharton’s fiction leads one to explore her varied portraits of heredity, which express biological and social inheritance as inextricable. In this respect, Wharton’s method assaults the artificiality of manners that represent social heredity solely in terms of tradition and ritual, or, as in Newland Archer’s world, “the [fashionable] thing” (AI 4) which The Age of Innocence reveals to be a codifying cloak that conceals biological essences. I pursue this topic by exploring the implications, for the fictional portraits of ideological competition, of Claire Preston’s claim that “Wharton’s sociobiological frame of reference predicts modern social analysis, which has made [ ... ] [the] useful analogy between evolution/selection theory and social development, treating the macro-social structure as ‘a selection environment’” (54–55).

The fictions I examine oppose the idea that it is not possible to curb the harm to individual equality caused by unregulated natural selection; these works find a politicized interpretation of Darwin, which is actually a form of cultural selection, objectionable. In this limited sense the novels tender a model of incremental progress predicated on scouring away from an idealized core of American distinctiveness an aberrant brutality toward marginal and vulnerable people, no matter their class affiliation. Ironically, though, the novels do not offer a clear idea of how to balance nature’s positive effect on culture—in the case of Ellen Olenska and Newland Archer, how sexual freedom might lead to a mutually enriching hybridization of American and European cultural practices—with nature’s disruptive potential. Individual moral agency holds out the possibility of resisting, even altering, a pervasive “survival of the fittest” ethic. Outside a problematic social Darwinist culture, there exists another interpretation of nature in Wharton’s texts, but it is one that must now be acknowledged as having its own distinct political thrust. In this interpretation, symbiosis and cooperation are key words, and mutual dependence between species provides a model for relations between individuals, and between classes.

The narratives find in Darwinian ecology a model for obviating the kind of individual aggression displayed by Undine Spragg in The Custom of the Country, and the cultural expansionism depicted in Wharton’s statement that “[t]he modern European colonist apparently imagined that to plant his warehouses, cafes and cinema-palaces within the walls which for so long had fiercely excluded him was the most impressive way of proclaiming his domination” (IM 22). Intervention is called for in preventing the wastage that is visited on humankind in an uncultured state, and which persists in a “civilized” world that extirpates Lily Bart and Ralph Marvell, causes the social death of Ellen Olenska, and colonizes other cultures. Wharton’s participation in the broader literary response to Darwinism, moreover, exhibits a complex and relatively consistent perspective that requires some historical contextualization to understand.

Donald Pizer³ describes the influence of Darwinism on American literature during the first decades of the twentieth century. He identifies a misinterpretation of Darwinian thought that the novels I examine refute in a systematic way:

[ ... ] Darwin’s belief that biological change is the product of variation and natural selection was immediately available as a possible means of examining change in other phases of man’s experience. The application to literary study of the environmental determinism implicit in the theory of natural selection was also encouraged, of course, by Taine’s belief that literature is the product of a nation’s physical and social conditions. But the basic pattern of evolutionary change which was joined to Taine’s environmental determinism to produce an evolutionary critical system was seldom Darwinian. Rather most critics accepted and absorbed Herbert Spencer’s doctrine that evolution is, in all phases of life, a progress from the simplicity of incoherent homogeneity to the complexity of coherent heterogeneity. [ ... ] The combination of Taine and Spencer is therefore the basic pattern in most evolutionary critical systems of the 1880s and the 1890s. (Realism and Naturalism 88)

Born in 1862, Wharton came of age intellectually in the period Pizer identifies. She once wrote that “Taine was one of the formative influences of my youth, the greatest after Darwin, [and] [ ... ] Spencer” (Letters 136). Frederick Wegener relates that “her criticism generally bears little resemblance, on the whole, to Taine’s famous deterministic method” (“Enthusiasm Guided by Acumen” 31), but the influence of Taine’s method exists in the “environmental determinism” present in novels such as The House of Mirth, which Carol Singley views as documenting “the effects of an increasingly consumer-based culture, shifting sexual relations, and changing urban and rural demographics on women of all classes” (Historical Guide 8). In Wharton’s sustained focus on change in culture that does not lead to coherence, one finds that her evolutionary fictional and critical system combines Taine and Darwin and, mostly, rejects Spencer; by 1902, in fact, she viewed Spencer’s thought as “the popular superstition” (“George Eliot” 73).

Despite her stated earlier enthusiasm for Spencer’s thought, Wharton grew to be skeptical of the optimism implied by his doctrine, which viewed evolution as a goal-directed process. In Social Statics (1851) he had written “so surely must evil and immorality disappear; so surely must man become perfect” (31). Informed as she was in these matters, Wharton would have encountered criticism of Spencer’s views on evolution. He had, for instance, come under attack from the American sociologist Albion Small who wrote that “biological sociology” (qtd. in Bannister 45) had unfortunate ethical and social consequences. In 1897 Small charged that Spencer’s alleged “principles of sociology” were really “supposed principles of biology prematurely extended to cover social relations” (qtd. in Bannister 45). A strikingly similar exception to Spencer’s work is a prominent feature of Wharton’s writing between 1905 and 1920, and, to a lesser extent, in later work too; signs of the esteem in which a young Wharton held Spencer, and then the growing dissatisfaction with his views, are present in her fiction and non-fiction.

Wharton’s confrontation with social Darwinist derivations of Spencer’s teleological evolutionism exists in her representation of characters such as Lily Bart, an “organism” with “inherited tendencies” (HM 301). Though highly moral, Lily, by the novel’s end, is eliminated because what T. H. Huxley called “the cosmic process” in his 1893 essay “Evolution and Ethics” (327) is reckoned with ineffectively. Some today view Huxley as the originator among Darwin’s defenders of the idea that progress toward a preordained goal is an element of natural selection, something absent from Darwin’s original concept. Colin Tudge argues, “Huxley (and Herbert Spencer, and many others since) did not simply espouse Darwinian evolution. They promulgated evolutionism—which effectively conflates progressive evolution in nature with social progress” (29). But one must also acknowledge that Huxley perceived Darwin’s original concept clearly, and that Huxley sought to address the dilemma evolution presents to beings capable of moral reasoning. “Now when the ancient sage [ ... ] looked the world, and especially human life, in the face, he found it as hard as we do to bring the course of evolution into harmony with even the elementary requirements of the just and the good” (“Evolution and Ethics” 315). Huxley made political points with Darwin’s work, and Wharton fictionally assesses the conflict between evolution and the “requirements” of which Huxley writes. She is sympathetic to Huxley’s belief that the “conscience of man revolted against the moral indifference of nature” (“Evolution and Ethics” 316), and she locates in Darwin’s work a material basis for conscience.

Wharton is critical of Spencerian evolutionism for its promulgation of the idea, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett expresses it, that the “‘survival of the fittest’ [ ... ] is not just Mother Nature’s way, but ought to be our way” (461). She finds in an adaptive moral sense a viable basis on which to base her view, shared with Huxley, that mitigation of the “cosmic process” is possible. It is arguable, moreover, that Huxley was not so much an evolutionist as he was a thoroughgoing materialist who viewed ethics as an adaptive feature of humans and their collectives, a possibility suggested by his claim that

the sum of tendencies to act in a certain way, which we call ‘character,’ is often to be traced through a long series of progenitors and collaterals. So we may justly say that this ‘character’—this moral and intellectual essence of man—does veritably pass over from one fleshly tabernacle to another, and does really transmigrate from generation to generation. (“Evolution and Ethics” 317)

These complexities are addressed in The Custom of the Country, for example, in Wharton’s portrait of Undine Spragg as signifying a recurrence of an earlier stage in social evolution. Undine finds her “impulses” (39) untrustworthy in an upper-class context desultorily battling the ethos of individualism and the isolation that kills Lily in The House of Mirth. But Undine soon gravitates to the ambitious Elmer Moffatt’s sphere, which exists apart from the world of the gentry—until Moffatt begins to buy it; here she can release her primal power. As an anti-heroine, Undine is the logical outcome of a Spencerian interpretation of Darwinian theory that downplays Huxley’s view, and that of Darwin in The Descent of Man, that moral “character” has evolved in response to environmental factors. Wharton’s depiction of Undine’s aggression illustrates a contemporary “scientific” devaluation of moral agency and judges it negatively.

In Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions he discusses one radical aspect of The Origin of Species, clarifying what were difficult and important aspects of evolutionary theory for Wharton to present:

Though evolution, as such, did encounter resistance [ ... ] it was by no means the greatest of the difficulties Darwinians faced. [ ... ] All the well-known pre-Darwinian evolutionary theories—those of Lamarck, Chambers, Spencer, and the German Naturphilosophen—had taken evolution to be a goal-directed process. The ‘idea’ of man [ ... ] was thought to have been present from the first creation of life. [ ... ] Each new stage of evolutionary development was a more perfect realization of a plan that had been present from the start. [ ... ] The Origin of Species recognized no set goal either by God or nature. [ ... ] What could ‘evolution,’ ‘development,’ and ‘progress’ mean in the absence of a specified goal? (171–72)

The “idea of man” present in these “pre-Darwinian evolutionary theories” views the human species, in its biological and moral dimensions, as subject to a process of perfectibility supposed to exist—and which was a sign of divine presence—in natural law; Wharton must have been skeptical of the pre-Darwinian theorists of evolution, for she depicts the version of evolution that was linked to the concept of perfectible humankind, but only in terms of the resultant damage to characters like Lily Bart. This misconception contributes directly to Lily’s fate by fostering the notion that an individual’s lack of adaptation to the social environment yields one unable to contribute to the realization of the “plan” Kuhn describes. A nineteenth-century teleological view of the evolutionary process, one that Wharton was conversant with, thus presented her with a working example of assumptions about a perfectible society her biological reading of culture had to dislodge.

Evolution argues for invisibly slow yet inescapable change, an idea that assaults not only theological principles, but, as Dorothy Ross notes, the ahistorical tenor of an American society that saw itself in Wharton’s time as exempt from the political dialectics of the old world (23).⁴ This sense of the special quality of the United States was under siege. As Ross writes: “American social scientists understood the laws of nature as Europeans had in the eighteenth century, as the rules through which God governed the world. [ ... ] In the Gilded Age [ ... ] secular naturalism would begin to undermine this early modern conception of natural law” (50). Wharton illustrates that social evolution progresses by chance variation, and so questions the p...