Evolution and American Fiction: Three Paradigmatic Novels

Abstract

There has been a great deal written about the impact of evolutionary ideas on late nineteenthand early-twentieth-century American and British fiction, with much of this criticism falling within one or another three general categories. Many critics are concerned with how specific novelists used specific Darwinian ideas in specific novels. So, for example, Bert Bender has examined in detail the ways that Darwin’s theory of sexual selection appears in various forms in a group of late nineteenth-century American novels,1 and I have studied how Cesare Lombroso’s criminal anthropology beliefs (themselves derived from an evolutionary conception of human brain development) deeply affected Frank Norris’ early fiction.2 A second kind of criticism, one devoted principally to British fiction, has concentrated on what has come to be known as the Darwinian plot. For such critics as Gillian Beer and George Levine3 the shift from a plot of extraordinary behavior and the frequent operation of chance to one of slow, fully explainable, and progressive change (in other words, from the romantic to the realistic plot) is attributable to the absorption of a Darwinian mind-set by post-Darwinian novelists, a mind-set in which their fictional accounts of events over a lifetime in effect mimic Darwin’s account of biological events over eons. Finally, and more recently, in a movement resembling that of evolutionary psychology, a group of critics, with Joseph Carroll a leading voice,4 has insisted that it is necessary in interpreting fiction to apply the root evolutionary insight that all human behavior is adaptive. In addition, Carroll and others hold that discussions of the novel must reflect an awareness of the history of the biological development of the brain, since all art stems from the distinctive cognitive abilities of the human animal.