Darwin and Ecology in Novels by Jack London and Barbara Kingsolver

American literary history has been quite slow to examine our novelists’ interest in evolutionary biology.¹ Even though the Darwinian revolution was by far the greatest force in the rise of literary realism in the early 1870s and remains an essential element in many novelists’ efforts to grasp “reality,” that part of the history of science is still obscured by American culture’s misguided fears that Darwinism is an affront to humanistic values. The on-going resistance to Darwinian thought is particularly unfortunate in the field of ecocriticism, whose rampant growth over recent decades has generated many attempts to define the field (it is often called the study of literature and the environment). However, it is still so hard to see the trees for the forest that few critics trace the “eco” in ecocriticism to its root in ecology and, therefore, evolutionary biology. Most ecocritics recall that Ernst Haeckel coined the term (ecology) and defined it as the study of the organic and environmental relationships that Darwin had described in the Origin of Species, but few seem prepared to act on the advice of one pioneer in the field, Glen Love, who urges literary critics to do more with evolutionary biology. Reminding us that Darwin is the “supreme ecologist,” Love suggests that ecocritics embrace science for the same reasons that Aldous Huxley articulated in Literature and Science (1963): we know “about the relationships of living things to one another and to their inorganic environment” and about “overpopulation, ruinous farming, senseless forestry and destructive grazing, about water pollution and the sterilization or total loss of once productive soils” (qtd. in Love 53). Love goes on to suggest that Huxley’s sense of ecology was influenced by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and to cite Carson’s belief that science and literature (“whether biography or history or fiction”) are inseparably aligned in their aims “to discover and illuminate truth” (61).

My purpose here is to enlarge our understanding of both literary naturalism and literature of the environment by examining Jack London’s three farming novels (Burning Daylight [1910], The Valley of the Moon [1913], and The Little Lady of the Big House [1916]) and Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer (2000); and to credit London and Kingsolver for having embraced Darwinian biology in order to produce ecological novels that address a number of environmental crises that we humans have brought about. Literary scholarship is remiss in overlooking these authors’ efforts to help us envision sustainable ways of life. Both London, who produced America’s first ecological novels early in the twentieth century, and King-solver, writing at the end of the century, address environmental crises like those that troubled Carson and Huxley, but both begin with analyses of their characters’ Darwinian relationships within the human community. With their emphasis on Darwin, London and Kingsolver are in the mainstream of American ecological writing with the better known ecologists John Steinbeck and Aldo Leopold. Writing in The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1941), Steinbeck paid frequent tributes to Darwin and explained that his and Ed Ricketts’s “interest lay in relationships of animal to animal”; but he also emphasized “that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality” (218) and asked, “Why do we so dread to think of our species as a species?” (266). After all, he wrote, “ecology has a synonym which is ALL” (88). And in The Sand County Almanac (1949), Leopold hoped to improve his readers’ “ecological education” (48) by urging them to take a seat in “the theater of evolution” (32); he proclaimed that “above all we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know that man, while now captain of the adventuring ship, is hardly the sole object of its quest” (117).

Before examining London’s and Kingsolver’s ecological novels, it is worth noting that Steinbeck and Leopold produced their ecological masterpieces during the years when Darwinism was emerging from its long “eclipse,” near the time when Julian Huxley published Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942).² Long before that, however (both before and during...